HINT-GIVING ITEMS IN PUZZLE-HEAVY GAMES

As a note: Not gonna comment on the usefulness of hint giving items, or whether it breaks immersion...but don't tie them to in-game features too tightly. Making them have a small cost is fine, but don't lock players out of things with them.

I've seen a few puzzle games on steam that give achievements for not using the in game help feature...which just means, if I need help, I'll alt-tab and google it, which defeats the purpose of having an in-game help function.

author=Kaempfer

author=Sooz
Hints really should only be there as an aid for someone who can't get by without.

This is like skipping a difficult boss with a savestate, though, or giving the player a super weapon to help defeat him. Hints run contrary to the entire nature of puzzles. If hints are desperately needed for most players to pass a puzzle (especially in a game where other puzzles aren't as hard or they aren't a main selling feature of the game) then perhaps the creator should go back and tweak the difficulty of the puzzle.

I guess I don't care that much about whether a player "legitimately" got past an obstacle. vOv I know, for example, that there are many puzzle types I am absolutely abysmal at, even though I'm pretty great at some others. If the Layton series didn't have hints, I'm pretty sure there are some parts I would've been stuck on completely.

And, of course, the previously-discussed moon logic puzzles, where the developer didn't realize they've made leaps of logic that normal humans wouldn't.

Maybe it'd be better to view hints as similar to grinding; I could beat a boss as intended, or, in most games, I have the option of doing something to make the boss easier. (Such as getting lost on the way and accidentally overleveling myself. Oops.) Similarly, if I'm just too shit at a certain puzzle, I can get a little help without having to look up the entire solution.

Honestly, the terror some devs and players have that someone might be able to access the rest of a game without solving every thing "naturally" is a little silly to me; if someone likes my hypothetical game enough to want to see all of it, I'm not keen on withholding things just because they might suck. Possibly this is an outgrowth of me being really bad at certain video games. It's like, yeah, one person's playing for the challenge, but maybe someone else just really digs the aesthetic and wants to see more.