Categorising puzzles

No one has yet mentioned what I think of as “exhaustion puzzles,” where the point is simply to try all of the options (Uncle Jimbo’s will is in the last of the bank’s 322nd safety deposit box that you check). I tend not to like them much, myself, and I’m glad not to be seeing them much lately, but they still occur from time to time.

Granted, if you know in advance you’re dealing with an exhaustion puzzle, it’s no longer, strictly speaking, a puzzle, because there’s no underlying model that you’re trying to understand by poking at it, but it’s still a puzzle-like kind of barrier that discourages, even if it doesn’t restrict, certain types of action: am I willing to walk east 231 times to get the Ancient Alder Staff of Czernobog so that I can defeat the dragon? Especially if there’s nothing to look at or do along the way, and I’m then going to have to walk back?

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IMO this should only be possible as a backup option if you’ve missed a clue somewhere, and perhaps not even then. If it’s too easy to do by brute force (say, there are only 20 boxes) then most players won’t even discover that the number of the deposit box you want is the number inscribed on the inside of Uncle Jimbo’s hat, or might decide that they’d rather just guess the number than go looking for the hat. If it’s too tedious, well, the players who don’t find the number in the hat won’t thank you - especially if, when they discover that the puzzle can be solved by brute force, they’ve no reason to trust that you’ve provided another way.

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I almost think if you have to brute force a combination and there is no solution provided and no tricky way to short circuit the combination, that’s not actually a puzzle - that’s progression or grind, possibly taken to an absurd extreme.

This does have its place. I’m reminded of a sequence in Resident Evil 7: The player plays a deadly gauntlet of puzzles first as another character by watching a video tape of them suffering grievous injury to learn the code to a padlock and ultimately dying, and then the player can survive the gauntlet in the present with spoiler-esque foreknowledge of the traps and solutions.

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The Prongleman Job does something of an exhaustion puzzle to get the stepladder and I think it works pretty well in light of the bigger "what triggers Prongleman’s return puzzle.

I’m not sure if this falls in the same category, but there’s also the thing where, to get past an obstacle, there are several different actions you can try, and after you try three different actions, you will succeed.

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It’s kind of an interesting set of questions: what makes a puzzle puzzly? Is it in the mind of the player, the designer, or in some aspect of the situation itself? Does it matter to the “is it a puzzle” question if the player knows that the solution requires nothing but a display of the virtues of patience and persistence? If someone releases a walkthrough demonstrating that the key is always under the last flowerpot you check in a nursery full of flowerpots, and players now know (or can know) this, does that change whether it’s a puzzle?

When I run across them, I tend to see them as degenerate puzzles. They don’t generally advance the plot, and if they require trying more than a very few options, they don’t enhance my enjoyment of the game, either. There’s no self-congratulatory a-ha! moment to enjoy, because an epiphany won’t help in solving the puzzle; there’s no underlying state being modeled that can be nudged by doing the right thing; or rather, the question of “what is the right thing?” is “just do everything.” But they do take on the appearance of puzzles, and gate access to parts of a game that aren’t accessible without them.

(This can be done well, though: was it Curses where the plane ticket was in the third place you look? It’s short enough not to be onerous, but it does a good job of aligning the player’s emotional state with the harried PC’s without turning into a death march of options.)

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“No more than three” is I think the common thread there; exceeding it turns the puzzle from an amusement to a grind.

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Many of y’all have heard my maxim on this subject: a good puzzle solution has to be surprising, but inevitable in hindsight.

As a result, not all puzzles will “work” for all players. If the solution was inevitable in hindsight, then the solution will be unsurprising (obvious) for at least some players. Similarly, for players who don’t “grok” the puzzle, it won’t feel inevitable even in hindsight. (“How was I ever supposed to figure that out?!”)

If the only solution is brute force, then the solution won’t be inevitable in hindsight, but it won’t even be surprising, either. When the solution turns out to be “322,” I’m not surprised. I knew it had to be some arbitrary three digit number. To be surprised, the player has to have some justified expectations that turn out to be incorrect in a way that the player failed to notice.

But IMO, standard key-door puzzles are “brute force” “exhaustion” puzzles in this sense. You’ve usually just got to explore every room on the map to find the key. There’s usually no reason why the key is in the office or the bedroom or the dungeon or whatever. You almost never say “Of course, I should have known that the key was in the basement.”

But exhaustion puzzles aren’t all bad. Hopefully the player had a pleasant time exploring all of those map rooms, so it didn’t feel grindy. (If there were some funny/interesting thing in each of the other 999 deposit boxes, maybe it would feel enjoyable to plow your way through them… maybe you’d keep on opening all of the deposit boxes, even after you’d found the key.)

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“Degenerate Puzzle” is a good term - sort of a broken or red-herring puzzle. I kind of do an opposite version in Cursed Pickle of Shireton (the pill dispenser and the rock-paper-scissors game) where it sets up what seems to be a huge puzzle, only for it to break or be completely skippable.

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You are right. Light touch is good for humorous purposes. Like in Elusinian Miseries in the cave. The parser seems to warn you away from the cave with how vast the system is, but after 5-6 moves it gives up and is like “Okay, you’re through the cave finally.”

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