The best puzzle games of 2024

Team Thinky, 6 December 2024

As we march toward the end of 2024, it’s time to look back and spotlight some of this year’s best puzzle games. Quite frankly, it’s been an incredible year for thinky fans. We got a long-awaited sequel to one of the decade’s best detective games, a cryptic metriodbrania with endless layers of puzzle solving, an excellent turn-based strategy game about wizards with guns, and plenty of hidden gems! 

Unfortunately, we haven’t played every puzzle game released this year (we are a small team after all), so if you think we’ve missed an important game, please let us know! We love hearing what folks have been playing so sound off in the comments or over on our Discord. You can also have your say in our upcoming Thinky Awards show! The public nominations are open now.

I also want to highlight how much we’ve grown in 2024 as a website! Between launching the database, creating a new shiny website, and organising Thinky Con - we’ve had a busy year! Our community has grown too which we’ve loved to see and hopefully, it will keep thriving as we continue into 2025. So, from all of us here at Thinky, thanks for your support and we hope you enjoy our picks for the best puzzle games of 2024!

Animal Well

There was a lot of hype in the thinky community for Billy Basso’s ethereal Metriodvania, but little did we know how deep this well would go. What I love about Animal Well is that you can take what you want from it. If you’re after an atmospheric Metroidvania that will take you a handful of hours to complete, you can play until the credits and leave it at that. If you’re a secret hunter who loves finding hidden details and clues, then you can go beyond the credits and keep exploring. And finally, if you’re a sicko who loves completely dismantling a game until you’ve poked around in every single nook and cranny - Animal Well is a completionist's dream. — Rachel

Secrets, secrets, secrets! My main recollection from playing Animal Well is constantly saying "I bet there's something hidden there!" in pretty much every room. It's a joy to explore such a dense and intricate map, discovering all the little secrets packed into every nook and cranny. The deepest layers might have gotten a little too obtuse, which is certainly in keeping with its heritage (Fez's black monolith!), but I still loved everything I did uncover in this strange and mysterious world. — Joe

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes can be incredibly overwhelming at first, but it’s all in favour of giving you as much information as possible to solve its intricate puzzle box. Puzzles in Lorelei are almost as much part of its story as its game design, with the two so closely interlinked it’s often difficult to know when a puzzle starts and ends. Lorelei is wonderfully inventive, effortlessly stylish, and totally spellbinding. I often flick back through the reams of notes I made as I was playing, sad that I’ll never get to solve them for the first time again. From all the entries on this list, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is my personal choice for puzzle game of the year. — Rachel

Lorelei is perhaps my most memorable all-round thinky experience from this year. It was amazing to see a game focus entirely on cryptic puzzles, where you have to figure out what the puzzle even *is*, which we typically only see in paper puzzle form. The game's greatest achievement, however, is its brilliant storytelling. The writing is clever, intricate, and creative, yet still so readable. It's a marvel that something such a dreamlike and cryptic narrative can fall together so neatly by the end, like one giant puzzle in its own right. — Joe

Tactical Breach Wizards

As someone who isn’t a massive turn-based tactics fan, Tactical Breach Wizards dares to make me a strategy game fan. I first played because I was intrigued by its particular take on fantasy - one where wizards are stacked to the teeth with guns - but I got immediately hooked on its turn-based puzzle rooms. Instead of brute-forcing your way through levels, there's an emphasis on manoeuvring targets around the space to take them out as efficiently as possible, all while controlling the space and with some strategic spellcasting. It’s super approachable too. You can undo moves and mistakes, letting you try different strategies before committing to them. With its tongue-in-cheek take on police dramas - druid mafia, Navy seers, traffic warlocks and the like - Tactical Breach Wizards makes for a smart puzzle game that makes an intimidating genre much more approachable.  — Rachel

Star Stuff

Star Stuff describes itself as "deceptively cute", which hits the nail on the head. It is simultaneously a great family game that explores programming concepts in a unique and approachable way, while also featuring some of the most delightfully challenging puzzles I've solved this year. Star Stuff uniquely combines coding with real-time sequencing puzzles, resulting in a programming game that is more about insight-based puzzle solving than it is about optimization. Combine that with the incredible environment art, character design, and animations that rival Nintendo's best work (I’m serious), Star Stuff is an absolute stand-out game from 2024. — Joe

Arranger

Most of the puzzle games on our list aren’t especially kid-friendly - that’s where Arranger comes in to save the day. In Arranger you play as Jemma, a headstrong misfit who dreams of leaving her village in search of adventure. Arranger’s world is entirely grid-based, and using her special power, Jemma can shift entire rows and columns in the same direction she’s moving in. Not only that, but when she reaches the edge of the grid she’ll loop around to the other side. It’s wonderfully playful puzzle design, and together with its bright, bold visuals and whimsical story, Arranger is bound to entice the attention of younger thinky fans. It’s a little too difficult for kids to play alone but perfect for parents and children to play together. — Rachel

So many of the games we cover are all about deeply exploring one system to an absurd degree, but Arranger is a wonderful example of the opposite. Sure, it has the core mechanic of shifting rows and columns around, but Arranger is not afraid to jump from one playful gimmick to another. This ties in beautifully with the protagonist's whimsical whirlwind adventure, meeting a whole cast of delightfully written characters along the way. — Joe

Isles of Sea and Sky

Winner of our Most Anticipated Game award, Isles of Sea and Sky taps into all that nostalgia we have for classic, puzzlier 2D Zelda games. Sail atop a sea turtle's shell, exploring a beautiful pixel art archipelago, where densely-packed and interwoven puzzles await. Isles of Sea and Sky features metroidvania-style ability upgrades, completely transforming your puzzle-solving options in spaces already explored. Perhaps its most daring innovation is to let the player work out for themselves exactly which puzzles are solvable with their current abilities, which I loved picking apart. A must-play for fans of exploration puzzle games. — Joe

The Rise of the Golden Idol

Color Gray Games released one of the best detective games of the decade and with their follow-up, The Rise of the Golden Idol, they’ve done it again. This sequel continues to map the titular idol’s bloody path as the story continues into the 1970s. The core mechanics remain the same: select words from grisly scenes and complete sentences of fill-in-the-blank whodunnits. The Rise of the Golden Idol keeps what made its predecessor compelling but widens its scope. Cases are more in-depth, scenes are riddled with detailed visual clues, and the story continues to be thematically filled with vengeance, greed, and murder. Like I said in my review, It's The Case of the Golden Idol, but better.  — Rachel

My only hope is that the Golden Idol saga grows into an extensive anthology of whodunnits, much like Agatha Christie's murder mystery classics. This sequel, The Rise of the Golden Idol, is certainly more of the same formula, but the formula just works so well. There's little more satisfying than analyzing a scene - character motivations, footprints, torn clothes, toppled chairs, splatters of blood - and feeling like a real forensics expert when it all comes together. Keep 'em coming! — Joe

Leaf’s Odyssey

Leaf's Odyssey is a hidden gem that fans of challenging puzzles really shouldn't miss out on. From YouTuber Alex Diener, this game is a new entry in the stepping genre, of which puzzle classic DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) is perhaps the best known. These games are all about understanding the movement patterns of enemies that move when you move, and using those patterns to your advantage. Leaf's Odyssey feels like a fresh and modern take on the formula, with outstanding puzzles that focus on key insights and some delightful mechanical twists. And you play as a ferret. — Joe

Balatro

If you’ve been following discussions from critics and players alike, Balatro has been a dominant 2024 Game of the Year contender since its release back in February - and for good reason. This deliciously devious poker-like is as hypnotic as it is satisfyingly thinky. Deciding what cards to play when, while also trying to rack up as many points as you can will require some head-scratching decisions. Balatro is wonderful in that it’s both adrenaline-pumping (there’s no better feeling when your combos start to rack up) and also hypnotically contemplative, giving you as much time as you need to work out what to do next and execute it with well-planned precision. With its roguelike structure and addictive ‘just one more turn’ gameplay, Balatro will absolutely eat away your hours. — Rachel

No Case Should Remain Unsolved

No Case Should Remain Unsolved is a hidden gem of 2024. This brilliant bite-sized detective game will have you hooked from the get-go. Playing as a detective recalling a murder case from their past, you need to correctly order bits of testimony given by characters related to a murder case. Testimony snippets are only a couple of sentences long, so figuring out who said it, and when they said it becomes vital to figuring out the central mystery. What surprised me the most about No Case Should Remain Unsolved is not only its unique ‘he said, she said’ system, but also how often the game would constantly make me second-guess my assumptions. It’s full of little twists and turns that will keep you on your toes. Many of the games on this list are pretty bulky, but if you have a spare evening over the holidays, make time for this detective gem.  — Rachel

Here's another reminder that if you didn't see your favourite puzzle game of the year, vote for it in the Thinky Awards - public nominations are open now!