A Place for Every Potion: water-sort puzzles, but make it a gothic apothecary

Grandpa's auto-sorting spell backfired, every potion in the lab has unravelled into one giant colourful heap, and he's off to an alchemists' convention for a month. Your job is two puzzles at once. First you decant scrambled layers from bottle to bottle until each one runs a single pure colour (if you've ever played a water-sort mobile game, your hands already know this part). Then you carry each finished potion to its exact shelf. You can only levitate a few bottles at a time, so deciding what to hold is the whole game.

It's a more thoughtful kind of tidy-up game than most, more puzzle than shelving, and it's the kind of thing where one more potion quietly turns into a whole evening. There are no timers, no fail state, and it autosaves after every pour. A 24-node skill board gives you a wider hand and a longer reach (and you can switch skills off if you like your own way better), but it never plays for you. There's one finite lab of 4,160 potions with a real ending, plus New Game II and III, a colour-blind mode that actually helps, full controller support and full rebinding. And it costs $5.09 during launch.

Some caveats: the pouring controls can feel fiddly until they click, it's repetitive by design, and if you were hoping upgrades would eventually auto-sort for you, they won't. On AI: the solo dev, who made all the 3D art and code, disclosed using AI for some textures and the music. The music has already been swapped for human-made tracks, and the textures are being redone with a freelance artist, though not necessarily all of them by launch. Also, it only came out on Oct 28, so the fast-riser buzz is based on about half a day of tracking. It's very early.