20 Best PS4 Puzzle Games

The Pedestrian puts you in charge of a stick figure, the kind found on exit signs and toilet doors, and you never leave the signs. The city around them is a full 3D world, but you only move across the flat faces of street and building signs. At first each sign has one way in and one way out. Then the game gives you sets of signs to rearrange, so a ladder down from one sign has to meet a ladder up into the one below it. Once you walk through a doorway between two signs, that link is fixed until you restart the level.

It first came out on PC, and the PS4 port was announced for January 2021. It pairs well with Superliminal, further up this list. Both games play tricks with how you see things, and both are over before they wear out their welcome.

Hue is a puzzle platformer about colour. Hue is looking for his mother, who turned an 'impossible colour' when the Annular Spectrum, a ring she made for seeing and changing colour, broke apart. You collect its eight shards as you go. Pick a colour from the wheel and the background turns that colour, and anything else in that colour stops existing until you switch again. A wall in your way can vanish. So can the laser that was about to kill you, if you picked well.

Fiddlesticks made the first prototype in two weeks, and the game came out on 30 August 2016 for PC and PS4 together. Players remember it as short and sweet, with an art style all its own. The puzzles get harder with each new colour you unlock.

Hitman Go turns Agent 47 into a game piece. Each level is a board of nodes and lines, the characters are modelled as miniature figures, and the whole thing is turn-based. Nothing on the board moves until you do, so the trick is reading the board before you commit. It was the first game from Square Enix Montréal, and the team decided a board game suited Hitman better than a straight action game.

It started on phones in 2014, and the Definitive Edition came to PS4 in February 2016. Its successor, Lara Croft Go, followed in August 2015, so the phone versions were already a small series by the time this one reached the console. Give it an evening. It is the one Hitman game where nobody sees you sweat, mostly because you are allowed to stop and think.

Superliminal starts with you falling asleep to a late-night ad for Dr. Pierce's dream therapy program. You wake up stuck in "a dream where perception is reality", and the game means it. Pick up a small cube, look at a far wall and let go, and the cube is now the size of that wall. Most of the puzzles are built on forced perspective, and the first time it works, you will laugh out loud.

A six-person team at Pillow Castle made it, led by Albert Shih, then a student at Carnegie Mellon. The demo was shown at the 2013 Tokyo Game Show, and the PS4 version did not arrive until July 2020. Players say everyone should try it at least once, and they are right. It will change how you look at your own living room for a day or two.

Unravel Two is about two Yarnys, small creatures made of yarn. The first game was single-player only. This one can be played alone or by two people on the same couch, with each player holding one Yarny and the two of them tied together. They must work together to solve puzzles, which is a sweet idea for a game and a good test of a friendship. EA announced it at its June 2018 show and released it the same day.

The story begins with a red Yarny washed ashore after a storm at sea, and most of the game happens on an island, with harder challenge levels on the side. It won Family Game of the Year at the D.I.C.E. Awards. Players recommend it for couch co-op, and if you have someone to share a sofa with, start here rather than with the first game.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a bomb defusal game where nobody has the full picture. One player is the Defuser and has the bomb on screen. The other players are Experts holding the manual. The Defuser cannot look at the manual, and the Experts cannot see the bomb, so one side describes wires and symbols while the other side flips pages and gives orders. Each bomb is made of modules, with a countdown timer ticking, and mistakes cost strikes that speed the timer up.

It started at Global Game Jam 2014, where its three developers had a few Oculus Rift kits to play with. It was built for VR first, and an August 2018 update dropped that requirement. The bombs are generated fresh each time, so you never solve the same one twice. The hardest puzzle in it is usually your friend trying to describe a symbol.

Statik is a PlayStation VR puzzle game, which makes it the one game on this list that needs the headset. Players who own a PS VR keep bringing it up when someone asks for a good puzzle game, often as the first thing to try in VR. One player said it has "the same tone and mood as Portal", which is about as good a compliment as a puzzle game can get.

If your headset has been sitting in a drawer, this is a good reason to dig it out.

The Bridge is a black-and-white puzzle game drawn by hand to look like an Escher print. You control an Escher-like man, but you also control the world. Rotate the level and gravity follows, so a ceiling can become a floor and a falling object can become a problem. The puzzles are all about working out which way is down at each moment, and what will move when it changes.

It started on PC and was later ported to a long list of systems, PS4 and PS Vita among them. Players recommend it for its Escher-style puzzles that play with dimensions. It is not the hardest game here, and that is part of its charm. You can finish it in a few sittings and walk away feeling very clever.

Catherine: Full Body was made by the team behind Persona, including director Katsura Hashino and character designer Shigenori Soejima. It started as an idea for an older audience near the end of Persona 4's development. Katherine wants to marry Vincent, and his indecision is wearing her patience thin. At night his problems turn into towers. The puzzles are climbing stages scored on your time, and items like spare blocks and energy drinks help Vincent climb more steps at a time.

The original came out on PS3 in 2011. Full Body was released in 2019 for the PS4, with extra content and a new character, Rin. Critics found the original hard, and Atlus released a patch with an Easy mode. The original sold over one million copies by 2017. Players count it as a puzzle game first, even with all the relationship drama around it.

Puyo Puyo Tetris puts Sega's colour-matching blobs and the most famous falling blocks in one box, and lets them fight. It was the first Tetris game Sega had published since a PS2 collection in 2006. It plays by modern Tetris rules, so the pieces turn and look the way current Tetris players expect. There is a story mode too, about a spaceship that crash lands on Ringo's world, and it is exactly as silly as that sounds.

The PS4 version came out in Japan in December 2014, but English players waited until April 2017 for the localized release. Players call it amazing, and a few call it underrated, which is fair for a game that spent years as an import. It is at its best with a second player on the couch.

Thomas Was Alone is a puzzle platformer starring rectangles, and somehow you end up caring about them. Each shape has a name and a personality, and the narrator, Danny Wallace, gives them a voice. His performance won a BAFTA. The goal in each level is to get the shapes onto their own exits at the same time, which means they have to help each other get there.

Mike Bithell made it, and he credits Sony UK's Shahid Ahmad with helping bring Thomas to PlayStation. It ended up on PS4 along with a long list of other systems. Puzzle fans keep recommending it to anyone who missed it. It is still one of the warmest games on this list, which is a strange thing to say about a red rectangle.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a detective game set on a ghost ship, and your job is mostly paperwork. You have to name everyone who was aboard and say how each one died. You do it by stepping into frozen moments of death, one flashback at a time, and working out who is who from whatever the scene shows you. It is all drawn in a 1-bit, two-colour style inspired by early Macintosh games.

It is the second commercial game from Lucas Pope, who made Papers, Please. He teased it in 2014 and it took four more years. It came to PC in October 2018 and reached PS4 a year later. It won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, and players rank it among the best detective puzzle games out there. Keep a notebook nearby.

Fez stars Gomez, who lives happily in a flat 2D world until he gets a red fez and finds out his world is one of four sides of a 3D one. From then on you can rotate between those four views, and the whole game is built on that. A gap you cannot cross in one view closes when you turn the world, and platforms that were far apart line up. Its designer, Phil Fish, wanted the lonely feeling of Ico, and he cut anything that was not needed.

Fez spent five years in development, and Fish was one of the stars of Indie Game: The Movie. The game came out on Xbox Live Arcade in April 2012, won Eurogamer's 2012 Game of the Year and came to other systems once a yearlong exclusivity deal ran out. Players often name it next to The Witness. Be warned that the backtracking near the end gets old.

Human: Fall Flat is a physics puzzle game about Bob, a plain white figure in a baseball cap that you can paint however you like. It was made by Tomas Sakalauskas of the Lithuanian studio No Brakes Games, who called it his "last shot at gaming". He set out to make something like Limbo or Portal. Then he watched his son play, and the boy did everything possible not to solve the puzzles. So Sakalauskas made the puzzles "not really watertight", and the game is better for it.

The PS4 version arrived in May 2017, and online multiplayer came in October 2017 with help from Nvidia. By December 2025 it had sold more than 58 million copies, one of the best-selling games ever made. Play it with friends. Half the fun is watching someone else's Bob fall off a roof.

Unravel is about Yarny, a tiny character born from a single thread, on an adventure through nature inspired by Northern Scandinavia. There are no spoken words. Yarny solves puzzles and uses tools to get past tough spots, all to find memories of a lost family. The music was inspired by folk music and traditional instruments, and it does a lot of the storytelling.

It came out on PS4 in February 2016. Critics loved the visuals and the soundtrack, though some found the controls and the puzzle variety a bit thin. Players recommend it as a calm, gentle game to unwind with, and it is the easiest game on this list to hand to someone who does not play much. If you liked it, the sequel is earlier on this list.

Tricky Towers looks like Tetris for about five seconds. Then the first piece slides off the side. You play a wizard building a tower out of falling bricks, and the bricks obey physics, so a tower that looks fine can lean and then come down. In Race mode you try to be first past the finish line. Other modes ask you to fit as many bricks as possible under a height limit.

There are 18 spells, and you can use them to help your own tower or wreck someone else's. That is where it turns into a party game, and an argument starter. It came to PlayStation Plus in August 2016 before its full PS4 release a month later. The studio, WeirdBeard, had been working on the idea since 2009, starting with a browser game called 99 Bricks.

Limbo puts you in charge of an unnamed boy looking for his sister in a black-and-white world that wants him dead. It is a 2D puzzle platformer, and many of its traps stay hidden until they go off. Playdead called this "trial and death", and the boy's deaths are grim on purpose, to steer you away from the wrong answers. Glowing worms latch onto his head and force him to walk one way until you get rid of them.

The film grain and quiet sound make it feel like an old horror film, and critics compared it to film noir and German Expressionism. It came out on Xbox Live Arcade in July 2010 and earned around $7.5 million there that year. Playdead's next game, Inside, followed in 2016, and players almost always recommend the two together. Play Limbo first.

The Talos Principle makes you an android waking up in strange worlds built by a voice that calls itself Elohim. He wants you to solve puzzles and collect sigils, and he warns you never to climb the tower in the middle. Of course you want to climb the tower. The puzzles are first-person, built from a small toolkit: jammers that shut down drones and force fields, and crystal refractors that carry beams of light to switches.

Computer terminals fill in the rest. These worlds exist only in a simulation, and the news reports and logs tell you humanity died out from a virus that thawed out of the permafrost. Croteam, the studio behind Serious Sam, made it, and the PS4 version came in October 2015. Players call it one of the hardest and best puzzle games they have played. A sequel arrived in November 2023.

Tetris Effect is named after a real thing: play enough Tetris and the falling blocks follow you into your thoughts and dreams. Tetsuya Mizuguchi had wanted to make a music game around Tetris for years, but the licence sat with Electronic Arts. When he finally got it, he made a Tetris where everything, down to the pieces, pulses and moves in sync with how you play. The backgrounds are full 3D worlds that change with how you play.

It came out on November 9, 2018 as a PS4 exclusive, with PlayStation VR support. Several publications named it Game of the Year, and Giant Bomb called it the best game of 2018. Players keep naming it whenever someone asks for a puzzle game, and in VR it feels like a different game. It is still Tetris. It is also the prettiest Tetris there is.

The Witness drops you on an island with over 500 puzzles and no instructions. Most of them are grids on panels, and the game never explains a rule in words. The puzzles teach you themselves, one panel at a time, until you start finding paths hidden in the scenery too. Jonathan Blow started it in 2008, right after Braid, and his team built their own engine and hired architects and landscape architects to design the buildings on the island.

It was meant for PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2013, but the engine outgrew those machines, and it came out on PS4 and Windows in January 2016 instead. It sold over 100,000 copies in its first week, about what Braid sold in a whole year. Players warn that it gets hard, but when you are stuck you can walk off and try another part of the island. Puzzle fans put it next to The Talos Principle and Return of the Obra Dinn, and players recommend it more than any other PS4 puzzle game.