As addicting battle royales and massive open world RPGs threaten to take over your life, escape from never-ending games with a brain-teasing puzzle instead. Some people might enjoy the lure of a 1000-piece jigsaw or a Sudoku book, but my favorite puzzles have always been found in puzzle games. I can’t say no to a puzzle-filled video game, especially one that doesn’t overstay its welcome. My favorite puzzle games can all be conquered in an afternoon (around four hours or less), with some offering more challenges than others.
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8
The Last Campfire
Source: Hello Games
The Last Campfire is one of those games I wish I could forget and experience for the first time again. Everything about it is a 10/10: the colorful indie aesthetic, the chill soundtrack, the not-too-challenging puzzles, and the heartfelt story. It finds you playing as a lost ember in search of meaning, and, along your way to light the last campfire, you’ll come across lost souls in need of your help. Don’t be fooled by the cute visuals; there’s real, moving emotion present in The Last Campfire.
It’s full of a couple dozen puzzles throughout the game–some difficult, but most easily solved–though they all feel varied enough. Some have you rearranging objects to platform through the puzzle, others involve manipulating light, and a handful involve moving statues around to deduce a solution. They all stand out in different ways, and the brevity of each puzzle lends The Last Campfire to quick gaming sessions to unwind with if you need a break in between other tasks.
7
The Gardens Between
Source: The Voxel Agents
Like The Last Campfire, The Gardens Between has a subtle-yet-affecting story. It follows a pair of young friends literally climbing over and combing through objects from their childhood spent together, like an old TV or a tire swing. The levels all feel personal to the pair, and over the course of the game’s short runtime, you’ll come to adore them and their friendship–your heart might even break by the end.
While The Gardens Between features 20 levels, the game can be completed in just an hour or two, depending on how challenging you find the puzzles. They all revolve around the game’s central mechanic–control over time. This time control is represented by the levels rotating as the pair of friends progress upward and through the levels. You’ll often have to rewind to manipulate objects or pause to let lightning strike across a stormy sky. They’ll progressively get more complex as the game goes on, but none of the puzzles should stump you for long.
6
The Star Named Eos
Source: PLAYISM
The Star Named Eos is another emotional puzzler. It follows Dei as he tries to reconnect with his mother via reading her letters and recreating photographs she left behind. The story is a truncated emotional journey, just like Silver Lining Studio’s first game, Behind the Frame. That emotion is also connected to the gameplay as each level is focused on exploring Dei and his mother’s relationship.
The puzzles present a nice variety of gameplay; there’s no central mechanic, aside from finishing each level with a photograph, so the puzzles will require you to navigate unique solutions. In one, you have to find your way through a maze, while in another you have to use a radio to receive instructions on how to open a locked box. No puzzle is too difficult, though your brain might spin at first trying to figure out how to recreate the photographs in each level.
5
Viewfinder
Source: Thunderful
Viewfinder is another first-person puzzle game involving a camera, though it’s much more trippy than The Star Named Eos. You’ll completely warp reality in Viewfinder’s mind-bending puzzles to progress the levels. You might grab a black-and-white photograph (in sharp contrast to the game’s brightly colored world), align it just right where you need a new platform to be, and then bring the photograph to life in reality, creating a platform in the real world.
Viewfinder’s puzzles force you to think in compelling and perspective-altering ways that offer fun and conquerable challenges; the phrase “think outside the box” certainly applies to Viewfinder. It constantly evolves, giving the player new ways to navigate and redefine its world to solve its puzzles. You also get to hang out with a round cat. What more could you ask for?
4
Contrast
Compulsion Games recently released the banger South of Midnight, but the studio’s first game is worth playing just as much. Contrast is a puzzle platformer with a unique gimmick–your player character Dawn, the imaginary friend of a young girl, Didi, can hop between the real world and the shadow world to platform and solve puzzles. When she becomes a shadow, she becomes two-dimensional and uses the 2D shadows as platforms to traverse the environment, which is a gorgeous 1920s vaudeville-like world.
Contrast’s puzzles aren’t too difficult and rely more on your understanding of the game’s shadow system than anything. You’ll move objects and light sources around to create your own platforms in the shadow world. Admittedly, the platforming isn’t always precise and can be frustrating at times, but for a game that’s only about three hours long, it’s never frustrating enough that you’d want to stop playing altogether.
3
Overboard
Source: Inkle
Overboard isn’t a traditional puzzle game in the sense that you’ll be moving mirrors around to guide a beam of light or figuring out how to manipulate platforms to traverse an environment. Instead, it’s a deduction-based game mixed with a logic puzzle: How do you get off the boat–and away with murder? Your player character Veronica Villensey begins the game by tossing her husband overboard a ship hours away from arriving in New York. She then must use her time remaining to successfully get away with the crime.
There’s a rogue-lite element to Overboard as well in that what Victoria learns from each run can influence your actions in the next run. If Commander Anders turns on you in one run, an objective for the next will be to figure out how to bring him on your side. And getting away with the murder isn’t the only goal–you’re also trying to find a way to keep your (late) husband’s fortune. How long Overboard takes is entirely up to you; you might stumble into a successful ruse early on or you might need a handful of runs to figure out the best way to elude justice.
2
Cocoon
Cocoon is one of the most well-designed games I’ve ever played. It includes no instructions yet is still easy to comprehend. Playing as a bug-like alien, you won’t feel lost traversing its various worlds, but you won’t feel unchallenged either; Cocoon’s puzzles strike the right balance between difficult and fun, intricate and seamless. Despite any perceived difficulty with its puzzles, Cocoon makes for a relatively easy platinum trophy if trophy hunting is your jam. Simply complete the game while exploring every pathway and you’ll have a shiny new platinum in no time (well, three or four hours, give or take).
In Cocoon, you’ll hop into orbs that transport your player character to other worlds. Sometimes you’ll hit a roadblock and will have to hop out of the world to progress or even carry the orb worlds through one another to solve puzzles. The orbs have different abilities while in your possession and carrying them through levels can reveal platforms or fire lasers, which you’ll sometimes have to aim into orbs to transport the projectiles to a different world. It’s all a bit trippy, bordering on psychedelic, yet, no matter how challenging Cocoon gets, it never feels confusing. Cocoon is wildly inventive and easily one of my favorite puzzle games of this generation.
1
Portal & Portal II
Source: Valve
While most of the games above are more recent releases, I can’t not mention a classic and one of the best puzzlers, Portal. Though its sequel is more expansive and will take you around ten hours, Portal can be completed in just a few hours–and it’s so good, don’t be surprised if you find yourself replaying it time and again.
You play as Chell as she navigates puzzles using a portal gun. Portal’s physics system is one of its main draws as Chell will retain momentum and speed while traveling through portals, necessary for progressing some levels and solving their puzzles. Portal is only $10 on Steam, but the patient among us will find that it routinely drops to a measly $1 on sale, and for just $2 you can get it and everything else in Valve’s Orange Box during Steam Sales. If you haven’t played it yet, there’s no time like the present.
