Sometimes, you want a complicated game that’s going to break your brain and push your skills to the max. Other times, you just want to do a little puzzle on your phone.
No studio understands that better than Lykke, a little known studio behind some of Apple Arcade’s best games. Lykke has become a go-to partner for Apple since the service’s launch thanks to creative puzzle games from Tint to Stitch. Now, gaming’s most consistent puzzle makers are back with a new game, Puffies, which joins a loaded month for Apple Arcade additions. While Katamari Damacy and Space Invaders might be more eye-catching to subscribers, Puffies is a the kind of go-to game you’ll want to keep on your phone. It’s another satisfying casual game from a studio that understands the platform it’s developing for better than anyone.
A new kind of jigsaw puzzle
Unlike its previous games, Puffies doesn’t invent a brand new genre twist. Instead, it’s Lykke’s take on a jigsaw puzzle. In it, players open packs of stickers and must assemble them onto a sheet. Each sticker has its own distinct shape, so getting each in the right spot is more about paying attention to the negative space on the sheet rather than using a grand picture to deduce what goes where. Each sticker snaps into place when I drag it to the right spot, with a a nice adhesive sound effect that gives each placement some satisfying tactile feedback.
Easy puzzles have me placing a handful of stickers at a time before moving on to a different part of the screen, similar to how Stitch works. Others have me filling in much larger sheets that take 10 minutes to clear. There are some more traditional puzzles too that just give me every piece at once and has me slotting them into the full sheet without guidance. It’s a good range of short and sweet puzzles to longer ones that players can pick at over a few sessions.
What gives this all a little extra spice is its aesthetic. To start a puzzle, I rip open a pack of stickers, not unlike the booster packs I open in Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. Each one is full of delightful stickers that follow a silly theme, from rockstar capybaras to Van Gogh goats. It’s puny and playful, filled with bright stickers to collect as I unlock more packs through weekly challenges and ongoing tasks.
If that sounds simple, it is — and that’s a good thing. This is Lykke’s fourth Apple Arcade game, and another that demonstrates how much the studio has casual mobile puzzling down to a science. It knows how to make a game that’s built to be played for a few minutes while curled up on a couch. Its games are all tactile, satisfying, and not too challenging.
It feels like the studio learns a little bit more about how to turn a fun puzzle idea into a long-term hook too, as Puffies features a layer of player progression and weekly challenges that’ll ensure players keep it installed. In an email interview, I asked studio founder Jakob Lykkegaard about how its learnings from previous games shaped Puffies.
“Ideally we have players consistently picking up our titles a few times a week as their way to relax,” Lykkegaard tells Digital Trends. “This means we try to design a more relaxed progression that allows for some flexibility but never makes you feel stuck. In Stitch, we now have over 500 hoops, and we would have handled the progression a bit differently if we had known that at launch. That’s one of the things we’ve tried to improve in Puffies. Instead of overwhelming you with 500 options of what to play next, we present you with ~5 at a time.”
That change makes a big difference, as I’m never overwhelmed by options and always drawn into one more puzzle on my list. As someone who never deleted Stitch off my last iPhone, I imagine Puffies will similarly live on in infamy in a home screen folder next to Balatro.
Lykke’s puzzle empire
As I was playing, I realized that I knew virtually nothing about Lykke. That surprised me given that I’ve now played and enjoyed four of its games. How did the small team become such a go-yo partner for Apple anyways, to the point that it was tapped to bring Stitch to Apple Vision Pro as one of its first games. Lykkegaard gave me the team’s origin story and how it came to team up with Apple.
“After the majority of our team spent several years working in free-to-play prior to founding Lykke Studios, we had grown tired of designing ‘monetization-first’ games and just dreamt of creating premium feeling experiences.” Lykkegaard says. “Our first title, Amon, based on ARKit, caught Apple’s eye and became a launch title for the iPhone X, which proved to us that Apple’s and our way of thinking about experiences were very aligned. This led us to later get involved in Arcade when we showed them Tint back in 2019, and without exaggeration, that was the first time in our gaming careers that we could just focus on creating a great experience for the players without worrying about user acquisition, ad integrations, and paid conversion ratios.”
We probably wouldn’t be making games anymore if it weren’t for a platform like Apple Arcade.
Apple Arcade isn’t just a good deal for a small studio like Lykke; it’s a bit of a necessity. Creating high-quality puzzle games like this is a tall task when you simply don’t know if they’re going to find an audience. Not having to worry about that part takes some stress off the team, allowing them to focus on what they do best. The proof is in the pudding considering that all of its Apple Arcade games are among the best offerings on the platform.
“We probably wouldn’t be making games anymore if it weren’t for a platform like Apple Arcade,” Lykkegaard says. “Our type of puzzles seems to fit really well with the average Arcade player. It would be hard to spend as much time as we do on creating that level of polish and detail in our games anywhere else, it’s just more fun for everyone that way.”
Though Puffies isn’t as inventive as Stitch, which is now available on Nintendo Switch, this is the exact kind of game that I still stay subscribed to Apple Arcade for. It’s a calming reprieve, free of ads or microtransactions that would ruin a perfectly cozy idea. I’m glad to see a studio like Lykke still taking full advantage of Apple Arcade’s sales pitch to double down on good-hearted mobile puzzle game design. Lykke may not be a household name, but there’s a good reason that it is a go-to partner for Apple. Few studios are this consistent.
Puffies launches on April 3 for iOS devices via Apple Arcade.
