Mistified

Have you ever tried cooking without spices? Yeah not the best, and our crow protagonist just lost theirs, stolen by the dark claws. Needless to say that’s unacceptable, and thus the journey to exterminate the dark claws and get back your spices begins.

Mistified is a grid-based puzzle game that mixes several genres, there are pure sokoban aspects – mainly the log pushing à la A Monster’s Expedition – as well as some Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows vibes. Your crow is equipped with a mist lantern that emits light around you, any animal in its radius will run in the opposite direction.

Killing the dark claws by stepping on them and disabling their traps is one of the objectives of the puzzles, but saving the souls of the animals by guiding them towards the soul circle is just as important. The puzzles are varied though, so sometimes you may only need to kill the dark claws, sometimes you may only need to save a certain number of animals, it depends. In any case you must be careful: no animal must be caught by the dark claws.

Mistified has an interesting non-linear world structure, the islands can be played in any order and their difficulty is indicated. Each island is then linear, the puzzles are unlocked one after the other until you reach your dear bottle of spices at the end.

The puzzle design is very good, Mistified is a creative game that plays with and properly exploits a lot of things, this is especially remarkable when looking at the puzzle diversity. Yeah sometimes you’re like “oh wow another river puzzle ****”, but most of the time, the islands offer unique experiences and are not limited to one pattern like most puzzle games.

The difficulty is pretty high once you’ve cleared the easiest islands. The animals and moving logs also emit light just like your crow, which can lead to tricky chain reactions. Some puzzles use them on purpose, but some other puzzles can actually be solved by taking advantage of these advanced and unintended interactions.
So I often had the impression the puzzles didn’t have only one solution, there are just too many things going on and weird interactions for that. It’s one of those games in which you’ll struggle with tricky setups and adjust until it eventually works. It’s especially true for the river redirection puzzles, some special logs allow you to block a river stream or split it in two… but it’s actually very hard to anticipate things in this type of puzzle and there’s a lot of stuff you can do once again.
Don’t worry though, there’s also a lot of more classic, small puzzles that only have one solution for sure, puzzles in which you need to find that little satisfying trick. It’s a very well crafted game puzzle-wise, inspired, varied and fun.

But Mistified is far from perfect, and some pretty annoying things spoil the fun a little bit. The first obvious one is the absolutely abysmal performance, I don’t understand how a 2D game like that can reach as low as 20 fps when it’s supposed to be a constant 60 fps, wow!
There are also a few bugs, mainly after you undo actions. Mistified doesn’t like it AT ALL when you undo too much, I had several game crashes because of that. In a game in which you need to undo a lot, that’s pretty silly. Using the undo button when you’re on the map is also risky, it can sometimes break the game.

All these things are annoying, but didn’t necessarily bother me too much because they don’t directly impact the puzzles.
There’s only one special case that absolutely needs to be fixed. When two rivers cross, one of them has priority and the other gets cut. If you block the river that cuts and then unblock it, it will become the river that gets cut.
Completely logical… but if you then undo, it won’t revert back to the previous state. That’s a pretty precise thing, but a few puzzles actually play with these river crosses and, whether you want it or not, you’ll have to undo a lot. So you can’t really prevent this bug from happening.

Some small quality of life features are missing as well. If you reset a puzzle after you’ve solved it, you need to solve it again. That’s a minor thing but I remember a river puzzle preventing me from going back.
You also can’t undo after a restart, please come on! That’s absolutely mandatory nowadays, it’s SO useful.

Contrary to Shrink Rooms which I recently reviewed, the problems in Mistified are actually not ruining the puzzles. Sure, they are annoying and some massive improvements would be appreciated, but Mistified is still a very good game with a clever design and fun puzzles.

Just one last thing, there are hidden hats to find. And yeah, I only completed every puzzle and didn’t hunt for them, so I don’t know if these are purely just small exploration bonuses or harder extra puzzles. If I ever come back to this game to hunt for them, I’ll update my review.

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Developer: SpiceBound Studios
Publisher: SpiceBound Studios
Platform: Steam – Windows/macOS
Release Date: April 12, 2025