How AI in puzzle games will make them more engaging

When it comes to the adoption of AI agents in video games, many often think that genres like RPGs, open-world games, and adventure games will be the first to integrate the tech. However, puzzle games, including puzzle platformers and hybrid casual puzzle games, are particularly well placed to take advantage of the gameplay and development benefits of  generative AI-powered agents.

Puzzle games have long been one of the most popular – and profitable – game genres. A 2023 report found that mobile puzzle games alone generated $42 billion and saw over 50 billion downloads between 2013 and 2023. That means that studios that find ways to leverage generative AI in the genre in innovative ways could potentially see a significant payoff. 

Puzzle games have also always been a corner of the gaming industry where innovation and art have flourished. Puzzle platformers like Portal, Inside, Braid, and Limbo each pushed the bounds of what’s possible in gaming in their own ways. Meanwhile, games like Never Alone and Seasons After the Fall, The Room, and Samorost 3 set a high bar for game art and animation. That innovative approach to game development has trickled down to more simple puzzle games like Baba Is You, an updated take on Sokoban puzzle games and G30 - A Memory Maze, a minimalist puzzle game where players piece together the memories of a person suffering from a cognitive disorder.

AI agents offer even more opportunities for innovation and experimentation within the genre. Casual puzzle games that are looking for ways to shift their gameplay from hyper casual to hybrid casual to improve retention and monetization can also greatly benefit from AI. In this article, we’ll share how AI agents and NPCs can streamline development while introducing new levels of complexity, interactivity, and personalization in all kinds of puzzle games through dynamic puzzles, adaptive difficulty, interactive NPCs, new game mechanics, and more.

Ways to integrate generative AI into puzzle games

The puzzle game genre represents a wide variety of games – from casual games like Plants vs Zombies and Angry Birds to hybrid casual games like Best Fiends and Toon Blast, and even puzzle platformer and puzzle adventure games like Portal, It Takes Two, Celeste and Teardown. 

Since each category of puzzle game would need to approach integrating AI agents in slightly different ways, we’ll break down the opportunities for integrating AI agents into puzzle games by the subgenre.  

Platformer and adventure puzzle games

Co-op puzzles with AI companions

Integrating AI-controlled companions in cooperative platform and adventure puzzle games can enhance gameplay by allowing players to work with AI companions to solve puzzles and complete objectives by interacting with objects, carrying items, or holding levers. With voice commands, the AI can understand the context of puzzles and respond accordingly, such as moving to specific locations, activating mechanisms, combining items, or giving the player tactical instructions to complete the puzzle. 

AI agents can:  

• Respond to direct commands: AI agents can help complete puzzles by responding to simple instructions like ‘Move here,’ ‘Pick up that object,’ or ‘Activate the lever.’
• Complete complex tasks: AI agents can also respond to more complex commands that require understanding multiple steps, such as ‘Find the key and bring it to the door,’ or ‘help me start a fire.’ They’re able to reason through potential steps in that process while checking to see what types of actions are possible from the game state. For example, the AI agent might know via the game state that there is wood outside in the woodpile and matches in the kitchen. The agent can then complete all the steps involved in starting a fire in the fireplace. 
• Engage in contextual interaction: AI agents understand situational commands like “Help me with this puzzle,” by recognizing the player's current activity and environmental context.
• Give hints: AI agents can also be on call to give a player hints on how to solve a puzzle if they get stuck or frustrated. This can help with onboarding, improve player engagement, and reduce churn by ensuring players don’t get too frustrated. . 

Social puzzle elements

Puzzle games that feature social elements often perform better. AI NPCs can introduce compelling social elements that deepen gameplay by creating relationship and trust-based puzzles. These social dynamics not only enrich the game narrative but also challenge players to think beyond traditional puzzle mechanics, adding layers of psychological and emotional complexity to the gaming experience – and also filing in for friends who have to leave the game. 

AI agents can:  

• Create trust-based mechanics: Players might need to build rapport with AI characters to unlock certain pathways or solve puzzles that require cooperative actions, encouraging genuine emotional engagement and strategic trust
• Add psychological elements: Players could encounter AI NPCs who manipulate emotions or mislead to create complex, mind-bending puzzles that require careful attention and context.
• Create interrogation-based puzzles: AI NPCs can serve as suspects or informants from whom players must extract crucial information by questioning them or employing tactics like persuasion or intimidation. 
• Add negotiation elements: Negotiating and haggling with AI agents for key items or information can test players’ negotiation skills and understanding of NPC motivations. 

Personalization

Players love the ability to customize and personalize the games they play. AI NPCs and non-NPC AI agents can significantly enhance personalization by dynamically tailoring the gaming experience to individual players and giving them more agency over their gaming experience. 

AI agents can: 

• Dynamically generate content: AI agents can create new, unique puzzles on-the-fly that reflect the player's progress and preferences. This offers endless variety and replayability and can even be customized based on past interactions or interests of a player. For example, if a player says they like lions, the AI agent can generate a puzzle that includes lions in some way.  
• Support difficulty adaptation: AI agents can analyze a player's skill level, preferences, and gameplay history to suggest puzzles that best match their playing style to ensure an engaging and appropriately challenging experience. Or conversely, AI NPCs and companions can adapt the game’s difficulty in real-time by providing different levels of support to players. 
• NPC customizations: With AI, players can generate customized characters where they choose their appearance, behavior, and dialogue style to align with their preferences.

Hybrid casual games

Transforming casual games with narrative and characters

AI agents can play a pivotal role in transforming casual puzzle games into rich, hybrid casual experiences that improve retention by infusing them with depth, narrative complexity, and innovative mechanics. By introducing a narrative and AI characters that players can develop connections with, games shift from simple puzzle-solving gameplay to experiences where players invest emotionally in character-driven stories. 

AI agents can: 

• Add narrative elements: AI agents can drive narrative-based game mechanics, where puzzles are interwoven with story elements that require players to interact with characters, uncover hidden plotlines, and make decisions that influence the narrative's direction. For example, AI NPCs can provide clues or backstory that unlock new puzzle challenges or alter game environments.
• Add social elements: AI agents can add social elements via things like competition, cooperative play, relationship dynamics, and more.  AI NPCs can also facilitate creative mechanics that are more complex than one would be able to play alone. For example, one could create a 3D puzzle game where NPCs help manage resources and guide players through complex environments.

New mechanics

Incorporating new game mechanics into hybrid casual puzzle games via AI agents can dramatically enhance gameplay by introducing engaging elements that transcend traditional puzzle-solving. These enhancements transform puzzle games into rich, hybrid casual experiences that captivate players on multiple levels.

AI agents enable: 

• Adaptive puzzles: AI can enable adaptive puzzles that change based on player interactions with NPCs or the environment. 
• Multi-layered puzzles: AI characters or AI agents can contribute unique abilities or information essential for progression. 
• Coop play: AI NPCs can facilitate real-time events such as cooperative challenges where players and NPCs work together to overcome obstacles to blend traditional puzzle gameplay with elements of strategy, exploration, and social interaction. 
• New elements: AI can be used to add elements from other types of games into hybrid casual games. For example, in a detective themed game players could not only solve puzzles but also engage in investigative interactions with NPCs by asking questions and gathering clues to add an RPG layer to traditional puzzle gameplay. 
• Dynamically generate content: AI agents can create personalized puzzles for players so that puzzles games never get stale or feel repetitive. This fresh and personalized content that can be contextual with the player’s experience, narrative, and character interactions will drive player engagement and retention. 

Casual puzzle games

New kinds of casual puzzle games

Using AI NPCs, game developers can pioneer new genres of casual puzzle games that redefine player engagement and blur the lines between storytelling, problem-solving, and interactive entertainment.

• Narrative-based games: AI agents and AI NPCs can serve as narrators or characters, driving the storyline through interactive dialogues, decision-making, and puzzle-solving collaborations. Narrative-based puzzle games immerse players in rich narratives where their choices influence the plot progression and puzzle dynamics, creating a personalized gameplay experience. 
• Innovative game ideas: AI-driven mechanics can directly shape puzzles and challenges based on player interactions and environmental factors. This approach allows for dynamically generated puzzles, adaptive difficulty levels, and evolving gameplay scenarios that respond to player strategies and decisions in real-time.

Content generation 

Generative AI can also help with content generation in casual puzzle games. Developers can customize content in real-time based on player preferences, ensuring a personalized experience with puzzles that adapt to individual skill levels, gameplay styles, and interests. 

AI agents enable: 

• Unlimited puzzles: AI enables the creation of unlimited content variations since it has the capability to continuously generate new puzzles, challenges, and storylines.
• Contextual puzzles: AI can generate contextual content that evolves with the player's progress and choices, embedding puzzles seamlessly into the game's narrative or thematic elements. This approach not only enriches the gameplay experience by offering fresh and diverse challenges but also ensures that each gaming session feels unique and tailored to the player's journey through the game.

Benefits

There are a number of benefits to including AI into puzzle games and puzzle platformers. 

Innovation

Integrating AI into puzzle games fosters innovation by either introducing novel gameplay mechanics or enabling types of puzzle games that weren’t possible before. For example, AI NPCs can allow for new puzzle-solving mechanics that make familiar genres of puzzle games fresh and interactive storytelling that keeps players better engaged and reduces churn. AI-powered NPCs can also introduce complex interactions and cooperative gameplay elements that enrich the overall gaming experience. 

Streamlined workflow

AI agents can help streamline both the development of puzzle games and the creation of expansion packs and additional content for those games. Adding AI agents for dynamic content generation reduces the amount of work needed to complete a game while simultaneously creating more puzzle variety for players. AI agents also provide dynamic interactions that improve replayability while helping add additional gameplay options for players.  

Replayability and longevity

Puzzle games often struggle with replayability due to static levels and predictable challenges. AI addresses this issue by allowing for more unpredictability with procedurally generated puzzles, dynamic interactions with the world and NPCs, and adjustable difficulty levels based on a player’s skill level. By continuously offering unique and unpredictable experiences tailored to player preferences, AI agents enhance the longevity of puzzle games and extend their appeal beyond initial playthroughs.

Increased revenue

Integrating AI into puzzle games can lead to increased revenue through enhanced player engagement and retention. AI-driven personalization and dynamic content generation attracts players seeking unique and evolving gaming experiences, encouraging longer play sessions, and support repeat playthroughs. This heightened engagement translates into higher retention rates and increased in-game purchases such as expansions or premium content or AI features packs.

Improved accessibility

AI can significantly improve accessibility in puzzle games by offering adaptive assistance, different modalities for controlling gameplay and learning about the gameworld, and customization options. Players with varying skill levels can benefit from AI-powered hints, tutorials, and difficulty adjustments tailored to their needs.

The future of AI puzzle games

By integrating AI into puzzle games of all kinds, studios can shorten development cycles, add personalization to their gameplay, and deliver a more engaging gaming experience. AI puzzle games can also include novel gameplay mechanics like co-op puzzles and more narrative-based games. 

Interested in creating an AI puzzle game?