HexLemma news & patch notes

HexLemma launched on June 26. Seventeen days and fifteen updates later, it's a bigger game in every direction. Every bit of it is free, save-compatible, and already installed. If you've had the game since day one, here's everything you own now that you didn't then.

The game teaches itself

• Interactive tutorial. Three guided lessons played on real boards. The game highlights, explains, and waits for you to make each deduction, from your first adjacency strike to chained multi-clue reasoning. Offered to new players automatically, replayable from the menu any time.

• Playable stage intros. Campaign stages no longer introduce their new clue with a wall of text. Each intro is a short paged demo on a live mini-board: do the move, get the flash, hop straight into the level.

• Hands-on help. The How-to-Play technique pages traded their static pictures for live practice boards. Read about equality chains or the neighbor-clear gesture, then try it right there in the help screen.

Something to chase every day and every week

• Weekly Big Board. One huge board of up to 271 cells per week, the same for everyone, rolling over Sunday midnight UTC with its own leaderboard. The daily is your coffee; this is your project.

• Past dailies are open and ranked. Missed a day? Step back and play it. Your time posts to that day's leaderboard and counts toward your totals and 🔥 streak, and everything you'd already solved was backfilled automatically.

• Streaks & sharing. The Daily tracks your solve streak and gives you a one-tap, spoiler-free result to post anywhere.

• Solver ratings. Every puzzle now carries an objective difficulty rating (600–3000), and solving hint-free moves your own rating against it. Once it settles, your badge sits right on the main menu.

Solving feels (and looks) better

• The stained-glass finish. Every solved board blooms into a one-of-a-kind mosaic: value-colored glass cascading out from your last move, a gold leading border embossing in over the top. A later performance pass made it glide at full frame rate even on 271 cells.

• Value highlighting. Hold a number key, or tap the value rail, to light up every cell that can still take that value. Big boards read at a glance.

• Graduated hints. The Hint button points at the next forced move in three gentle steps (the cell, the clue behind it, then a plain-language why) and never makes the move for you. The deduction stays yours.

• Two new music tracks joined the playlist, which now actually re-shuffles between loops.

Hardcore grew into a second discipline

At launch, Hardcore just switched off the safety net. Now it's a full fill-in logic mode: every cell starts blank, you pencil in notes and commit answers pen-in-hand, and you can dismiss clues you've finished using. When the board is full, you submit your work. A flawless board wins; anything less tells you how many cells are wrong and nothing about which, with a running mistake tally across attempts. You supply the deduction scaffolding the normal game hands you. Same puzzle, completely different experience.

For the record books

Past Solves now opens with your lifetime stats (total solves, flawless count, hardcore wins, best time) above a browser of every solve, campaign missions included, each with a full replay. And seven achievements were added for Infinite and Hardcore play, topped by Nightmare: a Huge board, on Insane, in Hardcore.

And the promise underneath all of it

Every campaign level is verified solvable by pure deduction: no guessing, ever. Since week one, a build gate has refused to ship any level that breaks that promise.

Plus the steady unglamorous stuff: a distraction-free UI option, swappable mouse buttons, dailies locked to standard rules so the leaderboards stay fair, the Steam overlay no longer able to freeze the game, and a long tail of fixes, most of them straight from your in-game bug reports. Keep those coming; every one gets read.

Thanks for playing. Hope to see you on the daily and weekly leaderboards. -Geriatric Millenial (And yes, I know its not spelled correctly)

• Stained-glass finish. Every solved board blooms into a one-of-a-kind mosaic — value-colored glass cascading out from your last move, a gold leading border embossing in over the top. Every win becomes a little piece of art, and they're all waiting in Past Solves.
• Value highlighting. Hold a number key — or tap a value chip — to light up every cell that can still take that value. A scanning aid that makes the big boards read at a glance.
• Graduated hints. Stuck? The new Hint button points at the next forced move: a nudge first, then the clue behind it, then a plain-language why. It never makes the move for you — the deduction stays yours.
• Daily streak & sharing. The Daily now tracks your 🔥 streak and gives you a one-tap, spoiler-free result to share.
• Lifetime stats & new achievements. A full lifetime stats line in Past Solves, plus seven new achievements for Infinite and Hardcore play — including Nightmare, for taking down a Huge board on Insane difficulty, in Hardcore.

Dropping Later Today: HexLemma's Biggest Update Yet (v1.9.0)

Hardcore Mode is out of beta — and completely reworked

• Blank cells. No candidate pips, no scaffolding — you track every possibility yourself.
• Pencil & commit. Note your maybes, then commit your answers, with a pen/notes toggle for fast entry.
• No hand-holding. Wrong answers stick. Nothing warns you, nothing corrects you.
• Prove it. When the grid is full, hit Confirm completed? — we'll tell you how many cells are wrong, never which ones. Restore your clues and hunt them down, or restart clean. Every wrong submit is counted.

Full v1.4.0 notes

• Hardcore is now a fill-in logic mode — blank cells, pencil notes, commit answers; pen/notes toggle for mouse, keyboard, or controller.
• A deliberate finish — "Confirm completed?" checks your board: a flawless grid wins; a wrong one tells you how many cells are off (no highlight) and lets you Continue or Restart, tallying mistakes per submit.
• Undo removed, replaced by direct editing — Backspace, the × in a cell's corner, commit a different number, or demote an answer back to a note.
• Pencil-notes persist across save/resume (existing saves load unchanged).
• Accessible mode and the daily challenge are unchanged.

v1.3.5 — June 29, 2026

• Opening How to Play from the pause menu no longer locks up the game. Pulling up the How to Play screen mid-puzzle and returning could leave the mouse unable to click anything, forcing a hard quit. Fixed — the pause menu no longer catches stray clicks through the help screen, and menus close cleanly so input can't get stranded.
• The Steam overlay no longer freezes the game. Opening the Steam overlay (Shift+Tab) and closing it could leave the game paused with all input dead. Closing the overlay now reliably resumes play.

v1.3.4 — June 29, 2026

• Mouse cursor is always visible. Removed the custom software cursor and mouse-hiding logic. The OS cursor now shows at all times — including while using a controller. Controller navigation (sticks, d-pad, board cursor, menu focus) is fully intact; the mouse simply stays where it is when you pick up the pad. We will push this back at a later date.

v1.3.3

• Bug fix: Daily challenges now always play in normal mode. With Hardcore on, a daily was starting in hardcore — hiding the mistake count and letting wrong moves stick, which skewed the leaderboard.
• Bug fix: Earned achievements now survive Purge Save Data. Purge still wipes puzzles, history, daily progress, and campaign progress, but no longer clears achievements you've already unlocked.
• Bug fix: Settings checkboxes are now visible in the Dark theme. The Skip-intro / Distraction-free / Swap-mouse / Hardcore boxes were drawing an un-themed glyph that vanished against the dark card.

HexLemma 1.3.0

Added

• Undo in Hardcore mode. Misclicked a cell? An Undo button (or Ctrl/⌘+Z) takes moves back one at a time — Hardcore-only, for rescuing fat-fingers. It still won't tell you whether a move was right; wrong cells are only revealed once the board is full.
• Dismiss clues by hand in Hardcore. Clues no longer fade on their own — right-click a clue (or press A on a controller) to tuck it away, and click again to bring it back.
• How-to-Play teaches techniques, not just clue types. A clue-highlighting page plus two shortcuts: equality-chain propagation, and clearing a value from a solved cell's six neighbors. Hints follow your Swap-mouse-buttons setting.
• Campaign stages walk you through the controls. The first time you open a stage, the rule intro is followed by a How-to-Play tailored to that stage's clues, then drops you into the level.

Fixed

• Hardcore now applies to every puzzle you start. Starting from the New Puzzle screen could quietly fall back to normal rules — wrong moves flagged and counted even with Hardcore on. Fixed.
• Tighter targeting on candidate numbers. Clicking or hovering inside a hex used to snap to the nearest number even from an empty corner; it's now tight to the digits.

HexLemma 1.1.1 — Play It Your Way

Every change in this update came straight from your feedback. Thank you to everyone who's reached out — keep it coming.

🖱️ Swap Mouse Buttons

Used to left-click-to-select in other puzzle games? You can now flip the controls so left-click commits a number and right-click eliminates a candidate. Settings → Gameplay → Swap mouse buttons

🍃 Distraction-Free Mode

A cleaner board for when you want to disappear into the puzzle. The timer, counters, and menu button gently fade away during play and reappear the instant your cursor comes near. Off by default, so nothing moves unless you ask it to. Settings → Gameplay → Distraction-free UI

💀 Hardcore Mode

For the deduction purists: HexLemma stops holding your hand. Wrong moves stick, nothing gets flagged, and you only discover where you slipped once every cell is filled. A flawless solve is the only solve. Are you sure? Settings → Gameplay → Hardcore mode

🎬 Campaign Replays

Relive your best deductions. Every campaign mission you solve is now saved to Past Solves (look for the ◆) — re-watch any of them step by step from the replay browser, or hit View Replay the moment you finish.

And as always: every campaign level is guaranteed solvable by pure deduction. No guessing, ever.

Known Bugs

• Surface Pro 7 - Occasional flashing obj in the top left corner. Trying to replicate via a pro 8. Will push a fix as soon as I can.

HexLemma — Update 1.0.2

Campaign: every level solvable by pure logic

• Levels you've cleared stay cleared — your progress and best times are kept.
• A level you were part-way through restarts fresh with its updated puzzle.
• New levels — and replaying a finished one — use the updated puzzles.

Bug fixes

• No more freezes: the game could become unresponsive (mouse and Esc both dead) after opening the Steam overlay or returning from Settings. Fixed.
• Display settings stick: window mode and resolution now persist between launches (default is native borderless).
• Consistent puzzles: some boards — especially star-shaped ones — could generate differently from one launch to the next, which could make a clue look like it didn't match the board. Generation is now fully deterministic.
• No stray key presses: board keys (like d to deselect) no longer fire while the game is paused or while a menu or text field is focused.
• Replay polish: clue badges no longer flicker open and closed while you step through a replay, and clues you cleared with deselect-all now stay cleared.

New

• Report a Bug in the main and pause menus — it attaches the current puzzle details automatically, with an optional email field so I can follow up with you directly.