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 SPOILERS ABOUNDI don't want this thread to just be a sea of black bars, so just letting you all know what you're getting into up front. Please put the title of the game you're talking about in somewhere near the top of your post so anyone who wants to avoid reading potential spoilers can simply scroll past! IF YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT HAVING PUZZLES SPOILED FOR YOU IN THE PUZZLE THREAD ABOUT PUZZLES, THEN I DONT KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOU, BUDDY!!! SPOILERS ABOUNDNow with that out of the way, let's get on to: What makes a good puzzle? This question has been on my mind recently, particularly in regards to Video Games. From simple block pushing puzzles ala Sokoban, to making a moustache out of cat hair to impersonate someone who doesn't even have a moustache, they are one of the most prevalent and popular forms of interaction in the medium next to popping heads with Sweet 360 No Scopes. A good puzzle can make a great game even better, while a bad puzzle can be incredibly frustrating and bring the entire experience down. This thread is for both of those extremes and everything in between! YOU DO NOT NEED TO WRITE A MILLION WORDS TO PARTICIPATE! Now you may be saying to yourself "Isn't there already a Puzzle Game thread?" Why yes! Yes there is, located here! So then what's the point of this thread? What this thread is:
What this thread isn't:
I want this to be a chill thread in general so as long as you try to stick roughly to the guidelines above things will be just fine. If I end up having to add more "guidelines" then something has gone terribly wrong and shame on you all. Not everybody will agree with me about my Very Correct Puzzle Opinions, and I wanna hear from you about yours! As I said at the top, you don't have to write a million words like I 
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Feb 2, 2022 23:31
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I'll start us off with the thread's namesake: Silent Hill 3: The Shakespeare Anthology Puzzle <Hard Riddle Difficulty> EDIT: it has been pointed out to me by forums poster Discendo Vox (thx!) that there is an excellent Silent Hill 3 LP by none other than Forums Treasure VoidBurger that not only explains this puzzle (and all the others in the game!) way better than i did here, but she actually got to interview the original translator of all the unvoiced text in the game (including every puzzle!), Nora Stevens Heath, and they go over all the things that were, well, lost in translation due to lack of context or misinterpretation! my explanation below is actually NOT the intended way to solve the puzzle which is just absolutely hilarious to me so no, this puzzle (and the later ones) were never meant to be this difficult or confusing, however i feel that doesnt detract from my point about outside information being required for this particular puzzle. i will leave my original post here for posterity, but i highly, highly recommend watching at least this video from VoidBurgers LP to get a much better idea of whats going on here! also she uses clips of various high school students reenactments of the plays and it, frankly, owns. also also i feel vindicated by the fact that VB also only knew Othello from the board game lmao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoiRxrO8o9A original post follows below 👇 Hoo boy. A rather infamous puzzle from what is generally regarded to be the entry with the most difficult "riddles" in the Silent Hill series. For those not in the know, Silent Hill 2 and 3 feature "riddle" difficulty levels that are chosen independently from the combat or "action" difficulty setting. These settings will affect all of the major puzzles in the game. Silent Hill 2 has 4 of them (Easy, Normal, Hard, and Extra), while 3 has, well, 3 (Easy, Normal, and Hard) At the end of the first mall segment about 15-20 minutes or so into SH3, you acquire a key to the 2nd floor bookstore, "My Bestsellers".   Inside, at the back of the store you'll find a door locked with a 4 digit keypad.   Depending on your riddle difficulty, there may be a note here. In one of the aisles, a bunch of books have fallen off a shelf. 2 on Easy, 5 on Normal and Hard. They are labelled 'Shakespeare Anthology' Volumes 1-5. On Easy, only 1 and 3 will be here.   In Silent Hill 3, Easy typically gives you the answer outright with minimal involvement required. In this case, you simply have to place the 2 books given back on the shelf and you'll find the randomly generated keypad combo scrawled across the spines of the books. That's it. Nothin' fancy!  Normal is the slightest increase in difficulty, with the clues being fairly spelled out for you. This time there is a memo by the door that reads: My Bestsellers Management posted:Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Put these books out of order. No points for guessing what you do here. Placing the books back on the shelf you'll notice like on Easy there is a code scrawled across the spines, but this time, you gotta put the books out of order to reveal the randomly generated code. Simple... ...and then there's Hard which will throw a fuckin' poem at you and require some out of the box thinking.  My Bestsellers Management posted:"In here is a tragedy--- That's uh, quite the step up. This time you'll notice the anthologies are all labelled with the name of a play in addition to their volume number.
Each stanza of the poem corresponds to one of the plays, and you gotta figure out which one goes where. quote:In here is a tragedy--- Just some intro flavour, moving on! quote:The first words at thy left hand: The first bit is setting up that the answer will read left-to-right in the order presented. The rest of the stanza is describing the plot of Hamlet. (4????) quote:As did this one, playing at death, The climax of Romeo and Juliet is being referred to here. (41???) quote:Doth lie invite truth? This one is the vaguest in my opinion (out of the plays I was previously familiar with), but I'm also far from being a Shakespeare buff and did terribly in school, so. I believe it's referring to the deception perpetrated by Macbeth and his wife, as well as the misconception he has about the witches' prophecies. (413??) quote:Still amidst lies, though the end Having never read or seen Othello, I only knew this one because I've played the board game lol. (4135?) quote:"Is not a silence brimming with That just leaves the final play, King Lear. never read or seen this one either, but from what I understand, it's a fairly accurate description. The daughter who actually does love the king refuses to resort to flattery for the throne, and they all ultimately meet untimely ends. Tragedy is the name of the game after all. (41352) But wait! Once you've figured that all out, you're gonna have a 5 digit number and as I mentioned earlier, the panel only accepts 4 digit codes. Well that's where the 7th stanza comes in: quote:One vengeful man The first line here refers to Hamlet, which is the 4th Volume. In his quest for revengeance, he spills blood for himself and his father. So we multiply. (4x2) The second line is about Romeo and Juliet (Volume 1) mourning poor Mercutio and presumably themselves. (1x3) Finally the 3 witches of Macbeth disappear, so we remove the Volume entirely. You know, instead of a 0 which the keypad clearly has... (3-3) This leaves us with the final code 8352 and now we can go meet Claudia and access the helevator to the otherworld. Very kind of the bookstore manager to leave such an easy clue for any employees who forget the code to the breakroom. --- Now, I don't think the bookstore puzzle is the hardest in the game (for me when I played this as a kid it was that friggin' hospital door) but it certainly is the most divisive. The problem with this puzzle IMO (besides there being a 0 on the keypad  ) is the fact that it requires outside knowledge to solve. That is, unlike the Weird-rear end Serial Killer Love Letter Puzzle later in the game, the player cannot figure out the answer solely with the information given in-game.Some people like this kinda puzzle as it rewards certain players by making them feel clever when they know the particular bit of trivia the designer had in mind. Personally I'm not a huge fan of this approach to puzzle design, as I tend to find it boring to have to resort to internet searching especially when it's likely the puzzle solution will come up in your results anyways (looking at you Secret World. cool idea in that game because it's thematically appropriate but sadly suffers from the aforementioned problem) --- For some contrast, I'd like to talk about the kind of puzzle design I do love, in perhaps an unlikely place: (Most of) The Whole Dang Hitman Series Not going to talk about any one level in particular (at least not in this post lol) but the Hitman series--particularly the modern World of Assassination Trilogy and 2006's Blood Money--contains some of my favourite puzzles in gaming. Now you may not traditionally think of Hitman as a puzzle game, but it very much is to me! Every single level is like a gigantic puzzle box filled with numerous creative and deadly solutions. You are typically given a simple goal for each hit; eliminate the target(s), procure any items of interest the client has requested, escape. How you do it and whether or not you do so undetected is up to you! Wanna go in guns a-blazing? There's a solution for that. Disguise yourself as a confidant of the target and choke them out in the bathroom? You bet. Make every single death look like an unfortunate accident? You better believe it! Dress-up in a fursuit and detonate a remote mine in a briefcase the target is expecting?  No Alerts, Suit Only, Silent Assassin?  There's hundreds of ways to accomplish each hit, and if you can think of it, you can probably do it. One of the gravest Gaming Sins to me, is figuring out a solution to a puzzle that absolutely -should- work, but it's not exactly what the designer had in mind, so tough luck pal! Hitman rarely suffers from this problem and getting creative with your solutions can be incredibly fun and adds tons of replayability. <image credits lol>
rox fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Feb 3, 2022 |
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Feb 2, 2022 23:31
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in kotor there's a cool puzzle about transferring energy between three pillars but you can't move the top rings below the bottom or something. don't remember
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Feb 2, 2022 23:41
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Nobody has ever actually solved a sliding block puzzle. It's impossible
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Feb 2, 2022 23:56
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monster hunter world: iceborne introduced these treasure hunt puzzles which required you to have excellent knowledge of all the little details in each map, that got progressively harder as you went through each puzzle series. i only had to look up the answer to one (always look up, folks) but managed to solve the other 59 on my own! it's still my rarest achievement on my steam profile.
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Feb 2, 2022 23:57
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Gaius Marius posted:Nobody has ever actually solved a sliding block puzzle. It's impossible which kind of sliding block puzzle do you mean. there's many.
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Feb 3, 2022 00:07
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I'm a big fan of the style of puzzle, prominent in Myst though probably not a strict majority, which is just "figure out how to work this machine without a user manual" like you just sit down in a chair and there's a device in front of you that looks like this:  what does it do? what can you accomplish with it? If you've been read the journal entries scattered throughout the area you probably have a good idea what this device is, but the game never explicitly tells you. And you still gotta figure out the controls the hard way, by pressing buttons and seeing what happens. And your goal isn't obvious either. If I recall correctly, the puzzle this screenshot is from isn't solvable just from the information you get while interacting with it (other than by brute force). You have to understand what this is, what you're trying to do, and combine that with the notes in the journal entries describing how other characters have been experimenting with the device (with more free time on their hands than you presumably have to brute force answers) to get anywhere.
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Feb 3, 2022 00:15
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cheetah7071 posted:which kind of sliding block puzzle do you mean. there's many. the 15 tile ones with an algorithm no normal person would bother learning because they're terrible puzzles
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Feb 3, 2022 00:16
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Looper posted:the 15 tile ones with an algorithm no normal person would bother learning because they're terrible puzzles you just solve it from the outside and move in. Not a complicated or difficult-to-learn algorithm
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Feb 3, 2022 00:17
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oddium posted:in kotor there's a cool puzzle about transferring energy between three pillars but you can't move the top rings below the bottom or something. don't remember yup this is a classic. always really tricky too. not many people know but its actual ly derived from a real world puzzle 
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Feb 3, 2022 00:17
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terrible. absolute garbage
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Feb 3, 2022 00:18
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that was in reference to sliding tile puzzles. ring towers are ftw
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Feb 3, 2022 00:18
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Now Klotski, there's a real fucker of a sliding block puzzle You've probably seen variants of it. It's in one of the Laytons, and I think old versions of windows had it packaged too: 
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Feb 3, 2022 00:20
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Kerrzhe posted:monster hunter world: iceborne introduced these treasure hunt puzzles which required you to have excellent knowledge of all the little details in each map, that got progressively harder as you went through each puzzle series. thats really cool! i love treasure hunts and puzzles that reward you for exploring and becoming intimately familiar with all the little intricacies and hidey holes of a given areascaling difficulty is a big plus too, if theyre all equally difficult then they can feel more like a chore than like youre building to a big reward
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Feb 3, 2022 01:02
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cheetah7071 posted:I'm a big fan of the style of puzzle, prominent in Myst though probably not a strict majority, which is just "figure out how to work this machine without a user manual" i love these kinda puzzles too! especially if you come across them early in the game and then spend a long time exploring and solving other puzzles with it lingering in your mind until you have all the pieces you need to go back and solve it i find that super satisfying
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Feb 3, 2022 01:06
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cheetah7071 posted:Now Klotski, there's a real fucker of a sliding block puzzle This is my favorite kind of sliding tile puzzle. One of my study halls in middle school had one called Road Rage, I think, that was themed around cars, and had 60 cards of increasing difficulty telling you how to place the blocks. I didn't know these was a proper name for it, and now I suspect it will be a lot easier to find variants. Thanks! Now the less fun kind of sliding tile puzzle, where you're trying to put an image together? I played the Finding Nemo game on Gamecube and to my memory nearly every level would just stop you at some point and have you do a sliding tile puzzle, and you had to maneuver your fish in order to physically move the tiles, rather than the small mercy of letting you just directly control the puzzle as a minigame. They were such a random addition, so frequently placed, and seemingly completely unadvertised. And they interrupted the flow and pacing of the game, especially if you didn't have the logical thinking skills (say, because you were a child playing a Finding Nemo game) to figure out the basic rules and strategies of sliding tile puzzles. TheRecogScene fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Feb 3, 2022 |
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Feb 3, 2022 04:18
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haha what posted:But wait! Once you've figured that all out, you're gonna have a 5 digit number and as I mentioned earlier, the panel only accepts 4 digit codes. Well that's where the 7th stanza comes in: I accept that I'm relatively new to the world of cryptic crosswords/puzzles and these tricks that other people seem to be able to recognize, but my brain just refuses to internalize the idea that this part of the puzzle is any way acceptable. It seems like an impossible leap. I guess the way you would figure it out would be to get to the point where you have too many numbers and realize the stanza you haven't used yet must mean something, and eventually try this. But it feels more confusing and off-putting than clever, to me.
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Feb 3, 2022 04:33
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TheRecogScene posted:This is my favorite kind of sliding tile puzzle. One of my study halls in middle school had one called Road Rage, I think, that was themed around cars, and had 60 cards of increasing difficulty telling you how to place the blocks. I didn't know these was a proper name for it, and now I suspect it will be a lot easier to find variants. Thanks! i played this one at summer camp once! its called Rush Hour!
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Feb 3, 2022 04:49
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TheRecogScene posted:I accept that I'm relatively new to the world of cryptic crosswords/puzzles and these tricks that other people seem to be able to recognize, but my brain just refuses to internalize the idea that this part of the puzzle is any way acceptable. It seems like an impossible leap. I guess the way you would figure it out would be to get to the point where you have too many numbers and realize the stanza you haven't used yet must mean something, and eventually try this. But it feels more confusing and off-putting than clever, to me. honestly it sucks lol i much prefer the rest of the puzzles in SH3. even knowing youve chosen Hard Mode, it's honestly baffling that its 20 minutes into the game. ridiculous.
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Feb 3, 2022 04:52
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cheetah7071 posted:which kind of sliding block puzzle do you mean. there's many. The one where they cut up a picture and you get a space to remix it, they are genetically impossible
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Feb 3, 2022 04:56
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I nominate Black Mirror 1 as containing the worst 15-tile sliding puzzle. It's a variant on the original that also requires you to understand and recognize the zodiac signs. No information about the zodiac is provided by the game. The game also uses a flawed method of setting the original state of the puzzle, so there's a 50% chance that the puzzle is unsolvable. The state of the puzzle is also saved into save games and it cannot be reset, so if you save your game after an unsolvable version has been generated, concrats, the game is now unbeatable.
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Feb 3, 2022 05:29
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haha what posted:honestly it sucks lol I like the idea of SH having a hard puzzle mode that's extremely difficult, and I actually think needing outside knowledge is a plausible thing, if you really want to commit to it...but... Voidburger's fantastic Let's Play of SH3 includes detailed commentary on each of the Hard puzzles, and best of all she got the chance to have extended conversations with the original translator. It turns out a couple of the puzzles are just bugged or have translation issues, and the explanations the playerbase came up with are completely orthogonal to the intended solutions. It's been awhile and I can't remember the details, but I know the face=keypad puzzle from the hospital was one of these. The linked playlist has the other videos that go into them- it looks like the Cock Robin puzzle was also in that category. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Feb 3, 2022 |
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Feb 3, 2022 06:00
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Discendo Vox posted:I like the idea of SH having a hard puzzle mode that's extremely difficult, and I actually think needing outside knowledge is a plausible thing, if you really want to commit to it...but... omg i'm gonna go watch this rn, thx so much!
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Feb 3, 2022 06:12
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At some point I can write up some effort for this thread on Jonathan Blow's profound influence on puzzle design and devotion to a concept I call "conservation of detail" (don't buy his games though, the dude is cancelled for incredibly good reasons). I can also write up a lot of  on the ARGs that were developed for payday the heist and payday 2 when I have some time.
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Feb 3, 2022 06:16
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Gaius Marius posted:The one where they cut up a picture and you get a space to remix it, they are genetically impossible here's the solution: solve the left edge. Solve the top edge. Repeat those two steps until it's just a 2x2. Rotate it a bit. done.
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Feb 3, 2022 06:18
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Discendo Vox posted:At some point I can write up some effort for this thread on Jonathan Blow's profound influence on puzzle design and devotion to a concept I call "conservation of detail" (don't buy his games though, the dude is cancelled for incredibly good reasons). I can also write up a lot of yes please!! i would be super interested in reading both of those things!
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Feb 3, 2022 06:27
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Lol, I just rewatched the video and even the Shakespeare puzzle is meant to be solved differently from your post. The Tarot puzzle is the only one that generally works as intended, and even it has issues. Such a clusterfuck.
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Feb 3, 2022 |
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Feb 3, 2022 06:39
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lmao i'm gonna have to write an addendum edit to my post after i finish watching this lp
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Feb 3, 2022 06:44
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Have any puzzle / survival horror nerds itt played tormented souls? It's almost more puzzle than horror.
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Feb 3, 2022 07:59
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i have edited my post about That Fuckin Shakespeare Puzzle to include the info helpfully provided by Discendo Vox about VoidBurger and Nora Stevens Heath talking about Silent Hill 3! absolutely worth watching the video for the high school student reenactments of shakespeare plays alone, but just a terrific lp all around. thx VoidBurger 🙏 💜 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoiRxrO8o9A
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Feb 3, 2022 19:25
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Does anyone have any recommendations for puzzles which feel like naturalistic parts of a world? Outer Wilds was a good one but my absolute favorite was Riven - finding the solution to the infamous marble puzzle was a huge meta-puzzle involving a ton of other interconnected puzzles, almost none of which felt arbitrary and instead felt exactly like trying to get alien technology to work. God, Riven was so good.
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Feb 3, 2022 19:28
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Feels Villeneuve posted:Does anyone have any recommendations for puzzles which feel like naturalistic parts of a world? Outer Wilds was a good one but my absolute favorite was Riven - finding the solution to the infamous marble puzzle was a huge meta-puzzle involving a ton of other interconnected puzzles, almost none of which felt arbitrary and instead felt exactly like trying to get alien technology to work. The puzzles in Obduction feel like emergent properties of the fantasy high concepts of the world
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Feb 3, 2022 19:31
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games like factorio, satisfactory, dsp etc are a constantly evolving puzzle that the player accidentally designs for themself.
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Feb 3, 2022 20:17
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I really enjoyed the hacking puzzles in Fallout New Vegas, because it's pretty much a fairly easier version of Mastermind. Made me feel smart.
Rupert Buttermilk fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Feb 3, 2022 |
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Feb 3, 2022 20:45
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Stux posted:games like factorio, satisfactory, dsp etc are a constantly evolving puzzle that the player accidentally designs for themself. That reminds me of Automachef, which is a divergent take on the automation genre. I played it a bunch a while ago and thought it was pretty good. Automachef is an automation game that obviously takes cues from Factorio, but it's structured like a traditional puzzle game. It has discreet levels with their own goals and challenges, rather than an expansive open world where you keep on expanding and streamlining the same machine. In Automachef, you get a set of goals to meet each level, build a machine to try and fill those goals, and then set it to run. If the goals called for by the level are met, it doesn't matter if the machine is teetering at the brink of obvious failure by the end. You achieved the goal and can move on to the next level, where it's a clean slate again. In a way it's a mix of Factorio and The Incredible Machine.
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Feb 3, 2022 20:51
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bossy lady posted:Have any puzzle / survival horror nerds itt played tormented souls? It's almost more puzzle than horror. Not yet, but it's on my (long, long) list- the protagonists' appearance made me hesitant at first.
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Feb 3, 2022 22:02
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StoryTime posted:That reminds me of Automachef, which is a divergent take on the automation genre. I played it a bunch a while ago and thought it was pretty good. Automachef is an automation game that obviously takes cues from Factorio, but it's structured like a traditional puzzle game. It has discreet levels with their own goals and challenges, rather than an expansive open world where you keep on expanding and streamlining the same machine. In Automachef, you get a set of goals to meet each level, build a machine to try and fill those goals, and then set it to run. If the goals called for by the level are met, it doesn't matter if the machine is teetering at the brink of obvious failure by the end. You achieved the goal and can move on to the next level, where it's a clean slate again. In a way it's a mix of Factorio and The Incredible Machine. if u like that theres also big pharma, which is the same idea but with drug manufacturing
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Feb 3, 2022 22:34
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StoryTime posted:That reminds me of Automachef, which is a divergent take on the automation genre. I played it a bunch a while ago and thought it was pretty good. Automachef is an automation game that obviously takes cues from Factorio, but it's structured like a traditional puzzle game. It has discreet levels with their own goals and challenges, rather than an expansive open world where you keep on expanding and streamlining the same machine. In Automachef, you get a set of goals to meet each level, build a machine to try and fill those goals, and then set it to run. If the goals called for by the level are met, it doesn't matter if the machine is teetering at the brink of obvious failure by the end. You achieved the goal and can move on to the next level, where it's a clean slate again. In a way it's a mix of Factorio and The Incredible Machine. Does it do that thing where at the end of the level it tells you what the most efficient solution is could be (like, in turns or money spent or whatever) or what the most efficient solution was by other players? I haaate that stuff. Part of my brain always has to try to find that efficient solution and I just stall out when things get too hard. Bad brain!
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Feb 4, 2022 04:52
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Discendo Vox posted:Not yet, but it's on my (long, long) list- the protagonists' appearance made me hesitant at first. Yeah she looks like she dressed for an anime convention but you get used to it / ignore it quickly. Also they added another costume that's more reasonable IMO.
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Feb 4, 2022 06:27
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Morpheus posted:Does it do that thing where at the end of the level it tells you what the most efficient solution is could be (like, in turns or money spent or whatever) or what the most efficient solution was by other players? This is the report it gives you after each level:  There's a bit of leeway in what it considers enough to progress, and there's metrics. I think there are leader boards somewhere, but it doesn't push them at your face. Here's another random screenshot since I have the game up now. You might not like it, but this is what peak burger efficiency looks like:  Notably everything in the lower left corner is devastated by salmonella, but it doesn't matter since all the mixed meat and bread pass through a single conveyor grill station both purifying and crisping it for human consumption.
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Feb 4, 2022 07:43
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