The Puzzle-Game Canon for People Who Hate Puzzle Games

Somebody tells you they hate puzzle games, and what they almost always mean is that in 1999 they spent four hours stuck in an adventure game, looked up a walkthrough, and discovered the answer was to combine two objects for a reason no functioning human would derive.

That reaction is correct. The genre earned it. What it isn’t is an argument about puzzles.

The actual crime

The canonical example is Gabriel Knight 3, where you disguise yourself by making a fake moustache out of cat hair and maple syrup. It’s a real puzzle in a real game by a good writer, and it’s indefensible, because there’s no chain of reasoning that arrives there. You get it by exhaustively combining inventory items until the game stops saying no.

Old Man Murray built an entire essay around this — measuring adventure games by how long until the first absurd object puzzle — and used The Longest Journey’s clamp-and-inflatable-duck sequence as its exhibit. That’s a harsh reading of a genuinely fine game, and the diagnosis stuck because it was accurate about the era’s default failure mode. The whole business is a decent chunk of why point-and-click died.

Here’s the distinction the canon below runs on. A bad puzzle hides an association: this object goes with that object, and the link exists only in a designer’s head. A good puzzle exposes a rule system, teaches it without saying so, and then constructs a situation where the rules imply an answer you can derive. When you solve one, the feeling is “obviously” rather than “finally”.

Every game here does the second thing.

Boulder Dash (Peter Liepa and Chris Gray, 1984)

Start here, because it’s the cleanest example ever built and it fits in a few kilobytes. Boulders fall. Boulders roll off other boulders. Dirt supports boulders; empty space doesn’t. Butterflies explode into diamonds. That’s the entire rule set, and you learn all of it in ninety seconds by watching things happen.

Then the levels ask you to reason. Every cave is a physics problem where the wrong dig order buries the exit permanently, and the game never once tells you a solution. Liepa worked out the falling algorithm and the rest is consequence. The grid that taught physics is a fair title for it.

Lemmings (DMA Design, 1991)

Dave Jones’s team gave you eight verbs, a stream of suicidal creatures, and a clock. The rules are printed on the interface — a Basher tunnels sideways, a Digger goes down, a Blocker stops the flow — and the puzzle is purely resource allocation under time pressure.

Nothing is hidden. Every failure is legible as your own arithmetic error, and the game is funny about it, which is the trick that made it sell in the millions. The puzzle game as slapstick tragedy is doing something the moustache puzzle never could: it makes losing informative.

Portal (Valve, 2007)

Two portals, conservation of momentum, and about three hours. Portal is the best-taught game in the medium and the teaching is entirely environmental — the early chambers physically prevent you from misunderstanding, and by the time you’re doing flings the physics has become intuition.

The reason it converts puzzle-haters is that it never has a moment where you’re stuck without knowing what kind of thing you’re missing. You always know the vocabulary. You’re only ever missing the sentence.

Braid (Jonathan Blow, 2008)

Each world introduces one time rule — rewind, objects immune to rewind, time tied to your horizontal position — and then exhausts its implications with a rigour that’s closer to mathematics than level design.

Braid’s puzzles are hard and none of them cheat. When you’re stuck, you’re stuck on a consequence of a rule you already know, which means staring at the screen is productive work. That’s the test.

The Witness (Thekla, 2016)

Blow again, eight years later, doing the same thing at absurd scale: hundreds of line puzzles across an island, arranged so that each cluster teaches a grammar element with no words at all.

The Witness is the genre’s most uncompromising statement about teaching. There’s no text, no tutorial, no hint, and it works because the panel sequences are constructed with the care of a language curriculum. The environmental puzzles — the ones where the island itself is the panel — are the payoff for having paid attention. The art of not explaining has no better exhibit.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll (Stephen Lavelle, 2016)

The hardest game on this list and the one I’d defend most fiercely. You push sausages onto grills with a fork. Sausages roll. Grilling both sides of each sausage without burning anything is the entire goal.

It looks like a joke and it’s a genuinely severe piece of design. Lavelle’s rules are four lines long and the implications run so deep that solutions arrive as revelations about geometry. Nothing is hidden, ever. You’re outmatched by a fork and some meat, and it’s entirely fair.

Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope, 2018)

Sixty people died on a ship and you have to name each one and how they went. The tool is a pocket watch that freezes the moment of any death, and the reasoning is pure deduction from faces, accents, clothing, position and a crew manifest.

The design safeguard is the confirmation rule: the game only confirms your answers in batches of three, so you can’t brute-force one at a time. That forces actual confidence, and it’s a small mechanical choice that carries the entire experience. The deduction masterpiece in two colours is the shortest description that fits.

Baba Is You (Arvi Teikari, 2019)

The rules are physical objects in the level. BABA IS YOU is three blocks on the floor. Push the word YOU away and you stop existing. Push WALL next to WIN and touching a wall wins the level.

Teikari built a game where the puzzle is the rulebook, and the honesty is total — everything is on screen, always. The difficulty comes from the fact that human brains are bad at treating grammar as furniture, and getting better at Baba Is You is watching your own cognition upgrade in real time.

Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital, 2019)

Twenty-two minutes, then the sun explodes and you wake up at the campfire with everything reset except what you know. There are no upgrades. The only thing that persists is information in your head.

It’s the purest version of the thesis: a game where knowledge is progression, and every lock is a thing you understand rather than a thing you hold. Anyone who says they hate puzzle games should be handed this one without explanation.

Cocoon (Geometric Interactive, 2023)

Jeppe Carlsen designed Limbo’s and Inside’s puzzles and then spent years on this: worlds contained in orbs you carry on your back, which you can enter, and which can contain each other.

The rule is recursive and stated once. Everything after is implication. What makes Cocoon exceptional is the editing — there is no fat on it, no filler chamber, no puzzle that exists to extend runtime. Six hours, every one of them load-bearing. Puzzle design with no fat on it is literally the whole review.

Three more, briefly

Tunic hides its rule system inside a scattered instruction booklet written in an invented language, which sounds like the crime and is the opposite — the manual pages are legible as diagrams before you can read a word. Chants of Sennaar makes you a field linguist and checks your hypotheses. The Case of the Golden Idol does Obra Dinn’s deduction in still scenes, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes demands you keep a notebook, which in 2024 reads as a provocation.

What they have in common

Legibility, mostly. Every game here can be described in two sentences, and in every case the difficulty lives downstream of a rule you’ve been given rather than in a rule you’re guessing at. When you’re stuck, you know what you’re stuck on.

The second thing, which matters more than it sounds: none of them punish experimentation. Boulder Dash lets you restart a cave instantly. Braid rewinds by design. Outer Wilds resets in twenty-two minutes regardless. Sausage Roll has an undo key you’ll wear out. The genre’s old crime was making you afraid to try things, because trying things meant an inventory grind. Take the fear away and the puzzle becomes a conversation.

Where to play them

Boulder Dash runs in any C64 or Atari 8-bit emulator and has had numerous re-releases; Lemmings is on GOG and every retro compilation going. Portal, Braid, The Witness, Baba Is You, Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds, Sausage Roll and Cocoon are all on Steam, and most are on consoles too. Baba Is You on Switch in handheld is the correct version.

If you’ve decided you hate the genre, start with Portal, then Outer Wilds. If you come out the other side still convinced, try Baba Is You, and notice how long it’s been since a game made you feel stupid in a way you enjoyed.