UBON'S PROFILE

People have already touched on the good points, so I'm just gonna say that opening a game with a Nietzsche quote borders on self-parody.

its me irl

Yeah, exactly. The process of solving the puzzle needs to be interesting, or else it might as well not be there in the first place. I've seen enough token "pick the correct option from this list" or "examine all the right objects" or "solve this third-grader's panel flipping puzzle"-s that seem to only be there for the sake of saying your game has puzzles in it.

(Hi, To the Moon.)

my favourite puzzle is the one where you need to push a key out of a keyhole onto a mat and slide it under a door

author=Zephyr
In many games where you have things like magic, it perplexes me how they rarely are used for any other practical means that defeating enemies. You've got fire-magic? "Oh geez, how are we ever getting past this wooden door or patch of poison spore flowers?"

To be fair, Golden Sun is guilty of the same thing to a large extent. While psynergy's concept of on-map spellcasting has potential, in the games themselves the only spells with any kind of lasting utility were given to you near the start of the game, and largely just pertained to (oh, baby!) pushing blocks.

The majority of other powers largely exemplify a problem I have with Zelda-style puzzle-solving in general: Rather than tools, they're more like specialized keys you use on different-looking locks. You see a rope on a peg and you know to use the one telekinetic power out of your arsenal of dozens that specifically pertains to ropes on pegs. You have another power that's only used for smallish objects hanging slightly out of reach, a power for pounding pegs into the ground and nothing else, a power for lifting objects of a certain size, etc. The things that you can use these on are all very obviously defined, and the powers themselves rarely have any kind of auxiliary purpose -- that ropes-on-pegs power is going to tie a rope to a peg, and heaven help you if you want to experiment and see if any of these do anything different.

The result is an idiotic call-and-answer form of gameplay that mainly only exists to spend the player's time for them. You see a setpiece that says you need to use power X. You navigate through the menu to find power X, and use it on setpiece Y. You repeat this until the end of the dungeon, at which point you usually forget that power X exists completely and go back to mainlining Move and Telepathy because those are the only two powers in the game that get any consistent use. Saying that psynergy "could affect the puzzle in more than one way" is pretty much farcical, as every power has only an incredibly narrow scope of use and the game rarely combines these new "mechanics" with anything other than more block-pushing.

Setting up proper puzzles takes a lot of time and thought, and a lot of people seem to go into it unprepared. A good start, though, is looking at the tools you give the player to solve them and thinking "as this is currently implemented, could it be reskinned as an button marked 'SOLVE PUZZLE' without changing anything?"

If the answer is yes, you might want to rethink things a bit. Quality over quantity, yeah?

Hm, yeah. I hadn't thought about what might be going on behind the scenes. Sorry about that! This thread's all I've really been following.

(My game contains little to no angels, so you losers are on your own there.)

e: whoa chain game what?