I’ve been playing some of the more recent adventure games and feel like the quality of the puzzles has gone down. It often seems a bit like use multitool on object to solve every puzzle. Equally, I can think many older games where the puzzle was so illogical it broke the gameplay and felt jarring to me.
So what makes a good puzzle? What are you most satisfying puzzles ever? What about your least favourite?
The first good puzzle that comes to mind is the final act of Sam And Max Save The World episode 1. Sam is basically having a hypnotism duel with the bad guy and you have to figure out how to get the minions to do what you want without the bad guy being able to stop you. What I like about it is that the puzzle lets you play with various options, the options have some amusing outcomes, you’re not forced to replay huge chunks of the game for guessing wrong, and the solution makes you feel clever for having noticed the trick to it.
On the flipside, there’s the infamous rubber duck puzzle in The Longest Journey, which is so bad it actually made me quit playing the game after I looked up the solution. The puzzle depends on several sets of nonsense actions that have no connection to any objective, which then combine in a leap of moon logic to solve the puzzle in the most obtuse manner possible. There’s no feedback or hints that make this in any way enjoyable to play around with, you just bang your head against the wall until randomly putting some stuff together that happens to work. The solution made me feel bad for trying to solve it at all.
So for me, a good puzzle is one where it’s fun to try different things and the solution makes me think “of course that’s how you do it!” A bad puzzle is one where I’m punished for trying things that seem reasonable and the solution feels like pushing random buttons because that’s what the designer wanted me to do.