Tag Archives: puzzles

I’ve recently finished the game Blue Prince, and my experience was…complicated. In this essay I want to talk through its design and the ways in which it both succeeds and fails at its core premise in terms of puzzle solving.

Physics puzzles are one of those things that we often understand to be bad. Not universally, but we acknowledge that you’re going to run into all sorts of problems with the physics that makes the experience frustrating. In this essay, I explore the underlying problems with physics puzzles that actually leads to this frustration, and explain some ways in which physics puzzles can be made more engaging.

All video games involve communication between the designer and the player. And that communication involves a language that sets expectations about how the game works. In puzzle games that language can easily become jumbled and create confusion for players. In this essay I explore a couple of particularly bad puzzles in the game The Painscreek Killings to showcase how video game language can break down if not employed properly.

When faced with a challenge, we can sometimes find ourselves wondering what we’re “supposed” to do. What strategy did a developer mean for me to employ to overcome this problem? However, in asking that question we have a tendency to mistake how intent in game design works. In this essay I break down the concept of the “intended solution” as applied to puzzle games to explain why designer intent doesn’t matter as much as tend to think it does.

Puzzle games can be a lot of fun and rewarding to play through, but they can also be complex enough to frustrate players. This essay contains some basic tips on how to approach puzzle solving in general so that players who want to get into puzzle games (but might feel held back) can improve their skills.

Puzzles in video games involve all sorts of mechanics, and one of the most interesting is a constructed language. But while constructed languages can be cool, they can also be frustrating to engage with. Using the recent game Tunic, I examine the basic problems and explore some basic ideas of how to deal with language puzzles from a design standpoint.