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Toki Tori
A 2D thinking puzzle in which a chick collects every trapped egg using only the tools a level hands him — build a step, lay a bridge, freeze a creature. What you are given, and how many, is itself the shape of the answer. From the Dutch studio Two Tribes, rebuilt from their 2001 Game Boy Color original.
puzzlepuzzle-platformerlogicThe Magic Circle
A first-person meta-puzzle set inside a fantasy game that has been in development for twenty years and is still unfinished. You steal behaviours from creatures and objects, paste them onto other things, and rewrite your way toward the exit. Puzzles have no single intended answer. Released in 2015 by Question, a studio whose members are credited with work on Thief and BioShock.
puzzlemeta-puzzlefirst-personThomas Was Alone
A 2D puzzle-platformer in which you switch between coloured rectangles, each given exactly one ability, and combine them into stepping stones across 120 levels. A narrator reads out what the shapes are thinking as you go. Released in 2012 by Mike Bithell's Bithell Games.
puzzlepuzzle-platformernarrativeHappy Game
A point-and-click adventure that walks a sleeping boy through three chapters of nightmare. You pull, turn and pick at the screen to open the way forward, and what waits there is smiley faces, pink bunnies and rooms the colour of blood. Amanita Design's first turn toward horror, scored by the Czech band DVA.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureEscape Goat 2
A 2D puzzle platformer about escaping a trap-filled stronghold with a goat and its mouse companion. Each room is a single screen, solved with jumps, an immortal mouse that crawls walls and stands on switches, and a magic hat that swaps the goat's position with the mouse's. Over a hundred rooms across ten zones, from MagicalTimeBean in 2014.
puzzlepuzzle-platformerplatformerBrothers - A Tale of Two Sons
Two brothers set out to find the Water of Life for their dying father. The left stick moves the older brother and the right the younger, both at once, and you cross ravines, waterways and the bones of giants by pairing what each of them can do. Every line is spoken in an invented language. Directed by Josef Fares at Starbreeze Studios, released in 2013.
puzzleadventurepuzzle-platformerFRACT OSC
A first-person musical-exploration puzzle set in a vast synthesizer-built ruin, where you actuate glowing nodes and sound rigs to wake dormant machinery and music back to life. There's almost no instruction; working out what is even interactive is itself the puzzle. Phosfiend Systems, 2014, winner of IndieCade's audio design award.
puzzleexplorationfirst-personLightmatter
A first-person puzzler where touching a shadow kills you instantly. Light your way out of a collapsed research facility using only portable lamps and light-relaying pylons, turning a floor of darkness into a safe path. Tunnel Vision Games' open love letter to Portal, built on the single paired verb of light and shadow.
puzzlefirst-personlogicObduction
Touch an artifact that falls from the night sky by a lake and you are flung to an alien landscape stitched from fragments of Earth across times and places. Walk, observe, and solve the machinery linking world to world to find your way home—a first-person adventure from Cyan, the studio behind Myst, that makes observation its only verb.
puzzleadventurefirst-person
