Puzzle video games owe their origins to brain teasers and puzzles throughout human history. The mathematical strategy game Nim, and other traditional thinking games such as Hangman and Bulls and Cows (commercialized as Mastermind), were popular targets for computer implementation.
Blockbuster, by Alan Griesemer and Stephen Bradshaw (Atari 8-bit, 1981), is a computerized version of the Rubik's Cube puzzle.[4]Snark Hunt (Atari 8-bit, 1982) is a single-player game of logical deduction, a clone of the 1970s Black Box board game.[5]
In Boulder Dash (1984), the goal is to collect diamonds while avoiding or exploiting rocks that fall when the dirt beneath them is removed.
Chain Shot! (1985) introduced removing groups of the same color tiles on a grid, causing the remaining tiles to fall into the gap.[6]Uncle Henry's Nuclear Waste Dump (1986) involves dropping colored shapes into a pit, but the goal is to keep the same color tiles from touching.[7][8]
In Lemmings (1991),[13] a series of creatures walk into deadly situations, and a player assigns jobs to specific lemmings to guide the swarm to a safe destination.[12]
The 1994 MS-DOS game Shariki, by Eugene Alemzhin, introduced the mechanic of swapping adjacent elements to tile matching games. It was little known at the time, but later had a major influence on the genre.
A physics game is a type of logical puzzle video game wherein the player must use the game's physics and environment to complete each puzzle. Physics games use consistent physics to make games more challenging.[19] The genre is popular in online flash games and mobile games. Educators have used these games to demonstrate principles of physics.[20]
Programming games require writing code, either as text or using a visual system, to solve puzzles. Examples include Rocky's Boots (1982), Robot Odyssey (1984), SpaceChem (2011), and Infinifactory (2015).
Exploration
This sub-genre includes point-and-click games that often overlap with adventure games and walking simulators. Unlike logical puzzle games, these games generally require inductive reasoning to solve. The defining trait is that the player must experiment with mechanisms in each level before they can solve them. Exploration games include Myst, Limbo, and The Dig. Escape room games such as The Room involve detailed exploration of a single location.
Sokoban games, such as its namesake title, or block-pushing puzzle games, involve pushing or pulling blocks on a grid-like space to move them into designated positions without blocking the movement of other blocks. Similar games include Baba is You and Patrick's Parabox.
A hidden object game, sometimes called hidden picture or hidden object puzzle adventure (HOPA), is a genre of puzzle video game in which the player must find items from a list that are hidden within a scene.[21] Hidden object games are a popular trend in casual gaming.[22][23]
In tile-matching video games, the player manipulates tiles in order to make them disappear according to a matching criterion. The genre began with 1985's Chain Shot! and has similarities to falling-block games such as Tetris. This genre includes games that require pieces to be swapped such as Bejeweled or Candy Crush Saga, games that adapt the classic tile-based gameMahjong such as Mahjong Trails, and games in which pieces are shot on the board such as Zuma. Puzzle games based on Tetris include tile-matching games where the matching criterion is to place a given number of tiles of the same type so that they adjoin each other. That number is often three, and the corresponding subset of tile-matching games is referred to as match-three games.
^DeMaria, Rusel; Wilson, Johnny (April 27, 2002). High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games (First ed.). Osborne/McGraw-Hill. ISBN978-0072224283.
^"Ally Noble Desert Island Disks". Retro Gamer (53). Imagine Publishing: 79. Hidden object games ... For example, you're a detective looking for clues in a picture ... they might be in monochrome on the wallpaper or peeping out from behind something.
