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45 Puzzle games reviewed and scored, best first.
45 reviews
Fifteen years on, Portal 2 remains one of the most acclaimed puzzle games ever made — and its small, honest minority of dissent is worth hearing, from real motion-sickness reports to a considered argument that the sequel traded the original's focus for scale.
9.5 / 10
A card-based deckbuilder that spends its first act convincing you it's a horror-tinged roguelike, then spends the next two acts proving that was never the whole game — a genre-shifting puzzle box from Daniel Mullins Games that has held a 96.8% Overwhelmingly Positive rating across 134,000-plus Steam reviews for nearly five years, even as a consistent minority feels misled by its own store page.
9 / 10
A haunting, wordless puzzle-platformer from the makers of Limbo, whose ending has divided players in exactly the same way for nearly a decade — not through controversy, but through a deliberate ambiguity some find profound and others find frustrating.
9 / 10
A time-loop mystery about a tiny solar system that "everyone says" you need to experience knowing nothing about — Overwhelmingly Positive at 95.6%, and honest enough with itself that its own top negative review is a genuinely unresolved crowdfunding controversy, not a design flaw.
9 / 10
A border-checkpoint bureaucracy simulator that turns document-checking into genuine drama, thirteen years on. Its creator says its themes have only become more relevant with time — a fact he finds less like vindication and more like a tragedy.
9 / 10
A deduction game that hands you a magic pocket watch, sixty deaths, and no other tools — and asks you to work out exactly who died how, in what order, and at whose hand, using nothing but observation and logic.
9 / 10
One person spent seven years building a pixel-perfect puzzle box with secrets buried so deep the playerbase had to solve the last of them collectively — and never added key rebinding, which is still its most-upvoted complaint.
8.5 / 10
A free time-travel Sokoban puzzler that gets one specific, difficult idea exactly right — solving a puzzle by recording your own past actions and then working alongside the ghost of what you just did.
8.5 / 10
An action RPG about playing an MMO, built around one verb — throwing an energy ball that ricochets off walls — that does double duty as the combat system and the language every dungeon puzzle is written in.
8.5 / 10
A point-and-click adventure dressed as a 1996 educational CD-ROM, with something wrong underneath it. One of the highest-rated games on Steam this year at 99% positive — and its single-save-file design is the reason that number isn't higher still.
8.5 / 10
FTL's creators followed up randomness with certainty — a tiny, perfect-information tactics puzzle where every enemy move is telegraphed in advance. Most players call the trade a triumph; a consistent minority of FTL fans still feel the resentment the top positive review admits to feeling at first.
8.5 / 10
The black-and-white puzzle-platformer that arguably started the modern atmospheric-indie wave, still Very Positive fifteen years later — and still facing the exact same trial-and-error criticism its earliest reviewers wrote, sometimes in nearly identical words.
8.5 / 10
A short, genuinely inventive puzzle adventure that reaches outside the game window to talk to you — 98.3% positive, and if you're on Linux or Steam Deck you should buy a different version of it.
8.5 / 10
Build a machine that makes gold, then spend three hours making it smaller — 97.1% positive, nine years old, and still receiving patches a fortnight ago.
8.5 / 10
A puzzle game about pushing boxes into boxes that contain themselves — 99% positive, one of the highest-rated games in this library, with a motion-sickness problem its own longest-playing critic begged the developer to fix.
8.5 / 10
A retro survival horror game that wears its Resident Evil and Silent Hill influences openly and still manages real originality — beloved for its atmosphere, queer storytelling and puzzle design, with one honest recurring complaint about how tedious that puzzle design gets.
8.5 / 10
Four years on, 97.2% positive across 176,389 reviews — and its critics are still arguing that the only reason it scores that well is that you play as a cat.
8.5 / 10
An automation game that skips the usual pretend-programming abstractions and just hands you a Python-shaped scripting language, then asks you to actually write the loops and functions that run your farm. The rare "learn to code" game that works as a game first.
8.5 / 10
A game about a small fox that hands you an instruction manual in a language you can't read and lets that single idea carry an entire adventure — and a soulslike hiding inside a Zelda costume, which is where most of its arguments start.
8.5 / 10
A genre-defying puzzle roguelike-lite set in a mysterious manor whose floor plan you draft anew each in-game day, celebrated with a 92 Metascore and widely called one of the most creative puzzle games in years — beloved specifically by players willing to take pages of physical notes, and marked by a real, still-unresolved design tension between its puzzle-solving brain and its randomised, roguelike-lite execution.
8 / 10
A decade-old physics-puzzle co-op favorite still getting free content updates today — and still, nearly a decade later, drawing a specific, sustained complaint from Linux owners about a 2018 platform decision that's never been reversed or clearly explained.
8 / 10
Hazelight Studios' GAME OF THE YEAR-winning co-op adventure remains one of gaming's most celebrated couch-co-op experiences, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 266,000 Steam reviews and independently confirmed to have sold over 23 million copies — undercut for a real, recurring minority of players by a genuinely dark, forced late-game "torture" sequence, and by online connectivity friction this review can confirm was substantially, though not entirely, fixed by a documented May 2024 update removing the mandatory EA Launcher requirement.
8 / 10
A hex-grid roguelike that swaps a conventional deck for a board you draft and build tile by tile, from the maker of the well-regarded mobile hit Cards of Terra — hitting 1.0 to a small but completely unanimous chorus of praise after what several reviewers admit was months of criminally low visibility.
8 / 10
A non-idle incremental where every resource tick comes from casting spell combos yourself rather than watching a timer, built around a genuinely novel glyph-alchemy system for crafting your own spells from scratch.
8 / 10
