Picture yourself on the stone floor of a chamber with a bow in your hands. An arrow goes into a box, you haul it up the wall, and you release it while hanging upside down from the ceiling. It doesn’t fall. Gravity has decided to take your side for once.
The game is He Who Watches, and nothing else you'll play in 2026 comes close to it as a puzzle game.
That’s a lot to assert, so some grounding. Portal reorganized something in my head back in 2007. It was a first-person puzzle game that played like a trick nobody should have been able to pull off, and for almost two decades nothing has managed to beat it. Then a single developer did.
One developer, one very strange building
He Who Watches is the work of Bobby Vanden, with Draknek and Friends handling publishing — a studio with plenty of puzzle pedigree. It borrows what made Portal so unusual and aims it somewhere completely different: perspective.
Story is almost an afterthought. You play an archer wandering a peculiar structure stuffed with puzzle chambers, solving rooms to open up new sections, collecting glyphs and tracking a god-like entity imprisoned somewhere within it.
You could reasonably file it under 3D Sokoban — the label for puzzle games built on pushing boxes around. An arrow lets you latch onto a box, and from there you shift it wherever it needs to sit, whether that’s a switch or simply out of your path. Reach the exit door in each room. Shove boxes, shoot switches, reason spatially.
Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it?
Then the walls become the floor
It isn’t. The twist: walls and ceilings are walkable, and gravity reorients itself to whichever surface you happen to be standing on.
Grab a box at floor level, set it down, and it rests on the floor. Nothing strange there. Haul that same box up to the ceiling, release it, and it stays glued up there.
The puzzles that emerge from that rule aren’t hard to imagine. Neither is the fact that tearing around every surface of a room in first-person will leave your stomach a little unsettled. It’s a fair trade. The execution is precise, and the puzzle design is sharp enough to justify the queasiness.
You become an engineer and don’t notice it happening
The reason He Who Watches never collapses into a gimmick is that Vanden refuses to stop at the gimmick. The gravity flip functions as groundwork rather than a novelty, and he keeps layering new concepts over it.
Well into my playthrough I reached a stretch of chambers organized around transport beams, which shunt boxes along a glowing green line. Then it clicked that blocking the beam’s path with a box turned the beam itself into a bridge I could walk over.
Not many puzzles later, I was essentially programming machinery to ferry boxes precisely where I wanted them. The escalation is so gentle that you turn into an engineer without registering the change.
The hint system other puzzle games should steal
If all of that sounds overwhelming, Vanden anticipated it. Each room comes with an optional mini-puzzle chamber designed to walk you through whichever concept the main puzzle is built on.
Suppose a gap in front of you looks impossible to cross. The hint room serves up a compact puzzle about moving a box over a gap.
It’s an elegant solution to the single worst wall in puzzle games — that dead stop where you’re stuck not because the solution is hard but because you can’t tell what the game is asking. It doesn’t happen here. The question is always legible. Answering it is where the difficulty lives.
I’m rationing it
I haven’t finished it yet, and that’s on purpose — I’m crawling through, giving every solution room to settle. Even when a puzzle has stonewalled me for 30 minutes, the answer always turns out to be sensically constructed and fair, and it delights me every single time.
My first run at Portal was a sprint, and I’ve never quite let myself off the hook for it. This time I’m taking it slow, because something this creatively euphoric shows up rarely, and there are still secrets in here I haven’t turned up.