Adventure Gamers - Forums

The weakest element in [Dorothy Sayers’ detective stories] is the part that makes them detective stories, the strongest the part which could be removed without touching the “problem of logic and deduction.” Yet she could not or would not give her characters their heads and let them make their own mystery.

- “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950)

Puzzle designers for games face a similar challenge. Unless one’s playable character is a wily kleptomaniac, realistic characterization clashes with puzzle-solving gameplay. As Graham Nelson put it, an adventure game is a crossword at war with a narrative.

How to deal with this?

Approach 1: Make the main character a wily kleptomaniac.

This is the classic LucasArts solution. Guybrush Threepwood, all three Day of the Tentacle PCs, and Sam and Max are characters who’d gravitate to zany, absurd solutions and lend them consistency.

This approach (like all of them) is harder than it seems. Once you’ve committed to making your main characters zany, you also have to commit to not making too many puzzles commonsensical.

Weaker games make the mistake of having some puzzles solved by doing what a cartoon would do in a given situation, and having other puzzles solved by doing what a real person might. I submit that this tonal clash is a bad move.

Suppose the player is allowed to solve SOME puzzles in an obvious way: “That door is jammed, so we go to the store and buy a crowbar.”

At that point, it’s incongruous when other puzzles can’t be solved so commonsensically! “Why,” the player asks, “do I need to put a spoon on a stick to retrieve grease from the bottom of a narrow jar? Sure, the jar is stuck to the counter, but why not break it? Or buy grease at the store?”

Once you commit to every puzzle being somewhat zany, you limit your game’s tonal options. That’s fine if you like writing comedy, but…

(Sometimes, comedy can arise from having an entire game full of zany puzzles, and then allowing a simple answer to intrude in a surprising way. The “drowning very slowly” puzzle in The Secret of Monkey Island is a fine example of this.)

The worst case occurs when a single absurd puzzle is dropped in the middle of a less-goofy game. You can probably think of examples, or even a particularly famous late Sierra example that we won’t dwell on here.

Approach 2: Avoid zany puzzles, or at least limit them.

Game design, character, and story are all one thing. They’re not separate. So the interface should be part of the thematic presentation of who the main character is, and how they would solve a problem. If Bernard from Day of the Tentacle had to unlock a door with a ham sandwich, he’d lubricate a piece of bread with mayonnaise, slide it under the door, poke the key on the other side through with a toothpick to drop it on the bread, then slide it back out. But Ben would kick the door down and eat the sandwich.
- Tim Schafer, interviewed here

This is fine advice from a brilliant designer. But Ben’s solutions DO get pretty ridiculous sometimes, though never to the degree of those in Day of the Tentacle! He isn’t just kicking down doors all game; that would be too easy!

It’s hard to not make challenging solutions to puzzles stretch credibility in some way or other. Usually, the answer to the question “Why would the player-character in particular have to do this elaborate set of steps?” is “They realistically wouldn’t.”
Police Quest 3 aimed for realism, but is the key duplication and other trickery really how we’d expect Sonny Bonds to handle the problem of a crooked partner? And surely he wouldn’t be the ONLY person to notice the pattern of the crime scenes.

There’s no such thing as a fully realistic adventure game. Spycraft gets about as close as you can to making this credible, and it’s full of goofy stuff, too.

“Inherent zaniness” is not a problem, necessarily, just a genre expectation.

Approach 3: Justify the puzzles in-story as the work of a riddle-loving eccentric.

You can avoid having a zany main character if you instead have a setting crafted by a goofy demiurge.  Portal‘s GlaDOS feels compelled to test the PC’s ingenuity. Stauf of The 7th Guest is a diabolical toymaker. The aliens of Rama are teaching you how to think like them. And the denizens and in-story builders of Professor Layton‘s world are puzzle-obsessives to the last.

On the one hand, this is a great way to pit a relatively serious main character against a contrived world. On the other hand, it means that you now have to introduce other characters who are at least a little zany.

Approach 4: Let the world and characters appear to make their own puzzles.

“Appear” is the key word there, of course; ultimately the designer makes the puzzles. But in this approach, the designer’s hand is as unobtrusive as possible. This does not mean that the game is “realistic.” As discussed above, that’s not really possible. It means that the puzzles seem to spring fully-formed from the game’s world and its implications.

When a designer can pull this off, it is wonderful! But it’s quite difficult to do this and still maintain some level of lateral thinking challenge. After all, when the puzzle and answer follow from the situation, won’t they tend to be too easy?

In this thread, I’ll discuss games that have followed approach 4, and how they pulled it off. This includes, but is not limited to, adventure games.

Game worlds that seem to “make their own puzzles:”

Example 1: Return of the Obra Dinn

In Return of the Obra Dinn, Lucas Pope integrates storytelling and puzzle-solving via a clean mystery-solving mechanic. As the designer of Papers, Please, Pope had experience in making puzzles smoothly reinforce a game’s theme and plot. But RotOD is in its own league; no other game has done it this well.

To summarize, avoiding spoilers as much as possible:

* The player character is an insurance investigator with no real characterization. This is not a game about the PC, but instead about skullduggery and intrigue at sea.

* You fill out a book with the names and causes of death of those on board.

* A magic watch lets you see the moment of death and hear the voices of the dead.

That’s it. What emerges is a logic puzzle of stunning breadth and ingenuity. Critically, the puzzles are not set aside as discrete, linear challenges that stand out from the environment. The player can and must use every detail available, and learn the routines, dress, and hierarchy of the ship. Because the gameplay is open-ended (within cleverly circumscribed limits), the player is less a ‘puzzle-solver’ and more a detective.

How does Pope pull this off?

* The PC’s task, the game’s interface, and the goal of each puzzle are all presented via one mode of interaction. If an early shooter game limits what you can do to “firing a gun at things and opening doors,” this one limits you to “witnessing scenes and writing stuff down.” And that’s enough - that is EXACTLY the mode of puzzle-solving that you expect an insurance investigator to do!

* Puzzles rarely seem too contrived. There are times when crew members will too-conveniently expose some detail that you need… but most of the time, the reasoning you use is organic to the situation. By recreating a ship and its social conventions, Pope creates puzzles that arise from the player’s attempts to untangle those conventions.

* Plotting drives puzzle design. By layering twists into the plot, then making part of the player’s job figuring out those twists from context clues, Pope makes “solving the puzzles” and “experiencing the story” effectively two halves of the same activity.

* The world is gradually revealed to avoid overwhelming the player. Because this style of puzzle relies on the player keeping up with what’s going on, Pope doesn’t let the player explore too far without checking understanding.

This is key! In games where puzzles are all self-contained set pieces, it doesn’t MATTER whether the player followed everything that happened before. But in RotOD, which is effectively one mega-puzzle, the player can’t be allowed to jump so far ahead that the threads become impossible to untangle.

Coktel Vision’s “Lost in Time” arguably follows approach 5. It lacks obvious jokery, yet the main character comes off as being a ridiculous genius whose solutions are all absurdly elaborate and often unrealistic, but are never called out as such.

Or maybe it was self-aware and I was too young to get it? It seemed earnest enough at the time.

A non-adventure game example of a well-integrated puzzle:

Example 2: Half-Life

Not ALL of the puzzles in Half-Life are well-integrated, not by a long shot. Some stand out as every bit as artificial and goofy as the zaniest adventure game puzzles. But some of its best sequences demonstrate more immersive problem-solving.

Prior to HL, it was rare for enemies in shooter games to use pack tactics. HL changed that. Here, enemy chatter dropped hints about what your foes were doing. Is that an adventure game puzzle? No. Is it some kind of puzzle?

You have a clear goal, and deciphering a hidden, well-defined rule set (the logic of the enemy chatter) gets you closer to achieving that goal. If not a puzzle, that’s at least puzzle-adjacent.

But a more ‘adventure game-y’ puzzle can also be found. It was great at the time, but it’s been so often imitated that its impact may be lost to new players. At one point, you encounter a giant tentacle creature in a pit, and…

...by listening to other characters and watching the monster’s behavior, you can determine that it is attracted to sound. If you walk slowly, it doesn’t hear you - but even that isn’t enough to get past it. To distract it, throw a grenade.

In an adventure game, this puzzle would be trivial. But I certainly didn’t EXPECT to be using shooter weapons to solve puzzles in 1998. Commenters at the time largely agreed that the scene demanded a combination of immersion and lateral thinking.

This puzzle followed from the environment, the interactions available to the PC, and the tools available without feeling contrived, and it reinforced the mood and the bare-bones plot. At this point in the story, the PC is not an all-subduing superhero. Sometimes, you need to remember that you are prey, and to THINK like that.

Thanks to TacoAdventure on the Adventure Gamers Discord for bringing this next one up!

Example 3: Space Quest I

Out of all the Space Quest games, SQ1 boasts the tightest, most well-integrated plot with the least filler (slot machine notwithstanding). It reveals its story primarily through gameplay, not cutscenes. Almost every step is integrated into Roger Wilco’s character arc, which has a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end.

It’s been YEARS since I’ve played SQ1, and I can recite pretty much every puzzle in it from memory. In comparison, I can barely remember many other AGs, whether I played them recently or in childhood. When the story and the gameplay support each other, both become memorable.

So let’s take SQ1 apart and see how it ticks. We’ll break it into the opening, midgame, and endgame.

The rest of this post is all SPACE QUEST 1 SPOILERS. For the sake of readability, I’m not spoiler-cutting the whole post.
.
.
.
.
.

Opening: Escaping the Arcada

SQ1 keeps the intro brief. Janitor Roger Wilco awakes from a nap in a broom closet on the spaceship Arcada. Alarms blare as he stumbles over the corpses of his crewmates. His laziness has saved him from being gunned down by the bloodthirsty Sariens.

The first act’s puzzles come down to:

1) Getting a cartridge holding plans for the game’s MacGuffin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin)
2) Escaping the ship before it explodes

Every step you take (dodging the invaders, frantically searching for supplies and a keycard) fits the scenario, which culminates with a last-minute flight via escape pod. More than that this sequence establishes that Roger is out of his depth and alive only thanks to his dumb luck. The opening puzzles center on running away. When you hear approaching footsteps, hide or die.

Wilco, as it turns out, is like the “happy fool” of the tarot. He’s always about to walk off a cliff, but never does, at least in the timeline where you restore after each ridiculous death. He seems like an unlikely hero at best.

Midgame 1: Desert Cliffs/Skeleton

A crash strands Roger in a harsh wilderness (a plot beat that SQ2 would recycle). But that doesn’t mean he can disregard the Sariens, who have dispatched a spider droid to assassinate him.

This is the next step of Roger’s growth. All methods of eliminating the droid begin with escape, and end with Roger turning the tables on it. He COULD just keep running, but now he has the option to strike back and protect himself directly.

After navigating the desert, Roger is challenged by an alien sage to prove his worth by destroying a monster, the orat. He resourcefully either tricks the spider droid into blowing it up, or makes it blow itself up. He’s resolved his first “quest,” and become a real adventurer, satisfying the floating head.

(At the end of the desert segment, a cartridge terminal waits to reward attentive players who can (and should) use it to learn more about the Sarien menace. Either way, Roger now goes to the nearest settlement to find a way off-planet.)

Midgame 2: Ulence Flats

Roger is now stranded in a backwater town with a bar, a few shady characters, and not much else. Everyone in Ulence Flats is trying to make a quick buck, life is cheap, and gambling is LITERALLY life-destroying. It’s like Mos Eisley in Star Wars, but less lively. Failure here doesn’t mean being blown up by a droid - it means being trapped in insignificance, stalling oout. And so the puzzles revolve around making enough money to get a ship and escape without being played for a sucker.

A victorious Roger never takes the first offer for a vehicle. He doesn’t trust a ship that’s liable to explode. He eavesdrops. He cheats at slots, abusing either save-scumming (magical ‘dumb luck’) or a magnetic widget (in the remake, a major improvement). In short, he has to push back against the apparent choices offered by others, breaking their rules. He has to say “no,” or he’ll be literally left adrift later on.

Endgame: The Deltaur

Now Roger’s character development has come to a head. Following coordinates he overheard in a bar takes him to the location of the Sarien mothership. This triggers the Big Choice: does he go after the Sariens, or run away?

Running ends the game, so why even include that option? Answer: It emphasizes that Roger’s irreversible decision. He doesn’t HAVE to do the brave thing, but he does.

If Roger was a cunning enough bargainer to get a jetpack, he can board the ship for the endgame. Finally, he goes on the offensive. He disguises himself as a Sarien, uses a gas grenade to kill a guard, and engages in ray-gun shootouts. In short, Roger has transformed from a frightened schlub to a clumsy, affable pulp hero.

Finally, the game will only end happily if the player was careful to keep track of that vital cartridge. To save Roger’s home planet, it isn’t enough to scurry from place to place and kept him alive - you must pay attention to the wider plot.

To summarize, we have four acts:

Act I: Roger runs away from a foe he can’t beat yet.
Act II: Roger does a quest for an elder to prove he’s worthy.
Act III: Roger shows he doesn’t ALWAYS trust people and can make his own decisions.
Act IV: Roger takes responsibility and fights for his planet.

It’s easy to miss how clean, elegant, and gameplay-driven SQ1’s plot is, because it’s not shouted at you from the rooftops in cutscenes. But it delivers on the promise of an ADVENTURE in an adventure game - the kind of adventure that leaves its protagonist forever changed.