Thinky Essentials: your favorites

ace attorney trilogy and golden idol are the all-timers here for me. voted the latter because it's more thinky. most of this list is great though. toki tori 2 is a wise deep cut, someone there knows their stuff

feel like Phoenix Wright doesn't really belong here but it's definitely an all-timer for me and i vote with my heart

I've played both Portals (only finished the original, though), Her Story, a short bit of The Witness, Obra Dinn, Phoenix Wright OG trilogy, Baba Is You (I was weirdly bad at this one), OG Myst but not the remake, The Case of the Golden Idol, the Storyteller demo, and Chants of Sennaar. I do intend to get Lorelei at some point.

I find I don't really love the Myst-like games, they just don't provide enough story and I lose the patience for the puzzles without a strong narrative to pull me along.

My heart is split between Phoenix Wright and Obra Dinn, with the Portals and Chants of Sennaar coming up behind. Tempted to vote Phoenix Wright for nostalgia reasons, but as pointed out it's not actually all that 'thinky' as a game.

I also don't love the Golden Idol games, tbh - the gameplay is absolutely great but I find something about their caricature-ish art style pretty gross and off-putting. It was there a little bit with the first one but dismissable, but I just couldn't shake it off with the second one.

Emily, the second Golden Idol game (occasionally) has better art! I'm finding it VERY taxing, though.

Baba is HARD, devilishly so in the later stages.

This is going to be down to Sennaar or Lorelei for me, and probably depends on where I land on docking points for game-breaking meta (Sennaar) or if my exhaustion at the game's end (Lorelei).

Talos and Witness were not for me. I tried picking up Breach twice, but just kind of ran out of steam and didn't get all that far.

I'm more into the logical side of things when it comes to puzzle games so I loved the witness and the talos principle, voting for the former as it was more varied and more creative. I want to play lorelei and I'm not above a thinky platformer so maybe fez too. portal is all time ofc.

the second Golden Idol game (occasionally) has better art!

It has more accomplished art - but that brings the grotesque elements to the fore, whereas the more pixelly art hid it somewhat. There's something about the caricaturish character design that just reminds me of racist newspaper ones: obviously not all caricature art is racist, but it still feels gross to me. This is totally a personal thing.