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Categorizing Puzzles In Adventure Games

Posted by Soulskill on from the tetris-needs-more-swords dept.

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."

6 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Missing Option by Deltaspectre · · Score: 5, Funny

    Fscking jumping puzzles

    --
    My UID is prime... is yours?
  2. Vague goals by Gruff1002 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Many games don't have a clearly enough defined goal.

    1. Re:Vague goals by Haoie · · Score: 4, Funny

      You mean like being trapped in a burning house, tied to a chair, with a deadly spider about to pounce on you, when you only have a pair of panties to help?

      Note: This is an actual opening scenario. I won't spoil which game it is.

      --
      If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
    2. Re:Vague goals by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Funny

      What do you mean game? Hey, do I judge your sex life? Now get offa my case!

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      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  3. Professor Layton by cootuk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Here in the UK, the Nintendo DS game "Professor Layton and the Curious Village" appears to be a big hit.
    This is really a small storyline to hold together over a hundred small puzzles.
    Perhaps the appeal of this is that people can dip in and out, leave what they can't do, and progress without one puzzle or action blocking progress along the whole.

    1. Re:Professor Layton by sorrowsjudge · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.