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I’ve mentioned before that I’m a huge fan of puzzle games. There’s something wonderful about ideas clicking into place to allow you to progress. And one thing I also do is watch others play puzzle games – at least insofar as my schedule allows. With a new game I’m unfamiliar with, it’s an opportunity to do puzzle solving without needing to buy a game. With a game I’m already familiar with, it’s an opportunity to observe others and perhaps learn tricks that I hadn’t thought of.
One thing I did recently was play Riven: The Sequel to Myst. Which, as the title helpfully notes, is the sequel to Myst, the famous computer puzzle game by Cyan Studios released in the early 1990s. As someone who grew up with Myst, I always remember being fascinated by the game. And I always find myself yearning for the more exploratory mechanics that Myst offers, compared to the puzzle-box setup offered by other games like Baba Is You or Patrick’s Parabox. These other games are absolutely fantastic and I adore them, but the reason I find more open-ended games fascinating is that they really make more use of the medium of the video game itself. They craft a world to explore, even if that world is tiny, allowing you to feel just a bit like you’re inhabiting a different space.
But in playing through some of these games and observing others, I’ve noticed something and have heard a set of complaints that revolve around a central “problem.” I put that word in quotations here because it may not be a real issue, depending on your point of view.
In playing Riven, which I did on stream,[1] I found that most of the actual “puzzles” weren’t particularly complex. In fact, they were pretty few and far between period. Most of what you’re doing is running around attempting to find clues that combine to form a solution for a particular puzzle. A lot of it winds up being just interacting with various mechanisms. To some extent, I found this annoying because it reminded me of point-and-click adventure games, which is a genre I’ve generally disliked. Not because the genre itself is bad, but because so many of them fall back on a set of annoying mechanical tropes: pixel hunting (i.e. “click all around to find the things that you can interact with”) and item rubbing (i.e. “use every item on every interactable object until something happens”).
In observing others, I recently watched someone playing Quern: Undying Thoughts, which is effectively a Myst clone. When I had first played it nearly half a decade ago, I remembered enjoying it for the most part, though being frustrated with some parts and especially the ending. Upon replaying it on stream, I enjoyed it much more, though perhaps that was in part because I was sharing that game with others (see Footnote 1). This streamer was not really enjoying the game though. I don’t want to cover all of their complaints, because this isn’t supposed to be an analysis of Quern, and also because this isn’t a response: there’s nothing wrong with that person only partially enjoying or even disliking Quern. Rather, I wanted to focus on one particular complaint. Or I guess two complaints, which revolve around a similar subject.
One person in the chat lodged the complaint that the game itself was very linear – the puzzles are set up in such a way that each is locked behind a key you get from the current puzzle. The streamer themself lodged the complaint that the puzzles were not very hard (it is worth noting that this streamer is also someone who enjoys puzzle games and is very good at puzzle solving).
I bring these up because both of these complaints are true.
And yet, in acknowledging those facts, I started to ask myself why that would be the case. Because that has been true of every game like Myst. With only a slightly minor exception to Myst itself, and even that difference is superficial – the options offered in Myst are merely a choice of which line to follow, each of which is short. And likewise, the puzzles in Myst are pretty simple, mostly involving discerning what to interact with and what is happening to the world when you interact with something.
And so we get to the point of this essay: why are these games like this? Why do they wind up being so linear, and the puzzles pretty slim and simple? Why focus on things like pixel hunting and interacting with items, rather than more traditional puzzle elements?
It would be easy enough to chalk the whole answer up to bad design, but I would like to offer that instead the cause lies at a much deeper level. It would be wrong to say that these games have to be that way, but that as a designer you want them to be that way.
Categorizing Puzzles
To step back for a moment, I want to make a bit of a division. While we talk about “puzzle games” as a broad category, it might also be useful to subdivide that category a bit further.
A lot of puzzle games that we’re familiar with are what I like to refer to as “puzzle box” games. You are handed an isolated stage where you have a specific goal, and everything you need to solve the puzzle is in front of you. Games like Baba Is You, Portal, or The Talos Principle are such puzzle box games.
On the other hand are more “exploratory” puzzle games. These are games where puzzle elements might be split up, very often into clues that you collect and combine to access new areas. Outer Wilds, La-Mulana, The Return of the Obra Dinn¸ and Myst all pull from this basic concept.
If we might use a lock and key metaphor, in a puzzle box game the lock and key are right in front of you. The puzzle is figuring out how to get the key into the lock. In exploratory puzzles, the lock and key are separated and need to be found. Usually the puzzle involves some combination of searching and connecting the dots to know when you’ve found the key to a given lock (or vice versa).
Games don’t need to fit into only one of these categories, and we can create additional distinctions if we wanted. A game like The Witness is mostly a puzzle box game, but also has a fair deal of exploratory puzzle solving – particularly with its hidden puzzles. Talos Principle and Quern both cross over in slight ways – Talos has secret puzzles that require a little more exploration and out-of-the-box thinking, while Quern will occasionally hand you isolated puzzle boxes to mess around with.
But the distinction is still important for a key reason: completion.
One thing that connects many exploratory games is a strong narrative throughline. The game isn’t just about solving puzzles, but using that puzzle solving in some way to tell a story. Which is not to say that puzzle box games lack narratives: after all, Portal and Talos both have a focus on narrative as well. But for exploratory games there is rarely “extra” stuff to tackle. Each puzzle is a step towards the next bit of story.
In addition to that, those narrative throughlines are meant to be diegetic – meaning that they are designed to feel natural within the logic of the game’s world. In a game like Myst, the various roadblocks you run into are with figuring out the various contraptions designed by Atrus to get the worlds working and potentially thwart thieves. The puzzles may be odd and constructed, but the idea is that they feel like something made by a person. Compare with something like Talos Principle: even though the puzzles technically have a diegetic reason for existing, they are still presented as little pocket universes that are designed by an AI, and thus feel like that.
I bring this up because that combination of factors is important. You as the player are meant to feel invested and immersed in the game world of a Myst or Obra Dinn in way you might not be pulled in for Baba or Portal.
And once you’re immersed, you have a stronger connection to the narrative, one you are more likely to want to see through.
Which Puzzle Comes Next?
Let’s do a clean comparison here and use Myst as our quintessential exploratory game, and Baba Is You as our quintessential puzzle box game.
For Myst, getting to the end has a fairly clear meaning. There are various bad endings, and one good ending. You can essentially fail and succeed at the game, and obviously as a player you want to succeed. And of course, that success also brings with it a culmination for the game’s narrative. And getting to that success means solving every puzzle given to you.
For Baba, you have a bunch of levels, but not every level needs to be completed. If a level frustrates you, you can just quit and go to another one. There is even an “end” to the game which comes well before every puzzle has been solved. Whether you as the player decide to continue or not is entirely up to you – you get to decide how many puzzles is “enough.”
But of course, Baba also doesn’t have a real narrative throughline. It’s mostly a series of isolated puzzles. So you don’t need to feel invested for anything other than the puzzles themselves. When you quit, you’ve gotten “everything” that the game has for you. When you quit Myst, you’re still missing out on the story.
A clear difference pops up here: Baba gives you options, while Myst doesn’t.
Options are easy to implement in a puzzle box game because the puzzles are isolated. You can not only let the player choose which puzzle to do next, but also hand the player more puzzles than they need to do: if they want to do everything, they will; if they just want to move on and get to the end, then they’re allowed. I would argue that giving players those options in these games is a bit of good design, as it allows players to direct their play as they see fit.
But options are harder to implement for exploratory games. Because so many puzzles may be interconnected, or else because you are feeding players a narrative and need to make sure they are able to follow along, you have to have a more careful control of the pace at which players learn. The alternative is that players can very easily get lost because they can no longer keep track of the various “keys” and “locks” they’ve found. While such options aren’t impossible, they are either very limited (such as in Myst), or the game needs to be built around a smaller set of “puzzles” which then get multiple possible solutions (such as in Outer Wilds).
Narrative Frustration
So now we have a couple of core ideas. One, that exploratory games are often focused on telling a story and immersing the player in a way that puzzle box games do less frequently. Two, that exploratory games are more constrained by their interconnectedness and narrative, and thus have fewer opportunities to provide the players with options.
These two ideas then combine to point out a problem: what happens if the player gets stuck?
This question is one that every designer needs to – and certainly does – think about. Developers put games through playtesting to get a sense of how to tweak systems so that players struggle, but don’t necessarily feel overwhelmed by that struggle.
In any other game, getting past a wall could have any number of possible solutions. Perhaps you’re playing an RPG and you could buy some more items, or grind for more levels, or just learn how to use your abilities in a more effective manner. In a shooter you can work on your movements, or observe attack patterns, or find cover. But with puzzle games, there’s only one solution. If you’re stuck, you just haven’t found the solution yet. You can still try multiple possibilities, but only one of those possibilities can work, whereas in other games all possibilities could be made to work.
And so puzzle games occupy a space where they can tunnel frustration. Hence the value of having alternative puzzles – if you only need to solve five of the ten puzzles offered, then getting stuck on one doesn’t need to feel like the end.
But now go back to those exploratory games. Since options are harder to work in – especially if you’re making a game like Myst – when a player gets stuck, they’re just done with the game. They can’t get any further. They could look up a guide, of course. But often feeling the need to use a guide in a puzzle game means becoming more – not less – frustrated. So it’s essentially asking which flavor of frustration they want to deal with – not getting to the end of the game and missing out on the narrative, or being told how to solve these puzzles.
And the narrative is supposed to be part of what hooks us in these games. Whether it’s solving a mystery or reaching some kind of climax, being told you’re not allowed to progress feels like you’re being told you’re not allowed to enjoy the game period. And that hits far worse than in a puzzle box game. It’s a deeper frustration, the kind that doesn’t just turn a player off from the game, but may well cause them to go out and yell about it to others. Getting players stuck like that could kill your game.
So how do you get around this? Well, what if you tried to limit that kind of frustration? Make sure that there is a way for players to get around those roadblocks?
If I asked you how to accomplish that, you could probably think of a bunch of possibilities. But many of those possibilities are going to involve lots of time and effort, assuming they can be implemented at all.
A fairly easy solution that you might have thought of, though, is to “simplify” the puzzles. This could mean one of two things. Firstly, making the puzzles themselves easier. Secondly, limiting the kinds of puzzles and transforming many of them into something that just about everyone can do.
What I mean by the first idea should be fairly obvious, but the second? What is an “obstacle” that everyone can eventually overcome, given enough time and effort? Something that doesn’t rely on intuiting something that might seem confusing?
Hide and Seek.
So instead of making puzzles that involve interacting with some machinery and figuring out how the machinery works, you just hide the keys and locks. The player found a key: what should they do next? Roam around the game world until they’ve found the lock it goes to. If you’ve tried to make it clear where to go next, the players who pick up on those clues will get there immediately. And those who don’t will get there eventually. You’ve made a puzzle that is universal.
I describe this all because this helps explain the design of so many of these open-ended games. Why so many of them are linear in their design – to prevent players from getting too lost. And why so many of the puzzles in these games can be fairly easy for the die-hard puzzle fan – because the developers don’t want to anger a big chunk of its player base. And why so much of these games can turn into running around and finding the right thing to interact with – because exploration is a challenge that everyone can overcome.
Which isn’t to say that exploration in a puzzle game is bad. Outer Wilds is arguably one of the best and most interesting puzzle games ever made, and it involves no “traditional” puzzles. It’s all about gathering information and using that information to gain access to areas that you always had access to in the first place. It’s all about exploration, and the puzzle is figuring out how to explore. But Outer Wilds is also a bit of an exception.
This also isn’t to say that a game of “hide and seek” can’t be implemented in better and worse ways. A good puzzle game should still be feeding you information about where something might be hidden, and giving you a sense of what you’re trying to find. It should help you to notice patterns so that you can apply those patterns at later points. If a game shows you a lock and then says “there’s a key hidden somewhere on this island…good luck!”, then the game is no fun because it just turns into meticulously checking every corner of the world.
Rather, all I simply want to get across in this analysis is the pressure to “simplify” puzzles in these exploratory games because they run into some problems that puzzle box games often don’t. And when we tack on the narrative component to these games, the problem gets compounded. Frustrating a player when there is a story on the line is a double offense that any reasonable developer would wish to avoid. And since puzzle games can’t allow players to “level up” and power their way through a puzzle, the puzzles need to be brought down to a level so that fewer and fewer people will get stuck. Or at least not so stuck that they can’t progress at all.
Concluding Remarks
Despite my frustrations with these exploratory puzzle games, I find myself constantly returning to them. In part, that’s because there are some absolutely amazing entries in the category. Outer Wilds and Obra Dinn illustrate that you don’t need to chop up everything into levels.
But the bigger reason is that I find them to be the most interesting way to engage with puzzles in a video game. They take control of the medium of the game in a way that puzzle box games don’t. And they also allow for a less repetitive experience. Where puzzle box games rely on the same basic mechanic being complicated in a variety of ways, exploratory games generally involve a wide variety of different mechanics. They bring this promise of a fresh experience, the opportunity to test your brain in a new way.
But really making good on that promise is another thing entirely. It’s a challenge that is difficult to do right. And if it goes wrong, it could go very wrong. A tightrope is being walked in these cases, and if it looks like the developer is going to fall, it may well be better to fall on the side that leads to a “better” kind of frustration.
[1] Upon finishing the game, I found myself somewhat torn. My enjoyment of the game ultimately came out of the collective process of solving the puzzle – whenever I got stuck, there were a couple members who would share ideas and help keep track of certain clues, or might notice something I hadn’t. Without them, I am sure I would have hated the game. I intend at some point to do an analysis of Riven specifically, but I don’t want to digress too much from my goal here.
Abstracting Games 