An adventure game mixes story and puzzles. There are puzzle games that don’t have stories, and interactive stories that don’t have puzzles, and such games can be masterful and beloved. But they aren’t, in my usage, adventure games.
Puzzles in adventures have gotten something of a bad rap over the years, in part because they are seen as obstructing the story. This image of adventure games is one in which there are story segments (dialogues and cutscenes) and puzzle segments (exploring, collecting and combining items, solving riddles, cracking codes, etc.), and they trade off in sequence. If the story is engaging and the puzzles are frustrating, this is a little bit like the experience of web browsing where before you can read the article you’re looking for, you first have to prove you’re not a robot by clicking on stoplights or parsing a hard-to-read CAPTCHA, or like playing some “free” mobile game in which interactive advertisements routinely interrupt your experience.
But in an ideal adventure game, puzzles and stories are not separate segments at all; they are marbled or melded—the puzzles reveal both the setting and the protagonist to the player. Of each puzzle, you can say: “Because such-and-such is true of this setting, this puzzle is here.” And of each solution, you can say: “Because the protagonist has this quality, he can overcome the puzzle this way.” Unavailable solutions can also reveal the protagonist, the way that negative space can reveal a subject’s form: “Because the protagonist has this quality (or lacks that quality), he cannot overcome the puzzle that way.”
If nothing else, an adventure game story should be a story about a protagonist who solves puzzles—otherwise, there will be an inevitable incongruity (“ludonarrative dissonance” in the jargon) between what the player is being told about his character (say, a hard-bitten soldier) and what the game is actually revealing about the character (that he scavenges garbage, serves as a gofer for strangers, and favors eccentric, indirect solutions).
In Primordia, our protagonist was a scavenger robot aspiring to pacifism, and the world was a crumbling dystopia. Horatio viewed any salvageable piece of machinery as worth saving because his survival depended on cobbling those pieces together into a home, a companion, and a means of escape. The world’s treasures were locked away because anything not locked away had long since been plundered or destroyed; the world’s inhabitants were eccentric, reclusive, and wary of strangers because a post-apocalyptic world is not conducive to normalcy or trust. While some of Primordia’s puzzles are not well-integrated—they violate the consistency of the world or its characters for the sake of presenting the player another obstacle—I think by and large we did a good job of revealing Horatio and his environment through the gameplay and not merely through exposition.
Strangeland is a psychological horror game. The obstacles the Stranger faces are expressions of fear, regret, and remorse. As I mentioned in a prior development diary entry, the game’s genesis was the death of my grandparents—in particular, processing the way my engineer grandfather had tried to “solve” the puzzle of my grandmother’s dementia. The Stranger’s attempts to solve the carnival’s puzzles reflect that same desperate belief that tragedy is a riddle with an answer, that grief is a cage to be escaped with the right key. The unnatural obstacles in the game can be solved by means that express both naivety and guilt: memory, pain, and metamorphosis are the means the Stranger will use to advance, though those methods will be embodied in particular tools (a dagger; a noose; a note; etc.) with symbolic significance.
Most of what the player will learn about the Stranger and Strangeland (and about the underlying tragedy that is the impetus for this nightmare) is revealed through the puzzles and their solutions. Because the puzzles generally have multiple solutions, the player’s course through the game will not only reveal but define the Stranger in subtle ways.
If adventure game puzzles only conveyed the game’s story, that would be enough. But I firmly believe that the puzzles have a second great significance: permitting the moment of kinship between player and designer, and between one player and another, that comes from solving those puzzles.
It is customary to praise sensible puzzles as “logical” and to criticize inscrutable puzzles as suffering from “moon logic.” I think this is a bit off. Very few puzzles adhere to formal logic. When we say a puzzle is “logical,” what we really mean is that we understood the rules that governed it, and were able to figure out how to employ those rules to solve it. That means puzzles are really about communication: the designer is speaking to the player (through visual cues, quips, failure messages, etc.) and trying to explain the rules. Such communication requires a shared language. But even a shared language doesn’t ensure communication—as any number of spats attest.
As a kid growing up in Washington, D.C., I had a lot of international classmates whose parents had immigrated or worked at the various embassies. My family became good friends with an Australian family whose three sons were particularly bright. But one spelling test, the youngest son missed what the teacher felt was an obvious word: he had, inexplicably, written “urb” in lieu of “herb.” The teacher demanded an explanation. “I thought it was some kind of slang for a city,” he answered. The teacher wrote the correct spelling on the blackboard. “But that’s herb!” Davie protested, pronouncing the H.
So too with puzzle “logic.” Every designer has his or her own dialect and accent, not to mention idioms and tics. Every player has the same. Even when we share a language, even when we’ve learned that language from the same canonical works, we all speak it in our own way.
Part of game development is figuring out how to account for this. We’ve had a months-long iterative dialogue with dozens of testers, broadening the ways we communicate to the player and expanding the number of possible solutions and the means by which the player can be nudged along. But still! The poor designer asks: “I’m thinking of an animal that is gray, has big ears, and a short tail; it lives in dry climates and can move at over 20 miles an hour.” The poor player answers: “A jackrabbit!” The poor elephant hangs his head.
For all these potential miscommunications, however, there is the sublime moment when the player and designer at last develop a common tongue. The player reads the game’s cues in the manner the developer intended; the game parses the player’s inputs in the way the player intended; and suddenly, “moon logic” gives way to a moon landing. We have bridged that gulf between two minds and received the greatest of validations: We are understood!
That eureka moment has always drawn me to adventure games as a player: the feeling of an earned kinship with the designer and other players alike. And it matters even more to me as a developer. As I’ve said before, the core value that I hope to convey in the games I design is humanism, and part of the humanistic project is building bridges. More than any other success, the most gratifying part of game development is when we forge a connection with a player, whether through the game’s themes, its art, or its puzzles. And the very best connections combine all of that: a puzzle expressing the game’s theme is solved in a manner that reveals the protagonist’s character and is understood by the player because we’ve achieved a common language. In that moment, there is a unity between player, designer, and character, one that is peculiar to the enduring genre of adventure games.