The best puzzle games like Chu Chu Rocket are Lemmings, Tetris 99 and Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. Below are 7, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to puzzle costs you.
Filtering to puzzle means you want to understand something rather than execute it. It is the right filter when what you liked was the click of working out how a system worked.
What you get: The moment of understanding as the reward. Good puzzle games teach a rule, let you feel clever, then show you the rule was smaller than you thought.
What made Chu Chu Rocket worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the puzzle part of that answer, and only the puzzle part.
The same idea slowed down — a crowd you redirect rather than drive.
Puzzle sabotage at ninety-nine players.
The best competitive falling-block game, and it teaches you.
If the elegance of the rule set was the appeal.
Block-pushing taken somewhere genuinely new.
Co-op puzzling where the failure is the entertainment.
Perfect information, a tiny board, and no luck to blame.
Momentum. Puzzle games are paced for twenty minutes at a time and most of them get worse past an hour.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Chu Chu Rocket that are not puzzle games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Chu Chu Rocket — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Lemmings. The same idea slowed down — a crowd you redirect rather than drive.
No. Chu Chu Rocket released on the Sega Dreamcast, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Rarely. A friendly art style is not a difficulty setting — some of the hardest games ever made look like children's books.
In a well-designed game the piece you are missing was taught two rooms ago. If a solution only arrives by trying everything, the design is the problem, not you.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Chu Chu Rocket list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is puzzle — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the puzzle guide for where to start in the genre generally.