Puzzle Games

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There are many types of puzzles games, and most of them are about solving problems. The main types include physic, logic, matching, shape manipulation puzzles, and word puzzles. All of which are extremely popular on mobile devices and are popular to a wider audience than users who are traditional “core” gamers.

Physics puzzle games depend on the simulation of physical properties of an object, such as weight, friction, inertia, bounciness, strength, etc. For example, in Portal, players must place the portals down to get the right angle and inertia to reach parts of the level. However, in logic-based puzzle games, you use mathematics to solve problems which are loosely connected by a story or rules. In Sudoku puzzles your objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 sub-grids that compose the grid contain all of the digits from 1 to 9. This shows how you use a set of fixed rules that need to be applied to find the solution.

Candy Crush is one of the most popular puzzle games and is a match-three puzzle. The game requires the player to move pieces turn by turn to create rows of three, which then explode. Creating bigger combinations rewards the player with special pieces such as pieces that can remove an entire row. These games have multiple levels, so when you complete one puzzle, you move onto the next level which gets increasingly more difficult as you progress through the levels. Candy Crush made $930 million in the 12 months ending July 2018. This shows how popular puzzles games are and that is why there is so many of them. Most of them are free to play however they have microtransactions which the player can purchase and help them progress through the levels if they are stuck or need some help. An example of this is Threes, which is a sliding block puzzle game, where players match numerical blocks to create the highest number possible. Another developer released an app called 2048, which was very similar but had more downloads because it was free to play.

Another type of puzzle game is the shape manipulation puzzle games. These shape puzzles require the player to manipulate (rotate, move, etc) different shapes to solve a puzzle. An example of shape manipulation puzzle games is Tetris. Tetris has shapes, called Tetronimos, that must be manipulated as they fall. If a complete row is filled in, the blocks disappear. The objective is easy to understand and it is easy to visualize solutions however the game increase in speed as the player progresses which makes it harder and harder to beat a high score.

The last main type of puzzle games is word-based puzzles. Word-based puzzles often require the player to create words from a set of provided letters. Many of the words provide bonus points for using difficult letters or creating longer words. Many word-based puzzles can be based on “American English” spelling which can be frustrating for people who have different spellings such as “British English”. This could be the difference between the word ‘colour’ and ‘colour’. Some popular word games include a turn-based multiplayer element, but this can lead to cheating as your opponent could google words or spellings to win the game.