So I don’t play a lot of puzzle games because something in my brain just hits a brick wall in regards to comprehending the mechanics in more complex situations. I’ll just get to a puzzle and know “oh I’m never gonna get this.” Maybe I haven’t yet learned to appreciate being stuck on a puzzle, and slowly weeding my way through to the answer. I still gather a lot of puzzle games that I think I’d like, or are really curious. Intelligent Qube, Stephen’s Sausage Roll (I don’t have a copy but ONE DAY), Pushmo, Catherine, etc. I have no clue what I’m doing in Tetris or Puyo or Panel de Pon or a whole buncha stuff.
But I know a lot of puzzle fans exist on here! I’d like to hear about your favorite pazuru games (new or old), which ones were good entry points into the genre/higher level play for you. What’s yr Recommended Playing in the world of puzzles?
I mean… some dork wrote about a bunch of puzzle games here (there are even links to all the puzzle games talked about on ye olde sb in there):
I would say that my faves are along the lines of Hanano Puzzle/Jelly no Puzzle, various Picross variants, Toki Tori 2, the Hexcells trilogy, DROD, and Corrypt. Probably The Witness when it isn’t annoying me. The thing is that the harder ones appeal to me, so they might not be the best ones for a beginner.
So I’ll mention some of the easier (or at least easier to get into) ones that I dig, then I’ll name some that might be harder but represent different kinds of puzzle games.
Puzzle games that aren’t so hard
Toki Tori 2+: It is a kind of platformer/metrovania puzzle game where you play as a flightless bird who must interact with the various animals in an area in order to proceed. It gets very hard if you want to be a completionist, but simply getting to the credits isn’t that difficult. Getting all the trinkets is a legit challenge but they are all optional and ideally the main run of the game will teach you enough along the way.
Hitman GO (and perhaps the Lara Croft/Deus Ex ones: Generally very cheap if not free and start off simple enough. Hitman GO did get trickier later on but you generally only have a few moves available at a given time.
Corrypt: Little freeware puzzler with a great gimmick I shudder to spoil. It starts off as a “push blocks around so you can exit the screen” kind of game that quickly mutates into something else entirely. It is relatively short and many will fail to beat it their first go around, so no real pressure on that front. Also the gimmick is among the most brilliant things I’ve seen in gaming and allows you to bend the rules of the game a great deal, so you won’t get stuck trying to figure out the one true solution.
Mole Mania (maybe Donkey Kong '94): Nintendo made gameboy puzzlers (DK '94 is a puzzle platformer which is slightly different). They do get tricky later on but Nintendo isn’t going to toss you into the deep end right away.
Portal: I figure this is fairly well known and needs no intro, but the original in particular is a very clever game, doesn’t overstay its welcome and isn’t that difficult to start with.
Different kinds of quality puzzle games
Hanano Puzzle/Jelly no Puzzle: These are your prototypical “pushing blocks on a single screen to achieve a goal” games. They are devilishly hard and don’t believe in things like having the first few puzzles be easy, so might be rough on a beginner. They might also be the best designed puzzles in this sub-genre.
Picross (and Hexcells): I have no clue if you are the type who would like number-based puzzle games. If you do then there are several good options. Picross is one of the classic ones and if you have a DS then Nintendo made both a high quality traditional and 3D version of it. On the PC there is the Hexcells series, which is basically a clever hybrid of Picross and Minesweeper. The first Hexcells game would be best for a beginner as it takes the most time to explain its rules.
Spacechem: Absurdly fucking hard. It is basically a programming-type puzzle game. You are given a grid of squares and must place symbols that basically create a program that take a given set of inputs and produces the proper output. What it does have in its favor is a demo that is very substantial, I believe giving you the first two worlds to play through. That would give you both the whole intro section plus enough actual puzzles to determine if it is something you might care for.
DROD (likely Gunthro’s Epic Blunder): I did a whole let’s play for the first one of these last year. It is basically a puzzle game in action/adventure game clothing where enemies only take one move after you take one, meaning you have to figure out how to take advantage of this to clear a room of enemies without dying. The fourth game, Gunthro’s Epic Blunder, was made to be an easier entry point to the series, although half the point of the series is how hard it can be.
The Talos Principle: A first person puzzle game by the folks behind Serious Sam. Sounds like a bad idea, turned out pretty good. I thought it ramped up a bit slowly in terms of difficulty, but that might be a benefit to you. Also comes with a pretty good framing device examining the meaning of existence and such.
The Witness: Another first person puzzler, but it takes place on its own Myst-type island and has a unique mix between traditional “puzzles on a screen” and “puzzles involving the environment” that can sometimes overlap.
I… should probably stop here. If any of those intrigue you mention it I can can probably either talk more about it or recommend other games in that vein.
Also, two tips that are likely obvious but often help me out in these kinds of games.
Often times you only have so many legit moves to start with, particularly in games that separate moves into distinct actions (i.e. you push a block one square). Learning to recognize them and which ones are the most promising is key. Better puzzle games will take advantage of this at some point to make the least promising one the right one, but generally not until later on.
Figure out what the final move or solution has to look like and work a few moves back from that. Often times beyond the final goal a few elements will have to be placed in a certain way for it to be possible, and identifying them early on can be a great help.
if you like number crunching, the Picross game(s) on the GB were pretty good to train your brain to see patterns in numbers. Like, you’d have a few lines half done, and you could start a chain that’d fill one third of the picture you are trying to unearth. Loved the idea that you could mark a tile visually and go from there to see whether your predictions would work out.
Lumines [any title] is pretty cool, but I never really managed to get good at it. Never stopped me from playing tho! Listening to the soundtrack/bgm in its proper form makes you want to chain blocks all the time, and it just takes you right to edge where everything goes wrong. Brilliant move!
…… and, of course, it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t shamelessly plug ENTHUSIA, because in Driving Revolution mode, you really had to wrap your head around … mention the arcade racer that made puzzling a core game mechanism, Burnout 2 w/ its infamous crash mode. Wreaking havoc on a street crossing doesn’t sound hard, but getting it right can get pretty awesome w/ a few buddies. Listening to discussions about these things can be fun: [quote]should you aim for the bus directly or try to hit that truck head on/w/ a small overlap on the van before him, to stop his momentum and finally make his trailer block the road?[/quote]
In the substantial Venn diagram/gray zone spectrum crossover between puzzle games and adventure games, I’d have to recommend the original Myst. I find the atmospherics of the more puzzley adventure games can sustain interest long after I’ve tired of staring at a grid of blocks or whatever.
oops!! sorry about thread overlap, I should have checked first. I’m definitely gonna read all that, thanks.
almost all of the games you mentioned are titles I at least know of, though Corrypt is a new one to me. I’ve actually completed so many Picross titles that I forgot they count as puzzlers, haha! Picross DS, Picross 3D, Mario no Super Picross (at least the Mario side), Pokemon Picross, etc. I’m gonna have to look into Hexcells. If your DROD LP isn’t already linked in the other thread, feel free to link it here! I think I bought that series on GOG once because I saw you praising it.
backing the gb picross titles for an easy charming entry into that sort of thing. also meteos is a fun and not hard game to get into! check it out! I used to play it when I was a kid and picked up a copy again recently for $2.50 and it’s def worth it
I recently played through Trace Memory, and the whole “mysterious island with the occasional easy puzzle” theme really made me feel like I need to just start Myst already.
I wouldn’t call Myst easy, exactly. It was early (though not the first), and it’s accordingly uneven. Still, an impeccable exercise in atmosphere. Probably the only practical way to play it any more is Real Myst, which is too bad, cause there’s something inimitable about those low-res QuickTime animations.
Pfft, I say let there be as many puzzle game threads as there can be. I just don’t want to rewrite about all of those games on account of my crippling laziness.
Since someone mentioned the Hexcells pack and the upcoming Steam sale I’d estimate is about a month away, there is also now a bundle for the entire -Cells quintology:
In terms of other mathematic/logic non-picross puzzle games, other than the -Cells games my favorite one is likely Slitherlink for the japanese DS. Basically you have a huge grid where certain squared have a number between 0 and 3 in them, which represents the numbers of sides of the square have a line going over them. When it is finished you have a complete loop that does not overlap itself. The same game is in the Simon Tatham Puzzle Collection under the name Loopy. You can find it here:
There’s a ton of other puzzle games of that ilk there, feel free to poke around. I would also recommend PicPic/Piku Piku for the Euro/Japanese DS and Patterna for the PC. Would recommend the demo for the latter as it has very tricky rules.
Felix mentioned English Country Tune, let me point out that while it has a demo the game has an odd difficulty curve where the second section might be the trickiest in the game for a first time player. This is due to the fact that the way gravity works in the game is relative to a tricky degree that takes a good bit for one to wrap their mind around. You can basically move on any surface and the gravity of anything you push is relative to your orientation on said surface. It eventually makes sense.
Here is my DROD Let’s Play, try not to hold my questionable LPing (especially early on) against it.
oh no no, I definitely know of Myst’s legacy of obtuseness. I meant, like, while playing Trace Memory I found myself thinking “I would rather be on a mysterious island where the puzzle solutions aren’t so simple”. Myst’s difficulty presumably plays a large part in its atmosphere.
I wouldn’t call it difficult, either, exactly. Like I said, it’s uneven. Some things are dead easy. A couple will drive you to a FAQ. In a way, the inconsistency of the difficulty curve adds to the legitimacy of the atmosphere. If it was too smooth, it would feel too designed. Not that the worlds of Myst aren’t designed…
I absolutely love SpaceChem, but if you want something a little friendlier, check out Infinifactory: pretty much the same feeling, but in three dimensions and with (mostly) an arbitrary amount of space so you aren’t forced to be quite as elegant as the harder SpaceChem puzzles necessitate. Also, probably a better story, not that it matters.
A similar vein of program-y puzzle game is Human Resource Machine. Pretty good times, a bit easier than both of the above.
I gave a few hours to The Witness and bounced off real hard. I really did not like it. Every time I played it, I thought that I should just be finishing up The Talos Principle instead.
The Witness, SpaceChem, and Stephen’s Sausage Roll are probably my favorite puzzle games?
DROD is up there too, but it’s more complicated to recommend. I think the newer games are really ugly and the older games, while having a more consistent aesthetic, have worse puzzle design. I haven’t played them all, though, so maybe there’s some perfect DROD out there.
It feels a bit silly mentioning it in this post because it’s not really in the same echelon but: the game “Tumblestone” was free on Xbox Gold a while back and I actually got a decent amount of entertainment out of it. It’s closer to Tetris than most of the games being mentioned here, but the main story mode is basically a series of puzzles with no time pressure (although I think the bosses may have some real time element). The basic conceit is matching 3 like-colored blocks, but each world introduces a new mechanic that get rather inventive and can be very hard to think about. I think I spent over 30 hours on it without seeing all the content. The difficulty curve is very uneven in spots and it can get super frustrating when you hit a mechanic that you just can’t figure out. I think the game’s retail price is $25, which makes it hard to recommend unless you know you’d like it.
Also I’m still pretty proud of my PuzzleScript game SwapBot so I’m going to shamelessly post it here.
SwapBot actually is a legit pretty swell puzzle game, and isn’t too long, so that wouldn’t be a bad option. I got stuck on stage 3 for way too long, but that was likely my fault.
i came in here to namedrop english country tune but felix had me covered. increpare’s got a ton of short freeware games too, some of which are puzzlers (mirror stage, opera omnia, kettle, many others). dude literally made PuzzleScript
speaking of puzzlescript, play heroes of sokoban and its many sequels (all freeware)
and speaking of sokoban, play A Good Snowman is Hard to Build (very underrated, very friendly difficulty curve, one of the only hangoutable puzzle games i’ve seen)
starseed pilgrim is perfect if you want a game about figuring out what to do on your own rather than strictly designed puzzles
world of goo is sort of a puzzle game, enough for me to remind everyone it exists and is beautiful and wonderful and good
joke answers: la mulana (How Much Do You Hate Yourself? Take This Quiz to Find Out), braid