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How fast is your brain at solving puzzles? How comfortable are you with decoding a code? Do you enjoy solving puzzles? Then you are at the right place. Have endless fun with our collection of fun puzzle games!
What are Puzzle Games?
Puzzle is the name of a genre of computer games, the purpose of which is to solve logical problems that require the player to use logic, strategy and intuition.
The history of development
The forerunner of the genre were board, graphic and mechanical puzzles - from crossword puzzles to the Rubik's Cube. These puzzles required the player to be logical and dexterous in solving, which also came to play an important role in the genre's prototypes such as Q*bert and Boulder Dash. The standard of the genre was the Tetris game, which appeared in 1985 and combined a simple and exciting gameplay.
In the early 1990s, games like Lemmings and The Lost Vikings revived the puzzle genre. The advent of three-dimensional graphics contributed to the development of puzzles on game consoles. Relatively cheap to produce games have found their niche on portable gaming systems.
Released in 2016, 'The Witness' successfully integrated one puzzle (with many variations) into an open world. The game is extremely demanding, as for a puzzle (on 4 gigabytes of memory it went to swap too often), but in a week it recaptured the millions invested in it.
Traditional puzzle
The games in this sub-genre replicate the gameplay of regular puzzle games: solitaire, mahjong, tag, etc. (possibly with purely computer-generated additions like a time limit).
In some puzzle games, the player is given random blocks or pieces that must be assembled in a certain sequence and shape. These games include Tetris, Klax, Lumines. At the same time, Tetris has spawned many sequels, variations and clones involving 'falling blocks'. Some of these puzzles have a game mode that is the opposite of the Tetris principle: for example, in Tetrisphere and Tetris Attack, the player must clear the area of details in a limited number of moves.
Another representative of the genre is Sokoban, created in 1980 by Hiroyuki Imabayashi, in which the player moves boxes around a maze in order to put them in a given final position.
Many quests and action-adventure games contain puzzle elements. For example, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, LittleBigPlanet and The Legend of Zelda series of games.
Usually puzzles do not cause difficulties for distribution and adaptation, they can be found on arcade machines, game consoles, PDAs, mobile phones.
Physics puzzle
Such games appeared in the early 1990s, when computers became powerful enough to calculate the behavior of colliding objects of complex shape, sagging ropes, etc. One of the first games of this type is 'The Incredible Machine'. The genre received a new birth along with touch phones. The most famous new wave physics puzzle game is 'Angry Birds'. Physical puzzles are sometimes referred to as Portal, The Ball games.
Puzzle games are often so difficult to understand that the term is sometimes used to generically refer to games with unusual, non-descriptive gameplay, such as Every Extend Extra, Braid.