Screw & Settle

Take it apart. Put it away. Watch it fall.

Screw & Settle is a cosy 3D puzzle about the quiet satisfaction of dismantling something properly. Every level is an object held together by coloured screws — a mallard duck, an astronaut, a cottage, a horse, a stack of crates strapped down with planks. Tap a screw and it spins out. Pull the last one holding a panel and the whole piece swings loose and tumbles away, uncovering the screws that were hiding behind it.

HOW IT PLAYS

You get two colour slots and one small bench. A screw drops straight into a slot matching its colour, and three of a kind clear together. Anything that has nowhere to go yet waits on the bench — and the bench only holds eight, so the order you work in is the whole puzzle. Take the wrong screw early and you will be staring at a full bench with nothing left you can place.

No timers. No lives. No energy meter counting down while you think. Just you, the object, and the question of which screw comes out next.

REAL THINGS, TAKEN APART

Thirty hand-built levels, and none of them are filler. Some are dense blocks of crates four faces deep — pure geometry, strapped together with steel planks. Others are things you will recognise before you have touched them: a bottle-green mallard, an astronaut in a white suit, a cottage with a slate roof and a brick chimney, a handheld console, an oak barrel, a hardback book.

They are built the same way underneath as the abstract ones, so they play like puzzles rather than like scenery. Spin the whole object with a finger to find the face you need. Pieces hang, swing and fall on real physics — a plank held by one last screw will sway before it goes.

The first three levels are deliberately small, so you learn one idea at a time before the stacks get deep.

BUILD A TOWN WHILE YOU SOLVE

Every level you finish pays out lumber, stone and grain, and all of it goes into Minnesota Outskirts — one empty plot at a time. A for-sale sign becomes a cleared site, becomes a timber frame, becomes a finished building: the city hall, the coffee shop, the hospital, the police station, the cinema.

Five plots. The town finishes around level 20, so the last stretch of the game plays out with the place already built and yours.

COLOURS YOU EARN

Take a building all the way to the top and it pays out two more screw colours — ten across the town, eighteen in all.

They do not make the levels harder. New colours replace colours a puzzle already used, so the same level comes back in deep crimson and forest green instead of plain red and green. Levels stay exactly the size they were. Your puzzles just slowly stop looking like everybody else's.

WHAT YOU GET

• 30 hand-built levels, from a four-crate slab to a sixty-three-screw duck
• Real 3D you can spin with one finger
• Two colour slots, one small bench, no filler mechanics
• 18 screw colours — 10 of them earned by finishing buildings
• A town that visibly gets built as you play
• No timers, no lives, no energy
• One hand, portrait, plays offline

Unscrew. Sort. Settle in.