Puzzle cliches

[cridia]

I am currently doing a little but of research regarding the topic of cliched puzzles, specifically puzzles in action adventures (the Zelda kind). An easy example that springs to mind is the block puzzle, where the player has to move blocks in some form (be it crates or whatever) to cover all of the switches and open a door. A popular variant on that being that same block puzzle on a frozen floor.

Since I am currently making something aking to an action adventure, I wish to at least try to avoid these tried and true puzzle conventions and use some new ones. So, what would be a puzzle in an action adventure you have seen many times too often?

 

[hittite]

Light all the torches to open the door. Name one Zelda game that doesn't have it in one form or another. I dare you.
Hit some sort of switch and run to the door before it closes.
kill everything in the room

 

[cridia]

Zelda 1!

But a very fair point nonetheless. Each and every Zelda seemed to have it after the SNES iteration and on top of that, it is rather silly if you think about it. I mean, come one, how the hell is a door in medival times supposed to detect that a few torches are burning?

 

[cridia]

Placing paintings in order seems to be a pretty common puzzle too. Or clicking on switches under them in specific orders. Also fucking teleporter puzzles.

The painting type also comes in other forms though. I have placed all sorts of things; paintings, hieroglyphs, emblems, jewelry of any kind, and so on. It makes a rather boring puzzle, especially if the hints towards placement become extremely obscure. Though, not only adventures are plagued by this, the more puzzle oriented JRPGs (such as Wild Arms) also make themselves guilty of it.

But, please explain the teleporter puzzles. I have encountered them before, but not that often. In fact, the only adventure game where I can remember these puzzles to be used quite often is the SNES Zelda.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Switchboard type puzzles where flicking one switch causes one or two other switches to flick and you have to get all of the switches to stay in the on position.

Pipemania. Nobody wants to see this again if they have played Bioshock.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Fuck switchboard puzzles. I am terrible at those. The gameboy zelda games love them too.

The worst thing about them is that the best strategy for beating them is to randomly flip switches until you get lucky.

 

[Layz92]

The puzzle where there are 2 types (usually) of switches (usually in a maze) and hitting the first switch will drop one wall but it will raise another, and hitting the other switch type will raise the first wall and drop the next and you have to problem solve by maybe throwing bombs to hit unreachable switches all to get the right combination of switch hits and placements of your character.

A bit confusing but I hope you get what I am talking about. The only example I can think of is in alundra where you go into the dream and there are the red and blue blocks and you have to go through coloured teleporters to switch which blocks are intangible.

 

[Indecipherable]

The various "stacking" puzzles where you have a tower of 4 blocks and each can only be moved when there is the right size block below it. Move it across the three possible places until it's stacked up in a pyramid.

 

[cridia]

I really, really hate those "one switch opens something to another one switch" switches. Zelda really loves to use those; especially timed ones. The only reason why you would mess up during those puzzles is because the timer is frigging annoying and you fall down by accident, kicking you back to the beginning of the puzzle. Prince of Persia for the SNES (the first one) also comes to mind as one game that used those constructions way too often.

Which brings me to a point of my own; jump puzzles; the kind where you need perfect accuracy. Alundra really went too far with that concept. There were two instances especially in that game that made me want to throw the controller, console, game and TV through the window at the same time.

One is in a cavern like level (with a giant centipede boss at the end), where you need to light 4 rooms with torches spread around. If the torches are hit by a droplet of water (conveniently falling from the ceiling) they are destroyed and if you happen to land in the water while carrying one, they are destroyed as well. These 4 rooms were specifically horrid, because you were not allowed to make even 1 mistake. Pixel perfect jumps without any room to err is not fun.

Another one is at the last level, where you had to jump on a series of switches in order as fast as you could, because as soon as you activated one that switch would go into the floor (making you unable to get to the next one if you werent fast enough). The fact that my controller didnt register diagonal jumps very well back then only added oil to the already raging fire.

This thread is becoming a great source of "what not to do for game puzzles" .

 

[AtticusSP]

All of Golden Sun.
Not that I have a problem with it. I fucking love block puzzles for some reason.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Adjust mirrors A and B so as to cast light onto object X so as to open door 1 which will grant access to the Blue key which unlocks the corresponding chest which contains item Delta which will unlock the rest of the current dungeon you happen to be crawling through. I think that covers Zelda puzzles. As for Resident Evil style puzzles, up until 5 [possibly 4] it was all about collecting key-fragments by using other minor keys so as to form a major key, the major key allowing access to new major areas. As for puzzles in casual games, those are largely about color matching or, the micromanagement of differently shaped objects so as to clear out rows and columns.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

-Hand Words-

and if it wasn't a key it was a crest. You have to keep that in mind about RE. If it wasn't a key it was a crest, always a fucking crest. Why a crest? BECAUSE I'M ALFRED ASHFORD!

As for silent hill? Silent Hill was all about gather arbitrary items and somehow macguyvering a key out of it that unlocked some sort of supernatural relic.

I didn't mention the Crests because they still functioned as keys once you had found all 3 pieces and glued them back together. What did the people of Raccoon City have against crests anyway? And why did they hide the pieces around town when they could have tossed them into incinerators or something?

 

[Shoggoth2588]

-Hand Words-

-words-

-words-

They did though, didn't they? They broke their crests and hid them in incinerators, dogs, the garbage. Whatever. Raccoon is not a city that respects the crest or the emblem.

Probably because they knew the truth about those Crests and Emblems. They were not Crests or emblems but keys. Cake there may be but, it is the Crest which is the true lie...and those damned cranks. Circular hole, Square hole, Hexagonal hole...damn those cranks...

 

[Oktanas]

The one you need to correct the laser beam using mirrors. Almost every game has this one.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

-Hand Words-

-words-

-words-

They did though, didn't they? They broke their crests and hid them in incinerators, dogs, the garbage. Whatever. Raccoon is not a city that respects the crest or the emblem.

Probably because they knew the truth about those Crests and Emblems. They were not Crests or emblems but keys. Cake there may be but, it is the Crest which is the true lie...and those damned cranks. Circular hole, Square hole, Hexagonal hole...damn those cranks...

There needs to be a puzzle where you need to put a key in a crest to unlock an emblem to place in the crank to twist it and lower the crate to push so you can reach the mirror which you have to turn to reflect the light beam onto the gem which moves the curtain on the paintings so you can put them in order of what actions you just fucking did. Then the door opens and the tyrant walks into the room.

...Then Lara Croft gives you a Rocket Launcher so you can get your ending and end-of-game grade

 

[cridia]

YOU GOT A J BECAUSE YOU SAVED ONCE, ASSHOLE TRY AGAIN! I really do love the series though. More cliched puzzles! The "animal" puzzle. RE in particular likes this but I've seen it used in a few other series. You're given a few animals or emblems of animals and are given a little poem along the lines of something like "I crawl on the ground and eat this" "I fly and eat that but this eats me" and you're expected to organize the animals by their foodchain order.

That just the painting puzzle thing you mentioned earlier . They really use these kinds of puzzles way too often.

 

[Georgie_Leech]

Good luck with avoiding the cliche's. There's only so much you can do with game mechanics, usually. Just about the only game that had creative ones that I've played is Lufia 2, which, although not Action-adventure, had some really interesting puzzles that took, say, blockpushing in interesting directions. I'm not counting the Professor Layton series; its style of puzzles allows for far more ingenuity in puzzles than an action-adventure

 

[Dr_Pie]

While not really cliché, I hate any puzzle to do with colour. I am colourblind. These puzzles are not good. I can spend hours on one puzzle trying to solve it, and I can't look at a guide for help, because I don't know which things are blue and which are purple so knowing where to move said miscellaneous pigmented objects helps me none.

Fuck colour puzzles!

 

[cridia]

Good luck with avoiding the cliche's. There's only so much you can do with game mechanics, usually. Just about the only game that had creative ones that I've played is Lufia 2, which, although not Action-adventure, had some really interesting puzzles that took, say, blockpushing in interesting directions. I'm not counting the Professor Layton series; its style of puzzles allows for far more ingenuity in puzzles than an action-adventure

Well, so far I am actually doing rather nicely with the design for the demo level. Not to say that it works; it is all just in the documenting phase, but I have got some nice puzzles so far that make use of the environment itself instead of putting a puzzle into it and letting the player solve it to switch a very weird switch. This thread is helping me pretty well .

 

[Malyc]

If anyone else has said this, im sorry but i got bored reading the posts...

Any puzzle involving plumbing(hacking the ammo machines in BioShock) really bugs me, especially when the water starts b4 i have got the path set up.