The 25 Best Puzzle Games to Play Right Now

Blue Prince, this spring’s buzzy and wildly engrossing indie sensation, is a terrific reminder of something video games do tremendously well: Puzzles! The game, about exploring a mansion where the layout is different every day, exists to confound players, and dares them to enjoy it. It’s a good bet – one of the more compelling, yet rarely made, arguments for getting into video games is that there is no better way to get a steady stream of dazzling, inventive puzzles in your life. Puzzles are so integral to the video game experience that most genres make room for them in ways that would be absurd in another medium. Imagine, for example, a George Romero zombie film where everyone stops dead in their tracks to do a round of Spelling Bee. In video games? That’s just Resident Evil.

Puzzle games, however, make teasing your brain the point of the experience, and not just a diversion offered for a change of pace. And while shareable word or trivia games like Wordle and Cinematrix, alongside puzzle pages like Puzzmo have kicked off a renaissance in puzzle-playing, nothing beats a good old fashioned video game for sheer variety of mind-bending ways to entertain yourself. There are logic puzzles and perspective puzzles, games of deductive reasoning and careful planning, physics toys and narrative knots. Some are leisurely, others demand you lean in–with a notebook, even.

Assembled here are 25 excellent puzzle games of all sorts that you can try right now. A note on the selections: This list prefers games that are both widely available on modern platforms, and also primarily about solving puzzles. That last part is tremendously subjective. As mentioned above, puzzles are such a foundational part of video games — a medium defined by problem-solving – that you could convincingly argue that all sorts of games are, in fact, puzzle games. This list, however, abides by a loose rule: while a few entries may indulge in platforming, or exploration, puzzles must be the primary focus.

Animal Well

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Even if you do not care to delve into its deeper mysteries – and there are tremendous depths here – Animal Well starts by upending most of your expectations. You play an egg-shaped…creature? plumbing the moody, atmospheric depths of a well. Creator Billy Basso approaches the puzzle-platforming genre with flourish, eschewing the traditional methods for video game traversal –a double jump here, a dash there — for a suite of stranger tools. A bubble wand, a frisbee. Learning how to use these is among the first puzzles you’ll solve in Animal Well, the delight of discovering new uses for them will push you to solve many, many more.

Baba Is You

Platforms: MacOS, Mobile, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Goddamn infuriating and undeniably ingenious, Baba Is You presents you with a series of statements – the eponymous “Baba Is You”, for example, translates to the player being able to control a sheep-like creature named Baba. Other statements, or parts of them, litter the stages: nouns and verbs and objects, all of which can be re-arranged to change the rules of said stage. Each level is a logic puzzle that’s less about finding a solution than it is about reasoning your way into winning, breaking the whole game open over and over again.

Blue Prince

Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox

The indie game of the moment, Tonda Ros’ ingenious sprawling work about exploring a house where the rooms are different every day delights in questions. Every one you might have is worth pursuing: Are the rooms really random? Why is the house like this? Why does the story cast me as a boy who only stands to inherit this strange estate if he can find the 46th room of a 45-room manor? Each answer will spur more, delicious questions, seemingly without end. Maybe that’s the point.

The Case of the Golden Idol

Platforms: MacOS, Mobile, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Wickedly macabre, The Case of the Golden Idol presents you with a moment of murder most foul, and challenges you to determine why it happened. Click around the lightly animated snapshot to learn more about the soon-to-be corpse, the suspects in the area, and any incriminating or contextualizing evidence there is to find. Each murder you solve builds on the next one, as connections between the victims and their associates emerge, along with a suspicious, perhaps cursed, golden idol that always happens to be at the center of things. A joy to play, especially with company.

Catherine: Full Body

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

A pervert’s labyrinth, Catherine: Full Body is the most provocative and risqué game on this list, but also perhaps the most thrilling. Catherine casts players as Vincent Brooks, a little worm of a man who, after an affair with the manic pixie dream girl Catherine, is tormented by guilt – and strange nightmares where he must climb a never-ending tower of blocks before they collapse into an abyss. The bulk of Catherine challenges you to climb these towers, a deranged game of Jenga-like block stacking and scaling, with occasional pauses to ask you binary questions about the nature of love and relationships. Oddly raunchy yet thoughtful, Catherine is still unique among puzzle games, 14 years after its release.

Chants of Sennar

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Chants of Sennar treats learning a new language like solving a mystery, and the result is one of the most unique video games in some time. Inspired by the biblical Tower of Babel, players must scale the massive structure inhabited by people who speak fictional languages, decoding the words, gestures and writings to solve puzzles and advance. Chants of Sennar isn’t just a novel puzzler, it’s a demonstration of games’ potential for considering something rather old in a very new way.

Fez

Platforms: iOS, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Phil Fish’s seminal platformer still has one of the most satisfying hooks in video games: A 2D cat with the power to give his world depth. The ability to hit a button and watch the screen rotate to show another side to every surface is intoxicating, and allows for endless variations on perspective puzzles. And while it’s far from the only offline game to spawn an online community, for a generation of brainy players Fez was the first game they collaborated with others around the world to solve its many completely optional, devilishly hidden mysteries.

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Recently remastered for modern platforms, Ghost Trick comes from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney creator Shu Takumi, and is just as full of quirky fun. As the recently-deceased Sissel, you play an amnesiac ghost trying to solve your own murder. You do this by possessing objects and setting off chains of cause-and-effect in each storybook-like level, indirectly influencing the living to get you closer to your goal of solving the mystery of your death, and preventing a few others along the way.

Gorogoa

Platforms: Mobile, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Beautiful and mysterious, Gorogoa is simple enough to play, but beguiling once you wrap your head around it. The screen is divided into four panels, each panel potentially holding a scene you can interact with. Perhaps one scene is actually layered, and you can separate interiors from exteriors, sending a boy from a tower to parts unknown. Gorogoa is full of tiny revelations like this, a seek-and-find picture book with an exciting new layer to it.

Humanity

Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Like Lemmings but with an existential twist, Humanity casts you as a Shiba Inu-esque spirit tasked with leading masses of people to a shining white goal. The Afterlife, perhaps? Solving each level comes down to establishing a pattern that the crowd – which will follow your directions – can safely follow. Straightforward yet inventive, Humanity is perhaps the most soothing game about the burden of responsibility you’ll ever play.

LOK Digital

Platforms: Mobile, PC

A word game where all the words are made up sounds confounding, but LOK Digital will have you wondering in what other ways  grammar has been holding us back. You play by tapping tiles, most of which will have letters – regular letters, it’s not that esoteric – in order to spell words the game will teach out. Each word you learn will give you a new way to achieve your goal, which is blotting out every tile in black ink. Spell the word LOK, for example, and you can blot out one other tile. Other words will let you blot out two tiles, or every tile of a certain letter. In no time at all you will be solving the most evil crossword puzzles, and should anyone peer over your shoulder, they’ll think you’re some sort of wizard.

Lorelai and the Laser Eyes

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation

Seductive and stylish, Lorelai and the Laser Eyes is the crowning achievement of the playful developers at the Swedish studio Simogo. You play a woman invited to an eccentric’s mansion to participate in his latest work of art, which apparently involves wandering the property and solving a large number of truly devious puzzles. As you unravel Lorelai’s depths, a story begins to piece itself together in your mind and sinister hazards emerge, resulting in one of the finest video game experiences in any genre.

Outer Wilds

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

One of the best tricks a video game can pull is when it sends you on a long journey to understand something hiding right under your nose. Outer Wilds does all that and more: A game where you are trapped in a 22 minute time loop in a dying solar system, you spend each loop launching off to a nearby planet (there are only a handful, and they’re all close by) to see what it can teach you about why everyone is doomed, why you’re trapped in this loop, and what would it take to break it– if that’s something you even want to do. Warm and surprisingly emotional, solving some of Outer Wilds biggest mysteries sits right up there with the very best endings in games.

Picross

Platforms: Nintendo Switch

There are a lot of ways to play nonograms – the sudoku-like puzzles where you fill out squares on a grid to form a pixel-art image – but few as consistent and soothing as Nintendo’s Picross series. The puzzle equivalent of a beach read, Nintendo has released a new Picross like clockwork every year, many trying out new features (2022’s Picross S8 introduced multiplayer) but never straying from the core mission: Chill muzack, and lots of lots of puzzles to unwind with.

Portal

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Recently collected on Nintendo Switch with its sequel as Portal: Companion Collection, the 2007 classic and its 2011 sequel Portal 2 are still among the cleverest video games ever made. As a test subject under the whims of a mad artificial intelligence, you’re forced to use a sci-fi portal gun – place an orange portal on one surface, and a blue portal on another, and voila, you’re Doctor Strange – to escape increasingly elaborate death traps. Brief yet dense and full of misanthropic humor, Portal holds the hell up nearly twenty years later.

Return of the Obra Dinn

Platforms: MacOS, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Return of the Obra Dinn will stop you in your tracks. With a visual style reminiscent of silent films, pulp serials, and very early computer games, Lucas Pope’s masterpiece begins with a mystery: The Obra Dinn, a merchant vessel missing since 1803, has suddenly appeared off the coast of England five years later, with all 60 souls aboard dead. Using a supernatural pocketwatch that allows you to see the final moment each corpse died, you must carefully reconstruct the ship’s fate – which is almost immediately stranger than you might expect.

The Room

Platforms: Mobile, Nintendo Switch, PC

A lot of things are described as puzzleboxes, The Room simply is one. An early example of the potential of smartphone gaming, The Room presented players with an oddly shaped box full of wonderfully tactile switches and levers to manipulate and see what they revealed. Notes added further intrigue and suggested an occult-themed story – one that would extend through four increasingly elaborate sequels, all well worth seeking out.

Storyteller

Platforms: Mobile, Nintendo Switch, PC

When you get right down to it, there are few things more playful than telling a story. Storyteller is about discovering, and celebrating, the whimsy of spinning a tale. The game will present you with a bunch of small images– a princess, a knight, a church, a sword, a gun – and ask you to arrange it to make, say, a love story, which you can do by adding the knight, the princess, and the sword to your little scrapbook, which will then transform to a fairy tale wedding. The more you play, the more complex scenes and stories you can assemble, and the more Storyteller will surprise you with its elasticity, and how many strange twists you can concoct, just by screwing around. Don’t let anyone tell you any of this has to be hard.

The Swapper

Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox

One of the most hauntingly existential games on a list with a fair share of existential entries on it, The Swapper is a claymation wonder, a sci-fi parable that deftly blends the pleasure of solving its puzzles with a dash of squeamish discomfort. You play an astronaut marooned on a space station, your only tool for escape a cloning gun that allows you to zap a copy of yourself wherever you point it. Press another button and you can swap your consciousness into that clone, now a meat puppet that you will likely treat as disposable. You will do this a lot, and you will think about it a lot, and odds are The Swapper will not be a game you easily forget.

The Talos Principle: Reawakened

Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox

There’s a fair chance you may find The Talos Principle immediately obnoxious: The game begins with you as a newly-awakened android, while a voice calling itself Elohim speaks to you as if he were the God of the Old Testament. He tells you the puzzles in his garden – first-person mazes with devices like turrets, barriers, and jammers to interfere with them – are for your development, and tells you not to climb a very big tower. If you find him annoying, that’s probably good – the game is interested in exploring that. Like a lot of puzzle games, it’s also interested in presenting a fractured story for you to mull over and assemble in your mind, and the combination of maze and narrative puzzles prove to be an intoxicating mix.

Tetris Effect: Connected

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, VR platforms, Xbox

If you haven’t yet experienced Tetris Effect, I know what you’re thinking. It’s Tetris! What more is there to know? You’re not wrong. You do know Tetris. But maybe you don’t know it like this: A sensory experience with a dreamy electronic soundtrack, trippy visuals, and hippie positivity, all designed to induce the titular Tetris Effect: A state where you start seeing those familiar tetrominoes everywhere. It rules.

Threes

Platforms: mobile, PC, Xbox, Web

The king of idle time killers, Threes is one of the few remaining reasons for not throwing your smartphone into the ocean. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to play Threes anywhere: in line for groceries, on the john, at the bar. One of the most elegant games of the 21st Century, it just gives you a 3×3 grid and lets you swipe tiles up or down to add up multiples of three. Try and merge as many tiles as you can, to get the numbers on them as high as you can. Compulsive and easy to parse, Threes is a habit you’ll have no desire to kick.

Void Stranger

Platforms: PC

Sokoban is a classic Japanese puzzle game about pushing boxes around a grid in the right direction and order. Do it wrong, and you can render a puzzle unsolvable. If you play video games frequently, you’ve probably solved a Sokoban-style puzzle (it is also a genre), probably in a Zelda game. Void Stranger is the Charlie Kaufman of Sokoban games, breaking the form wide open in metatextual ways to tell a story that does not, at first, even appear to be there. Perhaps telling you this much is ruining it. Play Void Stranger. At the very least, it’s a good Sokoban game.

The Witness

Platforms: iOS, MacOS, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

If Myst, Cyan’s classic game about exploring an island of intricate puzzles, were even more streamlined and made by a staggering pedant, you’d get The Witness. This, believe it or not, is a compliment. There is only one kind of puzzle in The Witness, and it involves drawing a line from one point to another. The complexity with which designer Jonathan Blow is able to mine from his chosen form of puzzle is genuinely awe-inspiring, but what’s more impressive is the way The Witness is carefully constructed to teach you its puzzle-logic, to show you a new way of seeing the world. Perhaps you will not solve every puzzle you encounter as you wander the island in The Witness, but the time you do spend there will be memorable.

World of Goo

Platforms: Mobile, Nintendo Switch, PC

A game for engineering freaks, World of Goo (recently remastered, courtesy of Netflix of all companies) sounds like one of those summer camp challenges for aspiring MIT students. Each level has a goal – usually a pipe – in some inaccessible location, and the player must build a structure of goo to reach it. Each glob of goo will connect to any glob it is placed next to, which allows for all kinds of creations – especially as variables are introduced that toy with the game’s physics. An early hit from the mid-2000s indie game boom, World of Goo recently got a new, excellent sequel last year – a perfect follow-up for those who want more.

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