Blue Prince seems to have cast its spell over puzzle-lovers everywhere. It's a game with plenty of ways of getting its hooks in you: a shape-shifting mansion full of delicious secrets, RNG deck-building that scratches your brain in all the right places, and a story constantly unfolding before you.
Blue Prince may very well be the best puzzle game of 2025, its mystery mansion welcoming those even outside of the puzzle community. It's an immense game, spanning hours of playtime and pages upon pages of note-taking, and even though there's nothing quite like it, we're here to recommend other games of the same puzzle-focused calibre. If you love Blue Prince for its secrets, look no further. If you're a major fan of puzzle solving through discovery, you've come to the right place. If you want other Metroidbrainia recommendations, we've got you covered. If you're that particular kind of sicko who specifically enjoys the Parlour puzzles, we've even got recommendations for you, babes.
Just like many others, we're loving Blue Prince here at Thinky Games. You can read Rachel's in-depth review, watch Joe tackle the game's first 30 minutes on our YouTube channel, read our tips and tricks guide, and check out the interview we did with the game's developer Tonda Ros (we highly recommend you read that).
So, have a scroll and see if anything takes your fancy. Do you have a recommendation that we missed? Join our Thinky Games Discord and let us know!
Secrets, secrets, secrets
If you love finding hidden secrets and delving deeper into a game's lore and worldbuilding, these games are for you. Meta-puzzles, secret endings, hidden areas, language deciphering and more - here's what you should play.
Tunic
Tunic may look cute, but behind its adorable fox protagonist is a world full of secrets ready to be discovered. What begins as a cryptic game guide filled with scribbled notes soon cascades into a search for ancient treasures, deciphering an ancient language, and plenty of Easter eggs.
Void Stranger
Part Sokoban-puzzler, part mystery adventure, Void Stranger surprised everyone with just how many secrets were hidden within its depths. With hidden items, shortcuts, story snippets and super secret game mechanics (??) to find, Void Stranger is packed with tasty secrets. As Thinky Games contributor (and Void Stranger expert) Mauve writes: "Void Stranger is a mesmerising puzzle box that embraces being abrasive, difficult, and (at times) frustrating, but these are the necessary pillars to making a truly subversive puzzle adventure like nothing we've ever seen in contemporary games." Get ready to have your expectations totally subverted.
Further reading: Void Stranger is abrasive, intense, and a triumph of modern puzzle design
Animal Well
Unlike Void Stranger, puzzle game fans knew exactly what shenanigans to expect with Animal Well, with solo developer Billy Basso hiding a bunch of hidden clues and messages in the game's Day of the Devs preview video. Animal Well is first and foremost a platformer, you're exploring underground caverns, surviving deadly encounters with the cave's unwelcoming dwellers and solving various puzzle rooms you find. But Animal Well is also a puzzle game completionist's dream. Hidden rooms, messages, puzzles, strange symbols - it's all here. You might want to join the Animal Well Discord for this one, folks.
Further reading: Animal Well review — An utterly compelling puzzle platformer that’ll sink its teeth into you
Paquerette Down the Bunburrows
Hidden mechanics and meta secrets, Paquerette Down the Bunburrows is not to be underestimated. Sure, you're chasing rabbits in a string of pathfinding-based puzzles, but there's so much more to this game than trying to corner cute bunnies. As you delve deeper down the rabbit hole, the game boundaries between puzzles start to blur, and it goes so much deeper than you'd expect. Happy bunny chasing!
LOCK
We love a mysterious, puzzle-filled island in the Thinky Games community, and LOCK is one such game. Made in the game creation system Dreams on the PS4, LOCK unfortunately gets overlooked, but for those who already have a copy of Dreams, LOCK is a must-play. LOCK is an extremely well-regarded game that aims to provide an approachable puzzle hunt experience.
Puzzle-solving through exploration
Just like Blue Prince, these puzzle games focus on exploring a game space as part of their puzzle mechanics. This might involve elements of time looping, navigation, mapping out a space, paying extra attention to environmental clues - these all contribute to a more in-depth understanding of the game and its puzzles.
Outer Wilds
Though a touch larger than Mount Holly, the solar system of Outer Wilds is dense with puzzles, breadcrumbs, and mysteries that reveal themselves with each new encounter. You only get 22 minutes to explore before each time loop resets, meaning you’ll wind up with dozens of threads to follow (and a packed notebook).
Further reading: Solve an Outer Wilds-style mystery through puzzles inspired by GeoGuessr in Locator
The Myst series
In addition to being a bona fide classic of the CD-ROM era, the Myst series is the most direct inspiration for Blue Prince’s environmental puzzle design. Completing each part of the island earns you one piece of the larger puzzle and moves you one step closer to understanding the mystery of the island and the powerful forces at play.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Few games are as tied to physical space as Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, where mapping out the Escheresque halls of the Letztes Jahr Hotel and unravelling its nonlinear narrative are one and the same. Remember: a surreal neo-noir nightmare monster is just a puzzle you haven’t solved yet.
Further reading: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes review — Simogo’s artful puzzle box displays near perfect vision & How Lorelei and the Laser Eyes made its reality-bending story into one giant puzzle
Chants of Sennaar
Slowly parsing out the language of a new world is one of the great joys of puzzle games, and here’s one that takes this mission completely literally. If learning to navigate a world of unfamiliar words and symbols appeals to you… well, you should consider a career in archaeology. Alternatively, you should pick up Chants of Sennaar.
Return of the Obra Dinn
Starting with a list of 60 names—the crew and passengers of the derelict merchant ship the Obra Dinn—your job as an insurance investigator is to unravel the fates of each missing person and the harrowing events that led to the ship’s ultimate fate. All you’ll have to start with is a mystical pocket watch that shows you the moment of an individual’s death, and a whole lot of blank pages. Return of the Obra Dinn is a must-play for puzzle-lovers. Good luck!
Fez
One of the titans of early indie puzzle design, Fez’s dimensional platforming mechanics are just the tip of its mind-melting ARG iceberg. What first seems like a treasure hunt for shiny golden cubes soon unravels into something more, with some mysteries remaining unsolved since 2012—maybe you could be the one to crack this thing wide open.
Metroidbrainias (aka knowledge-based progression)
Think Metroidvania, but instead of upgraded abilities and a decked-out toolbelt, the way to progress is through your understanding of the game and its systems - that's a Metroidbrainia. Progression here is locked behind pieces of information or a hidden mechanic which act as 'mental keys' to help you advance. Technically, everything is available to you from the very beginning, you just didn't know it. We love them, and here are our favourites.
Toki Tori 2
Whistle, stomp, and… that’s pretty much it, actually. Your abilities don’t change much as you progress in Toki Tori 2, only your understanding and observations about how they interact with the world. The cool thing in Toki Tori 2 is just how many discoveries are stuffed into an unassuming package.
Outer Wilds (again)
For those who can’t help but try to squeeze in one more run, Outer Wilds’ looping gameplay is guaranteed to get you hooked. Uncovering something as a simple symbol stretched on a wall will have your neurons firing. Every time you die, you’re sent back to square one with nothing but the knowledge you’ve gained, but so many more questions to answer—which, as any Thinky player knows, is delicious.
Tunic (again)
Physical keys and tools are a big part of Tunic, but they're just the start of finding every corner in this fantasy world. Designed to evoke the feeling of flipping through an old school game manual, Tunic harkens back to a time in videogames where physical booklets were another way to communicate secrets to players. It's something lost to video game history, making Tunic the perfect throwback for puzzle fans.
The Witness
You can’t step in the same river twice, and although The Witness’s puzzles all revolve around tracing similar paths on similar gridded panels, the context around each one changes again and again. It’s one thing to learn the rules of the game, and another to stay on your toes and learn how to learn.
Further reading: Swampy Boots: the puzzle so fiendish it has its own dedicated community
Chroma Zero
Solo dev ekorz set out to make an “epiphany-punctuated” puzzle experience with the recently released Chroma Zero, situated firmly in a world of shifting colour, energy, and gravity. As your experience changes, so does the world, revealing more answers and more questions.
Linelith
It’s easy to lose dozens of hours and fill multiple notebooks when playing Blue Prince, making Linelith’s short, relaxed pace more than a bit refreshing. It's a line-drawing puzzle game, similar to The Witness, where you have to draw lines to satisfy puzzle constraints. It's short, but it packs a whole bunch of clever twists and discoveries in its hour-long package.
For the Parlour Room puzzle lover
If you loved solving the riddles in the Blue Prince's Parlour Room, we have some great news for you. There's a whole subgenre of puzzle games that follow the same format, so we've listed our favourites below.
Mimic logic
A Dungeons & Dragons classic monster takes centre stage in puzzle roguelike Mimic Logic. You need to read the statements of each Mimic, work out which ones are lying and find the treasure in the ones telling the truth. If you accidentally open up a Mimic, they'll eat you, and it's game over. Thank goodness there are no Mimics in Blue Prince, I would be dead on day 1.
Knights and Knaves
A twist on the classic two doors with two guards riddle, Knights and Knaves tasks you with sorting the lies from the truth, but with symbols. Questioning guards, meaning choosing the right combination from a roster of symbols, and they'll reply in equally cryptic symbology. You need to decipher what they're saying and decide which door is safe to enter. It begins with guards, but you'll quickly be up against lions, clowns, and talking statues too.
Senna and the Forest
If trees could talk, what would they say? Well, in Senna and the Forest the trees are full of secrets. This game tasks you with learning why a forest is slowly dying, a disease eating away at the trees. To discover how the disease was spread and in what order, you need to learn the identities of each tree and their history by talking to them. Seena and the Forrest is wonderfully abstract and perfect for those who love riddles.
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