Puzzle Games I've Played
Puzzle games are categorized by a primary gameplay loop of solving puzzles, either atmospheric or explicit. I've played 122 games in this genre so far.
You can also go back to all genres.
Botany Manor
Pleasant little puzzle game. Fun to explore the manor and piece together the clues about how each plant is grown. On the simpler side, but generally enjoyable for its short runtime.
The Looker
Great games demand great parody. It's got some fun puzzles in its own right, but manages to be laugh-out-loud hilarious in its own right. Is the perfect length and was a blast top to bottom.
Chants of Sennaar
Superb puzzle game. Loved learning languages based on context clues and pictograms. The sections combined and overlapped well. The overall message was good and the story went fun places. Managed to say a lot without any dialogue. Had some unnecessary stealth sections, but they didn't bog it down too much. Deservedly in the conversation w/ Obra Dinn and Golden Idol.
Chicory: A Colorful Tale
Extremely charming, but with more of a mental health focus than expected. Puzzles were good and coloring the world is a fun mechanic. Controls occasionally frustrating, but a fun outing overall.
Semispheres
Great puzzles and controls. Really fun way to stretch and explore the "split brain" concept. Only a few levels _really_ made use of that, but they were hard and it would have been tiring to do more. Pretty good difficulty overall and a great collection of mechanics.
Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery
Short and sweet game about art and love. It's a little heavier than its art and presentation let on, but it's fun to click around.
Strange Horticulture
Fun, plant-based puzzle game. There's a branching story that's surprisingly engaging. Plant identification gets a little repetitive after a while, but there's enough different identification angles and other puzzles that it stays fun.
Cocoon
Ethereal little puzzle game. I loved the seamlessness and otherworldliness of the environment. Was also nice to have a game from this dev that wasn't so gross or death-focused. The recursion was a good mechanic and it did a good job respecting your time. Lovely little experience!
Inscryption
fascinating game. Fun gameplay, kept it fresh throughout. I'm not totally sure I followed the story, but I loved its layers and my total inability to guess what was coming next. The whole thing came together very well. Extremely unique game.
Escape Academy
A little janky, but very fun. Good puzzles, charming enough story (such that it is). Did the DLC too, which were fun but not necessary.
Patrick's Parabox
Very charming puzzle game. Definitely mind bending, especially towards the end. Completed 161/364 puzzles, which is impressive. Game felt smooth and engaging throughout, and introduced new mechanics well.
Slayaway Camp
Great little game. Loved the style and the setting. Puzzles were generally good, but the difficulty curve was all over the place. Some of them were super hard and required _many_ complex positions, while others were more straightofward. I liked the simpler ones, but it's nice that there's stuff there for everyone. Cool settings, good puzzle mechanics, great vibes.
Mom Hid My Game!
Didn't expect to like it, but I did! Small, cute puzzles. Not hard, but entertaining. Extremely short.
The Case of the Golden Idol
Great puzzles, good art style. Liked the overarching plot and the approachability of it all. I could have used 20% more difficulty, but it was a superp addition to the detective/logic genre.
Song of Bloom
Sort of odd little puzzle experience. Sort of like a more abstract Blackbox, if that's a thing. Short ans sweet, with a bit of story. Odd, but enjoyable.
Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4
Very charming game. Puzzles were fine and controls were a little finnicky, but it's easy and fun and we had a nice time. Music is great, cutscenes were hysterical. There's a million little things to find.
TOEM
Extraordinary. Extremely charming, straightforward but not too simple. Fun to explore and build a little vacation album (captures some of the magic of FFXV in that way). Great level design. Fun taking pictures of hard-to-find things and wear funny clothes. Just a delight, top to bottom.
Superliminal
Not really a story, even though there pretends to be one. But, the trippy visuals and mind-bending puzzles were pretty neat. Short and sweet.
The Forgotten City
Very cool exploration and mystery. I really liked how the storylines fit together. City was fun to poke around and the premise was interesting. Cool mix of history, too. I could have used more of it, but it was pretty tightly told.
Unpacking
Very pleasant game! Interesting to example the story of a life via the ownership of things. Gameplay was light, but fun. Enjoyed seeing the subtle story unfold.
Assemble With Care
Wonderful! Delightful, tacticle little game. Cute story with heart. Nice music and sound design too.
It Takes Two
Superb gameplay. Always new environments and styles to keep things fresh. Story was decent, but a little hamfisted. Presentation overall was great though, espeically puzzles and level designs.
Nauticrawl
Neat little puzzle game. A little hard to get started on, but it did some hand holding. Was unclear when I found the thing I was looking for, but I got there. Very cool vibe controls. I bet it's great in VR.
WHAT THE GOLF?
Really superb! Tons of teeny micro-puzzles. Constantly inventive. Really never knew what was coming next. Total joy. Beat the main story in 2:25 w/ 4322 strokes.
Maquette
Cool puzzles and atmosphere, evocative enough story. Mind bending presentation. Cute little game!
Bugsnax
Very cute/horrifying game. Gameplay is simple, but layered. The characters have a surprising amount of depth to them, which gives the game a lot of legs. Had fun exploring the world; got the plat! --- Finished story in 7h 29m. Caught 52 on that play through on 9/24
Minit
Cute, compact game. Fun to explore and slowly build the scope of the world. Effective, simple graphics. Good music. Simple, but enjoyable.
Last Day of June
Interesting game. Great art style and sound design. Repetitive animations could have gone a little faster. Gameplay was light, but story was compelling and engaging. Enjoyed it, especially its focused length.
Call of the Sea
Drop dead gorgeous. Good atmosphere and sound design. Puzzles were good without being too hard/obtuse. Story was decent and I liked how we discovered it over time. Wish you walked faster. The exposition and narration was a little odd, but was done sort of out of necessity (only a single character). Vibrant, if shallow, world. Enjoyed it though.
The Gardens Between
Very unique game! Vibes like Monument Valley. Puzzles weren't too complex, but there were some cool environmental ones. Great art and vibe, too.
Carto
Delightful game! Great art style and characters. Puzzles were light, but pretty good. Great core puzzle elment - they did a good job with it. Manipulating the map could have been a little more fluid, especially when trying to match pieces that didn't fit, but I really enjoyed it all the way through.
Hexcells Infinite
Really great game. Tough but fair. Harder than the others, but fun. A little too easy to make UI mistakes on the iPad, but it’s a nice game.
Death Squared
Very fun! Cute and (not usually) vindictive. Neat puzzle design, fun to collaborate. Excited to try the harder ones eventually. These definitely got harder, too. Cute little story to go with it too, which wasn't necessary but was pleasant.
macdows 95
Cute little game, great puzzles. Good atmosphere (such that it was). Felt like BlackBox for PC? Definitely neat.
Snipperclips: Cut it out, together!
Really great puzzles. Good physics, fun to think outside the box. Not every puzzled esign was a hit, but most of them were. Very fun multiplayer, but works well solo.
Outer Wilds
Fun game. Really interesting sense of exploration. Lots of info to find, basically all of it self guided. I liked finding new things all the time. It was a little frustrating having to re-do dangerous sections when I ran out of time, since there's no checkpoints. Very cool dangerous feeling atmosphere. Lots of cool flavor and discovery. Definitely a subnautica vibe. Space physics were really good, too. Fun to boost around.
DEVICE 6
Weird interactive puzzle / novel. Really amazing presentation, both at an audio and visual level. Sort of odd and meta, but in a very cool way.
Hexcells Plus
Hard, it typically fair. Pretty good UI, but reuse of some elements lead to confusion. Still, pure logic and actual thinking required made it a lot of fun.
Return of the Obra Dinn
Really great concept. Frustrating at times, but really rewarding to figure it all out. Enjoyed the art style.
Pony Island
Short, immersive, silly little game. Enjoyed the meta aspects immensely. Gameplay was a good balance of simple and compelling. Didn't overstay its welcome. Clever writing.
Nimbus
Really interesting concept executed very welll. The levels are a good exploration of the possibilities and the speed lead to a lot of very nervous flying. Unabashedly played it on "easy" so I didn't have to restart levels. There are extra levels and challenge coins that I didn't get. It'll give me something to come back to if I want. Either way, I got what I wanted from this game.
Up Left Out
Great puzzles. I previously liked another game of theirs. 50 levels. creative use of the mechanics and it builds on itself well. Good tactile feel. Great sound design.
Hexcells
Really slick game. A little confusing on a couple of rules, but well done. Difficulty really ramped up at the end. Had the satisfaction of games with no luck where you finally make a breakthrough.
The Room: Old Sins
The best one so far. Good puzzles, no wandering. Some actual story. Great design. Fun aha moments!
Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
Really neat game! Visual novel, plus some puzzle areas. Puzzles were (very occasionally) frustrating, but the story was good and being able to explore the branches was really neat.
We Were Here
A little light on direction in some areas which led to some frustration in progress (having to do a puzzle a few times because of a hard one after it), but awesome use of asymmetric information and some good puzzles. Really neat experience. Played with vicky, would also be very neat with a rando.
Klocki
Totally guessing on day. Great puzzles though, cool design, components feel good in the hand.
Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Puzzles are very hit-or-miss, but the art, story, and music are fun. All things told, it's aged surprisingly well.
Jusant
Climbing as a core mechanic felt quite good. It was fun looking for handholds and swinging to reach something new. The story being all text as fine and the collectibles left something to be desired. Also, for being a platformer, there was remarkably little ability to fall off things. It's pretty and zen though, which is a nice change of pace. Great sense of scale, too.
Finity
Fun little puzzle game. Ultimately felt pretty hard for the amount of enjoyment it brought. Haptics and design were great, as was the concept. Just didn't love it
The Forest Quartet
More style than substance, but nice art and music. There were some minor puzzles and story about mental health that didn't really go anywhere, but it wasn't an unpleasant hour.
Storyteller
Fun art and stories. But ultimately, the difficulty was inconsistent. Puzzles were either too simple to too hard with little in-between. Fun for a couple of evenings though. Also I'm extremely curious about how the execution engine works behind the scenes.
Katamari Damacy
Very stylistic. Super weird, but the gameplay is engaging. Good music. Sense of scale gets very cool, especially in the late game. Occasional bugginess held it back, but it's a quick fun time.
Operation: Tango
Neat puzzle game. I liked the asymmetry, but some puzzles were hard to do on a controller and there were noticeable bugs. But, there were some very neat sections and I'm glad we played.
Causality
I enjoyed the concept and the UI is pretty good, but it wasn't quite engaging enough to hold my attention. Finished 2/4 worlds (and no bonus puzzles)
2000:1: A Space Felony (Or How I Came To Value My Life And Murder Mercilessly)
Fun concept, nice (if simple) art, great writing. Actual deductions were a little frustrating, but I ultimately did like the open-endedness of solving the murders- actually had to do some thinking.
Please, Touch The Artwork
A small trio of puzzles. 2/3 great and 1/3 a miss, which is a decent ratio. Neat presentation and good sound design. Definitely new, and there's something to be said for that!
The Almost Gone
Some good puzzles coupled with a too-serious theme. It's interesting, but a little intense for what the rest of the game is. I did like the framing and exploration though.
LEGO Builder's Journey
Largely charming. Graphics were great, story was cute. A few puzzles overstayed their welcome and controls were bad on PC (likely fine on touch devices). Overall very pleasant though.
The House of da Vinci
Definitely had "the room" vibes. Enjoyed bits of it, but a lot of the puzzles were more obtuse than I'd like and the controls weren't as polished as they should have been. Also, some levels felt very scattered, moving around to lots of puzzle elements intead of increasingly complex single boxes. Just didn't quite click for me
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Great concept. Satisfying to peel apart ships. I didn't love the timer- felt like it detracted from what I was there for - puzzling apart things. Zero-G was good, as was the presentation and story. But, it's repetitive and simplistic enough that it's not something I'll be able to sit down and play many many more hours of. But, I enjoyed what I got from it.
Grindstone
Cute game. Surprisingly deep gameplay, but I didn't love the number of collectibles and lack of meaningful progression. Core gameplay is interesting though!
The Sojourn
Simplistic puzzle game. Nice graphics, though there wasn't any real story to them. Just nice. Slightly more story than something like the witness, but really not much. Some interesting puzzle mechanics. I like that they kept expanding the bits. Neat, but nothing showstopping.
Baba is You
Really superb puzzles, but just brutally hard. I like the idea of it more than actually playing it, unfortunately. Great design and ideas though.
Unravel Two
Great gameplay, nice graphics (if not a little hard to parse at times). Didn't really have a story, but pretended it did.
Hypnospace Outlaw
Really interesting game. Huge amount of content and atmospheric storytelling. The story was good and the puzzles were fine (the whole mechanic is basically just sifting through tons and tons of noise). The presentation is spectacular and there's certianly a lot to find. Does really well capturing the vibes of an era.
The Turing Test
Interesting enough story w/ some nice background. Some plot holes though. Puzzles were between fine and good, with only one or two standouts (there were 70 total). Compelling enough to keep playing, but not something I'd come back to.
Biped
Cute game! Definitely some neat puzzles. Some worlds were more interesting than others, but they did a good job varying the core theme. We did a challenge level and it was genuinely challenging! There was also coin collection, but for no real reason? It was weird. Enjoyable though.
Train Valley
Cute game. Fun to build tracks. The restrictions were occassionally frustrating rather than interseting, but I liked the premise. Good music. Would have been nice if you could make actual train signals vs having to manage things more manually. Would have been nice to be able to delte track for free before it's actually built. Also, little control over how fast trains go, so sometimes a solution that should work crashes anyway because one train is too fast.
Wilmot's Warehouse
Cute game. Pretty zen. I was doing well for a while but then i refactored and it all went to hell. Decent upgrades (mostly, some didn't do anything helpful) and a pretty satisfying loop. It got hard towards the end and doing any more organization was going to take more trouble than it was worth. Still, very original idea! Good soundtrack/sound design, too.
Untitled Goose Game
Cute little game. Simplistic, suprisingly tough controls. Great audio work. Charming, lots of cackling. Nice and short, too. Nails what it tries to be, but I think it was a little simplistic to have totally knocked it out of the park for me.
NABOKI
Another good game from this dev. This one felt a little less focused than previous entries, but it was good.
Eloh
Great music and sound design. My biggest complaint is that it becomes hard to follow the balls in later levels, which makes the puzzles frustrating to solve. As a result, I didn't quite finish (stopped on level 85)
Tick Tock: A Tale for Two
Neat little game! Clever the way it pairs players without actually needing a connection or server. Puzzles were mostly straightforward, though we got stuck a little. Nice theme though, and worth a quick play if you enjoy asymmetric puzzlers.
Glass Masquerade
Nice (if not eventually repetitive) soundtrack. Pretty good visuals, very chill. Sometimes it wouldn't look like a piece fit in a spot and it inexplicably would. I figured a digital puzzle could be very precise and this somehow wasn't. Nevertheless, it was fun.
We Were Here Too
Pretty good, but the puzzles this time around were more frustrating than before. Still neat co-op, I like the concept. It was differently creepy than the other, too.
Old Man's Journey
Certainly a very pretty game. Nice music. The gameplay itself isn't a lot to speak of, but they do a nice job imparting story through art and sound. There are a couple of puzzles and the controls are good enough.
G30
Neat game. The puzzles (especially the later ones) didn’t seem to have a lot of logic to them. The way the mental health piece came together was well done. The game and music were well put together.
Donut County
next idea, surprisingly cute, good writing, great execution. Lacked the exploration of katamari, but was more inventive with the core concept. Had actual writing, too. Not much challenge and it's fairly linear (you have to get everything in a level), but it's pleasant
Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
A fun mix of both games. Pretty good story. Gameplay was watered town versions of each game, but still pretty enjoyable.
Boom Blox
Cute puzzle game. Animals were weird looking and all the cutscenes rhymed. Had a lot of ideas going (jenga, throwing to physics, gallery shooter) but had more shooting than I wanted. Nearly beat it (second to last level) but my arm started hurting because I had to throw so many baseballs at zombies. So overall, physics puzzles were great, shooting was fine/tiresome. Some neat ideas in there though.
Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward
Neat concept, but the execution felt a little repetitive in places. Decent puzzles. Some good twists, but story is ultimately all over the place. Would recommend if you like the series and are pretty patient!
Potion Craft
Neat little game. I liked the idea of combining exploration and inventory into one system. Plus, being able to cache and improve recipes was fun. The controller support was pretty good, but the game got pretty repetitive and tedious. Fun idea, but I didn't want to play much more of it.
The Council
Very interesting premise, so-so execution. Interesting to investigate, solve puzzles, and fail some situations. But, the story sort of goes off the rails, and the branching narrative means there are lots of loose ends. Some of the puzzles are sort of duds, too. Neat idea, glad I played it in the end.
Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaire's Conspiracy
Cute, but lacks depth. The mysteries are small and unimpactful. It's clearly aimed at a younger audience. Puzzles are ok, but too many trick questions and there's not enough happening in the game to make it worth finishing.
The Sexy Brutale
I wanted very badly to like this game. On paper, it's perfect for me. But, in practice, it seemed like the puzzles were both too easy and too complex? They were unnecessarily hard to discover (a lot of wandering), but also too simple once I knew where the pieces were. The cast was interesting and the presentation was good though. Just didn't quite click.
Card of Darkness
It was cute enough, but I didn't find the gameplay quite engaginging enough to recommend. It was basically just tapping in the right order. I realize this is a stupid reduction (most games are some sort of tapping), but it didn't quite click with me.
Doodle God Universe
Cute concept, but tedious UI and logic that only sometimes makes sense. Nice way to waste an evening, but not much more.
Mars Power Industries
Cute little game. Art was nice, but puzzles were only ok. I think there's maybe some story there if you get bonus puzzle items, but I wasn't enjoying it enough to go for that. Neat concept, but not an interesting enough execution.
Hitchhiker
An interesting concept bogged down by a nonsense story without a conclusion (or really any resolution at all). There's not really any gameplay and it felt like a weird modern-art theater piece that doesn't make any sense at the end. To bill this as a "mystery game" is criminal.