Good puzzles in AGS games released in 2024

[heltenjon]

I'll start one for this year.

The Best Puzzles award may be water under the bridge, but that doesn't mean we can't have a thread to discuss it. The question is simply: What puzzles in AGS games released in 2024 did you like? Why did you like them?

Please make the thread user-friendly with well marked spoilers, for instance like this:
Steeplejack:

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And something about it in here.

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Hopefully, this may give devs some feedback on what type of puzzles work well, and the players a chance to discuss and (dis)agree.

(In addition, I could imagine similar threads for the current year could be useful if we started them now and run them all year. It may be helpful when the year is over and we try to remember what games we liked months back and a help for nominating to the AGS awards. If the interest for such threads is there, of course.)

[heltenjon]

I'll start. I really liked the ventilation puzzle in In Our Midst.

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I liked that the puzzle involved several locations and characters. You had to exploit the engineer's lazyness, understand and manipulate the vent system and the cleaner droid, play to the captain's sense of duty and finally sabotage the air lock.

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That's quite a few steps, yet in feels organical and natural.

[heltenjon]

I've recently played The Shame of the Pack. It's a puzzle fest, which achieves the incredibly difficult art of integrating the puzzles into the story seamlessly. I particularly liked

The map.

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I liked the investigative style of eliminating all the wrong houses through observation and information already received earlier. I think it's cool that Frank does this when you direct him to. It's good character writing, telling us that he has knowledge, skills and perhaps even opinions that the player may not have. And he'll help you.

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Getting rid of the squatter.

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One of the earliest problems in the game, and with a logical step-by-step solution. I liked how I identified the problem (revolver) and then tried to come up with a solution. When that failed, I had to address the reason that failed, and so on. This kind of multiple steps puzzles are very satisfying to solve.

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Getting information from the guy in the red jacket.

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I don't even want to think about how many steps are needed, starting in the very first scene, ending up in one of the last scenes.And it's arguably even just a step in an even larger puzzle sequence, regarding the construction site. Now that's nested puzzle design!

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The moles.

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The confidence of Frank tells us that ten bullets will be enough. But there has to be a trick to it. Or several.

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[heltenjon]

Sadly, I seem to be the only one using these threads. 

But there are more puzzles that need bragging about.

Day of the Hamster sports good puzzles. I particularly liked finding hidden items.

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This had me construct a sort of geiger counter from a blueprint. There's some more info gathering that shows this can be made in different ways, with different results. Delightful!

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MORT: Manageable ok response team manages to make puzzles simply out of using the interface.

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I liked sending items through vents, using the robot as a third player character, and having to coordinate where everyone was because of pressure plates and the likes.

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An English Haunting is very good at integrating the puzzles in the story. I think my favourite had to be the boxing match.

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Having to dress up a corpse to, in a roundabout, fix a boxing match and fool the Irish mob kept me entertained. I loved how the historical period was used for making puzzles that involved fact finding, inventory and dialogue with multiple characters.

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Brownie's Adventure simply have to be mentioned because of the opportunity to solve some puzzles in a way a good guy normally won't. You get the chance to

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Let a guy drown. And steal someone's wooden legs.

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Not exactly hero 101.

Use it all (or forget your ball) for the most part has my own strange puzzles, but one of Kastchey's is one of my faves this year: The Pig dialogue puzzle.

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Basically, the pig has a type of colour blindness, and the player has to manipulate him into believing something about this mysterious hidden colour. I loved how Kastchey took this idea and ran with it.

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The Sphinx of Time. The puzzle involving the pattern machine.

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It's kind of hand-waved how the puzzle came into being, but I like very much the pattern recognition involved to solve it. Especially seeing as how the viewpoints change.

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[Carles]

I see you're talking about puzzle games from 2024. Let me recommend my game, The Legend of Skye! 

It's a classic point and click adventure focused on puzzles, I think it has some very interesting ones. A few days ago it was nominated for Best Puzzles at the AGOTY Awards!

[heltenjon]

I see you're talking about puzzle games from 2024. Let me recommend my game, The Legend of Skye! 

It's a classic point and click adventure focused on puzzles, I think it has some very interesting ones. A few days ago it was nominated for Best Puzzles at the AGOTY Awards!

Actually, you are right. As reported in the game's own thread, The Legend of Skye indeed is puzzle-heavy. Some of the puzzles have lots of steps, just as I like them. So far, I think my favourite is the puzzle about smuggling a chocolate bun out of the bakery.

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Though I would have loved it if one of my failed attempts had worked: drugging the chef and knocking him into the trapdoor with the chandelier.

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Puzzles now go under "best gameplay", btw, in case you wondered where to nominate the best of the year.

Many of you probably like The Crimson Diamond. I will argue that a kind of puzzle in this type of parser game, is noticing which words are possible avenues for interrogation. That's not easy to implement using point and click interfaces, so I like that there is something that makes the typing worthwhile.

Falco - Lightning Strike in Town Festival is an investigation game told solidly tongue-in-cheek. Even so, Falco has to gather info from conversations in order to satisfy the NPCs. I liked those mini-quizzes, and also that the game is built in a manner where you may spot the obvious solution, but that leads to having to do two other things, but in order to do that, you first need to figure out something else...it leads to a sort of cascade of solutions in the end, and I liked that effect.

WHAM's MAGS entry A Place of Significance holds a shrewd puzzle: Is it possible to get the girl? The problem is

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"I have tried everything!"

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Yeah, that really is a spoiler.

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Melon Head by MIGGO also has fun puzzles. The world is so alien that you start asking yourself questions like

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"What can I ppossibly use the Giant Tongue for?"

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I think my favourite puzzle chain is the one involving the letters. Not going to say anything more here. 

The Phantom Fellows also deserves a mention. By and large, the clue to progress in this and similar games, is to revisit the same location and try to do something as both characters. The ghost can do stuff that the living person can't and vice versa. In a way, it's like having a whole new set of verbs, because they may work differently if done right. And it's done right here.