We’ve played them all.
Che you are young (very young) video gamers at the beginning of your journey or enthusiasts with (many) years of experience belonging to the so-called Old Guard, you will certainly have heard of Bomberman and the hundreds of titles that have populated the childhood of adults and children alike.
All we’ll have to do is solve puzzles and situations with logic, ingenuity, and also a good dose of intuition. Puzzle games, or puzzle video games, perhaps represent the vast majority of the video game catalog from its beginnings to today, thanks to their ability to embrace multiple categories of gamers and, above all, female gamers.
The gameplay can vary depending on the game’s objective, the level design, and other distinctive factors, but basically it introduces us to a world defined by very precise rules, with bonuses and penalties depending on how we play the game.
Whether it involves fitting tetrominoes together to create lines that will self-destruct once completed, as is the case with Tetris of course, or shooting colored bubbles to the top of the screen to stick them to others of the same color so they burst, earning us points and precious space, as in Bust a Move, the principle is always the same: beat the level with the most formidable joypad of all time, our mind.
A different story from shooters, sports simulators or even role-playing games, which often rely on the player's ability to think and on a certain inclination toward resource management and planning, Puzzle Games do not require a real story to play through or cinematic cutscenes: plot developments in the style of The Last of Us are not only not considered, but would also and above all be out of context with the spirit of this genre.
Immediate and rapid learning are the essential keywords that a programmer must always keep in mind if they want to offer the product that the user, that is us, is looking for.
Penso, per esempio, ai Lemmings, those cute, adorable and self-destructive green creatures who were the protagonists of the eponymous 1991 game for Amiga and which, by providing us with intuitive gameplay that fully respected the guidelines of puzzle games, demonstrated among other things how easy it was for us players to take control of the digital life of an entire people and dispose of it at our pleasure.
Salvarli e superare il livello o farli morire nei modi più disparati accettando il game over con un sorriso? Not insignificant moral dilemmas, if we think about it. The Video Game could, and can, also lead toward crossroads of this kind.
And what can be said, then, about a seminal and still unmatched title like Money Puzzle Exchanger, created for Neo Geo in 1997, in which we must literally know how to do calculations, without the aid of a calculator, to stack coins and clear the screen of the dozens of colored tokens ready to drag us into ruin at the fateful game over?
Or The Adventures of Lolo, for NES, one of my favorite games: in this case too, logic and reasoning will be the only weapons available against the enemies who stand between our hero and Lala, kidnapped by the bad guys.
Conceiving levels that know how to engage the player with a riot of colors, adorable characters, and a mechanic that is easy to learn, yet not trivial, still constitutes the secret to a good puzzle game today.
The graphics side must be polished, but what will make the difference will certainly not be the firepower of the graphics card, but rather how the elements on the screen are used: this has meant that many titles released over the years have been made by small production houses, often independent ones, which have put the few resources at their disposal in the service of a good idea, fitting it together perfectly just like the tetrominoes in a game of Tetris.
