14 Best Wii U Puzzle Games

Thomas Was Alone was developed by Mike Bithell, and its heroes are plain coloured rectangles. Each shape is characterized by a unique name and personality, including the eponymous Thomas, and a narrator tells you what every one of them is thinking. That narrator is voiced by Danny Wallace, whose performance earned the game a BAFTA Games Award. The goal in each level is to direct the shapes to exit points specifically tied to each shape, so that they all stand on their exits at the same time.

It came to the Wii U after a long run on other systems, and it lost nothing on the way. You would not expect a game about a lonely red rectangle to make anyone feel things. It does, and that is the whole trick. It is the kind of pick players reach for once they have bought the big Nintendo games and start digging through the indie shelf.

The Swapper was developed by Facepalm Games, an independent developer in Helsinki, Finland, and it was ported to PlayStation and Nintendo by Curve Studios in 2014. You explore a dying space station, and the device in the title is the key to every room. The story leans hard into what that device means: one character believes she can use the swapper directly on the transplanted brains and swap the person's consciousness into a body.

It has an aggregate score of 87/100 on Metacritic, and reviewers praised its puzzle quality and its innovative mechanics. This is the gloomiest game on the list by a mile, and also one of the smartest. Players keep putting it on their lists of eShop games worth owning, usually right next to the other indie puzzlers on this page.

Edge is a platform puzzle video game with an isometric viewpoint. You move a cube by "rolling" its faces toward a given direction, and the levels hang in empty space, so one bad roll sends you over the side. It started out on phones, where it was removed and re-added to the store multiple times because of a trademark dispute with Tim Langdell of Edge Games over the word "Edge" in the title.

Reviewers praised its minimalistic level design and chiptune soundtrack, and it holds up because there is nothing in it to get old. The Edge Extended levels came included in the Wii U version, so you get the whole thing in one download. Players who browse the eShop for indie games keep pointing new owners toward it.

Toki Tori 2 is the sequel to the 2001 game Toki Tori, and it was released on April 4, 2013 for Wii U before it reached Steam. An updated version called Toki Tori 2+ followed on the Wii U, adding new music and puzzles. The little yellow bird gets two skills to work with, and the first one is Whistle, which generally causes creatures to move closer to Toki Tori.

Everything else comes from poking at the world. Walk into water and your feathers get wet, and walking through cut grass while wet will cause it to grow so it can be used. It is a game about noticing things. The level editor for the Wii U was cancelled due to lower than anticipated sales, which is a shame, because players list it among the Wii U games worth owning.

Art of Balance was originally released as a WiiWare title in 2010, and it was enhanced in high definition and ported to the Wii U in 2013. The idea is simple. You stack oddly shaped blocks on a narrow base, and once all blocks have been used, a countdown starts. Your tower has to stay up until it reaches zero, or you start the level over.

That countdown is where the drama lives. You will watch a stack wobble for three seconds and feel your heart rate climb over some wooden shapes. It looks like the plainest game here, and it is also one of the hardest to put down. Players who know the eShop's smaller games keep telling people not to skip this one.

Teslagrad is set in a steampunk-inspired version of old Europe, in a non-linear world with more than a hundred hand-drawn environments. It was made by Rain Games, who stopped work on the first game the team was building in order to focus on Teslagrad. It is the most platformer-like game on this list, with its puzzles built into the climbing and jumping.

It is also very pretty, the kind of hand-drawn look that holds up much better than early HD textures do. A sequel, Teslagrad 2, was released in 2023, so the studio clearly had more to say. On the Wii U, players who dig past the big releases keep recommending it to people who just bought the console.

Stealth Inc 2 is a stealth puzzle game from Curve Studios, and it got 82/100 on Metacritic based on 21 reviews. Thomas Whitehead from Nintendo Life gave the game a 9/10 and called it "one of the very best download games on the Wii U." Not every critic was won over. Eurogamer's Chris Schilling compared it unfavorably to Mark of the Ninja and Toki Tori 2 and called it "too demanding and too laborious".

Both of them have a point, and that is part of the appeal. It is tough, and it does not apologise for it. If you want a puzzle game that pushes back, this is it. It keeps turning up when players pick the best games on the eShop, and it earned its place there.

Dr. Luigi is a 2013 puzzle video game developed by Arika and Nintendo SPD and published by Nintendo as a digital title for the Wii U. It came out on December 31, 2013 in North America, which marked the Year of Luigi celebration's continuation into the next calendar year. The game is Dr. Mario with Luigi in the lab coat, plus a new mode called Operation L that received mixed opinions.

Critical reception was average, with a score of 65/100 on Metacritic based on 38 reviews. One review called it "a satisfying, customizable collection of puzzle games", and that is fair. In the first week of release in Europe it was the number one bestseller on the Wii U eShop. Players rank it above several indie favourites, because sometimes you just want pills and viruses.

The Wii U version of Scribblenauts Unlimited is the first game of the Scribblenauts series to be released on a home console. One of the primary differences with this game is that it takes place in a large overworld that is open to exploration. Sometimes a puzzle will transport you to a self-contained level, where you must solve multiple puzzles before being awarded with a Starite.

You solve problems by summoning objects, and each player could store up to 900 objects, made by them or downloaded from the community. The Wii U version also has exclusive cameo objects of characters and items from the Super Mario and Legend of Zelda games, which is a very good reason to type Link into a puzzle game. It shows up on players' lists of Wii U essentials.

The Cave's story is based on a magical talking cave, voiced by Stephen Stanton, with a labyrinthine set of tunnels within it. You pick three explorers to go in, and the characters are based on stereotypical figures, such as a hillbilly and a pair of twins who act as one character. Many of the game's puzzles require the three characters to work in coordination to complete.

Some puzzles are specific to the unique abilities of a character, so the Cave can only be fully explored through multiple play-throughs. The exploration is based on 2D platformer elements, though the game is presented with 3D graphics. It is funnier than most puzzle games bother to be, and the cave itself gets the best lines. Players rank it fifth here, ahead of a lot of eShop games with bigger fans.

Little Inferno is a sandbox-oriented puzzle video game primarily viewed from a first-person perspective. It is set in front of a brick fireplace, and you use it to set various objects on fire, from toys to electronics. The game was released for the Wii U in November 2012, so it was there for the console's first winter. It was designed as a satire of games in which the player dedicates long amounts of time to performing tasks considered to be unrewarding.

Little Inferno garnered widely varied reactions upon its release. Some reviewers praised the unique gameplay concepts and satirical narrative, while others believed the gameplay was too simplistic. It is a short, odd game, and nothing else on the console feels quite like it. Kyle Gabler composed the soundtrack and released it for free.

Pushmo World is the sequel to Pushmo and Crashmo, and it was released worldwide on June 19, 2014. It was created as a sequel to Pushmo on the Nintendo 3DS, and the children are once again trapped within the Pushmos. This time Brutus is jumping on the reset switches all over the park, so you have to pull the block puzzles apart and climb them to get the kids out.

Tach said the game was not customized for the home console, but did not need to be, and he was right. The puzzles get properly hard late on without ever feeling unfair. A sequel, Stretchmo for the Nintendo 3DS, was released in 2015. Players still bring it up when the talk turns to what made the Wii U worth buying.

Affordable Space Adventures was released for the Wii U via the Nintendo eShop on April 9, 2015. Its main feature is its unique use of the Wii U GamePad to control a spaceship, using the controls shown on the touch-screen including two different engines. Up to two additional players may join using Wii Remotes or Wii Classic Controllers, taking over movement and scanning. The company that sold you the trip, UExplore, keeps telling you how safe it is, so safe that the company's safety director was given an extended vacation.

It received the "Best of PAX East 2015" award from Destructoid before launch, and at the Danish SpilPrisen Awards in 2016 it won "Game of the Year". Players keep naming it when someone asks what to play on the Wii U, and it is easy to see why.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is a spin-off of the Super Mario series, and a prequel to Super Mario 3D World. The developers had wanted to make the concept levels into a full game since the start of 3D World's development, and upon Shigeru Miyamoto's request, work began after 3D World came out. Toad cannot jump, so the team leaned on camera control, and they wanted it to teach players unfamiliar with the idea how to use it. At the start of development the team designed 100 levels and played through them together.

The game received generally favorable reviews, being praised for its graphics and concept but criticized for its camera control. The Wii U version sold over 1 million copies, making it one of the highest-selling games on the console. Players name it among the best games on the console. As one player put it, "Captain Toad is a great, charming puzzle game." They also back it more than twice as strongly as the game in second place.