Enigma is a free, open-source puzzle game inspired by Oxyd on the Atari ST and Rock’n’Roll on the Amiga. You steer a small black marble with the mouse and must find and uncover every pair of identically coloured Oxyd stones in a landscape — a premise that is simple to explain and famously hard to master. Hidden traps, vast mazes, laser beams and countless puzzles stand between you and the stones, and with well over a thousand main-pack levels there is a great deal of game here.

Overview

Enigma has been developed for over twenty years by a small group of volunteers, and it is still recognisably the game it set out to be: a mouse-controlled marble, a tiled landscape full of obstacles, and pairs of coloured stones to uncover. Each landscape is an independent puzzle built from reusable objects, and the difficulty curve runs from gentle tutorial levels to genuinely devious late-game mazes.

Key Features

• Over 2,600 levels bundled — 1,100 main-pack levels plus 22 tutorials, 1,119 Sokoball levels, 95 pentomino puzzles, 268 DejaVu levels and 2 training levels as of release 1.30.
• Physics-driven marble control — you move the marble with the mouse; momentum, rubber bands, springs, magnets and moving blocks all change how a level plays.
• A large vocabulary of puzzle objects — Oxyd stones, lasers, mirrors, one-way floors, portals, glass marbles, inkwells, pebbles and more, which level authors combine into new kinds of riddle.
• Levels as data, scripting with Lua — landscapes are authored as data and scripted in Lua, and the community contributes new level packs regularly.
• Multiple graphical tilesets — the look of the landscapes can be swapped, with support for additional tilesets added in 1.30.
• Localised interface — translations include English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and, since 1.30, Bosnian, Chinese, Japanese, Norwegian and Slovene.
• Modernised engine — 1.30 moved the game from SDL 1.2 to SDL 2.0, added unconstrained window resizing and switched internationalisation to tinygettext.
• Small and self-contained — no account, no store, no telemetry and no network requirement; it runs on modest hardware.

Why Use It

Enigma is one of the oldest continuously maintained free software games, and it shows in the level design rather than in feature bloat. If you enjoy the “one more try” loop of a well-made puzzle game, the sheer volume of hand-built levels gives it enormous longevity, and because it is a native desktop game it stays responsive on old machines where modern titles will not run. It is also entirely volunteer-run, with no monetisation, advertising or data collection anywhere in the product.

Use Cases

• Deep single-player puzzling on the desktop when you want something slower and more thoughtful than an action game.
• A retro-gaming fix for anyone who played Oxyd or Rock’n’Roll and wants a modern, maintained continuation.
• Playing offline — the full game works with no connection and no account.
• Tinkering with level data and Lua scripting to build your own landscapes.

Platforms

Windows, macOS, Linux and other modern Unix systems. Most Linux distributions package it (Debian and Ubuntu ship it as enigma), and pre-built Windows and macOS installers are published with each release.

Licence

Free and open source — GNU General Public License v2.0. The source code is at github.com/Enigma-Game/Enigma.

Website

nongnu.org/enigma — the official homepage, with downloads, screenshots, news and the user manual. Latest release: Enigma 1.30 (27 August 2021).

Similar Tools

• HyperRogue — another open-source puzzle game, built around non-Euclidean geometry.