Baba Is You (2019)
Created by lone Finish developer Arvi “Hempuli” Teikari for a game jam, Baba Is You has since gone on to draw serious acclaim, and has even found itself nominated for Best Independent Game at The Game Awards 2019. Try it out, and you’ll understand why immediately. Baba Is You gives you control of its own rules by placing them in the world. By shifting blocks on the 2D levels, you can alter the defining rules, changing the win conditions, physical barriers and even what you, the player, control.
Baba Is You is more than just the title, it’s a core rule that lets you hop around as a small, hippopotamus-like creature. Replace the Baba block with on reading Wall and you’ll suddenly find yourself in control of every piece of stone barrier on the map. There’s an enormous degree of creativity and challenge enabled by the foundations of Baba Is You, and more than any other game on this list it’ll have you walking away from the screen to ponder its tougher challenges over a cup of tea of coffee. If you’re after a challenge, don’t miss Baba Is You. Click here for our review.
Stephen’s Sausage Roll (2016)
Stephen’s Sausage Roll is an ugly game. Stephen’s Sausage Roll is a strangely named game. But sometimes, you just need to roll a sausage around. Stephen’s Sausage Roll is all about rolling sausages onto grills on a small grid. Sausages roll when pushed, and you need to make sure each side of the sausage is cooked. That’s the entire premise, yet Stephen’s Sausage Rolls stretches it out into nearly 100 puzzles, each unique and inventive.
If you’ve played Sokoban puzzle games, you’ll know what’s in store here. However, if you’ve not tried a game of this kind before, then the bizarre controls, muddy graphics and odd name may have put you off from picking it up. Despite these setbacks, Stephen’s Sausage Roll has earned a reputation as a brilliant and deliciously tough puzzle game that genre stalwarts will relish.
Those are our picks for the best puzzle games of the decade. It’s been an absolutely stellar ten years for fans of virtual brain teasers so we’ve no doubt that plenty of other cracking puzzle games have slipped through our mental net. Let us know your favorites and any that we’ve forgotten down in the comments below.
