Season Three week 3: Cross Words and Sound Mind

Season Three's third pair arrived with the Thursday 22 October drop (midnight PT), and Panic's Season Three page now lists Cross Words and Sound Mind under Week 3. That leaves HELLEVATOR and Chance's Lucky Escape 2 for the final week. Season Three is $39 in Catalog and runs through 29 October.

Cross Words (Shaun Inman, of Ratcheteer) is a word puzzle. Two words that cross on a shared letter are laid out on a 5x5 board and scrambled, and you unscramble them within a target number of moves (par) by sliding whole rows or columns. Clearing 8 boards at or under par unlocks the next par. There are three modes: Commute (par stays put), Roadtrip (par climbs after a set number of boards) and Revisit (go back to skipped boards or try to beat par). Every random board has a share code, so you can send a tricky pair to a friend. It uses the d-pad, A, B and the crank, has a hint system and options to cut down movement and flashing, and Panic notes English fluency helps a lot. 15.2 MB, first published 22 October.

Sound Mind (Chuck Jordan, of Sasquatchers) is a hide-and-seek game for two players sharing one Playdate. A dead man's will leaves his fortune in doubloons to his scheming children, Kane and Mabel, on one condition: they spend the night in his haunted study, where a cursed grandfather clock stops time for one of them every 30 minutes. Players take turns using hiding places, secret passages and traps to end up with the whole inheritance, but the other player can hear everything you do. Audio is by Julian Kwasneski and Jared Emerson-Johnson of Bay Area Sound. Panic warns it is heavily dependent on audio and may not be playable for people with hearing loss, and calls it darkly comic, with light-hearted references to death. It uses the A and B buttons and the crank. 18.8 MB. Both developers say their games were made without generative AI.

Our game pages: games/cross-words and games/sound-mind.