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Wilmot Works It Out
A puzzle-building game: open the weekly package, pull out square pieces, assemble the pictures, and hang the finished ones on your walls. Each package mixes pieces from several pictures, so sorting comes before building. The sequel to Wilmot’s Warehouse, from Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg.
puzzleobservationlogicIn Other Waters
A non-violent sci-fi adventure in which you play the AI aboard a stranded xenobiologist's diving suit, scanning an alien ocean from a panel of contour lines and cataloguing the life you find. From Jump Over The Age, built so the ocean is never rendered — only described.
narrative-puzzleobservationexplorationThomas 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-platformernarrativeCypher
A first-person puzzle game about cryptography. You walk white exhibition rooms and decode the ciphertexts hung on their walls, from simple substitution through polyalphabetic ciphers to machine ciphers. A solo work by Matthew Brown of the Hexcells trilogy, and it assumes you have paper and a pencil.
puzzlelogic-deductionminimalistBombe
A logic puzzle where you do not clear the Minesweeper board yourself: you write rules that act on the numbered regions, and a checker verifies them. Rules that pass are applied automatically to every board from then on, leaving only the situations no rule has reached. A solo project by Charlie Brej.
puzzlelogicautomationIsle of Arrows
A puzzle-leaning tower defense: place randomly drawn tiles onto a floating island, grow the paths yourself, and line up towers against the waves. Unwanted tiles can be skipped, one at a time, for coins. Gridpop's crossbreed of board game and tower defense.
puzzlestrategyroguelikeISLANDERS
A minimalist placement puzzle: drop buildings onto procedurally generated islands and score them by whatever sits nearby. No resource management, no citizens — one verb, "place." A small release from Grizzly Games.
puzzlestrategyminimalistMini 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.
puzzleminimalistsimulationLara Croft GO
A turn-based puzzle adventure that walks Lara down isometric ruins one tile at a time. You slip past snakes and spear traps, pull levers, and count the turns left on a cracking floor. Square Enix Montréal folded Tomb Raider's jumping, climbing and shooting into single board moves, in the second game of their GO series.
puzzleadventurepathfindingMinit
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-loopSUPERHOT
A first-person shooter built from white rooms and red figures, where the world's time advances only as far as you move. You take your weapons from the enemies who drop them, and a single hit ends the level. Grown by SUPERHOT Team out of a game-jam prototype.
puzzlefirst-persontime-manipulationMini 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.
puzzleminimalistsimulationÖoo
A wordless exploration puzzle platformer in which a caterpillar sheds a segment of its own body as a bomb and detonates it from a distance - one verb that opens an entire underground, where the keys are things you know rather than things you carry. From NamaTakahashi, who made ElecHead.
puzzlepuzzle-platformermetroidvaniaMonument Valley
An optical-illusion puzzler in which you walk the silent princess Ida across isometric monuments, rotating the view until disconnected paths look joined — and become joined. The PC edition of ustwo games' 2014 mobile release, with the extra chapters included.
puzzleperspective-puzzleminimalistLinelight
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-platformerDorfromantik
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.
puzzlelogicminimalistInto 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-basedWilmot'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.
puzzleobservationsimulationSokobond 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.
puzzlepathfindinglogicLYNE
A minimalist logic puzzle: join same-coloured shapes with a single non-crossing line and fill every tile on the board. From octagonal crossing tiles and lines fighting over space, solo developer Thomas Bowker draws bottomless difficulty out of almost nothing — 650 handcrafted puzzles plus an infinite daily generator.
puzzlelogicminimalistHexcells Infinite
A Minesweeper-lineage logic puzzle: find the hidden blue cells on a hex grid using only adjacency counts, line hints and consecutive/non-consecutive markers — pure deduction, no guessing. Matthew Brown's third entry layers an endless puzzle generator over 36 hand-made boards.
puzzlelogic-deductionminimalist
