Puzzle games have always been a demanding genre, challenging your brain in unique ways and offering an experience outside the typical hack and slashers. These games also come in various levels of difficulty, either rewarding your persistence and dedication, or leading you to uninstall the game in frustration.
However, when puzzle games expect you to take notes on the information you gather, it can be purposefully difficult in a way that rewards attention. Solving puzzles this way can give you a greater sense of accomplishment and connection to the mechanics, and some games take this level of involvement further than most.
A randomly generated exploration puzzle game, Blue Prince has you tracking down the mysterious entrance to the 46th room of your family’s ever-changing mansion. Each room contains clues as to how to interact with puzzles in other rooms and hints as towhat items to look out for.
Blue Prince cannot be solved without taking notes, even containing a note suggesting you take notes to keep track of all the information. As you explore new rooms, read terminal entries, and discover hidden information, you will need to keep track of every detail you learn to open the final antechamber.
Be mindful of your notes, as some information can be misleading or even straight up lie to you.
A pixelated platforming puzzle game, Fez takes the 2D world and allows you to flip the world in 3D space, sometimes hiding information or new areas to explore. This mechanic is incredibly well-thought-out, sometimes reinventing itself to stump you or forcing you to return to previous areas to progress.
Fez also hides clues in plain sight, hinting at ways to read encrypted statements you find much later on, and even requiring you to decode a made-up language. Without a pen and paper handy, you will have a very difficult time solving Fez’s more difficult puzzles, getting in the way of collecting every glorious cube.
Placing you on a monochromanic sailing ship in the aftermath of its sudden arrival, you are tasked with solving the mystery behind its initial disappearance and the reason behind its crew’s deadly fate. By interacting with the dead through the use of a magic pocket watch to watch their final memories.
Giving you free rein on the ship and allowing you minimal knowledge of the events immediately puts you into Sherlock mode, piecing together timelines, events, and suspicious characters. This game demands meticulous note-taking, trusting you to piece together the overall puzzle by not holding your hand.
A game familiar to older players that has been remade and overhauled over the years since its release in 1993, Myst is simply one of the best puzzle games ever made. After reading a mysterious book, you become transported to an island containing a multitude of interconnected, if overly convoluted, puzzles.
While the game does show its age in places, this also works in its favor for those who prefer complex puzzles that require note-taking. Sometimes puzzles are split by vast distances, forcing you to jot down potential outcomes of pushing a button or pulling a lever, all while peppering the hidden plot in pages and books.
More of an interactive film than a video game, watching a series of interviews by a live actress, attempting to understand… her story. The gameplay mostly involves using a search bar to uncover hidden interviews with keyword searches. The only problem is that you must uncover these keywords by watching the videos.
This puts you in the place of an internet sleuth, piecing together the nuances and details of the story while also understanding that it is told out of order, creating a custom timeline. Unless you have a banger memory, you must take detective-level notes to unlock the mystery and find all the videos and keywords.
What surprisingly started as a mod forSkyrim, The Forgotten City became a standalone puzzle, adventure, mystery game involving using a time loop to uncover the truth behind the Golden Rule andthe Roman city’s leaders. The Forgotten City has many different endings, with some harder to achieve than others.
By talking to the various residents, learning the location of specific items to return to after a loop, and the consequences of specific actions, you set up a row of dominoes that leads to uncovering the city’s secrets. This requires writing down the convoluted potential of every piece of dialogue, item, and unlocked door.
Chants of Sennaar is a puzzle game that centers its mechanics around uncovering new languages, learning its words through context, and uncovering their grammatical structures. While they are unique to the game, it can feel like you are learning a new language with each new area.
What makes this game especially thoughtful is that each language is different in more than just words, as you will need to uncover how plurals work, where adjectives go, and even how gender is viewed by the cultures. There is a logbook to help you keep track of new words, but taking notes is how you truly unlock the languages.
An optional puzzle requires you to translate for other characters, which requires perfect knowledge of all in-game languages.
2Unheard
Told through a top-down blueprint of each area, you must solve crimes using only audio cues attached to various suspects. This game kind of throws you into each case with very little information, forcing you to parse details exclusively through the use of audio and location.
Luckily, Unheard allows you to take notes directly in the game, which slide across the screen at the timestamp you wrote it on. However, this can actually hinder your investigation, allowing only up to ten words and not always being accessible, making physical pen and paper a preferred choice to find each culprit.
Tunic is anisometric action-adventure gamethat has a unique puzzle mechanic at its heart, where all the game’s instructions, dialogue, and mechanics are hidden behind a made-up language. to figure out how the game’s mechanics even work, you will need to suss out clues from experimentation and a handy manual.
However, the manual itself is already written in the fake language, meaning you will have to rely on your notes to translate the game and navigate effectively. While it’s possible to make it through the game on skill alone, without descriptive notes and loads of experimentation, you will have a bad time.
