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138 Puzzle games reviewed and scored, best first.
138 reviews
A turn-based duel-roguelike where combat is a match-3 grid that loops at the edges — a genuinely clever twist on a tired mechanic, wrapped around a run structure that's thinner than its 180-item loot pool wants you to believe, and prone to grinding to a standstill once enemies start stacking defence.
6.5 / 10
A Souls-like roguelike built around genuinely innovative dungeon-sliding puzzle mechanics, let down at launch by combat its own fans called clunky and unreadable, followed by a rapid post-launch patch cycle that a meaningful share of reviewers credit with turning the game around.
6.5 / 10
A well-made, press-praised fusion of Dorfromantik's calm tile-placing and Tetris's spatial pressure, backed by a developer who delivered every update on its promised free roadmap, let down for a real minority of players by a lack of hook to keep coming back.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed cryptogram game dressed as occult detective fiction — decode short runic scriptures with frequency analysis and context, then type your own conclusion about what really happened.
6.5 / 10
A visually breathtaking sci-fi puzzle-platformer from ex-Playdead developers whose gorgeous atmosphere and sound design are undercut by controls and collision detection a large share of its own reviewers call janky, measured constantly against the Inside and Limbo pedigree its creators can't escape.
6.5 / 10
A budget first-person stealth horror game that drops a lone archaeologist into a Mayan tomb full of patrolling "Guardians," built on a demo that spent over a year gathering feedback before the ten-level full release launched with no user reviews yet to check it against.
6.5 / 10
A steampunk grid-based dungeon crawler built squarely in Legend of Grimrock's shadow, with atmosphere and a Bioshock-flavoured setting that reviewers consistently praise -- and one specific, repeatedly-named design decision, enemy level-scaling, that a large share of its own fans say ruins the back half.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed, Portal-inspired puzzle game built to show off path-traced lighting, adding a genuinely clever dual-dimension twist — undercut for a consistent share of players by floaty movement physics and a portal gun that lacks Portal's own funnelling.
6.4 / 10
A well-crafted reverse-escape-room puzzler from an actively supported studio, undercut for a large share of reviewers by puzzles that lean on unclear logic leaps rather than fair deduction, and a co-op structure that leaves one partner idle for long stretches.
6.1 / 10
A two-day-old two-player co-op puzzle platformer built entirely around a single mechanic — shooting a laser from your own eye to push or pull your partner through obstacles neither of you could clear alone — priced at NZ$2.39 with zero user reviews and zero recorded concurrent players at the time of checking.
6 / 10
A genuinely novel time-rewind combat mechanic — freely wind time back mid-battle to try a different move — carries a debut studio's fantasy tactics game a long way, but a marketed "RPG" with no items, equipment or character building, and a story that thins out at the midpoint, means fewer than one in thirteen players ever finishes it.
6 / 10
An H.R. Giger-inspired biomechanical nightmare eight years in the making, whose extraordinary art direction is praised almost unanimously by the same review base that overwhelmingly describes the actual game underneath it as short, clunky and built on a store description its own most-upvoted review calls factually false.
6 / 10
A NZ$1.49 solo-developer horror game about a child escaping a cult's private chapel — verified here against Steam's own genre field ("Indie," which says nothing) and its top-voted community tag ("Idler," which says something wrong). Three puzzles, two endings, no idle or incremental mechanic anywhere in it.
6 / 10
A genuinely clever, Tim Burton-esque co-op puzzle-platformer that both sides of its review sample agree only really works with a second player — solo mode, camera clarity, and general polish all draw the same specific, repeated complaints over a decade after release.
6 / 10
A match-3 board dressed up as a mine shaft, where clearing gems drags the camera deeper underground. The exploration hook is genuinely clever; the grind wrapped around it is not.
6 / 10
A visually striking Lovecraftian metroidvania about diving into murder victims' dying memories, undercut at launch by clunky controls and poor optimisation the developer never fully resolved before formally announcing, in a farewell post nearly two years later, that support had ended for good.
6 / 10
A straight Steam re-release of the 1998 Nintendo/PC puzzle cult classic about raising terrain to hold back constant rain, published by trademark-holder Piko Interactive with no review corpus yet to check it against.
6 / 10
A short, simple, family-friendly hidden-object mystery that most reviewers on both sides of the aggregate agree is enjoyable while it lasts — but too brief and too generic in its story for many to call it worth the full asking price.
5.8 / 10
A NZ$3.19 minimalist block-breaking puzzle that dresses each stage up as a psychological phenomenon — anxiety, ADHD, perfectionism, obsession. The idea is more interesting than the evidence that it actually pays off; the entire public record on this three-month-old release is two Steam reviews, split exactly down the middle.
5.6 / 10
A NZ$7.89 Early Access hybrid from solo Steam developer major90 that feeds a match-3 grid into a physics-simulated coin-pusher tray — a genuinely unusual pairing, checked days into a launch with zero Steam reviews, zero achievement data and, by the developer's own admission, no progression system built yet.
5.5 / 10
A hexagonal match-3 board wired to real RPG stats and live PvP is a genuinely clever hook, but Ino-Co Plus buries it under slow pacing, undertaught systems and a monetisation menu that several of its own players call pay-to-win.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developer dungeon crawler where a small green-hooded adventurer works through expanding stone chambers on stamina, hearts and a growing key ring, with almost nobody outside the developer having weighed in on it yet.
5.5 / 10
A hamster-cage colony sim where you build both across and up through a planet's crust, then cap every map off with a physics-based rocket launch — a genuinely novel structure let down by AI-generated portraits, math bugs in its own production formulas, and a patch history that goes almost silent the week after full release.
5.5 / 10
A solo-developer escape-room-style puzzle adventure through a mysterious woodland — logically satisfying puzzles wrapped in almost no story, a missing settings menu and a runtime most reviewers clock at under an hour.
5.5 / 10
