9.8 Puzzle
One of the commonly seen things in puzzle games is much of the text is rendered as an actual graphic and stored in a similar manner to graphics usually as there is not enough text to warrant a full engine. This not to say there can not be text in the game but as rendering a fancy font would take serious effort much of the text may still be as graphics. They are also some of the most likely to be incorporated into other “genres” (Puzzle Quest being a good example although it goes further and there have been a few mahjong (not solitaire) titles wrapped in what many would
Broadly speaking they are subdivided into two classed
- Computerised versions of traditional card/board/item games
- Reflex testing games
Computerised versions of traditional games (or indeed not so traditional games but ones that could have been) vary as widely as the games themselves. Indeed how to have a computer play them is often a field in computing unto itself or at least a recognised problem (Chess and Go being two of the most famous although games like mahjong are well studied too). In many cases this also leads to the AI in said games being classified as broken or broken by modifications most humans are quite happy to handle and might not even notice unless they take the time to truly analyse it.
Reflex testing games on the other hand tend to have more in common with other types of games (the Kururin series for instance is often classified as a puzzle game but seeing it run would see most hackers approach it as they would a platform game). Although there have been a few attempts at capturing real world reflex testing games few have worked that well and many are truly quite abstract (consider what Tetris truly is for a moment).