Puzzle games that respect your time

There's a difference between a puzzle game and a patience test dressed up as one. The ones I keep installed let me make real progress in a five-minute window.

I like puzzles with a clean state — you open them, you see the board, you solve. No long intros, no energy meters. Driftwood Isles isn't strictly a puzzle game, but its small mechanisms scratch the same itch beautifully.

A tip for picking them: check whether the game works offline before you commit. Some puzzlers phone home just to show ads, and that defeats the point of a quiet offline session.

The best ones store your progress locally so a dead connection never costs you a solved level.