I’ve been thinking about this stuff lately because of a guy named FLEB. FLEB (whose real name is Paul Hlebowitsh) has been a fixture in the internet’s puzzle ecosystem for a few years now. (If you’re surprised to learn that the internet has a dedicated puzzle scene: Welcome to the internet, friend, because you must certainly be new around here!) A regular participant in MIT’s famed Mystery Hunt—a.k.a., the big leagues of esoteric and silly communal conundrum solving—FLEB is a YouTuber and game designer who’s put a handful of games out on Steam to date, with the most recent one, 20 More, Somehow Even Smaller, Mazes, arriving just a couple of weeks ago. (The game is, you’ll be shocked to learn, a sequel to a 2024 offering titled 20 Small Mazes, and manages to live up handily to the name.) With the exception of last year’s Strange Jigsaws, his biggest game to date—which retails for all of 5 bucks—FLEB gives these games away for free, to anyone who’s interested in his particular brand of brain-twisting absurdity. Which is crazy, because they’re some of the very best, and funniest, puzzle games currently available on the internet.
The names, in case it wasn’t clear, are part of the joke: While the two Mazes games have plenty of puzzles that have the look or basic mechanics of a simple labyrinth—and Jigsaws contains many pieces you’ll have to slot together in one way or another to make sense of its universe of creative chaos—the actual mechanisms of solving them are never that simple. Spoiling even one (and thus robbing you of the “Oh, you mad fucker” moment of delight when the solution hits) would be actively cruel, especially given how accessible FLEB’s games are. (Seriously, you could be playing 20 More, Somehow Even Smaller, Mazes, 60 seconds from when you read this sentence, at least if your computer’s handy.) So suffice it to say that FLEB has created puzzles here that take the form of stock types while actually touching on every type of puzzle-solving there is: Logical deduction, mad leaps of intuition, spatial understanding, and sometimes just the wild cunning of knowing that there’s got to be a catch to whatever seemingly simple thing you’re being asked to do. They’re games that impose a sort of joyful paranoia on the player, the same sense of “Ah, fuck, what’s going to delight me next?!” that we imagine the poor doomed kids in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory must have felt, right before getting shoved down the Bad Egg Chute.
Importantly, these puzzles are only occasionally really difficult, and never cruel; in interviews, FLEB has talked about how accessibility is key to his design sensibility. (He’s quick to note, for instance, that puzzle-solving isn’t actually a measure of intelligence, so much as it is a skill that can be developed through vigorous exercise; you can just train your brain to think in absurd corkscrews, if you’re inclined to find this kind of thing amusing.) It seems to be part of why he gives these beautifully crafted games away for free, or near-as, while filling them with puzzles that combine professional craftsmanship with silly jokes clearly designed to make his kid laugh. (All three games contain drawings supposedly happily scribbled by his daughter, which have then been adapted into some of the more fiendish problems on offer, while the finale of 20 More is essentially a full-bodied Dad Joke.)
The act of puzzle-solving is, after all, both a strangely solitary and a deeply communal one. You can’t make a puzzle for yourself, typically; any good one requires a recipient/solver/victim in order to really work. At their core, the question they most often ask is “Can you think the way I was thinking when I made this?” It’s a strange sort of telepathy, and a beautiful one. I’ve never met FLEB, and probably never will, but I’ve walked the mazes of his mind, and assembled the jigsaw pieces he left for me—and thousands, if not millions, of others—in those quiet, silly, secret spaces. He took the time to write a bunch of jokes for me, and people like me, and the warmth I feel for him, despite knowing practically nothing about him, is real, and sincere. The best way I can think to honor it is this: Go play 20 More, Somehow Even Smaller Mazes. It’s free; it takes about two hours to beat; it’s one of the most delightful games of 2026. And when you’re done, you’ll have two other similar boxes of beautiful jokes to open up. What a trove!
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