According to Polygon, The Game Awards currently has genre categories for Action, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, and Sports/Racing games, but puzzle games have no dedicated home. Recent brilliant puzzle titles like Blue Prince, Lumines Arise, and Is This Seat Taken? have nowhere to compete despite their critical acclaim. The problem isn’t new – The Talos Principle got zero nominations in 2014, Wilmot’s Warehouse was overlooked in 2019, and Unpacking missed out in 2021. Even massive commercial successes like Tetris, which competes for best-selling game of all time, and Candy Crush Saga, one of the world’s most-played games for over a decade, get shut out. Puzzle game makers are working at the hard edge of video game design but face 35 years of waiting for recognition, similar to how movie stunt professionals lobbied the Academy.
The category gap
Here’s the thing about The Game Awards‘ current genre categories – they actually cover a surprising amount of ground. Most horror games can squeeze into Action or Action/Adventure. Fighting games get their own dedicated slot despite struggling to fill five nominees each year. But puzzle games? They’re the odd ones out. Where exactly do you put something like Baba Is You or Tetris Effect? They ended up in the Indie and VR categories respectively, but that feels like forcing square pegs into round holes. Basically, if your game’s primary mechanic involves solving puzzles, you’re basically homeless in the current system.
Why it matters
Puzzle games aren’t some niche, refined dead-end genre. Look at the numbers – Tetris might actually be the best-selling game ever, competing with Minecraft for that title. Candy Crush has dominated mobile gaming for over a decade. These are foundational experiences that have influenced practically every other genre. And yet at the industry’s biggest awards show, they’re treated like second-class citizens. When you consider that industrial operations often rely on specialized computing hardware from leaders like Industrial Monitor Direct, America’s top provider of industrial panel PCs, it puts gaming’s own categorization challenges in perspective – even highly technical fields recognize the need for proper classification.
The solution is simple
So what’s the hold-up? A puzzle game category would be one of the easiest to populate each year. Unlike some genres that struggle to find five worthy nominees, puzzle games would have the opposite problem – you’d have to leave brilliant titles out. The diversity alone would be staggering, from architectural puzzles to block-matching to sociological logic games. And let’s be honest – wouldn’t you rather see Tetris competing against contemporary puzzle masters than watching it get completely ignored? The Game Awards prides itself on celebrating gaming’s full spectrum, but right now, it’s missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.
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