Puzzles: How hard is too hard?

Avatar image for kleingordon
kleingordon

12

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 0

User Lists: 0

What puzzles in games have you given up on? I don't mean "I'll sleep on it" or "maybe I don't have the right ability/idea yet" but deciding you just aren't going to figure it out (or looking up a solution). I've heard a lot of reactions like this to TIS-100 as a concept, and some of Fez's secrets, and it's almost a genre-defining trope for adventure games, but I'm curious to hear more examples.

By contrast, I found the way The Witness treated critical-path puzzles as lessons to be a nice way to alleviate this; I felt like I was looking for a new concept while solving, rather than just "the answer." I did look up one of the panels in the lowest level of the ruins, though.

For context, I'm a (very) amateur game developer working on a game that teaches you a (fictitious) language through puzzles. Hearing people refer to the cryptograms/substitution ciphers in Fez and Hyper Light Drifter as "languages" made me wary of coming off as too arcane and involved.

Avatar image for beachthunder
BeachThunder

15269

Forum Posts

318676

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 0

User Lists: 30

If a puzzle seems fair and doable, I'll probably never give up. There are some puzzles in Prelogate and Fish Fillets that I have literally spent dozens of hours trying to figure out.

Avatar image for icemael
Icemael

6901

Forum Posts

40352

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 20

User Lists: 20

As long as attempting to solve the puzzle is fun and interesting, there is no such thing as "too hard." Even a puzzle that couldn't be solved in a lifetime wouldn't be "too hard" if it had the power to fascinate and entertain.

Avatar image for adequatelyprepared
AdequatelyPrepared

2522

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 0

User Lists: 0

SMT: Nocturne has a series of sliding block puzzles that I always just use a guide on because sliding block puzzles are perhaps the most unsatisfying things to work out, especially if the prize is another sliding block puzzle.

Fuck sliding block puzzles.

Avatar image for deactivated-60dda8699e35a
deactivated-60dda8699e35a

1807

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 0

User Lists: 0

To get the "True" ending in Braid, you have to gather 8 stars hidden throughout the levels. The methods to gather these stars range from incredibly time consuming to something so obscure that you'll never be able to do it, let alone KNOW about it, unless if you've looked up a guide or are insanely observant. I don't even know if I should even consider getting the stars to be puzzles, since I honestly don't think anyone who plays the game will get ANY on their first, second, third, or any play through unless if you're told about them. Either way, I tried to get them once, and decided very quickly that was way too much of a hassle, especially considering the true ending is just some pretentious bullshit that makes no sense regardless - not that the normal ending is any easier to make sense of either.

That being said, Braid is a great puzzle game. Just ignore the stars and play it for the creative time puzzles. I need to try out The Witness, now that I think of it.

Avatar image for sparky_buzzsaw
sparky_buzzsaw

9897

Forum Posts

3772

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 39

User Lists: 42

I don't mind hard or clever puzzles, but I do mind puzzles that require some degree of either pixel hunting or incredible sight. Talos Principle is by and large a great puzzle game, but when the game requires you to be able to see distant laser catalysts in trees in order to solve its "harder" puzzles, it kind of sucks.

Avatar image for ripelivejam
ripelivejam

13572

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 0

User Lists: 0

#7  Edited By ripelivejam

the witness is pretty much the only puzzle centric game i've played in a long long time, and it made me fee like the complete dolt i am which is nice! i will agree the design is really well done but i'm just too fucking dumb for it. i'll return to it someday and give it another weak attempt.

i can only think of portal before that and i didn't have a problem with it from what i recall. when i played myst as a young teenager i was both enthralled and frustrated to no end by it; i feel like i should have been more persistent with it (never got far).

e: i typically am not fond of adventure game style puzzles, even if the narrative is entertaining.

Avatar image for quantris
Quantris

1524

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 0

User Lists: 0

IMO games outside of the actual puzzle genre have tended to have too easy puzzles (basically because they don't want their players to get stuck, while missing that getting unstuck is really most of the fun for some people). Though I suppose adventure games are an exception, since there's a tradition of really obscure "puzzles" in those.

The Witness was quite good, though I think I found it easier than some others did (probably because I play lots of puzzle games, and know some graph theory etc.). It ended before the game got too carried away with making puzzles "hard" for the sake of difficulty (which is easy if you make the grid really big and throw lots of elements on it). The best thing it did was that pretty much every puzzle was logically tractable (and *apparently* so) so the player doesn't feel like he's being trolled.

Like @beachthunder said, if the puzzle is fair then I probably wouldn't ever give up on it. Over the past couple days I've been momentarily stuck on puzzles in Stephen's Sausage Roll (now I'm almost done, I think!) but it was always just some thing that I hadn't thought to do and ended up pretty obvious in retrospect. That feeling is one of the reasons I play puzzle games!

Avatar image for bisonhero
BisonHero

12787

Forum Posts

625

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 1

User Lists: 2

#9  Edited By BisonHero

@adequatelyprepared said:

SMT: Nocturne has a series of sliding block puzzles that I always just use a guide on because sliding block puzzles are perhaps the most unsatisfying things to work out, especially if the prize is another sliding block puzzle.

Fuck sliding block puzzles.

My biggest issue is that there isn't really any way to see the pattern or trick to a longer block sliding puzzle in many cases, and it's often very difficult to visualize very many steps ahead, or to start with the solution you want and work backwards.

It's not so bad if it's a rectangular/square grid composed of square, uniform blocks, and there's one empty space, and all they want you to do is rearrange them to form a picture or something, because sorta like a Rubik's cube, there's a certain algorithm of block rotating you can stick with that will gradually move certain blocks where you want them. But when it's a large area composed of multiple irregularly shaped blocks with only a small handful of spaces in between them, there's almost no chance you will accidentally get the solution by brute force, and sometimes the solution is dozens of steps long. Yes, the last 20 or 30 steps might be trivially easy since you're most of the way there and you can kinda visualize what's "left to be done" by that point, but still. I know it's about manipulating the small blocks around the bigger blocks for the most part, but it's a complete nightmare to get started and I often just don't have the patience to experiment and instead look up a solution. They're rarely fun.

I think they also made me angry in Professor Layton, because the whole point of that series is that they give you hint coins you can spend if you're really stuck but want some minor satisfaction that you kinda got to the solution on your own. But block sliding puzzles are so fucked long that there isn't enough space in the hint text box to possibly give you any real help, so instead with each progressive hint coin you spend, the hints just keep telling you "nah, for real, I can't help you with this one, but here, let me tell you the minimum number of moves this is going to take, or maybe I'll give you some trivia on the history of block sliding puzzles." Yeah, thanks, but fuck yourself.

Notable examples all from Professor Layton (admittedly, I think all of these are from post-game bonus puzzles, and are entirely optional):

Professor Layton and the Curious Village, a simpler set of blocks but still, 81 moves is a long solution:

Loading Video...

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, pretty crazy set of blocks to work with, and 78 moves is no joke:

Loading Video...

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, a modest 37 step solution, but I found the opening arrangement pretty demoralizing (goal is to get the gem to the top, skip to the "Solution" section in the link):

No Caption Provided

http://www.professorlayton3walkthrough.blogspot.ca/2010/09/thehiddendoor.html

So to answer OP's question, I don't like really long block sliding puzzles because I feel like easier, shorter block sliding puzzles really don't teach you transferable lessons about how to solve more elaborate block sliding puzzles, and they're often so long that they render any kind of hint system useless. I guess it's a lot like throwing a Rubik's cube at someone who doesn't already know the methods by which you can make solid progress, and expecting them to accomplish fucking anything with it, and surprise, they don't unless they spend days with it and reinvent the wheel by figuring out those methods on their own.

Avatar image for sagesebas
sagesebas

2465

Forum Posts

579

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 3

User Lists: 5

The witness

Avatar image for fredchuckdave
Fredchuckdave

10824

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 0

User Lists: 2

Generally speaking I don't think people complain about puzzles being too challenging, rather they complain about them being too obtuse; the more "adventure-gamey" a puzzle is the worse it will be.

Avatar image for tyrrael
Tyrrael

485

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 0

User Lists: 0

I don't mind hard or clever puzzles, but I do mind puzzles that require some degree of either pixel hunting or incredible sight. Talos Principle is by and large a great puzzle game, but when the game requires you to be able to see distant laser catalysts in trees in order to solve its "harder" puzzles, it kind of sucks.

This right here sums it up. When all the necessary components to solve the puzzle are not available and it requires pixel hunting to "figure out" the puzzle, then that is barely a puzzle. I haven't played the Talos Principle, but I know exactly what you mean. Hiding, or in some cases, obscuring, certain components from sight in order to make the puzzle more "difficult" is lazy and just feels like needless padding.

Also, aimless wandering to "solve" a puzzle is infuriating. Think about some of the classic games you may have played. While it's not exclusive to these games, it's the best place to start. I, along with a lot of other people, often refer to them as "where the fuck do I go" games. Essentially, there's a way to proceed further into the game, but absolutely no information is given on how to do that. So, what you end up doing is aimlessly wandering until you stumble upon the solution completely by accident. This doesn't mean you "figured out" the puzzle. It's one of the reasons I can't stand games like Dark Souls. The majority of progression is just guessing where to go next.

I think the best kinds of puzzles are what I call "self contained puzzles". God of War is a good example of this. You get to a room that you need to get out of. You can see the door where you need to exit, and all the components are placed in front of you. It is then up to you to figure out how to "put them together", so to speak, and proceed to the next area. Outside of puzzle games themselves, I think the best kinds of puzzles are the ones that take you a few minutes to figure out. Any longer than that, and the player is most likely going to get frustrated, especially since the game isn't a puzzle game or if it's a poorly designed puzzle for reasons that were highlighted earlier. Any shorter than that, like a few seconds, and it's going to seem pointless.

Avatar image for randyf
randyf

200

Forum Posts

10

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 2

User Lists: 3

The puzzles on Silent Hill 3 on hard were stupid. The first puzzle requires that you know relatively-obscure lines from Shakespeare plays. The rest of the puzzles also get baffling crazy.

Avatar image for frodobaggins
FrodoBaggins

2267

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 0

User Lists: 0

#14  Edited By FrodoBaggins

As soon as I become stuck on a puzzle and there is no hint system It's too hard. I lose all enjoyment, it simply isn't fun for me.

Avatar image for deactivated-5a923fc7099e3
deactivated-5a923fc7099e3

533

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 0

User Lists: 0

The witness. It was one of the most frustrating experiences of my gaming career. At a certain point I just gave up.

Avatar image for johnrizzoli
JohnRizzoli

9

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

0

Followers

Reviews: 0

User Lists: 0

Puzzles can't be too hard. You can be too lazy. As for me, attempting to solve the puzzle is fun and interesting and it's very good for your mental skills