REVIEWS
All Reviews
179 in English · filter by genre, mechanic, difficulty, year
Mosa Lina
A 2D physics puzzle-platformer where you collect the fruit on a stage and return to the exit. You can only walk and jump; everything else comes from three tools dealt at random each attempt. Stuffed Wombat calls it a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim.
puzzlepuzzle-platformersandboxSomerville
A 2.5D narrative puzzle-adventure in which a nameless father crosses a British countryside broken by an alien invasion, a dog and a small son at his side. Light in hand, he melts alien matter and lets it set again to open a path. Jumpship's first game, told without a single line of dialogue.
puzzleadventureatmosphericSamorost 3
A point-and-click adventure across nine tiny worlds with no dialogue and no text, where a hooded figure carries a found brass flute and opens the way by playing notes at rocks, creatures and machines. From Amanita Design, the studio behind Machinarium.
puzzlepoint-and-clickexplorationEscape Simulator
A first-person escape-room puzzler where you move the furniture, smash the pots and pick up nearly everything you see. Solve 28 rooms designed with real-life escape room operators, alone or in online co-op, then keep going into thousands of community rooms built with the bundled editor. From Pine Studio.
puzzleescape-roomfirst-personDorfromantik
A hand-painted tile-placement puzzler: draw one hexagonal tile at a time and rotate it so its forests, fields, houses, rivers and rails line up with their neighbours. Complete quests to win tiles back and keep the village landscape growing, in Berlin studio Toukana Interactive's debut.
puzzlelogicminimalistBroken Age
A village girl chosen as a sacrifice and a boy aboard a spaceship run by an overprotective computer. Switch freely between their two stories, combining objects to solve puzzles, in a hand-painted point-and-click adventure — built in two acts by Tim Schafer's Double Fine on crowdfunded money.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickThe Signal State
A 2D logic puzzler where you slot modules — AND, NOT, attenuators, sample-and-hold — into a rack and patch them with cables carrying voltages from -100 to 100 until the output waveform matches the spec. Reckoner Industries builds it on modular synthesis, framed as repairing the irrigation of a ruined farm.
puzzleprogramminglogicKaizen: A Factory Story
A 2D automation puzzle set in 1986 Japan: lay arms and tracks across a green workbench, program a timeline of commands, and build assembly lines for calculators, camcorders and arcade cabinets. Made by the original Zachtronics team under their new studio Coincidence, with a pachinko-flavoured solitaire on the side.
puzzleautomationprogrammingWe Were Here Forever
A co-op-only first-person puzzle adventure in which two prisoners, held in separate parts of Castle Rock, escape by describing to each other what only one of them can see or hear. Explaining yourself over a walkie-talkie - and being misunderstood - is the mechanic. The fourth entry in Total Mayhem Games' We Were Here series.
puzzleescape-roomco-opThe Past Within
A point-and-click adventure playable only by two people at once: one stands in the Past, the other in the Future, and every puzzle is solved by describing aloud what only your own screen shows. The past is drawn in 2D, the future in 3D. Rusty Lake's first co-op-only game.
puzzleco-opescape-roomGone Home
A first-person exploration game: home on a rainy night in June 1995 after a year abroad, you open every door and drawer of an empty house and reconstruct a year of family history from the letters, cassettes and magazines left behind. No combat, no puzzles, no fail state — the verbs are open, pick up, read. The first game from Fullbright, founded by veterans of BioShock.
explorationobservationmysteryInto the Breach
A top-down tactical puzzle: three mechs on an 8×8 grid, every enemy attack for the coming turn shown to you in advance, and a city to keep standing. Subset Games, makers of FTL, stripped almost all randomness out of the combat itself.
puzzlelogicgrid-basedPaper Trail
A top-down puzzle game in which the screen is a sheet of paper: fold it over and the terrain on the reverse joins the front, building a path for Paige as she journeys through a hand-drawn world. From Newfangled Games.
puzzleadventurepathfindingThe Room 4: Old Sins
A first-person contraption puzzler set inside an old dollhouse found in an attic: open the mechanism in one room, then carry what you find to the room that is missing a piece. The fourth entry in Fireproof Games' The Room series, rebuilt for PC.
puzzleobservationmysteryThe Vanishing of Ethan Carter
A first-person mystery in which you play an occult detective, walking a deserted valley to examine bodies and belongings and reassemble each death by putting the scattered fragments back in order — a photogrammetry-built forest explored with no map and no HUD, from The Astronauts.
investigationobservationnarrative-puzzleThimbleweed Park
A point-and-click adventure about a 1987 small-town murder, switching between five characters — two FBI agents, a ghost, a foul-mouthed clown and an aspiring game developer. Its nine-verb SCUMM-style interface was rebuilt for modern machines by the creators of Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureWilmot'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-puzzleLittle Inferno
A 2D point-and-click that plays out entirely in front of a fireplace: order toys from a catalogue, burn them, watch how each one goes, and pair two or three of them by wordplay to find 99 "combos." Released in 2012 by Tomorrow Corporation, the studio behind World of Goo.
puzzlepoint-and-clicknarrative-puzzleSokobond Express
A grid puzzle in which you draw one unbroken path for a single atom, bonding it to the atoms it passes until the target molecule is assembled — a minimalist crossbreed of Sokobond and Cosmic Express, published by Draknek & Friends.
puzzlepathfindinglogicMoncage
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-clickMyst
A first-person puzzle adventure: you arrive on an unknown island and move between an abandoned library and four Ages, piecing together a story of family betrayal from machines and journals alone. Cyan Worlds' own Unreal Engine rebuild of their 1993 original, walkable flat or in VR, with optional puzzle randomization.
puzzleadventurefirst-personGenesis Noir
A hand-drawn black-and-white point-and-click adventure in which you play No Man, a watch peddler diving through the history of the universe to save his love from the Big Bang — a gunshot fired by a jealous god. Feral Cat Den built it out of tactile puzzles: turn a dial, touch a thing, see what happens.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickQuadrilateral Cowboy
A first-person hacking puzzle where you type commands into a laptop to hijack doors, cameras, turrets and robots, pulling off heists with a crew. Made in 2016 by Blendo Games (Brendon Chung) of Thirty Flights of Loving, set in a retro-future cyberpunk world.
puzzlehackingimmersive-sim
