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Escape 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-platformerplatformerMini Motorways
A minimalist 2D puzzle game in which you draw roads, one at a time, through a city that keeps sprouting colour-coded houses and destinations. Each week you are handed a motorway, a roundabout or a traffic light to spend, and you keep redrawing the network until the traffic finally seizes up. From Dinosaur Polo Club, the New Zealand studio behind Mini Metro.
puzzleminimalistsimulationMinit
A small black-and-white top-down adventure in which a curse ends every life after sixty seconds and sends you home. Only the items you picked up and the new houses you found carry over, so each minute reaches a little further than the last. Made by four developers including Vlambeer's Jan Willem Nijman, published by Devolver Digital.
adventurepuzzletime-loopKeep Talking and Nobody Explodes
One player sits in front of a bomb; everyone else reads the defusal manual. The reader cannot see the bomb and the person seeing it has no manual. You hand conditional instructions across by voice and cut the wire before the clock runs out. A game-jam-born co-op puzzle from Steel Crate Games, with VR support.
puzzleco-oppartyAI: The Somnium Files
A detective adventure set in near-future Tokyo, in which a one-eyed police detective works a serial murder case alongside the artificial intelligence housed in his prosthetic eye. First-person investigation scenes alternate with third-person 'Somnium' dives into a suspect's dream, where a six-minute budget must be spent to open Mental Locks, and an in-game flowchart lets you walk the branches toward several endings. Written and directed by Kotaro Uchikoshi of the Zero Escape series, from Spike Chunsoft.
mysteryadventurenarrative-puzzleMini Metro
A 2D minimalist puzzler in which you draw subway lines between circle, triangle and square stations in a growing city, allocating the carriages and tunnels handed to you each week, and keep the city moving until the platforms overflow. From New Zealand's Dinosaur Polo Club, grown out of a game-jam prototype.
puzzleminimalistsimulationPony Island
A meta-puzzle in which you are trapped in a deliberately shoddy arcade cabinet built by the devil, alternating between a pony side-scroller and puzzles that reorder instruction blocks inside the machine itself. Daniel Mullins's first commercial release turns the window and the UI into the mechanism.
puzzlemeta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleHyperbolica
A first-person non-Euclidean adventure set in towns built from hyperbolic space, where parallel lines refuse to stay parallel, and spherical space, where distant objects look larger; you talk to residents and play races, skiing and snowball fights to build an intuition for the place. Made by CodeParade, who wrote the rendering pipeline from scratch.
puzzleexplorationfirst-personLinelight
A minimalist puzzle game in which you steer a small bar of light along thin lines, working past switches, doors, keys and lethal red lines. No jump button and no shoot button — over 250 levels across six worlds, from My Dog Zorro.
puzzleminimalistpuzzle-platformerWilmot's Warehouse
A 2D organisation puzzle: push the delivered goods into your warehouse and file them however you decide. No rule governs the shelves, and when the service hatch opens you retrieve orders from memory alone. By Richard Hogg and Ricky Haggett, who previously made Hohokum, with 200 kinds of pictorial tile piling up.
puzzleobservationsimulationCryptmaster
A word-driven dungeon crawl in first person: type the words you have recovered to fire skills and answer riddles. Built in monochrome pencil illustration with a fully voiced narrator, by Paul Hart and Lee Williams.
puzzleword-gamenarrative-puzzleMoncage
A wordless optical-illusion puzzle adventure. Each face of a glass cube holds a different world, and rotating your view until two silhouettes line up locks them into a single mechanism. You move between a factory, a lighthouse, an amusement park and a church, picking up scattered photographs that assemble the story of a father and a son. From Optillusion.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickChinatown Detective Agency
A cybernoir point-and-click set in near-future Singapore, where you run a detective agency and crack international cases by researching real facts in a browser outside the game. General Interactive Co.'s experiment hands the last step of every clue to the live web.
deductionobservationmysteryDo Not Feed the Monkeys
A digital voyeur simulator: watch strangers - 'monkeys' - through surveillance cameras, pick clues from their rooms and talk, and pin down who they are with a notepad and a search engine. Blackmail, help, or look away, all while juggling rent, food and sleep. A game by Fictiorama Studios.
observationdeductionsimulationOuter Wilds
Explore a solar system on a 22-minute loop and unravel the mysteries of an ancient race.
narrative-puzzleobservationmeta-puzzlePapers, Please
A border inspector in a fictional authoritarian state, caught between paperwork and morality.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleLIMBO
A boy walks through a monochrome forest searching for his sister. Trial and death advance the way.
physicsobservationnarrative-puzzleHalf-Life 2: Episode One
A five-hour escape with Alyx, blending gravity-gun physics puzzles and FPS combat.
physicsnarrative-puzzleZuma Deluxe
Fire same-color balls into an Aztec-themed snake's path to clear them. PopCap's golden-era action puzzle.
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