12 Best PS Vita Puzzle Games

You never control Mion directly. She is a silver-haired girl with branches growing from her head, and you guide Lumen, a firefly moved with the front touchscreen, while she follows wherever it goes. A second firefly, Umbra, lives in her shadow and takes over with a tap of the rear touchpad, reaching objects too far away for Mion. Nippon Ichi Software made it, and there is almost no dialog or text at all, just gloomy rooms that flicker like an old film projector.

The creepy atmosphere and grim story are enough to keep you hooked. It is also one of the hardest games on the console, built on trial and error and instant death. One reviewer needed 48 tries to get past a single checkpoint in the second level, so playing it can feel like an ordeal.

Ecolibrium hands you a virtual ecosystem and asks you to keep it alive. You grow plants and animals by balancing four variables: Water, Minerals, Vegetation and Meat. Get the mix right and life spreads. Get it wrong and things start dying, which is a lot of guilt for a handheld game. You earn and spend ecopoints along the way, and a series of multi-stage challenges gives all the tinkering some structure.

The Spanish studio StormBASIC made it for Sony, and it came out in Europe in 2012 before reaching North America in 2013. Reviews were mixed. Critics called it deep and well designed, but also said it is hard to recommend to anyone but the most bored. It is a slow, thoughtful sim, and it rewards patience more than quick fingers.

Smart As... is Sony's answer to Brain Age, made by Climax Studios. Every day you play one game from each of its four areas, Arithmetic, Logic, Observation and Language, and get a Brain Power Score you can compare with the rest of the world. There are 20 games in total, and they use nearly every part of the Vita, from the rear touchpad to the gyro sensors and AR cards. John Cleese narrates, which is exactly as delightful as it sounds.

Every game in it is great fun, without exception. Unlocking them is less fun. You get 4 games on the first day, and the remaining 16 open one by one on the days after, a rule that is hugely restrictive and utterly unnecessary. Once they are open, each one has difficulty levels up to Genius.

Metrico drops a small figure into living infographics. Across 6 worlds full of bar charts, line diagrams and pie charts, every graph reacts directly to your movements and inputs, so the way you move changes the level in front of you. The level itself is the puzzle, and figuring out what makes a chart grow is half the fun. Digital Dreams made it as a Vita exclusive, and later puzzles even use the camera.

Critics called it beautiful and ingenious, with seriously sharp brainteasers at its heart. One reviewer warned that you might not feel comfortable playing it on a bus, twisting the handheld in every direction while people stare. Laborious controls get in the way more often than they should, especially when the tilt and rear touchpad come into play.

Baby is a little girl with an upside-down face and a heart-shaped balloon, and you lead her through a world of children's fantasies and fears by holding her hand on the touchscreen. Popping other characters' balloons with a tap unlocks new backdrops, each with its own power, and you swap between up to three of them with a swipe of the rear touchpad. Many puzzles demand quick shifts between backdrops.

Ovosonico made it, led by Massimo Guarini, who had worked on Shadows of the Damned, and the art follows the style of Edward Gorey. Eurogamer said it walks the fine line between the weird and the wonderful with aplomb. Other critics found it a breezy puzzle game that is challenging in all the wrong ways, and the touch controls sometimes work against it.

Escape Plan was a launch game for the Vita and the debut of Fun Bits Interactive, produced by Chris Millar of Fat Princess. You guide Lil and Laarg, two monochrome prisoners, through booby-trapped rooms by tracing paths and tapping obstacles out of the way. Traps range from a single brick on the floor to enormous rotating fan blades. When the two are inflated with helium you tilt the console, and to save them from fast traps you pinch the Vita, touching the front and back at once.

Fail, and you get a gruesome death in crisp black and white, set to a classical soundtrack. A preview called it perhaps the best showcase of the Vita's unique capabilities. Minor control issues keep it from perfection, and a PS4 version followed in 2013.

Rose is a girl trapped in a ruined castle, with a thorny rose attached to her body that lets her drain the blood and color from objects. Drained objects freeze in place, becoming bridges or clearing a path to the exit. She is mostly helpless alone, so a faceless stone giant carries and throws her, and it can fall any distance or walk through thorns without getting hurt. You switch between the two to solve each room.

Nippon Ichi made this one too, and after Yomawari one reviewer joked that somebody at the company hates little girls. The story comes in blood memories, shadow puppet scenes that get very dark. Few puzzle games make you care this much about their heroine, but the murky art hides the line between background and foreground, so you will restart rooms more than you would like.

You are Dokuro, a skeletal worker for the Dark Lord who sees the captive princess crying and decides to help her escape the castle. He flips switches to open paths, and after drinking a potion he can carry the princess himself. The levels grow steadily more complex as you climb, and the whole rescue is drawn in a storybook art style that softens the gloom.

That look has a sweet origin. Director Noriaki Kazama had worked on gory games like Ninja Gaiden Sigma, but after he had a baby he browsed children's books at a bookstore and was inspired by the art. Game Arts made it for the Vita first. Critics found it stunningly beautiful, but unbalanced difficulty and humdrum puzzles turn the later floors into a slog.

PulzAR turns your table into the puzzle board. You lay the Vita's AR Play Cards on any flat surface, and the rear camera puts mirrors, splitters and colour changers on top of them. Your job is to bounce a laser through them to power a rocket and fire it at the deadly meteors heading for Earth. Nudging a card with your fingers moves the mirror on screen, which is still a neat trick.

Few games made the AR cards feel worth keeping. One critic said it shows off the Vita in a way other early games did not, and another praised its brilliant table-top puzzling. The tracking has hiccups, though, so expect the odd mirror to wander off mid-shot.

Nine kidnapped strangers are split into three teams and forced into a death game by a masked figure called Zero. Each chapter covers a 90-minute stretch, and you can play them out of order, moving between animated scenes, escape-the-room puzzles and moral decisions. It is the last game in the Zero Escape series, written and directed by Kotaro Uchikoshi, with music by Shinji Hosoe.

It nearly did not happen. The project was put on hold in 2014 because the series sold poorly in Japan, until fans started a campaign called Operation Bluebird and development came back in 2015. Its elaborate puzzles and mind-bending plot make it a fitting end to the trilogy. The animation is another story: characters move like they wandered out of a Dire Straits video from the 1980s.

Two-color blocks fall in 2x2 chunks, and you rotate them into squares of a single color before a bar called the Time Line sweeps across and wipes them out. If the stack reaches the top, the run is over. It came out alongside the Vita in February 2012, and you can play with the front touchscreen, the back touchpad or the buttons. There are six modes, from the long Voyage run to Duel.

Producer James Mielke first pitched it to Ubisoft as "Daft Punk Lumines", but the band was too busy writing the music for Tron: Legacy. For fans of the PSP original, it was the most fun the series had been since its 2004 debut. You can ignore the touch controls, which are frustrating and, thankfully, completely optional.

Sigma is abducted and forced to play the Nonary Game with eight other people, run by an AI that looks like a CGI rabbit. It is a rough morning by anyone's standards. The game swaps between escape-the-room puzzles and visual novel sections, where you choose to ally with or betray the others in the Ambidex Game. Those choices lead to 24 different endings, and a flowchart lets you jump back and try another path.

Chunsoft made it only because the first game, Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, was an unexpected critical success in North America. Work started on the DS before moving to the 3DS and Vita. Critics called it a mature and delightfully dark whodunnit. Only the ending wobbles, as the closing chapter turns overwrought after all that careful setup.