The answer is simple. Games are categorized as AAA when they’re built by large teams with large budgets at large companies. Puzzle games usually don’t require a team of hundreds of people and tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars to produce. The gameplay and asset scope is tiny in comparison to a typical AAA game. Most games with puzzle elements that do end up getting made by AA and AAA studios (like Portal) have the puzzle aspect merged with some other genre (like FPS, in Portal’s case), and those other genres do require more resources to produce.

I agree with Grailly’s second and third ideas. Classic puzzle games gain very little from photorealistic graphics.

I also agree with a Reddit comment that point ‘n’ click adventure games, a closely related genre, could benefit tremendously from AAA graphics. The trick would be convincing companies to make and sell a game designed for players to get stuck for hours.

What is BOTW if not an amplified puzzle game? The core mechanic aside from the open world is literally to enter small isolated puzzles and to solve them. Zelda in general is heavily reliant on puzzles, are they not puzzle games? What about detective games and point and click games like Myst, Monkey Island, what are they?

There are many mobile games like Candy Crush or Angry bird.

To which I answer, can’t we kill stuff in puzzle games?

So essentially something like Thief or Dishonored where you need to find a path in a level?

I believe you’re being very reductive by saying we don’t have AAA puzzle games. Yes we don’t have AAA tetris-like because they don’t need ultra HD graphics or first person viewpoint and therefore they have some limits, but puzzles have definitely been incorporated in many games.