Your Favourite... Gaming Puzzle

[Dannnnnnnnnn]

Welcome to a new VG thread series: Your Favourite...

Each month(-ish), the VG board will explore your fondest memories of gaming with a new thread focused on a different area of the hobby.

These will be more specific than simply "your favourite game," highlighting some under-appreciated and rarely discussed aspects of game design. If you have ideas for future editions that you'd like to see, feel free to shoot me a PM.

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This month, we're exploring an aspect of game design that gets a lot of focus as a genre, but not so much as a critical component of almost every type of game: puzzles!

Almost every modern game has some form of puzzle, whether it's a simple search quest to extend playtime, a fun optional activity, or a foundational pillar of the game itself. When done well a puzzle can create a very satisfying experience, but when poorly done they can make a game frustrating, boring, or overly bloated. Often, though, we don't actually talk about the puzzles themselves:

Despite this, we rarely talk about puzzles separately from the games they belong to. This is an opportunity to revisit some of your most fondly remembered puzzles, whether you liked, disliked, or felt meh about the broader game.

Happy reminiscing!

 

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For me, the two puzzles that stand out in my memory are:

1. Silent Hill (PS1): A Tale of Birds Without a Voice. This particular puzzle always jumps out whenever I think about clever and satisfying puzzles. In it, you must play a tune on a piano, but there is no obvious solution to which keys to press. To make it even more confusing, only half of the keys work. The solution is in a poem on the wall, called 'A Tale of Two Birds Without a Voice.' On the surface this doesn't seem to have any relevance to the piano, but it is a riddle which identifies the colour of the keys by the type of bird (e.g., 'raven' = black, 'dove' = white), the positioning of the key by the bird's location (e.g., 'flying higher than the dove' being the black key above the 'dove' key), and the order that you should press them in by their order of appearance in the poem.

There is an added layer, however. When I finally figured out what the poem meant, I returned to the piano, and naturally gravitated towards the working keys. I finished the puzzle and... nothing. I went back and forward, trying to figure out what I wrote down or pressed wrong. But nothing worked.

The solution is related to the poem's title: these birds don't have a voice, so it is actually the broken keys that solve the puzzle.

By modern standards this is quite an obtuse puzzle, granted, but it holds a special place in my heart. There certainly is a nostalgia factor to this one, for me, given how satisfying the experience was as a kid, but I think it still holds up as a really well constructed puzzle. You can see it in action below, starting at around 2:49.




2. The Witness (Multiplat): The Challenge. A more recent entrant is The Witness' final, secret puzzle. First, if you haven't played The Witness and like puzzle games - don't read this yet, just go play it. It's an extremely well constructed game. While the overall hook of the game - draw a line from one side of a grid to the other - remains consistent and simple, each new area introduces a new mechanic (without holding your hand and telling you what it is). For example, perhaps there are some places a line can't cross, or you have to enclose a certain shape with the line before finishing.

In the latter stages of the game, the puzzles start to combine the mechanics together to create clever, sometimes nasty puzzles to challenge your knowledge.

But nothing compares to the secret, post-game challenge level. In it, you have to complete a bunch of puzzles within a narrow time limit. Sounds simple, right? Here's what makes it special:

1. The sequence of puzzles test your knowledge of every mechanic in the game, one after the other and sometimes together.
2. The puzzles are spread around a wide area, and only light up in a specific order that you need to memorise.
3. Sometimes navigating the area itself requires you to solve a puzzle (e.g., remembering a previous solution).
4. The puzzles are randomised, so there is no way to remember the solutions.

And to top it all off, your timer is Edvard Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King. The music gets faster and faster and louder and louder until it ends, when the puzzle resets and you start all over if you haven't finished in time.

This is easily one of the most stressful yet satisfying gaming moments of my life. Tough, pressured, but definitely doable if you understand the game. A really nice finale to a strong game.