Your Favourite Game Genre

You probably didn't think it was possible for me to be even more nerdy than I come across but I'm going to share something I don't tell people much. I like to write theses (dissertations) for fun. I can hear a million students groan in horror at that admission but it's true. I love gaming and my degree was in Computer Science with Games Technology, despite that combination my actual thesis for my degree was the design of an Encryption Algorithm to replace DES as a competitor to AES. I never wrote a thesis about gaming because it wasn't actually an option surprisingly, there were key tests that had to be met and writing about games wouldn't meet those tests.

Despite the restrictive nature of the choice of topics, writing the thesis itself proved to be an easy task, whilst other students abhorred the 10,000 word requirement, I as someone who has always had an interest in writing and a love of writing found that target easy to hit. So much so that in the time since graduating I have occasionally taken to picking subjects to write about at length.

My favourite genre of gaming is 3D First Person Puzzle Games, with a particular focus on perspective based games, it probably won't surprise you to learn then that I have written a 6,000 word thesis on the topic and used 3 games as case studies: Antichamber, The Witness, and Manifold Garden, spoiler alert, two of these games will appear in this list before the challenge is complete.

The thing I love most about these types of game is the fact that when you reach the point of frustration and you are unable to progress, often the best solution is to walk away, take an hour to do something else and come back and 9 times out of 10 you will solve whatever problem you were stuck on within a few minutes if even that.

There were very few decent puzzle games around when I was growing up, and even fewer 3D games that focused on puzzle solving. Action games and platformers dominated, all games that relied on timing and coordination rather than intellect. It wasn't until I played The Witness that I realised just how enthralling a 3D puzzle game could be. To date one of my favourite series in the genre has been The Room, and my favourite instalment being The Room 4: Old Sins which sees you interact with a model of a mansion and allows you to enter into that space and play around.

This is not only a genre of games I love to play but also one I like to watch. Gab Smolders on YouTube in particular has covered quite a few, including The Room series. Her playthrough of The Room 4 is worth a watch if you've never played these types of games before and want an idea of what they are like.