Most game puzzles follow a certain internal logic. You learn the mechanics, you spot the problem, you apply the solution. It’s satisfying, sure, but it rarely makes you feel like you’ve just pulled off something truly devious. Then there are the puzzles that look you dead in the eye and say, “No, the answer isn’t in here.”
These are the moments that demand you think beyond the controller, beyond the game window, and sometimes beyond reality itself. I adore them, and these are some of the very best. They’re sometimes frustrating and opaque and make you want to tear your hair out, but that’s often the point.
11
Pokemon X & Y
Evolving Inkay
Pokemon has always had some odd evolution methods – trade while holding a specific item, level up near a mossy rock, that sort of thing – but Inkay takes the biscuit. This unassuming little squid Pokemon evolves into Malamar at level 30… but only if you physically turn your entire 3DS upside down while it levels up. Not a menu option. Not an in-game item. You, a grown adult, holding your expensive handheld console the wrong way up.
The best part? The game gives you essentially no indication that this is what you’re supposed to do. The 3DS was the first Nintendo handheld with an internal gyroscope, and the development team clearly couldn’t resist finding a use for it.
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It makes a certain thematic sense, since Malamar is literally an upside-down Inkay, but ‘thematic sense’ is cold comfort when you’ve been wondering for hours why your squid won’t evolve. On the Switch, you have to do it in handheld mode with the Joy-Cons attached, which is somehow even more awkward. I respect the commitment to the bit.
10
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
Don’t Trust Anything
Eternal Darkness didn’t just feature unconventional puzzles; it made the unconventional its entire personality. As your character’s sanity meter depletes, the game begins attacking you, the player, with fake error screens, volume bars that appear to change on their own, simulated save data deletion, and even a pretend Blue Screen of Death. On the GameCube, of all things.
What earns Eternal Darkness a spot on this list isn’t any single puzzle, really, but the way its sanity system forces you to constantly question what’s real. When nothing on screen can be trusted, every interaction becomes its own little lateral-thinking challenge. You’re not just solving puzzles in the game – you’re solving the puzzle of whether the game is even being honest with you. It’s exhausting. I loved it.
9
Baba Is You
Rules Are Suggestions
Most puzzle games give you a fixed set of rules and ask you to find the solution. Baba Is You gives you the rules as movable objects and asks you to rewrite them. The foundational logic of each level – what you control, what kills you, what constitutes a win — is laid out as physical text blocks you can push around and rearrange.
Stuck because lava is deadly? Just push the word “HOT” away from “LAVA” so it stops being dangerous. Can’t reach the flag? Make the wall the win condition instead. It’s a game where the most powerful thing at your disposal isn’t any item or ability, but the dawning realisation that the rules you assumed were fixed are just suggestions. The difficulty ramps up spectacularly as the implications of this freedom become increasingly mind-bending, and the late-game puzzles genuinely made me want to lie down on the floor for a bit.
8
Fez
The Black Monolith
Fez is full of cryptic puzzles, but one stands above all others: the Black Monolith. This towering obelisk presents a code that, upon its discovery, seemed genuinely impossible to crack. It wasn’t tied to anything visible in the game. It didn’t follow any established pattern. It just sat there, radiating smug energy.
The solution was eventually brute-forced by the community rather than elegantly deduced, and that became its own fascinating story. Players spent weeks collaborating online, developing elaborate theories about the game’s number system and language before the answer was finally crowbarred out.
Whether the Black Monolith was intended to require the collective efforts of thousands or was simply too clever for its own good is still debated – the puzzle still seems to be technically ‘unsolved’ – but you have to admire the audacity of including a puzzle this impenetrable in a game you can otherwise finish in an afternoon.
Psycho Mantis
The Psycho Mantis boss fight in Metal Gear Solid remains the gold standard for fourth-wall-breaking game design, and it’s not hard to see why. The encounter begins with Mantis ‘reading your mind’ by scanning your PlayStation memory card and commenting on save data from other Konami games. It’s a wonderful bit of theatre, but the real genius comes when you actually try to fight him.
Every attack misses. Every shot goes wide. The game tells you he’s reading your every move through the controller, and he’s not bluffing – the fight is functionally impossible through normal means. The solution is to unplug your controller from Port 1 and plug it into Port 2, so Mantis can no longer ‘read’ your inputs. It asked you to step outside the game entirely, and it set the template for every meta-puzzle that followed.
6
Doki Doki Literature Club
Delete Her
Doki Doki Literature Club presents itself as a saccharine anime dating sim, and for the first hour or so, it does a very convincing job of that. Then things go sideways in a way I really don’t want to spoil for anyone who hasn’t played it. What I will say is that the game eventually traps you in a room with the character Monika, who has become self-aware, deleted the other girls from the game’s files, and now wants to stare into your soul for all eternity.
The solution isn’t found in any dialogue tree or gameplay mechanic. You have to close the game, navigate to the actual game files on your computer, open the Characters folder, and delete Monika’s .chr file yourself. It’s a moment that blurs the line between playing a game and doing something to a game in a way that felt genuinely transgressive in 2017 – and it’s far from the only time DDLC asks you to think outside its window. The good ending requires you to save-scum your way through Act 1 to view every character’s scenes, something the game never tells you to do. Deleting other character files at different points triggers unique responses, too. The whole thing is designed so that the most interesting content is found by players willing to poke at the game’s actual file structure, which is a wonderfully devious approach to puzzle design hiding inside what looks like the least threatening game imaginable.
5
The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
The Sacred Crest
Phantom Hourglass is one of those love-it-or-hate-it Zelda games, but even its harshest critics tend to admit that one particular puzzle is a stroke of genius. Deep in the Temple of the Ocean King, you find a room with a sacred crest and an instruction: “Press the sacred crest against the sea chart to transfer it.” You stare at it. You tap things. You draw on the map. You try everything the touch screen will let you do. Nothing works.
The solution is just to close the DS lid. Seriously.
The top screen presses against the bottom screen, ‘stamping’ the crest onto your sea chart. It’s so beautifully literal that it’s almost infuriating. Sometimes the best solutions are the ones hiding in the most obvious place imaginable.
4
Inscryption
Stand Up!
Inscryption begins as a tense cabin-bound card game against a shadowy figure, and if you take it at face value, you’re going to miss basically everything. The first major revelation comes when you realise you can stand up from the card table, walk around the cabin, and start solving puzzles in the physical space around you – puzzles that feed back into the card game and change its rules.
That’s just the beginning, and like so many times with this list, I’m reluctant to say more. Without venturing too deep into spoiler territory, the game’s later acts ask you to engage with it on an entirely different level, blurring the line between the game and its own files. Inscryption teaches you early on that the boundaries you assume exist are meant to be broken, and it keeps finding new boundaries to shatter right through to the credits. If you haven’t played it, please go in blind. Trust me on this one. It’s one of those games.
3
Tunic
The Secret Language
Tunic looks like a charming Zelda-like adventure with an adorable fox protagonist, and it is that, but hidden beneath the surface is one of the most elaborate meta-puzzles in modern gaming. The game comes with an in-game instruction manual, written in a fictional language, that most players initially dismiss as cute flavour text. It is, in fact, the key to everything.
Deciphering the manual’s language and cross-referencing its cryptic diagrams with hidden details scattered throughout the game world reveals an entire secret layer of puzzles that most players will never see. The final challenge, known as the Golden Path, requires you to have essentially decoded the game’s hidden language and understood the deeper structure behind its world. It’s a puzzle that rewards obsessive attention to detail and a willingness to look past what the game appears to be – and the moment it all clicks together is one of the most satisfying eureka moments I’ve had in years.
2
Hotel Dusk: Room 215
The Jigsaw
Hotel Dusk is packed with puzzles that exploit the DS’s unique features, and bless it, it really goes all in. The most famous involves a jigsaw puzzle that a young girl named Melissa has been working on. After you help her complete it, you need to read a message written on the back – but the completed puzzle is displayed on the top screen, well out of reach of any touch input.
The solution is beautifully literal: it’s another case where you simply have to close the DS lid. The game interprets this as physically flipping the puzzle over, revealing the hidden message on the other side. It’s so simple and so elegant that most players spend far too long tapping every possible option before the penny drops. A later puzzle similarly requires you to blow into the DS microphone and then close the lid to perform CPR, pressing the two screens – and the two characters displayed on them – together. It’s the kind of design that understands the DS wasn’t just a screen; it was a physical object with moving parts.
