Puzzle games, for when you just like solving problems/pretending to be smart

[Morpheus Kitami]

Everett Kaser Software makes some pretty good titles, mostly involving Sherlock Holmes. They're all logic puzzle kind of games, you make deductions based on clues you're given until every square is filled out. He started in the DOS era and is still going. He even keeps on with the shareware model. Moriarty and Honeycomb Hotel are my favorites.

 

[Zombra]

After playing the Golden Idol games, Superliminal, and Chants of Sennaar, I've been searching for other puzzle games and a couple of titles keep popping up. Sadly (luckily?), I only trust opinions coming from this site, so... are any of these worth a playthrough?

I tried Overboard! and sadly had to give it a 'Not Recommended'. It is not a puzzle game nor an investigation game.

Alternatively, do you have any other suggestion?

Can't recommend enough. My Steam review.


Weird I never reviewed this but it is VERY good. You've probably never heard of it which is a shame.
Please ignore the filler combat in the trailer - this is NOT a game about shooting skeletons with fireballs, it's a brilliant environmental puzzle game. In 2022 I said, "Amazing first-person puzzle fantasy, constantly challenging, so frustrating at times and so rewarding."

 

[Zombra]

Oh also I started this a couple months ago


and I like it a lot, despite its being very hard to get into. The first 2 hours left me overwhelmed. The environment is so full of puzzles, locks, and clues that I found it really difficult to know where to even begin. I gave up for a while but really want to get back into it because all the user reviews say how satisfying it is to crack.

 

[Maxie]

not a real puzzle thread without Cypher, conveniently on sale now. it's as minimalistic as they go, just you and a bunch of rooms containing increasingly more complex cyphers to decode. you will go through a shitload of paper.

 

[Damned Registrations]

No mention of the La Mulana games? Granted they're also platformer/metroidvania games, but the focus is clearly on the puzzles, and they've got some of the most fiendish ones around if you get far enough in. I guess a lot of it is riddles, rather than proper puzzles, if anyone cares to make that distinction.

 

[3 others]

No mention of the La Mulana games? Granted they're also platformer/metroidvania games, but the focus is clearly on the puzzles, and they've got some of the most fiendish ones around if you get far enough in. I guess a lot of it is riddles, rather than proper puzzles, if anyone cares to make that distinction.

I think that puzzle-riddle distinction is an interesting lens to approach this. After playing and greatly enjoying La Mulana 2 a few years back, I tried Thimbleweed Park some time after it, and was struck by how similar the puzzles/riddles felt. The form (or to use game design jargon - verbs) to solve the puzzles/riddles is very different in 2D metroidvania and point-and-click adventure, but the concept seems much more similar between them than in, say, The Witness. And as I consider La Mulana 2 to be one of the best games of all time, and Thimbleweed Park unfinishable mediocrity, maybe the form is the critical factor here. Or maybe the "riddles" themselves are better than in a contemporary, well-regarded point-and-click.

Anyway, La Mulana and especially its sequel are so good that they should be mentioned in all even remotely tangential topics. Shame there aren't more of these... "galious-like" games around. Maybe Unepic comes closest, I dunno...

 

[3 others]

I've been playing Void Stranger lately. It's a minimalistic sokoban puzzle game with exactly one tile-switching central mechanic, extended into hundreds of levels. There seems to be plenty of esoteric additional content and a JRPG-lite plot to give some narrative to the block-pushing. I can't speak much for either of those additional elements since I haven't finished the game, but the core playing experience is actually really good. The puzzles are minimalistic and tough but not as humiliating as in something like Stephen's Sausage Roll, and the soundtrack that keeps blaring over the ponderous descent into the titular Void deserves an extra shout-out too. Sometimes it's bomberman-bombastic, sometimes brooding, sometimes hopeful and determined, always creative. These kinds of chiptune sawtooth synths aren't really something I'd listen to elsewhere but they are the very essence of video game music and fit very well here.

It's all (including the music) done by two talented and confident guys, which means you'll see some bold design decisions as they chase their vision but generally everything seems well-polished here. Tentative recommendation unless there's some absurd nosedive at the latter floors (I'm somewhere around 170 or so)

 

[HansDampf]

Void Stranger has been popping up on my radar several times in the last few week. The universe really wants me to play it. I've read that on top of all the Sokoban puzzles it's also riddled with riddles that can take you up to 100 hours to solve. That's probably exaggerated, but it makes me a bit cautious. Please report back.

 

[NJClaw]

Weird I never reviewed this but it is VERY good. You've probably never heard of it which is a shame.

I love Supraland, it's a real gem. I only played it once, but it's so memorable I still remember most of it. The pseudo-sequel is still on sale:

 

[Spukrian]

I have a love/hate relationship with the Supraland games. Anyways, I talked about them here.

EDIT: In the old post I said I didn't want to 100% them, but after posting that I did get all of the achievements somehow. I also did a playthrough where I got the Secret Upgrade in Six Inches Under.

 

[Dark Souls II]

Cool puzzles in this one, not on Steam or Gog sadly.

You can find Nabokov's problems on most Chess platforms of course. I like this one, very ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ

 

[Gostak]

Not my forte but here go these:

https://www.koryheath.com/zendo/ (scroll down there to zendo-san for an old Windows version of it).

https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Homeworlds (you'll have to compile this yourself. For a beginner an OK computer foe).

Also dig for a working wayback link for https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/32369/modern-art-computer-game-w-ai-available-for-downlo/page/3
(It's worth it. I just noticed there is another for Ra, have not checked that one myself IIRC). Ah, also here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160704152324/http://gabrielrocklin.me/modart.zip
So bonus: https://web.archive.org/web/20160704152324/http://gabrielrocklin.me/ra.zip

And Pushover (dat old DOS Domino brick tilting game as the red ant-thingy).

 

[3 others]

Void Stranger has been popping up on my radar several times in the last few week. The universe really wants me to play it. I've read that on top of all the Sokoban puzzles it's also riddled with riddles that can take you up to 100 hours to solve. That's probably exaggerated, but it makes me a bit cautious. Please report back.

Well yeah, after finishing the first playthrough - presumably with the unlimited lives the game grants you - you seem to get something of a bad ending and are required to restart the whole game and its 200+ levels from the beginning in order to complete the thing properly. I took a look at the Steam discussion page and the people there are talking about all kinds of strange playable characters and bossfights and other stuff so there appears to be tons of content even after that point.

Like I said, certainly some bold design choices here. Not sure I'm gonna return to check the rest of it out though.