Nestling somewhere between the brutal sausage-fest of Stephen's Sausage Roll and the charming Tower-of-Hanoi-esque snowfolk of A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build is the upcoming puzzler, Pipe Push Paradise.
Pipe Push Paradise is the work of Corey Martin (design and programming) and Teodoro Zamudio (art and music). It follows the familiar format of pushing pieces of a puzzle around a tight space, but instead of stringent grill requirements or snowball rolling you're tasked with slotting pipes into place to restore an island's supply of clean water.
At first the puzzles are just about getting the hang of pushing simple bits around and not getting them hopelessly stuck. Pretty soon you'll start to encounter L- and S-shaped pieces, though. Shoving those in particular ways will cause them to roll into an upright position. Sometimes that's an infuriating problem to counter and sometimes it opens up an elegant solution.
I have a preview build which I'm tinkering with at the moment (the game isn't out until January 2018). I've chewed through the simpler challenges of the first few zones and am now cycling through what I think are the medium difficulty puzzles. Chasms, rotating plates and more are involved in the current batch I'm playing with. I've fallen into that puzzle state of bashing my head against one for a while, then switching to another to see if a few minutes doing something else has helped dislodge a solution.
I will say that the difficulty curve seems less curvy and more prone to peaking and troughing in the build I have. Partly that's a wider problem with the genre because this type of puzzle game relies on players having "aha" moments. Those are so personal and so tied up in whether you've fixated on the right or wrong thing regardless of dev prompts that a universal curve seems impossible.
Pipe Push Paradise does seem to have more of those swings between easy and brutal than can be chalked up to an ongoing genre struggle. But even with that in mind it's shaping up as a good puzzler to chip away on in the chilly evenings of the new year*.
*Or balmy ones - hello southern hemisphere!
