Iniquity and Vindication

Puzzles in an RPG? Not that big a deal.

The idea of adding puzzles in RPG dungeons is as old as RPGs. It's not exactly a novel gameplay system, but it's also not one that all RPGs do - especially not in a major, pervasive way. Most RPGs have a puzzle every few dungeons. Because the puzzles are rare, there's no need to build a gameplay system for them - each one can just involve interacting with the environment in a way that you can't do anywhere else.

I chose to fill my game with puzzles, and even go so far as to give the player "tools" - abilities, essentially - that he collects over the game to interact with environments in more and more ways. The fact that you use each tool many times helps its role get established in your mind, which lets me make more complex puzzles without having to teach you new controls for each puzzle. Puzzles here aren't just an occasional chance of pace to break the monotony, like in most RPGs - they're something you're engaged in constantly.

I didn't go the heavy puzzle route in I&V this just because it was "neat." I also didn't do it just because I liked Zelda and wanted to mimic it, or because I felt like puzzles were expected in RPGs. I did it because there was a hole in the gameplay without the puzzles, and this was the best way to fill it.


Let me explain my thought process a little.

Iniquity & Vindication is pretty linear. You can't go backwards - or at least, there's no reason to. You can't re-fight enemies to train and earn experience points. There aren't a bunch of quests you can go do. There's basically going to be no exploration at all. I'm going to try to add some optional side-zones and some places where you can pick what order to do things in, but by and large the game is going to keep you moving forward, with pacing more like an action game than a traditional RPG.

All of these things are being done for good reasons, but when you add them together you get a feeling, like in Final Fantasy 13, of being pushed down a tube by the game designer. And I know people don't want that feeling, for the most part, even people who prefer linear games. Maybe for specific segments, but not for more than 90% of the game. Plus, though I tried to make the combat really engaging, and I think I succeeded, you can still only fight so many sharks in a row before you start wanting something more. So I wanted to add something to make the player feel like he was in control, just a little.

But making the player feel like he's in control and giving the player control don't actually have to always be the same thing. A big part of game design is psychology - which I'm mostly incompetent at, but I've picked up a few tricks along the way. So instead of giving the player multiple paths, I give him one path, but make him work to reach it. If you feel clever for figuring out how to progress forward, you won't want to go other ways anyway - you'll want to go the way that you earned by being clever. By adding a puzzle before it, the trio of battles against acid sharks feels like a reward for your problem-solving skills, instead of layer 9 out of 382 of an endless wall of battles.

A railroaded game with puzzles is also just inherently less linear than one without puzzles, because even if you know you're going to go to room 12 after room 11, you're still making choices. You're choosing between a right choice and a lot of wrong choices, but that's still very different than just holding the control stick forward to move forward. No one ever complained that Portal was too linear, right? (No one I care about, anyway.)


You're unlocking the exit, not finding the entrance.

I've said this before on the forums: I don't like a lot of adventure-whatever hybrid games, because I don't like feeling like I have to search for the gameplay before I can play it.

Zelda does this a lot. Metroid does this a lot. They give you a whole world to explore, and you can unlock more and more of it as you go. A major part of Zelda and Metroid is discovering secrets and finding places you can go. Some of the things you find are immediate rewards, while at other points you actually have to spent time searching the world for the dungeons you're supposed to enter. There's a lot of memory involved, too: "Now that I just got the bombs, where have I seen bombable walls? I should go back to all those walls and bomb them." There's nothing specifically wrong with that type of gameplay, but it's not the type of gameplay I want to make in this game. So in I&V, you won't spend ten minutes looking for the path, but you might spend ten minutes thinking about it. Is that better? In a way, I think it is. You're more likely to get frustrated, but you're less likely to get bored. A trade-off, but in my mind a good thing overall. Overcoming my frustration makes me feel like a winner - overcoming my boredom just makes me feel like I can finally get back to playing.

I'd say the tools I give the player probably have more in common with Lufia 2 or Wild ARMs than with Zelda or Metroid. You use old tools on new environments, but you never use new tools on old environments. You never have to remember where you've been, or figure out where to go. You know exactly where to go: the door right in front of you. You just have to figure out how to open it.