# Top 31 Indie Puzzle Games of All Time

> Some of these broke brains in a single weekend, others took months, and at least one is mostly about tidying a shelf. Small studios, enormous ideas.

*By YPB Team · Published October 31, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/top-31-indie-puzzle-games-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Witness** — score 1000/1000
   A 2016 open-island puzzler built around hundreds of line-drawing panels and hidden environmental secrets.
2. **The Room** — score 961/1000
   Fireproof Games' 2012 tactile puzzle-box game that became a mobile phenomenon.
3. **Baba Is You** — score 756/1000
   A 2019 puzzle game where you push word blocks around to rewrite the rules of each level.
4. **Antichamber** — score 689/1000
   Alexander Bruce's 2013 mind-bending puzzler set in a non-Euclidean maze.
5. **Return of the Obra Dinn** — score 689/1000
   Lucas Pope's 2018 deduction game about identifying the fate of every crew member of a ghost ship.
6. **Monument Valley** — score 689/1000
   ustwo's 2014 mobile puzzler guiding a princess through Escher-like impossible architecture.
7. **Braid** — score 611/1000
   Jonathan Blow's 2008 time-rewinding platformer that helped launch the modern indie scene.
8. **Stephen's Sausage Roll** — score 611/1000
   Stephen Lavelle's notoriously hard 2016 block-pushing game about grilling giant sausages.
9. **Gorogoa** — score 611/1000
   A 2017 hand-illustrated puzzle game where you rearrange and layer picture panels to connect scenes.
10. **Viewfinder** — score 611/1000
   Sad Owl Studios' 2023 game where photographs become real 3D spaces you can walk into.
11. **Human Resource Machine** — score 517/1000
   Tomorrow Corporation's 2015 office-themed game that teaches programming through puzzles.
12. **Snakebird** — score 517/1000
   Noumenon Games' deceptively cute and brutally hard 2015 snake puzzle game.
13. **The Swapper** — score 517/1000
   Facepalm Games' 2013 sci-fi puzzler about cloning yourself and swapping between bodies.
14. **The Talos Principle** — score 517/1000
   Croteam's 2014 first-person puzzler mixing laser and block puzzles with philosophy about consciousness.
15. **SpaceChem** — score 402/1000
   Zachtronics' 2011 breakout puzzle game about building molecule-assembling reactors.
16. **World of Goo** — score 402/1000
   A 2008 physics game about building wobbly structures out of living goo balls.
17. **Limbo** — score 402/1000
   Playdead's 2010 monochrome puzzle-platformer about a boy in a deadly shadowy forest.
18. **Cocoon** — score 402/1000
   Geometric Interactive's 2023 puzzle adventure about carrying entire worlds inside orbs.
19. **Opus Magnum** — score 402/1000
   Zachtronics' 2017 alchemy engineering puzzler about designing elegant transmutation machines.
20. **Machinarium** — score 402/1000
   Amanita Design's 2009 hand-drawn point-and-click puzzle adventure starring a little robot.
21. **The Case of the Golden Idol** — score 402/1000
   Color Gray Games' 2022 detective game about reconstructing murders from frozen scenes.
22. **Her Story** — score 402/1000
   Sam Barlow's 2015 FMV mystery solved by searching a database of police interview clips.
23. **Chants of Sennaar** — score 0/1000
   Rundisc's 2023 language-deciphering puzzle game inspired by the Tower of Babel.
24. **Fez** — score 0/1000
   A 2012 platformer where rotating a 2D world in 3D reveals layers of cryptic puzzles.
25. **Inside** — score 0/1000
   Playdead's 2016 follow-up to Limbo, a dark and wordless puzzle-platformer with a famous ending.
26. **Superliminal** — score 0/1000
   A 2019 first-person puzzler built on forced perspective, where objects change size as you look at them.
27. **Patrick's Parabox** — score 0/1000
   A 2022 recursive block-pushing puzzler where boxes contain whole levels inside themselves.
28. **Manifold Garden** — score 0/1000
   William Chyr's 2019 gravity-shifting puzzler set in infinitely repeating architecture.
29. **Unpacking** — score 0/1000
   Witch Beam's 2021 zen puzzle game that tells a life story through unpacking moving boxes.
30. **A Little to the Left** — score 0/1000
   Max Inferno's 2022 cozy puzzle game about sorting, stacking and tidying household objects.
31. **Mini Metro** — score 0/1000
   Dinosaur Polo Club's 2015 minimalist puzzle game about designing subway maps for growing cities.

Tags: games, indie, all time, puzzle