When you think of action games, it’s unlikely you’re going to consider the puzzle sections as a highlight. That is, if you’re an unsophisticated gentleman whose brain might as well be leaking from his ear.
Action games can be great to switch your brain off and press square through a horde of mobs. But sometimes, you want an action game that can both give you that dopamine rush of taking out a tough boss, while also making use of your brain to lock in on a genuinely tough environmental puzzle.
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As an RPG fan, I love puzzles. They’re not only a great way to throw in some powerful worldbuilding, but solving a tough puzzle that you’ve spent hours trying to figure out can lead to one of the most rewarding moments a player can have in a game.
That’s why we’re looking at 10 action games that don’t shy away from having tough puzzles alongside stellar combat moments.
10 Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
Use the Force to Solve Environmental Puzzles
Star Wars: Jedi Survivor is a stellar follow-up to the previous Fallen Order, adding more of what everyone loved. We got more combat, more lightsaber forms, and most importantly, we got Turgle. But what we also got were new, large sprawling worlds loaded with puzzles that truly had our brains working overtime.
In true Metroidvania fashion, after certain story beats, we’d gain access to new powers, which we’d be able to use in combat or traverse the world in new ways. These powers would also introduce new environmental puzzles we’d have to solve in order to find a new stim canister or Priorite shard. If you think these were going to be easy, you’d be mistaken, as there’s so much variety and complexity to each one.
My personal favorite puzzles involved the homing droid bombs, which would roll after you and explode if they got too close. The game would take this idea and really flesh it out, letting you destroy walls all over Koboh to find new items. There are also several great platformer puzzles throughout the game as well, which equally test your reflexes and your ability to map out a route to progress in a level, rather than letting you autopilot throughout the game.
9 Resident Evil 4 Remake
Scarce Resources Turn Combat into a Puzzle
The Resident Evil franchise is famous for its unique puzzles, which turn the locations you nervously explore into terrifying escape rooms. Resident Evil 4 sees the series seamlessly blend its action-combat with these puzzle sections, serving up a nice mental break from cultist zombies trying to cut us in half with chainsaws.
While there are still those classic Resident Evil puzzles that’ll see you aligning dials to match certain insignia, or hack your way through electronic locks, combat itself has become a puzzle in this game. Given how scarce resources are and how many hits your enemies can take before going down, resource management becomes a skill needed to make it through the game.
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Several rooms will also have a number of enemies blocking your path, meaning you’ll need to plan ahead and min-max the amount of resources you’re willing to spend to make it through. If you’re going in expecting to shoot every zombie in the head, you’re going to hit a wall in your playthrough fast, meaning you’ll need to actually put some thought into every shot you take, because you never know when you’ll reliably get more ammo later.
8 Tunic
Discover The Way Forward Through Inferred Information
Tunic is a refreshing retro-inspired game that is tailor-made for gamers looking for an experience that scorns handholding and lets them discover the world and its many secrets on their own.
You play as an adorable sword-and-shield-wielding fox, who must discover where to go next based on inferred information from the manual they carry. You’ll start the game with an empty booklet, and will spend the remainder of your playthrough searching for the missing 56 pages. The combat in the game is pretty simple and gets the job done, but it is far from the focus of the game, which is entirely centered around its story and open-world exploration.
Some of these puzzles can be pretty elusive, but that makes the moment when you finally connect the dots and understand what the game is trying to communicate to you all the more rewarding.
7 Darksiders
A Hack-n-Slash With Genuinely Tough Puzzles
Darksiders is a fantastic blend of the hack-and-slash action of God of War and the complex environmental puzzles of The Legend of Zelda. Like with Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, you’ll collect new items and abilities that will be vital in solving new puzzles. Eventually, the game will force you to use multiple items simultaneously, using portals, a boomerang, parallel dimensions, and more to work through some truly complicated set pieces.
Even some of the simpler puzzles early in the game can be quite challenging, like in The Twilight Cathedral, which will ask you to ignite red crystals so you can explode them with bombs. You’ll also need to coordinate a chain reaction by aiming blue energy beams at the right spot, all while on a tight timer. Given that it’s also an older game, your side companion isn’t yapping the solution at you every other second because you dare to take a second to take in your surroundings.
6 Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
“You Call this Archeology?”
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is maybe the best video game adaptation of the franchise we could have asked for. Taking inspiration from the Uncharted series, players will see themselves equally getting into frantic shootouts with villainous Nazi’s, while also spending an equal amount of time solving ancient puzzles that connect to the mysterious artifact in the game.
In most action games, puzzles are merely a breather in between combat. But in The Great Circle, puzzles are actually the main set piece, where combat is a nice treat after spending a chunk of time figuring out which mirrors you need to align to correctly bounce light off in the right direction.
There’s an impressive number of different puzzles in the game, all of which feel fair and rewarding to figure out. Solving puzzles will also unlock new locations, treasures, and move the story along, which makes it feel more like a centerpiece of the game, instead of a neat side activity you can sometimes indulge in.
5 Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Combine Puzzles With Physics
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the best sequels to any game ever. In this massive new title, everything in the game is a puzzle, with no single solution to figure it out. Whether it’s figuring out the most optimal way to climb a mountain to enter a shrine, how to defeat an entire base of Moblins, or how to progress through a Temple with the tools at hand.
What made TOTK such a breath of fresh air is that it re-invented the wheel by literally letting you make wheels. This Zelda title introduces the Ultrahand ability, which lets Link fuse objects together to build weapons, tools, and even vehicles. It’s a neat tool that opens up the possibility for so many physics-based puzzles, and there’s an impressive depth to the amount of constructs you can build here.
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As a result, there are so many creative solutions to many of the game’s puzzles, which can really make you feel like a genius for figuring them out.
4 Hitman: World of Assassinations
Discover the Most Optimal Way to Take Out Your Target
The Hitman series has always been about discovering the most optimal and stealthy way to assassinate your target without getting caught or causing too much collateral. But I’d argue Hitman: World of Assassinations has some of the best set pieces that truly let your imagination run wild.
Each level has so many moving parts you can use to cloak yourself and set up your perfect murder. For example, each level can have a wide variety of disguises lying around that you can use to blend into your environment. While blending in with fellow security or staff, you can learn about potential safety hazards, which you can leverage to kill your target and get away with it scot-free.
Or if you’d prefer a true 200 IQ experience, you can set off a chain of events that prompt your target to place themselves out in the open, right in the scope of your sniper rifle from several miles away. The game has so many creative solutions to these assassinations that players are still finding new ways to take out targets years later.
3 Dishonored
Find a Way to NOT Take Out A Target
Dishonored is a clever stealth game with a not-so-subtle morality system, which will punish you quite severely if you decide to murder and rampage your way through the game. Where Hitman challenges players to find the most optimal path to kill their targets, Dishonored pushes players to find the most optimal, non-lethal route to removing their target.
Due to the game’s canon “Pacifist” good ending, the game will reward players for making their way through levels without murdering anyone. Which makes sense within the game’s lore, as you don’t really want to be killing soldiers who are just doing their job, none the wiser of the greater conspiracy at hand.
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This can end up being even harder than finding the optimal way to kill a target, as you still have to secure their specific elimination method and reach your exit point. For example, you can still sleep dart a target, but they can be woken up by other enemies before you have the opportunity to retrieve a specific item, or carry their bodies to NPCs who will decide their fate later on for you.
2 Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
A Platforming Masterpiece
The Prince of Persia series has always had puzzle-solving as one of its most defining features, but none have gobsmacked me quite like 2024’s The Lost Crown.
Following Sargon, the youngest and most gifted member of an elite royal guard known as “The Immortals”, you’ll find yourself navigating the maze-like ruins of Mount Qaf, which is filled with several environmental puzzles that’ll truly test your platformer skills. Thanks to Sargon’s time powers, you’ll be able to create “checkpoints” of your exact position, and teleport back to them later, which can make for some tricky puzzles that rely on deciding where to optimally leave your checkpoint, and when to return to it.
This opens up the game to some truly challenging movement puzzles that’ll require perfect precision in where you land, as well as a great sense of rhythm to keep time of time powers and when to use them.
1 Neon White
Pair Your Momentum With Strategy
If you’ve never dabbled in the wonderful world of speedrunning, then you need to give Neon White a try. The game is effectively a first-person platformer game, but it’s also a complex puzzle game, prompting players to interrogate their play style to figure out the fastest and most optimal way to clear levels.
As part of solving the game’s many movement-based puzzles, you’ll be given different weapons and ammo cards with limited resources. Some of these weapons, like the Shotgun, can be used for extra momentum, putting players in a difficult conundrum of deciding whether to use their ammo on enemies, or for the extra speed, or the secret third option, which is how to use it for both.
It’s an excellent onboarding game for players who have ever been curious about trying speedrunning for themselves, as the game gives you the tools and slight nods to figure it out for yourself, while offering you a sandbox to keep trying and testing new theories out for yourself.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
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