The best abandonware puzzle games

If you’ve ever looked at Tetris and thought, “This needs to be in 3D and way harder,” then BlockOut 2 (2000) is your kind of punishment. This brain-melter takes falling blocks to the next dimension—literall...

Pipe Mania (also known as Pipe Dream is a tile-matching (sort of) puzzle game about flowing liquids developed by The Assembly Line in 1989. You must build a path made of pipe pieces to let a green liquid (sewer goo?) flow. It's si...

Don’t let the pixelated graphics and cheerful music fool you—Chip’s Challenge is a gauntlet of logical torment. You play as Chip, a nerdy teen who agrees to navigate deadly mazes filled with monsters, traps, and ...

Before Indiana Jones had a whip, Chagunitzu had block puzzles. Released in 1990 by Softdisk (and developed by a young John Romero), this game is a precursor to God of Thunder and part of the Kroz lineage. You navigate tombs, avoid...

The Incredible Machine (part of The Incredible Machine series) is a single-player peculiar DOS physics-puzzle game developed by Jeff Tunnell Productions and published by Sierra On-Line in 1993. The goal of the game is to buil...

Taito’s Puzznic (1990) takes the idea of matching tiles and injects a surprising amount of strategy. You slide blocks to align pairs, but each move requires forethought—or you’ll trap yourself faster than a Tetri...

Lemmings 2: The Tribes is an abandoned puzzle game part of the acclaimed Lemmings series. It was developed by DMA Design and released by Psygnosis in 1993. Lemmings 2: The Tribes runs on DOS but was also published for Acorn, Amiga...

By 1994, digging had evolved from arcade twitch action to full-on economic warfare. Diggers on DOS turned mining into a cutthroat competition between quirky alien races, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and distinctly od...

Classic Concentration brings the Alex Trebek game show to DOS, complete with low-res puzzles and that addictive memory card-flipping mechanic. Match two elephants, and boom—you get a piece of a rebus puzzle that looks like i...

Lemmings was one of the most iconic puzzle games ever made. It was also one of the most inventive. The idea behind those tiny furred punk suicidal rodents is truly a stroke of genius. Not surprisingly, after the huge success of th...

Zoom! is a puzzle game that desperately wants to be cool. You're a sunglasses-wearing smiley face cruising down psychedelic gridlines while dodging blobs and filling in tiles like Tron on a budget. It’s fast, weird, and occa...

Sokoban is a classic puzzle game first released in 1982 by Hiroyuki Imabayashi for the NEC PC-8801 in Japan and later ported to a number of platforms, including DOS, as Soko-Ban. The name "Sokoban" translates to "warehouse keeper"...

The Incredible Toon Machine is a puzzle video game developed by Jeff Tunnell Productions and published by Sierra On-Line in 1994. It serves as the successor to the game Sid & Al's Incredible Toons and is part of the The Incred...

Supaplex is a classic puzzle game released in 1991 by Think!Ware Development for MS-DOS and Amiga. It is heavily inspired by Boulder Dash but introduces more complex mechanics. In Supaplex, you control a red, Pac-Man-like cha...

Block O Mania is what happens when a Rubik’s Cube and a sliding puzzle fall in love during a rave. Released in 1989 for DOS, this game will twist your brain into shapes it wasn’t designed for. The goal? Push blocks. Lo...