The Greatest Puzzle Games On The PlayStation 4 And PlayStation 5

Key Takeaways

• Puzzle games on PS4 and PS5 offer a refreshing break from the typical action-packed titles, challenging your brain in unique ways.
• From mind-bending platformers to visually stunning adventures, there’s a puzzle game on PlayStation for every player’s taste.
• Whether manipulating time in Braid or shifting perspectives in Maquette, each game offers a fun and engaging puzzle-solving experience.

Puzzle games offer something a bit different from the over-the-top action that can be found in most triple-A titles that overpopulate the medium. They require you to stop and slow down as you use your brain to figure out the satisfying and tricky challenges that lie ahead.

Luckily for PlayStation gamers, there’s a whole host of high-quality puzzle games available on the PS4 and PS5. They come in all shapes and sizes, from colorful sidescrollers, to refreshingly unique mind-bending platformers, and critically acclaimed classics. Whatever your pick, there’s a head-scratching puzzle game here that’s sure to test your brain as it fires on all cylinders.

Updated November 28, 2024, By Kyle Chamaillard: There are plenty of fantastic puzzle games on the PS4 and PS5, so we’ve decided to revisit this article to include even more essential titles for anyone who would rather use their brain than their fists.

18 Chants Of Sennaar

Learning a new language can feel like a puzzle, and deciphering unfamiliar words and phrases might be more frustrating than fun. Chants of Sennaar magically turns this process into a riveting adventure that requires you to use visual clues to understand fictional languages and unravel the truth behind this mysterious land.

It may sound complicated at first, but every step forward becomes incredibly satisfying once you start figuring out how to solve the game’s language-based puzzles. Chants of Sennaar will enchant you with its art style and story, but the puzzles are the heart of the experience.

17 Viewfinder

Viewfinder is a unique puzzle game that has an incredible core mechanic driving its story. Each level requires you to take photographs with a camera and then overlay them onto other parts of the world to create new paths and solve puzzles.

You’ll need to look at each area carefully to know what to take a photo of, and how to use that photograph to clear obstacles and advance the narrative. The colorful environments are the perfect backdrop for some excellent head-scratchers, and the game isn’t too long, so you can easily beat it in a sitting or two.

16 Braid, Anniversary Edition

The original Braid was an exceptional puzzle-platformer that released before the PS4 and PS5. Yet, the remastered Anniversary Edition has come out on the later Sony systems. It features improved visuals and some new levels.

It contains the same high quality of platforming and puzzle-solving as the original. Most of the puzzles revolve manipulating time to create a path forward. While completing these well-designed trials, you get to appreciated the title’s beautiful art-style and surprisingly deep story.

15 Human: Fall Flat

In Human: Fall Flat, you are put in control of a very wobbly human-like creature. Along with waddling around, you can also grab things and pull yourself up on ledges. With these limited abilities and wacky physics, you must complete various different puzzles throughout the game.

What’s interesting is how open the game is. You’re simply placed into an area and told to reach the end goal. As such, you’re free to complete the puzzles anyway you deserve. Sometimes, you can even climb over walls to avoid puzzles completely. This is seemingly allowed, as you’re encouraged to be creative.

14 Little Nightmares 2

Puzzle games aren’t tied to a specific visual style. Some puzzlers are bright and colorful, while others are dark and creepy. Little Nightmares 2 certainly fits into the latter group, as this is an unsettling puzzle-platform adventure.

You play as a little protagonist, who journies through many dark places. Some of them include weird creatures that are trying to get you. So, most of the puzzles revolve around avoiding their gaze and grasp. If you are caught, you die instantly. Therefore, there is a bit of a survival element to this title.

13 Untitled Goose Game

The core concept of Untitled Goose Game is as simple as it gets. You play as an obnoxious Goose who roams around a village and torments the people living there. The village is split into a few different areas.

When you enter one, you’re given a list of things to accomplish in that area. Most of the tasks involve stealing things or tricking people in some way. While it might not sound like it, these are actually puzzles that you must complete. Some are small and obvious, while others are a lot trickier. All of them are a lot of fun, and the game is very comical. It’s also unique, as not many games put you in the role of a mischievous goose.

12 Superhot

While there are many first-person puzzle titles, there aren’t many first-person shooter puzzlers. After all, the genres are complete opposites. Yet, the team behind Superhot has managed to meld them together in a clever way.

For every level, you’re put into a completely white room that contains red enemies. Each one of them can kill you in one shot. You have to figure out a way to get them first. To do so, you have to make use of the fact that time only moves forward when you move. So, you have to figure out when and where to move at any given point so you can avoid their fire and get them with your own. This process is compelling and surprisingly challenging.

11 Unravel Two

Unravel Two is one of the best puzzle platformers you can play on PlayStation systems. You control two adorable creatures that are completely made of yarn. The advantage of their strange biology is that they can use a bit of themselves as a rope to swing on.

Most of the puzzling and platforming in the game revolves around swinging. You also need to push some things and do the occasional wall jump. It’s all about progressing to the end of each colorful level.

10 Escape Academy

Escape rooms have taken the world by storm, offering up a cerebral alternative to a more typical mid-week nighttime outing. It’s no wonder, then, that Escape Academy looks to capitalize on this global phenomenon.

Unlike your more ordinary escape room game, Escape Academy puts you in the shoes of a budding escape artist who must test their puzzle-solving skills in various challenging hand-crafted rooms, all designed by escape room experts. As with all escape rooms, they are better with friends. Escape Academy is no different in this regard as it, thankfully, has online and local co-op.

9 The Pedestrian

One of the most appealing aspects of The Pedestrian is its delightfully unique premise and aesthetic. You play as a stick figure as they navigate through various forms of public signage to traverse through a series of visually appealing urban environments.

It’s a simple idea that ramps up in difficulty as you progress through the levels while rearranging and reconnecting various signs to get to the next stage. It’s extremely inventive, with a fantastic musical score and brilliant use of the PS5’s haptics on the DualSense.

8 Puyo Puyo Tetris 2

Taking the classic gameplay from beloved puzzle classics, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 is a puzzle game for true fans of the puzzle genre. The aim of the game is to clear lines or combine colours in Tetris and Puyo, or merge both classic gameplay elements in a cool fusing of the two vintage games.

There is a load of ways to play, including a meaty single-player offering and a variety of online and offline multiplayer modes to sink your teeth into. It makes for some awesome competitive fun and is especially a great game for couples.

7 Return Of The Obra Dinn

Return of the Obra Dinn is an incredibly unique adventure that’s chock-full of intrigue. You take the reins of an insurance investigator who must unravel the mystery of what happened to the Obra Dinn – a cargo ship that left five years prior and returned without its crew.

It’s an intelligent adventure where you must use your wits to connect the dots. Equipped with a magic pocket watch that allows you to return to the moment of each crew member’s death, you need to put together the clues and use logic to solve the puzzle of each murder, and its simple 1-bit art style is a joy to look at, too.

6 Chicory: A Colorful Tale

Appealing to the crayon-wielding inner child within us all, Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a satisfying and colorful adventure that allows you to inject some life into a literal blank canvas. Chicory, the world’s most famous artist, is missing, and it’s up to her number one canine fan to pick up her magical brush and add color back into the world once more.

Each level is reminiscent of a page from a coloring book and gives you the freedom to color the world how you see fit. Much of the game’s puzzles need to be solved by manipulating the environment with paint, often revealing areas and opening up new possibilities. It’s vibrant and gorgeous, with an astoundingly beautiful original soundtrack from the legendary Celeste and Minecraft composer, Lena Raine.

5 Manifold Garden

You may need to brace yourself for a bit of perspective-shifting nausea when trying your hand at this mindbogglingly brilliant first-person puzzler. Manifold Garden has you navigate through a series of gravity-defying impossible architecture that echoes the disorienting brilliance of an M.C. Escher painting.

Eventually, you’ll be breaking the laws of physics with the best of them as you learn to master the game’s impossibly inexplicable perspective-based traversal to solve a series of extraordinary puzzles. The art style is so appealing, it could very easily be displayed in a modern art gallery, and no one would bat an eyelid.

4 Maquette

Maquette is another mind-bending puzzler that plays with perspective and scale in extraordinary ways. Taking a page straight out of Alice in Wonderland, you can drastically change the shapes and sizes of the world’s objects, depending on your positioning and perspective.

What results is a reality-shifting puzzle experience that will mess with your sense of scale. You’ll come across gaps in the ground that appear as huge chasms as you get up close, as well as a tiny doll house that turns into a sizable mansion that would put Buckingham Palace to shame. It also has an interesting story beneath it all, voiced by Hollywood stars Bryce Dallas Howard and Seth Gabel.

3 Gorogoa

The gorgeous visuals just keep on coming. Gorogoa puts its interesting story against the backdrop of thousands of beautifully crafted illustrations. Each painting in this vast collection was painstakingly hand-drawn by James Roberts – it’s absolutely breathtaking.

Each scene will have a selection of these gorgeously designed panels, which you must arrange to solve the puzzle that presents itself. The art needs to be manipulated in inventive ways in order to progress and unfold the story. It’s one of the best-looking puzzlers out there and was influenced by some of the world’s most famous and celebrated illustrators.

2 The Witness

From the same creator of the critically acclaimed sidescrolling platformer, Braid, The Witness takes Jonathon Blow’s brand of intellectual puzzle-solving to a fully explorable and open 3D space. From the get-go, you find yourself on an island with no memory of how you got there.

What stands between you and finding your way back home are roughly over 500 puzzles scattered about the vibrantly colourful island. Though deceptively simple at first, each puzzle builds upon what came before, and you must use your accumulated knowledge of each to help you solve what’s to come.

1 The Talos Principle

Though it seems like an age since it was first released, The Talos Principle still holds up as one of the best puzzle games ever made. It expertly blends intelligent puzzle design with a captivating and intellectually stimulating narrative, that will have you asking difficult philosophical questions throughout your journey.

You take control of a sentient AI who winds up on a strange island full of ancient ruins and futuristic technology. Your creator has given you the not-so-simple task of solving the many laser puzzles dispersed through the stunning environments – all while questioning your purpose and the very nature of your existence as you know it.