There’s perhaps no genre synonymous with mobile platforms – especially iPhone or Android devices – than puzzle games. Low intensity inputs are good for a device with no buttons, and the pace of these games plays well with the low session time, start-and-stop nature of mobile gaming. Puzzle games also take so many unique forms nowadays that a top list in the genre can produce completely different looking games.
If you’re looking to test your literary skills, we’ve got a great collection of Word puzzle games as well!
As you’ll see below, we have our own menagerie of titles that we feel represent the best Puzzle games have to offer across iPhone, iPad and Android devices…
Evergarden (Review)
Developer: Flippfly
Platforms: iOS Universal
Price: $4.99
This recent release is an easy inclusion in our best-of collection not only for its accessible nature, but also because it requires a lot of careful thought and planning. It’s more of a high-score puzzler than anything else, but the floral theme and impressive nuances make for some entertaining sessions. Evergarden’s developers estimate that the game will take between four to eight hours to fully explore. After this, it is all about breaking into the global high score tables.
Consequently, it is more of a Tetris high score chaser rather than the type of puzzler where you have to pit your wits against increasingly difficult levels. Unlocking all of the game’s secrets does not require particularly high levels of skill, just the persistence to keep playing and adding to your gem collection.
Death Coming (Review)
Developer: SixJoy
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: $1.99
Death Coming is a cute pixel game of Where’s Wally twisted in with Final Destination. It’s a murder simulator with the player taking the role of an omnipresent servant of Death. You are tasked with offing a certain number of people in a detailed pixel-art scene through manipulating the environment towards various horrible accidents and mayhem. The pixel artwork is awesome, reminiscent of a really great Kairosoft game. Everything is clear and distinct even at a distance, although the game is definitely better sized for tablets and larger phones. The characters are cute and expressive in their tiny little animations. It’s a shame the devs didn’t trust their core gameplay enough to avoid gumming it up with unnecessary frustrations.
Monument Valley (Review)
Developer: ustwo games
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: $3.99
Every intrepid fan of puzzles is intimately familiar with the eureka moment after which everything falls into place. With Monument Valley, these insights are found by rotating and manipulating the world and its unlikely, Escher-esque geometry. Visual insights coincide with mental ones. And what visual twists and turns there are! Paths bridge on towards infinite loops, curve around corners and angles which display cleanly on the tablet’s surface but will warp the mind. The challenges and spatial awareness necessary are minimal, yet the game never feels reductive or simplistic despite its pared-down nature.
Infinite West (Review)
Developer: APE-X GAmes
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: Free with IAPs
Infinite West is a puzzler that resembles more boardgame than match-3. It’s difficult to find which had a bigger influence on it, the sombre motif of the Ed Porter/Sergio Leone style western or Square Enix Montreal’s critically acclaimed GO series. What’s easy to see is that developers APE-X have a clear reverence of both and have done their best to highlight what makes both strong while adapting it to a unique vision. Achievement hunting and score chasing in Infinite West can throw you in that fervent, ‘just one more map’ loop because of the solid core concept, and the presence of IAPs is by no means a deal-breaker as you get given a modest amount of freebies anyway.
Lara Croft GO (Review)
Developer: Square Enix
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: $7.49, $4.99
Many a sterling series has seen its reputation dinged by weaker entries. In particular, the sophomore slump, that challenge to recapture what made the original great without slavish repetition. Every member of the GO series has its unique merits and mechanics, but Lara Croft GO stands as the series best. Hitman GO was plagued by odd turn-counter challenges which offer only derivative challenges and pad the playtime without expanding content; Deus Ex GO’s grand plan for daily challenges and community-generated puzzles largely fell flat, but Lara Croft GO along with its two expansions hit the sweet spot of challenge, presentation and pacing. Its focused treasure hunts will keep the best minds, most any mind, really, engaged. (There’s even a maddening hidden-object sidegame to unlock cosmetic goodies if either of those are your wont) Its solutions were exclusive and in many cases immune to the kind of brute-force, mindlessly-spam-moves approach to puzzling, and the whole adventure felt like just that.
The Witness
Developer: Thekla (iOS), NVIDIA (Android)
Platforms: iOS , Android
Price: $9.99, $13.60
The Witness is an excellent game to binge, forget, and then revisit. Its puzzles are sorted into wholly distinct environs (treehouses, greenhouses, forests, deserts, mountains, castles) with each of the regions introducing a unique mechanic. Powering on the panels by drawing glowing lines. The game is open world, with players free to wander around and be as enlightened or confounded as they like, and the ultimate nature of the island and its nameless visitor (Witness?) is left up for interpretation. Still, the puzzles are incredibly varied and numerous, and the island is a wonder to explore and idly consider just what in the world is going on.
Cosmic Express (Review)
Developer: Draknek Limited
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: $4.99
Cute little aliens harumph and squidge themselves into unlikely spherical compartments as they commute to their destinations in outer space. In Cosmic Express, the puzzles are pickup-and-deliver, drawing train paths for a route that allows for no cross-overs or doubling-back. The game includes a ton of levels and gets surprisingly difficult (or rather: uncompromising, since difficulty is always a relative, judgmental term) sooner rather than later. Every level feels crystal clear in the post-solved hindsight; nothing is superfluous. Cosmic Express winds its way through the galaxy and wends its way into your heart.
Beglitched
Developer: Alec Thompson
Platforms: iOS
Price: $3.99
Beglitched is the story of the Glitch Witch’s sudden disappearance from a computer OS and the player character’s sudden quest to train and replace her. You’ll open ‘files’ to find items, other avatars and programs, and enemies. The game is split between overland mode, which utilizes a minesweeper-like method of divining connecting spaces, and the match-three battle mode. The tone is light and idiosyncratic, and the level design is inspired and gimmicky in a good way. Constraints, properly applied, stimulate creativity. (Or else we’d be without the phrase ‘thinking outside of the box’). Beglitched was released without much fanfare and then subsequently ported to mobile, where it shines even more because of its screen-within-a-screen schtick.
Mini Metro (Review)
Developer: Dinosaur Polo Club
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: $4.99
Logistics makes the world go around. These often break down into math and logic puzzles, even to the point that we have fields dedicated to studying the topology of knots. But maybe none of this matters and you just need to get to work. Well, Mini Metro folds all of this and makes for an amusing, minimalistic puzzle about ordering and sequencing the right trains in the right time to complete the right route. So, programming motion to meet specific goals, and tinkering towards that end. Some puzzles rely unduly on shifts in perspective or tricks of the light to interpret what happens next; not so with Mini Metro. The needs and requirements of the puzzles are always clear, the demand is upfront: all the player has to supply is the way forward, that vital connection which will close the gap and make everything come together.
Developer: Loveshack
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: $4.99
The search for the story is the story in Framed 2. Cleverly partitioning and recombining what made the original so great, the follow-up refines and refreshes the initial conceit. Comic book action meets stealth in a cheesy noirish setting. One could even say it…re-frames…what made the original great. Yes, it is probably the shortest and most easily exhausted member of this list but it still has a little extra panache that merits some special attention. There are games to play for months or years, trying to crack their mysteries or refine skills. Then there are those games to consume in an afternoon, letting the whole experience become a unified and unbroken memory. Framed 2 belongs to the latter category, a class of brief puzzlers definitely worth playing.
The Room Three (Review)
Developer: Fireproof Games
Platforms: iOS, Android
Price: $3.99
What can be said about The Room series that hasn’t been said before? Its excellent value and construction, or the heaps of critical awards? Not to mention the host of mistaken-identity jokes based on the so-bad-it-is-a-phenomenon film of the same name. Puzzle boxes are a unique tactile treat which shrink a world into a single object and then propel one to open it based on nothing more than curiosity and the hint that something might wait inside. The Room has digitized this experience as well as it could have been, all while making the experience portable and affordable and just a skosh mysterious.
What would your list of the best puzzle games look like? Let us know in the comments!
