A History of Puzzle Games
The Evolution of Core Puzzle Genres
When you think of puzzle games, what do you think of? When most people think of puzzle games, they only have one or two images in their head. Probably a simple game with minimalistic theming and a basic tile-matching mechanic. However, puzzle games have birthed games that look and play in radically different ways from each other while still falling fully into the puzzle genre. And this diversification happened very quickly. In the space of ten years the core sub-genres were created, and then over the next 25 years puzzle games have innovated heavily, devising mechanics that push the human mind to its limits as puzzle game players have bent time and space, built amazing machines, and navigated fantastical locations. This is only a short list of the amazing diversity that has been hidden in the puzzle genre over its young life.
Action-Puzzle Games
The puzzle genre as a whole, and more specifically the action-puzzle sub-genre, first got a lot of attention in 1984. While there were puzzle games before 1984, none of them compared to Tetris, a game created by Alexey Pajitnov that required forming lines out of tetrominoes, irregular shapes made out of four touching squares. Tetris was a huge success to the point that now, over 30 years later, it is still being played by large audiences in many forms. Tetris was the first hugely successful puzzle game, and the first hugely successful action-puzzle game. Action-puzzle games were iterated upon through the years with new mechanics, but two of the most revolutionary games were made in 2007 and 2009. Portal was developed by Valve in 2007 and introduced players to portals, which were basically artificial wormholes. Place two portals on opposite walls, and the player can use them to get from one side of the room to the other without ever physically crossing the room. The game uses this ability to create more and more confounding puzzles as the games goes on, requiring maneuvers that would otherwise be impossible like free-falling through two portals placed above and below each other to generate the momentum needed to fly across the map.
Braid was made by Number None in 2009 and instead of folding 3D space, it manipulated the flow of time. The player starts the game with the ability to rewind time, and each chapter adds new mechanics that the player must learn how to exploit. These include the passage of time being dependent on the player’s horizontal level location meaning that when the player moves forward time moves forward and when the player moves back time moves back. These two games were groundbreaking, both by showing what could be made inside a game engine, and showing publishers that there was a large audience for mind bending action-puzzle games. More recently, the latest game in the action-puzzle series The Legend of Zelda was released in 2017 by Nintendo. Breath Of The Wild came out to much commercial success, and included puzzles that required the player to stop time, create pillars of ice, and use telekinetic powers to manipulate the various blocks, boulders, and metal sidings available in the puzzle levels. This shows an overview of how action-puzzle games have evolved over the years, and how even within the sub-genre, games can be wildly different from each other.
Tile-Matching Games
The tile-matching sub-genre was created in 1985 with SameGame, A game in which players were presented with a grid of colored blocks, and could select groups of identically colored blocks to remove them from the grid. The goal was to remove all blocks from the grid. In 2001 Bejeweled made the now ubiquitous tile-swapping mechanic famous, giving players the goal of getting a certain score to win. From there, thanks to iOS there was an explosion of tile-matching games, but not much innovation in game mechanics. Finally in 2014 Threes came out, which upended the classic idea of tile-matching with new mechanics and a high difficulty bar. Players slide tiles around a grid, merging 1s and 2s together to form 3s and larger numbers with copies of themselves to double their value. The game ends when no more tiles can be merged. These games are some of the most abstract of puzzle games, with minimal theming and typically no overarching story. These games are also some of the most similar, but even here if one were to compare Bejeweled to Threes, the games not only have little in common thematically beyond minimalism, but also mechanically are different due to how the tiles in the two games interact in very different ways with each other.
Digital Recreations of Classic Puzzle Games
Another popular type of puzzle game is the digital recreation of older games, like the classic card game Klondike. Microsoft began shipping Windows Solitaire in 1990, and made it a default application on windows operating systems. The game played just like a typical game of Klondike. Later on, the company Freeverse released Burning Monkey Solitaire for Macintosh in 1998, not changing how the game played at all but giving the player access to many more single player solitaire games, along with an audience of monkeys that would make jokes and comment on the player’s performance. As time has gone on, developers have created digital versions of more and more games, and more recently have replicated the wooden Labyrinth games found in stores. Many versions of these physical games have been made by various companies, but they all involve the players tilting the board of the game to guide a marble through a maze and into the end hole. To do this, players either use knobs on the side of the box or by physically picking it up and tilting it in their hands. In the digital recreations on smartphones, which have also been released by many different developers, players are able to simply tilt their phones and see the board tilt on screen, guiding the marble through the various levels much like players using the original games. This is a fantastic use of the medium, as it allows for a much greater play experience than what a physical board, with only one labyrinth, would provide. These games are useful in seeing how developers are even pulling ideas from physical games for new ideas and innovations in the greater puzzle genre.
Hidden Object Games
Hidden object games were invented around 1990. Probably based at least partially on the Where’s Waldo book series, these games center around searching the scenery of the game for hidden objects. In Alice: An Interactive Museum, an early hidden object game from Toshiba in 1991, players hunted through a museum for a deck of cards that held clues to finding the last room in the game. The game was controlled with the mouse and allowed the player to inspect the various art pieces, shelves, drawers, and so on found throughout the library. In doing so the player would occasionally find one of the deck’s cards. More recent games have been released on smartphones like Fantastic Beasts: Cases which was released by Warner Brothers in 2016. The game gave players a limited time to spot specific objects hidden throughout various scenes, and also allowed the players to cast spells and brew potions to assist in figuring out the mysteries the items were connected to. A bit more recently, in 2017, Hidden Folks was released by Adriaan de Jongh and Sylvain Tegroeg. Hidden Folks went back to the original concept of the genre, and made a chill game that has no time limits or fancy mechanics, and instead just has beautifully animated visuals and highly interactable scenes. This sub-genre is probably the most homogeneous of all the puzzle sub-genres, but even here games can have widely different themes.
Physics Based Puzzle Games
Among all the rest of these genres, physics-puzzle games have more slowly innovated over the years. One of the earliest examples was The Incredible Machine by Kevin Ryan in 1993, a game where players would build ridiculous Rube Goldberg machines to perform amusingly simple tasks. Players would have access to different objects each level, ranging from various sizes of balls to ropes and even a few animals. Over the years, more types of physics-based games were invented, including bridge building games. World of Goo was released in 2008 by 2D Boy to much acclaim. World of Goo had similar mechanics to previously released bridge building games, but added on its own innovations, along with a fantastic and adorable theme. Other games would require getting a heavy vehicle of some sort from one side of the bridge to the other, freezing time so that the player could build the full bridge before gravity, and a train, attempted to break it. World of Goo asks players to connect their limited supply of goo balls together in real time, while forming bridges and towers in order to get past the level’s various obstacles. Players always have to be vigilant to make sure their construct has proper supports, lest it break and collapse as they build. Each level has the end goal of getting all of the unused goo balls to a pipe that serves as the exit. Bridge Constructor: Portal was released in 2017, and has the basic ideas from the previous bridge building games, that of building bridges over obstacles before running vehicles over them. However, it is set in the dangerous world of Portal and thus has an increasing number of portals that the vehicles must go through, along with dangers in the form of turrets, pools of acid, and laser fields. The player also frequently has to fling vehicles across large gaps, something that has sadly been missing from bridge building games up until Bridge Constructor: Portal. The game tracks the amount spent to score the player, giving an incentive to build as little as possible, instead of giving players a strict budget to work with. A new twist on the sub-genre is currently still in development in the form of Besiege, a game currently in alpha from Spiderling Studios where players build massive 3D siege weapons to attack medieval armies and castles. The weapons currently in the game include everything from buzz-saws to rockets, and a well-built machine can be incredibly dangerous. These games are an interesting exploration of how physics can be combined with puzzles to create great games that are easy to start out in, but tend to get difficult very quickly. The sub-genre is also one of the more diverse, despite them being mostly focused on building things. Just by looking at the mechanics of the games, it is clear that each game has its own system and mechanics for construction.
And There Were Countless Stars In The Sky
All of this goes to show how even though the puzzle game market was as small as other video game genres heading into the 1980s, the following 40 years have seen an explosion of new and innovative puzzle games that have spread across the world. And the results of this innovation can be seen all over, as many AAA titles will pull in puzzle mechanics to spice up their games through mini-games and side-quests. The puzzle genre is very diverse at this point, and there is no reason to expect that it will stop innovating any time soon. Why stop moving, when the only limit is the size of your imagination?
This article was written for the ArtG 80H class at UC Santa Cruz.
