Summary
Story-driven puzzle gamesmight not be as rare as more niche genres like on-rail shooters, but big fans of this genre are easily left wanting more. Imagine, then, being a fan of philosophical story-driven puzzle games. With a genre as specific as this, the problem is simply finding the few existing examples available.
Video games are a unique medium for telling philosophically loaded stories because, unlike books or movies, they can go one step beyond explaining or showing the idea in question. Through puzzles, players are directly implicated in the dilemma and tasked with finding a solution, one that can be merely provided by the game or offered through a story that properly engages with the puzzles. Not all puzzle-based games rely on elements of philosophy, but those that do are certainly difficult to forget.
The Talos Principlemight be the most well-known philosophical puzzle game. Thisfirst-person puzzlerdeals with themes of identity and how one can define life and consciousness. The game features an android protagonist guided by a voice that begins the story proclaiming itself a deity.
It also has some solid puzzles to boot. One criticism sometimes aimed at the game is that the puzzles and story aren’t often tied together, meaning that the puzzles don’t organically lead the player to think about the game’s themes. That isn’t exactly true, as the revelation of how the two halves are connected happens late in the game, which can make the rest of the title feel a bit meandering. Still, it’s a title that’s sure to get players thinking.
The Witnessis arguably only a philosophical puzzle game in the sense that it tries to communicate a complex but abstract idea. Still, it’s one of the most interesting puzzle games out there and one of very few thatdoesn’t need a tutorialto introduce each new mechanic.
The Witnessis the second game released by Johnatan Blow, a renowned developer who also created another beloved puzzle game,Braid. This was one of the original indie games to take the world by storm, and it’s still a solid platformer with interesting themes to take in.
5Manifold Garden
Promotes Philosophical Thinking Through Puzzles
Manifold Gardenmight be one of the most unique puzzle games out there. The premise is simple: a first-person exploration game about finding a way forward in a variety of scenarios. But the world ofManifold Gardenis unlike any other, at least in video games, feeling like a 3D, walkable version of an Escher painting.
The puzzles inManifold Gardenfeel like they have philosophical weight because they require players to think in ways they never thought before. Falling from a level is a great way to move forward since the structures repeat infinitely. Moving forward might mean moving inside one of the megastructures from before, like zooming in on a 2D fractal.
4The Swapper
Examines The Idea Of Cloning
The Swapperis a 2D puzzle game about a space explorer who crash-lands on a deserted planet. The game really starts when the protagonist finds a device with the ability to create clones of the user, which are then controlled in tandem with the real body. Soon, the existence of a “real body” is put into question when the player gains the ability to transfer their consciousness to one of the clones.
WhileThe Swapperhas a story (and a complex one at that), itdoesn’t really need wordsto create an interesting philosophical dilemma. Is making copies of the protagonist really fine when there’s no way to know what swapping her consciousness with theirs really means? How about leaving behind the original body? Does that mean anything at all?
The Turing Testis a first-person puzzle game set in the future. The protagonist player takes the role of Ava, an engineer employed by a research facility and space station in orbit around one of Jupiter’s moons. But what seems like a routine repair mission soonevolves into a dilemmathat will decide the future of humanity.
The philosophical elements inThe Turing Testmight be a bit too straightforward for some players, as they are not always integrated into the story. A common criticism is that there’s no reason for the game’s research facility to be so focused on AIs, considering they were studying something very different. Still, the topics discussed are original enough to remain interesting for the whole game. The space station setting is also very unique among philosophical puzzle games.
Superliminalis a first-person puzzle game about size and perspective. The puzzles, for example, are literally about moving items around and seeing the world from different perspectives. For example, players can make a door look larger and then reshape a key to the right size to open it.
The story is pretty much the same. The protagonist ofSuperliminalis undergoing innovative dream therapy, which uses thepower of dreamscapesto let patients reshape the size of their problems and increase their ability to feel empathy by practicing the use of different perspectives. Soon, the experiment goes wrong, and dreams become nightmares. Still, nothing that a new perspective can’t reduce to a size we can deal with.
The Talos Principle 2is, surprisingly, a direct sequel to the original game. This is surprising because, whileThe Talos Principlehad a story, it wasn’t exactly the point. Still, even if the sequeldoesn’t feature the original protagonist, and it takes off quite a while after the original game’s ending, it still means that potential players should still finish the original before getting started with this one.
If the original game was about the nature of consciousness,The Talos Principle 2is about finding humanity in ourselves. In a way, this title takes a more direct stance on the significance of those themes, but that doesn’t mean that players can’t come to a different conclusion than the one offered.
