“I am anthropomorphising puzzles a little bit, which I think is useful. As such, a good puzzle provides the player with the tools necessary to solve it it teaches, and perhaps even coaxes, but ultimately it lets players stand on their own two feet.Īnd not just the player, says Blow. This, I confess, is just my personal theory, and if it’s not broadly true, then it at least applies to the kinds of puzzle games I love - the kind of games that feel like an intimate and inspiring communication from designer to player. What’s the difference between a puzzle and a problem? A puzzle is in partnership with the player to reach its own solution - a problem is just an obstacle, impassive and possibly insurmountable. What follows, then, is not a recipe so much as my extrapolated list of possible cooking utensils: approaches to consider which will radically alter the flavour and texture of the resultant concoction. “I’m not completely sure I could lay out for you what those are, because it’s an art, not a science.”īut wait! Despite their collective reticence to provide a bullet-pointed recipe for the perfect puzzle, certain topics of conversation return again and again in each interview - ideas like “a good puzzle knows what it’s about”, discussions of minimalism and how that relates to elegance, and how ambition separates a truly great puzzle game from the sort you poke at on your phone while taking a dump. “There are definitely techniques and skill involved,” says Blow. I’ve asked three of my favourite puzzle game designers to demystify their dark magicks: Jonathan Blow, best known for the puzzle-platformer Braid and currently hard at work on firstperson perplexathon, The Witness Alan "Draknek" Hazelden, creator of Sokoban-inspired sequential-logic games, including Sokobond, Mirror Isles and the forthcoming A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build and Jonathan Whiting, a programmer on Sportsfriends and collaborator with Hazelden on Traal, whose own games are a regular Ludum Dare highlight. But how do you design a puzzle to best provoke that eureka moment? What gives a puzzle its aesthetic, its pace and texture? Why does one puzzle feel thrilling while another feels like a flat mental grind? Whether mulling over a cryptic crossword or somersaulting through Portal’s portals, there’s a moment of epiphany which, for me, pretty much transcends all other moments in gaming. But it’s not beating them that’s the exciting part: it’s understanding them.
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