Bring Your Pet To School Day needs you to use clues in a busy classroom to figure out pet ownership and seating placements.
You’re a substitute teacher and, before you can even get started with your day, you need to get your class in order… quite literally. Bring Your Pet To School Day (by Gwen C. Katz) is a single-room puzzle game where you need to not only match up your students and their pets, but also identify the seating pattern of the room and pair the names of everybody (and the pets) to them, and all before roll call.

Many, many years ago there used to be little cryptic riddle images that you could get, a kind of tricky spin on your Where’s Wally/Waldo, where you had to gather the information in images in order to figure out the solution to a puzzle. This game teases exactly the same part of my brain, challenging both memory and deduction in how it hides clues around the screen to be discovered.
Gameplay is incredibly simple, with a small number of interaction points (like clicking the note on the desk) that give you simple, written clues. The rest of the clues are visual and context-led, such as which children are interacting with (or trying to interact with) which animals. You simply click, or drag-drop, to interact.
There’re two difficulties, with the first (Easy) locking in the correct grouping of Child, Child Name, Pet and Pet Name if they’re dropped into the correct seat. Difficult Mode doesn’t do this, and you’ll simply need to get it right and submit before you find out that you’ve correctly figured everything out.
Its a short experience but it’s a really fun way to spend a few minutes, and it can also be played on your mobile browser (well, in most cases). If you enjoy it, the developer (G.C Katz, as part of Nightwell Games) is working on a title with similar mechanics called Surradia: An Art Retrospective.

Bring Your Pet to School Day is playable for free in your browser on itch.io.