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Puzzle reviews

138 Puzzle games reviewed and scored, best first.

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138 reviews

Turn-based strategy chess hybrid with roguelike dungeon crawling, real-time spells and online multiplayer PvPWindows PCmacOSLinux

Dunchess

Real chess rules underneath a board that fights back — pieces carry hit points and their own fog-of-war vision, captures aren't guaranteed kills, and a mid-turn real-time window lets you burn a cooldown spell before the clock passes to your opponent. Two days into Early Access it already has a working single-player mode against AI, up to four-player online lobbies, and eight patches.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Action-Adventure RPGWindows PCmacOS

Eastward

A gorgeous pixel-art adventure with some of the most detailed, distinctive sprite work and sound design in the genre, wrapped around a story a large and consistent share of its own reviewers say loses the plot somewhere in its middle stretch.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Action-AdventureWindows PC

Fading Echo

Emeteria's debut turns into a fluid, chain-reacting sphere and reshuffles reality around you, and that idea alone is worth the price. The kicking-things-off-ledges combat underneath it never catches up.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Action-Adventure, Exploration, Dark FantasyWindows PC

Hell is Us

A visually striking, thematically ambitious action-adventure whose bold "no map, no quest markers" promise turns out, according to a large share of its own players, to mean hunting for symbol-matched locks and keys rather than genuine intuitive exploration — and whose combat, marketed heavily in trailers, is repeatedly described by its own fans as not actually the point.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Automation PuzzleWindows PCmacOS

Kaizen: A Factory Story

The first release from Coincidence, the studio Zach Barth founded after closing Zachtronics, and a genuinely good factory-automation puzzler by any independent measure — that its own most enthusiastic reviewers still rank as the weakest entry in its creator's catalogue, a verdict this review's near-unanimous negative sample backs up in specific, comparative detail.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Puzzle AdventureWindows PCmacOSNintendo Switch+2

Röki

A gorgeous Scandinavian-folklore adventure about grief and redemption from a debut studio of PlayStation veterans — critically Strong and Very Positive on Steam, with a very consistent minority complaint that its puzzle pacing, backtracking and slow, unskippable animations undercut the story it's telling.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Action-AdventureWindows PCmacOSLinux

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

The closing chapter of the rebooted Survivor trilogy swapped Crystal Dynamics for Eidos-Montreal and gunfights for stealth and puzzles -- a deliberate pivot that split reviewers in 2018 and, eight years and a Definitive Edition later, is still what most players argue about, alongside a specific progress-blocking puzzle bug that outlived several rounds of patches.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Environmental StrategyWindows PCmacOSLinux

Terra Nil

A genuinely inventive "reverse city builder" about restoring wastelands to life, praised almost universally for its concept and art, undercut from launch by a length-and-price complaint even its fans echo, and more recently by a major free content update that split longtime players over how "chill" the game is supposed to feel.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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PuzzleWindows PC

Toffee Cats

A cat-themed connect-the-pipes puzzle game wrongly aggregator-tagged as an idler — it's actually a well-made, honestly priced Flow/Numberlink game with over a thousand hand-graded levels and no idle mechanics anywhere in it.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Fantasy Puzzle-PlatformerWindows PC

Trine 5: A Clockwork Conspiracy

Frozenbyte's fifth fantasy co-op puzzle-platformer is, by wide agreement, its most gorgeous entry -- and its most persistently broken in the mode the series is built around. Steam has it at Very Positive, but a third of its English-language negative reviews, spanning three full years, describe co-op desyncs, lost progression and crashes that were never fixed.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Text Adventure / Interactive FictionWindows PC

Lifestream - A Haunting Text Adventure

A GUI-driven text adventure about a priest's disappearance and the son retracing his steps, running two timelines and two protagonists through 78,000 words of prose. Every one of its 23 Steam reviews is positive, and the achievement data backs up what reviewers say about the pacing — most players who start it see it through.

6.8 / 10

Reviewed

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AdventureWindows PC

A Pizza Delivery

A genuinely beautiful, emotionally resonant narrative exploration game about a pizza delivery rider stuck in a looping, half-real world, undercut by a specific, widely reported mouse- focus bug and a save system that can lose an entire chapter of progress.

6.6 / 10

Reviewed

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Puzzle, Adventure, RPGWindows PC

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure

A short, gorgeously presented puzzle-adventure built around a genuinely clever core mechanic — shifting entire rows and columns of the world to move yourself — whose puzzles rarely escalate past their opening ideas and whose YA-inflected writing draws consistent criticism even from its own fans.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Roguelike, Deckbuilding, Physics PuzzleWindows PC

Ballionaire

A physics-driven pachinko roguelike that calls itself the first "autobonker" — a genuinely satisfying opening few hours undone, by its own players' account, when the item pool keeps growing without any way to reliably draw the pieces that combo together, punishing the very meta-progression the game is built around.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Automation Puzzle, Factory SimWindows PC

Beltmatic

A minimalist factory-automation puzzle where the resource is arithmetic instead of raw materials — technically clean and genuinely charming for its first few hours, but its own review history and achievement curve agree it runs out of ideas well before the credits, and both fans and critics keep naming the same rival game as the reason why.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Roguelike DeckbuilderWindows PC

Card Homestead

A roguelike deckbuilder where placement matters more than the cards themselves — draft one of three each day, stack it onto a shrinking farm grid, and chase chain-reaction synergy before rising taxes end the run — with a launch-week freeze bug the developer has already patched and a genuine split over how hard the game actually is.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Golf, Roguelite, PlatformerWindows PC

Cursed to Golf

A genuinely inventive golf-precision-platformer whose own most enthusiastic players keep arriving at the same specific verdict — the game is excellent, and the roguelite structure wrapped around it is a mismatch that makes hours-long runs punishing rather than replayable.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Puzzle, Co-op, Escape RoomWindows PC

Escape Academy

A well-crafted co-op escape-room game whose puzzles draw genuine praise, held back by a mandatory timer players have been asking to disable since launch week, a roughly four-hour campaign against a DLC catalogue that doubles the price, and a cross-platform promise several reviewers say still doesn't work years later.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Puzzle, Casual, RPGWindows PC

Garlic Builder

A relaxing pixel-art building game about fulfilling customer blueprint orders as a young garlic apprentice, praised as a "hidden gem" comparable to Coloring Pixels for players who enjoy Minecraft-style creative pixel art, with real complaints about window sizing bugs and how little the core loop actually asks of the player.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

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