Anybody got any reccomendations for a good PC puzzle game? My PC is pretty old, I think it ran Elder Scrolls: Oblivion OK but I wouls not want to test it with anything that requires more processing than that, so no “The Witness”, however good it looks.
Games I really enjoyed.
DROD, all 5 games. This is by far my favourite puzzle game I’ve played; simple mechanics, beautifully clever puzzles.
Lemmings: I played all the Lemmings games back in the day
Tetrobot and Co/Blocks that Matter. 2 games from same developer with some very clever puzzles.
Baba is You, I actually found this from a SDMB thread. Another great concept with some clever puzzles.
All the DS Layton games. I find the stories annoying and skip them as much as possible but the puzzles are great. No longer have a DS but a similar format PC game would be good.
Some I didn’t enjoy:
SpaceChem: don’t know why, but the mechanic just didn’t grab me
Any “match 3” puzzle style game.
Any “hidden object” game
Puzzle Agent: Layton clone with vastly inferior puzzles and much worse mechanics.
It’s not horribly difficult but I found Monument Valley to be thoroughly enjoyable to play, particularly with the bonus “Forgotten Shores” levels. The visuals are just wonderful. There’s a sequel but I haven’t played it.
Played on tablet so I don’t know how (or if) they’ll run on your PC, but both have been out for years.
I liked all the games on your list and enjoyed the Swapper. I remember it being too short, though. That it built up the difficulty of the puzzles and once it reached the peak, it was immediately done.
Thanks, I’ve played Monument Valley and enjoyed it, not as much as the 5 I listed though. I forgot I also had an Amazon Fire tablet, so I can also play anything on Amazon’s Appstore, (backed a losing horse there, but not quite enough for me to buy a replacement tablet that actually runs Play Store)
Portal (and Portal 2) - You have to figure out how to move through a room given a set of parameters. The story is amazing, hilarious, and slowly revealed, and the joy of figuring out how to get out of the room is excellent.
The Room series - I played these on my Android, but they’re much more traditional “solve the box” games. Atmospheric and not too challenging.
The Talos Principle - like Portal, you move through an environment figuring out how to move onto the next area. Scales well.
Literally listed as a no-go in the original post, but I will add it is probably the best pure puzzle game of all time. They have it on tablets and phones, too, so maybe worth a look on one of those.
“Portal” was based off a prototype called “Narbacular Drop” if I recall correctly, created by some interns. So if you wind up liking the conceit of Portal, you may also like “Quantum Conundrum”, which was made by one of those interns as a commercial product.
It’s sort of an environmental puzzler game, where you have some tools to help you manipulate the environment in various ways. I see that I last played it in 2012, so if your computer can run Skyrim, it can surely run this.
Each board is a pure puzzle; all you do is click on the puzzle pieces (it isn’t immediately obvious what the pieces are: straights, 90 degree curves, tees, crossovers, crosses, and two opposed curves. They all exist on grid points of an unseen background grid.) You are trying to connect the square light sources (they come in three colours: Red, Green, and Blue) to the round lamps, so that the correct colors fill each lamp. An incorrectly connected or disconnected lamp will look like an empty circle with a border of the colour it requires.
There are seven types of lamps:
Red - must be sourced from red source(s) only
Blue - must be sourced from blue source(s) only
Green - must be sourced from green source(s) only
Yellow - must be sourced from at least one red source and one green source but no blue sources
Cyan - must be sourced from at least one blue source and one green source but no red sources
Magenta - must be sourced from at least one red source and one blue source but no green sources
White - must be connected to all three source colours
This all based on the rules for combining the colours of light.
The boards are randomly created when you start them. If you continue to play the regular game, the boards will get progressively more difficult to a point. My regular game is around Level 4000 but the boards are the same level of difficulty as boards from, I don’t remember, number 100?
The downside is that this is possibly still a purely flash game that will stop working in about three months.
My first attempt to play Portal wasn’t successful. I didn’t like it at all. But a few months later I had nothing to do and decided to give it a try. And you know what? Now it’s one of my favorite games.
You can find more puzzle-platformers on steam. This is how I found the game Inside. A great story with an interesting, even sometimes creepy atmosphere.