What kind of puzzles do you like in your Adventure games?

[Greeny]

Here at Gliese productions we know the people love sharing their opinions, so it's time to put that to good use and get free inspiration for our early development phase.

In all seriousness, Visual Novels have always had a close similarity to point-and-click adventure games, and, with some tinkering, Ren'Py perfectly supports creating games of the sort. I'd love to see some more of it around here, and I'm going to lead by example.

But what kinds of puzzles to you like? What kinds do you hate? Let's discuss!

[AshenhartKrie]

None.
I hate puzzles.
With a passion.
-ahem-
I do like riddles though. Riddles count as puzzles, right? Being a not very logical person who gets frustrated when things in puzzle games don't go the way I want them to go, I find that riddle are much more fun for me.
The answer is hidden within it, and they rhyme.
The good ol' traditional ones anyway.
So yeah.
I like riddles.

[gekiganwing]

* Optional puzzles: if the player finishes them, there is a reward. But they're not strictly necessary.

* Walk away and return later: if the game includes a puzzle that must be completed in order to progress, then the player should not have to solve it *right then,* or search the web for a solution. Instead, let the player step back, look for clues, and save before continuing.

* Easy to reset: if it's a difficult puzzle, then it should not be just as challenging to reset it and try again.

* Reduce blind guessing: establish the rules of your fictional world. Let players use the knowledge they've gained from your game. Even if the fictional world is meant to be ridiculous, it should have some form of internal logic.

* Don't compel the player to pick up every item.

* If there is a text parser, the player should not have to guess the exact phrase which the design team thought up.

I'm pretty sure there's a few people on this forum who have firsthand experience with difficult adventure games, such as the ones Sierra On-Line was famous for. If so, do you look back on that era with horror or admiration?

[Amorphous]

I like most puzzles, even those of the 'tear your hair out in frustration' variety. Short of some pixel-hunting point and click puzzles (even those I play sometimes), I'll enjoy practically every kind of puzzle, or at least, I haven't had many complaints about the puzzles I have seen in the past.

What I don't like is puzzles that seem to just pop out of nowhere, especially if there's no indication that a puzzle really 'belongs' there. Not sure how to describe this...I'm okay with Professor Layton puzzles, because you're expecting one every time you do everything, as it's that kind of game. Similarly, point and click 'locked room mysteries' is okay too, as you come to expect the puzzles as the 'levels', so to speak. But if you say, have a game that's 99% narrative and just making choices, and suddenly put a push block puzzle in there to solve a lock, I'll be a bit miffed. Even Legend of Zelda puzzles annoy me sometimes, because they often seem to just be there for no reason whatsoever.

Biggest example of puzzles that annoy me that I can think of right now is in Final Fantasy XIII-2, which I'm currently playing through. Most of the game is typical Final Fantasy, JRPG stuff...and then suddenly in order to solve time paradoxes you have to solve a falling floor tile puzzle (collect all the items on the floor, but you can only step on each tile once before it falls out, etc.). I have nothing against falling floor tile puzzles, but putting it there seemed very jarring.

I guess for me, everything puzzles-related depends on context. Worst thing you can do with them is to just slap them on without making them an integral part of the game or the story. In point and click, as long as you can make the puzzle logical (and possible to solve!) and fitting with the narrative / story, then it'll be okay.

[OokamiKasumi]

What kind of puzzles do you like in your Adventure games?

If we're talking about Visual Novel styled adventure games: I Don't.
-- In my personal opinion, Visual Novels are more "choose your own adventure" games rather than RPGs. I play them for the Story. Anything that stops me from reading said story; such as a puzzle, annoys the heck out of me. Making a decision from a menu of choices is fine; I expect that in a VN. However, I see puzzles as annoying time-wasters that interrupt the story I'm trying to read.

[papillon]

I'm an oldschool Sierra fangirl; I'm perfectly happy with crazy puzzles and dying all the time. Save early, save often!

I also have no shame about resorting to a walkthrough if I'm stumped or just don't feel like dealing with a problem at the time.

What annoys me most is puzzles that are painful to solve even if you know the solution. This generally comes down to awkward controls. Getting over that stupid bridge-gap thing in Dragon Age? ARGH. There's no way to cheat past it; knowing the answer makes it easier but it's still fiddly and annoying and a waste of time to do it, especially since the game controls are really not designed for this purpose.

If you're putting something in a game it should ideally be fun, right? An adventure game puzzle can be fun through the thrill of mental challenge, or it can be fun from the amusement of watching something unusual happen (combining random objects into a device that allows you to distract a security guard with a floating pie is funny). The fun of the latter is not damaged at all by using a walkthrough, and while it may not be as funny the second time through the game, it might still be at least a little bit amusing. This sort of puzzle is not getting in the way of the story, it's PART of the story.

But playing the Towers of Hanoi AGAIN is not even slightly fun. It's not a Novel Challenge to anyone except the one adventure game player in the world who hasn't encountered that puzzle before, and it wastes a lot of time to get through it.

[Explosions&NickCage]

I'm fine with any puzzle that isn't a stupid slider puzzle. The ones where you have an empty space and all the jumbled up tiles need to be arranged to make a picture.
That isn't a prize, Cracker Jacks. That's a curse.

Never met anyone who didn't like riddles, though.

[Greeny]

What kind of puzzles do you like in your Adventure games?

If we're talking about Visual Novel styled adventure games: I Don't.
-- In my personal opinion, Visual Novels are more "choose your own adventure" games rather than RPGs. I play them for the Story. Anything that stops me from reading said story; such as a puzzle, annoys the heck out of me. Making a decision from a menu of choices is fine; I expect that in a VN. However, I see puzzles as annoying time-wasters that interrupt the story I'm trying to read.

Just worth mentioning, but I do believe you should only include puzzles if you advertise it as such; I'm talking about games where the puzzles are the focus, rather than a gimmick.

[dramspringfeald]

I'm a fan of most all kinds of puzzles my favorite are the "blackout" and mind puzzles my least is the "talk to these 63 people in the proper order to move to the next level" ones... they are just a pain in the ass and need to stop.

[Zylinder]

I like puzzles that have more to do with thinking than randomly pushing things and hope you get lucky. More riddle-like, like the kind available in Professor Layton. Pretty much liked every puzzle there. I don't like puzzles like the kind you might get in a Tales/Pokemon/FF game where you have to arrange boxes in X positions or drop boulders or slide across ice fields in a particular way. They're less 'puzzles' than a pointless waste of time, and I can solve them by doing mindless trial-and-error faster than if I actually stop and think.

Bottomline: Stuff that I have to think about.

[icecheetah]

Pretty much what Zylinder said. I also like puzzles that don't have a time limit after which you fail and have to reload your save game (e.g. Broken Sword: surviving a certain meeting with the murderer) because, unless it's a large amount of time that renders the time element pointless, I just feel like I am going to fail before I even begin.

I can enjoy puzzles that involve in game trivia, as long as it's fairly easy to tell where you can get the information, and I can enjoy things that involve 'game logic', though only to a point.

[Desu_Cake]

Puzzles with more than one solution. I like it if in a game, something that I noticed earlier on becomes a good hint to the solution, and yet I don't like it if the game forces me to be on the lookout and committing every single last thing to memory, just in case it's necessary to solve a puzzle.
For me the big thing though is that I hate games that have nothing, then one or two random puzzles thrown in halfway through. If I'm just idly playing a game then -Surprise- a puzzle suddenly drops in front of me, I tend to get a bit annoyed. (It tends to happen a lot in indie RPGs)

[Gear]

I like logical puzzles that are in context. Despite liking the general feel and story of the Professor Layton games, the puzzles aren't really in context there. Myst, on the other hand, had a lot of great puzzles that were directly tied to where you were and what you needed to do. I also like the puzzles in the Ace Attorney series, because they're in context, and word puzzles are fun, too.

Puzzles have to be logical, obviously. No guess-check-revise puzzles, because there's no challenge in them other than the fact that they're tedious.

However. I hate slider puzzles. Hate them. With a passion. I don't care how in-context they are. I can not stand them.

[Cabriolean]

If it has to be completed to continue/reach a certain ending, then 36 square chess (think a normal chess game there's one or two other differences, but that's the big one), a riddle, or an easy-ish code to break. If I'm playing a visual novel, it's generally for the story, so most of the time, I'd skip the puzzle unless I absolutely had to do it.......
Also if it ties in with the game, like a code-breaking minigame in a VN about spying/ninja etc.