Design Dilemma
Jun 10, 2015
Editors Note: There are NO spoilers in this post.
Every adventure game I've worked on has had the "one puzzle". The one that drives you crazy because you know the end result, but you don't know how to get there. You try everything and it all seems too obscure, or worse, too arbitrary. You like the core puzzle, you like the objects it uses, but you just can't seem to make it work.
In Monkey Island, the rubber chicken with the pulley in the middle was one such puzzle. The player needed to get to Hook Island and the zipline felt like a good solution. There was something nice about that, but we just couldn't figure out a clever way for it to work. Maybe you could use a small piece of rope or cloth to slide along the line, but that was boring. We had the idea of a small pulley or something round like a pulley, but that was also boring.
I'm don't remember who came up with the rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, it sounds very Steve Purcell, but it might have been Dave or Tim or Noah or any number of people we brainstormed with. I just don't remember. But, it was born out of pure frustration: "Screw it, just make it a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle" and then we'd all laugh and there was a moment of silence where we all realized that was the solution. It was a puzzle solved with humor.
Humor is a great puzzle solver, but you have to be careful. Your solution might be funny, but the objects involved might be too useful in other situations. I felt we were pretty safe with the chicken with a pulley in the middle. Not too many other puzzles that could be solved in unintended ways.
Axes are alway bad. The moment you put an ax in your game to solve a puzzle, you're asking for trouble.
Maybe the ax is needed to chop down a tree (a legitimate but slightly boring puzzle), but the problem is an ax is a universally useful tool for everything from smashing locked doors (Jack Torrance style) or pounding nails or cutting a piece of string.
You can have the characters say "I don't want to do that" if they try and smash in a door but that feels cheap and players know it. There are legitimate reasons for the main character to say they won't do something but they can't do it every time the player tries to (legitimately) solve a puzzle in a way the designer doesn't want.
Which brings us to Thimbleweed Park, the whole reason you're bothering to take a few minutes from you busy day and read this website.
We are confronted with such a puzzle and we'd like to open it up to all of you to help figure out an interesting and possibly funny solution. We're not doing this as a "PR stunt" to make the backers feel engaged, we're truly doing this because we're stumped.
If you follow the link below, there will be spoilers, but not major ones. This is a relatively small puzzle and it happens in the first 30 minutes of playing the game.
FOLLOW THIS LINK TO MILD SPOILERS
Please do not post comments on this page talking about the puzzle or any other spoilers. I will delete them and not feel even the slightest pang of guilt (possibly even some glee).
- Ron
The monkey wrench puzzle in MI2 is logical and great fun once you realize the solution, but when the game is translated it makes no sense and you have to solve that puzzle trying every object with the water pump until you solve it, and even when you solve it you can't happen to realize the meaning of that puzzle. I don't mean that a great puzzle like that has to be removed, but maybe, when a puzzle is dependent on the language there may be different solutions or objects to solve the puzzle depending on the language the game is being played on.
But as I stated before, it is a great and fun puzzle for english speakers :D
When I was a kid I couldn't finish MI1 due to not knowing how to get by the piranha poodles. When I eventually looked up the solution I was like "how was I supposed to know that?". But in hindsight, it was pretty obvious (especially with a name like Caniche Endormi flower!)
If you quickly figure out what you're meant to do, or know roughly what you're meant to be looking for, it's fine, but it's terrible to be stuck on that puzzle...
It's because it's one of the few puzzles where you can't really just try every object with every other object, because there are way too many possible variables that it creates. So if you're stuck on it, you're properly stuck.
Compare that for example to the puzzles of Broken Age: often there is no motive, it is just running around, exploring and hoping to get a needed item by accident before actually knowing that it is needed, while the puzzle itself has nothing to do with the object one gains from it. The zany stuff is really just zany. It tries to be fun by having no connection, pretending that this would be like the Lucas Arts trademark humour. But there is no punchline. No punchline means: no fun.
Even the (admittedly untranslatable) monkey wrench puzzle and the book puzzles revealed their motives before. At some point one could come up with a solution on a purely logical level without trial and error testing every item with every character or environment item. The moment one discovers the solution even just by accident, one can get the joke, and it is funny, even if sometimes in the "ouch" kind of way.
After all, this is THE puzzle of MI2 you will always remember, so having it chiseled on your tombstone is not that bad. Could be worse.
In other words: Make a puzzle in TP which is even more hilarious and silly and which most people will hate. This would make me happy.
(btw. Boris will fix it :)
Heck, you even earned me an A in an English class once, when I knew a word my teacher didn't ^_^
I'll always remember the bobby pin sign that you used to unlock something in Zak McKracken as my most frustrating genre puzzle. It was so gigantic, I didn't even consider using it, and then it dawned on me over dinner, and I rode my bike back to Dave's house to try it on his C64, then we heard the sweet music of the disk loading.
Wait, maybe that was my favorite puzzle:)
That's a great story :)
Desparation Freelance Puzzle Design (for that one puzzle) courtesy of...
Or maybe they can just get some free stuff. :)