Puzzle game
Also said as Puzzler, Logic game
A game whose challenge is working something out, not doing it quickly. It promises the moment when the answer arrives and you feel clever, and that feeling is yours, because you got there.
A puzzle can be solved once, so each must teach you something the last one did not. Good ones forgive your slips and let you try ideas freely, since the challenge is thinking.
Say it
“Give each room one idea. Three rooms to teach it, then one that combines it with the last idea. Undo is free and unlimited, so nobody ever has to replay a solved step.”
Where you’ve seen it
Sokoban (1982) has been pushing crates into dead ends for decades. Portal (2007) teaches one idea per room, and Baba Is You (2019), where the rules themselves are blocks you can push, gives you free and unlimited undo, because a misstep there is not what you are being tested on.
Not to be confused with match-3
A logic puzzle has an answer that you work out, and it stays solved. A match-3 is an endless reaction game that happens to be called a puzzle game by app stores.