Puzzle games come in a range of styles, from mindless relaxation machines to hardcore logical quagmires, and we have a little bit of everything in this list. From classics like Threes! and Braid to new-school entries like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and Escape Academy, there’s always a puzzle game to play between meetings, during a slow Sunday afternoon or with a group of friends on the couch. Here we’ve compiled some of the best puzzle games to activate your brain in new ways or unwind after a long day.
Apple
Threes! took the mobile gaming world by storm about a decade ago — it was the original “sliding numbers” puzzle game. Because the three-person development team behind Threes! had the audacity to charge for their game, tons of lesser clones quickly followed. But Threes! is the most satisfying experience, and it’s now part of Apple Arcade.
As with most perfect mobile games, the mechanism here is extremely simple and very satisfying. You slide numbers across a four-by-four grid, trying to combine a 1 and 2 into a 3, and then combining threes to make increasingly larger numbers. Each new number greets you with a goofy catchphrase, and the game has a delightful score that never gets old. If you never tried Threes! in its heyday, this is your excuse to get sucked in. — Nathan Ingraham, Deputy Editor
Apple
Mini Motorways and its predecessor Mini Metro are the kinds of games that can be simultaneously chill and extremely stressful. The chill comes from developer Dinosaur Polo Club’s simple animations, bright but somehow also muted color schemes and minimalistic music and sound effects. The stress comes from the gameplay, which always ends up spiraling out of control.
In Mini Motorways, you’re tasked with building roads to connect houses and businesses and keep traffic flowing. It starts off simple enough, with a couple houses and a few different destinations, but your city keeps getting larger, there are more cars on the road and the layout that was so effective a few minutes earlier is suddenly strained. Mini Metro has a similar vibe, as you build subway lines and stations on a map vaguely resembling some of the world’s biggest cities.
Both games end when stations get too crowded, or cars aren’t able to get to and from their destinations. The last few minutes before it all comes crashing down is incredibly stressful, as you try to reorganize streets or completely change subway designs to keep up with the influx of passengers all in service of getting a higher score. But there’s an undeniable sense of calm that can happen when your subway line is just humming along, or when everyone in your city can get to the store. There’s nearly endless replay-ability here, too. — N.I.
Simogo / Annapurna Interactive
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a third-person noir detective game set in a haunted hotel with impossible architecture and a gruesome history. Its hallways are dense with logic-melting puzzles about magicians, mazes, astrology, filmmaking, mausoleums and physics, and it isn’t even clear why the protagonist is there in the first place. With artifacts from the 1800s, set pieces from the 1960s and technology out of the 2010s, it’s barely clear when she’s there. Lack of direction is a key tenet of the game, resulting in a sense of solitude that’s deliciously unsettling.
It’s also empowering. The hotel in Lorelei is a playground of secrets with no set path for players, and there’s a rich density of riddles and lore to untangle in every scene. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is horrific and emotionally powerful, and its visual vibe is “David Lynch does Kentucky Route Zero.” The entire thing is deeply, endlessly satisfying as a puzzle-solving experience. For lovers of riddles and psychological terror, this is one of the best games of the generation. — Jessica Conditt, Senior Reporter
Apple
I’ve been playing Grindstone on and off since Apple Arcade launched in 2019. The puzzler does just about everything right, introducing you to the marauding viking-type Jorj who has to do battle with boards full of cute but creepy enemies. From your starting point, you can trace a bath through the baddies, cutting through ones of the same color all in one move. Make a big enough combo, and you get a grindstone — this lets you switch to another color of enemies in the same chain, making it possible to string together bigger and more complex runs across the board. To beat a level, you usually need to take down a certain number of enemies, or beat a few of the higher hit-point baddies that spawn.
That’s the core mechanic, but developer Capybara Games put a ton of variety into Grindstone. Enemies get more aggressive the longer you’re on the board — so while you can rack up a lot of loot, you might also end up in a situation you can’t escape. There are world bosses that use the mechanics of the previous levels in clever ways, tons of items you can unlock and use to even the odds and a handful of extra game modes that keep things fresh. Not to mention ridiculous outfits you can equip to give Jorj additional powers, like the Santa suit that gives you random power-ups. If you asked me the first game you should download from Apple Arcade, I’d have to recommend Grindstone. — N.I.
Annapurna Interactive
Cocoon is a near-perfect puzzle game in which you play a bug and who has to jump between worlds to progress. It’s a laser-focused experience that only lets you play around with one or two mechanics at a time, and stretches each of its ideas to its natural conclusion. After solving a couple of rudimentary riddles in its introductory stages, you’ll encounter an orb — these are the heart (and the body) of this game. You carry them on your beetle back, initially using them as keys to open doors and solve puzzles, before discovering that inside every orb is a new world of mysteries and challenges to overcome.
Cocoon is the first game from Geometric Interactive, a studio founded in 2016 by Jeppe Carlsen and Jakob Schmid. Both are alums of Playdead, the Danish studio behind Limbo and Inside, for which Carlsen worked as lead gameplay designer — but Cocoon’s structure of layered, interconnected worlds showcases another level of maturity and artistry. It’s an experience I can (and will) recommend to anyone that plays video games, and plenty who don’t. The seven hours or so I spent with Cocoon are among the most memorable of this decade, and I’ll definitely be returning to it in a couple of years, once my brain has purged all of the answers to its puzzles. — Aaron Souppouris, Executive Editor
Devolver Digital
The Talos Principle 2 reintroduces a post-apocalyptic world filled with the puzzles and dreams society left behind, and populates it with a race of machines who simultaneously worship humans and consider themselves to be the natural evolution of the race. The game offers an optimistic and immersive playground of puzzle solving and philosophical inquiry, and it feels both grander and more cohesive than the original The Talos Principle (which is also worth playing). The first game featured a lone robot in an AI-powered testing ground; the sequel stars an entire society of sentient machines. It also has lots of laser-powered, logic-based spatial puzzles, of course.
The puzzles are devilish. They start simply, prompting players to divert laser beams into portals of the same color using connector rods, jammers, blocks, pressure pads and fans. As players progress through the puzzles, the game introduces new tools, like a drill that can create holes in some walls and an inverter that reverses the laser color, adding unexpected complexity to the mechanics. Nothing beats that breakthrough feeling when the entire room suddenly makes sense, the lasers align, and all the right doors slide open. The Talos Principle 2 effortlessly captures this sensation, again and again. — J.C.
Coin Crew Games
I know this isn’t a dating column, but I’d like to offer some relationship advice anyway: Find someone you can play Escape Academy with. Escape Academy masterfully translates the most entertaining aspects of real-life escape rooms into video game form, offering dozens of clever puzzle stages on a friendly platter. Playing with a partner, the puzzles achieve that special kind of collaborative tension that escape rooms are known for — you know, the kind that results in bursts of frenzied yelling and furious encouragement at regular intervals, even from the quietest of people. Escape Academy produces this precise reaction and that’s what makes it so magical.
Escape Academy was created by a team of former escape room producers at Coin Crew Games, and their expertise shows in every stage. The game came out in 2022, but Coin Crew is still dropping new content on the regular. This will be a highlight of your puzzle (and co-op!) game library. — J.C.
Billy Basso
Animal Well offers barely any guidance at all. You (as a squishy little meatball thing) emerge from a flower into a cave with a large, ghostly squirrel on one side. It’s not clear which direction to move in, what the objective is, what your character is or why you’re there. All you can do is explore and try to figure it all out.
It’s been described as a Metroidvania, and the main game takes most folks between four and six hours to finish. But Animal Well is really more of a puzzle platformer: If you know what to do and how to do it, it’s possible to beat the game in a few minutes. That’s part of Animal Well’s charm and beauty. Solo developer Billy Basso has weaved an intricate web of secrets, many of which are hidden in the shadows of the game’s gorgeous pixel art. — Kris Holt, Contributing Reporter
Newfangled Games
In Paper Trail, the aim is to guide protagonist Paige through mazy environments toward her goal of attending school and becoming an astrophysicist. But there are many obstacles in her way. Fortunately, Paige can bend reality. This means players get to fold over the edges of the game’s world, which has two planes — just like a piece of paper — to open up new paths for Paige.
Paper Trail builds on this central idea and the difficulty curve is fair but challenging. A nice hint system shows what folds to make, but not how to move Paige or any objects around. Although the controls can be finicky, even while playing it on mobile, it’s perhaps the puzzle game I’ve found the easiest to engage with lately. I enjoy contorting the world around Paige and lining up some patterns to unlock a path. It’s the kind of game that makes me feel smart and satisfied whenever I figure out a solution. — K.H.
Finji
How do you write about a game that’s best experienced without expectations? That’s the challenge of saying something meaningful about Tunic. You can speak to its influences — primarily The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, with a dash of Soulslike combat — but that doesn’t do the game justice. Worse yet, it fails to capture its appeal. I could also mention its haunting soundtrack by Lifeformed and Janice Kwan or the austere beauty of its art style. But again that’s not quite what makes Tunic so special.
I’m being purposefully vague because to say more would be to rob the game of its magic. So I’ll leave you with this: It’s fitting Tunic casts you as a cutesy fox because the game has a knack of making you feel so clever anytime you work through one of its many mysteries. Do yourself a favor and try to play this one without turning to the internet if you run into a roadblock. On the other end is one of the most rewarding gaming experiences in recent memory. — Igor Bonifacic, Contributing Reporter
digimoss
Here’s a simple and inviting one. POOOOL is perhaps best described as a Suika-like, if you’ve encountered that fruit-combining game on Switch, iOS or Android — but it has incredibly sweet sound effects, supremely satisfying physics, and it’s set in a billiards hall rather than the produce section. In POOOOL, players fling a ball at a table of other variously sized balls, hoping to smash the same types together so they become an even-bigger ball. The combined balls pop after a certain size and the table fills up with bouncing globes of different colors, and it’s fun to see how each turn transforms the landscape. Also, the faces on the balls feel a little bit like Threes!, which is cute. POOOOL is mindless in the best possible way. — J.C.
Thekla
Do you remember that video of Soulja Boy discovering Braid in 2009, a few months after it hit Xbox Live Arcade (RIP)? Yeah, that’s how playing Braid, Anniversary Edition feels.
Braid is a legendary indie game with a time-control mechanic that allows the player, a little dude named Tim, to navigate platforming worlds in his crisp suit, avoiding obstacles and surviving jumps by rewinding and pausing the action. He’s searching for the Princess, who’s been snatched by an evil knight — but as Tim defeats each stage, memories shine light on the truth of his relationship with the Princess, resulting in a powerful story of introspection and perception.
Braid, Anniversary Edition retains everything that made the original game so fantastic and expands on these features. Its artwork has been repainted, pixel by pixel, and revamped with additional animations and visual details. The Anniversary Edition looks incredible, sounds great and still feels magnificent to play, plus it includes 15 hours of developer commentary from developer Jonathan Blow (who has another game on this list, The Witness), artist David Hellman (who also has another game on this list, Arranger) and others. — J.C.
Furniture & Mattress LLC
Arranger is utterly unique. You play as Jemma, who lives in a world that’s essentially a giant interconnected grid. While most of the inhabitants can move around as they please, Jemma is essentially fixed in place; moving her will move everything in front of and behind her like a giant slide puzzle.
As you progress, you’ll use Jemma’s ability to solve puzzles and (hopefully) save the day. The gameplay is something like a Sokoban game — that classic puzzle format where you move boxes around a warehouse — but with everything interconnected, the rules and patterns are different. Your natural instinct might be to walk in a straight line towards an object, but that won’t work: The object will move with you, so you need to move out of the row or column and find a different way to reach it.
Discovery and application is everything in Arranger. There’s nothing particularly exciting about moving in a circle to methodically drag a dagger down a corridor, but it’s genuinely enthralling to figure out that’s the key to advancing to the next area, and apply that to future puzzles as if it’s second nature. There’s not a ton of replayability, but it’s definitely worth setting aside six hours or so to play the whole game. — A.S.
Thekla
The Witness is essentially Jonathan Blow’s take on Myst, and it’s an expert display of puzzle design and immersive intrigue. You’re alone, on a small island, and approach a terminal. On it is a simple maze — you draw a yellow line from the entrance to the exit, and then, in first-person view, follow the yellow line that’s generated in front of you to the next terminal. The game takes this simple loop and iterates on it in increasingly creative and complex ways, and it features over 600 extremely taxing puzzles.
The final puzzles in The Witness can take literal hours to complete. This is the puzzler’s puzzle game, and it holds up well nearly a decade after its debut. — A.S.
Enhance
Humanity would be gruesome if it weren’t so oddly charming. In Humanity, players are a Shiba Inu shepherding hordes of people across dangerous platforming landscapes, coordinating their leaps and turns until they make it to the exit, which is always somewhere extremely inconvenient. The more complex levels result in streams of tiny people jumping across huge gaps, falling off ledges, pooling in divots and even swimming through cubes of water, kind of like a deadly, half-synchronized dance.
Humanity might be the closest we get to understanding how dogs truly view humans — just masses of friendly flesh constantly on the verge of lethal disaster, and always in need of protection. — J.C.
Dry Cactus
2016’s Poly Bridge was far from the first bridge-building simulator, but it quickly stood out from the crowd with forgiving-but-real-enough physics, a relaxing vibe and fun challenges. Since that initial release, there have been two more, and Poly Bridge 3 is undoubtedly the best of the bunch. The game has a more realistic physics engine, with a stronger focus on foundations than previous entries. It also has the most inventive challenges the series has offered to date.
The official campaign has a little over 100 levels to play through, some of which I’m still stuck on, but there are leaderboards to climb (judged by budget efficiency and strength, of course), and new challenge levels posted every week.
If the third in the series is a bit too much for your budget, Poly Bridge 2 is less than half the price and well worth a look. It has a similar number of campaign levels and also contains the entirety of the first game’s puzzles (hidden behind the developer’s logo in the workshop, if you’re curious). — A.S.
Michael Kamm
Need a puzzle game that feels like meditation? Ouros is it — it’s about manipulating orbits and curves to hit a series of points in the correct order, complete with soothing bell tones and a reactive, water-like background. Like most good puzzle games, it starts simple and grows increasingly complex, with connections that require loops, whorls, twists and other forms of creative geometry. You may need to break out a notebook and pen here.
Ouros is an ideal game to play after a taxing day, or as a slow way to wake up your brain in the morning. After solving the Wordle, of course. — J.C.
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