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138 Puzzle games reviewed and scored, best first.
138 reviews
A turn-based Mars colony-builder its own fans call "the game I've been looking for for decades" — SimCity and Theme Hospital without the real-time pressure — divided by a card-draw terraforming system some players find satisfyingly puzzle-like and others call too random to plan around.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, unusually faithful Indiana Jones game with excellent puzzles — and hardware requirements strict enough that its second most-upvoted critic warns you'll discover the problem after the refund window closes.
7.5 / 10
Zachtronics in three dimensions, and the one its own siblings' reviewers keep calling fun — except it rates below them, costs the most, and its critics say it isn't the factory game the name implies.
7.5 / 10
A serene climbing adventure whose art, sound and central mechanic draw near-unanimous praise, undercut by a consistent complaint — voiced even inside its own top positive review — that a three-to-six hour runtime and static, letter-based storytelling ask a lot for the price, with barely a third of players ever reaching the ending.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, unsettling puzzle-platformer sequel that expanded on a beloved horror original -- Very Positive on Steam, with a genuinely well-documented, still-unresolved PC-specific bug and a mouse-and-keyboard control scheme reviewers have criticised in near-identical terms since launch week.
7.5 / 10
A yandere-dating-sim premise that flips into psychological horror within its first minutes, and one of 2024's biggest indie viral hits — reviewed here with a specific, verifiable colorblind-accessibility gate its own community flagged, and a look at why a mostly-linear, five-hour game became a genre-defining moment anyway.
7.5 / 10
Nomada Studio's follow-up to the beloved GRIS is gorgeous by near-universal agreement and just as consistently marked down by its own fans for one specific addition — combat — that a majority of its detailed critics say undercuts the emotional, puzzle-led magic that made its predecessor a modern classic.
7.5 / 10
A visually stunning sci-fi puzzle-platformer that draws the same LIMBO and INSIDE comparisons its critics use against it, praised almost unanimously for its art and music while a large, specific share of its own reviewers argue the puzzles never move past their opening ideas.
7.5 / 10
You brew potions by physically dragging a pestle across a map of alchemical effects, and it's one of the best crafting mechanics anyone has invented. The argument isn't whether it's good — it's whether a brilliant idea that stopped being developed is worth twenty-nine dollars.
7.5 / 10
Series creator Ron Gilbert's genuine return to the franchise thirty years on -- warmly received by a wide margin, and reopening the exact argument his own Monkey Island 2 ending started in 1991, with the same specific complaint dominating this game's negative reviews.
7.5 / 10
The 2020 game that started the shape-cutting automation genre, built by stripping Factorio down to logistics alone — no combat, no scarcity, no enemies. Cheap, historically important, and rougher than the sequel it spawned.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, ambitious philosophical puzzle sequel that expands everything the original did, which a large and vocal share of veteran fans argue is exactly the problem — bigger worlds, more dialogue and easier puzzles than the tight, focused original they loved.
7.5 / 10
A charming, Pikmin-inspired storybook fantasy adventure about two runaway children commanding a herd of forest spirits -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam for its art and atmosphere, with a consistent, specific complaint that its combat and controls never match the genre giant it invites comparison to.
7.5 / 10
A charming, gorgeously realised 3D exploration game about being shrunk down inside an ordinary suburban house, whose near-unanimous acclaim sits on top of a small but consistent minority report that the collecting loop underneath the charm doesn't have much depth once the novelty wears off.
7.5 / 10
Frozenbyte's course-correction after Trine 3's disastrous 3D detour, returning to 2.5D co-op puzzle-platforming with three fairytale heroes -- still Very Positive on Steam seven years on, with the series' oldest, most consistent complaint (the combat) as fresh in this year's reviews as it was at launch.
7.5 / 10
Build a working CPU from NAND gates upward — a genuinely singular idea, sold as education, and 57 of its 100 most-helpful negative reviews say the teaching is the part that doesn't work.
7.5 / 10
A stick-figure comedy RPG from the Kingdom of Loathing team that landed among 2017's most acclaimed indies -- Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam nine years later -- while carrying a serious, publicly documented allegation against its director that a real share of its own reviews now raise unprompted.
7.5 / 10
A two-day-old cozy first-person tidying sim that scatters 2,071 jigsaw pieces from 87 real public-domain paintings across a gallery and asks you to sort them back into place, priced at €4.67 and sitting at 91.7% positive on its opening weekend.
7.2 / 10
A NZ$13.25 picross-minesweeper hybrid built around one continuous 60,000-tile puzzle split into 200-plus regions, where over half of owners fight all the way through to full completion — undercut by three of the game's only eleven English negatives independently accusing its Egyptology trivia of being undisclosed AI text.
7.2 / 10
Fishing Cactus takes the Flash-era Shift games they helped build in 2008 and turns them into a full cyber-noir puzzle-platformer, with a level editor that outlasts the campaign — and a few real rough edges around connectivity and price.
7.2 / 10
A minimalist Steam collection of twelve chess variants plus 400-odd puzzles from a small studio that clearly loves the game — elegant and cheap, but thin on true online multiplayer and, per its own achievement stats, barely explored past the basics by most buyers.
7.2 / 10
A voxel-art city builder that trades money and disasters for a strict web of building adjacency rules, turning city planning into a genuine spatial puzzle — Very Positive on Steam, with a persistent, well-documented complaint that its achievement-gated progression can trap players on the first map for good.
7.2 / 10
A gorgeously written and animated tale of 18th-century card-cheating whose own fans repeatedly describe the actual moment-to-moment gameplay as a punishing quick-time-event exercise rather than the strategic con-artistry the premise promises.
7 / 10
A voxel-styled match puzzle that swaps the usual click-and-swap for sliding whole rows and columns like a stone tablet, wraps it in a roguelite deckbuilding run, and backs it with a real 8-player online mode that almost nobody is around to fill.
7 / 10
