Because I Said So February 1, 2000

By Ray Ivey

Put
a Muzzle on the Puzzle: A Rant on Puzzles That Suck

A terrific
recent thread on GameBoomers
discussed gamers’ most difficult puzzle experiences.

Now, I love a difficult
puzzle. It’s one of the main reasons I play adventure games (that, and the fact,
of course, that it’s such a babe magnet, don’t you know).

I began
to think about difficult puzzles that I had enjoyed. The Mayan slider puzzle in
Timelapse. Rescuing Teddy in Amber: Journeys Beyond. The Chinese
box in Black Dahlia. These puzzles were good and chewy, and solving them
was quite satisfying.

However, there is another type of difficult puzzle.
The Bad Difficult Puzzle. These are the challenges that leave a bad taste in our
mouths, that force us to resort to hints or walkthroughs, or sometimes even suicide.
Let’s talk about these stinkers a bit, shall we?

Let’s divide up these Bad
Puzzles into two groups: Inappropriate Puzzles and Overly Obtuse Puzzles.

Inappropriate
Puzzles

First, there’s the puzzle that’s difficult because it somehow
stumbled into the adventure game from the wrong genre. These include tricky arcade
games, difficult action sequences, or manual dexterity challenges. The classic
offender in this category is in an otherwise magnificent game, Timelapse. In
the Anasazi sequence there is a puzzle in which you must shoot an arrow through
a hole in a distant rock. After many hours of blissful exploration and puzzle-solving,
here came this ridiculous out-of-genre puzzle that brought the entire game to
a screeching halt. I found myself stuck for a frustrating week on this stupid
puzzle. It made me angry, because it was an arcade game, pure and simple, and
didn’t belong in Timelapse.

Dust is a very fun and well-built
adventure game that has a truly challenging action shootout sequence near the
end of the game. I was pretty lucky with this one, but I know it frustrated a
lot of players. Did it belong in an adventure game? Hmm …

Of course
these stinkers are purely subjective. When I come across a non-adventure puzzle
in a game that I am able to solve without going crazy, it doesn’t make me mad.
For example, the darts puzzle in The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Rose
Tattoo. This dart game drove many players crazy, but I loved it. (I even have
a certain twisted friend who claims to like the arrow puzzle in Timelapse,
but she will remain nameless.)

There are shooting puzzles in Atlantis:
The Lost Tales that drove players to the brink. Some players hate the action
sequences at the end of GK3. Others may hate the arcade sequences you have
to beat in the middle of Dogday.

Overly Obtuse Puzzles

Then
there are the puzzles that make me even more irritated. Yes, I’m talking about
those stinkers I call Overly Obtuse Puzzles. Puzzles where only luck, not logic,
will solve the problem. Or puzzles in which you actually have to die to get the
information necessary to go back and do the puzzle again successfully. No fair!

Then
there are puzzles which are just mean. My favorite example of this is in one of
the greatest adventure games ever built, Riven. A central puzzle in Riven
involves solving the “Stone Circle Puzzle.” Each stone has a stylized
icon of an animal on it, and to solve the puzzle correctly you have to push the
correct series of stones down.

How do you discover the correct order of
stones? It’s quite ingenious, really. It requires the player to make a series
of connections. First, you find a series of large rolling marble thingies, each
marked with something that turns out to be a number. Also, each one makes a sound
as you touch it. Later in the game you find animals that make these sounds. Connect
the dots and you figure it out … the numbers represent the order of stones to
push … and the ones you push are the ones that have the correct animal icons
on them! Ingenious, right?

Wrong. Why? Because the very first stone you’re
supposed to push is a fish. A fish makes no sound. Therefore there is no sound
when you touch the “#1” marble. There’s some obtuse visual of a fish
symbol that you truly have to bend over backwards to find elsewhere in the game,
but it’s just too off-the-wall. The result is that the very first stone is the
most difficult to figure out. This problem wouldn’t have been so terrible if the
ambiguous animal had been the last stone–you could eventually work it
out by elimination. But with it as the very first stone it created a very mean
puzzle.

Another classic example is the rune jewel you have to reconstruct
in Black Dahlia. The puzzle simply requires that you make a required set
of runes adjacent to each other on a jewel-shaped frame. What the puzzle makers
didn’t think about, however, is that there are inevitably two solutions to this
puzzle, each a mirror image of each other, each equally correct. I got this puzzle
correct, with every rune in place, but the answer wasn’t accepted because of this
flaw. No fair!

The Mayan slider puzzle from Timelapse is pretty notorious,
too. I don’t have a quarrel with it, actually, in terms of difficulty. What I
do disapprove of is the fact that the game was released without the puzzle’s
getting “parity checked,” meaning its starting position could be a shuffle
of the tiles that’s actually not solvable! There is no excuse for this kind of
bad programming.

I’d love to hear what you think, Intrepid Reader. Which
puzzles do you consider bad? In each category? Perhaps you can think of a category
of bad puzzle that I’ve missed. Let me know!