The best puzzle games like Zack and Wiki are Return of the Obra Dinn, The Sexy Brutale and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Below are 9, 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 Zack and Wiki 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.
Deduction as the entire mechanic, and it never tells you if you are right.
A repeating day full of people on schedules you have to learn.
A puzzle game where the puzzles and the story are the same thing.
The best-written adventure game there is.
Handheld puzzling with the same gentle tone.
Physical puzzle solving where your body is the obstacle.
Puzzle design at its sharpest, and very funny.
A small adventure hiding an enormous amount of secret design.
The best new puzzle game in years, and it respects you.
Momentum. Puzzle games are paced for twenty minutes at a time and most of them get worse past an hour.
The full list is on games like Zack and Wiki — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Return of the Obra Dinn. Deduction as the entire mechanic, and it never tells you if you are right.
No. Zack and Wiki released on the Nintendo Wii, 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 Zack and Wiki 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.