Escape Goat
Escape Goat by Magical Time Bean is a puzzle platformer stylized after the 8-bit Nintendo era. You play as a purple goat with strikingly green horns and golden eyes. Somehow this odd combination makes for a highly convincing and enjoyable character to play as, one which could even have been considered as iconic as Mario, if it had existed back in the day. Like many NES era games this is a title of few words, yet it does not need to say much for you to grow fond of this unconventional hero and push onward to rescue your trapped friends and escape the magical prison.
– Real player with 27.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Puzzle Platformer Pixel Graphics Games.
This is decent. At such a low price, I’m OK recommending it. My only gripe is that there are far too many times when a mechanism’s result is unclear. Otherwise, the platforming is solid and the visual style is simple and fairly easy to recognize the parts after you have seen them once. As with Super Meat Boy, I enjoy the single-room challenges that are fairly compact and let you get back to the action quickly, and it offers a variety of routes in case you get stuck on one area (this did not happen on the first mission).
– Real player with 13.9 hrs in game
LIMBO
LIMBO - 9/10
WARNING
I don’t recommend playing this game if you’re REALLY arachnophobic.
Story
LIMBO is a 2D puzzle platformer game set in, as the title says, Limbo. You wake up there and go through it to find out your sister’s fate. The puzzles require perfect timing more than anything else, which can be really frustrating at times. Then again, that’s the whole point of a puzzle game. Witnessing the ending for the first time can be really confusing and unsatisfying, but, as you play along a bit more, you begin to raise questions and wonder about it. It then turns into a satisfying end. Overall, great story. Some would argue that this game doesn’t even have a story, guess I just proved ‘em wrong, eh?
– Real player with 13.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Puzzle Platformer Dark Games.
LIMBO is one of those 2-D platformer games with puzzle elements. You know, those games where you keep having to solve puzzles here and there moving objects, like crates, rocks, even dead bodies and deadly traps. I got this a long time ago, and this is the first time I actually tried playing this after casually “finding” it again in my library.
Pros:
- The controls are nice (I used a controller myself.), it feels intuitive and doesn’t really fuck you over with high gravity or slippery floors. It’s kinda fast paced and doesn’t force you to do ridiculous jumps all the time like SMB or Electronic Super Joy.
– Real player with 10.8 hrs in game
NightSky
A very mellow and enjoyable puzzle/platforming game, with some secrets that unlock an NG+ to add replayability. Controls kind of sucked on a controller but keyboard played fine.
In Nightsky you play as a sentient glowing ball on its quest to travel from the left of the screen to the right. You roll left or right, and have buttons to speed up or slow down/grip the ground. There’s also a wildcard interaction button that changes its use depending on the scene. The game does a good job of introducing you to gameplay concepts and ramping up in challenge. The levels are varied and each can be a decent puzzle. Some of them are figuring out what you’re supposed to do, others are more a test of timing and reflex. Different contraptions are used throughout some of the levels, adding extra flavor. Throughout the game there are also secrets that act as a sort of new game + and open a secret final level.
– Real player with 16.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Puzzle Platformer Casual Games.
I wanted to recommend NightSky for a little while now.
A must-have if you enjoy puzzle games based on physics!
You control a mysterious marble going on an journey through several dream-like landscapes : Industrial, littorals, forests, caves, ruins, etc;
Your marble has two main skills, the Slow-Down button, and the Speed-up button. The former allows you to be more precise in your moves, but lacks some motion power. The latter will allow you to jumps gaps and do wall-rides, but it’s harder to control properly.
– Real player with 12.8 hrs in game
The Floor is Jelly
The Floor is Jelly. No title describes what this game developed by Ian Snyder is really about more. This is a platformer game where you control a little tiny human guy and guide him through each level, with each level split up into several rooms connected by windows.
Your little guy can jump around, and can climb up walls by jumping up them like in the Mega Man X games. It doesn’t sound that simple, though. Whereas other platform games took place on solid ground, in The Floor is Jelly, well, the ground acts exactly like that. As you move around, the ground beneath your feet violently wobbles and jiggles around like a gigantic waterbed. It’s not just the ground that flings around, too. Even the walls and ceilings ripples and bounces as you wall jump and hit the ceilings retrospectively. It’s not all bad, however. You can take advantage of the wobbly ground by using it as a trampoline, but you’ll need to time your jumps right or your bounce may fall flat. It may take you a while to get used to these bouncy castle physics, but soon enough, you’ll be bounding around like a pro.
– Real player with 57.2 hrs in game
I don’t recommend it, but you may still like it. My reasoning is below.
Here’s what you do:
You play as a tiny little two-legged thing which is capable of jumping off floors and walls. The floors and walls, as the title suggests, are jelly-like and react as such when you touch them. The more force you put against these surfaces, the more they move. Fluctuating the walls and floors can add height and distance to your jumps, allowing you to reach some areas that you couldn’t reach otherwise.
– Real player with 7.4 hrs in game
Four Sided Fantasy
This is a platform puzzler with a unique twist. The 4 edges of the screen can be ‘wrapped’ so that your character disappears off one edge and appears on the opposite side, then you let go of the ‘lock’ for the character to continue along the path you’ve set.
The main thing I have to say about this game is that it’s very disorienting and strange (in a good way). I completed the game and I can honestly say that I never reached the point where I properly understood what I was doing. Even towards the end I was still using trial and error sometimes. Maybe if I do this, that or the other it might work…
– Real player with 6.5 hrs in game
Preface: Is the game necessarily bad? No. However, because of the Yes/No only on Steam, I cannot fully give it a recommendation for everyone to play. There are still flaws to it as seen below.
The idea of Four Sided Fantasy is somewhat original, at least in the fact that games have not frequently used the wrap-around screen as an actual puzzle itself. The controls of the game are simple: You move. You jump. You lock the screen in place. By locking the screen in place, you can walk to an edge of the screen and wrap around to the opposite side (this applies to both left/right and top/bottom).
– Real player with 3.8 hrs in game
Pid
A truly hidden gem that deserves more recognition. How this game is not as known as other indie titles is beyond my understanding. Pid is everything you want from a platformer-puzzle game, and its price is ridiculous considering the amount of content it has (way more than the 12 hours the description says if you want to 100% the game).
As said, Pid its a platformer-puzzle adventure which focuses more on platforming than puzzles, yet there is always a good mix of them through the whole game. In fact, overcoming some platform challenges can become a puzzle itself.
– Real player with 27.2 hrs in game
No game has frustrated me and entertainmed at the same time so much than Pid.
Underneath the beautiful aesthics (it honestly had a pixar vibe going on) and the fucking amazing sound track lies a game so god damn hard it made me want to burn my computer.
The game starts out friendly enough. You learn the basic mechanics of using the game’s gravity gems to float to high unreachable platsforms. Then you are introduced to bombs, music boxes, smoke bombs, lazer beams, and so on to assist you. Then approaching the first boss there is a sudden difficulty spike. Platforms got smaller, enemies became faster, and oh god the fucking spiked walls. EVERYWHERE.
– Real player with 18.1 hrs in game
1000 Amps
“When Less that 34% of your game’s players have gotten just the first achievement after FIVE YEARS, you know you done screwed the pooch”
Platforming, puzzles and Oh my Golfballs does this game get annoying!
There is nothing actually broken or incorrect wrong with it, per say, but the mental loops and back-tracking you have to do in this game is problematic to say the least.
You are a light plug (I assume) whose job is to find all the blocks in a room.
You start a room with no blocks lit, and anytime you bump into an area where a block is hidden, that block is revealed and blocks you.
– Real player with 10.7 hrs in game
At its core, 1000 Amps is somewhat similar to VVVVVV - you’ve got a whole bunch of interconnected rooms to explore, and will spend most of your time figuring out how to get to them all. That said, there are a couple of things going on here to help separate this one from its “metroidvania” peers:
- Right off the bat, there’s the graphical style, which is built almost entirely on sharp, grayscale squares; it might come off as dull at a glance, but for a world built with such limited materials it actually looks pretty nice. The simple black, white, and shades in between are pleasant and clean, not to mention spiced up by the lighting, which I’ll get further into in a moment.
– Real player with 8.0 hrs in game
Ethan: Meteor Hunter
A lot better than I expected! 4/5
Pros:
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Very challenging puzzles and platforming.
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Good variety of challenges.
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About 3 leaderboards per stage. Clear time, fragments collected, and pauses used.
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3 worlds with many stages. The game is hard enough to make you spend a lot of time trying to beat it, but it doesn’t feel very unfair. (I spent an hour on a late stage once…)
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Lots of replayability for every stage due to built-in challenges for low clear time, fragments collected, minimal pauses used and leaderboards.
– Real player with 35.1 hrs in game
A tough 2D puzzle-platformer that gets a lot harder along the way but is a little more focused on precision platforming and a bit less on tough puzzles.
Both keyboard & mouse and a controller work pretty well with this game with me using the keyboard & mouse a lot more often mainly for the frequent puzzle sections that come up where it helps with allowing me to be a little more precise on object placement thanks to the mouse controls. The controller works well for everything else.
You start off in a tutorial level which I don’t think tells you everything you need to know so you’d have to do your own learning.
– Real player with 30.7 hrs in game
Baby Dino Adventures
This is a great platformer reminiscent of the old school ones but with a lot of original twists. And let’s face it, everything is so cute! 🤗
– Real player with 2.8 hrs in game
Baby Dino Adventures is a cute 2D platformer in which you control a young baby dinosaur as he collects eggs, destroys crates and makes friends by stomping on their heads. There’s even a vegan option that replaces the collectable steaks by broccoli (HOW CUTE IS THAT!?)
It’s a perfect game for kids (my 5yo daughters loves it!) as well as retro-loving parents who just want to have a great time.
– Real player with 1.9 hrs in game
Backworlds
This is a very good puzzle platformer with quality content, more then enough puzzles and a good soundtrack.
When I started playing this game I was bored, the puzzles were too easy and I wanted to stop playing it. I was 8 hrs into this game when I relized this game had potential and after finishing every single puzzle (only 5 % completed all the puzzles) I am happy to say that this game was worth my time and money. In this game you are free to go almost wherever you want so you can start any puzzle at any time except some locked doors and bosses. The main mechanic is a paint brush and you control it with your mouse, you will have to use it constantly because you will solve every puzzle using it. The harder levels are really what made me like this game so much, if you get to the levels where you have to use all mechanics learned through out the game you are in luck because they are some of the best created levels in a puzzle platformer I played in a long time. I am sure I solved some levels in my way and I am sure that was the intention of developers.
– Real player with 27.2 hrs in game
Very good puzzle metroidvania. Every world has a new mechanic tied to the secondary world you access via painting a part of the screen.
It’s a shame this isn’t more widely known.
– Real player with 8.6 hrs in game