Joe Bernardi of Paste put Ziggurat in a lineage of iOS games where the player tries to do a fun thing as much as possible before dying, including Canabalt, Bit Pilot, and Super Crate Box. He connected Ziggurat mechanics to Rogers's longstanding interest in "infinite mode" without external rewards, and praised the charge time mechanics as "excellent" and the perfect awkward length to confuse muscle memory. Leray of TouchArcade praised its attention to detail, especially in the character sprites. Paste Bernardi called Action Button's design restraint "admirable" and lauded the game's balance. He noted its "extremely focused shallowness" as defining, like a Dorito, and called it "one of the best iOS games [he had] ever played". Reviewing for ActionButton.net, indie developer Adam Saltsman called Ziggurat "French New Wave action videogame fan art".
