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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."
Luckily, adventure games make up for their (typical) lack of jumping puzzles by means of giant heaps of "move your cursor in a search pattern over the entire screen, waiting for the cursor to change, indicating that that particular blade of grass, although identical to all 5,000 others of its kind, is the one that triggers the action that you'll need to have triggered 5 screens later" puzzles.
To be fair, not all adventure games do this; but second rate adventure games are even worse (and this takes real skill) than second rate platformers in terms of "the requirements are obvious, the interface will drive you to suicide" type challenges. The best examples of the genre do this even better by making the requirements completely counterintuitive and brutally illogical.