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Categorizing Puzzles In Adventure Games
MarkN writes "There's hardly a video game made nowadays that doesn't involve puzzles in some sense. In some games they serve as occasional roadblocks to break up the action, and in the genre of adventure games the whole focus of the game is solving a set of related puzzles. I've written a piece for AdventureClassicGaming describing and categorizing puzzles in adventure games. Adventure games make use of explicitly designed abstract puzzles — they're explicitly designed rather than being randomly or procedurally generated, and abstract in the sense that all you need to do is figure out the right actions to perform, rather than making the performing of those actions be a challenge in and of itself. My classification makes distinctions at two levels: you have self-contained puzzles, which can depend upon using your basic verbs of interaction, solving some minigame based around achieving a particular configuration, or providing an answer to a riddle. On the other side, you have puzzles that require some external key: this could be an item, a piece of information, or an internal change to the game's state triggered somewhere else. From there, I talk about some of the possibilities and pitfalls these puzzles carry, as well as their use in other genres. I'd be interested to hear the community's thoughts on the use and application of puzzles in adventure games, and games in general."
Leisure Suit Larry 7? I think I remember briefly panicking from the horrifying urgency of it all before realizing that they weren't about to let you die, just giving you a simple puzzle they could talk you through at the start.
If you actually read any of the newsposts related to that game, you would have realized that the comic was supposed to be FUNNY, and the Penny Arcade guys (Tycho, at the very least) love the game. It gets my thumbs-up, by the by.
Some of the puzzles in the Phoenix Wright games were irritatingly linear and basically necessitated that you throw aside your pretentions to rational thought and simply try and figure out how the hell the designers intended you to solve the puzzle... often blindly choosing between alternatives so the narrative can later elaborate on why you were right, while obvious paths of inquiry are left unexplored.
(eg, a guy was strangled to death, but you're unable to bring this up when the prosecution is going for a guilty verdict based on fingerprints on a knife... not to mention that there are other reasons the fingerprints couldn't have been conclusively linked to the murder. It's just a game of trying to guess the one magical way that the designer wanted you to progress.)
Broken Sword II :)