Good puzzle game recommendations?

Hey guys!

My girlfriend has slowly been getting into games, and her current preferred genre is puzzle games! She absolutely loved the Witness and Anti-chamber, and just finished up Picross 3D: Round 2 (which she consumed all of ravenously over the course of maybe two weeks). However, I'm starting to run out of ideas of games for her to play. She played and enjoyed portal 2 until she had to kill one of the turrets, at which point she stopped playing.

She has really grown to enjoy playing games before bed on the 3DS, so any puzzle game recommendations for that would be great! I've offered the Ace Attorney series, Ghost Trick, and Professor Layton but she doesn't want anything with a story; she's more focused on the puzzles themselves. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! (PC recommendations also accepted!)

I really like Hitman Go, Lara Croft Go, and I don't want to hype it too hard but, The Swapper is awesome.

The Go trilogy is $2 on the App store (iOS) atm which is a great get.

not really a puzzle guy, but I have heard great things about The Witness as well.

hitman and lara croft GO look cool, because i'm a big fan of those franchises anyway.

INSIDE and LIMBO are 2 really good side scroller games with excellent art style, puzzles are easy though

a similar one is Unravel, excellent graphics.

Hmm, it's hard to come up with pure puzzle games without any story/progression fluff. And Picross 3D R2 is the best version of its kind.

Maybe Pushmo or Crashmo? There are also a number of regular (i.e. 2D) Picross games on the eshop. And if she's never tried it before, I'm sure Sudoku would be right up her alley.

Stephen's Sausage Roll is one of the most brilliant and brutally hard puzzle games out there. Absolutely nothing but puzzles all the way down, and they are devious and expertly designed. If she is comfortable being extremely frustrated, but also into discovering how puzzles work without instruction ala The Witness, it may be something to look into.

Jon Blow said:

"After this game comes out, if your game design school isn't teaching it, then it is just a bad school, sorry!"

and

"Stephen's Sausage Roll is such a good game. I'm just sayin'."

As someone who holds The Witness among the very best games I've ever experienced, Stephen's Sausage Roll is *balls hard*. I was not able to complete it, but I respect it immensely.

The Room series. The Room II and III are the real standouts.

Star rating is difficulty. Just going to mention stuff that hasn't otherwise been said.

• Fish Fillets 1 and 2 - but mainly 2, the presentation of the second game is definitely much nicer than the first. Warning: Both of those games get brutally hard. *****
• Snakebird - adorable and pretty tough. ****
• RUSH - Fun puzzles and a great soundtrack. ***
• Catrap (Game Boy, but available via 3DS eShop) - One of the few puzzle games that I keep coming back to. ***
• PuzzleDimension - Some great puzzles, but can also get a little frustrating (especially the camera angles). ***
• Hexcellsseries - an interesting blend of Picross and Minesweeper. ****
• Hook - a very breezy puzzle game, but still fun. Also, a nice minimalist aesthetic. *
• Klocki - basically the same comment as above. *
• LYNE - a simple concept and a shitload of puzzles. Entrancing. ***
• Splice - exceptional soundtrack. Can be very difficult and confusing until you get the hang of it. ***
• TokiTori - cute and fun puzzle-not-quite-platformer. Not too dissimilar to Catrap that I mentioned earlier. ***
• CrossSet - very much a podcast-listening kinda puzzle game. **
• Prelogate - a puzzle game based around logic gates. As you'd imagine, some of the puzzles end up being incredibly difficult. *****
• Paint it Back - Basically Picross for PC, but with a sense of humour. ****
• Unconventional Guns - Maybe the most enjoyable out of the Puzzle Script games. It's definitely worth checking out some of the others though. ***
• Fake Colours - presentation-wise, it's a little shit, but there's some very satisfying puzzles. ****

The Talos Principle is amazing.

The best of the puzzlers are behind us. NES era games were great. Kickle Cubicle, Lolo 1, 2 and 3, Blockout..

Picross (Non 3d) is really good too if she hasn't played that yet. The 3ds eshop has it, as well as Pokemon picross.

I only know PC games but here are some puzzle games I've played recently and seem to meet your requirements:

Hexcells - It's so good! as someone else said it's basically a cross between picross and minesweeper.

Paint it Back - Seemingly the only decent picross game on steam.

SpaceChem - This seemed pretty daunting at first but the game does a good job of easing you in and the text story can be safely ignored. I highly recommend this even if it seems like it might go over your head.

Infinifactory - Made by the same guy who made SpaceChem. It seems to be that game but in 3D but i haven't gotten to deep yet.

There's literally a billion Picross games on the 3DS eShop

Those should keep her busy for a week or two

Rupupu Cube: Lup Salad is great. Never released outside of Japan but there are region-free DS and PSP versions. No knowledge of Japanese necessary other than for navigating menus but that can easily be done by trial and error.

Pokemon Picross is a piece of shit.

Good games that have been mentioned:

• Stepehen's sausage roll
• PushMo/CrashMo/etc.
• SpaceChem (although you can play the codex of alchemical engineering online for free and it is more fun)

Phone games

• FLOW FREE & FLOW FREE: BRIDGES on phones, almost endless amount of puzzles that really get you into the zen of completing many in a row. once you master it it's very mechanical but it seems like that is what she is into over brainteaser type puzzles
• Cut the rope & other spinoffs
• Where's my water?/Where's my Water 2?/Where's my Perry?/ Where's my Mickey?
• ChuChu Rocket puzzle mode

As far as pc games go the best pure puzzlers are:

• Stephen Sausage Roll - most satisfying puzzle game i've ever played
• English Country Tune - from the developer of Stephen Sausage Roll
• Snakebird (also on phones) - this is one of the hardest puzzle games
• Braid - from the developer of The Witness, very good
• The Bridge - a puzzle-platformer about"mc esher"-like spaces
• The Talos Principle - very Witness-like

There are also the zachtronics games which are not always difficult to complete but become super challenging when competing on the leaderboards

• SpaceChem (i think this is on phones) - puzzles about combining and separating molecules (no chemistry knowledge required)
• Infinifactory - puzzles about building things in a factory like way

Might and Magic Clash of Heroes is excellent. It does have a little bit of story/character progression, but really, take a look at some videos of it. It's block-matching and strategy is really unique. It was on DS so you may be able to do it backwards compatibility on 3ds (I forget exactly with the different models)

Shameless plug from me but I’ve just released my puzzle game Chromas. It’s fairly quick to learn but as the levels progress it gets really quite hard.

It has 150 free levels with more being added in the next few months. Here’s a link:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/chromas/id1435692074?mt=8

Baba Is You is the best puzzle game I've ever played, although Portal 2 is my favorite; I'm just consistently impressed by the amount of intelligence and detail in that game.

If you have a Switch, there are 3 Picross games for it that are like 10 dollars a piece, each with 20-30 hours worth of puzzles. They're pretty standard Picross, but they're still excellent.

Also, I'd recommend Into The Breach; it isn't technically a puzzle game, but it's easily the most puzzley tactics game I've played, and it's amazing.

Any of the Zachtronic games are great for PC eg. Spacechem, Magnum Opus, Shenzen IO, EXAPunks. They're very much about building automated systems or programs to solve the problems presented but they introduce the concepts well imo and are great fun.

I'd also 100% recommend Hexcells if she likes Picross as a natural progression from that.

For 3DS I recommend a bargain bin ass game called: "Sudoku +7 Other Complex Puzzles by Nikoli" which has a good selection of different logic puzzles by Nikoli (and Sudoku obviously, though it's easily the least interesting puzzle of the bunch). In general Nikoli invented many of the logic puzzles you see around, including Picross and they design some really good puzzles. The game features 100ish puzzles of each type and is a great way to try some of the other logic puzzles out there.