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Because I Said So
February 1, 2000
By Ray Ivey
Put a Muzzle on the Puzzle: A Rant on Puzzles That Suck
A terrific recent thread on GameBoomers discussed gamers' most difficult puzzle experiences.
Now, I love a difficult puzzle. It's one of the main reasons I play adventure games (that, and the fact, of course, that it's such a babe magnet, don't you know).
I began to think about difficult puzzles that I had enjoyed. The Mayan slider puzzle in Timelapse. Rescuing Teddy in Amber: Journeys Beyond. The Chinese box in Black Dahlia. These puzzles were good and chewy, and solving them was quite satisfying.
However, there is another type of difficult puzzle. The Bad Difficult Puzzle. These are the challenges that leave a bad taste in our mouths, that force us to resort to hints or walkthroughs, or sometimes even suicide. Let's talk about these stinkers a bit, shall we?
Let's divide up these Bad Puzzles into two groups: Inappropriate Puzzles and Overly Obtuse Puzzles.
Inappropriate Puzzles
First, there's the puzzle that's difficult because it somehow stumbled into the adventure game from the wrong genre. These include tricky arcade games, difficult action sequences, or manual dexterity challenges. The classic offender in this category is in an otherwise magnificent game, Timelapse. In the Anasazi sequence there is a puzzle in which you must shoot an arrow through a hole in a distant rock. After many hours of blissful exploration and puzzle-solving, here came this ridiculous out-of-genre puzzle that brought the entire game to a screeching halt. I found myself stuck for a frustrating week on this stupid puzzle. It made me angry, because it was an arcade game, pure and simple, and didn't belong in Timelapse.
Dust is a very fun and well-built adventure game that has a truly challenging action shootout sequence near the end of the game. I was pretty lucky with this one, but I know it frustrated a lot of players. Did it belong in an adventure game? Hmm ...
Of course these stinkers are purely subjective. When I come across a non-adventure puzzle in a game that I am able to solve without going crazy, it doesn't make me mad. For example, the darts puzzle in The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Rose Tattoo. This dart game drove many players crazy, but I loved it. (I even have a certain twisted friend who claims to like the arrow puzzle in Timelapse, but she will remain nameless.)
There are shooting puzzles in Atlantis: The Lost Tales that drove players to the brink. Some players hate the action sequences at the end of GK3. Others may hate the arcade sequences you have to beat in the middle of Dogday.
Overly Obtuse Puzzles
Then there are the puzzles that make me even more irritated. Yes, I'm talking about those stinkers I call Overly Obtuse Puzzles. Puzzles where only luck, not logic, will solve the problem. Or puzzles in which you actually have to die to get the information necessary to go back and do the puzzle again successfully. No fair!
Then there are puzzles which are just mean. My favorite example of this is in one of the greatest adventure games ever built, Riven. A central puzzle in Riven involves solving the "Stone Circle Puzzle." Each stone has a stylized icon of an animal on it, and to solve the puzzle correctly you have to push the correct series of stones down.
How do you discover the correct order of stones? It's quite ingenious, really. It requires the player to make a series of connections. First, you find a series of large rolling marble thingies, each marked with something that turns out to be a number. Also, each one makes a sound as you touch it. Later in the game you find animals that make these sounds. Connect the dots and you figure it out ... the numbers represent the order of stones to push ... and the ones you push are the ones that have the correct animal icons on them! Ingenious, right?
Wrong. Why? Because the very first stone you're supposed to push is a fish. A fish makes no sound. Therefore there is no sound when you touch the "#1" marble. There's some obtuse visual of a fish symbol that you truly have to bend over backwards to find elsewhere in the game, but it's just too off-the-wall. The result is that the very first stone is the most difficult to figure out. This problem wouldn't have been so terrible if the ambiguous animal had been the last stone--you could eventually work it out by elimination. But with it as the very first stone it created a very mean puzzle.
Another classic example is the rune jewel you have to reconstruct in Black Dahlia. The puzzle simply requires that you make a required set of runes adjacent to each other on a jewel-shaped frame. What the puzzle makers didn't think about, however, is that there are inevitably two solutions to this puzzle, each a mirror image of each other, each equally correct. I got this puzzle correct, with every rune in place, but the answer wasn't accepted because of this flaw. No fair!
The Mayan slider puzzle from Timelapse is pretty notorious, too. I don't have a quarrel with it, actually, in terms of difficulty. What I do disapprove of is the fact that the game was released without the puzzle's getting "parity checked," meaning its starting position could be a shuffle of the tiles that's actually not solvable! There is no excuse for this kind of bad programming.
I'd love to hear what you think, Intrepid Reader. Which puzzles do you consider bad? In each category? Perhaps you can think of a category of bad puzzle that I've missed. Let me know!