Why are online puzzle games having a moment?

Hooked on LinkedIn’s Queens? Gotta extend your Wordle streak in the New York Times games app before you start your day? You’re in good company on today’s Vergecast episode. Allison Johnson is joined by Simon Anthony and Mark Goodliffe, world-class puzzle champs and hosts of the delightful Cracking the Cryptic, a YouTube channel where they solve a puzzle on camera every single day.

They specialize in sudoku — and not just the classic number games you might be familiar with. Simon and Mark tackle mind-bending, seemingly impossible puzzles, working through it all in real time, sometimes over the course of several hours. What happens when you get stuck? How can you tell the difference between a puzzle made by a human and a computer-generated one? Why are we addicted to puzzle games all of a sudden? They help us crack the clues.

Then Allison sits down with Marc Levoy, one of the pioneers of computational photography, to talk about his new camera app: Project Indigo. Levoy is known for his earlier work on the Pixel camera, and was a driving force in shaping phone photography into what it is now. We last caught up with him in 2020 when he left Google for Adobe, so we got up to speed on what the heck he’s been doing for the last five years — and the important difference between HDR and an HDR-ish photo.

Finally, Allison takes a hotline question from someone who is not particular about their phone camera’s image quality, but does have a beef with camera bumps.

Read more about the topics covered in today’s episode:

• Cracking the Cryptic — YouTube
• This 25-minute video is the most riveting sudoku puzzle you will ever watch
• The Atlantic is making a big push into games
• I regret to inform you that LinkedIn’s games are very fun
• The mastermind of Google’s Pixel camera quietly left the company in March
• The brain behind the Google Pixel camera is building a universal camera app for Adobe
• Marc Levoy on the balance of camera hardware, software, and artistic expression
• Adobe launches a new ‘computational photography’ camera app for iPhones
• Adobe’s new camera app is making me rethink phone photography