HINT-GIVING ITEMS IN PUZZLE-HEAVY GAMES

For almost all players of puzzle games, their enjoyment in a game comes from overcoming challenges. There's no satisfaction in getting past a puzzle if you didn't actually solve it. If there's no challenge, if the game solves its own puzzles while I watch, then I feel no sense of accomplishment.

However, I totally understand that some players are better at puzzles than others, and that it's frustrating, not fun, to get stuck for hours. Unlike other challenges, you can't practice until you get better, or grind until you get stronger, or retry until you get lucky. You just have to find the thing you missed. And so I understand why The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds included the hint goggles, an item that tells you how to solve any puzzle in the game.

But I still fucking hate those stupid hint goggles, and they ruin the game for me.

I'm fine with there being difficulty settings in a game, and I'm fine with those settings applying to puzzles as well as combat. But I'm not fine with designers removing all the challenge entirely for everyone - forcing everyone into easy mode. That's what the hint goggles do. If Nintendo would just let people choose between easy mode and hard mode when they start playing, and made hard mode apply to puzzles as well as combat, it would have worked so much better.

Functionally, the hint goggles work like a togglable easy mode setting. But the difference is they're not presented that way to the player. They're found in a treasure chest and equipped like the hookshot or boomerang. They're presented as a tool that's just as valid a way to solve puzzles as any other tool. And so, psychologically, it makes solving the puzzles with the hookshot or boomerang far less satisfying, because instead of feeling like you're good at the game, it feels like you're just not making use of the puzzle-solving tools you're given. It's like not using the shield or not picking up health refills - instead of feeling like you're beating a harder version of the game, it just feels like you're playing badly.

Someone was trying to explain to me that the hint goggles were perfect and that a difficulty setting would ruin the game for a variety of reasons that sounded like bullshit to me, but I'd love to hear an explanation of this viewpoint from someone capable of expressing their thoughts more coherently.

My counterpoint to him was that a difficulty setting can change any aspect of the game you can imagine, as long as that aspect makes the game more or less difficult. It doesn't have to just be numerical changes to combat, nor would that be appropriate for a game like Zelda where the combat is only a portion of the challenge. It would probably be appropriate for a game like Zelda to have multiple difficulty sliders - one for puzzles and one for combat - since many players only have trouble with one of the two. A "hard puzzle mode" that was togglable in the menu that disabled the hint goggles would not only be plausible but would be extremely appropriate for a puzzle game like Zelda or Portal, since the hint goggles do undeniably make all the puzzles easier. Normal mode could play like the game currently does, while easy mode also illuminates the next object that must be interacted with to solve the puzzle.

The player's mindset when choosing a difficulty setting is different than their mindset when choosing equipment and talent upgrades and assigning skill points. You feel like a better or smarter player if you become stronger through your choices in those aspects of gameplay, but you feel like a worse player if you become stronger by choosing a lower difficulty setting. There's no logical reason for this except for the way they're presented - picking the perfect stat build in Dragon Age is presented as a challenge to be overcome, while the difficulty setting isn't. The hint goggles in A Link Between Worlds aren't a puzzle to solve but they're also not a difficulty setting - they're somewhere in between. Finding the right place to use them isn't particularly challenging but it's still presented in a way that feels like exploration and discovery. As a result the player feels encouraged to use them to find the hidden hint ghosts, the same way they're encouraged to find the hidden squid babies.

The hint goggles are presented like a power-up, like a heart container or a bigger bomb bag, that players should be expected to use once they get. But while the game's combat is designed to still be challenging and satisfying even if the player finds the power-ups, the game's puzzles are designed with the assumption that the player isn't using the hint ghosts, and using them feels like skipping challenges instead of overcoming them. This bad feeling might be necessary for novice players, but should ideally be limited as much as possible.

Link Between Worlds charges you a "play coin" every time you use the hint goggles, which you get by carrying your 3DS around with you in sleep mode. 1 coin every 100 steps, up to 10 coins a day. The play coins end up being a joke since the player almost certainly will have more than enough to use the hint goggles on every single puzzle in the game, especially if they are a novice who plays slowly. To talk for a minute about a different situation, I think fixing this issue would actually make the game fun for novice players without affecting expert ones. If there were five or ten hint coins in the game and they were hidden in secret chests throughout Hyrule, that would actually be really cool. It would make the player feel like even when they got stuck and used the hint goggles, they still solved a puzzle to get past that point, it was just a different puzzle. Giving players that feeling of "I figured it out!" is super important - it's the one way that puzzle games provide fun. Allowing players to use the hint goggles in a way that felt satisfying instead of just neutral would be tremendously beneficial. This is what I think Nintendo was actually going for by making them be a usable tool in the game instead of a menu setting, but the infinite currency that's obtained by not playing zelda caused it to fall flat.

Sorry for the giant wall of text! I'm interested to hear what other people think about players having problems with puzzles and needing hints, other players having problems with hints and needing puzzles, and how you reconcile those needs.

How did you get the coins? How did it limit them? What was the interface like for using them? Did the ability to use the coins seem like part of the puzzle, or more of a metagame option?