Steam’s new releases chart is a ghost town this weekend, and the numbers don’t need embellishment.

Derby’s Tycoon Online sits at #1. Four concurrent players. Zero reviews. Dreams Far Away holds #2 with literally zero players and zero reviews. These are not typos — this is just what Steam looks like in late March when no publisher bothered to show up.

Five spots down, a free picross-minesweeper hybrid called 2025: Mosaic Retrospective is quietly the only new release anyone is actually playing. 129 concurrent players. 100% positive reviews across the board. A player base that requests each new installment by name in their Steam reviews.

“Thank you for making another one of these!” wrote one player with 1.1 hours on the clock. “I requested it in my review of last years, as I’m sure others did too, and I just really appreciate it.”

The game is the work of solo developer Mark Ffrench, operating under the studio name Divide The Plunder. It presents a single enormous puzzle that reveals pixel-art illustrations of global news stories from 2025 as you solve it — a logic-puzzle time capsule. Each number tells you how many cells in its surrounding grid should be filled, minesweeper-style, but at a scale designed to be chipped away at for weeks.

The 2024 edition currently holds a 9/10 rating from nearly 1,000 reviews on Steam. Ffrench told The Geekly Grind that the retrospective series was inspired by annual jigsaw puzzles published by the Telegraph in the UK, calling it a “time capsule of real-world news stories.”

In a chart where the top game can’t crack double-digit players, a free puzzle game with genuine community enthusiasm is the only thing moving the needle. The scoreboard doesn’t lie.

Sources