Recomend me some good Puzzle computer games

Cafe Society
1

I enjoy good puzzle type games, not these shoot-em up kind and I seem to have a hard time finding good ones. Usually they either tend to be like Myst where you only carry one thing at a time and the puzzles are way to easy, or they are too difficult or require you to push one small pixel to get something to work.

So far the best I ever played was Shivers, I really liked the game, it was large, had lots of puzzles and some interaction with NPCs. I’m looking for something similar, doesn’t have to be horror but would be good. Doesn’t matter how old they are as I can probably pick them up off of e-bay.

2

Grim Fandango is the best computer game I’ve ever played on anything, ever.

Anyhoo, hype over, it’s a sort of noirish mystery by Lucasarts, set in the Land of the Dead, which is all Mexican-styled in a very cool way - everything’s based on the Day of the Dead festival, it looks ace. None of the puzzles are stupidly obtuse, or rely on finding a single pixel like you say, and if only all movies were as well written as this, I’d be in the cinema half of my life. Linky linky.

3

The best puzzle game I ever played was “The Fool’s Errand”. I played it on a Mac, and I don’t know whether it was ever released for DOS or Windows. I think the author’s name was Cliff Johnson, not sure about that, though.

4

Do you ever play Civilization? Not exactly a ‘puzzle’ type game, more of a strategy game but very interesting.

5

a good puzzle game which is a series of nothing but puzzles is Pandora’s Box

6

I second Grim Fandango. I’ve played it twice (about 2 years apart) and LOVED it both times. Well written, good puzzles, and an interesting plot. The writer(s) had a good sense of humour, too. “My Scythe. I like to keep it next to where my heart used to be”.

Sanitarium is also a good one. It gets a little bit cheezy plot-wise near the end, but its still a good game. Its a few years old (approx same time as Grim), so you should be able to find it for not too much $$. I’d like to find it again and play it, if I get the time.

7

I’ll third Grim Fandango.

8

This is kind of old but how about boxworld? It’s free, too.

9

I agree that this was a very enjoyable game for people (like me) who enjoy jigsaw-type puzzles. I keep looking for Pandora’s Box 2.

10

I’ll second “Fool’s Errand.” It’s an oldie but a goodie–and the author has it for free download here.

11

I’m not sure if this is the sort of puzzle game you mean, but if you check out www.popcap.com there are several games like Bejeweled and Alchemy that you can play free online or download for a small fee. Very addicting!

12

Thanks for the suggestions guys I’ll see if I can find a copy of Grim. I don’t play too much really and have dropped a couple of the DreamCatcher games because of stupid little things.

13

If you do not care about a plot, I highly recommend the Smart Games series. There were three, all released by Hasbro, with the last one released in 1998. Each contains about a dozen genres of puzzles and within each genre, anywhere from 15-100 puzzles each. Each puzzle type is relatively unique. One that stands out from the first game involves a 1 minute or so sound clip (a piece of classical music, or part of a speech by Churchill et al) that has been broken into 5 second bits and you must rearrange the bits to get the clip back ‘in order’. Each series has at least one trivia game involved as well as a diverse set of word/logic/number/spatial type puzzles. A review of the third game (including screenshots) can be found here:
http://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/zones/reviews/pc/nov98/sg3.html

Again, if plot isn’t important, I’d also recommend you take a look at Buena Vista’s “Heaven and Earth”. This game consists of about a dozen different spatial puzzles, of which there are a fifty or so indvidual puzzles within each. Examples here are the ‘anti-maze’ where you can only move your cursor between walls (you look top down) as you try to get to the exit. Also included in this game is a ‘solitaire’ type card game where the cards are all different flowers/scenes/seasons and you try to form combinations with the cards presented to get a maximum score. There is also a pendulum type game where you move the mouse to try to influence the movement of the pendulum so that it will pass over certain points in a bowl. As you progress, magnets are placed in the bowl (some attract, some repel) to make it more of a challenge. This game is a bit older, but I have recently started playing it again with no problem on XP. It is still apparently being sold http://shop.store.yahoo.com/classicsoftware/heavearbybue.html.

All of these still reside on my hard drive and get tackled now and then, sort of to reaffirm that I am not as smart as I like to think I am :smiley:

14

Drastic, bless your blue-eyed, everlovin’ heart for that link. I had a pirated copy of Fool’s Errand on my old Mac Plus back in '89 - unfortunately it carried a virus and blew me out of the water for a time. I’ve been looking for that game ever since. Now I finally get to play it! Wheeee! :smiley:

Third on “Heaven and Earth” - I got a copy off an abandonware site a while ago and spent hours playing all the games and taking the “journey”. Very challenging stuff.

Anyone got a link for Pandora’s Box?

15

If you are into puzzle games then you might like ‘interactive fiction’(IF), which it just another name for text adventures.

There are quite a number being written, and quite a few particularly good ones out there. Also, most, if not all of the ones being written now are free. They seem to have changed to be more like interactive stories, rather than being just about puzzles as they seem originally to have been about, but still puzzles seem to be a features in most.

One I particularly liked was ‘Shade’ which isn’t particularly a puzzle game, but is rather creepy. I won’t try to explain anything about it, as that would spoil things.

Also, ‘Spider and Web’ is more of a puzzle game, where you are being interrogated, and have to explain to the integerrogator how you got captured, so in effect you have to work out what you did, by doing it. (although there is more to it than that).

That’s just 2 games, there are plenty more.

This website:
http://www.wurb.com/if/index , has reviews of a lot of IF games, as well as links to the games themselves so it might be worth loking at that if you want to know what games are worth playing. It also splits games into genres, so you can look at the horror ones if you want. It also links to a number of other websites with games on, or reviews, or suchlike.

To play most of them, you seem to need to download an ‘interpreter’, which is what actually runs the game. The main ones seem to be z-code, TADS, and Hugo. This site links directly to the main interpreters:
http://www.igs.net/~tril/if/best/index.html

Once you have the appropriate interpreter, you just download the gamefile, and then load the game into the interpreter, then play the game just by typing. If you are familiar with how to play text adventures, then it’s fairly easy to get back into it, but if not, this webpage gives a good introduction:
http://www.microheaven.com/IFGuide/step3.htm

There seem to be a lot of websites on the subject of ‘Interactive fiction’, so if you want to know more, then google it, or follow links from the pages I’ve linked to, and go from there.

And that’s it. You might not like text adventures, but it’s worth trying some of the stuff that’s out there, particularly if you haven’t played for a while (or at all), as things seem to have changed quite a bit.

16

Not exactly what you’re looking for, but here is one that I solved once a long time ago and haven’t been able to solve again since. Of course, it’s because I get frustrated and quit. :confused:

http://fathom.org/opalcat/java/wolves.html

Let me know if you solve it.