Sunshine Heavy Industries

Sunshine Heavy Industries is a 2D spaceship-design puzzle game with a charming framing. You're the new engineer at the newest shipyard in this arm of the galaxy, and your job is to build ships for a colorful cast of space weirdos who walk in with specific demands and increasingly tight constraints. The puzzle is fitting their requirements together using over a hundred different parts and dozens of unique subsystems.

The gameplay loop is open-ended puzzling. Each customer has needs — specific weapon types, cargo capacity, engine power, sometimes very particular aesthetic preferences — and you assemble the ship to satisfy them within the available budget. There are countless solutions to every level, and the design encourages personal style as much as optimization. Two players solving the same level will usually produce wildly different ships, and both can be correct.

The complication is your business partner. He keeps finding new ways to screw up your reputation with the local pirates, which produces story beats and additional constraints across the campaign. Help your customers build their dream ships while navigating the consequences of your partner's increasingly questionable decision-making, and the story unfolds across 50+ story levels with more added every patch.

The game has tons of replay value through daily challenge leaderboards, post-credits content, and the open-ended design that rewards experimenting with constraints you didn't have to follow. It's a small, focused puzzle game with character — the kind of experience where you spend an hour solving one ship just to admire how absurd it looks, then move on to the next request from the next eccentric space dweeb who walks through the door.