The best puzzle games like Tetris are Tetris Effect: Connected, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 and Lumines Remastered. Below are 11, 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 Tetris 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 game made overwhelming — sound and light tied to every piece you drop.
For the competitive half, and the best way to learn versus play.
Block-dropping on a musical timeline, so the beat decides when things clear.
Nintendo's other falling-block game, and the one built around colour matching instead of shape.
If what you loved was a tiny rule set with an enormous ceiling.
A run is a coffee break, the numbers escalate absurdly, and one more go is the whole design.
Arrows, mice and cats — the same purity of rules, with four players.
Perfect information and a tiny board, so every loss is legibly your fault.
Pachinko and deckbuilding, and just as easy to start and hard to stop.
Ninety-nine players, one board each, and the only battle royale anyone over forty enjoys.
Puzzle League under its original name — swap instead of drop, and deeper than it looks.
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 Tetris that are not puzzle games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Tetris — 12 picks, no genre filter.
Tetris Effect: Connected. The same game made overwhelming — sound and light tied to every piece you drop.
No. Tetris released on the Nintendo Game Boy, 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 Tetris 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.