Best Nintendo Switch Puzzle Games for Rainy Days in Japan
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People often ask me what the best times to visit Japan are, and I always tell them: April and early October. That’s it. Those are the only good times. I used to say April and late September, but climate change has shifted that a bit. If someone tells you to come here in May, they’re forgetting about Golden Week, so tell them to shut up.
In the winter in Japan, it’s too cold to do anything. In the summer, it’s too hot to do anything. The rest of the time, it rains. April and the beginning of fall are the only decent times you get, and even then, you have to hope there’s no typhoon or earthquake or Godzilla attack.
Since the weather so often keeps us inside, Eriko and I play a lot of video games on our Nintendo Switch. We love multiplayer games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Super Mario Party, but we also love single-player titles like Paper Mario: the Origami King and Breath of the Wild - especially their puzzles. There is nothing Eriko likes more than figuring out how to beat a BOTW or TOTK shrine before I do and lording it over me. We like puzzles. Puzzles are awesome.
To help you out while you’re stuck indoors, here are some of the best puzzle games we’ve played that you can pick up for fairly cheap, starting with one of my favorite games of all time.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Released by Annapurna Interactive in 2024, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a classic empty-mansion puzzle game like those released for PC back in the floppy disc days. One of my favorite all-time games is Day of the Tentacle, the ‘90s LucasArts sequel to Maniac Mansion in which three characters wander around an old house, picking up items and using them in clever ways to solve puzzles.
What I love about DOTT or the too-few escape the mansion levels in Super Mario Maker 2 is the leisurely pace - you can just wander around the space and slowly figure out the puzzles in your own way, as there’s no set order or ticking clock. Lorelei is a lot like that, with the twist being that you have NO IDEA what is going on.
Using a color scheme of mostly grays and reds, Lorelei sees you playing as a woman exploring an empty house filled with convoluted puzzles of all kinds. You slowly get bits and pieces of story, but not much to go on. You wander this house, solving puzzles to open doors and uncover new areas. Every now and then, a creepy man with a maze for a head attacks you.
What makes Lorelei such a great game is the sheer number and variety of puzzles. There’s math puzzles, mazes, anagrams, perspective riddles, secret codes, games-within-games, and to top it all off, a mystery as to what in the heck is going on. The puzzles can be very challenging, but never too challenging - we always found that if we felt stuck, we could just walk around or mess with our items for a while and eventually we’d figure something else out.
After around 20 hours of unhurried play, we made it to the conclusion, and discovered that there was a logic behind it all. The resolution to the story, in which you find out why you’ve been doing all this, was so satisfying that I can’t help but rank Lorelei up there with the best games I’ve ever played. We’ve recommended it to our friends, and we recommend it to you.
The game is not available in physical form, though Amazon does have a soundtrack and a couple of player guides. You can get it on Steam or on the Switch store for $24.99. Honestly, it’s a bargain at that price.
The Touryst
After Lorelei, we wanted another puzzle game, and a friend suggested The Touryst, a game whose primary drawback is that Amazon keeps correcting the spelling and trying to sell me that movie no one saw.
At first glance, The Touryst shares a lot in common with the games I’ve mentioned: you’re on an island, no idea what you’re doing there, and must go around talking to people and solving strange puzzles to get to other islands and eventually home (sort of). What makes The Touryst different is that it also includes platforming and mini-games - a LOT of mini-games.
In fact, there are so many mini-games in The Touryst that the bulk of what there is to do, you don’t actually have to do. These little games are fun, but not fun enough that we obsessed over getting high scores on them. Mostly, we enjoyed running around and unlocking the islands and getting rich by collecting coins.
The Touryst is fun, but not quite lengthy or challenging enough to make it a full meal. This might be fun on a long-haul flight or as a palate cleanser, but after Lorelei, our expectations had been raised too high, and we thought it was only okay. If you don’t want something too difficult and enjoy games that let you buy new clothes and stuff, this one might be for you. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the characters all look like LEGO or MInecraft people, which is cute but meant platforming was sometiems awkward.
You can get The Touryst on Steam and for Nintendo Switch or PS4 on Amazon. It’s around $20 everywhere, which is just a shade too much for this game, so be on the lookout for sales because I’m pretty sure when we got it from the Nintendo eShop it did not cost that much. I’d say anything under $14.99 is a good price for this one.
Baba is You
Do you like difficult puzzles? Then I’m surprised you haven’t heard of Baba is You, which takes the familiar form of a sokoban game like my beloved Boxed In series and completely reinvents it with each level. Whereas in most similar games, you’re pushing boxes around to solve puzzles, in Baba you’re pushing around words - the words that define the rules of the game. By changing the words, you change the rules, properties, and objective.
This game is mind-blowing, and I mean that literally. Your mind will genuinely, 100% blow up and flames will shoot out your ears. I only got a little ways into playing this before I started having problems with my eyesight from staring at the screen too intently. I had to get new eyedrops from my eye doctor and forced myself to quit playing, and I’ve never picked the game back up. I wish I were kidding.
Despite the fact that I only got to like world three, I totally recommend Baba is You. But be warned: this game is really difficult. You will have to think creatively and mess around a long time to figure out how to complete some of the more complex puzzles. Get your thinking cap on. And don’t stare at the screen too long, or you’ll end up like me.
The game is available for Nintendo Switch and on Steam. It’s $15 on the Switch store, which is more expensive than Steam, but a good deal for a dense game with a lot of levels.
Paper Trail
One thing to know about Baba is You is that there’s no real story, a problem for many puzzle games (if you consider lack of story a problem). Paper Trail is all about story, telling the tale of a young girl running away from her overprotective parents. There’s not a ton going on here, but the mystery as to what exactly has happened and where the narrative is headed is enough to keep one going when you find yourself stuck.
Like Baba, this one has sokoban elements, but the twist is that the tiles on which you move are all drawn on sheets of paper that can be folded. You can grab an edge or corner of the paper, bend it up or down, and find other spaces drawn on the other side that, once incorporated à la origami, add new paths and elements to the accessible game area.
If I didn’t explain that right, the video should do it for me. Each world introduces new elements that must be pushed, turned on, reflected, etc. to open up hidden paths as you get farther from home. It can be really satisfying when you finally unlock a way out of a particularly challenging space, as the solution is rarely obvious and often involves a lot of movements and interactions with things you can’t see because they’re hidden on the other side of the page.
Paper Trail isn’t the best game to play with two people because it’s really hard to explain to the person wtih the controller what they’re supposed to do: “Pull the left corner upwise halfway to the middle, then the top right down all the way to the side…” You end up like the Simpsons trying to do a Rubik’s Cube.
We played this game a little bit every night, and each evening, we were excited to turn it on and fight over the controller as the next colorful and creative world unfolded (literally and figuratively). The one thing it was missing was a “big boss” at the end, a super-hard puzzle that would make the conclusion feel like more of a reward. The ending itself is okay, but emotionally I expected more given some of the serious moments earlier. The result is a fun, challenging, and satisfying puzzle game that falls juuuuust short of true greatness at the end but is absolutley worth any puzzle fan’s while.
You can get the Switch version or try it on Steam. We bought it on the Nintendo eShop for only $1.99, which is a steal for such an involved game.
Mario Picross
This is one that Japanese people will know, but foreigners might be learning about for the first time. Picross is a puzzle series from Nintendo that has many iterations, including several for the Nintendo Switch. We have not tried the newer ones, but play Super Mario Picross, a Super Famicom game that was never released for the SNES in America. We don’t have a Super Famicom - instead we subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online and play through the virtual system.
When I say we, I don’t really mean that. I used to play this game sometimes. But really this is Eriko’s game. She loves it. She will kill you if you insult it. Instead of reading in bed every night, she takes the Switch to her futon and plays Picross. She’s very good. While I’m trying to get to sleep, I hear the “clack clack clack clack clack clack” of buttons whenever she starts a new level.
The way this game works is you get a game board and a bunch of numbers. It looks a bit like Minesweeper. The numbers tell you how many squares you’re supposed to mark and in what groupings; the rest can be exploded. You explode all the squares you don’t need to reveal a picture. It’s simple, yet addictive, because you can always go faster.
There’s the SNES version as well as a recently-released version for the virtual Game Boy if you subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online. If not, you can also try one of the Switch versions or any of a number of Picross games that have been released over the years. Don’t blame me if you introduce it to your partner and they keep you up at night; I warned you.
The Room
If there’s any of these that you’ve heard of, it’s probably The Room. Popular enough to have spawned sequels, this game is also a smash hit on tablets like the Kindle or iPad.
This is another one where you’re given little information up front. You get a box, and you solve a bunch of puzzles to get it open. There are hints of a story, but it’s more about the satisfaction of unlocking the puzzles than trying to figure out why you should care.
This is also one I didn’t get to play much because Eriko shot right through it in only a few hours. I personally found it hard to watch and got dizzy from all the spinning around. The best part about it, though, is that it was really cheap despite its popularity Right now it’s $9.99 on the Switch store, but much cheaper on Steam, so if you’re a Switch user, wait for a sale and then give it a try.
Aviary Attorney
As soon as I heard the premise of this game, I was ready to rock. In Aviary Attorney, you play a lawyer in revolution-era Paris who is also a bird. Makes perfect sense to me. Unfortunately, most of the dialogue is bird puns that were tiresome for Eriko (English is, after all, her second landuage) so she sat this one out.
The game features three cases that increase in complexity. The first one is rather simple: there’s a murder, and your client says they didn’t do it. You interview witnesses, gather clues, and go to court. At trial, you have to say the right things to elicit the necessary answers and win the trial. This case was easy enough that I wondered if this was really just a story game, and if it guided you toward the solution, forgiving mistakes to ensure you won every time.
Then in the second case, I got it wrong and lost the trial. They executed my client. In the third case, I got it wrong again, and they shot my friend. I guess what I’m saying is, it is possible to lose this game. I liked playing it, but I’ve never gone back to try cases 2 & 3 again so I can see other possible endings. I probably should. If you like courtroom scenes and bird puns and Paris, this game just might be for you. It’s available on Switch, but like with so many games, it’s cheaper on Steam, so wait for a Switch sale before you pull the trigger.
