Bizarre Puzzle Game
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Some puzzle games, instead of simply being Match Three Game variants, Tetris clones, or Puzzle Platformers, are insanely weird, mind-defying things, where classifying a game into a genre can be as much a puzzle as the game itself. This seems to apply to Capcom puzzle games more than those by any other company.
This doesn't include games which are just weird because the developers decided that Tetris should have an Excuse Plot that involves evacuating a planet via Tetris powered portals to other planets. Framing a paddle and ball game in a trapped spaceship plot, like in Arkanoid, is either an example of an unholy amount of abstraction or Serious Business. Running round on giant dice trying to match numbers in order to blow them up on the other hand can best be described as "the hell?"
See also Widget Series.
Examples of Bizarre Puzzle Game include:
- Gregory Horror Show has you creeping round a hotel spying on guests, such as anthropomorphic roulette wheels and giant pink lizard nurses with blood taking fetishes, in order to steal their souls while trying not to go insane and get trapped there forever yourself.
- Bombastic has you align dice in just the right way to make them explode.
- And Devil Dice, to which Bombastic is the sequel.
- Welcome to Mondo Medicals! You have applied for research! You will help us help you! Help to find the cure for cancer! First we need to verify you! A test will perform this! We hold no response for your safety!
- Zack and Wiki has you playing a 10-year-old pirate who obsessively munches on chocolate bars, and works for a bunch of rabbits, and who seeks the body parts of a cursed pirate which have turned into solid gold things. Your best friend is a flying monkey thing who turns into a bell on command, and the ringing of the bell has the power to turn enemies into items and items into enemies. Oh, and the tutorial has you throw away your Parasol Parachute while you're still falling.
- Super Monkey Ball offers a non-Capcom example.
- Marble Madness can be said to a relative of this game, since the only gameplay difference is that you're moving the ball rather than the playing field.
- Let's face it, it's the monkeys, not the gameplay, which make Super Monkey Ball go from "weird" to "WTF?"
- Marble Madness can be said to a relative of this game, since the only gameplay difference is that you're moving the ball rather than the playing field.
- Viewtiful Joe is technically a platformer, but may involve possibly even more puzzle solving than fighting. It shows how Capcom can make this thing apply even if the game isn't a puzzle game.
- Talismania may qualify, as the player has to connect two identical coins by the longest route possible.
- Intelligent Qube sees you setting traps on a giant grid to capture cubes that are steadily rolling at you while trying not to be crushed.
- Galapagos has you escorting a (suicidal) artificial intelligence in a little spider body named Mendel around a gigantic random collection of platforms and things by randomly clicking on stuff to clear a path by manipulating the environment. This is supposedly to save its potent AI from being used in a weapon.
- While Spin Jam has a match-three element, that ain't how you win levels. The three matched balls provide a force (of sorts) in a straight line that runs through the center spindle, which will cause affected balls to be shot away from the center and (hopefully) into matching-colored flower petals. Filling those petals is the ultimate goal.
- Puzzle de Harvest Moon is nearly impossible to classify, being a truly bizarre game that's closer to Reversi than anything. Unfortunately, the complex and arcane rules that go with this make it too complex to be engaging as a Puzzle Game.
- Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming is similarly impossible to classify, but a much simpler and more entertaining game.
- Today I Die is one of these, and a beautiful one at that. Basically, it's playing a metaphor for returning from the brink of suicide.
- The object of World of Goo is to build bridges across levels by stringing together balls of goo.
- Pang has you popping balloons with a harpoon while trying to dodge them at the same time.
- Saw. While there are a couple of actual video games that fit this trope (think Professor Layton meets Hostel), the "games" played in the movie series will occasionally fit this bill as well.
- Katamari Damacy.