Portal is one of the most beloved puzzle games ever made, and rightfully so.
Besides the boundless, monotone charm of GLaDOS and theperky salesman talk of Cave Johnson, the gameplay is both accessible and easily understandable. You put a portal here, you put a portal there, speedy thing, speedy thing comes out, etcetera.
It’s a simple spatial reasoning gimmick that pretty much anyone can figure out, but with enough potential depth to keep you entertained for a good while.
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However, part of what makes puzzle games appealing is the degree to which they can test your logic and reasoning abilities. Maybe “simple” isn’t really what you’re in the market for, and in that case, Portal loses its gameplay edge and has to rely on its presentation (which is admittedly still pretty excellent).
If you want puzzle games with a little more zest, there are more than a few you can turn to, including these.
To quickly clarify, we arenot saying any of these games are objectively better than Portal, merely that their gimmicks or problem-solving approaches are more varied or elaborate.
8Return Of The Obra Dinn
Extreme Bookkeeping
Return of the Obra Dinn
I am genuinely glad I live in the era of digital databases, and I mean that.The idea of taking notes and making edits completely by hand and memory terrifies me from a personal and professional perspective.This is probably whyReturn of the Obra Dinngave me the runaround for a good while, not that that’s a point against it.
The central gimmick of Return of the Obra Dinn is that you need to mark down the identities, jobs, and ultimate fates of everyone who was sailing upon the doomed vessel. You do this by looking into the past at the moment of their deaths, but that alone doesn’t usually tell you anything. It’s not like every corpse on the ship is wearing underwear with someone’s name sewn into it, after all.
You need torely on context cluesto identify individuals in the flashbacks, such as the numbered bunks they’re sleeping in or the titles other passengers address them by. It’s a game that necessitates a critical eye for the smallest details.
7The Witness
It’s There To Be Solved
The Witness
Sometimes, the primary gimmick of a puzzle game can be the explicitlackof a primary gimmick. In other words, puzzle solving for its own sake, under its own power, with raw logic and deduction. To play a game likeThe Witness, you need to be especially confident in your ability to determine that one plus one equals two, even if the game is doing its darndest to claim otherwise.
The Witness’ many puzzles are based around the concepts of shapes, patterns, and sequences. Anyone can identify a pattern easily enough, but it takes quite a bit more brainpower to piece together a pattern with missing or distorted segments, or an exceptionally lengthy pattern.
It’s a logical long game, testing your ability tohold and string together long lines of individually simple data points.
Playing The Witness is kind of like working in data entry. I’m decent enough at stringing bits of information together, but when you need to do that for long stretches while keeping it all logically consistent, it takes a lot more focus than I expected.
6Baba Is You
Puzzle Is Solve
Baba Is You
Game design, on a broad scope, is something of a puzzle in itself. Even when you’ve got identifiers and modifiers up and running, you still need everything to flow in a clean sequence of if, then, and because, or the world you’re building makes no sense.
PlayingBaba is Youis kind oflike working as a bug tester on a nearly-finished game, and occasionally going out of your way to break it as hard as possible.
Baba is You allows you to manipulate the world through words and actions. Every individual puzzle is full of word tiles stipulating one of the current “rules,” such as “WALL IS STOP.” Take the “STOP” out, and walls can’t halt your progression anymore. By strategically removing and replacing words and functions, you bend the puzzle to your will.
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Possibly the most original puzzle game in recent memory, Baba is You is also an exercise in frustration and stretched-out logic.
What I love most about Baba is You is its little a-ha moments, those times where even an accident can inadvertently solve a puzzle. The only goal in any given level is to find the flag, but if you make it so “WALL IS FLAG,” you just have to touch a wall to win.
Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey
Braid, Anniversary Edition
If we’re talking about high-concept puzzle game gimmicks,time manipulation is always a steady standby. It’s one thing to futz about in space, but to mess with time is to mess with progression and causality, otherwise very abstract notions. If you want to get really abstract with your puzzles, an old favorite of the genre isBraid.
Braid’s central hook is that you have the ability to universally rewind time, both for yourself and any assorted enemies or objects in the room. At first, it’s just a matter of positioning yourself to benefit from moving obstacles, but as the game goes on, the gimmick evolves and branches out.
Objects and enemies become immune to time manipulation, your own movement affects the progression of time, rewinding creates a temporary duplicate of yourself, and so on.
Braid exemplifies the concept of fourth-dimensional thinking. It’s not just you, running right and jumping on stuff, you also need to keep track of how the world is progressing around you, both dependent and independent of your time shenanigans.
Change Your Perspective
Speaking of multidimensional thinking, one puzzle game that’s well-known for its perspective-shifting mechanics is Fez. Imagine if you were playing Portal, but in order to find a spot to stick a portal, you had to look slightly to the left of reality as a whole. That’s kind of what playingFezis like.
Fez’s shtick is thatit’s always presented to you as a two-dimensional plane, when everything actually exists in three dimensions.
By rotating the entire world horizontally, you can reveal platforms, secrets, and objectives that were previously hidden by an illusion of perspective. What may have previously seemed like a ladder with half its rungs missing is actually a complete staircase with the remaining steps merely discolored or placed oddly.
In addition to that core gimmick, Fez is also full of bizarre little sub-puzzles. These can include language ciphers, invisible platforms, and even QR codes you’re supposed to scan with your phone. This game was literally the first interaction I ever had with QR codes, and the fact that the game could influence me directly, even in a small way, was mind-blowing.
3Blue Prince
Everything Is A Context Clue
Blue Prince
Puzzles are hardly the exclusive territory of high-concept science fiction. Eccentric rich people have been subjecting their friends and family to annoying contraptions for kicks for centuries. That’s pretty much the entire conceit of Blue Prince: navigating your great-uncle’s weird house for legal purposes.
Blue Prince is a large-scale escape room puzzle with roguelike elements. Every room in the house is full of individual riddles, as well as context clues to solve different riddles elsewhere.
The twist is thatthe rooms of the house change every day, so you’re never quite sure what information you have goes where.This is why, early on, the game tells you outright thatyou’d better be writing stuff down.
I don’t think I’ve ever been told to take notes as explicitly by a game before Blue Prince, and honestly, it’s refreshing. In level-based puzzles, you may need to write down a code here or there, but this entire game is like one big interlocking Rubik’s Cube.
2Lorelei And The Laser Eyes
Hope You Paid Attention In School
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Many puzzle games will introduce you to their central concepts or gimmicks early on, then base any subsequent puzzles on a gradual evolution of those concepts.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyesis not one of those games, and it tells you this up front — when you first start the game, you get a little notice informing you that, in order to solve the game’s puzzles, you’ll need a suite of basic and not-so-basic knowledge already in your brain.
Concepts referenced by Lorelei and the Laser Eyes include, but are not limited to, Roman numerals, astrological signs, the periodic table of elements, dentistry, Agatha Christie novels, atomic numbers, and the keys on a piano.
Granted, if you aren’t already familiar with any of this stuff, you can find in-game documents that will give you a rough rundown on them, but you’re definitely supposed to solve it off-hand.
I have approximate knowledge of many eclectic topics, and even I had no idea how to broach some of these puzzles.Yes, I know who Agatha Christie is. No, I do not know where Hercule Poirot lives. I guess that just showsmy database of random triviacould always be a little bigger.
1Outer Wilds
The Whole Solar System Is The Board
Outer Wilds
Linear puzzle games like Portal require you to think outside the box, but specifically within the confines of a slightly larger box. You’re only solving one puzzle at a time, and don’t really need to think about any more than that.Outer Wilds, meanwhile, is an entire puzzle adventure across a solar system. It couldn’t do much to constrain you even if it wanted to, which it doesn’t.
Outer Wilds isn’t just about hunting for context clues, it’s abouthunting for context, period. You don’t really know what you’re doing or striving for beyond the fact that there’s a time loop, and you should probably do something about that.
It’s entirely on you to systematicallysearch every semi-habitable planet in the solar system for whatever crumb of information and directionyou wrestle out without getting yourself killed.
In a way, Outer Wilds kind of perfectly embodies the puzzle-solver’s spirit. When I got stuck looking for my next clue, and that happened a lot, I would swiftly realize, “oh, I don’t have to do this right now. Let’s just put a pin in it and go solve something else somewhere else.”
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