An Interview with Thinky Games

The recent Thinky Direct has really helped to bring Thinky Games to the attention of many more people, myself included. With the goal of highlighting puzzle and problem-solving games, the website is a haven for the genre with news, reviews, articles and much more.

After the Thinky Direct, I was lucky to have had the chance to sit down with manager Joseph Mansfield and news editor Corey Hardt to discuss Thinky Games, the direct, and the future of Thinky Games.

To get started, I asked Joe and Cory if they could introduce themselves and the roles they play at Thinky Games.

Joe: Sure, I’m Joe, Joseph Mansfield. I’m the manager at Thinky Games, which I hate saying because it doesn’t sound like a very fun title!

But basically I direct where we go with everything. How many people do we have working on certain things? What kind of stuff are they working on? I also like to do some of the streaming and I sometimes do a bit of the writing. I am also largely involved in the bigger events that we do, like the recent Thinky Direct, Thinky Awards or ThinkyCon.

Corey: Hey, I’m Corey and I am the news editor at Thinky Games. I write our newsletter, which goes out every couple of weeks, and I choose a lot of the news that we cover on the site, which I write a lot of myself. This is my first job doing writing and having an actual job in the games field.

I sort of found the puzzle community through different Discord servers in 2020, when I was looking for new communities. I found ones where I felt I belonged and people who were making and playing games that I really connected with. I started writing a little blog about little puzzle games and then when this project really got rolling, Joe decided to reach out to me because of the writing I’d been doing and here we are!

I was intrigued to find out from Joe and Corey exactly what it was about puzzle games over other genres that caught their attention.

Corey: I also do some game design. I’ve been interested in it for a long time, so I think pretty deeply about games and why they’re interesting or what I’m interested in specifically. It’s something I come back to very often and I’ve seen this in other game design texts, which is the concept that learning is key to a lot of people’s interest in games in general.

Whether we realise it or not, very often in many different genres, some games don’t feel or look like puzzles at all; very often the real joy that people are experiencing playing something is the tiny little increments of learning and realisation of new things as you play. It’s this zeroing in on this focus on going from not knowing to knowing something, that process of learning, that I think is really deep and why people like games in general.

Joe: There’s this interesting thing with a thinky game where you could watch somebody play on the screen, and not very much is happening. But the designer, the developer of the game, is communicating things to you and it’s all going into your head and it’s bouncing around for you to figure something out, to work through the logic, and come up with whatever solution you need.

This, at least for me, makes the satisfaction so much higher because it’s all on me to just think through whatever puzzle problem is being presented and come up with an answer. I’m not being railroaded down a certain path; I’ve got to figure it out and that is extremely satisfying.

One thing to add is that not everything that we cover is about puzzle games. Our community loves strategy and tactics games. We have a board games channel on Discord and Corey covers board games every now and then too. Because we are not just about what people would call a straight-up puzzle game. It’s about games that let you take your time to think through a problem and solve it.

Now that we know a little about why puzzle games attract Joe and Corey so much, I wanted to get to the bottom of how Thinky Games was formed and what the idea was behind it.

Joe: So the Thinky Games community actually existed before the Thinky Games website. There was a Discord community created by Alan Hazelden from Draknek and Friends who made and published lots of great puzzle games.

It’s called the thinky community and Corey and I both joined that Discord, probably around 2019. I’ll have to skip a bunch of the details, but effectively, I sent an email to the Carina Initiatives, saying I’m interested in starting a website about these games because I think we could encourage more people to play and discover them. They mailed back saying, Oh, we’re already working on a website for these games, which was just an amazing coincidence.

But they did need help getting the website launched because they had been working on it for a while. They just needed a bit of help getting it out into the world. The thinking here was that this community that already existed is fairly insular. It’s on Discord; we all have our own little niche things, and we know what we mean because we all understand each other’s way of talking about these games. But my goal was in trying to encourage more people to try out these games.

That’s what the Carina Initiatives interest is too. They fund many maths, engineering, STEM organisations and such. But they have a particular focus on this concept of playful problem solving and how if you do problem solving through play, that’s a great way to learn. So we’re connecting back to learning here.

During this time we created the Thinky Games database, which is a section on our website where you can search for specific games depending on the filters you implement. Say you want games that are really difficult or games that are really easy or you want a platformer on the Nintendo Switch.

Corey: I think the database is proving quite popular. When I mention it to someone on Discord or online , they’re always surprised that something like this exists and it’s getting to this point where it’s quite full of games, and you can search in any category and have a lot of results.

Joe: It blows my mind when you look at a specific game and you see the similar games it’s suggested at the bottom of the page. It’s always really good at suggesting them and the fact that I was one of the developers working on the website is crazy to me. I’m like, Wait, how is this so good?

Corey: One thing I wanted to add to Joe’s response was that we were in this little community and it was very concentrated, but it was passionate. That’s the reason that I started writing at all. It was 2020, and the world was being shaken up, and I had been working in restaurants for many, many years, and then I didn’t have a job, and I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen in the future.

So I started doing some of the stuff that I’d always thought about doing, which was writing about games. This tiny community are just very passionate and there were a lot of these people making games, free games, web games, things like that, that were, to me, really interesting, high quality and worthy of being seen and played by more people. So that’s the whole reason I started writing about any of them to begin with.

Joe: One of the other factors that we think about and consider is that there are probably lots of people who don’t even realise they can get a kind of thinky experience out of video games at all. I talked to some of my friends, who I know are 100% the kind of people who would enjoy these games and I know I can get them involved. My friend who helped me develop the website, in the process, discovered a bunch of these games and now basically exclusively plays thinky games, whereas before she hadn’t really played that many video games so my hope is we find more of these kinds of people.

One last question before we get into the Thinky Direct, which was aimed at Corey, as I wanted to find out more about the fortnightly newsletter that he writes.

Corey: So every two weeks I send out a newsletter and I share articles and reviews that we’ve recently written on the site and just generally what’s going on. I also use it as an opportunity to throw in a bunch of other little headlines that we didn’t necessarily take the time to write about.

One of the other cool features is that we share a recommendation for a free game every newsletter. This kind of stems from when I was writing about games before I came to the website and I continued it right into the newsletter. I was writing about a lot of these small free games that people in this little community were making and a lot of them are playable in a browser. You just pop open the page and play it; no downloading needed!

We call it our Thinky Games Club and there’s a channel in our Discord where we discuss them. Sometimes it’s something that is very newly released; for example, there was a really cool Snakebird fan game released recently that was one of our club picks that we all played and talked about and then sometimes they can be an older classic, some little puzzle thing from an expert designer in our community that is really worth highlighting and showing off to people.

Moving over to the Thinky Direct, I felt finding out how it came to be would be a good starting point.

Joe: It’s been on the to-do list for a long time and one of the things we’ve learnt over this time is that if you are really broad and trying to cover everything, a lot of people are just not going to pay attention. Sometimes you need to have a really focused thing that says, Here’s a bunch of great games.

Doing something like the Thinky Direct is a great way, for just half an hour, to show a bunch of amazing trailers for amazing games, announcements and demo reveals. It’s really good to have these moments where we’re just really focusing in and kind of making a bigger splash and it’s almost the same reason why we did the Thinky Awards too.

With my curiosity piqued with how something like this is planned and created, I asked Joe how long the Thinky Direct took to plan.

Joe: We kicked it off three months ago, I think; that would be my guess. We hired a team to help us do it, and it’s the same lead producer who runs the showcase Dames 4 Games (Destinee Cleveland); she brought on her team of people that she knew and had worked with before to help us make it. So fortunately for the core Thinky Games team, we got to be fairly hands-off.

Then the actual editing of the video happened in the last week and a half, I think, right before airing So it got down to the wire for sure. Ideally we would have had longer for the whole thing, but I’m terrible at starting projects at the last possible moment.

A lot of these things, like the Wholesome Direct, also do a Steam event at the same time. And we were fortunate in that we partnered with the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase, which was happening on Steam at the same time. This is a yearly Steam sale of puzzle games. So instead of having to organise the Steam event as well, we were just handling the Thinky Direct.

There must be plenty of planning that goes into a project like this. But I wanted to find out what kind of considerations Joe had to make in the planning phase of the direct.

Joe: So in terms of game selection, I wanted to make sure that there was a variety for people to see. Hopefully anybody interested in thinky games of one kind or another had a game in that direct that they are interested in. I did see a lot of people saying they were interested in every single one so that’s ideal. So yeah, just having to basically have a lot of variety and also making sure they were of a quality that gave people a great impression of the kind of coverage they can expect from Thinky Games.

Corey: I know that at least for two of the developers – it gave them a voluntary deadline that they decided to commit themselves to or spurred them on to make a new trailer or announce a release date. And I know that for those two, it was very helpful and motivating for them in their process of deciding where to draw their lines and on deadlines, so that was pretty interesting.

Joe: I think Michael Brough wrote a blog post about how us asking him to provide a trailer basically got him to focus on the audiovisual design of the game because he hadn’t quite  nailed it down and so it gave him the motivation to do that. The other thing is it’s also great to put some games in there that are fairly well known, like Is This Seat Taken?, The Mermaid Mask, or Strange Antiquities. It’s great to put them alongside games from developers who are putting out their first commercial release.

With some directs, like the Triple III Initiative, going for just trailers or others breaking them up into segments, I wanted to ask Joe and Corey why they decided to go with the format they did and how long it took to agree on the design of the direct.

Joe: I don’t know if there’s a huge amount of rationale behind it. As I said, we hired Destinee Cleveland to produce the direct And I think her showcase is of a similar format. So I think it was really just taking Destinee’s format and kind of going, Well, what if we did that but we really focused on the games? and that led to what we ended up with. I think it is just nice to have those breaks too because if you just have trailer, trailer, trailer, back to back, some of them are just going to get lost. Whereas I think having the little breaks between helps you kind of wrap your head around what you have just seen. So I think it was just a nice way to do it.

Plus, Rachel, our editor, was co-hosting with me and the way we recorded that was we got the list of trailers ready and watched them together in synchronisation, like three, two, one, press play. Then after doing a batch of six or whatever, we would just react to them as naturally as we could because you’re recording. It needs to flow nicely.

One of my favourite questions to ask is to find out what challenges had to be overcome and whether it moved the direct into a different direction.

Joe: We didn’t really go in any massively different directions. Probably the biggest challenge is that you’re trying to gather a lot of resources from a lot of people. You’re trying to get, at the very least, the trailers, which for a developer, making a trailer for their game is quite a bit of work.

Also, on the landing page we have on the website for Thinky Direct, there’s like a quote from each developer and so we asked everybody for that. We had to make sure we knew what specifically each developer was announcing about their games Because some of them were just releasing a demo, some of them were announcing their release date, et cetera, so making sure all that was accurate.

So the main challenge was getting all that information right and on time because the other thing is that as we were partnering with the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase, we had a specific date we had to be done by, which was May 29th, as that’s when the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase was launching. It was quite a lot of stress in the last week, but it’s just the way it is. You’ve got a deadline. You’ve got to get everything done for it. It’s also quite exciting and rewarding at the same time.

One thing that I was impressed about with the Thinky Direct was the curation of the games. I had only heard of one or two, with the rest being really intriguing, original games, and I asked if that was difficult to get right.

Joe: It was definitely one of the worries I had. We would put the Thinky Direct out and everybody would be like, Oh, we already know about all these games. But I think because we’re deeply in the puzzling space, we knew of these games And so I was kind of scared that everybody in the community would be like, Oh, I was hoping for some big reveal of a new game.

Corey: It’s really easy in our little bubble to feel like that, which I’m sure is true for anybody focusing on a little niche – oh, everybody already knows this stuff. Am I doing anything useful at all here? Is anybody receiving this information I’m writing? And if it’s interesting to them or they even care.

But every time we talk with someone like you, it’s a wonderful eye-opener. Or every time I get feedback from someone that’s like, I love the newsletter; I always learn about so many cool things. That’s just such wonderful feedback for us that you got wind of the direct because it’s a big event happening and people are sharing it around.

Joe: I was also amazed that even people I think of as core community members, who have been around for a few years and with whom we’ve chatted a lot about lots of niche games, were like, Oh, I’ve just added 20 games to my wish list!’

I knew that every game featured in the Thinky Direct was Joe’s and Corey’s favourite, but I wanted to find out if there was one in particular that stood out more than the others.

Corey: EMUUROM, as it’s really visually interesting with a kind of retro pixel style. It’s basically a non-violent Metroidvania where you’re discovering and cataloguing new species of creatures. I think a good selling point for EMUUROM is that it has a lot of Animal Well-adjacent stuff going on with new weird creatures you run into, figuring out how they behave in lots of puzzly environments, so EMUUROM was super cool to have in there.

Also, Michael Brough’s game called 868 Back, which is the sequel to his little roguelike called 868 Hack, which is about hacking computer systems and extracting information and credits and then getting random abilities and interacting in the environment in new ways to see how long you can survive the viruses that are attacking you. I am really personally excited for 868 Back and it was super cool to have a trailer from him there.

Joe: Just to add to 868 Back, that was definitely the trailer that I was really glad came through in time for us to get it into the direct because that game didn’t have a Steam page before the Thinky Direct. The Steam page was set up and the first-ever trailer for the game was made because of the Thinky Direct. I’d love for more people to discover Michael’s games and play them so yeah, I was really happy to include that one.

For my pick, I was really enjoying The Button Effect. You start pressing these buttons that start doing things and you have to experiment by pressing other buttons to find out what they do, and you go, Oh, maybe it’s because of this and you end up coming up with these theories and then applying them and I was having a great time with that so yeah, I’m looking forward to the full game.

Corey: That one’s getting a lot of buzz. I’m hearing a lot of people get excited about The Button Effect.

Joe: I like the little kind of the puzzles themselves; there’s not really a distinction between where one puzzle ends and the next one begins. But there are these little areas and they look like little mechanical contraptions. You press a button and this panel spins around and you press this other button and this other thing moves. It’s just like going into a museum and playing with the little interactive exhibits.

To finish the interview, I wanted to give some time for Joe and Corey to tell us what’s next for Thinky Games and what we should be keeping an eye out for.

Joe: There is a project we’ve been working on for a while that I can’t really talk about but I can tease it a little. How can I tease it… I guess I could at least say it’s like a little game of our own that will appear on the website. It involves our monster character, and it’ll be cute, and lots of fun things are planned for it. Hopefully that will be in the near future and give people an exciting reason to come visit the site regularly and get a bit of Thinky Monster lore!

It is a wacky project and I am very interested to see how people receive it. We will also be doing the second edition of our ThinkyCon, which is orientated towards developers and designers of thinky games. Last year we did three days of talks, with people presenting design ideas or how they implemented features in their game. We had the New York Times folks join us to talk about how they caught games for the New York Times website and I also have people talking about crosswords, so we feature all sorts of things.

Corey: There’s a great playlist on our YouTube channel of all of the talks from last year. It’s turned out to be a wonderful resource of interesting chats about designing games in this space. I think ThinkyCon kind of represents a sort of another audience of people who are deeply interested in very logical and thinky games, so people start thinking deeply about puzzles and how they go together. If you solve a lot of puzzles, you start kind of naturally thinking about how puzzles work, and that leads you to thinking about how games are put together, and you might have ideas of your own.

Joe: It’s usually individual people presenting a slideshow or something similar and in fact, I don’t think we had any multi-person panels last year, which I would be interested in doing.

Maybe we’ll get the chance to do that this year. It would be cool to have a panel with the Rise of the Golden Idol designers. I can’t promise this will happen but if they were interested in it, I would love to have a panel where people can ask them questions about designing certain cases from the game. Also, because it had an interesting development story, with the idea of having all these different designers doing different bits of the game, it would be very interesting.

A huge thank you goes out to Joe and Corey for their time; it was a great conversation, and I hope this has inspired you to explore the puzzle game genre. If you would like more information on Thinky Games, then please take a look at their website, full of excellent articles, reviews and features waiting for you.

If you would like to follow Thinky Games on socials, you can find them over on BlueSky