How come when a new puzzle game is announced it can’t be met with immediate excitement like other genres can? As a huge fan of puzzle games, the answer is really simple - it’s incredibly subjective. There are too many times where I will hear of a new puzzle game and all it will show is some logo that really only shows a general art style and the game name.
The problem here is that once I open up the trailer or news piece on the game, that is when I will learn what type of game it actually is. Unfortunately, most of the time it will be some color-matching game like Candy Crush or a fit-the-pieces game. While I understand that original puzzles were the cardboard images that you have to fit the pieces together for, and those types of puzzles are still being made to this day, but do you really think that’s what I was hoping for?
When I think of puzzle games, I think of titles like Silent Hill, Resident Evil, general Metroidvanias, and a bunch of indie games, like The Witness, The Station, They Were Here, Tormented Souls, and Tandem: A Tale of Shadows. All of these games provide puzzles in different ways, each unique in their own right.
Horror titles like Silent Hill, Tormented Souls, and Resident Evil tend to have riddles, hidden hints, and specific items that have to be collected in order to solve their puzzles. Then there are titles like The Witness and The Station that just throw you into an environment, sometimes with a reason, and have just puzzle after puzzle laid out in front of you with your path to freedom being opened one step further with every puzzle solved. Utilizing a co-op-dependent approach is They Were Here which has two players working together to get out of containment. Then, using a similar co-op-dependent approach but leaving it to a single-player experience, are titles like Tandem which has the player control two characters from different point-of-views that have to interact with each other in a specific way in order to proceed.
My point in this explanation is that there are so many different ways that a game can be considered a puzzle game, but for many players, such as myself, when it ends up just being a silly color matching game or fit-the-piece game, it is a letdown. I don’t want simple puzzles! I don’t want to just waste time on my phone with puzzles that require more movement than actual thinking! It just doesn’t scratch the itch in my brain that a true puzzle game does.
So, what is the resolve to this dilemma? The same as other genres - branch them out! If a genre focusing on melee combat and progressing through the game is a “rogue” title, but they are separated by if you start from the beginning being a Roguelike and if you maintain meta-progression being a Roguelite, then why can’t different puzzle games be branched accordingly?
Need to search the map for clues and collect specific items to combine with other ones or interact with specific parts of the map in order to proceed? That would be a Map Puzzle Game, or Map Puzzler. Need to work together with a friend or secondary character in order to proceed? That would be a Co-Puzzle Game, or Co-Puzzler.
Stop just calling anything that can be considered one a puzzle game! It is way too general, it doesn’t properly explain what the game is, and they always have to have a second genre attached to it in order for you to really know what type of game it is. I would even be fine with games like Candy Crush and regular old-school puzzles maintaining the plain puzzle genre, but we should start using genre clarifiers for fans of puzzle games outside of a mobile device.
