4Stack #12 — answers & breakdown
Saturday, July 25, 2026
A puzzle about how games get made and how they get received, rather than what is in them.
The sixteen cards in this puzzle were: The Last of Us Part II, It Takes Two, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Undertale, Stardew Valley, Cave Story, Papers, Please, Unpacking, A Short Hike, Spiritfarer, Coffee Talk, Five Nights at Freddy's, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Poppy Playtime, Hello Neighbor.
The four stacks
Game of the Year winners
The Last of Us Part II, It Takes Two, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3
Game of the Year winners at The Game Awards, across four consecutive-ish years.
Cozy games
Unpacking, A Short Hike, Spiritfarer, Coffee Talk
Games largely built by one person. Cave Story is the oldest and most influential of these — Daisuke Amaya spent five years on it and released it free in 2004, and a lot of the modern indie scene traces back to it.
(Mostly) one-person games
Undertale, Stardew Valley, Cave Story, Papers, Please
The cosy game boom: low stakes, no fail states, deliberately gentle. Spiritfarer is the emotional outlier, being a cosy management game about ferrying the dead.
Mascot horror
Five Nights at Freddy's, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Poppy Playtime, Hello Neighbor
Mascot horror — the genre that owns children's YouTube. Five Nights at Freddy's essentially invented the template in 2014 and everything else here follows its lead.
Want to try it yourself? Play puzzle #12 — archive plays don't affect your streak. Or jump into today's puzzle.