Most of the game's puzzles follow a certain internal logic. You learn the mechanics, identify the problem, 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 here.”
These are the moments that require you to think outside the controller, beyond the game window, and sometimes beyond reality itself. I adore them and these are some of the best. Sometimes they're frustrating and opaque and make you want to tear your hair out, but that's often the point.
11
Pokemon X and Y
The Evolving Inkay
Pokemon have always had some weird evolution methods — trade while holding a specific item, level up near a mossy rock, and the like — but Inkay took the cookie. This unassuming little octopus Pokemon evolves into Malamar at level 30.. but only if you physically turn your entire 3DS upside down while it's powering up. There is no offer option. This is not an in-game item. You, the adult, are holding your expensive handheld console the wrong way up.
The best part? The game basically doesn't suggest to you that this is what you should do. The 3DS was Nintendo's first handheld with an internal gyroscope, and apparently the development team couldn't resist finding a use for it.
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It makes some thematic sense since Malamar is literally a reverse Inkay, but “thematic sense” is cold comfort when you've spent hours wondering why your octopus won't evolve. On the Switch, you have to do it in handheld mode with the Joy-Cons attached, which is kind of it even more embarrassingly. I respect the commitment to the piece.
10
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
Trust nothing
Eternal Darkness didn't just feature unconventional puzzles; it made his whole personality unconventional. As your character's sanity meter depletes, the game starts attacking you, the player, with fake error screens, volume bars that change on their own, simulated save data wipes, and even a fake blue screen of death. On the GameCube, of all things.
What earns Eternal Darkness a spot on this list isn't really any single puzzle, but the way its sound system forces you to constantly question what's real. When nothing on the screen can be trusted, every interaction becomes its own little challenge for lateral thinking. In the game, you don't just solve puzzles – you solve the puzzle of whether the game is being honest with you at all. It's exhausting. I loved it.
9
Grandma is you
Rules are suggestions
Most puzzle games give you a fixed set of rules and ask you to find a solution. Baba Is You gives you the rules like moving objects and asks you to rewrite them. The basic logic of each level—what you control, what kills you, what constitutes a win—is laid out as physical blocks of text that you can move around and rearrange.
Is he stuck because the lava is deadly? Just push the word “HOT” away from “LAVA” to make it no longer dangerous. Can't reach the flag? Instead, make the wall a win condition. It's a game where the most powerful thing at your disposal isn't any item or ability, but the realization that the rules you thought were fixed are only suggestions. The difficulty ramps up impressively as the consequences of this freedom become more and more overwhelming, and the late-game puzzles really had me laying on the floor for a while.
8
Fes
Black monolith
Fez is full of mysterious puzzles, but one stands above all others: the Black Monolith. This tall obelisk represents a code that seemed truly impossible to decipher upon its discovery. It wasn't tied to anything visible in the game. It didn't follow any established pattern. He just sat there and radiated smug energy.
In the end, the solution was brutally forced by the community rather than elegantly deduced, and that became its own fascinating story. Players spent weeks collaborating online and developing elaborate theories about the game's number system and language before the answer was finally spoken.
Whether the Black Monolith was intended to require the collective efforts of thousands of people or was simply too smart for its own good is still up for debate—the puzzle still appears to be technically “unsolved”—but you have to admire the audacity to include such an impenetrable puzzle in a game you can otherwise finish in an afternoon.
Psycho Mantis
Metal Gear Solid's Psycho Mantis boss fight remains the gold standard for fourth-wall-breaking game design, and it's not hard to see why. The session 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 piece of theater, but the real genius comes when you actually try to fight it.
Every attack misses. Every shot goes out. The game tells you it's reading your every controller move, and it's not bluffing – combat is functionally impossible by normal means. The solution is to disconnect the controller from port 1 and plug it into port 2 so that Mantis can no longer “read” your inputs. It asked you to leave the game entirely and 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 it does a very convincing job of it for the first hour or so. Then things go sideways in a way that 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 a Monica character who has realized herself, deleted the other girls from the game files, and now wants to stare into your soul for all eternity.
The solution is not found in any dialog tree or game mechanics. You need to close the game, go to the actual game files on your computer, open the Characters folder and delete Monica's .chr file yourself. It's a moment that blurs the line between playing a game and doing something with it in a way that felt genuinely permeable 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 and go through Act 1 to see each character's scenes, which the game never tells you. Deleting additional character sets at various points also triggers unique reactions. The whole thing is designed so that the most interesting content will be found by players willing to poke around in the game's actual file structure, a wonderfully inscrutable approach to puzzle design that hides inside what looks like the least threatening game imaginable.
5
The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
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 genius. Deep in the Temple of the Ocean King, you will find a room with a sacred crest and the instruction: “Press the sacred crest on the sea map to transfer it.” You stare at it. You knock on things. You draw on the map. You will try everything that the touch screen allows you to do. Nothing works.
The only solution is to close the DS lid. Seriously.
The top screen will press against the bottom screen and “punch” a ridge into your sea chart. It's so beautifully literal it's almost infuriating. Sometimes the best solutions are the ones hiding in the most obvious place imaginable.
4
Encryption
Stand up!
Inscryption starts out as a thrilling cabin card game against a shadowy figure, and if you take that at face value, you're pretty much missing out on everything. The first big revelation comes when you realize 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 going too far into spoiler territory, the game's later acts ask you to engage with it on a whole other level, blurring the lines between the game and its own files. Inscryption soon teaches you that the boundaries you assume exist are meant to be broken, and it keeps finding new boundaries to break all the way to the credits. If you haven't played it, go blind. Trust me on this one. It's one of those games.
3
Tunic
Secret language
Tunic looks like a charming Zelda-like adventure with an adorable fox protagonist, and it is, but beneath the surface lies 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 a cute flavor of text. It's actually the key to everything.
Deciphering the manual's language and cross-referencing its cryptic schematics with hidden details scattered throughout the game world will reveal a whole secret layer of puzzles that most players will never see. The final challenge, known as The Golden Path, essentially requires you to decode the game's hidden language and understand the deeper structure of its world. It's a puzzle that rewards obsessive attention to detail and a willingness to look past what the game looks like – and the moment it all comes together is one of the most satisfying eureka moments I've experienced in years.
2
Hotel Dusk: Room 215
Jigsaw
Hotel Dusk is packed with puzzles that take advantage of the DS's unique features, and bless it, it really does go all out. The most famous is a jigsaw puzzle that was worked on by a young girl named Melissa. After you help her finish, you have to read the message written on the back – but the completed puzzle appears on the top screen, out of reach of any touch input.
The solution is pretty literal: it's another case where you just have to close the DS lid. The game interprets this as physically flipping the puzzle and revealing a 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 by pressing the two screens – and the two displayed characters – together. It's the kind of design that understands that the DS wasn't just a screen; it was a physical object with moving parts.
