Everything MUST Fit! makes thinking outside the box part of the puzzle

I love puzzle games, but it can be hard to find ones that strike the right balance between simple and challenging. I find that many puzzle games lean too far in one direction or the other, so players either breeze through them or never finish them at all. When I first saw Everything MUST Fit!, I hoped it would manage to bridge the gap between the two, and I was right to hope. 

Everything MUST Fit! is a grid-based organizing game by Janbeh Games that has a very important twist: the items change depending on the time of day or what you do to them.  You can get destructive with a hammer, or combine two items to make something entirely new, and experimenting with combinations is half the fun. 

Or in my case, an entirely distracting and enjoyable side quest, but we’ll come back to that later. 

Hako has some very particular skills

Hako is the main companion character in Everything MUST Fit!, and in her world of disorganized things and general mess, she is a girl with a valuable set of skills. Hako is an organizer, capable of making things fit into strangely shaped packages, even if it means she has to think outside the box to do it. 

Instead of being defeated by objects that don’t fit inside the designated grid, you and Hako can work together to get creative and force them to fit. Dragging items into Hako’s hat at the bottom of the screen lets you change their shape or combine them with others, creating a new item that may or may not fit in the grid. 

However, some of the combinations in a level are red herrings. Just because you can combine things doesn’t mean you necessarily should or have to. Figuring out which combinations are essential to completing a level and which are simply interesting to know is a huge part of the game, and Everything MUST Fit! awoke the completionist inside me in a way I didn’t expect. 

Side quests and hint systems

As much as I love puzzles, I also don’t like seeing checklists half completed. There’s a drop-down box on every level of Everything MUST Fit! that includes all of the possible combinations and whether you’ve discovered them or not. So, of course, I spent a lot of time trying to combine random things to check off all the possible ones on each level. 

Once I managed to find them all, though, I turned my attention to actually making everything fit in the allowed space, and this is where I tell you that, despite its adorable aesthetic, Everything MUST Fit! is actually deceptively challenging. There’s something about having multiple options for some of the items that kind of melts my brain a little, in a good way, and presents something more challenging than I’m used to in these types of puzzle games. 

Thankfully, you aren’t going into this without help. You can access a hint system that allows you to uncover one block from a solved grid at a time, providing you with just enough of a pointer to get you out of a hole without rescuing you entirely. If you don’t want to use the hint system, you can also skip any level without being locked out of future ones. 

Cozy to a fault

Everything MUST Fit! has the adorable art style that is quickly becoming a calling card for Janbeh Games, and as you play through the levels, you might even encounter a familiar face along the way, like Ghostie.

On top of being utterly cute and cozy, there are also no time limits or pressure to make you feel like you're not solving things fast enough. There also aren't any star ratings for levels; once a level is done, it's done. There's no need to feel like you didn't do it "quite right" because you only got two stars out of three.

I’ve been a fan of Janbeh Games since the release of its first game Love, Ghostie in 2024, so I’m super excited to see them back with this adorable puzzle game! There’s no release date for Everything MUST Fit! yet, but ahead of Steam Next Fest, the demo is coming to Steam on October 1, and I cannot recommend it enough if you love puzzle games.