Puzzle Games!

[H.Protagonist]

We were having a friendly discussion at the office about puzzle games today, and I'm wondering how you guys fit in to it.

Do you like puzzle games? (examples: Professor Layton, Limbo, Myst, etc)

And,

Are you Male or Female?

[Boy_Tomo_Chan]

I love puzzle games! I just have a bit more difficulty powering through them for 8 hours cause..thinking the whole time!

[WoottWinds]

Love 'em. I'm not too incredibly bright though so I appreciate moderately challenging puzzles like Picross, Picross 3D, Layton, Portal, World of Goo, Peggle, etc. Puzzles are also my girlfriend's favorite game genre, and I've seen a ton of "casual gamers" around my workplace flock to puzzle-esque games rather than try RPG's, FPS', or other types of games that involve some kind of character movement.

[Sgt Phantomizer]

I'm not really sure if i like them or not as this specific genre is a little too broad and i tend to like some games while i dislike others.

Example: I found Puzzle Quest to be an interesting game that i quite liked as well as Hexic HD, but i dislike Tetris and any variants of it (i essentially mean to say that i dislike puzzle games of the match 4 variety) because 1) i easily grow bored with them and 2) they give me headaches after a while.

Myst i easily grow bored with them as with most Adventure games because for me, there's too much brainwork included and not enough story to reward my efforts, the only exceptions here have been The Longest Journey, Syberia and Syberia 2 as well as a little known Adventure/Horror game on the DS called Theresia: Dear Emile.

And i've never played the Layton games and i played the demo of Limbo, i have mixed opinions of it :P

[NorseFTX]

I love puzzle games!
I loved 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, I enjoy and programmed an Excel version of Tetris, I think any game where you can chain-clear stacks is awesome, and I play Minesweeper chronically.

[GeeLW]

Why does being male of female have anything to do with puzzle games? They're not EXCLUSIVELY for gals, you know. That said, I play a ton of them jut because many are great brain pumpers. NEVES is a great DS game even if you think you'd hate the genre in general. I'm Tetris'ed out myself, but there's stuff like Puzzle Fighter, Megapanel, Cu-on-Pa, The Bombing Islands, Flipull, Puzznic, Devil Dice, Builder's Block, Intelligent Qube and a ton of others I go back to because I love the challenge of figuring out stuff.

One of the funniest thing about the genre is watching die-hard anti-puzzle fans try something out and end up saying "hey... er... this is really cool!" before they drop the controller and act like they didn't like the game... Whatever.

[WoottWinds]

@GeeLW - Neves is a great underrated puzzle game for DS. There's an iPhone game called Cross Fingers that recently reminded me of Neves, and I'm having a blast going through it.

[Deuce]

Portal is pretty much the epitome of the puzzle genre. A visceral thrill to go along with the brain teasers, not to mention some genuinely funny writing and great voice acting. This is how puzzles should be done in games.

[H.Protagonist]

Why does being male of female have anything to do with puzzle games? They're not EXCLUSIVELY for gals, you know.

Never said they were exclusive for girls. The poll is just to see if forum members stack up similar to the (amusing) results from our own office. We found that out of 6 employees, only 2 would rate a Layton-esque game very high and actually enjoy puzzle games (in the Layton/Limbo sense, as there are many different kinds of puzzles some of which are more appealing to other people). The two who rated high and like puzzle games were both female and the other four were male. When we talked about the apparent gender disparity (only in our employee pool, mind you) it was suggested (by a guy) that maybe the men lacked the patience to finish the puzzles and were therefore too impatient to enjoy the game.

While I certainly don't believe that somehow girls have more patience than guys as a sex, I was curious to see what the spread would be for other puzzle players. I actually only know two other people outside of work who like puzzles, and again, both are girls. So, this is just curiosity, not science.


And, I REALLY want to play Portal.

[Chaosblade]

I'll elaborate then, because voting yes/male doesn't really seem to answer the question entirely.

I voted that I like them, but you could say I'm kind of picky. I like things like Tetris and Hexic, and on the other end of the spectrum I really liked Portal (play it, you won't regret it!) and look forward to Portal 2 going on sale so I can pick that up.

Something like Layton is less appealing to me though, and even Portal to some extent since it's the same each time you play it. I prefer something like Tetris where it's basically the same each time, but the randomness factor means you need different solutions. I don't really know how else to describe it.

But in general, even though I play the occasional puzzle game and certainly wouldn't say I dislike them in general, it's far from my favorite type of game.

You might get similar results asking about RPGs, particularly longer ones. I notice that a lot more females tend to like those versus other genres, and that a lot of male gamers tend to prefer... well, things that aren't long RPGs. That applies primarily to Japanese RPGs, but I've known a several girls into things like Diablo (surprisingly enough). Other western stuff like, say, The Witcher or Mass Effect? Not so much.