What gives a puzzle game a sense of pace is not the beating of its challenges in quick succession, but the speed with which new ideas are presented to you and internalised. Learning, rather than solving, is the measure of exhilarationĮlevating the player isn’t just a puzzle’s purpose, though, it’s also its propellant - the difference between a slog and scintillation. What is its purpose if not to be understood, to teach or elevate the player?Ģ. A lot of Sokoban levels are like this: there’s a crux somewhere and then the rest of it is rote pushing blocks around.”Īn unsolved puzzle is a tree falling in a forest with no one there. There’s another class of puzzles that I don’t like so much where there are a lot of elements and one of them is the key one that you have to figure out and then the rest of the puzzle is very simple. There’s a category of puzzles that want to be solved, that try and manipulate the player where they haven’t been given the solution but they have some idea of what they should be doing to look for the solution. “Good puzzles are usually like that,” says Whiting tentatively, before retracting: “Maybe I can’t say that. I tend to err on the side of not being cryptic.” A good puzzle leads the designer to help design the puzzle and often in the process of this happening the designer says, ‘Oh yes, I can reflect some of these same things that I followed and have the puzzle also communicate to the player.’ That’s sort of a separate choice about how cryptic you want the end result to be. “I am anthropomorphising puzzles a little bit, which I think is useful. As such, a good puzzle provides the player with the tools necessary to solve it it teaches, and perhaps even coaxes, but ultimately it lets players stand on their own two feet.Īnd not just the player, says Blow. This, I confess, is just my personal theory, and if it’s not broadly true, then it at least applies to the kinds of puzzle games I love - the kind of games that feel like an intimate and inspiring communication from designer to player. What’s the difference between a puzzle and a problem? A puzzle is in partnership with the player to reach its own solution - a problem is just an obstacle, impassive and possibly insurmountable. What follows, then, is not a recipe so much as my extrapolated list of possible cooking utensils: approaches to consider which will radically alter the flavour and texture of the resultant concoction. “I’m not completely sure I could lay out for you what those are, because it’s an art, not a science.”īut wait! Despite their collective reticence to provide a bullet-pointed recipe for the perfect puzzle, certain topics of conversation return again and again in each interview - ideas like “a good puzzle knows what it’s about”, discussions of minimalism and how that relates to elegance, and how ambition separates a truly great puzzle game from the sort you poke at on your phone while taking a dump. “There are definitely techniques and skill involved,” says Blow. I’ve asked three of my favourite puzzle game designers to demystify their dark magicks: Jonathan Blow, best known for the puzzle-platformer Braid and currently hard at work on firstperson perplexathon, The Witness Alan "Draknek" Hazelden, creator of Sokoban-inspired sequential-logic games, including Sokobond, Mirror Isles and the forthcoming A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build and Jonathan Whiting, a programmer on Sportsfriends and collaborator with Hazelden on Traal, whose own games are a regular Ludum Dare highlight. But how do you design a puzzle to best provoke that eureka moment? What gives a puzzle its aesthetic, its pace and texture? Why does one puzzle feel thrilling while another feels like a flat mental grind? Whether mulling over a cryptic crossword or somersaulting through Portal’s portals, there’s a moment of epiphany which, for me, pretty much transcends all other moments in gaming. But it’s not beating them that’s the exciting part: it’s understanding them.
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