"Hush Puppies" puzzle - a discussion of puzzles

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Those of you who have played Simon the Sorcerer 2 will recognize the following scenario. For those of you who haven't, I'll put it in spoiler tags, but I really think you should read it.

Spoiler

So, in the bad guy's fortress, you have to get past a guardian. He's half-asleep, or something, so you just have to not be smelling anything pervasive, or something, and have to blend in with the scenary, or something, and have to be silent. Well, how do you manage to be silent? After somehow conjuring up a dog, you have to WEAR DOG. No kidding, this is the verb+noun structure. Simon obediently turns the dog into a pair of Hush Puppies slippers, wears them, and goes past in silence.

[close]

At what point do the puzzles stop becoming hard, and start just being plain unfair? This has always been a gripe with me. It must be said, at this point, that I don't play adventure games for their puzzles. I really appreciate GOOD puzzles, but that doesn't necessarily mean that to be GOOD they have to be insanely HARD. I know some people actually like them hard, so it's really to them that I direct the previous question.

We have a case in point right here in AGS. Wretched (Magsic I and II, Where's My Hat Ma, Crave, Zugzwang and Bog's Adventures in the Underworld) has a style of his own. His games always offer his unique style of graphics, a very atypical storyline, superb programming feats... and really TOUGH puzzles.

Me, I like most of Wretched's puzzles. But I think some of them are past hard and plain unfair. Can't name any right at this moment, 'cause I'm in a bit of hurry, but I can, if you like. BUT, I've noticed some people keep on praising Wretched's puzzles as being "hard, really hard, and inventive". It was then, when I noticed this feedback, that I understood even puzzle design isn't as clear-cut a case as I thought.

So basically that's it. Where do HARD puzzles start becoming unfair? And surely it isn't necessary to hint the player along every other step of the way, is it? What, overall, makes for enjoyment of the game? discrete puzzles? Puzzles that are-obviously-puzzles? HARD puzzles, or EASY puzzles? FAIR puzzles, or games that require you to have actually programmed the game in order to think them up?

And if any of you link to some previous thread where this was extensively discussed, I think I'll do something crazy...

[ManicMatt]

Some hinting is required, at least! I recently played a game ("Brain Hotel") and looked at an item, and the character said "Nothing to say about it,". This instantly made me conclude that it's not important and just ignored it. Except it was an important item you must pick up.

Also in that game, there's a crate you can pick up. You try to open it. "I can't open it." The problem I have with that statement, is WHY can't he open it? Because he's under an oath not to open client's parcels? Because he just doesn't want to? Or because it's sealed with tape? Nailed down? Doesn't have a lid? WHAT? He should have said "I can't open it, I'm not strong enough, the lid is stuck on too tightly." So I had to look up a guide to find out that I do infact need to open it.

I like good puzzles, even hard ones, and if I do get stuck, and look up the solution, I hope that I kick myself for not realising it, rather than just saying "What? That's absurd! I'd have NEVER figured that out!"

If it wasn't for the fact that the Simon puzzle you mentioned had already been heavily discussed all over the place in every magazine and webpage ever, I'd have been stuck on that for ages, I'm sure.

[Gilbert]

Accolade's LSL clone, Les Manley in Search for the King.

How on Earth would I know I have to type

Spoiler

hitchhike

[close]

to continue on with the game, without any clue, and when I'm not a native speaker, who didn't have a decent library of vocabulary?

Not that it was a game of any good anyway...

(I think it's similar to the magic word puzzle people stated about some KQ games, I don't know much though, as I had only completed KQ5 and 7).

[SSH]

I remember a game of "Pilgrims progress" for the Spectrum and you had to type, exactly, as you were leaving the city of Destruction "Run and do not look back".

Aaarrgh!

[Gilbert]

It just told the players to run and do not look back on the game.

[GarageGothic]

From a personal point of view, I no longer have time for hard puzzles. As a 13-year-old I could spend days and days on a single puzzle, but these days I reach for a walkthru whenever I feel myself stuck for more than 20-30 minutes. Then, if the solution turns out to be (in my opinion) unreasonable, I end up referring to the walkthrough throughout the rest of the game, whenever I don't know how to proceed. Most of my favorite adventures (including Police Quest 2, Dreamweb, The Colonel's Bequest, Gabriel Knight series) have very few actual "puzzles" at all - I enjoy games that focus on "doing" rather than "figuring out what to do".

As for the "hush puppie" example, it's very similar to the infamous "monkey wrench" puzzle. I would stay far away from this kind of puzzles unless they are the main type of puzzles in the game and the hints are very, very good. Two adventures that use puns to great effect is Infocom's "Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It" and Legend's "Companions of Xanth", and I admire them for turning humor into actual gameplay, something very few comedy games succeed in.

[Babar]

I posted something about this a while back, and I'm still not satisfied. Can someone give me an example of a "good" puzzle that "fits in with the story"? Because I don't think such a thing exists. Either you do everything normally and it's so intuitive that it's not like a puzzle at all, or you are searching in desperation for a walkthrough

[GarageGothic]

Either you do everything normally and it's so intuitive that it's not like a puzzle at all

See, to me this sounds like the perfect adventure game. Which is why I dislike the term "puzzle" immensely, and why I to a large degree have distanced myself from the adventure community. This is pretty much how the non-comedy/fantasy Sierra games used to be - Police Quest, you follow police protocol as outlined in the manual. Gold Rush, preparing and undertaking a journey, then following clues to find your brother.

I don't think it's about finding puzzles that "fit the story", but rather find stories that naturally contain actions and events that lend themselves to gameplay. People keep saying that "Le Serpent Rouge" in Gabriel Knight 3 is the greatest adventure game puzzle ever, which may very well be true. But it's not a very typical puzzle (I, for one, can't name a similar puzzle), nor is it much of a puzzle at all. In fact it gives you so many clues (the poem is almost a walkthrough in itself)  that it's just one long  series of research and map plotting, which is highly enjoyable for sure, but not anything that is likely to keep you stuck. Jane Jensen have chosen an underused genre in adventure games - the treasure hunt - and designed a game that is the digital equivalent of Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold Bug.
Compare Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine - another game supposedly about treasure hunting, but failing miserably in delivering. Instead of using the vast desert area to let the player search for clues to the mine, the designers instead have use spend a whole act running back and forth mixing sunscreen for a Pamela Anderson lookalike!

[Vince Twelve]

I have to agree with GarageGothic.  The puzzles that seem best interwoven into the story are not made by thinking of a puzzle that fits the story, they are made by thinking of stories that naturally contain connundrums and presenting them properly.  A detective story has a puzzle built naturally into it.  Perhaps it's a who-dun-it kind of mystery...  All the gameplay focuses around uncovering those clues that help unravel the mystery (puzzle) at the core of the game.

A "natural" puzzle like this will often have many layers and pieces that can be approached in different ways with differing results.  GarageGothic also summarized this neatly with his GK3/AEatLDM comparison.

I, for one, am not terribly hung up on puzzles needing to weave naturally into the story.  I know Myst is not a popular game among adventure game purists, but I loved Myst and especially Riven for the logic and mechanical based puzzles.  It's just an excercise that my brain enjoys.  I think this came out a lot in Anna. 

But on Rui's original question: I can't stand puzzles that are solved by completely random item combination/interaction.  If I come accross something like this, I will often quit a game or, if the story is intriguing enough, rely on a walkthrough until the end, just to see it through.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I think that if a puzzle is cleverly enough designed for a specific game, most of the time you won't even know it's there.  That is, you'll be aware that it's a puzzle but because it is so fun to do and fitting with the game that you don't really notice.  An example would be action scenes in adventure games, and yes, they really are a kind of puzzle, success has just shifted away from your knowledge of weird things or inventory to figuring out the best way to jump a gap or the best pattern to attack a foe to win.  Ultimately, the best puzzles are the ones that either:

1.  Remain wholly transparent.

or

2.  Make you say 'wow, that's neat' when you think of the solution.


Two is obviously the more difficult situation to achieve, as puzzle solving capabilities vary widely by player.  The important thing is not to punish the player constantly, and one thing that will do it is poorly constructed, CONSTANT puzzles.  There is nothing that will drive me from a game sooner than puzzles for the sake of it or puzzles that take the place of gameplay or story.

[LimpingFish]

People have different ideas about what defines a "puzzle", or indeed, what makes one puzzle "harder" than another.

Illdefined or downright obtuse puzzles in IF are the kiss of death, and pointless "Courier" puzzles in Graphic Adventures are just tiresome, imho.

"Return to Mysterious Island" had an interesting puzzle dynamic, where items could be combined to solve one puzzle, then disassembled and re-combined, in a different manner, to solve another. It wasn't rocket science, but it added more to inventory puzzles than just "Use item A on item B". Not a lot more, granted, but still...

I suppose you have to find the line between dropping hints for the player, and just leading them by the hand.

Plus, illogical obtuse puzzles artificially stretch the lifespan of a game.

[nihilyst]

What I really dislike are puzzles, that might be good as a puzzle itself, but do not fit. Take "Still Life": Why do I have to solve a lever puzzle to start a crane? WHY? What crane is that? There are similar examples as well. It's not that I dislike those kind of puzzles. I really enjoyed "Sentinel", because it had atmosphere and some hard, but not too hard puzzles. And it was made for the puzzles.

[Sylvr]

If anyone's ever played 'Shivers' it's full of tough puzzles like that. Some of them are for opening doors, or making certain pots or lids available, or whatever (I haven't played the game in a long time). The game, IMO, is supposed to be more focused on those puzzles (although they shouldn't've been so hard), and I guess only those kinds of games should do that.

[EagerMind]

Can someone give me an example of a "good" puzzle that "fits in with the story"?

For me, the puzzle that stands in my mind as "The Great Puzzle" is the final puzzle of Monkey Island 2 where

Spoiler

you make a voodoo doll to destroy LeChuck.

[close]

Why did/do I love it?
- It was "hard" (at least for me), but completely logical.
- The clues were all around you, but not obvious (and if I remember, required a little lateral thinking).
- It incorporated knowledge that you learned earlier in the game.
- The solution (that is, gathering the items you needed) wasn't linear.

I can still remember when the solution came to me (after roaming the tunnels wondering what the f- I was supposed to do next), it was literally like a light turned on in my head (yeah, I'm a geek).

1.  Remain wholly transparent.

I might use the world "consistent" instead - consistent with the needs of the story, and consistent with real-world logic (or if not, consistent with some game logic that has been made clear to the player). I don't mind knowing that I'm dealing with a puzzle - even if it's a hard one - as long as the puzzle and its solution flows naturally from the story and is logically consistent. Maybe we're talking about the same things, just using different words.

I actually think more games suffer from the opposite problem of "The Ridiculous Puzzle": namely, "The Gratutious Easy Puzzle". That is, a bunch of simple puzzles that are thrown in just for the sake of having puzzles and don't really have anything to do with the story. These just grow tedious to me, and I'll lose interest just as quickly as I would with some crazy puzzle that has a non-sensical solution.

... these days I reach for a walkthru whenever I feel myself stuck for more than 20-30 minutes.

I would have to disagree with this mindset. I completed MI2 without a walkthrough, and it's probably one of the reasons I have such a fond memory of that game. Certainly there were times when I was stuck, but it was all the more satisfying when I figured out the solution. But the caveat is: if I'm going to spend a lot of time working out the solution, the solution better make sense. In MI2, for the most part, they did. Sure there were a couple dubious ones:

Spoiler

"Pulling" the shovel off the sign at the beginning, while "picking it up" wouldn't work. And as you mentioned earlier, using the monkey as a wrench to turn off the waterfall.

[close]

But I think there were enough clues to figure out the solution.

Spoiler

For the monkey in particular, the shape of it in the inventory tipped me off.

[close]

Definitely it's a fine line, and of course everyone is different in what they enjoy and what they find difficult. But I'm beginning to think that identifying a bad puzzle is a lot like identifying porn: "I can't define it, but I know when I see it!"

[Helm]

This topic again! At least reading through this iteration, we seem to be making some headway.

I want to suggest to you all to download and play an old game called KGB (AKA Conspiracy). Now, KGB is extremely demanding of the player. It doesn't treat you like an idiot (try to remember in how many adventure games you play the part of a juvenile clueless idiot, and contrast it against playing the part of a highly capable Soviet secret service man, undercover in the underworld). But it's not unfair, and not adventure-gamey about the obstacles you overcome in the game at all. If you play it, try to solve the first part of the game, Kursk Street, without a walkthrough. It's taxing, but doable, and extremely gratifying if you can do it. The way this game deals with puzzle construction is that it uses the Investigation model. you need to uncover information, so you have to talk to people, when you have a good reason break in houses and so on. Nothing you try to do is without a clear reason when you're doing it. That is, there's so much to do, and most of it kills you, that when you try something, you're forced to be doing it because you have a cunning plan to try out.

Think about this, when you play Monkey Island. Nothing you have to do in KGB is done aimlessly or randomly or because you got lucky or because you clicked everything on everything. Of course, quite unlike the sort of Adventure game that killed Adventure Games, when you do wrong things, the game punishes you with walk-deathness or pure simple deathness, not 'I can't do that' nor 'that doesn't work'. There is, effectively, NO STUCKAGE in KGB. You will die a lot, and you'll torment yourself trying to carry out your mission, but you never sit around doing nothing in-game, going from room to room searching for an obscure puzzle to tackle or an object to pick up you've missed. In fact, KGB creates the illusion that there's always more going on every second in-game than you can possibly be putting your attention on, so you have to make strategic decisions of where to be, when, to get ahead. This game puts you in the midset of a KGB undercover agent, and nothing else I've played comes close to how potent this experience is.

[ManicMatt]

"I got stuck on KGB" - Matt (Many years ago)

Interesting game it was, I got to a point where I'd died a million deaths where I've been kidnapped and I'm stuck in the room with a woman (As far as memory can tell). So I got a walkthrough and followed it to the letter. I'd started again. I once again came to a point where I was stuck in a room with a woman, and I had to say the right things to save my life. Following the guide I said all the things suggested, and I died. I then presumed the guide was wrong and looked elsewhere. All the guides told me to do the same thing, which led to my death. So my experience of KGB was a frustrated one. I'll probably never know why the bloody game didn't work like they said. Bah.

[Helm]

You have to be nice to her, but tell her nothing of importance. Then, persuming you have flushed the cocaine in the toilet earlier, you can bluff your way out of there. What you haven't done, I suppose, is the cocaine part.

[Ali]

I think the most important thing is for puzzles to grow out of the environment and the narrative.

If the hush puppies puzzle was in 'Nord Or Bert Couldn't Make Head Or Tail Of It' it woulds be a great puzzle and it would fit in with the feel of the game. In the context of Simon the Sorcerer it's ludicrously bad.

Without regard to Conspiracy and Monkey Island, I think the important thing to note is that both games have puzzles that fit with their characters and their stories. For that reason the player rarely feels cheated. The puzzles feel natural, and not like obstacles contrived by villainous designers.

[TerranRich]

You know, I just finished KQ5 again the other day, and I never realized how god-awful the puzzles in that game were. You basically had to experience something that killed you in order to know that it killed you, so you could work around it. Example:

Spoiler

You die if you talk to anybody in the Inn in the beginning of the game. But the right way to go about getting the lamb and rope from there is to go in, get knocked out, make sure that you had saved the rat, and gotten the hammer. Whew!

[close]

I always thought that puzzles should blend right into the gameplay and not be an obstacle. A fix for the above mess:

Spoiler

Make it so that the Inn is shut down until you come across the rat being chased by the cat. And on that screen where you save the cat by throwing a shoe at it to save the rat, have the narrator say something like "That poooor mouse. Graham wishes he could do something to save her!" and if the player fails to use the shoe correctly, the chase just goes off-screen. Once the player re-enters the screen, the chase occurs again...and again and again until the player figures it out. Then, give the shoes to the cobbler in the town. THEN open up the Inn.

[close]

That's how I'd do it at least.

I mean, I know it makes no logical sense for the Inn to be shut down, and then re-open for no apparent reason, but it happens in games all the time. It could easily be explained away with a reason such as, the Innkeeper was out doing "business" (since he's a criminal and all) and there could be a sign on the door saying "Gone Fishin'" or something to that extent. You know what I mean.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Weren't all KQ games exercises in masochism?  I can't think of one where you didn't die constantly.