Please Fix the Road review – turn chaos to calm in this pleasing puzzle

PC; Ariel Jurkowski
Stylish and minimalistic, this gentle, quietly demanding game offering escape and satisfaction will entertain for hours

If the success of Wordle proved anything this year it's that, in times of stress and uncertainty, good puzzle games provide a means of temporary escape for the brain. And while there's no shortage of competitors in this crowded genre, Please Fix the Road is a stylish and pleasingly minimalistic newcomer that deserves an audience.

As the title suggests, this is a game about mending transport routes - not just roads, but canals and railway tracks too. On each level, you're given a small landscape with an incomplete route, and you must use the tools available to allow travellers to get from A to B. Bombs clear land, while road tiles let you fill in the missing sections of your network. However, you only get a certain number of bombs and roads per level, and the pieces have different shapes: some bombs clear two adjacent tiles of land, while others clear three or four, perhaps in an L-shaped pattern; and road tiles can be straight or curved.