Puzzle

Portal

These are games where the player is provided with a set of unfamiliar tools and then asked to explore their uses. Sometimes these tools are falling blocks that you must organize into lines, and other times you’re given a portal gun that lets you explore complex environments. So the role of player agency in puzzle games is to learn the nuances of the core tools so that you can use them in increasingly sophisticated ways or under greater pressure.

These games tend to fall into two major categories, though neither is sufficiently distinct to merit a subgenre. The first and most typical type includes relatively short affairs that rarely last more than a few minutes. However, their short length is usually balanced by a random element to them that makes them more or less infinitely replayable. The latter type of puzzle game is longer and more elaborate, but the puzzles themselves are typically setpieces with one real solution. So once you’ve finished the game, there’s not much point in coming back.
Notable examples
• Tetris
• Portal
• World of Goo

Adventure

Day of the Tentacle

It might appear that adventure games are a subgenre of action adventure (or vice versa) because both involve exploration and item collection. However, where action adventure games populate their worlds with enemies, adventure games use puzzles, and that proves to be a game-changer. In adventure games, the fobs you collect are used to solve the puzzles, so if you don’t have the right stuff, you can’t really play the game. So genre entries end up being more about scouring the environment for any interactive item, no matter how small, and then puzzling over the random debris in your pockets (in case it’s not intuitively obvious to you that the best way to traverse a zip line is using a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle).

Notable examples
• The Curse of Monkey Island
• Day of the Tentacle
• Professor Layton and the Curious Village

The non-gamers who read this blog are here for many reasons. Some are family and obligated, some are friends who follow it as the sole sign that I’m not dead yet, and some just happened to stumble by while looking for something else. However, for all their differences, all these people share one complaint in common: they have no idea what I’m talking about. Gaming is an insular little hobby. We have our own jargon and incestuous little comparisons that make perfect sense if you’ve been following the hobby for a decade, but everyone else is out in the cold. So in the spirit of Nintendo’s blue ocean strategy (see, I did it again right there), this week we’ll be doing some outreach to the non-addicted community. This week we’ll be looking at gaming genres: what they’re good for, why we use them, and a primer for some of the more ubiquitous genres that’ll be suitable for linking in future reviews.