Examples of GREAT adventure game puzzles?

[Korgoth of Barbaria]

What would you say are great examples of adventure game puzzles - ones that are genuine works of art, so to speak - and how could you write such puzzles in a way which doesn't turn off a modern audience?

 

[Tehdagah]

I want examples too.

 

[SerratedBiz]

I think you meant to ask, 'why are Lucasarts games puzzles better than Sierra games puzzles?'.

 

[toucanplay]

All great adventure game puzzles adhere to two rules of thumb as far as I can tell:

- never contain hints in a different screen than the actual puzzle, having to trek all the way back and forth is a bother and will render any and all puzzle tedious shit in no time
- don't waste the character's progress in case they misstepped or do so only within the puzzle's current stage in the case of multi-stage ones

The former secures interest, the latter allows experimentation
To ensure that the player doesn't just try everything until something works, unique mechanics are preferred to inventory manipulation

I'm using p&c vocabulary right now (screens, stages etc.) but the model applies freely to all sorts of adventure games in my opinion

I'm going to (sort of) disagree with you on your first. I can understand why you made it (I got complaints about this on a project I made) but I don't think it's a problem with the puzzles themselves, but in how adventure games usually work.

If all of the clues for the puzzle have to be in the same screen, it limits the puzzles you can have: you can't really reuse a puzzle component/location in a new way (Quern did this by locking puzzle components in other areas that you can access via progression); and sometimes it just doesn't fit in with the game world (Gabriel Knight had a code puzzle; it would be awkward if the person who helps you by giving you clues is just hanging around in the same location). Additionally, you could not have a timing puzzle that depends on number of scenes moved between (which may or may not be good, but I'd rather developers have the option to do it well than just rule it out completely).

I think the main problem here isn't with the puzzles and clues being separated, but that it's often just too fucking annoying to go from scene to scene. Characters move too slowly, and often you can't just skip over scenes that don't matter at that moment. There are ways to go about this though: make the game world small or well-connected, have fast travel on a mini-map, an in-game journal that makes it easy to collect clues and reference them later (or, better yet, one that lets you take photos like some of the Myst games do), zip mode that lets you skip between hubs (Myst, but Gabriel Knight 1 does this in a fashion with taking your motorcycle around the place).

It's a bit like the difference between a sudoku and a cryptic crossword puzzle: they're both mentally engaging, just one requires you to bring in more outside knowledge to solve.

 

[MRY]

I think the very best puzzles tend to build upon each other, such that earlier puzzles teach you rules that when combined in interesting ways yield the solution to later puzzles. Spider & Web is the king of this, but you see it in Monkey Island 2 a fair bit, too. Secondly, also present in MI2, I think good puzzles take a rule and have it work differently from how you expect.

For instance, you might have a drinking contest where you are up against a powerful drinker. NPC takes a sip and grins. PC takes a sip and passes out. You discover that you can swap out the bottle that's being used. [Rule: Player can swap out bottle. Logical step: Swap it out for something lower alcohol.] This turns out to not help because the NPC can still outlast you. [Rule application 2: Swap it out for something STRONGER.]

A puzzle I like along these lines is the fan you meet in Machinarium where you assume you're trying to calm it down, but then you discover that if you get it madder, it breaks.

When these two approaches are used in tandem, you wind up with the made up "Prestige" stage of a magic trick, where the trick is replicated in a way even more astounding than the first, the truly magical one.

 

[Jigby]

I liked the talk the Antichamber dev gave at one of the GDCs. He prototyped the game and then sent it to different conventions for playtesting. Basically, a large portion of the testers failed at the game for reasons completely unforeseen, although perfectly logical. The different puzzles were obviously designed to introduce the mechanics gradually, but the players couldn't learn them at the same pace. When faced with a difficult puzzle, hardcore players would just plow through, but the casuals got stuck and with the accumulated frustration they eventually quit the game. To solve this, he introduced nonlinearity, where at different puzzle gates he added side branches for casuals. That way, when casuals got stuck, they could enter the side branch that would further teach them the puzzle mechanic or maybe even simplify the original puzzle.

There's more there, he talks a lot about foreshadowing, creating memorable sections, removing necessity for a player to be psychic when solving puzzles etc.. Here's the link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_0Tawc_1A4

I'm not sure, how much of it can be applied to classical pnc adventure games, but I found it interesting.

Another pet peeve of mine is, that a lot of the classical adventure games fail at the execution part of a solution to puzzle. A lot of times you figure out what you have to do, but actually fail to do it because of unintuitive interface/controls or just plain unintuitive design. In one of the Wadjet Eye Games, (Technobabylon I think), you have to solve a relatively simple inventory puzzle. I can't remember the specifics, but what I remember is, that you have to interact with the item in a special screen, not just regular inventory screen - there the game gives no response. Another example of this is dialog in QFG4, where you've got 2 dialog windows. One, where you click on an NPC, and the other, where you click on yourself.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

All great adventure game puzzles adhere to two rules of thumb as far as I can tell:

- never contain hints in a different screen than the actual puzzle, having to trek all the way back and forth is a bother and will render any and all puzzle tedious shit in no time

This is false. You have to rank puzzles into tiers. 'Basic' puzzles should follow the above rule, while 'plot-vital' or 'epic' puzzles should never be confined like this. For those you gather upon elements needed from multiple sources.

The problem is with the middle tier puzzles, the 'stumpers'. They and their answers should not be confined to a single location, but they shouldn't be spread out all over either. It's getting them right that can make or break a game.

Puzzles that have repetetive actions that require going back and forth, though... those can take a long walk off a short plank. See Monkey Island 2's "use bone on hole in tree" puzzle to get an idea what I mean.

 

[Barbarian]

"Le Serpent Rouge" in Gabriel Knight 3 comes to mind as probably one of the greats if not the greatest. It was a challenging and intelligent puzzle, yet completely reasonable and well thought off. The way you pieced it together with clues and research was brilliant.

If you like the classical "nonsensical" type of puzzle in humoresque adventures than probably Day of the Tentacle has some of the coolest. You had to coordinate between the 3 playable characters in 3 different periods of time to solve many of them.

Azrael's tear also comes to mind as a game with brilliant puzzle design. Specially for the fact that many times you could solve both puzzles and objectives in multiple ways.

 

[madrigal]

GK3 cat hair moustache was brilliant, it combined humour with multiple object interactions and everything was logical and flowed from the goals established by the plot.