It’s been a busy month at PSI-HQ as we’ve been developing two new puzzles, which includes having folks test them on paper, making all of the art, writing the hints, coding them, testing them digitally, and revising anything that isn’t working. One of the puzzles needed a whole second pass with a new approach to get it to work properly, but now that it’s been recoded, it feels really good! I’m excited to show it to new players at a local indie game live testing event later this week.
But the really big news that I have to share about Puzzle Spy International is that we’re pushing back the release date to Q1 of 2026. There’s a whole development story associated with that so let me share:
When Talia and I first envisioned PS over 5 years ago, it was a MUCH bigger game. The story had you traveling to just about every continent on the planet. There was a laser lab in Rio de Janiero, a stolen goods dealer in Tehran who had found the bad guys a used rocket from Kazakhstan, a kidnapped American NASA scientist, space laser arrays, a liaison with an agent from the Soviet Cypher Corps, and much, much more! The game also involved 40-45 totally unique bespoke puzzles. After a while of working on that, we realized that we would never finish something so large and we back-burnered it.
We spent some time instead developing a space epic incorporating Star Battle puzzles until it too got too large to be feasible. At that point, we looked back at our first love PSI and thought about scope: If we cut it massively, it could be a short 8-puzzle game and we’d already designed a good portion of the puzzles needed. And so that’s what we did! We’ve been progressing with it steadily for two years now, and if we’d stuck with that plan, we’d be getting close to shipping it now. But when we cut the much-larger story, we just ended it at some arbitrary point.
We didn’t include the big finale, that part just got chopped out. And the more we thought about the story we’d settled on, the more it felt like the ending was abrupt and unsatisfying.
So over the past couple of months, we’ve been rewriting the conclusion. Instead of just stopping at some point, it now builds to a climax. Agent Epsilon wind ups somewhere really cool and the threat level is dangerously high. And when you get to the end, it feels monumental. We are SO much more excited about this new ending and know that anyone who plays it will be too. Of course we can’t add more story without adding more challenges - read as ‘puzzles’ - for Agent Epsilon to solve! And we’re really proud of these puzzles: They’re super fun, all different from anything already in the game, and they really dovetail nicely with what Agent Epsilon is doing in the story. They just FIT and that fit is truly satisfying.
Of course these additions mean more design, coding and play-testing (see above.) And this whole new area has required more illustration than any other location, almost as much as all of the other locations combined! The plus side is that you get a more exciting story with more fun puzzles and a more satisfying ending. The only negative is that you’ll have to wait a little longer to play it. We think the trade-off will be well worth it.