Categorizing Puzzles In Adventure Games 44
MarkN writes "There's hardly a video game made nowadays that doesn't involve puzzles in some sense. In some games they serve as occasional roadblocks to break up the action, and in the genre of adventure games the whole focus of the game is solving a set of related puzzles. I've written a piece for AdventureClassicGaming describing and categorizing puzzles in adventure games. Adventure games make use of explicitly designed abstract puzzles — they're explicitly designed rather than being randomly or procedurally generated, and abstract in the sense that all you need to do is figure out the right actions to perform, rather than making the performing of those actions be a challenge in and of itself. My classification makes distinctions at two levels: you have self-contained puzzles, which can depend upon using your basic verbs of interaction, solving some minigame based around achieving a particular configuration, or providing an answer to a riddle. On the other side, you have puzzles that require some external key: this could be an item, a piece of information, or an internal change to the game's state triggered somewhere else. From there, I talk about some of the possibilities and pitfalls these puzzles carry, as well as their use in other genres. I'd be interested to hear the community's thoughts on the use and application of puzzles in adventure games, and games in general."
Vague goals (Score:3, Interesting)
Many games don't have a clearly enough defined goal.
Professor Layton (Score:4, Interesting)
Here in the UK, the Nintendo DS game "Professor Layton and the Curious Village" appears to be a big hit.
This is really a small storyline to hold together over a hundred small puzzles.
Perhaps the appeal of this is that people can dip in and out, leave what they can't do, and progress without one puzzle or action blocking progress along the whole.
Re:Professor Layton (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard of the game, and I've been meaning to try it, though I'm not sure it's quite as big a hit [penny-arcade.com] on this side of the pond.
Linear puzzles (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing irks me as much as linear puzzles, where you have to solve A to get to B to get to C to get to D... Granted, some gates may be useful when they make sense -- i.e. you must figure out how to get on the space plane before you are given access to the puzzle of how to do an space walk.
Even then, many of the puzzles would benefit from a way to go back to the puzzles. Like if you didn't go EVA and retrieve the broken antenna needed later in the game, you should be able to go back and do a second space trip, not being stalled on the first space trip until you have done that puzzle.
The most successful Infocom games (apart from those that played on sex) were those that had a minimum of linearity, and where you could go back and get a missing piece later. Similar with games like Baldur's Gate -- where BG and BG II succeeded due to having non-linear puzzles within each chapter, the higher amount of linearity of Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale was probably their downfall.
Oh, and let's not forget the Ultima series. Not only did bugs and bad copy protection ruin the later games, but the greatly increased linearity of the puzzles made the games tedious.
Worst of all was an adventure game (no name, no shame) that I bought based on blazing reviews. It turned out that I got to play it for about an hour, stuck on one of the very first puzzles, which (I later found out) required knowledge of American sitcoms to get past. Being European, and never having had a chance to see the sitcom in question, there was no way to solve that puzzle. Since this was also before the advent of Internet, there was also no easy way to find a walkthrough to get past it. So it went in the garbage. If the puzzles hadn't been linear, I might have enjoyed the rest of the game, and could have come back to that one puzzle later, once I had obtained the needed information.