Playing Spilled Mushrooms has been a humbling experience. There I was, thinking I’m good at both puzzles and card games, when I found myself briefly stumped on my very first “delivery” in this card puzzle game about gathering mushrooms. That’s what I get for underestimating a game with cute animals in the cover art.

In Spilled Mushrooms, a Playdate game, you are a mushroom delivery-person who has messed up bigtime: you’ve spilled the mushrooms (obviously), and somehow done so in such an extreme way that they’ve ended up scattered across multiple habitats. Oops! You have a week to collect them all and get them to their intended destination. But — in what sounds like my dream scenario — you’ve befriended the wildlife, so you have a support network of animals willing to help you fix your mistake.

The game requires some light math and a lot of strategic thinking. Each animal is able to gather a specified number of mushrooms and do so for as many days as are written next to the hourglass symbol on its card. The Hippo, for example, can pick up five mushrooms in one shot, but only for one day. Meanwhile, the Porcupine can only grab one mushroom at a time, but will do so for six days.

Each animal also has a unique trait that has potential to interact with the other cards in its habitat. The Moose or Elephant will increase other animals’ collecting capacities while the Grizzly Bear will do the opposite. The Platypus… well, Platypus is confused. As you play, you’ll earn little tokens that can be used to help you stack the deck with cards you want to see in your hand. You can only place one card per turn, and there are three habitats to clear over the course of the seven in-game days that make up a round. Each of those sites will hold a different number of mushrooms.

Once I dusted the cobwebs off my brain and got the hang of the game’s flow, I was able to redeem myself and start winning some rounds. But successfully collecting all your mushrooms on the first (... or second) try isn’t a given. The puzzles take a few minutes to solve and they’re procedurally generated, so you’ll get something new every time. Sometimes, they’re pretty hard. Spilled Mushrooms also gives you the option to create a custom delivery, in which you pick the habitats, mushroom counts and available animal cards.

Despite the challenge, Spilled Mushrooms is a really relaxing game — and one that I keep getting sucked into for long stretches of time. It’s reminiscent of Wingspan with its nature focus and tranquil soundtrack, so it’s a great thing to pick up when you want to unwind at the end of the day or, conversely, ease yourself into thinking while you have your morning cup of coffee. This one will probably be in my regular rotation of games for a good while.

Off-Planet Dreams gives you everything you need to succeed, if you really want that. Help is just a few button-presses away at (almost) all times. Because of that, it feels uniquely accessible for what it is — an “invisible puzzle platformer” designed to trip you up over and over again until you’ve learned enough from your mistakes to move forward. Depending on how you approach it, Off-Planet Dreams is either a trial-and-error nightmare loop or a relatively easygoing platform adventure. Or something between the two. I died 274 times in my first playthrough, if that’s any indication of how challenging it can be.

Off-Planet Dreams presents you (playing as a blob) with a grid and some floating doors, and says, essentially, ‘okay, now find your way out.’ There are platforms that form a path to each door, but all the platforms are invisible. This is where the game’s “difficulty is what you make of it” ethos comes in. You can commit to jumping into the abyss every time and hoping to land on a platform, memorizing each misstep so you know what not to do the next time around if you die, or you can choose one of the three available tools for some guidance. “Peek” will give you a quick glimpse of any platforms nearby, “Paint” will highlight any platform you’ve stepped on, and “Show” will reveal all of the platforms in that room.

Being stubborn, I was determined to get as far as I could without any help. But, I was humbled not too far in when I found myself trapped in Level 2-5 — a level with multiple sublevels that’ll repeatedly throw you back to its start if you go through the wrong doors. Here, I eventually caved and enabled “Show” just to give my brain some space to work out what the puzzle was without having to worry about remembering platforms. (When I finally figured it out, it wasn’t even that complicated. Sigh). After that point, I bounced between going unaided and using the “Paint” option as a little treat.

The game throws a curveball at you about halfway through when it introduces a new mechanic that requires the crank, which I thought was really clever once I got over the initial frustration of not knowing what the hell was going on. And further on, Off-Planet Dreams undergoes a stylistic shift that transforms it into something else entirely than what it was at the beginning. The developers wrote in the description that Off-Planet Dreams is “more than a grid of dots,” and they weren’t kidding. I had a lot of fun with it. You can get it now on the Playdate Catalog for $6.