![]() ![]() How it works: Deep within the bowels of Colossal Cave, “a huge green dragon bars the way!” Your objective, naturally, is to get past him to explore the area beyond. If you readers enjoy and/or find this article useful, then perhaps it can become a semi-regular series going forward.Īnd now, with all that said, let’s accentuate the positive for once and relive some classic puzzles that have been delighting their players for decades.īy Will Crowther and Don Woods, public domain, 1977. I’ve split the field evenly between parser-driven text adventures and point-and-click graphic adventures. As that statement would indicate, I’ve restricted this list to games I’ve already written about, meaning that none of those found here were published after 1992. All ten games are found in my personal Hall of Fame and come with my highest recommendation. Needless to say, there will be spoilers galore in what follows, so if you haven’t played these games, and you think you might ever want to, you should absolutely do so before reading about them here. Still, we’ll do the best we can today, and see if we can’t tease some design lessons out of ten corking puzzles from adventure games of yore. ![]() In any creative discipline, rules will only get you so far at some point, codification must make way for the ineffable. As such, the craft of making merely good or fair puzzles is largely subsumed in lists of what not to do - yes, yet more negative reinforcements! - such as Graham Nelson’s “Bill of Player’s Rights” or Ron Gilbert’s “Why Adventure Games Suck and What We Can Do About It.” It’s much more difficult, however, to explain what makes a brilliant, magical puzzle. They should be reasonably soluble by any reasonably intelligent, careful player, without having to fall back on the tedium of brute-forcing them or the pointlessness of playing from a walkthrough. It’s not overly difficult to generalize what makes for fair or merely “good” puzzles. So, when my reader and supporter Casey Muratori wrote to me to suggest an article that singles out some great puzzles for detailed explication and analysis, it sounded like a fine idea to me. And even if you just read this blog to experience (or re-experience) these old games through the sensibility of your humble author here, you’re missing out if all you ever hear about are the puzzles that don’t work. If you’re a designer looking for tips from the games of the past, it certainly helps to have some positive as well as negative examples to look at. Unfortunately, this leaves the situation rather unbalanced. I want my readers to have the thrill of tackling those for themselves. Spoiling the great puzzles, however, is something I’m always loath to do. The fact is, I don’t feel much compunction about spoiling bad puzzles. But, for reasons that I hope everyone can understand, I’ve spent much more time illuminating negative than positive examples of puzzle design. ![]() I’ve always tried to take the subject seriously, and have even dared to hope that some of these writings might be of practical use to someone - might help designers of the present or future make better games. This blog has become, among other things, an examination of good and bad game-design practices down through the years, particularly within the genre of adventure games.
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