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Evan's Remains
A 2D puzzle adventure built from single-screen block puzzles — platforms that vanish once you step off them, blocks that switch other blocks on and off — carrying the story of Dysis, a girl searching for a missing boy named Evan. A game by maitan69.
puzzleplatform-puzzlenarrative-puzzleThe Last Campfire
A 3D puzzle adventure in which Ember, a small lost flame, walks an underground world and works through the small contraptions blocking the stranded souls it finds there. A storybook-shaped project from Hello Games, the studio behind No Man's Sky.
puzzleadventurenarrative-puzzleinbento
A pattern-matching puzzle played inside a 3×3 lunchbox. You don't place the food directly: you play a small hand of operation cards that move, swap, copy or lift tiles, and you must spend every card exactly. 127 levels, wordless, with a short story about a cat mother and her kitten. By Afterburn, who also made Golf Peaks.
puzzlecasualnarrative-puzzleWilmot 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-puzzleobservationexplorationThe 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-personDonut County
A physics puzzle in which you steer a hole in the ground, swallowing a town's furniture and residents to make the hole grow. There is one verb — move the hole — and the levels are strung together by conversations with the townspeople. Made by Ben Esposito and published by Annapurna Interactive.
puzzlephysicscomedyHappy 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-clickadventureOneShot
A top-down puzzle adventure: guide a child through a world whose sun has died, carrying a single lightbulb toward the top of it. Between the item-combining, a handful of puzzles reach out into the player's own computer. From Future Cat.
puzzlemeta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleMachinika: Museum
A first-person puzzle box in which you scan alien devices of unknown origin delivered to a museum, peer inside them and reprint their missing parts until they run again. A short piece from Littlefield Studio that opens seven machines one at a time, with the touch of science-fiction archaeology.
puzzleescape-roomobservationAutonauts
An automation puzzle in which you land on an empty planet, chop and quarry by hand, and then teach robots the steps you just performed so they can do them for you. With short Scratch-style scripts and one small memory allowance per bot, you grow a production line from farming to industry. Made by Denki, in Scotland.
puzzleprogrammingautomationEliza
A visual novel about a woman who returns to work as the human voice of an AI counseling app, reading its scripted lines aloud to clients. Written by Matthew Seiji Burns and made by Zachtronics, the studio behind Opus Magnum, it ships with a kabufuda solitaire game on the side.
visual-novelnarrativeadventureRöki
A point-and-click adventure through a snowbound forest drawn from Nordic folklore, following Tove as she gathers and combines objects to search for her sister. Polygon Treehouse's game has no combat and no fail state, carried instead by hand-drawn landscapes and a story about loss.
adventurepoint-and-clicknarrativeUntitled Goose Game
A sandbox stealth-puzzle in which you steer one goose through a quiet English village, working down a to-do list of pranks that sits in the corner of the screen. The goose can honk and it can carry things; the board is the villagers reacting. Made by House House, a four-person studio in Melbourne.
puzzlestealthsandboxRiME
A boy wakes on an unfamiliar island after a storm and runs, climbs, swims and shouts at the stonework, guided by a red fox toward the peak of a distant tower — a five-chapter puzzle adventure with no combat, no HUD and no dialogue, released by Tequila Works in 2017.
puzzleadventureexplorationCHUCHEL
A comedy adventure from Amanita Design in which a hairy little creature chases a single cherry through thirty short stages, helped and hindered by his rival Kekel. There is exactly one verb — click — and behind almost every press waits a hand-drawn gag.
puzzlepoint-and-clickcomedySherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments
A third-person detective adventure set in Victorian London: walk the scene, lift clues from it, then wire them together on a board called the Deduction Space until a conclusion forms. Each of six standalone cases supports several conclusions, and you also decide whether to hand the person you name to the law or let them go. Made by Frogwares.
deductioninvestigationnarrative-puzzleSyberia: The World Before
A third-person adventure in which lawyer Kate Walker moves between two timelines — a girl named Dana in the 1930s and Kate's own present — retracing the history of the city of Vaghen alongside the automaton Oscar. Progress comes through assembling mechanisms and hint-assisted exploration. Microids' fourth entry in the series.
narrative-puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickDay of the Tentacle Remastered
Double Fine's redraw of the 1993 LucasArts game: a broken time machine scatters three friends into the past, present and future of the same motel, and you switch between them, mailing objects across the centuries to stop a purple tentacle from taking over the world.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickTetrobot and Co.
A grid-based thinking puzzle in which you steer Psychobot, a microscopic repair robot, swallowing and spitting blocks to mend the insides of a broken giant. Swing Swing Submarine build fifty-odd levels out of little more than three materials — wood, sand, stone — and one rule: like sticks only to like.
puzzlelogicsokoban-likeSyberia 3
A third-person adventure in which the lawyer Kate Walker joins a Youkol migration north, assembling clockwork devices along the way. Microïds' third Syberia, which trades the fixed painted screens of the first two games for a 3D space you walk around in.
narrative-puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickUnheard - Voices of Crime
A deduction adventure played over a top-down floor plan: you move between rooms and scrub a recording of the day back and forth, listening. There are no subtitles — you name the figures and answer the case questions using only what you heard. From NExT Studios.
mysteryobservationpuzzleTacoma
A first-person exploration adventure set aboard an emptied space station in 2088, where you replay, rewind and walk around volumetric recordings of its six-person crew to reconstruct the days before they left. From Fullbright, the studio behind Gone Home.
observationnarrativeadventureTOEM
A hand-drawn monochrome observation-puzzle adventure in which a child leaves home with their grandmother's camera, photographs whatever the villagers and townspeople ask for, shows them the shot, and uses the stamps earned to move on to the next region — rotating the view to hunt for subjects, from Something We Made.
puzzleobservationadventureMonument 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-puzzleminimalistIs This Seat Taken?
A 2D logic puzzle in which you seat a cast of little shapes — in a cinema, a bus, a taxi, a wedding reception, a diner — pulling them one at a time out of the queue and settling them where they want to be. Someone refuses to sit behind a big hat, a child wants to stay next to their parent, a nose objects to the coffee two seats over; you look for the one arrangement nobody complains about. Poti Poti Studio, published by Wholesome Games Presents in 2025.
puzzlelogicnarrativeSamorost 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-clickexplorationPaper 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.
puzzleobservationmysteryThimbleweed 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-clickadventureSokobond 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.
puzzlepathfindinglogicGenesis 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-clickDuck Detective: The Secret Salami
A 2.5D observation-and-deduction adventure where a down-on-his-luck duck detective peers at evidence and slots words into fill-in-the-blank sentences to crack the case of a stolen lunch. Happy Broccoli Games takes the Golden Idol style and makes it light, fully voiced, and pun-heavy.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleRailbound
An overhead track-laying puzzle where you place a limited number of rails so a moving locomotive links its carriages in the right order, avoids collisions, and brings everyone home. Tunnels, barriers and switches blow the board up into timing permutations, all solved with a single verb: lay track. From Afterburn, the studio behind Golf Peaks.
puzzlelogicpathfindingLucifer Within Us
An isometric detective game where you scrub testimony timelines and jab at contradictions to solve murders, piecing together motive, means, and opportunity in a daemon-haunted theocracy — from Kitfox Games.
mysteryobservationnarrative-puzzleArranger
A grid puzzle-adventure where taking one step moves everything sharing your row or column, and the board loops at its edges. No sword or keys — you shove the things on the floor to open the way. The debut from Furniture & Mattress, folding movement, combat, and exploration into a single verb.
puzzlegrid-basednarrative-puzzleHidden Folks
A 2D hidden-object puzzle set in hand-drawn, monochrome miniature landscapes you unfurl, cut through, and poke to uncover the folks tucked inside. Every sound is made by human mouths, across 32 areas with 300+ things to find.
hidden-objectobservationpoint-and-clickTelling Lies
An FMV mystery where you search a database of secretly recorded video by the words spoken in it, reassembling four lives and one big lie from fragments. From Sam Barlow of Her Story, built on a single verb — search — that takes stories apart and rebuilds them.
narrative-puzzleobservationmysteryThe Rise of the Golden Idol
A 2D deduction adventure where you click through frozen crime scenes and drop harvested words into blanks to reconstruct who did what, why, and in what order. A standalone sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol, set across twenty linked cases in the 1970s.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleUnderstand
A mouse-only minimalist puzzle where each level hides a ruleset: you draw a single line, read which rules it satisfied, and deduce the hidden rules themselves. Almost no instructions, you advance on hypothesis and refutation alone. By Artless Games, 2020.
puzzlelogic-deductionobservationSokobond
A 2D Sokoban puzzle where you move a single atom around a grid and bond it with the atoms it touches to assemble a target molecule. Each atom's number of free 'hands' is the only grammar; tiles that break, double, and rotate bonds arrive one per chapter. By Alan Hazelden and Lee Shang Lun, 2014, scored by Allison Walker.
puzzlesokoban-likelogicThe Roottrees are Dead
A first-person deduction puzzle: scour the early, dial-up-era Internet plus books and articles to establish who is truly blood-related to a crashed dynasty, filling in the blanks of their family tree. Evil Trout Inc.'s reworking of a free Global Game Jam browser game.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleFEZ
An exploration platformer where you rotate a 2D world in 90-degree turns, shifting how the plane reads to connect platforms. Collect cube fragments while wandering a crumbling world — Polytron Corporation's signature take on rotation.
puzzle-platformerexplorationobservationCosmic Express
A route-drawing puzzle: lay down train tracks to pick up and drop off cute alien passengers in the right order, fitting one winding path into a tight grid.
puzzlepathfindingsokoban-likeTaiji
A grid-based logic puzzle in the lineage of The Witness: toggle tiles on panels by deducing unwritten rules through pure observation, as you roam a quiet open world.
observationlogic-gridopen-worldThe Case of the Golden Idol
A deduction game: examine frozen crime-scene tableaus, gather words from the evidence, and fill in the blanks to reconstruct each murder across an 18th-century mystery.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleViewfinder
A first-person perspective puzzle where the photographs you place into the world become real 3D space, letting you reshape the environment to find a path through.
perspective-puzzlefirst-personphoto-puzzleSuperliminal
A first-person puzzle where perspective alone decides how big things are.
first-personexplorationChants of Sennaar
Climbing a Babel-like tower, you decipher the unknown logographic language of each floor's people from pictures and gestures. A game of observation and inference.
observationnarrative-puzzlemeta-puzzleAntichamber
A first-person puzzler in white walls and black lines that treats non-Euclidean space itself as a grammar.
observationmeta-puzzlefirst-personManifold Garden
A first-person puzzle about choosing your gravity inside an Escher-esque world of infinitely repeating architecture.
puzzlefirst-personexplorationA Monster's Expedition
Push trees to make logs and bridge to the next island. An open-world Sokoban.
sokoban-likeobservationLorelei and the Laser Eyes
In an eerie monochrome hotel, over 150 ciphers, numbers, and symbol puzzles weave through every floor.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleThe Talos Principle 2
Lasers and cubes and philosophical dialogue weigh equally in this first-person puzzle.
logic-gridnarrative-puzzleassemblyCOCOON
A world inside an orb, an orb inside that world, all the way down.
meta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleassemblyUnpacking
Pull things from boxes and place them on shelves. A 'life-told-by-objects' puzzle.
assemblynarrative-puzzleobservationReturn of the Obra Dinn
A monochrome mystery where an insurance assessor must identify sixty crew and reconstruct their fates aboard a ghost ship.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleGorogoa
A hand-drawn 2×2 grid of paintings. Rearrange, zoom, connect — a picture-book puzzle.
observationassemblynarrative-puzzleThe Witness
More than five hundred line-drawing panels. Observation itself becomes the verb.
observationnarrative-puzzlepathfindingHer Story
Search a police database of live-action video clips to reconstruct the story of a missing husband. An FMV mystery.
narrative-puzzleobservationmeta-puzzleMachinarium
In a town built of scrap, a small robot rescues his lover. A hand-drawn, dialogue-free adventure.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservationSyberia II
Kate and the automaton Oscar travel into frozen Russia for one final leg of the journey.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservationSyberia
Lawyer Kate Walker crosses Europe and Russia, unraveling the mystery of the automata.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservationMyst III: Exile
A canonical Myst sequel across six Ages. The first to introduce 360-degree free view.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleEscape from Monkey Island
Pirate Guybrush's last classic, the era of 3D LucasArts adventure, with wildly inventive item combinations.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservation
