AB2012: Genre tags are so vague and misapplied that half the time I've stopped using them to describe gameplay and prefer to compare it with known titles, eg:-
- "Portal-like" = Expect a First-Person physics puzzler
- "Doom-like" = Expect an arcadey-shooter that places fast-paced fun over realism often with pseudo-linear maze-like maps
This conveys a lot more useful information of what to expect in just two words that over-simplified "Puzzle", "FPS" or "RPG" does not (CRPG, ARPG or JRPG? Does it play like Morrowind or Baldur's Gate? Is the RPG-ness something solid or another "Obvious FPS with a wafer-thin skill-tree tacked on to fake depth"), ("Does this 'puzzle' game play like Lemmings, Tetris, Myst or The Talos Principle"), etc. I don't even think it's possible to describe a game in just one word vs having a group of primary + secondary tags or "Games similar to" list.
This doesn't always work.
For example, I've used the term "SaGa-like", but all you can really deduce from that is that the game is an RPG that doesn't use XP-based leveling (and even then, SaGa 3 original uses XP, though I actually don't consider that game a SaGa-like because of that). It doesn't tell you whether the game is like a typical linear JRPG structually (SaGa 1 and 2 are like this), or if it's a nonlinear open-world game filled with side quests (like Romancing SaGa).
By the way, I consider the term "CRPG" to refer to all computer/video game RPGs, whether they're JRPGs or WRPGs; I typically use that term when it's important to distinguish it from non-computer RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons. Meanwhile, I use WRPG and JRPG to refer to the style of game, rather than where it was actually developed, so Romancing SaGa would be a WRPG, and a game like Ikenfell would be a JRPG.
For Adventure versus Puzzle, my personal definition is something like this: In an Adventure game, puzzles are scripted; there are no standard rules that the puzzles in those games use. (So, such games might play like Myst.) In a Puzzle game, there are specific rules that the puzzles follow, and typically it's a small set of rules that are easy to understand, so a game like Tetris (and perhaps Lemmings?) would fall here, as would Bejeweled. There's a category of games that could be called "Action Puzzle" games, where the game runs in real-time, but the mechanics are otherwise more iike a puzzle game; I would put Tetris in this category.
Also, sometimes games have modes that are in a different genre. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has a Classic Mode that turns the game into a Classicvania (the normal mode is a Metroidvania) while the roguelike Shiren the Wanderer has 50 puzzles, in which the game plays more like a puzzle game (you are given hand-crafted levels to play through, and they're balanced so that you have to treat them like puzzles).