Puzzle games are an interesting genre.
While some of the greatest of their breed make appearances on larger consoles, they
have mass popularity on other mediums, from PC to mobile.
And some of these games have made gigantic strides in redefining what the genre is capable
of doing.
So today we’re counting down the top 10 best puzzle games of all time.
Let’s see if your favourites made the cut.
And heads up!
There’s a few spoilers in here.
10 Lemmings This Atari ST and PC 1991 game is a game where
you guide a group of lemmings to a designated exit.
To help aid in this, you have certain skill sets you can give to certain lemmings to help
clear or alter the landscape in order to get the required number of lemmings to the exit.
It was developed by DMA Design, which is now Rockstar North.
At the time, it was one of the most popular computer games, receiving rave reviews.
9 Scribblenauts Scribblenauts is a series made up of a few
different games, with the first of the same name being released in 2009.
Exhibiting at the 2009 E3, the game was called a sleeper hit, and won multiple best of show
awards in the process, making it the first portable console game to ever score recognition
like that.
Created for the Nintendo DS, it’s follow ups Super Scibblenauts, Scribblenauts Remis
and Scribblenauts Unlimited have collectively sold over 13 million copies.
8 Peggle Described as a casual puzzle video game, Peggle
was released in 2007, and consists of dropping a limited supply of balls down into a bunch
of coloured pegs in an attempt to hit marked pegs and achieve a high score.
Skill shots required.
The game got an immense popularity boost during a demo created for Valve’s The Orange box,
and has had over 50 million downloads since.
7 Gunpoint A stealth based puzzle platform set in the
near future where you play a spy named Richard Conway who needs to infiltrate various buildings
while working cases for clients.
Using gadgets, you avoid the likes of guards and other security tech, and end up unraveling
a grander murder mystery scheme in the process.
Certain technology that Conway uses has various effects on the gameplay, with different modes,
like the Crosslink mode that highlights circuits.
It’s all about rewiring and manipulating the security features in each building in
order to complete your task.
6 World of Goo World of Goo was developed by indie company
2D Boy, with it’s release on the Wii and PC back in 2008.
It’s been a critical hit, with a nomination for the pumas McNally Grand Prize, Design
Innovation Award and Technical Excellence at the Independent Games Festival, plus a
bunch of other award wins since.
Essentially, you are building structures using balls of goo, some of which have different
properties, with the end goal being to get a certain amount of goo balls to the pipe,
which is the designated exit in each level.
5 Braid Spoilers for this one here.
One of the more famous indie games out there, Braid was created by developer Number None
with designer Jonathan Blow.
The game follows a protagonist named Tim who is trying to rescue a princess from a monster.
But throughout a series of puzzle solving and text reveals, we come to learn that Tim
is in fact the monster the princess has been running from.
Braid is hailed for being one of the trailblazers in contemporary indie game development, and
was featured in the doc Indie Game The Movie.
4 Limbo Uncertain of his sister’s fate, a boy enters
limbo.
That’s all we get as an introduction to this puzzle platform.
We’ve talked about Limbo on a few of our other lists and how it’s ability to connect
you the boy’s character is incredibly impressive.
You’re essentially looking for your sister while needing to solve puzzles in order to
progress.
It’s dark, it’s challenging, and it’s hauntingly beautiful, using only greyscale
to make up the world.
Fans have speculated what certain things mean in the game, and there’s many a theory out
there, including that the boy is dead to begin with, the sister is dead, and how they died
- from falling from their treehouse, to speculation of a car crash.
3 Fez Another indie game, Fez was critically acclaimed,
and featured a mechanic that involved it’s 2D puzzle platform set in a 3 dimensional
world.
This happens after a tear in the fabric of spacetime occurs and the player is given a
fez, and resets the game as if it’s just glitched, then reloading to let players shift
between 2D and 3D in order to complete puzzles.
Incredibly smart and the inspiration for many indie games that came after it like Monument
Valley and Crossy Road, journalists and critics called it a tribute to 80’s gaming that
was a perfect wordless sci fi parable.
2 Portal 2 Developed by Valve, Portal is considered a
classic.
And it’s sequel, Portal 2, released in 2011, succeeds it by expanding on the original much
further, and was praised for it’s writing, pacing and overall dark humour.
Some have even gone as far as to call Portal 2 one of the greatest video games of all time.
The first person puzzle platform added a ton of new features in terms of gameplay, and
included a two player coop mode that requires players to work together and rely on their
teammate to solve the puzzle.
1 Tetris If Portal is a classic, well, Tetris must
be legendary then.
Created in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, an artificial intelligence researcher in Moscow, the game’s
purpose was to be a simple exercise to challenge the AI.
Since those humble beginnings, Tetris is now available on almost every single video game
console and computer operating system, and even scored the title Greatest Game of All
Time from Electronic Gaming Monthly and came in second place in IGN’s 100 greatest video
games of all time, and has sold more than 170 million copies, 100 million of those digital,
which makes it the best selling paid downloaded game of all time.
There we have it friends!
Puzzles!
What’s your favourite puzzle game?
Let us know in those comments below.
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but in the meantime, I’ve been Kelly Paoli and this has been top 10 gaming.
I’ll catch you all in the next one.