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What are your favorite casual puzzle games?
Hi! I'm looking for some fun and interesting casual puzzle games. Some of my favorites, in no particular order, are:
- Sudoku
- Nonogram - like the recent Every 5x5 Nonogram or Picross.
- Tetris - Apotris on GBA is great!
- A few from the Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection
- Sokoban
- Catrap on Gameboy, a bit similar to Sokoban
- Dragonsweeper and Mamono Sweeper that people recommended here a while ago.
- Chip's Challenge - Lexy's Labyrinth is a browser-based reimplementation.
Since you're a fan of nonograms/Picross, you should definitely check out Proverbs and Mosaic of The Pharaoh, IMO. The puzzles are similar to nonograms but using a slightly different ruleset, and rather than lots of little puzzles they're giant ones that you slowly solve portions of over time. The pictures they form are pretty charming/amusing as well.
And looking in my Steam library 'Puzzle' category, here are a few more I can also recommend:
Hex/Square/Crosscells is another pretty good casual puzzle franchise that you might enjoy.
Paint it Back is basically Picross on PC, and pretty good too. IIRC, it was actually @Deimos that recommended it to me way back in the day.
Please, Don’t Touch Anything is reminiscent of those old "Don't push the button" Flash games, but more polished and with tons of different endings to discover.
The Room franchise isn't exactly "casual" since it can get somewhat difficult at times, but it was pretty great.
And ditto for The Witness, Superliminal, and The Talos Principle. They're not exactly casual in terms of gameplay or difficulty level either, especially once you get a bit deeper into them, but they're truly phenomenal games, IMO. Talos Principle 1 & 2 are both currently on sale as well, BTW.
p.s. Opus Magnum might be worth checking out too. It may look casual-esque, but it's just about as far from casual as you can get in terms of its difficulty. However, it's one of the absolute best puzzle games ever made, IMO.
Seconding Proverbs and Mosaic of the Pharaohs, they've eaten up dozens of hours of my free time and are great to chill out to with a podcast or audiobook on in the background.
My understanding is that among Zachtronics games, Opus Magnum is frequently recommended as a good one to start with because it's one of the easiest to get into! Which says a lot about their games in general lol
I'll agree, it's a pretty difficult puzzle game by normal standards, but you will know quickly if it scratches the right itch, and if it does it is very satisfying to tinker with until you manage to find a solution.
The only other Zachtronics game I've really played is Spacechem, which it's about the same difficulty (and a very similar puzzle type) as Opus Magnum. But yeah, I've looked at all the others too and the majority of them seemed like they would be way too hard for me. E.g. I do actually own TIS-100 as well, but it immediately made my head hurt so I gave up on it pretty quick. ;)
Edit: Oh, nm. I have actually played Infinifactory and MOLEK-SYNTEZ too.
I am still really tempted to try Last Call BBS though, since I watched Cracking The Cryptic play Dungeons & Diagrams, one of its mini-puzzle games, and that looked interesting and not too terribly difficult.
Zachtronics games tend to fall into one of two categories -- the ones that are this kind of... assembly puzzle, for lack of a better term? and the ones that are more coding/computer science-y. In my experience what people typically recommend for beginners is Opus Magnum as the first of this kind, and Exopunks as the first of the more coding-y type. I've really enjoyed both (and will probably move on to more Zachtronics games once I'm done with them) but I can definitely see other people only vibing with one kind or the other.
I love nonograms but haven't found any programs that are "good enough" except for Nonogram Katana. I paid for the Google Play version and likely have a thousand or more hours in it, and since I started they've added a whole other level of building a village, adventuring in a dungeon, and the like. That's fun and all, but the nonograms are just awesome in general, and there are thousands of great options as one can submit their own.
If you have a Switch you should definitely check out Picross, if you haven't already. IMO, it's still the king of nonogram games in terms of its level of polish. I've played all of the mainline series starting from the DS/3DS era up to all the latest Switch ones (Picross S9 and S+), as well as most of the branded ones (even from franchises I don't recognize, e.g. Picross Kemono Friends).
Picross 3D is very good but it's only available for the 3DS as far as I know.
One of the problems I have with Picross is that sometimes the grid is very small and zooming in isn't handled very well. That isn't a problem with Picross 3D.
I've been playing this through RetroArch (using the melonDS core) on my phone. It's great, and works very nicely with a touchscreen.
HUGE shout-out to Tametsi on Steam. It's super cheap (I think I got it for $3?) and somewhere between Minesweeper and Nonograms. It's casual in the sense that it's easy to pick up and play, but it is tough as nails.
LFTL (and since I was curious to see it too):
https://store.steampowered.com/app/709920/Tametsi/
2048!
Hmm. Oooh. Yeah.
I have a soft spot for Professor Layton games. They’ve all been ported to iPad, so it’s easy to play for a few minutes here and there.
I keep going back to Enigmo over the years. Work out how to use various parts to bounce little drops of ink into buckets.
I think someone on here got me in to baba is you. You solve puzzles by making and changing the rules of how objects interact.
Polarium Advance on GBA (better than the also great DS version). One puzzle a day mode is highly recommended! Easy to emulate but there's something about playing on a real GBA Micro/SP. A cheap emulation handheld like Miyoo Mini would also suffice. You press a button and are instantly back in the game—no faff. https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2014/01/01/polarium-advance-daily-puzzle-challenge/
There's also a similar mode in my own Sparrow Solitaire, for Playdate.
MaBoShi (DS), Orbital/Orbient (GBA), and Magical Puzzle Popils (GG) both amazing but perhaps slightly less casual, though no worse than Chips Challenge.
On Apple Arcade, the game Stitch. is worth all the time for casual puzzling. I apologize if it’s not available elsewhere but this game has had me in its clutches for over three years.
I have an extremely old Steam game collection, so some of this stuff is bound not to work on modern PCs anymore, but...
Brain-Off Fun: An Arcade Full of Cats, Dorfromantik, Hidden Folks
Proper Puzzle Games: Cogs, Hitman: GO, Human Resource Machine, Little Inferno, Pictopix, Puzzler World, Quell, Quell: Memento, Quell: Reflect, Voxelgram, World of Goo, Zenbound 2
I do also have a list of 3D games with puzzles at the core of them but where you must control the game with a keyboard and mouse. So far as I recall, every game here is playable with just a mouse.
It's not my entire collection, and I did try to make sure I included my favorite picross/nonogram game in there (Voxelgram, though I have not played the sequel.)
If you don't mind keyboard and mouse, I've got a bunch more games that I can recommend as well.
Related to Chip's Challenge is Chuck's Challenge, from the same developer!
Somebody here turned me onto a guy on Twitch, kilg0re_Tr0ut, who plays a game called Sherlock once every stream. Everett Kaser has a ton of interesting looking games.
Tetris and Puzzle League are go-tos for me as well for endless puzzles that you can just pick up, do for however long, and leave. Flipon is a great Puzzle League clone as well.