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When encountering the connect-a-circuit science minigame in Spiderman, I was surprised at how simple it is. I also recalled similar full-size games I've played in the DOS era that have one do this on a much larger scale and with actual challenge.

The distinct difference from connect-the-dots games is that there are directional pipes on a 2D field rather than nodes.

I don't recall how they made it challenging: was it timing, limited items, or error penalties that made it non-trivial to advance through the stages. I'm looking to see if that subgenre of puzzles has taken off by itself. To be specific, this refers to building circuits out of different, directional elements.

What's that sub-genre of puzzles called properly, and what are the most successful titles in it?
Also, were difficulty mechanics besides time limits implemented in any of these?

enter image description here

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    Welcome to Arqade! Please remember that we don't allow game identification questions if you don't provide an actual screenshot of that game, so this can remain open only if focuses on the genre identification.
    – pinckerman
    Commented Oct 27 at 0:47
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    @pinckerman Edited to focus just on the genre.
    – Therac
    Commented Oct 27 at 7:01
  • Is that similar to the hacking mini-game in Bioshock? Or hacking in Deus Ex Human Revolution?
    – Joachim
    Commented Oct 27 at 10:13
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    @Joachim Similar to Bioshock (directional pipes), not to Deus Ex (connect the nodes).
    – Therac
    Commented Oct 27 at 11:51

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'Officially' there seems to be no name for the sub-genre specifically.

This Bioshock article on Fandom links to the game Pipe Mania, which apparently was the inspiration for the hacking mini-game (tongue-in-cheekly called Pipe Dream in-game, apparently, although that could have been coined by fans because it was the title for ported versions of Pipe Mania).

Pipe Mania is classified as a Puzzle game. Very helpful. The main Wikipedia article on the puzzle game genre mentions a few types of puzzle solving, and it seems "sequence solving" fits the bill the best, but can be interpreted in two ways (finding the logical result of a given sequence is the more common interpretation). This is not an existing sub-genre, though.

Searching for "sequence solving Puzzle video game" does bring up the aptly named android game The Sequence:

in-game gameplay screenshot from the video game The Sequence

This screenshot seems to present a scenario and gameplay similar to yours.

There's also the Pipes Puzzle game/genre, also known as Net or Freenet, which limits this type of puzzle to rotating the different elements within their 'sockets'.

Alternatively I would have suggested Flow Puzzle, but that's not as common a term as I would have expected.

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    Thanks! While not an official subgenre, Pipemania definitely seems like the common ancestor of these minigames. I'll hold off on accepting a bit, per usual, but "pipemania-like" is a good starting point )
    – Therac
    Commented Oct 27 at 18:38
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I don't believe there is a common term.

I can't prove a negative but neither Steam nor Wikipedia treats games like this as anything more specific than "puzzle". The bioshock wiki, linked in comment, just says "like Pipe Dream". Other examples on other game databases similarly just use "puzzle" and refer to Pipe Dream/Pipe Mania.

These examples are just tagged as "puzzle", there's no more specific "pipe puzzle" tag. At most there's a reference to Pipe Dream/Pipe Mania, which appears to be the original. Which is probably the only reliable way to refer to them - "games like Pipe Dream".

This reddit posts suggests "plumber type game", but this doesn't appear to be common.

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  • I had been waiting for feedback on my comment before posting my answer, but came to the same conclusion.
    – Joachim
    Commented Oct 27 at 17:28

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