Hot Wax: a falling-block puzzler where you burn the lines away

Hot Wax looks like Tetris for about five seconds. You drop oddly shaped candles into a well, but instead of clearing full rows, you light a wick and let the flame crawl from candle to candle. Every piece you place moves the fire one step, so you're building a fuse while you stack, and a careless drop can snuff the whole chain out. The twist is that packing pieces tightly, the classic Tetris habit, can actually hurt you, because the fire needs room to spread. Players keep saying the same thing: your Tetris muscle memory only gets you so far here.

There's plenty around that core. Ritual mode asks you to hit a score goal (a run takes up to about ten minutes), Penance lets you work through a wall of tangled wax at your own pace, and there are endless, practice and daily-challenge modes with leaderboards. Bombs, thermite, magic acorns and boons from the temple's strange resident shake things up, and you unlock some 35 colour palettes as you score. The synthwave soundtrack and slightly trippy pixel look get as much praise as the puzzle itself.

The catch is the learning curve: planning chain reactions takes a while to click, and several happy players admit they're still figuring it out. It's also a score-chaser rather than a campaign, since the store says unlocking all the modes takes a couple of hours. But at $5.99 with the launch discount (normally $7.99), with full controller support, Steam Deck Verified status and Mac and Linux builds, it's an easy recommendation for anyone who loves falling-block games and wants something genuinely new.