[mrLOL]

Hello party-people!
I love adventure-games, mostly the story and stuff, but as I'm making my own adventure-game (as a professional) now for the first time I'm having really easy writing the story but now I need to insert some barriers and puzzels into it which I've never done before so a good starting point is to think of my favorite puzzles in my favorite adventure-games to learn from them.
But I just realized, I can't think of any adventure-game-puzzels I actually enjoyed.
I can only remember loving when making progress (especially if good story like Grim Fandango) but I can never remember really likeing the puzzel and challenge (like say I would in a well-done action game where it's like "bring it on, bitch!" where the challenge might even be more fun than the reward).

So recently I replayed Grim Fandango (my most favorite game) and have disected every puzzel onto a document so I can learn from them, but the more I write down about a puzzel, the more I realize how boring most puzzles are and how little sense they make.

So my question is, what are your favorite adventure-problems that you actually enjoyed solving (rather than "aah shit, the key broke now I have to fix it somehow, why oh why..")?

PS: when I say puzzels, I just mean anything in an adventure-game that you need to solve.

[Panthera]

I like inventory puzzles and dialogue puzzles. Inventory puzzles like; "I need to get through this dark cave and I have a lamp, some electrical cords and a battery".. hmm.. I also like to explore for clues and items, but don't hide them away so much that you spend 15 min. on every screen looking for hotspots. I liked Hotel Dusk's dialogue puzzles where you need to say the right things when talking to people. Like; it might not be a good idea to tell the hotel manager that you broke into his office, even if you found some very interesting things there.. I also don't mind the "I'll give you what you need if you bring me this" puzzles. Even when they require you to go through several people.

But I'm mostly like you. I play for story, so I don't care much for puzzles. I solve them to continue, but give very easily up, so if I hit an obstacle, I usually look up a walkthrough.
I didn't manage to solve a single puzzle in Grim Fandango on my own, so I gave up playing it. My favourite game is The Longest Journey. I found several of the puzzles there interesting (just avoid the duck, clamp puzzle) like the police stations repair men, the false eye, the boat mission (getting the ship to leave with you on it), and several of the others too.

I'm not especially fond of logical puzzles, but if I manage to solve them on my own without help, I always feel very smart..
Just avoid the clichéd ones (door, paper, pencil, slider puzzle) and don't go for the extremely hard, and it should be al right..

[mrLOL]

Ah, cool, I haven't played that game, so if you do tell the hotel manager that you broke into his office, are you penalized by this in any meaningfull way (like in Fahrenheit where your mood-meter would go down because of the stress which might lead to breakdown later in the game if you keep it up) or is it the standard adventure dilemma where the NPC's will always forgive you no matter what (because you need him or her to continue the story) (with the exception of the times it's so bad you die and have to reload)?

Yeah I think Grim Fandango is probably one of the hardest adventure-game out there, even tho I've already played it before and even tho I'm holding the walkthrough in my other hand now that I'm replaying it, it's still hard!

TLJ is another game I haven't played unfortunatel (only Dreamfall) but I might give it a chance later.

Ah, "logical" puzzels, that's the word I was looking for (when I was trying to explain that it's not nessesarly that type of puzzles I'm wondering about).

[Panthera]

If you do something stupid as carrying with you stolen material when you are searched (which happens at a certain point in the game), you're kicked out of the hotel, and therefore the game is over. You're then restarted to a few moments before your fault. It's not an optimal solution, but of course much easier to implement than having it affect the rest of the game. Since I was restarted to just before I got "game over" it wasn't really annoying, but I got game over one time after going through a whole conversation, and having to do all that again was very annoying. The concept was nice though, even if it could have been solved in another way.

I recommend reading Squinky's Adventure Architect series, she talks about how dialogue choices affect the game:
Adventure Architect #2: Chivalry is Not Dead, Part 1
Adventure Architect #2: Chivalry is Not Dead, Part 2
Adventure Architect #2: Chivalry is Not Dead, Part 3
adventure Arcitect #2: Chivalry is Not Dead, Part 4

[Adventurous One]

It's kind of hard for me to think of puzzles that I enjoyed solving (I usually remember the story, not the puzzles), but I can think of a few examples:

Space Quest 2: The guard on the launch pad, and being able to get through this puzzle multiple ways. In fact, just about any puzzle that gives you multiple ways to solve it. I enjoy these because not only does it prevent the player from being stuck and/or beating his/her/its brains out over the puzzle, but it also gives replay value.

Phoenix Wright Series: I just loved figuring out what evidence was required in trial, especially in the second one. That and all the dialogue trees, which were somewhat related to the puzzles.

[Jelena]

I like mapping out mazes.

*hides*

[misa]

I can't think of one that I loved solving, but I can certainly think of several that I hated trying to solve! :p Anyone who's played GK3 and Myst Revelations can probably think of which ones I'm talking about!

[Squinky]

I like logic puzzles because I'm a computer science geek (the one in What Linus Bruckman Sees When His Eyes Are Closed is a favourite that comes to mind) and I always feel like I'm actively doing something when I'm in the middle of solving them, rather than feeling stuck. I'm also a huge, huge fan of dialogue puzzles because they do a great job of conveying story through their gameplay, rather than serving as a mere obstacle. The latter type is what I like to implement a lot of in my own games these days. (By the by, thanks for the heads-up on my Chivalry articles, Panthera!)

Of course, I think the way you should go is not necessarily to think of your favourite puzzles from past games, but of puzzles that you think would fit with your story, its world, its characters, and its themes. Of course, if you can't think of any puzzles that would do so, I'd suggest creating a puzzleless adventure game, similar to what's been done in interactive fiction games such as Photopia.

[cwapitm]

I liked most of the puzzles in Grim Fandango actually even though several of them were hard. One of the puzzles I actually thought was hard, but I managed to solve on my own and I enjoyed it was the crane puzzle in year 3 where you had to rescue Glottis. I had fun with that one.

I also like puzzles that involve humor such as those in Day of the Tentacle. Probably my favorite in that game was the human contest. I also like logical puzzles that make sense. Puzzles that make me think that no one could possibly solve it without help are not good. The worst are probably pixel hunts involving painting the screen with your mouse just to find an item.

[MoriartyL]

I could name some challenges I enjoyed, but they all come from games which aren't story-driven. In a story-driven adventure, puzzles -no matter how clever- take away a lot from my enjoyment of the game.

My advice? If it doesn't fit your vision to have puzzles, don't force them in.

But it's almost considered unacceptable to have an adventure which doesn't pretend to be interactive! [sigh] I'd recommend that you add interactivity which determines the pace of the game rather than preventing the player from continuing at all. But I've never played a game that did that, so it would be asking too much.

[mrLOL]

Hey those are mighty good answers.
First of all (before I forget it) reading this made me remember 3 puzzels I actually enjoyed:
1) Monkey Island 1 insult-sword-fighting (atleast I think I WOULD have enjoyed it, if it weren't for the fact that the only english I knew when I was playing it the first time helped me only to identify that there was a 'dog' in the scumm-bar).
2) Fahrenheit start-murder.
3) Fahrenheit saving the little kid that feel into the ocean (not really an adventure puzzel, but if it were, oh boy what a nice set-up).

Anyway..
Thanks for those articles, I'll defenitely give them a read today.

Adventurous One: hehe I really thought I had played (almost) all adventure-games, but you guys give examples from the games I haven't play that Phoenix trial sounds like a great puzzle to study but I haven't even HEARD of that game, but I'll check it up.

Misa: Oh yeah, that would be the worlds longest thread!

Squinky: I suppose logical puzzles can be fun after all, maybe they just have a bad reputation from all the times they are too arbritary (Grim Fandango's first logical puzzel to bring down the power-plant tree was just waaay too out there for me).

"conveying story through their gameplay, rather than serving as a mere obstacle" that's exactly what I'm trying to acomplish really.
In my story there are one or two places where I admittivly are looking for something to stall the story (so that I can make good use of the environment I have to create for 2 very important- but also short- scenes) but for the most part the story naturally have a lot of things needing solving by the hero I'm just not sure how to set them up as a good adventure-puzzel (which is obviously very different from the way "puzzles" work in literature).
And a good way to learn that is by looking at how the pros do it, but I'm starting to think most pros aren't at all very good on this part (which in part is probably why "adventure-games are dead"), I'm still going to do some more experimentation and research on games (maybe check out the ones you guys recommended) but I'm also trying a new approuch which is to read some theory-articles on the subject (including yours ), I was afriad that any adventure-game-specific article would be too simplistic like this one ( http://www.adventuredevelopers.com/f...=18&showpage=1 ) which is just do's and don't rather than why's, which is only helpfull if you're making a really generic genre-game, but I've actually found some that looks really good, will print them out today.

MoriartyL: Hmm you bring up a good (but sad) point..
I can definitely think of the action-games that are story-driven (like Vice City) where I love the story-setup/reward AND the challange, but not so easy for adventure-games (even tho as a whole I like adventures more than action-games).
It definitely fit my vision, I'm just not sure how to set them up, there's definitely some scenes where the puzzles wrote themselves and I'm reeeeally excited to see how they will perform in-game.
But like every other creative-medium there are always places where you don't have that flash of enlightenment where you have to use your left side of the brain to come up with something that is just as brilliant, and the left-side might not be as artsy but it knows what it likes and can disect that, some of what it learns might not be applicible to my specific game but that's ok cuz in that case I just put it in my huge scrapbook for later use.

[Crapstorm]

I am glad you asked, mrLoL! I love puzzles - always have & always will - and I love adventure games that have great puzzles. Here are a few examples of really fun puzzles that I truly enjoyed solving:

1. Myst (the original) I think the area was called Channelwood, and you had to open and close a number of water valves to get power to different devices, like doors and lifts. Each time you turned a valve, the sound of water flowing would change, and you had to walk around, listening carefully and fiddling with valves to figure out how the whole system was connected.

2. Myst III Probably my favorite adventure game puzzle of all time was the one where you had to balance a scale by putting different pieces of a ball on one end. You could also move the fulcrum of the scale. Trial and error didn't work, so you had to do a little research about the relative densities of the materials you were dealing with. I don't want to spoil the puzzle, so I'll leave it at that. This one put me in an arm chair with a cup of tea, a pad of paper and a pencil for a good hour!

3. Full Throttle had an ingenious little puzzle in which you had to open a giant garage door to drive your motorcycle through. First, you had to get a padlock off the door. (I think this was done using a key found somewhere.) Then, you could raise the door by pulling down a chain next to it. Problem was, when you let go of the chain, the door crashed down. The solution was very simple, but quite hard to see. It stumped me for days. The solution came to me when I was at work, and I think I left early that day to rush home and try it.

4. Obsidian contained many very clever puzzles. One of my favorites was a bureaucratic maze in which you had to navigate a 3x3 grid of cubicles. Each pair of adjacent cubicles was separated by a locked door. You needed a certain combination of colored access cards to get through each door. The problem was, the locks ate your cards, and in each cubicle you would find new cards. It was really tough to figure out the route that would get you into that last cubicle where the prize was located, but what a treat when you got it!

I could go on, but I think that's a decent sample for now.

[misa]

Originally Posted by Crapstorm

4. Obsidian contained many very clever puzzles. One of my favorites was a bureaucratic maze in which you had to navigate a 3x3 grid of cubicles. Each pair of adjacent cubicles was separated by a locked door. You needed a certain combination of colored access cards to get through each door. The problem was, the locks ate your cards, and in each cubicle you would find new cards. It was really tough to figure out the route that would get you into that last cubicle where the prize was located, but what a treat when you got it!

That's one of my favourite games! I loved a lot of puzzles in it including that one.

[mrLOL]

Originally Posted by Crapstorm

I am glad you asked, mrLoL! I love puzzles - always have & always will - and I love adventure games that have great puzzles. Here are a few examples of really fun puzzles that I truly enjoyed solving:

1. Myst (the original) I think the area was called Channelwood, and you had to open and close a number of water valves to get power to different devices, like doors and lifts. Each time you turned a valve, the sound of water flowing would change, and you had to walk around, listening carefully and fiddling with valves to figure out how the whole system was connected.

2. Myst III Probably my favorite adventure game puzzle of all time was the one where you had to balance a scale by putting different pieces of a ball on one end. You could also move the fulcrum of the scale. Trial and error didn't work, so you had to do a little research about the relative densities of the materials you were dealing with. I don't want to spoil the puzzle, so I'll leave it at that. This one put me in an arm chair with a cup of tea, a pad of paper and a pencil for a good hour!

3. Full Throttle had an ingenious little puzzle in which you had to open a giant garage door to drive your motorcycle through. First, you had to get a padlock off the door. (I think this was done using a key found somewhere.) Then, you could raise the door by pulling down a chain next to it. Problem was, when you let go of the chain, the door crashed down. The solution was very simple, but quite hard to see. It stumped me for days. The solution came to me when I was at work, and I think I left early that day to rush home and try it.

4. Obsidian contained many very clever puzzles. One of my favorites was a bureaucratic maze in which you had to navigate a 3x3 grid of cubicles. Each pair of adjacent cubicles was separated by a locked door. You needed a certain combination of colored access cards to get through each door. The problem was, the locks ate your cards, and in each cubicle you would find new cards. It was really tough to figure out the route that would get you into that last cubicle where the prize was located, but what a treat when you got it!

I could go on, but I think that's a decent sample for now.

Interesting, those personal choices of puzzles definitely shows what type of player you are.
I wonder if MoritaryL is right, maybe puzzles can really only be enjoyed when the game is about puzzles (like Myst, Raven etc) and when it's story-driven puzzles don't really belong (or at best they belong but they only help at making the story reward sweeter rather than actually being fun by themselves).

I suppose your Full Throttle example is a story-driven game tho, and you're right, that's a perfect example of a well-designed puzzle in a story-driven game!
One of the articles said that after completing a puzzle you should ideally say to yourself "Why didn't I think of that before?" and that puzzle is the best example of that I've heard.


[Full Throttle Door Puzzle Spoiler]

Spoiler:

You had to think out of the box, because you so assumed that you should go through the garage door, but the chain you had to pull went all over the wall so instead of trying to open the door, you could LOCK the door which means now you can't pull the chain anymore but can instead use the chain to just climb over the wall, brilliant!

Squinky: I didn't realize you were a celebrity, Cubert rocks!

[Squinky]

Originally Posted by mrLOL

Squinky: I didn't realize you were a celebrity, Cubert rocks!

I didn't realise I was a celebrity, either, to be honest. That said, thank you!

[Nelza]

Oh, I thought he was quoting you. LOL!

[GhostPirateLechuck]

I love the Monkey Island puzzles where you have to follow someone through the jungle to get to the destination you need. For instance, the sword master.

[WRMW]

I absolutely loved the "Writing on the Tomb" puzzle in GK1 and the taperecording puzzle in GK2. The satisfaction after finally solving those two puzzles dulls other puzzles in comparison. I think it's because they were complicated, but logical. I had to BE Gabriel and figure out what I would actually say, how exactly I would solve his predicament. Also having the liberty to write anything in the puzzles made it so much more rewarding when you finally got the right answer.

The Serpent Rouge Puzzle in GK3 would be similar, but it was too hard for me to solve without some help.

[mrLOL]

Ah, more replies
GhostPirateLechuck: Brilliant! you are right, that puzzle is just so perfectly integrated into the engine, I'll definitely add that one to my list.

WRMW: Omg! the writing on tomb puzzle is my most hated puzzle ever, are you seriously saying you completed it without a walkthrough?
Like you said it allows you to write whatever you want, but IMO the only way that would work is if there were alot of freedom to the game. So in RL where you would be able to write whatever you want you would also be able to get different reactions to the unlimited choices of what you can write, whereas in this game there's only 1 right solution (which there is no hint to) and you have to write it exactly in the grammar the game-designer made it in, yuck!

So I defeinitely think that puzzle is too hard (and badly designed), but maybe the reason why you like it and I don't is because you completed it by I couldn't.
I was recently playing GhostRecon:AdvanceWarfighter2 and in there there were 2 buggy levels, one where the "Next Mission"-button was greyed out after you completed it (so you just had to replay it over and over again until the bug stopped) and one where the anti-helicopter rockets just dissapeared when 2 enemy choppers arrived so I had to spend like 25 minutes just running around in circles machinegunning the choppers (and just refilling my ammo on all the dead corpses throughout the whole level),
here's the ironic thing, those 2 levels are the ones I actually like and remember for some reason.

[WRMW]

Originally Posted by mrLOL

WRMW: Omg! the writing on tomb puzzle is my most hated puzzle ever, are you seriously saying you completed it without a walkthrough?
Like you said it allows you to write whatever you want, but IMO the only way that would work is if there were alot of freedom to the game. So in RL where you would be able to write whatever you want you would also be able to get different reactions to the unlimited choices of what you can write, whereas in this game there's only 1 right solution (which there is no hint to) and you have to write it exactly in the grammar the game-designer made it in, yuck!

So I defeinitely think that puzzle is too hard (and badly designed), but maybe the reason why you like it and I don't is because you completed it by I couldn't.

Unfortunately, I think my success may have well impacted my enjoyment of the puzzle. I'm sure while I was solving it I was angry and frustrated, but I NEEDED to solve it, and when I finally did, the satisfaction (and pride!) wiped all those memories from my mind. This left me with an overwhelming fondness for the puzzle, where having to look up the solution would have only left frustration.
But I disagree that there were no hints, else how on earth did I ever solve it (trial and error would have been impossible)? I feel the puzzle was wonderfully layered and you had to make small realistic steps (translate the ruins, then figure out how to read them). Then using information gathered from various places in the game you had to formulate a plan, and then figure out how to communicate this in "voodoo language".
I don't think this puzzle was too obtuse or illogical because I do not, as a rule, particularly enjoy exceptionally difficult puzzles (a la Riven), but I sure enjoyed this one!!!