Upalu Mundi

THE perfect track-and-signal zach-like game. Easy to finish, despairing to optimize.

Upalu Mundi is a rare gem indeed! It's a little bit rough around the edges, but it nails the gameplay. The puzzles themselves are fairly easy, at least so far, but you can try optimizing your solutions in true Zachtronics-like fashion. That's where the real challenge lies. Personally, I'm quite content to build inefficient and overly expensive railways because I just like to see the little trains choo-choo around the track, with the satisfying "dings" that come with picking up and dropping off workers and resources. A friend of mine with over 100 hours in the game kindly gifted this for me, so unfortunately my review won't be counted in the overall review score, but I definitely give it 10/10 dings!

This is a great puzzle game about optimizing railroad connections for transporting items between two points in a grid with constraints. It looks quite scary at first due to the busy UI and dense text, but it turns out to actually be based on pretty simple and straightforward rules and a small number of easy to use design tools. You don't even have to read the documents (though a lot of people will enjoy the snark) as the first batch of levels are bite-sized tutorials for the various elements of the game. You can also see in-game how well your friends did in each level compared to you! It seems to run just fine on Linux (Arch), so I imagine it will run fine on your Steam Deck.

Nice lil' charming puzzle game!

Uh oh, I think this game is going to be bad for me.

Fun train puzzles. Gets progressively more challenging. It's both relaxing yet also wracks your brain at the same time. Cool vibes/setting too.