Puzzle games are often the most interesting on the PC market. With both indie and big-budget titles alike, some of the most weird and wonderful ideas come out of this head-scratching genre. Every time you think there can’t be any weirder of a concept for a puzzle game, you get something like Superliminal which messes with your perspective at every turn, or Baba Is You which plays with the very rules of video games themselves.
If you’re looking for a good “sit down and think” kind of gaming session, then check out these great puzzle games that are currently being sold at a discount in the Steam Summer Sale. If you like the brainier side of video games, then check out our roundup of the best strategy games in the Steam Summer Sale too.
Baba Is You’s concept is quite hard to explain, despite being easy to visually communicate. Instead of a fixed set of mechanics, the whole idea is that you constantly change the game’s rules by moving about words that recode the game. Lava may normally cause you to death if you touch it, but if you’re able to create the phrase “Lava is Push” you can push it out of the way instead – or even better “Lava is Win” will make you instantly win the level.
This simple idea creates some of the most mind-bending puzzles you’ve ever seen that are incredibly rewarding to wrap your head around.
Both a challenging puzzle game and a narrative-focused mystery, in Heaven’s Vault it’s your job to sail around a star system to slowly translate an ancient dead language, and use that to solve greater mysteries at play. Every place you discover has a great new avenue for adventure, full of little conundrums to solve as you piece together more and more of this language. Similarly, Chants of Sennar is another great game that plays with this concept, for a little bonus recommendation.
The We Were Here series are great puzzlers to play with a friend. The idea is that the two of you are separated with only a walkie-talkie to communicate. One of you will find a puzzle, while the other has to find the solution to their puzzle somewhere in their environment. You’ll constantly be going back and forth trying to solve each other’s puzzles while you remain separated. It’s both a brain-tickler and a test of your communication skills.
A game so good it kicked off a bit of a sub-genre, but Papers, Please still does it the best. You play as the border crossing guard of Arstotzka, a fictional Soviet-coded country. All you have to do is check if a person’s passport is valid and either approve or deny their entry into the country. Simple enough, but day after day you’ll have more and more documents and rules piled on to you, giving you a ridiculous amount of things to check with every entrant.
That’s not even mentioning the moral choices the game piles on top of you. Your position of power can easily be abused for both acts of good and evil, but all of them will have consequences, as you need to do your best to earn enough money to keep your family alive.
Shadows of Doubt is still in early access, but it’s incredibly impressive in its current state. It is a procedurally generated detective game, where murders will randomly happen around the city and it’s your job to investigate the scene, question witnesses, and slowly draw the clues together to catch the killer. You’re not technically a police officer though, meaning you’ll often have to work outside the law to solve the case, which is where the game’s great stealth mechanics come into play, making every adventure a unique thrill ride.
Superliminal is a game where nothing is as it seems. It plays with perspective in ways that will continue to trick you over and over again. At its most basic, the game plays with size and perspective as its core mechanic. So if you pick up a box that comes up to your waist, but then move that box away from you, it will remain the same size in the frame, but get further away, meaning that when you let go, the box is suddenly much bigger than when you picked it up. Things get a lot more complicated than that as it goes on, and you’ll be better off going in as blind as possible.
If one of the things you liked about Portal was the pureness of being thrown into an environment with simple mechanics and told to just get on with it, then The Talos Principle is a great place to go. The first game is great, but the sequel greatly expands the puzzle mechanics, giving you a first-person puzzling experience that can match up to the genre kings.
You do have to deal with a lot of Philosophy 101 discussion along the way, but it makes for a good enough story to carry you between the many puzzles this game has to offer.
While this game took the internet by storm as a bit of a meme when it came out, it’s worth pointing out that it is a fairly great puzzle game underneath all of the goose jokes. With the limited abilities that come with being a goose you need to navigate an increasingly hostile environment to do more and more complex things. It does all this while managing to be genuinely quite funny along the way too.
Outer Wilds gives you a ship, gives you a solar system to explore, and leaves everything else up to you. There are no directions or quests, you simply have to go out into space, decide where to go, and find the mysteries to solve along the way. Oh, also after 22 minutes the sun will explode, destroy all life in the system, and revert you back to the beginning of the time loop. You could work out why that keeps happening if you feel like it.
Earlier I described Superliminal as “a game where nothing is as it seems”, well, Antichamber takes what few rules that game’s world had and throws them out of the window. In Antichamber everything will constantly change in ways that seemingly make no sense. You’ll go down a corridor, and turn back only to find that the corridor is gone and a completely new room has taken its place.
The game constantly messes you, but as you explore and discover new rooms, you slowly begin to learn the twisted logic at play. Despite everything around you being chaotic and nonsensical, you get a wonderful feeling of slowly pulling all the threads together and making something intelligent from the madness, which is Antichamber’s true strength.