ReThink 4

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that a single developer ships, quietly, into the Steam catalogue and then keeps tending long after release. ReThink 4 is exactly that. Yaeko has been building this laser-puzzle franchise for years, listening to player feedback after each entry and filing down the rough edges, and the fourth numbered instalment feels like the most considered version of that process so far. The core loop is about redirecting beams of light with repositionable cubes. Coloured lasers need to reach colour-matched targets, and the challenge comes from understanding how mixing wavelengths behaves: red plus blue makes magenta, white minus green makes magenta again, and so on. The cube redesign in this entry removes a redundant piece from the previous game and tightens the rule set so that complex solutions require fewer objects on the board. That sounds like a small thing but it makes a genuine difference to legibility. You spend less time tracking where every cube is and more time actually thinking about what you want the light to do. Puzzles are also grouped into areas you can move through freely, solving in whatever order suits you, which takes the pressure off any single room that has you stumped. Built on Unreal Engine 5, the game looks considerably cleaner than its predecessors. The dynamic global illumination does something pleasant with the minimalist white-and-glass aesthetic: when you slot the final cube into place and the lasers bloom into their targets, the room actually glows in a way that feels rewarding on a purely visual level. A dual-soundtrack option was added based on community requests, so you can swap between the original ambient score and an alternate selection depending on your mood. Both sit in that calm, faintly clinical register that laser-puzzle games seem to gravitate toward, and it works here. Community players have praised the art style consistently across the series. The honest caveats: story is essentially absent. There is a futuristic setting but almost no narrative tissue around it. Players who need a Portal-style throughline of wit and worldbuilding will find this sparse. The difficulty curve is also real. Some puzzle rooms in the later sections are demanding enough that community discussions have threads asking for hint systems, and none exist yet. If you bounce off a room, you are on your own or reaching for a walkthrough. The series as a whole sits a tier below Portal or The Talos Principle in mechanical ambition, and ReThink 4 does not change that gap, but it was never trying to close it. What it does is deliver a focused, handcrafted set of optical logic problems inside a calming space, with a developer who genuinely listens and keeps updating old entries long after their release window. For a budget-tier puzzle game made by one person, that kind of sustained care is not nothing. It is, in fact, quite a lot.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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