Take a look to find a new favourite puzzle game today.
Puzzles are a broad church, after all.
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.
It’s possible to get it wrong.
That goes in the bathroom, along with your towels and shampoo.
A ladle does not belong in the bedroom.
Part of the puzzle is fitting your things around the possessions of people you live with.
Unpacking isn’t a puzzle like doing the cryptic crossword is.
Unpacking is a puzzle like real life is.
It’s a twist on a familiar formula that will surprise you with how hard it can be.
The art is colourful and streamlined, inspired by children’s picture books.
And the levels themselves fit with that vibe.
They’re downright whimisical, from gardens, to messy kitchens, to the actual moon.
But with the whimsy you also get a quiet story about grief and moving on.
A lot to pack in one game.
Inside these rooms are more puzzles.
Old Sins is the most complicated but most satisfying of all the Room games yet.
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.
it’s possible for you to see someone standing in the distance outside the window.
It’s a short, spare game with nothing wasted.
A locked room mystery with a twist.
This all plays out in beautiful 2D animations, and without any actual instructions.
PlayDead managed to build on Limbo with Inside.
Inside’s protagonist is a young boy who you join in the middle of being chased through a forest.
The ending is famously, er, surprising.
But there are also puzzles that you solve by paying attention to the game world.
I don’t know if that counts as a puzzle, exactly, but it’s bloody good.
Once you pull the trigger, you play over the shoulder of the bullet.
But if you hit a wall or an obstacle, that’s it.
In one memorable level at a mansion, more than one person is on a different sort of drug.
It’s difficult, but it’s very worth it.
Now, thanks to Mini Motorways, that absolute fool can be you!
Maybe a motorway would help ease the congestion, but it might back up traffic either end.
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.
But you could push boxes (and yourself) into other boxes that have openings.
You have to think in boxes.
you’ve got the option to transport boxes inside boxes.
it’s possible for you to 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.
Knotwords
This is sort of like doing a quick crossword but without any clues.
You’re told what letters go into each of the tetronimos, but not where.
So that foursquare could contain the lettersOVOW.
This isn’t as hard as it sounds, and you get into the swing of it pretty quickly.
You also have a lot of puzzles to choose from, with more generating every month.
Dorfromantik
Dorfromantik is a lovely game.
It’s perfect for streaming.
It’s perfect for playing sitting on the sofa.
you might get all intense and try and beat your high score and take it all seriously.
But if you want, you’re free to just have a lovely time building a pretty town.
Plopping these down joins them together to form your growing valley.
But to get a high score you have to pay attention.
It’s the right level of chilled out while still requiring some active thought.
But here we are.
What constitutes a start or an end can be flexible.
The laser beam boxes take an absurdly long time to power up, with so many steps involved.
This game is free!
Baba Is You
Baba Is You isn’t exactly a sokoban game.
But in Baba Is You, you’re able to 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 every level has a solution, and training yourself to think the right way is tough.
Until you start moving it all around, that is.
The puzzles are surprising and delightful, and a bit magical, but grow in complexity.
It’s a fantastic puzzle game.
you’re free to make arms pivot, pistons retract, control the exact amount they pivot when… And that’s a fairly simple puzzle.
But there’s a lot of open-ended flexibility here.
If your machine works, it works.
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.
But fear not, because you’re able to hack into them to dissolve and reposition things.
In simple terms World Of Good is a physics-based bridge builder, crossed with Lemmings.
The goo isn’t (aren’t?)
that struturally sound, though, and are given to buckle under their own weight.
World Of Goo is both chaotic and elegant, and is still a marvellous achievement this many years later.
Mondays, am I right?
An ex-cop can shoot a window out where someone else might break it.
There are layers and layers of cleverness and complexity to peel back.
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.
But many of the other puzzle types made complete sense to me.
And you might hate the ones that I understood straight away.
Portal
It was one of the best games full stop when it came out, and it still is.
It’s a classic for a reason.
Outer Wilds
Outer Wilds is a unique puzzle game meets ramshackle space exploration.
There’s a lot to see, which is where the repeating loops come in.
One is a puzzle planet.
One is an exploded shell turned into a weird poket universe inside a multidimensional bramble.
you’ve got the option to follow the sound of instruments to fellow scattered cosmonauts.
The solution to Outer Wilds' puzzle is the universe.
It’s hard to imagine what could unseat it from the number one spot on best puzzles, either.
The challenge is to match up each body with the ship’s manifest and a cause of death.
This body belongs to the captain, who was shot by y, that sort of thing.
Your choices are only revealed as correct once you’ve got three compleletely right at once.
