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The best puzzle games to play right now

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It’s no understatement to say puzzles form the backbone of video games as a medium of entertainment.

For me, it started with games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past , in which dungeons contained numerous mysteries that pushed me to consider, and then reconsider, how I used Link’s vast arsenal of tools to accomplish a task like, say, opening a secret door to a room. And while several adventure games make problem-solving a key aspect of exploring, just plain old puzzles also have played a large role in the history of video games.

It could be the picture book-esque stylings of point-and-click games like Goragoa or the mind-bending worlds of Cocoon , developers continue to shower fans of games with all kinds of brainteasers. Even in the past two years, I’ve seen word games — still puzzles! — take on a new level of widespread popularity through the breakout success of games like the New York Times’ Wordle and now Connections .

There are truly too many puzzle games to choose from. If we really wanted to get philosophical, we could extend this designation to the vast majority of games. So we here at Polygon decided to start by writing up some of our personal favorite puzzle games. From classic match games like Puyo Puyo to the deviously clever visual puns of Baba Is You , here are Polygon’s favorite puzzle games. — Ana Diaz

Baba Is You

Where to play: Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch, Windows PC

Baba Is You is a word game and an environmental puzzle game, but not in the way that either of those genre terms typically get used.

In this game, the words you select change the environment around you and the entire conditions of the game itself — almost like you’re the level designer. The top-down, 2D game starts simply enough, giving you rules in the form of text on the screen like “Baba is you” (you control a little sprite named Baba), “rock is push” (if you run up against a rock, it’ll move), and “flag is win” (touch the flag to complete the level). But each of those pieces of text can be moved around on screen to spell out different commands, thereby changing the entire world. Pushing these pieces of text to instead make them say “rock is you” turns the rock into a playable character, while Baba simply stands there motionless.

That might not sound too complicated, until the game introduces a ton more objects and actions, thereby allowing you to feel like even more of a galaxy-brained genius upon figuring out how to reorder them in your favor. Like the best puzzle games, Baba Is You will make you feel both smart and stupid constantly — but mostly smart, because you’ll be training your brain to think in ways that are entirely new. — Maddy Myers

• $15 at Steam
• $15 at Nintendo
• $7 at Google Play

The Case of the Golden Idol

Where to play: Nintendo Switch, Windows PC

Much like Return of the Obra Dinn (more on that in a sec), the real work of playing The Case of the Golden Idol doesn’t involve anything you do on screen — it happens in your head as you sort through the clues the game has provided.

In this game, it’s not just one event that you need to unravel, but a whole series of mysterious and fantastical murders to solve, one by one. The killings take place over the course of several years, each of them related in some way to a magical object with extraordinary and lethal powers (the titular Golden Idol). Like Obra Dinn , all you get are glimpses of each murder, but not a whole cutscene — just an unsettling, looping animation of the victim’s final moments. As the omnipresent investigator, you can sort through the character’s pockets and explore the victim’s surroundings, which will allow you to put together clues and make an accusation — in the form of a written logbook that has predetermined phrases for you to select.

In that way, Golden Idol involves some process of elimination, since there are only ever so many words that you can put into your logbook to describe the murder’s events, but those words might not make any sense to you until you’ve fully processed the scene and the clues. Again, this is a game that unfolds in your head and not on screen — because once you know whodunit, selecting the words that describe the solution is a total breeze. This is a game that will have you wishing you could erase your memory and play it again. Luckily, there’s some fantastic DLC for it and a sequel on the way. — MM

• $12 at Steam
• $18 at Nintendo

Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X

It’s difficult to communicate the terms of a puzzle without using a single line of dialogue or piece of text, yet that’s precisely what Cocoon does throughout its short (four-to-five-hour) but monumentally impressive run time. You play as a cute little bug exploring a series of strange sci-fi worlds using mysterious, glowing orbs to transport yourself to and fro. Environmental hazards abound, but the path beyond each of them always turns out to be head-slappingly simple, requiring you to just look at the minimal tools at your disposal and using them to your advantage. The pulsing synth soundtrack will accelerate in a hopeful direction whenever you get closer to solving a puzzle, which helps. The only frustrating part is that Cocoon still has boss battles in between its oodles of environmental puzzles, and these are fine but not nearly as fun as, well, the puzzles. That’s why you’re here, after all. — MM

• $25 at Nintendo
• $25 at Steam
• $25 at PlayStation

Connections

Where to play: NY Times Games

Sometimes you want a gorgeously rendered puzzle game that you can sink hours into on your PC or your console. And other times, you want “grid on phone.”

“Grid on phone” is having a moment in the puzzle genre — trivia games like the Immaculate Grid or Vulture’s Cinematrix have captured the hearts of nerds of all stripes. But for my money [ Ed. note: Those games are all free] the New York Times’ daily Connections is the most complete and satisfying version of “grid on phone.”

Each day, players are presented with a four-by-four grid of words. The goal is to find four groups of four connected words: Maybe they rhyme, or have to do with a connected topic, or can all use the same prefix or suffix. Some are harder than others — in each set of four groups, typically two are pretty easy and two are pretty difficult — and Connections editor Wyna Liu is quite skilled at tricking you into thinking you’ve found a group where one doesn’t exist. That level of difficulty is what makes Connections challenging and fun, and when you manage to guess the most difficult group of the day first, it’s a great feeling. — Pete Volk

Where to play: iOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One

Capybara Games’ Grindstone is one of my go-to games if I’m just traveling with my iPad. You play as an ogre-like miner who slays monsters and collects items called grindstones. To collect these stones and complete each level, you’ll chart a path through a corral of monsters by connecting creatures of the same color. If you slay more than 10 monsters in one turn, you’ll be rewarded with a shiny grindstone that allows you to continue your chain attack with a differently colored monster.

Grindstone is polished down to the most minute details. The developers honed in on a strong sense of style that leans into colorful, cartoony art and quirky character design. Even small actions, like slicing through monsters, feels oh-so satisfying as your little ogre grunts and rips through all the little creeps.

I also personally like that you can play through the campaign and upgrade your character. So while it’s a puzzle game, the game does have a progression element where you power up your little miner. What’s more is that this part of the game also introduced certain strategy elements, so you might need to plan out what items and upgrades you’ll want depending on the specific challenge of each level. — AD

• $20 at Steam
• $20 at Nintendo
• $20 at PlayStation

Lumines Remastered

Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox One

Have you ever loved a game that you absolutely suck at? That’s me with Lumines Remastered . On its face, this game has a rather simple premise that will feel comfortable to fans of other falling-block games, but it never fails to kick my ass.

In the main mode, you work with a generously wide board that’s 16 blocks long and 10 high. As you play, a two-by-two square composed of smaller blocks falls from the top of the screen. Each of these squares has its own combination of two different colors of blocks. For example, the first level has a silver-and-orange theme, so one square might have three orange blocks, and then one silver block in the upper right corner. You clear the board by arranging these smaller squares so that the smaller blocks of the same color stack to form other square and rectangular shapes. You lose the game once the blocks stack up and surpass the height of the board.

Lumines Remastered feels great to play and has a great sense of style to boot. The game has a rhythmic pace to it because the squares and rectangles of the same color don’t clear until a cursor aligned with the beat passes over them. I personally think fans of Tetris Effect will love it for its pulsing electronic beats and dazzling visual effects. I might not always get as far as I want, but I’ll always come back for more. — AD

• $15 at Xbox

Where to play: Android, iOS, PlayStation 3, Windows PC, Xbox 360

Peggle was released in 2007 and it’s still one of the best puzzle games of all time. A mix of Japanese gambling arcade game pachinko, pinball machines, and centuries-old billiards game Bagatelle, Peggle is played by launching a ball from the top of the screen to bounce around and clear a board full of pegs. It’s a mix of luck and strategy in deciding where to aim the ball to maximize the amount of pegs that are lit up or cleared. It’s pure serotonin when you make huge combos or clear the board — set to an epic rendition of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, particularly “Ode to Joy.”

I remember playing Peggle on Xbox Live Arcade, but it’s now available on basically all platforms. PopCap eventually released Peggle Nights and Peggle 2 , plus Peggle Blast for mobile devices, among others. From its major success, Peggle has almost become a genre: There’s roguelike Peglin , dungeon crawler Roundguard , and role-playing game Beast Breaker , if you’re looking to spice up the original gameplay. — Nicole Carpenter

• $1 at Steam

Where to play: Nintendo Switch

Nonograms like Picross are a tried-and-true puzzle format. In Picross games, you fill in boxes on a grid to reveal a picture by using numbered hints assigned to each line. My personal favorite version of it is Sega’s: the Picross S games for Nintendo Switch. Sega released the first Picross S in 2017 and has released more than eight different versions of it since. (I played Picross S4 and 5 , and enjoyed those ones specifically.)

Picross games have a laid-back feel that’s notably less frantic than some of the other options on this list. You can learn the basics in minutes and kick back once you do. I personally appreciate how the Picross S series feels great to play in a digital format since it gives you all the notation tools you need to succeed.

Picross would make the perfect match for the sudoku-inclined. I’d also venture to say that its laid-back gameplay and almost pen-and-paper feel would make it a great next step for any fans of word games wanting to try something new. It is the perfect game to play on a lazy Sunday morning as you drink a giant cup of coffee. —AD

• $8 at Nintendo

Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On!

Where to play: iOS, Nintendo Switch

One of my favorites puzzle game genres is “improbable mashup of solitaire with something else” (see the entry for Regency Solitaire in this list), and you don’t get more improbable than Pokémon developer Game Freak’s collision of frantic, high-speed card-clearing with a surprisingly deep and tactical horse-racing sim. Originally appearing on Nintendo 3DS, Pocket Card Jockey is now available in a remake for iOS (via Apple Arcade) and Nintendo Switch. The game involves clearing hands of cards very quickly against the clock to determine your success in various phases of the horse race, but there’s a load of other stuff going on too, including managing your horse’s positioning on the track, its levels of energy and stamina, and so on. There’s even an involved and lengthy career mode where breeding and stable management comes into play. Super cute and accessible on the surface, Pocket Card Jockey is a deep, hypnotic, and exciting mashup of sports and puzzle game under the surface. —Oli Welsh

• $7 at Apple Arcade 1 month

Pokémon Puzzle League

Where to play: Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack

When I’m hanging out with family around the holidays, there’s always one game that comes out. It’s not a sleepy-eyed Mario Kart or anything like that, no — we just love to play Pokémon Puzzle League .

Originally released on Nintendo 64 in 2000, we now enjoy the game by playing it via the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription . The game is basically Tetris Attack (also known as Panel de Pon ) with a Pokémon skin. You navigate a one-by-two cursor that flips the blocks from one spot to another. So if you have a red “fire-type” block sitting to the left of a blue “water-type” block, it will swap their spots so the blue one is on the left and red is on the right. Then, you just try to match up lines of three of the same color or more. When you get into it, the game can take on a dizzyingly fast pace that can hook you in for hours.

With a soundtrack that contains cutesy versions of classic tracks like “ Pokémon World ” and crunchy animated visuals from the early era of the franchise, it will tickle any longtime fans of the series. However, it still holds up as a great puzzle game and is a joy to play in local co-op with the non-Pokémon lovers in my life. —AD

• $50 at Best Buy

Puyo Puyo Tetris

Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox One

If there is one game on this list that has an uncanny ability to leave me and my friends red-eyed and wondering how it’s already 3:00 a.m., it’s Puyo Puyo Tetris .

The game combines Puyo Puyo — the beloved color-matching game from Sega — and Tetris , the classic falling-block game with tetrominoes. It’s kind of a matter of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and Tetris certainly doesn’t need any fixing. Puyo Puyo Tetris (and its accompanying sequel) have long been my couch co-op Tetris game of choice.

While the game does have single-player content, I’ve only ever played it with others. In a match, each person gets to choose between playing with the Puyo Puyo mode or Tetris mode. You can play with up to four people at once, and clearing lines on the board in the Tetris version or matching colors in the Puyo Puyo version sends attacks that fill up your competitors’ boards with gray blocks or Puyos.

Puyo Puyo Tetris blends the two classics excellently, even if my groups tend to skew toward the Tetris side of things. I’ve had friends jump in with Puyo and it provides a new kind of challenge as a Tetris player. The one drawback? Some might find the voice-over of its cartoon characters a tad annoying, but even their grating nature can be endearing in its own way, especially if you’re one to shout into the late hours of the night. — AD

• $4 at PlayStation

Puzzle & Dragons Story

Where to play: iOS

Puzzle & Dragons Story is an Apple Arcade game that combines creature battling and match-3 systems. The classic tile-matching gameplay is where you’ll be attacking the monsters you’re fighting — what you match determines how hard you hit, what element is boosted, or when you heal. It’s one of those games that looks easy, but there’s a lot of strategy involved when you get into the depths.

The franchise has been around since 2012 in several different forms on mobile, but Puzzle & Dragons Story is the latest release, removing the microtransactions from the game — one of the big things the game has been criticized for in the past. Between the dungeons, Puzzle & Dragons Story is filled out with a dramatic narrative that’s easy to consume in small bites, making this one of my top games for whenever I’ve got a spare moment. — NC

• $0 at Apple

Regency Solitaire

For soothing, smooth-brain puzzling in the true casual-gaming tradition, you can’t do better than this elegant solitaire variant with a Jane Austen-inspired storyline. In 2015’s Regency Solitaire and its 2024 sequel you play Bella, a social-climbing debutante whose pursuit of the perfect marital match is punctuated by lots of attractively arranged tableaux of cards to clear by clicking on them. And the clicking feels great — developer Grey Alien Games is a master of this sort of thing, so the crisp sound effects and light arcade-style scoring systems are perfectly tuned to keep you pleasantly engaged, but not too excited. The Austen pastiche is pretty funny, too. There’s not much to choose between the first and second games, but Regency Solitaire 2 looks better on modern displays, and is a tad more refined. (The original is available on Switch and PC; Regency Solitaire 2 is on PC only.) — OW

Return of the Obra Dinn

The vessel Obra Dinn left port with 60 souls aboard and returned with none alive. It’s your job to deduce what happened to each member of its crew and how they met their fate. You’re given a crew manifest, some sketches, and a pocket watch. Using this device next to a corpse or other points of interest presents you with a snapshot of how the incident occurred and a bit of dialogue, allowing you to piece together events as you explore more of the ship.

The first handful of deductions are relatively simple, but as you cross names off your list, evidence becomes increasingly obscure, forcing you to fill in the blanks by cross-referencing new information as it becomes available. You have an unlimited amount of time to come to your conclusions before departing, but the Obra Dinn isn’t a particularly hospitable place. From the moment you step aboard, the eerie silence is punctuated only by your footsteps and the groaning of the vessel against the increasingly restless tide. Even with the knowledge that I could leave at any time, I found myself occasionally jumping at shadows and wondering if I wasn’t joined by some spectral passenger.

The first-person perspective might throw someone that’s unfamiliar with the genre, but the simple control scheme and leisurely pace ensure that it remains accessible for anyone looking for a puzzle game that offers an honestly unique experience. — Alice Jovanée

Suika Game was one of my most-played games last year, and will likely be in the running in 2024, too. Even with so many hours logged, I’m not good at Suika Game , and I’m not sure I ever will be . And yet, I keep playing — the fruit-merging game has its hooks deep in me. It’s, again, one of those deceptively simple games: Just combine two of the same fruit and keep fruits from spilling out of the box? Easy, right? No! This is like Tetris if it had bounce physics, so you also have to worry about fruits shooting themselves out of the box with a weird bounce. Though I get frustrated, I keep coming back because it is a compelling mix of skill and luck — but likely mostly luck. You can only play Suika Game on Nintendo Switch in the United States right now, but there’s hope for it coming to mobile. — NC

• $3 at Nintendo

The Witness

Where to play: Android, iOS, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox One

If you want to go on a philosophical journey into the heart of puzzles as an art form — and who doesn’t? — there is perhaps only one game that can take you there: The Witness , the abstract, first-person puzzle adventure that was designer Jonathan Blow’s follow-up to Braid . In a way it recalls Myst ; you wander around a strange, idyllic, deserted island, solving puzzles to unlock new areas. But in The Witness , absolutely all the puzzles, which you access via panels in the game world, are 2D maze puzzles, variations on an original design of Blow’s. Through countless permutations, Blow builds upon this simple puzzle concept, turning it into a language in its own right and a dialogue with the player — like Bach turning a simple melody into the Goldberg Variations. It’s one of the most rigorous and challenging explorations of game design ever, and an essential experience for the true puzzle connoisseur. — OW

• $40 at Steam

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The best puzzle games on PC

Stump yourself with the best puzzle games from our list of favorites.

Choosing the best puzzle games from decades of favorites seems like an impossible task, but it's one we've undertaken. Of all the revered PC game genres, puzzle games are among the most classic, but for this list of recommendations, we've haven't tried to rank the greatest puzzlers in the history of everything—just great, modern games we think you'll enjoy a lot right now.

2023 games : Upcoming releases Best PC games : All-time favorites Free PC games : Freebie fest Best FPSes : Finest gunplay Best MMOs : Massive worlds Best RPGs : Grand adventures

We've also narrowed our definition of 'puzzle game.' We hope you’ll find a game on this list that you haven’t played before, that’ll test your problem solving skills and ingenuity, and give you that fuzzy wave of relief and pride every time you have a breakthrough. And with that as our goal, we haven’t included games like Peggle, which aren't really puzzling , or Tetris, which wouldn’t be quite so challenging if time weren't an issue. We’re looking for more contemplative games here—you know, chin scratchers, brow furrowers, hair puller-outers, games that are going to stump you. We'll add to this list in the future, too, dropping in new games, or older ones if we revisit them and decide the ought to have a place here.

Release date: 2014 | Developer: State of Play | Steam Kami’s rules are simple: click on any pattern of contiguous squares of the same color to change them to another color of your choosing, and try to make the whole sheet the same color in as few moves as possible. The basic technique is to start by unifying the largest shapes, surrounding any odd colored islands, and then swapping the large area to match those isolated squares. The principle is straightforward, but identifying the most efficient path requires seeing several moves ahead, and after the tutorial puzzles it can take a lot of thought. It feels great when it clicks, and the way Kami’s rough sheets of colored paper magically fold themselves away is mesmerizing. The colors schemes are gorgeous, too, and the music is sweet and relaxing—it feels to us like an excellent companion for a mid-afternoon cup of coffee.

The only problem we have with Kami is the baffling inclusion of a daily hint limit. On mobile, you could pay for extra hints, but on PC, there are no microtransactions. So, if you run out of hints for the day, that’s it. And the hints are important. If a puzzle has us stumped, getting just the first move is really welcome, as it sets us on the right path without removing the sense of accomplishment entirely.

Kami made this list despite some unnecessary mobile baggage, though, because there's a workaround: if you run out of hints and really want another one, you can just set your system clock to another day.

Release date: 2014 | Developer: Thomas Bowker | Steam Lyne is another game we share with mobile, but worth a shout. It’s not the sort of game that stumps you, stopping you cold—it’s one for fiddling with until the solution appears. The basic problem is that you have a few shapes on the board which need to be connected. Your connective lines can’t intersect each other, and you can only connect shapes of the same type. You must connect every shape with its same-shape friends, and fill every ‘hub,’ each of which might need a different number of connections. The solutions are zig-zagging patterns of lines, perfectly avoiding each other and hitting all the notes they’re supposed to. It can be challenging, but never really frustrating, and it's a great way to zone out.

Release date: 2011 | Developer: Zachtronics | Steam SpaceChem is about making molecules, though you don’t need a graduate degree in chemistry to sort out its puzzles. That’s what’s so lovely about Zachtronics Industries’ games— TIS-100 , for instance, is about assembly language programming, but we’ve managed to get through a few puzzles and feel awfully clever without any experience in that area, either.

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Essentially, you’re creating an elemental circuit board, a set of instructions for building molecules. As in Infinifactory, the act of designing a system and then watching it work is the joy here. Eventually, though, SpaceChem does get hard, so approach it with patience and a willingness to learn.

The Swapper

Release date: 2013 | Developer: Facepalm Games | Steam The primary mechanic in The Swapper is the ability to create a few clones of your main character wherever your line of sight and clone-gun reach permits, which then allows you to ‘swap’ to that clone instantly. Clones mirror everything you do, regardless of where they’re located. Shoot one up to a high platform, take a few steps forward, and that clone will fall forty feet and hit the ground with a sickening crunch. Puzzles revolve around environmental obstacles (switches, light variables that prevent cloning or swapping, twitch clone-swapping) but your cloning tools never fundamentally change. What you’re allowed to do is there from the get go, and if you catch on early enough, there are huge sequences of the game you can skip earlier than normal.

Environments and objects themselves are based on actual clay models, so everything carries an uncanny, semi-realistic aesthetic, as if you could reach out and touch any of The Swapper’s decrepit space station environments. As if the gameplay wasn’t enough, the narrative wraps everything up in a mysterious and somewhat horrifying examination of what qualifies as a living person. Puzzle over life and death while you puzzle over puzzles.

Release date: 2009 | Developer: Number None | Steam Every world in Braid opens with a slightly tweaked version of the same ‘tutorial’ level. There’s a pit and no way for your little Mario-esque avatar to jump across. Initially, it feels insulting, a silly commentary on 2D platforming conventions and level design—nothing you typically see in those games is ever impossible. Otherwise, how would you finish the game? But Braid turns one genre into something else entirely by layering abstract rules and mechanics.

Each world operates by its own set of rules based on the passage of time. In one, you can just hold a button to reverse the flow. In another, whatever direction you walk in progresses or reverses the flow of that level’s timeline. They don’t necessarily get more complex, but more unique. Actual difficulty comes from the level designs themselves. Some puzzles will take hours from you, maybe days. They require time away, the solutions coming to you with a slap of the forehead, possibly while you're brushing your teeth or mid-conversation about the last ball game.

So, the pit and gap are no longer an impossibility. A ‘broken’ platforming level transforms into a simple puzzle, and opens up new avenues of thinking in a familiar framework.

The Incredible Machine 2

Release date: 1994 | Developer: Jeff Tunnell Productions | GOG In the opening sequence of Pee-wee Herman’s Big Adventure, the titular weirdo makes breakfast via an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine. A sequence of bizarre, otherwise unrelated objects are made one—a candle burns a rope that drops an anvil and sends a ferris wheel spinning which—you get the idea. All this, just to crack an egg.

The Incredible Machine 2 (not to discount the first) harnessed both the absurdity and ingenuity of Goldberg machines, tasking the player with completing a fairly simple objective by very complex means. And there were plenty of means. You might just have to ‘get the tennis ball into the waste bin’ but you’re given a few treadmills, gears, a hamster on a wheel, a trampoline or two, and maybe a boxing glove to do it. There were ideal solutions each puzzle, but as the game opened up and allowed for use of more tools, the solutions became less prescribed and more up to player creativity. And even though the puzzles got hard very quick, failure was usually funny instead frustrating. It’s this, the open-ended and experimental nature of The Incredible Machine that makes it such a timeless puzzle game.

The Talos Principle

Release date: 2014 | Developer: Croteam | Steam Without the narrative dressing, The Talos Principle is still an amazing puzzle game. The majority of what you do is navigate a series of puzzle rooms, picking up and moving objects (boxes on switches, prisms that connect lasers and open doors, fans, and so on) in order to unlock doors or skirt by defenses in order to grab a tetromino piece, aka, the win condition. While the game introduces the varying tools over time, the whole of what you can accomplish with them is there from the start. As more tools are thrown into increasingly complex puzzles, it becomes a matter of experimentation and order of operations. What can a fan lift? When should the fan lift? How do I power the fan? Each puzzle feels impossible at first, but by the end, the machinations you discover and execute as a player feel so robust, complex, and smart that it’s hard not to feel like the last two hours of brickwalling were actually a breeze.

That The Talos Principle shares a writer with another game on the list, The Swapper, isn’t a surprise. They both deal with similar themes–consciousness, humanity, moral ambiguity—and wrap them around the gameplay in a way that doesn’t feel convoluted or forced. The Talos Principle’s plot is also really well written. It carries the same slow sense of growing uncertainty that Portal pulled off so well at first, and takes it to another level with genuinely smart philosophical, human, and breezy narrative tidbits. So, while you solve individual puzzles, you’re also puzzling out the nature of what you’re doing, and whether or not pursuing certain paths will have any effect at all on the game’s ending. It’s as mind-bendy as mind-benders get.

Release date: 2013 | Developer: Polytron Corporation | Steam Fez is a charming and oddly sad puzzle platformer, but at first glance not a particularly challenging one. Tasked with navigating a peaceful 2D world harried by the arrival of 3D, protagonist Gomez (he wears a Fez) must navigate 3D worlds from a 2D perspective. Sounds confusing! It is, but the simple act of playing the main game through to completion never gets too taxing. The real puzzles in Fez aren’t really required to finish the game, but their impenetrable, mysterious nature invites speculation. They’re puzzles of course, but the way they’re presented feels like archeology: deciphering the meaning in obtuse hieroglyphs and mysterious QR codes. It took the community months to understand how to solve some of these puzzles, and I’m fairly certain some remain uncracked. Play Fez for the beautiful world and breezy tone, stay for one of the toughest challenges hidden in a purportedly ‘easy’ game.

Hexcells Infinite

Release date: 2014 | Developer: Matthew Brown | Steam Hexcells is a slow, methodical game, because you’re penalized for wrong moves—sort of like advanced Minesweeper. The board is made up of, as you’d expect, hexagons. Some are part of the pattern you’re trying to create, and turn blue when you left click them. The rest are not, and when you reveal them as imposters by right-clicking, they show you how many adjacent hexes are part of the pattern. Some also give you extra information, such as whether or not the adjacent blue hexes are adjacent to each other or separated.

Hexcells is about considering simple bits of information and determining what hidden information they reveal. For instance, if an uncovered cell is adjacent to one blue cell, and a blue cell is already uncovered next to it, you can safely count out all the other cells touching it. Pretty simple for simple patterns, but it very quickly becomes tricky, like advanced Sudoku. The feeling when you clear a puzzle with no errors is one of relief more than victory, but it is really satisfying to sweep the board without a single misclick. This one isn’t for those who like to fiddle with a problem until they find a solution—Lyne or Infinifactory come to mind—but for those who like to make deliberate moves for a precision puzzling strike.

Antichamber

Release date: 2013 | Developer: Alexander Bruce | Steam Explaining Antichamber to people is difficult. It’s a stone cold first-person puzzle game, no doubt. There are definite rules in its stripped down corridors and cryptic rooms, they just take an entirely different perspective—sometimes literally—to understand. There’s no invasive narrative precedence to speak of, so the gameplay is reduced to exploration that hinges entirely on the player’s curiosity. You spend the majority of the game encountering strange architecture or tools attempting to decipher if they can be used to traverse through an environment or to clue you in on other rules in Antichamber’s world. Most conventions of how we understand physical space through the first-person perspective are twisted in subtle ways or thrown out completely. To explain how is to ruin the game completely.

Most surfaces, including objects, are white with black lines defining their features, but color gradients sway in and out of certain halls and rooms as if to evoke the intimate, troubling psychosis of our dear friend, MS Paint. The thing is, all the color has meaning. It, and nearly every visual, auditory, and tactile component feed into the game’s psychedelic logic. Learning this logic is only half the battle, the remainder is applying that logic to even more mind-bending puzzles. So, for example, once you learn that certain doors can only be opened if they cannot be seen, applying the same line of thinking to an increasingly complex series of puzzles turns from mental exercise to an exercise in integrity. The more you understand in Antichamber, the less you trust yourself.

World of Goo

Release date: 2008 | Developer: 2D BOY | Steam Like all the best puzzle games, World of Goo's core concept is simple: Use elastic, adhesive (and sentient) balls of goo to build structures that will enable them to climb up to a pipe, where they can be sucked up and delivered to the World of Goo corporate headquarters. It's easygoing at the start—build a tower, construct a bridge, nothing too complex—but quickly grows more difficult, and bizarre, in equal measures. Obstacles like whirling blades, spikes, and fire make life nasty and short for many a Goo Ball, and after awhile different species of Balls with unique characteristics will begin to appear. Balloon Goo floats, for instance, while Green Goo can be detached and reused, and Beauty Goo is huge, aggravating, and generally useless. And because everything is made of goo, everything you create is inherently unstable: The trick isn't to build solid structures, but to figure out how to let them sag and sway—because they're going to—without breaking into pieces.

But what elevates World of Goo from a good puzzler to a great game are the detail and flourishes that aren't necessary to the puzzles, but are absolutely indispensable to creating the marvelous world in which they exist. The squealing, bug-eyed Goo Balls are endearingly cute, and the light-hearted, sometimes cryptic messages left by the Sign Painter are entertaining in their own right. There's a story here too, believe it or not, and it actually gets a little dark, although it never entirely lets go of its inherent goofiness. Even the soundtrack, at the risk of overselling it, is sublime, and somehow a perfect match for a game about stretching sticky globs of grease into weird shapes. World of Goo is one of those games that belongs on just about every "games you should play" list, and it’s baffling that, years after its release, there's still no sign of a sequel.

Infinifactory

Release date: 2015 | Developer: Zachtronics | Steam Infinifactory is one of our highest-scored games of 2015, with Chris calling it his favorite puzzle game in years. Like SpaceChem, Infinifactory is a creative factory design game, though a bit more accessible. To please your alien captors, you’ve got to jetpack around a factory dropping blocks—conveyor belt blocks, for instance—to build a machine that will complete a set of goals. The simplest is to transport a component from a dispenser to the correct exit point, but as your tasks get more complicated, logic devices are introduced to increase the complexity of your designs along with them.

Infinifactory is all about satisfaction of building the most beautiful, efficient machine you can and watching it do its work. As Chris put it, “It's the videogame equivalent of those incredibly compulsive looping gifs of factory processes.” There’s also a dark, slapstick story threaded in, and some wonderful environments in later puzzles.

Portal and Portal 2

Release date: 2007, 2011 | Developer: Valve | Steam Portal was a success—a huge one—for a number of reasons. The writing, the humor, and the story that unexpectedly began to drip through the cracks of Aperture Science while we played Valve’s 2007 first-person puzzler. Thing is, it would still be a great game without any of that because the puzzle-solving is so damn great on its own. Escaping a series of test-chambers armed only with a gun that shoots space-warping portals is fun and rewarding. At the time it was also completely different from just about anything we’d seen in an FPS.

The basics are simple to grasp. After placing two portals in two different spots, walking into one portal lets you exit the other, no matter where it is. Each new puzzle chamber is more complex than the last, and soon you’re using portals to avoid turrets, fling yourself over floors of acid, activate buttons and redirect lasers. There are even some reflex and momentum-based puzzles which challenge you to place your portals as you’re sailing through the air. It culminates in an escape of sorts, a fascinating crawl behind the scenes of the facility where we get to put into practice everything we’ve learned. The difficulty increases gradually, getting more complex at just the right pace, so we never feel frustrated and yet it never seems too easy. There’s even a puzzle-based boss fight, and a charming little song when you win. While Portal 2 upped the ante in just about every department, the original is still a wonderful, funny, and rewarding way to spend a few hours. (And, to be clear, we also recommend Portal 2, especially for its co-op puzzles.)

Baba is You

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Hempuli Oy | Steam Baba Is You gets away with being so infuriatingly mind-bending by also being so dang cute. Baba (you) pushes around blocks of words to change the level environment and the conditions of the game itself. 

In one level you start as a rabbit in a walled room. Inside the room with you are three text blocks—“Wall”, “is”, and “stop”. They’re connected in a straight line so the walls currently stop your character from passing through them. If you nudge any of the blocks out of line the walls no longer stop you and you can walk through them. 

The blocks which make a win condition for the level aren’t yet connected in a line. The simplest solution to that is to push the blocks marked “flag”, “is” and “win” into a line. After that, walking to the flag will complete the level.

But there are other solutions which immediately start to show you how many possibilities the system involves. You could mix blocks from the first and second room to write “Wall is win”. That lets you finish the level by touching any of the walls. 

Although the difficulty curve between levels can feel a bit off-kilter depending on how you personally think about each puzzle, Baba Is You is incredibly versatile, allowing for a number of unorthodox solutions to each level.

Tyler grew up in Silicon Valley during the '80s and '90s, playing games like Zork and Arkanoid on early PCs. He was later captivated by Myst, SimCity, Civilization, Command & Conquer, all the shooters they call "boomer shooters" now, and PS1 classic Bushido Blade (that's right: he had Bleem!). Tyler joined PC Gamer in 2011, and today he's focused on the site's news coverage. His hobbies include amateur boxing and adding to his 1,200-plus hours in Rocket League.

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