12 Best PSP Puzzle Games

Where Is My Heart? is a platform game by the Danish studios Schulenburg Software and Die Gute Fabrik. It came out as a PlayStation mini in North America on November 8, 2011. You guide a family of three monsters through a forest after their home, a tree, floats away one day. It starts out like any platformer. Then the picture breaks into frames of varying sizes and shuffles them, and you have to work out where your character is in each frame and how the pieces connect. You can switch between the three monsters at any time, and each one has a special ability.

The idea came from designer Bernhard Schulenburg's memories of getting lost in the woods as a child on a hike with his parents. The players who found it recommend it warmly. It is proof that the minis store had a few real gems hiding in it.

Mercury came out in North America on 6 April 2005, on a tight schedule to match the launch of the PlayStation Portable. You tilt the whole stage with the analog stick to roll a drop of mercury toward the goal, and you have to keep enough of it together to beat each level's percentage limit. Later levels add color mixing based on the RGB color model. Archer Maclean came up with it by taking the labyrinth minigame from Jimmy White's Cueball World and adding a "liquid metal physics" engine. It was first designed to use a tilt sensor add-on for the PSP, but that version was never released.

Critics liked the idea and the level design and complained about the difficulty. The rush shows, and the team said the finished game was less refined than they intended. Players rank its sequel five places higher, and the sequel earned it.

In early 2006, Sony released a remake of Lemmings for the PSP, developed by Team17. Sony owned the series by then, after buying the studio that published the original. The game is the same idea it always was. The lemmings walk forward no matter what, and you hand out jobs to get enough of them to the exit alive. Blockers stand still and make the others turn around, which is often the only thing standing between your crowd and a long fall.

Lemmings is one of the most widely ported games ever made, and Mike Dailly estimated that 15 million copies sold between 1991 and 2006. A mathematician later showed that solving a level is PSPACE-complete, so if a stage has you stuck, it is officially hard. Players who know the older versions say this one holds up well.

Patchwork Heroes was developed by Acquire and published by SCEA in 2010. Its Japanese title translates to "A Million Tons of Pieces", which tells you the plan. Huge warships float over the land, and you cut them apart by holding the circle button while you move. When a cut goes from one side of the ship to the other, the smaller side falls off. You keep slicing until the warship can no longer move. The gray parts can only be broken with mojo, which you build up by cutting.

There is a catch, because your allies are locked in prisons on the ship. Cut a prison off before you rescue them and they are gone for good. It plays a bit like Qix with a sword and a grudge. Players who found it call it quick and a lot of fun, and it is the hidden pick on this list.

Exit came out in Japan on December 15, 2005, and in North America on February 14, 2006. You play Mr. ESC, an escapologist, and your job is to lead people out of hospitals and other buildings before time runs out. Fires, floods, earthquakes and even meteor showers get in the way. The people you rescue are not much help. Children can only climb over small heights, so you push crates into place to build platforms for them. Each level gives you a score out of 100, based on how many people you saved and the par time.

It later reached the Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Arcade, and a DS version followed in 2008. Players who grew up with it remember it as a childhood favorite and still tell new owners to play it.

Rovio started Angry Birds on a small budget after making 51 games for other publishers. It began as a simple sketch by Jaakko Iisalo, and the slingshot was rejected at first before the team came back to it. The developers later realized the birds needed an enemy. That is how the pigs got involved, and the pigs have been paying for it ever since.

Sony released it for the PSP as a PlayStation mini with nearly 200 levels from the original game. It was also playable on the PlayStation 3. PC Magazine said the controls were fine but "not nearly as satisfying as the touch-screen controls found on smartphone versions". Players still put it seventh here, ahead of games that were made for the PSP from day one.

Mercury Meltdown is the sequel to Archer Maclean's Mercury, made by Ignition Banbury, the studio formerly called Awesome Studios. Maclean himself had resigned early in production. This time the team had more time and experience, and it listened to player feedback. You still tilt the stage to guide your mercury to the goal, but the blob now has four states: Normal, Solid, Fast and Slow. The worlds are called Labs, and each one is split into 16 stages shown as test tubes.

There are now 160+ levels, and bonus stars unlock party games you can play against the computer or a friend. A PS2 port called Mercury Meltdown Remix followed a month later, then a Wii version. If the first Mercury beat you up, this is the one to try.

In Crush you play Danny, a young man with insomnia who uses an experimental device to explore his own mind and find out why he cannot sleep. The levels are events from his life, and the art takes cues from Tim Burton and M.C. Escher. Your goal is to collect his "lost marbles". The trick is that you can crush the 3D level flat into 2D, so platforms far apart suddenly line up. Critics compared it to Super Paper Mario from the same year, though the Zoë Mode team had the idea five years earlier.

Crush won several awards, including PSP game of the month. It still missed its sales targets. It got a second life on the 3DS as CRUSH3D in 2012. Players call it a great puzzle game, and it is easy to see why once a level clicks.

Puzzle Quest was the brainchild of Steve Fawkner, the designer of the Warlords strategy games. While his small team was refining its engines, Fawkner got hooked on Bejeweled and played it late into the night. So he made a fantasy RPG where every battle is a match-three board. Colored tiles give you mana for spells, and skull tiles do direct damage to your opponent. There are more than 150 quests, plus cities to capture and companions to recruit.

It first came out on the DS and PSP in 2007 and was a surprise hit. It has since been ported to almost everything, and a remaster called Puzzle Quest: Immortal Edition came out in September 2025. Players talk about it as the game they lost the most hours to, one more battle at a time.

Echochrome was made by Sony's Japan Studio and Game Yarouze. A mannequin walks through a world full of Oscar Reutersvärd's impossible constructions, inspired by M. C. Escher's Relativity. You rotate the world, and whatever looks connected from the camera's angle is connected. If a gap is hidden behind a pillar, it is not there. The engine behind it is the Object Locative Environment Coordinate System, developed by Jun Fujiki.

The North American release was download only and has the first 56 levels, with solo play as the only mode. In Europe you could buy it on UMD with 96 levels. Ask players for a single PSP puzzle game and Echochrome comes up a lot, mostly from people who still think about that art style.

Lumines II came out in November 2006 in North America and Europe from Buena Vista Games, and in Japan in February 2007. It is a direct sequel. You still make squares of one color and wait for the Time Line to sweep them away. New modes include Mission mode and a Sequencer for making your own music. Producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi wanted more songs this time, and 100 songs were planned at first.

The new skins include music videos from artists such as New Order and Beck. Some reviewers did not enjoy the American songs, while others welcomed them. Players put it second on this list, right behind the game that started it all.

Lumines began when Tetsuya Mizuguchi heard about the PlayStation Portable and wanted to make a game for it. It was the first game developed by Q Entertainment and a launch title for the PSP, made by four or five people over a year. You rotate 2x2 blocks made of two colors and line up squares of one color. A Time Line synced to the music sweeps across and erases them. Each skin changes the look and the music. Katsumi Yokota kept every song in 4/4 time except "Big Elpaso".

The subtitle Puzzle Fusion was there because the music is part of the game. The original earned the best review scores and most of the awards in the series. Players named it more than four times as often as its sequel, and many still treat it as the PSP's essential puzzle game, and one summed it up as "Best puzzle game since Tetris."