The best action puzzle games

The classic bomb-defusing, platform-hopping, enemy-dodging chaos of Bomb Jack gets a fresh coat of pixels in this 2002 DOS remake. You’re still the tiny superhero hopping aro...

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 p...

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 r...

In The Lost Vikings (1993, DOS), three Viking warriors with more brawn than brains find themselves kidnapped by aliens. Instead of raiding villages, they’re solving puzzles w...

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 ...

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 ...

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 geni...

Doh is back, and he’s mad - presumably because no one understood what he was in the first place. Arkanoid 2 takes the original formula and dials everything up: more levels, m...

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.&nbs...

ZZT (1991, DOS) looks like it was drawn by an enthusiastic ASCII artist with too much time and not enough colors. And yet, it’s brilliant. Part action game, part puzzle adven...

Arkanoid is a classic arcade video game that was first released in 1986 by Taito. It is a breakout-style game, which means that the primary objective is to break a wall of bricks o...

Lemmings is a classic puzzle-platformer video game developed by DMA Design (now known as Rockstar North) and published by Psygnosis. It was originally released in 1991 for the Amig...

DX-Ball 2 is a popular brick-breaking game that was first released in 1998 by Longbow Digital Arts. It serves as a sequel to the original DX-Ball, which was inspired by the classic...

Also known as Puzzle Bobble, this bubble-popping classic stars those cute dragons from Bubble Bobble, now in competitive puzzle mode. Match three colors, clear the screen, panic as...

In Airball (1987), you don’t play a knight, a space marine, or a plumber - you play a literal ball of air. Trapped in an isometric nightmare of spikes, fans, and poison gas, ...

This 1989 game is based on the animated movie where dogs die, go to heaven, then come back for revenge (sort of). The DOS adaptation? Well, it’s more like All Pixels Go Nowhe...

Archipelagos is like a fever dream after watching too much Myst. You’re dropped onto strange, floating islands inhabited by stone monoliths and evil terrain-infecting sludge....

This isn’t Disney’s musical fairytale—it’s a DOS game, which means Beauty and the Beast is way more "puzzle platformer" than "tale as old as time." You play...

In Contraption Zack, you play as a kid with more mechanical gadgets than common sense. Your job? Fix a series of increasingly absurd machines in a puzzle platformer that’s eq...