Traffic by D. S. Yu
I’ve never managed to solve Rematch, Andrew Pontious’s 2000 game in which you have exactly one turn to avoid being crushed by a car. Traffic has much the same idea, though it is a little more forgiving in terms of turn count: you have several turns to live, and dying doesn’t reset the progress you’ve made so far.
On the other hand, Rematch is supposed to be solvable, while Traffic is anything but. As other reviewers have already noted, this game seems to not have had any testers; or if it has, they must have been divinely inspired. Take the traffic box sequence. We’re given what seems to be a fairly clear puzzle, but it’s a red herring: yes, you can solve the equations implied by the panel, but they mathematically underdetermine the solution. The actual solution is to ask your mate for a screwdriver – there is no indication that he has one – in order to open up the panel to find the reset switch, even though no reset switch is mentioned and the game never indicated that the panel can be opened. How is a player supposed to come up with this? Or take the scene in the bus. You have to open the window, even though a window is not mentioned. (Cultural note: bus windows in the Netherlands don’t open. This might be different in other countries, sure, but then it’s extra important to mention a window and allow me to examine it, so that you can convey this information.)
The only way to progress is to follow the walkthrough. But by the time I got to the police car scene, the game was so confusing to me (I had no idea what was going on or what I was supposed to be doing) that not even the walkthrough was helping me. I tried to type in the commands, but the scene ended before I could finish the supposed string of six things you have to tell the young man.
All games need beta testers. Puzzle games need them much, much more. There’s nothing more frustrating to players than being given puzzles that they can’t solve, not because they don’t try or fail to come up with good ideas, but because the puzzles are underclued, require confusing syntax, or are not as intuitive as the author thought.