Whenever I talk about minimalist puzzlers, people lean in. Especially people who claim they do not play video games.

So here is another one: Cubot.

The premise is almost aggressively simple. You slide coloured cubes onto matching tiles. That is it. No story. No characters. No fluff.

Everything is white. The floors. The walls. The void. The only real visual information comes from the cubes themselves. It looks like a design exercise that escaped a prototype folder and shipped anyway.

Controls are dead simple. Keyboard. Xbox controller. PS3 controller. One finger is enough. The game was literally designed around minimal input.

Here is the part people find surprising. All selected cubes move at the same time. Every move is global. That one constraint is where the game gets mean in a quiet way. You are not solving one problem. You are solving 3 or 4 at once, whether you like it or not.

It was built by one person. A French developer who made the entire thing solo in a few months. 80 levels. 10 episodes. Buttons. Elevators. Teleporters. Color swappers. All layered on top of the same tiny rule set. No new controls. Just more consequences.

The music barely exists. Soft ambient hum. Easy listening to the point of near-absence. It is there to keep your brain from getting itchy, not to be remembered.

It runs on anything. Specs are irrelevant. Your GPU can stay bored. That is fine. This is a puzzle game. The work happens in your head.

I will admit this. I am tired of minimalist puzzlers. The genre is crowded with games that mistake emptiness for depth.

Cubot mostly avoids that trap. It is calm. It is clever. When it gets hard, it is hard because you misread the board, not because it is messing with you.

It is also short. You can finish everything in under 75 minutes if you are paying attention. Some people do it much faster.

And it costs C$2.19 at full price. Not a sale. Just the price.

At that cost, it does not need to justify itself. It just needs to work. It does.