You may well remember the first time you were ever stuck on a game puzzle. For me, it was Scott Adams' vintage graphical adventure, The Hulk, and it involved killer bees; I don't recall much else. This was the age of text-based classics like Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and The Hobbit, in which the solution often relied on you entering exactly the right verb-noun phrase: 'Go North', 'Dig hole', 'Kiss monkey' – ah, the memories. For many veteran gamers, the words "I'm sorry, I can't do that here" still bring about paroxyms of frustration.
But as games evolved, puzzles evolved too. Soon they were environmental, requiring the discovery, combination and manipulation of seemingly random objects. From Ultimate's Sabreman series in the ZX Spectrum era to the likes of Uncharted and Assassin's Creed today, we're continually shifting blocks, turning dials, and figuring out how to utilise seemingly random inventory items.
Nowadays, however, there are some who think that puzzles are being quietly removed from the game designer's palette. During his keynote at the Develop conference in Brighton earlier this month Tim Schafer, the writer of much-loved LucasArts titles like The Secret of Monkey Island and Full Throttle, related an interesting experience with Microsoft's QA department:
"When I started out on Psychonauts I was making a lot of it like an adventure game. There's a level where you have to hang paintings on the wall and they come to life – and that was a big puzzle element. But when Microsoft's useability team were testing it, they said, 'It's great but a lot of people had trouble with the paintings,'. I said, 'what do you mean?' and they replied, 'Well, they didn't know to put them on the hooks... they were confused for a while, but they figured it out in the end.' And I was like, 'That's what we used to call a puzzle!' You wouldn't know what to do, then you'd think about it, then you would know what to do. That's completely illegal nowadays..."
I'm not sure if I'd agree that puzzles have been outlawed, but today's block shifting and physics-based item-balancing conundrums are never quite as head-scratching as the fiendish lateral-thinking tests of yore. It's also been a while since I've encountered anything like the surreal moment in Monkey Island when Guybrush Threepwood escapes a watery grave by picking up the heavy weight that's been tied to his leg and simply walking out of the deep pool he's been thrown into. And I'll never forget the puzzle in Resident Evil that requires Jill Valentine to play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a grand piano – such an exquisite and innovative collision of hokey horror, gothic romance and beautiful music.
But, anyway, which have been your favourite, or at least most memorable, puzzle moments? They can be from any genre and any age, but if you're referencing a current title, it might be best to avoid giving away the solution. Puzzles drive us mad at times, but never quite as mad as when some know-it-all leans over our screen and offers an uninvited, "I've done this, you just need to give the noodles to the meerkat"...
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