Ligo

A hidden gem of a game, it's easily one of the best puzzle games of 2025.

Ligo is a gravity-based, multi-control puzzle game with incredibly novel mechanics. I was just as amazed by it as I was by Bonfire Peaks, since it has everything a great puzzle game should offer. Each level is designed with clear objectives and challenges, leaving very little room for unintended solutions. The game also features meta-puzzles that you must solve to progress and clear each world. While not explicitly stated, the backdrop story is heartwarming.

Currently, the game hasn't had the "Profile features limited" restriction lifted. A game this good shouldn't go unnoticed.

The only minor drawback is that you don't have many levels to play when you get stuck. And the Winter world, in particular, involves gravity inversion, making it very difficult to plan your moves ahead.

Difficulty : 4/5 (Very Hard)
Global : 5/5 (Perfect)
Curator page : Anokturnus
Look no further. If you like sokoban games, Ligo will probably be the best of this year.
Ligo takes you to a mysterious galaxy plagued by yellow squids. You control one of the creatures tasked to cure every land of this galaxy; the squids need to be crushed.
Ligo is a purely 2D sokoban in a side view, which is actually pretty rare! Sokoban games are usually false 2D, a top-down view but they actually have a lot of verticality in them. Purely 2D sokoban games tend to sacrifice the y-axis and don't play with height.
Puzzle games that choose to sacrifice the z-axis are usually puzzle-platformers, which is why Ligo is original. It's NOT a platformer, the only similar game I can think of is Snakebird.
The first world of Ligo is perhaps the best tutorial I've ever seen in a puzzle game. A few puzzles in and you already know this game is gonna be incredible, everything is just perfectly crafted.
The very first thing that impressed me was not even related to the puzzles, it's the music. Every track of this game is fantastic, these calm and melancholic tunes complement the feeling of the game extremely well. Props to the composer, really!
The puzzles of this first world teach you the basic tricky interactions you'll have to deal with, it's literally a shower of "aha moments" that instantly makes you understand the puzzle design is excellent.
So, what exactly are the mechanics of this game?
Like every sokoban, the cube is your best friend. However this time you also have other best friends, namely other creatures like you.
Dealing with several creatures at once is one of the strong focuses of the game. Don't worry if you hate simultaneous control, there are plenty of puzzles with only one creature! The creatures can fuse when they come into contact in a specific position, resulting in a longer or taller creature.
Another major aspect of Ligo is weight, it's not a game that just plays with height, oh no! Cubes are heavy, you can use them to crush squids, no problem. A creature is lighter than a squid though, which means you can't just fall on a squid to crush it... unless you're in fused form. Two fused creatures are heavier than a squid, but still lighter than a cube. You actually need 3 fused creatures for a cube to be lighter.
The latter info might seem irrelevant, but this is an extremely important aspect later in the game as you'll get to the most complex mechanic : gravity beams. I won't go into detail about it... but yeah, you can imagine how tricky weight management can get with it.
It's really hard to describe Ligo's mechanics in detail given how rich the game is. It just fully explores everything, every puzzle feels different and explores a subtlety of the mechanics; this is the mark of the great puzzle games. The puzzles are small, you can end up brute forcing some of them, but overall the interactions and setups are just too tricky and precise for that. Which means the difficulty is very high, Ligo is a long game that requires careful analysis and patience.
Ligo doesn't only have self-contained puzzles. This is what often makes me push my rating to 5, good meta puzzles are the undeniable proof that the dev completely mastered their craft. And yeah, Ligo has them.
As you progress through a world, you unlock cubes and creatures that help you reach other puzzles. Simply reaching a puzzle can be very tricky sometimes, the worlds themselves are indeed puzzles. The self-contained puzzles are just an isolated piece of the world, which means you can use the vines, platforms or anything in them once they are completed.
Yet, that’s not all! Once you’ve unlocked everything in a world, a final puzzle awaits you. Somewhere in the world, you need to bring every cube, creature and even yourself and reproduce a certain shape with them. These special puzzles reward you with a piece of cryptic lore, which I honestly never could make sense of haha.
The last things I need to talk about are huge spoilers, don’t read if you haven’t fully completed the game!
When you wander through the first few worlds, you’ll notice reversed, inaccessible puzzles up in the sky. It’s obvious you can’t reach them the first time, but I hate delaying puzzles. So I tried a bunch of things, starting with bringing a cube from another world. You see, every world has a teleporter, this is your way of traveling across the galaxy. So what if I teleported a cube? Eh, no it doesn’t work. Makes sense, that would break pretty much every meta puzzle. So what if there was something hidden? Could be, like a gravity beam at the bottom of the void… but no, nothing.
But as I explored much later worlds, I ended up making a very interesting discovery: I broke the teleporter. It is composed of a roof and a special cube at its base, which can apparently be removed. The thing is, I fell on the roof, reversed by a gravity beam. And yeah, I never thought about it because teleporters are usually completely isolated from the rest of the puzzles, but entering the teleporter in reverse is doable and actually also teleports you in reverse! Such a cool moment.
The best thing is that this isn’t even the only condition to reach the reversed puzzles. Taking the teleporter in reverse is the end, beforehand you need to correctly set up the puzzle elements to help you. That just goes to show how incredible Ligo’s puzzle design is.
Yet, that’s still not the coolest moment! Breaking the teleporter is very useful for the meta puzzles, it counts as a valid element for the shape puzzles. I thought it would be their only use… until I observed a very strange thing. The roof of the teleporter has a sign on it, and I just found that sign on a random stone block. I had already encountered that sign before, so I thought this might just be a decorative element. I explored the world once more, and the verdict was clear : this is not decoration. The quest to unlock the misery worlds was on, these 4 secret worlds require to find a way to break the teleporter, find the sign, and finally find a way to create that new teleporter. I hadn’t had such a mindblowing moment in a long time, meta puzzles are a thing… but meta secrets like that are on another level.
What more can I say? Ligo didn’t just live up to my expectations, which are quite high, it completely smashed them.
A must-play.

Extremely high quality Sokoban with a twist, and some ingenious level design. There are only a few mechanics (that you have to learn for yourself) but they get squeezed for every last drop of juice they have. There is no fat, no two levels are the same and they force you to think outside the box.
Solutions are hard, but you are loosely free to try other levels if you get a bit too stuck, so you're not banging your head against a seemingly unsolvable puzzle for too long.
Very refined and cleverly constructed, will undoubtedly be among the best puzzle games of 2025.
*edit* - I've given up on trying to 100% the game. The late/post game levels are just way way too difficult.

9.5/10

Squish Squids with cute ghosts.

What is it: This adorable game is about mini-ghost people that can combine and detach like power rangers, with the goal of squishing orange squids. Do I enjoy it? Absolutely. The premise already starts you off where some puzzle games evolve into. You start controlling one ghost and quickly realize once others are introduced that they move in sync. This is where the heart of the puzzles lie.


It has a mix of everything thinky and makes me happy: blocks with different characteristics to push and pull, dark ghosts that refuse to cooperate unless you give them a hug - and gravity! It also uses its environment in a puzzly way that I have never seen before. There are vines you can climb up and down and if they have a big bud at the end you can stand on top of them. Gravity allows for squids and boxes to smash against each other and essentially float in mid air. Wooden platforms that restrict objects from passing through to one single direction allow us to cut up and resize our ghosts into tall towers or long worms. There is a unique combination of mechanics that I have never seen before and easily puts this game in a league of its own.

Overall: amazing! Oh I forgot to mention that there are meta puzzles that you need to solve to access some levels which are often harder than those levels themselves. This makes the game more than amazing - unforgettable.

How hard is it: hard to very hard, ★★★★★.

How long is it: More than 210 levels, took me about 75 hours to complete. Hard levels can be skipped but you have to solve some levels to progress - meaning it is possible for progress to come to a complete halt.

Level design: Beyond exceptional. I found next to zero fat. 99% lean meat here.Rating 9.5/10.

Quality: Undo through resets, level select is done by moving throughout the overworld - super immersive. All controls are intuitive and remapping for controller and keyboard. Volume sliders. Grid toggle (tho I never used it). Has all the settings you’d expect/need. Cloud saves work. Fast and responsive.

Worth the price: Yes X9999.

Most positive aspect for me: The unique combination of mechanics. I feel like I have played a puzzle game that contains one or two of the mechanics here, but the way this game combined them all made it a unique puzzling experience. Familiar yet brand new.

Most negative aspect for me: Sometimes I felt like I was running around with my head cut off and would stumble upon answers. This just happened a handful of times though.

What would make it better: While in the overworld, I wish I could zoom out and see the whole world in one shot. This would have made solving the overworld puzzles a little less stressful.

Also consider:

Snakebird, it has a similar POV and “running around until the solution occurs” type play style.

An Architects Adventure, it shares a similar freedom of constructing a particular shape to solve a puzzle.

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Ligo is a brilliant spatial logic puzzle game. Good puzzlers rarely simultaneously excel in puzzle design, atmosphere, sound, and art. After clawing my way to the Ligo end game over the course of 70+ hours, I am here to report Ligo absolutely shines in all respects.
Ultimately this is another block pushing game, but this one is special and belongs in the same league as Baba Is You and Stephen's Sausage Roll. The SSR influence is especially evident. At first glance Ligo's mechanics seem relatively straightforward. Push blocks, crush squids.
Then you begin to progress through the levels and soon realize every level is a bludgeon to the head, each one more severe than the last. The bludgeons are disheartening and painful. You begin to wonder if 5 hours stuck on one puzzle is really an enjoyable way to spend your free time. It seems incomprehensible anyone with average problem-solving skills can complete this game. And then, after a lengthy period of self-doubt and utter despair, you slowly begin to think in new ways. You return to early game, seemingly uncrackable puzzles only to find they are now a simple exercise in basic logic. There is extremely satisfying skill progression here if you stick with it.
Ligo captured my attention in a way few puzzle games have. It's probable I will exceed 100 hours of playtime when I finally defeat this beast. I had strong doubts at times that I would make it.
It's difficult to find much to criticize. I did at times get bogged down for hours while attempting all possible Ligo permutations in some levels. Typically, though, once you see the correct solution, it's not long before you clear a puzzle. The sometimes tedious fiddling around with Ligo arrangements can indeed be frustrating. But that's just how Sokoban games often are in general. Odds are that you enjoy that kind of thing if you're reading this review. The punishment makes the reward all the sweeter.
If you have high patience and want an extremely hard puzzle challenge, pick up Ligo without hesitation. This is the real deal.

Even with the year still fresh, this Sokoban gem has already cemented itself as one of 2025 very best puzzle games.
Its brilliance lies in its deceptively simple core mechanics, which you'll progressively discover by yourself and which are ruthlessly exploited. Most puzzles might seem impossible at first sight but then transform into a series of exhilarating 'eureka!' moments. It's a very satisfying testament to ingenious design.
It also looks great and plays great on the Steam Deck.

This game is top-tier sokoban. The puzzles are hard, but the solutions are just wow - so creative. I am in awe of what Mr. Berleur has made here. Absolutely recommended for puzzle fans.