Good puzzle design

[Ady]

Just picking up the baton previously held by Che Musashi in the thread about cheat devices, though this is something I've been meaning to bring up on here for a while myself.

What I'm after here is what you consider the determinants of both good and bad puzzle design.

I'm sure there's games you've played whose puzzles flummox you for a while, but when you finally figure them out, you just think "Oh yeah, why didn't I think of that?" and kick yourself for not thinking of it before.

Conversely, there are other games whose puzzles frustrate and -once solved- leave you feeling annoyed at the developer; "How and earth was I meant to know that!?" you think. The puzzles being unintuitive, obtuse and obscure and solved through desperate trial and error and guesswork rather than lateral thinking. Once solved. you wonder how you were ever exepcted to know something so obscure.


OK, so can you think of some games that constitute the above. On my part, I'd list both Ico and Zelda as games with good puzzle design. I'd cite the Resident Evil games and (at a push) the first Silent Hill game (as great as it was) as games with poor puzzles.

I'm sure you can think of plenty more games, so it's over to you...

[wicky]

DENKI BLOCKS !

[Madbury]

For me poor puzzle design is the thing which turns me off a game, regardless of how good the game is. If I get stuck I will not use a cheat guide and will struggle with it for a few goes, if I haven't figured it by then it's game over. Perhaps this is why I've started playing more and more arcade games where the mental input is much more direct (e.g. figure out how to navigate through that bullet pattern and quick).

Also this is probably why Shenmue is one of the few adventure games that I've actually finished. The game doesn't let you get stuck, by interacting with everything around you it is always possible to figure out what to do next. Plus it marries with the arcade gaming I love so much.

[quirky]

I think nearly all RPGs suffer from poor puzzles at some stage. Some have "cryptic clue" style almost crossword puzzles which make you think "it can't be that... can it?" and when it is you smile.

Then at the same time they can have some infuriatingly rubbish "only way to proceed is to read a walkthrough" moments. For example having go to a particular room in a particular house in a particular location to progress the story. That's when they are at their worst, when the puzzles become more a trial and error thing. The game that made me think of this was Shadow Hearts (PS2, cheap and cheerful old skool RPG) though particular examples escape me at the moment.

[jimmbob]

I think some of the worst puzzles are in Point 'n Click titles, like Discworld for instance, total trial and error. I don't mind a puzzle being criptic [it is a puzzle afterall] but when it's seemingly nonsense they just frustrate.
The puzzles in Silent Hill 2 and 3 are particularly good because you can set the difficulty depending on your own level, a great idea that should be put into more adventure games...

[makkuwata]

Fur Fighters had a fantastic balance, the best of any game iv played.

If you've never played, and im sure most haven't, the aim is to collect 'babies' (the characters kids) each area had somewhere in the range of 6 to 12 babies to collect. But only the parent of each kid could collect their own baby, i.e the cat can only collect the cats, the dog can only collect the dogs. In certain locations throughout each area there were points where you could change characters, and each character has their own unique ability to get past certain situations.

This formula, combined with some fantastic level design, makes for puzzles better than zelda

[Brats]

Just because you can't do a puzzle in a game, doesn't make it poor. The Water Temple in OOT is often cited as stumping many a player, but I completed it without having to resort to any guide and it's one of my favourite dungeons in any Zelda game.

The trouble for most people is that the whole dungeon is one huge puzzle that works in three dimensions, containing an extra degree of complexity. Most people are used to thinking laterally in two dimensions, so the raising and lowering of the water level causes some people problems. I'm not saying I'm a genius or anything, but that dungeon requires a certain way of thinking to solve it. Some people think the necessary way, some don't.

The worst example of puzzles imo are ones where although you are on the right track, you must get the puzzle exactly right. This can be frustrating because often you can eliminate the correct way to proceed in your own mind because you didn't do it just right. Going back to Zelda again, the one puzzle that stumped me in OOT was shooting the ghost paintings with the bow in the forest temple. I actually did this, but my timing was slightly off so it didn't work. I therefore assumed that this was not the correct way to proceed and spent days trying other stuff. When I found out, I was like "FFS! I bloody well did that!"

The only duff puzzle imo in an otherwise amazing game.

[Babelrich]

A second over here for Fur Fighters, to this day it's still probably my favorite PS2 game (Shame about the voices tho).

Has anyone played The Incredible Machine series? Now there are some fiendish puzzles. Make the cat scare the mouse to open the cycling monkey's blinds so he'll se the banana and start pedaling to power the fan...

Class

[Babelrich]

A second over here for Fur Fighters, to this day it's still probably my favorite PS2 game (Shame about the voices tho).

Has anyone played The Incredible Machine series? Now there are some fiendish puzzles. Make the cat scare the mouse to open the cycling monkey's blinds so he'll se the banana and start pedaling to power the fan...

Class

[Squirtle]

A second over here for Fur Fighters, to this day it's still probably my favorite PS2 game (Shame about the voices tho).

Should have played the DC version then. IIRC, it has pseudo voices, like the DC version of Rayman 2 and Banjo Kazooie, Zelda et al. Much better.

Of course, I haven't played it for ages so may be mistaken, but don't think i am.

[Marvelon]

The incredible Machine! now theres one I hadn't thought of in a long time. Like lemmings in the way that there-is-a-way-to-do-it-but-it's-not-logical-untill-you-figure-it-out. Brilliant.

I really enjoyed Fur Fighters as well.

But good puzzle design I think relies greatly on integration. If it makes sense for a puzzle to be there it's easier to solve it. Theres a slide-jigsaw-puzzle in Onimusha which just seems completely out of place (your also under a time limit) that's just a puzzle for the sake of it.

but in silent hill 3 for example you find the bucket, you find the two (obviously) combinable chemicals and then you come across a hall with an airvent that can be turned on and off and a bunch of meat eating flies - need I say more?

[womblingfree]

I love the puzzles in Resi games. The lateral thought involved reminds me of Johnny Ball's think of a number.

[makkuwata]

the voices in PS2 fur fighters aren't that bad, but yeah, i prefer the dreamcast version. mainly for the graphical style though

making it cel shaded for PS2 was pretty pointless. they probably only did it to avoid reviewers complaining about the conversion. but then agian, they added an extra level and the voices....so i don't know why the hell they decided to change the graphics

[Staplehead]

To go to a specific instance, there was a moment in Zelda, Majora's Mask that made me slap myself on the forehead and praise the developer's name.

If anyone's still playing, then TURN BACK NOW! Spoiler alert!

It's in the water temple (the one you get to on the back of the turtle. There's this room with a fan propelled by water and a door you need to get to. I thought that I could just jump across while it was still moving, but after about a million attempts I got fed up. Then I wondered if I could stop the water with ice arrows, but I told myself 'surely not - nothing could be that clever', but I tried it anyway and EUREKA!

Even though I've only played the PS1 demo of Silent Hill, I actually really liked the piano puzzle with the white birds and black birds relating to the different keys, but I've done some music before.

Chris.

[Che Musashi]

My problem with puzzles these days are that some develops are still enthralled with the Almighty Crate. Move the crate, shoot the crate, climb the crate, carry the crate around and use it as a weapon. Oh great crate we worship thee.

I wonder where half the games we know of today would be without crates. Crates can hang in the air, ala mario or be in set in a fixed space, either way games are crate crazy.

It seems that a majority of unituitive puzzles these days involving moving some damn box around. Even Ico had crates, but they were logical and not just put there just to be a puzzle to solve. What annoys me too about other puzzles like the ones in RE. Are the "only shiny object in the room solution". Can't get the door open, walk around look for the shiniest thing in one of the previous rooms will probably solve your problem.

Or input a sequence of codes that make no sense just to get a spark plug to turn on a generator which leads to a brain eating monster. I just wish designers took more time to design games that used logic and had puzzles that fit the situation more apropriately.