The wonderful game puffs. combines the satisfying snap of a puzzle with the nostalgic joy of a sticker book.
This 2025 Apple Design Award finalist for inclusivity is full of virtual puffy stickers, the kind that 80s kids slap on their binders or act out during recess. Players tear up themed packs of vibrant, kitschy decals—perhaps punk-rock capybaras, perhaps sporty sushi rolls—and place them on a blank sheet so that everything matches without overlapping.
The stickers are rendered with such precision that players can almost feel the slight tingle of their shiny surfaces under their fingertips – and the gentle haptic ‘blop’ that accompanies each placement is supremely satisfying. These sensations are not a coincidence: puffs. Developer Lykke Studios spent months carving out these little moments.
puffs.
- Available at: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV
- Team Size: 8
- Based on: Thailand and Cyprus
Download Puffies. by Apple Arcade >
“We always start with a material we like,” says Lykke Studios founder Jakob Lykkegaard. For the company’s 2023 Apple Design Award winner, stitch.that material was thread woven into whimsic embroidery puzzles. For their 2022 Apple Design Award finalist, tint.it was watercolor paint on thick, textured paper.
When the team started to brainstorm the project that would become puffs.they set their sights on a puzzle-style experience that feels natural on touchscreens. Her eureka moment was landing on puffy stickers as puzzle pieces; they are tactile, nostalgic and much more interesting to look at than a single puzzle piece.
And then everything blew up. “Because of the game physics, our first prototypes pretty much exploded,” laughs Lykkegaard.
Each of the game’s 4,000 stickers is a 3D-modeled object that is rendered to the game’s physics engine – and early tests proved that they didn’t play well together. Once the team figured out how to stop the pieces from ricocheting around the virtual tabletop, they turned to the problem of what should happen when a player tries to place a sticker on another. Is this something that comes up a lot during the game? Not really. Did they even spend months perfecting it? Absolutely.
Lykkegaard recalls discussing the optimal outcome of this sticker-on-sticker scenario with the team. “Does it stick where it is? Does it slide down? And if it slides down, in what direction and at what speed?” he says. They eventually decided to have the sticker zip back to the edge of the puzzle where it came from, but “it’s not inaccurate to say we spent three months on it,” says Lykkegaard. “We scrapped the entire code base and started over until it felt right.”
This pursuit of perfection is cut through the design of the game. The cutouts around each sticker were drawn by hand because automated tracing looked too sterile. Tilting a device causes a subtle parallax effect on the vinyl surface of a sticker, as if it were catching the light in the room. And the team endlessly iterated on snap distances — how close a piece needs to be to its proper place before it gently clicks into place when released — down to the last pixel.
“Players can feel it subconsciously,” says Tanin-Andre Hohmann, producer at Lykke Studios. “They may not know it, but they say, ‘Oh, I like that better.’ And then when you ask why, they’re like, ‘I don’t know, really. It just fits better.'”
The best-it-can philosophy also extends to the art of the game. From cute cactus creatures to anthropomorphic toilet plungers, puffs. Stickers are brought to life by talented illustrators around the world. “It is literally the artist’s art,” says Hohmann. “We wanted it as unfiltered as possible.”
The game also benefits from his home country. While Denmark-born Lykkegaard and many of his teammates hail from Europe, Lykke Studios is based in Phuket, Thailand – far from stuffy boardrooms and packed conference halls, close to a slower pace of life and simple creativity. “I tend to like to get into the bubble of the Bay Area or Europe, explore things, and leave that bubble again,” Lykkegaard says. “And then unlimited time to think and come up with new ideas.”
That unbridled mentality can be felt in the puzzle itself. Each sticker-sheet level is painstakingly designed by hand – no algorithms, no automation. Timers and “game over” screens are not a thing puffs.; Difficulty comes entirely from how many stickers are in the pack that the player chooses. And to ensure that larger puzzles don’t overwhelm players on smaller devices, the camera gently zooms in to frame the area where the actual handful of stickers belong.
Accessibility follows the same uncompromising logic. Players can enable more generous snap distances, switch sticker placement contours and use a finger offset option that allows for reduced motor function – or just very large hands. The guiding principle is simple: if a player comes up with a valid barrier that the team has not considered, and it is feasible to fix, the team adds a solution.
The cost of all this crafting? time. Fortunately, the team’s past successes have given them the freedom to polish their games without rigid milestones. But still, is it worth it? To obsess over squish and snap, to tune out the “rip” of opening a sticker pack, to discard piles of code because some interactions don’t feel perfect?
“There’s a lot of stuff in the game that no one will ever see that we put energy into just because we know it’s there,” Lykkegaard says. “And that makes us proud.”
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