Puzzle games have a special place in the world of video gaming. While first-person shooters and role-playing games use a juxtaposition of aggression and co-operation with others to lure us in, puzzle games seduce us not through bloodlust but through intellectual lust. On the PlayStation 4 (commonly referred to as the PS4), these kinds of digital brain teasers all promise us entrance into a realm of logic and strategy and creativity, where we can leave the comparatively brutish world of meatspace behind. If you’re looking to follow us in, this piece can be your guide: let’s explore the world of PS4 puzzle games, unearthing a rigorously curated and discerning list of the puzzle games you’ll want to be playing. You’ll get your brain teased, your patience tested, and maybe increase your IQ as we go. Let’s go on our cerebral adventure together and figure out which are the must-play PS4 puzzle games.
Puzzle games are a broad church, but they all feed off a human urge to make sense of something. They run contrary to all the twitch-action releases: strategy and sometimes even lateral thinking can be needed, along with patience. PS4 has plenty of games across the puzzle spectrum, from something as calm as the meditative Laserbots to as twisted as ohMyBod by Robot Audio.
Portal 2 builds upon the genius of the original, amplifying it with new mechanics that shift the way you perceive puzzle gaming. From Valve. PS4 compatible, it also expands the settings to include larger puzzles, and introduces a deeper story – an essential experience for puzzle and platform veteran and newcomer alike.
In ‘The Witness’, your objective remains tantalisingly obscure as the game draws you in and asks you to solve puzzles, one after another, growing more intricate as the game world opens up before you. Out now on PS4, The Witness is an example of environmental storytelling done right. The game wants you to look, be curious and find answers to conundrums hidden in plain sight.
Baba Is You takes the puzzle genre almost to its breaking point by taking the idea of rules as a way to redefine objectives and raising them to the meta-cognitive level, making you manipulate the game’s rules to define objectives anew. It’s a bold and brilliant puzzle game, available on PS4 and other consoles, that turns language into a sandbox and reminds us that the puzzle genre can be not just one of spatial awareness but of comprehension and transmutation.
In reimagining a classic, what is ‘Tetris Effect: Connected’ but the warm glow of the original comfort game, infused with an audio-visual hypnosis? On PS4, this reworking makes the puzzle’s act of block-stacking a transcendental experience, especially when played in co-op mode, as two minds make perfect sense of a puzzle.
In ‘Bowdlerised schoolboy puzzle’, ‘Gonchi Banana’, ‘nauthron’ – and then Suika Game, square Tetris reimagined in a circle. These three titles alone demonstrate just how novel the puzzle genre is on PS4, and how it’s evolving: how a genre that many assume to be abstract puzzles divorced from narrative is blending with new points within the spectrum between narrative and gameplay. In The Talos Principle and World of Goo, the abstract puzzle encounters philosophical and architectural substance, and are – perhaps, for the first time – more than just a series of challenges.
Each of these puzzle games represents a world within the PS4, and if you delve into their myriad possibilities, what emerges is a console that is more than just a games-maker, but something that can gather and support scavengers of the mind, or philosophical adventurers, or fellow dreamers. Whether you’re engineering light and dark in The Talos Principle, or tearing open holes to reality in Portal 2, or reconstructing the language of signs in Baba Is You, the strength and versatility of puzzle games powers the PS4 into a trove of new worlds.
In a world where action games play at 120 frames per second and blow everything else away, PS4 puzzle games create a quiet space where time slows down, and where each puzzle becomes an exercise in the joy of discovery. Of course, not all puzzles are created equal. There are simple spatial puzzles that sharpen your spatial awareness, there are logic puzzles that test your deductive skills.
And finally, whether you’re a puzzle veteran or a complete novice, the PS4 is exactly where you want to be if you want to immerse yourself in a cave of wondrous brainteasers. Because, if nothing else, the most high-minded adventures in the entire catalog of video gaming tend to unfold right here in the deep reaches of your own head. So take off your clothes. Put off your shoes. And let these PS4 puzzle games guide you homeward, bit by cinematic and cerebral piece.
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