As any major awards ceremony approaches, there’s always a clamor for the addition of new categories to recognize unsung work and fill the hearts of followers with niche passions. It can even work: The next Oscars will hand out an award for Best Casting for the first time, and the long-desired Stunt Design award will debut in 2028. So the organizers of The Game Awards will have to forgive us if we deluge them with similar pleas. (Though we might have to wait a while — it took 35 years of lobbying by the movie stunt community for the Academy to relent on the Stunt Design award.)
My colleague Claire Lewis has already made the case for a horror game category. That would rule. So would board games, which is Austin Manchester’s personal cause. But Claire and Austin will have to forgive me if I try to elbow in front of them in the queue, because like all blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument for why my demand is the most urgent and important of all. The demand is this: We need a category for puzzle games.
Categorizing art by genre is not a science; it’s very subjective, and it will always start arguments and end in fuzzy definitions. There’s a reason the film Academy doesn’t do it. But it is a necessary evil in the world of video games, which are so diverse they barely qualify as a single art form. For the full spectrum of achievement in video games to be recognized, and for games of all stripes to have a chance for representation, genre categories are essential.
The Game Awards has genre categories for Action, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, and Sports/Racing games. Between them, these six categories actually cover a lot of ground, and you can find room for most games within them (as well as broader categories like Multiplayer and Ongoing Game). With respect to Claire, most horror games would slot easily into Action or Action/Adventure. There is a route to representation there, however unlikely and fraught with competition.
Not so for puzzle games. There’s simply nowhere to put them. Consider three of 2025’s best games, all very different: the architectural riddles of Blue Prince, the pulse-pounding block-matching of Lumines Arise, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles of Is This Seat Taken? Where could they possibly go, between these six categories? Nowhere, that’s where. Blue Prince was nominated in the Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie categories; the other two are out of luck.
There are dozens of brilliant puzzle games released every year that have no home at The Game Awards, unless they happen to qualify for categories like Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, or the extremely competitive Indie races. The Talos Principle wasn’t nominated for anything in 2014. Nor was Wilmot’s Warehouse in 2019, or Unpacking in 2021. Baba Is You snuck into Indie, Grindstone and Threes! into Mobile, Tetris Effect into VR/AR. You really have to go hunting for puzzle game representation at The Game Awards.
These are often small games, but the art of the puzzle game is of massive significance. Candy Crush Saga is one of the most-played games in the world and has been for over a decade. Tetris is arguably in competition with Minecraft for the title of best-selling game of all time; it’s also in the running for best game of all time, period. Puzzle games are foundational to the art of video games, and they are in conversation with almost every other genre. With respect, they are not a refined but dead-end niche that is only in conversation with itself, like fighting games — an important genre, no doubt, but one which struggles to fill a field of five nominees every year.
Puzzle games wouldn’t have that issue. You could fill a field of five with fascinating, diverse, deserving games every year with ease — or rather, with difficulty, because you’d have to leave so many good games out. And to reiterate, these are games that otherwise have no home at The Game Awards (especially when the Mobile category is filled with trash). Puzzle game makers are working at the hard edge of video game design, creating some of the purest expressions of the video game form. Just like movie stuntmen, they deserve recognition. Let’s not keep them waiting 35 years.
