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The best puzzle games on PCA very puzzling collection
A very puzzling collection
We’ve got everything a puzzle-head might want: sokoban games, murder mysteries, strategy, physics, goo, and that one Jonathan Blow made. Puzzles are a broad church, after all. Best of all is that all of these are playable and ready to go, so there’s no mucking about with emulators. We’ll keep the list updated with the new best and brightest puzzle games, too, so check back every so often. Scroll down to read them all, or click a name that takes your fancy in the list below.
The best puzzle games on PC
25. Unpacking
Unpacking TrailerUnpacking is a lovely, detailed, but low-stress puzzle gameWatch on YouTube
Unpacking Trailer
There may be some among you who object toUnpackingbeing classified as a puzzle game, and to those people I say: Boo! Boo to you! It’s not the kind of headscratcher that’ll see you rage-quitting a level until you’ve calmed down enough to have another go at it, but the challenge - to unpack and put away a person’s possessions as they move to different homes throughout their life -isa puzzle. It’s possible to get it wrong. As you open the brown boxes and pull things out of the rustling paper, you understand that it would not do to put the tooth paste in the kitchen. That goes in the bathroom, along with your towels and shampoo. If, once you’ve emptied all the boxes, some things aren’t where they’re meant to be, their outline will glow until you make room somewhere more appropriate. A ladle does not belong in the bedroom.
Part of the puzzle is fitting your things around the possessions of people you live with. If you move in with housemates, one of whom is making a Sailor Moon cosplay dress, there isn’t much space in the living room. One level in particular broke my heart, as you have to find the right place to put your framed art degree once you move in with a new boyfriend. Unpacking isn’t a puzzle like doing the cryptic crossword is. Unpacking is a puzzle like real life is.
23. The Room 4: Old Sins
The Room series always sees you, the unknown player character, lured to an isolated area full of complex puzzles that you have to solve. The very first Room was a room - an attic, in fact, and The Room 4 goes back to the attic. This time you’re confronted with a very detailed dollhouse of a mansion, which turns out to be a model of the mansion you’re in. The model is itself partly a puzzle box, with moving cogs and sections that open up as you interact with it, but it also, as you open up access to the different rooms, is a kind of magic portal to full-sized versions of said rooms.Insidethese rooms are more puzzles.
22. The White Door
Not all puzzle games have to be maxi.The White Dooris one of the more recent entries in the Rusty Lake series of 2D puzzle games, and is arguably the most minimalist. You control an amnesiac in what appears to be some kind of hospital room, where each day is planned out to a strict schedule. The game doesn’t tell you this, of course, but the schedule is pinned to the wall for you to find. A nurse comes in to ask you questions: what’s today’s date?; how old are you?; where do you work? And you have to find the answers to these questions around the room. Subtle things change. You can see someone standing in the distance outside the window.
Every night you dream of events in your past, and can use them to untangle the events that brought you to this room in the first place. It’s a short, spare game with nothing wasted. A locked room mystery with a twist.
21. Gorogoa
This all plays out in beautiful 2D animations, and without any actual instructions. Gorogoa is fantastic and letting you experiment, sometimes nudging you the right way with some pictograms, but for the most part just letting you explore its living, moving world. It’s both beautiful and innovative, in a way not many games of any genre manage, let alone puzzle games.
20. Inside
PlayDead’s creepy, monochrome side-scrolling puzzle-platformerLimborightly caused a stir when it was released, because nobody had seen anything quite like it before. PlayDead managed to build on Limbo with Inside. Though Inside has a lot of similarities - a side on puzzle-platformer with a small, vulnerable protagonist, and dark themes - but it takes both it’s ambient storytelling and how it plays to new heights. Inside’s protagonist is a young boy who you join in the middle of being chased through a forest. The journey progresses through decreasingly rural areas, then through a weird science facility full of what appear to be mind controlled zombies and various human experiments. The ending is famously, er, surprising.
19. Children Of The Sun
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Devolver Digital
The puzzles in Children Of The Sun are intricate, speed focused tactical puzzles to find the right path through a level, and that path must be through a bunch of dudes' heads. After escaping from an evil cult you, a nameless girl, have taken it upon yourself to exact revenge for the death of your mentor. Luckily you can do this with your natural telekinetic powers, meaning you can take out dozens of cultists with a single bullet. You begin each level skulking on the edges - in the darkness looking at a street, a warehouse, a drunken party in the forest - where you line up your shot. Once you pull the trigger, you play over the shoulder of the bullet.
18. The Case Of The Golden Idol
The Case Of The Golden Idol is a point and click detective game that strips out all the extraneous bullshit like walking around and talking to characters, so the time you save there can be redistributed to furiously staring at word bubbles. The Case Of The Golden Idol spans many decades in the lives of a couple of posh weirdos and their family and associates, all centering on the titular artifact. Every few years there are some (or several) murders relating to it, and you get to see them in a snapshot moment - either the moment the murder is committed or as the body is discovered - with the characters, scene and items all frozen.
17. Mini Motorways
Have you ever been stuck in traffic commuting and thought, “what absolute fool designed this?” Now, thanks to Mini Motorways, that absolute fool can be you! The idea is to plan the road system of a city, getting people from their houses to where they need to be and back again, as efficiently as possible. The cities grow as the game goes on, so your roadways get more complicated, and you can put in things like roudabouts, motorways and traffic lights to keep things organised, but you have a limited number of these, as well as limited road tiles.
Houses, the population centres of your city, and workplaces keep mushrooming up across the confined map area, and they’re colour-coded. A yellow workplace might appear next to a bunch of blue homes, while the yellow population density is mostly on the other side of the river. Junctions slow down traffic, so if you can put in roundabouts it all flows better, but roundabouts take up a lot of space. Maybe a motorway would help ease the congestion, but it might back up traffic either end. Mini Motorways is a continuous puzzle, in other words, and one that only gets harder the better you are at it.
16. Patrick’s Parabox
The ouroboros is the ol' famous endless snake eating it’s own tail thing. Patrick’s Parabox is a bunch of boxes inside boxes, boxes eating eachother recursively, with puzzles inside. It’s technically a sokoban game - you have to push boxes into the right places, and if you push them against a wall you can’t pull them out. But you can push boxes (and yourself) into other boxes that have openings. These boxes themselves contain shapes that you can use to traverse and solve the puzzle outside the box. You have to think in boxes.
There are 350 hand-designed puzzles in this mind melter of a game, and Patrick’s Parabox does a good job of teaching you the fundamentals of its rules so you can tackle more advanced puzzles. You can transport boxes inside boxes. You can put a box inside itself and start thinking in infinity. Multiple boxes can be stacked inside other boxes, like nesting dolls. Look, this game has a lot of boxes. It’s an interesting and thoughtful twist on sokoban constraints that kind of makes you feel like a super-advanced mathematician.
15. Knotwords
This is sort of like doing a quick crossword but without any clues. You’re given a small asymmetrical grid of empty squares, and within that grid are tetronimo shapes - maybe a foursquare, maybe a right angle made of three, and so on. You’re told what letters go into each of the tetronimos, but not where. So that foursquare could contain the lettersOVOW. Your job is to fill in all the letters so that every line accross and down makes an actual word.
This isn’t as hard as it sounds, and you get into the swing of it pretty quickly. It can be tough when you realise that the word you were sure was your lynchpin turns out to be wrong, but there’s a fair and helpful hint system. You also have a lot of puzzles to choose from, with more generating every month. It’s a lot of fun if you like word puzzles, and it’ll probably expand your vocabulary, too.
14. Dorfromantik
Dorfromantik is a lovely game. It’s perfect for streaming. It’s perfect for playing sitting on the sofa. You can get all intense and try and beat your high score and take it all seriously. But if you want, you can just have a lovely time building a pretty town. All these things are contained within Dorfromantik, a puzzle game where you place tiles to build a serene rural landscape.
13. The Looker
What constitutes a start or an end can be flexible. The letters S and E both count, and in one puzzle there’s no end, and you have to listen as the narrator beeps while you draw your line around a maze - literally, he says “beep”. The puzzles are all logical within the established rules, but require thinking outside the box, and are playful to boot. And throughout you’ll see little references to The Witness, like a framed picture resembling one of the tree puzzles. The laser beam boxes take an absurdly long time to power up, with so many steps involved. You can find little recording boxes around the place, and one of them is an advert for used cars. This game is free!
12. Baba Is You
Image credit:Hempuli Oy
Baba Is You isn’t exactly a sokoban game. You’re pushing stuff around to get to touch an object designated as the winning object, sure, and that pushing is subject to sokoban constraints, so if you push something into a corner it’ll be stuck there. But in Baba Is You, you can change what the winning object is. Or, indeed, what the you is. Each level will also have word blocks that form statements: Baba is You, Flag is Win. But you can also push those word blocks around to make Flag is You, so instead you’re controlling the little flag sprite. Maybe you can make Baba be You and Win at the same time, creating an instant shortcut for the whole level.
You can make it so you can walk through walls, you can change which items are hazardous, you can make Baba float, you can change the colour of objects. But every level has a solution, and training yourself to think the right way is tough. Luckily the game has llovely, simple, almost childish 2D drawings to represent everything, so it’s very clear what everything is. Until you start moving it all around, that is.
11. Botany Manor
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Whitethorn Games
The setting of the manor is beautiful and quiet, but sunny, and there are no voices - Arabella doesn’t talk to herself as she works - so it’s an incredibly peaceful game, without being at all easy. The puzzles are surprising and delightful, and a bit magical, but grow in complexity. It’s possible to spend five minutes searching the ground floor for a hint of the year that the manor was built, after a hint gleaned from a pious poem, and when you find it you feel proper smart. It’s a fantastic puzzle game.
10. Return To Monkey Island
Most importantly, this is a robust and interesting point and click puzzle game that uses fun cartoony logic in it’s myriad puzzles (and there are two difficulty settings, too). As a beloved video game series, Return has locations, characters and even jokes from the old games, but adds a new spin. It’s meta (but not in an annoying way) about Guybrush’s status as a famous adventurer, because ultimately things are changing and maybe he doesn’t mean as much any more, but it’s not alienating if you’ve never played these games. There’s a lot that’snew, too, and the quality of life changes, which include getting rid of the nine-verb menu and an extremely reactive hint system, make this a fantastic game for old fans, but also to onboard players who’re a bit leery of point and click adventures in general.
9. Opus Magnum
This is probably one of those puzzle games that secretly teaches you principles of computer coding, isn’t it? In Opus Magnum you build automated machines whose repetetive movements will construct potions and poisons and what have you weirdnesses for you, an alchemist. There are programmable arms, tracks, pistons, and all manner of weird machines that you have to give meticulous instructions to. You can make arms pivot, pistons retract, control the exact amount they pivot when… It’s overwhelming to start with, as you also have to take into account the timing, and how each of these elements move in concert with each other.
When you’re faced with the challenged of putting two of a particular reagent together, in time for a third to be transformed and slotted on a rail so that they all come together, just as an arm is read to pick them up and drop them into the finished slot - and program it so the process can repeat without any of the mechanised bits lagging behind - you quickly see whether or not you’re cut out for Opus Magnum. And that’s a fairly simple puzzle. But there’s a lot of open-ended flexibility here. If your machine works, it works. You can concentrate on making a beautiful, elegant machine with no parts wasted, but it still counts if you bodge together an awkward monstrosity. There’s Steam Workshop integration, too, so you can struggle against challenges set from all over the world
8. The Talos Principle
Image credit:Devolver Digital
The Talos Principle blends the old, as you explore the ancient ruins of different civilisations, and the new. The hazards on your puzzling progress being high tech forcefields, floating robotic explosives, and automatic mounted gatling guns. These you can stall using Jammers on tripods, so much of your puzzling is getting your timing right and figuring out the logic of what will happen if you drop a certian barrier at a certain time. Later on you use light splitting crystals, which you can use to charge up doors in complex trails around the ruins, and weighted cubes on pressure pads The aim is to collect what are, basically, tetronimoes that allow you to open the doors to the next area.
7. Ctrl Alt Ego
Ctrl Alt Ego also appears on our best hacking games list, because it’s both - although, if we’re being honest, it’s more straightforwardly a puzzle game than a hacking game. Actually, being super honest, it’s not really a straightforward puzzle game. You’re a sort of disembodied AI presence, able to flit hack into a flit between different machines. This includes, for example, cameras on data banks, allowing you to scope things out, but also little robits to trundle around, or even littler ones that can sneak into tunnels and have a ‘bark like a dog’ function.
The aim is, broadly, getting from one end of the 3D level to the next, but there are obstacles a-plenty in your way. Apart from physical obastacles like boxes and barriers, there are enemy robots who can tell if your droids are going where they shouldn’t be, and daddy units that can dissolve matter. But fear not, because you can hack into them to dissolve and reposition things. Lateral thinking is encouraged and, indeed, essential, and if you die it’s fine, cos you just go back to being disembodied and can have another go at it.
6. World Of Goo
Image credit:2D Boy
The goo isn’t (aren’t?) that struturally sound, though, and are given to buckle under their own weight. Luckily there are different subspecies of goo, like pink ones that can float like helium and give you some lift, flammable goo, or green velcro goo so you can sort of rebuild structures mid-level. World Of Goo is both chaotic and elegant, and is still a marvellous achievement this many years later.
5. Unavowed
4. The Witness
The island of The Witness is very big, with a castle, an orchard, a severe-looking dock, a swamp, a lab, blossom trees, a desert bit, a forest, a mountain, a sort of treehouse - just, loads of weird bits. And each of these bits are full of puzzles - each area having a slightly different flavour of puzzle, though they’re basically all getting a line from one side of a little input board to the other - teaching you the rules of how to solve things in The Witness. The orchard has puzzles that mirror the apple trees in front of you. Some maze puzzles need you to look at the shapes of shadows. The swamp has tetronimo shapes on it’s puzzle boards, and the treehouse has white and dark stars. I didn’t get on with either of those at all. Or the puzzles in the forest where you have to listen out for the tone of birdsong, those can, candidly, go absolutely to hell.
But many of the other puzzle types made complete sense to me. And you might hate the ones that I understood straight away. What makes The Witness so impressive is what makes it hard to describe: it’s sort of every kind of puzzle game at once. And, on top of that, you’re walking around a weird island, listening to cryptic voice notes and wondering who put all these machines there in the first place. Eventually, if you play it long enough, you can see there are puzzles all around you…
3. Portal
2. Outer Wilds
Outer Wilds is a unique puzzle game meets ramshackle space exploration. You wake up as the newest member of the Outer Wilds cosmonaut team, about to take your first solo flight (in a spaceship made of bins) away from your tiny home planet. It genuinely is tiny, too - it’d take you about four minutes to walk around it, but that’s a precious amount of time to take, given that the sun in the centre of your tiny solar system goes supernova 22 minutes after you open your eyes.
1. Return Of The Obra Dinn
Image credit:3909
