In the 265 years since English cartographer John Spilsbury invented the jigsaw puzzle to convince his kids that maps were cool, innovations in art, interactivity, and, uh, literal jigsaw technology have unlocked the medium’s endless possibilities. Still, I’m not sure anything would melt Spilsbury’s brain quite like Strange Jigsaw, the new game from cheerful internet puzzlemaker Fleb. Not just because the18th-century Englishman had no concept of a “video game.” Fleb’s puzzles are genius, too.
If you’ve spent time in YouTube’s puzzle scene, you’ve probably encountered Fleb, whose gentle sense of humor and analytical mind made him a perfect guide to the history of brain-teasers. Strange Jigsaws feels like the ultimate distillation of that brain: a game that starts with jigsaw puzzles and then gleefully mutates them into something much weirder and funnier.
“I wanted every puzzle to be different,” Fleb told me from his home in North Carolina. “Anything you can do to mess with the structure… what happens if the pieces don’t have any edges? Or if they’re subject to gravity? Things that wouldn’t happen in real life — that’s where you start to hash it out.”
Before diving into full-time game development, Fleb worked as an electrical engineer who dabbled in game-playing and -making. But when his homegrown project, the quirky 20 Small Mazes, found a cult audience, he and his wife decided it was time for him to “try for a year to make a video game.”
The result is a collection of around 50 mini-puzzles that feel ported over from an alternate dimension, as if Adventure Time became a point-and-click adventure. One minute you’re sliding pieces across a board, the next you’re reassembling abstract nonsense into something meaningful. They’re jigsaws in name only — which, as Fleb notes, is kind of the point.
A puzzle hunt for one
Fleb has been part of the puzzle-hunt world for nearly two decades, competing in legendary team events like the MIT Mystery Hunt. That community’s influence is all over Strange Jigsaws’ thematic puzzles, which hide wordplay and mechanical twists inside every corner.
“Puzzle hunts are a style where every puzzle is kind of different, but they share a theme — their answer has to be an English word or phrase,” he said. “This game is an attempt to translate puzzle hunts to a video game in a way that doesn’t involve answering everything with English.”
He cites inspirations that range from Portal and The Witness to the sokoban-style boom sparked by Stephen’s Sausage Roll and Patrick’s Parabox. The mechanics of that DNA is visible throughout Strange Jigsaws, which at times feels like an elaborate escape room. There are puzzles that require zooming between screen layers, shifting perspective of the entire board, and even using the menu interfaces for different forms of in-game navigation. Fleb aimed to push formal experimentation to extremes as he riffled on classic scenarios and jigsaw what-ifs.
“What happens if you have a million pieces? What happens if you have two?” he says of his ideation process. To make each scenario feel like a new discovery rather than a wall, he paid close attention to how players think, acknowledging that difficulty isn’t one-size-fits-all. Some puzzles, like Strange Jigsaw’s menu or rope challenges, demanded cognitive leaps that not everyone could make easily, yet those same moments often led to breakthroughs that felt deeply satisfying. “You can design bigger gaps, bigger leaps or smaller leaps,” he said, describing his process as a constant calibration of how far to push without breaking the fun.
In the spirit of player fulfillment, in what he admits was a polarizing move for someone in the puzzle community, Fleb opted to add a “Hints” page for Strange Jigsaw on his own website. But for him, approachability matters just as much as elegance. “I would like people who have never played puzzle games before to be able to complete the game,” he said, adding that he wished there were more entry-level puzzle titles to welcome new solvers.
How to puzzle
What sets Strange Jigsaws apart from other puzzle collections is its humor, a playful, dad-energy absurdity that runs through every design decision. It’s the same quality that makes Fleb’s YouTube channel so endearing. “One of the things I want is funny stuff to happen,” he said. “Sometimes I just think of a joke and make a puzzle out of it.” Asked to explain how he came up with Strange Jigsaw’s “Three Circular Saws in a Trench Coat” puzzle… he couldn’t really. Three Circular Saws in a Trench Coat is just funny.
As far as inspirations for his comedic voice go, Fleb admits it mostly comes from what he’s reading: a lot of children’s books to his five kids. “Dog Man is a huge hit in this house,” which, if you know Dav Pilkey’s zany-but-lighthearted comics, makes perfect sense. Strange Jigsaws never takes itself too seriously, except when it absolutely does. There are plenty of legit challenges dropped into the mix.
He laughs when players tell him they were stumped by “Blue Temple,” a puzzle that involves detecting hidden pieces, then reassembling them into [no spoilers!]. “That is probably what I would call the hardest puzzle in the game,” he admits. “But it’s also one of my favorites.”
Not every idea made it into the final game (the gallery above are a few examples). Among the scrapped concepts were a sokoban-style overworld and a retro board game. There was even a video-based puzzle that was “depressing to cut” because the Godot engine couldn’t handle scrubbing through video files. “It was a rough day when I discovered that,” he said. Other puzzles, like Blue Temple, went through multiple redesigns before landing on their final form.
But that’s part of the joy of making puzzles, he insists — the discovery that sometimes the best idea emerges only after you’ve thrown out five others.
“You work for six months at something, have no idea how it’s going to work out, and then in one day everything comes together,” he says. “Sometimes you get through a whole puzzle and only at the end do you realize what it really was, and you have to go back.”
Fleb isn’t done tinkering. A follow-up to 20 Small Mazes is on the way. Though pitched as a DLC, he confirms the sequel will be a standalone, “somehow even smaller,” he chuckles, and free to play. He knows that isn’t the savviest move for someone making it as a solo dev, but… he wants to give it away. “My wife was like, ‘What are you doing?’” he says. “But I don’t want to […] You try to explain things in the past, like why would I make 20 Small Mazes free, but it works out . There aren’t rational explanations for this irrational behavior!”
The real drive comes from wanting “to explore still more in the puzzle space” and the flexibility solo development gives him to balance creativity with family life. He hopes to eventually make a larger sequel to Strange Jigsaws other than Strange Jigsaws 2, which [no spoilers!!]. He’s also still a puzzle player, with Lab Rat, Glowkeeper, and the adorable logic game Öoo (“It’s great because it has such deep ideas,” he says) ranking among his personal favorites of the year. In a space increasingly shaped by marketability and metrics, Fleb’s approach is refreshingly personal — pursuing the odd and what’s worth solving for its own sake. Strange Jigsaw might melt John Spilsbury’s 18-century brain, but he’d also be proud.
