To expand on your point that puzzle solving is a skill to learn rather than an indicator of intelligence, it really is a ton of skills. You have logical deduction, pattern recognition, creative thinking, perception, spatial reasoning, memorization, literary analysis, brute mental speed, and more. Strength in one does not imply strength in others, which is why every puzzle game may feel like it's starting from ground zero. Eventually, you'll transfer lessons and skills across puzzle games, but you really can only grow them with time spent on puzzle games. I agree that puzzle solving has very little to do with intelligence, but is instead a fun hobby that appeals to a lot of people deep down. For most people, they just need the right starter puzzle game to get into the genre. Baba Is You and Paquerette are among the top 1% hardest puzzle games I've seen, so there's no shame in bouncing off either. Do consider returning after years and years of puzzle solving however! They are greatly rewarding once you're prepared. As for starter puzzle games, have you played Case of the Golden Idol? Excellent game, especially since you've enjoyed Obra Dinn. As for sokobans, I've noticed that they often rely too heavily on brute mental speed than other skills. In my opinion, popular sokobans get popular despite their sokoban nature, not because of it. You've also noticed that it's easier to get into solving mode if you're not talking haha. I also like to shut up and go into the think tank to solve some puzzles, and then cut out the silent thinking because nobody wants to watch me stare wordlessly at a screen. On average, my raw footage is 2x-3x longer than the edited video, take that as you will. Great video!
Agreed! I usually prefer open world games (for some reason. Idk why cos I always get lost haha), but the right game to get into a new genre is insanely important. I don't play many different games, so I don't have too much experience on multiple styles, but I generally got a lot more interested in puzzle games after playing Baba Is You as my first proper one. I still haven't finished it after having it for at least 1½ - 2 years now, but I regularily revisit and taking a few months as breaks actually helps a lot. Upon revisiting, I sometimes manage to easily solve a level that I had been stuck on before. But of course, Baba Is You isn't for everyone. Especially as your first puzzle game since it is so hard can can be frustrating. I didn't even know it's considered one of the very hard games when I bought it, and in hindsight I definitely don't recommend people getting into puzzle games with Baba Is You as your first game. If I had known that Baba Is You is not a beginner kind of game, I probably would not have gotten it. But I didn't and I guess I was just lucky enough to not get discouraged by how hard it is😅. Really enjoy your videos, btw :3
Thanks so much for your comment! Love your channel! I have indeed played Case of the Golden Idol and it's one of my favorites. Really looking forward to the sequel. Investigation and logic games are hands-down my favorite genres. With pattern recognition being a close third.
That's sometimes a development problem. You need to make sure, as a developer, that the player is either aware of what's possible or has adequate clues to realize it.
@@k96man nah you aren't missing pieces. often you are only missing the fact that you can sort the pieces in a certain way that makes the solving easier. even for jigsaw puzzles there are techniques and guides that make solving them easier and faster. most people don't know them or only heard mentions of them.
@@dovos8572 I suppose I should have elaborated I was more venting my frustrations with Zelda like dungeon puzzles Where it can sometimes be unclear if you're lacking an item or are simply overlooking something that's already in your inventory. Hence the missing puzzle piece
i think it's also the fact that in normal games, you fail because of your mistakes in the moment: "i should've dodged sooner", "i should've jumped further", "i should've been quicker", and you fail when your mistakes pile up, you can still succeed by making mistakes, but in puzzle games, failing is the default state of being, you succeed by solving, aka finishing the puzzle, but as long as the puzzle is not solved, you are in a constant state of failure, and the longer it lingers the more frustrated you get, it's like playing a normal game, but it's just the feeling of you making mistakes repeatedly over and over again for as long as the puzzle takes
I can absolutely get that. But I do think the more you work with a given type of puzzle the better you get at figuring out where you made your mistake and spotting them in the future.
Good point. In combat-focused games you could barely beat a boss, or you can practice to a point you don't even get hit. Meanwhile in puzzles you get it right or you don't. You need exactly the right idea. That said I had a lot of fun with Portal 1 & 2 because I'm pretty good with spatial stuff and it's also just a really fun experience inbetween.
@@SaHaRaSquad You know there's actually some debate over whether puzzle games should even be counted as video games. The reasoning being that since puzzles don't have an opposing force, only a problem in need of solving, they aren't actually 'games'.
I sometimes watch videos about ouzzle games and they usually say something like "this puzzle only took me five minutes." When i took half an hour to best the puzzle
Well keep in mind people doing puzzle games on stream probably have a massive skillset to draw on by that point. And sometimes things just click. I've definitely been on both sides of that.
There's also the inverse situation happening where you solved a puzzle in two minutes and the other guy is like, "this puzzle was just too hard and I hated it"
I think i'm just more used to failure on a skill-based environment. A hard boss in a video game may take me an hour at best to beat. A hard puzzle in a video game might take me upwards to 5 hours, and chances are, said game is fully packed with like 50 more of puzzles of this exact sort, and i just don't want that kind of time commitment
That's definitely an issue. I'm far more likely to bounce off puzzle games that endlessly iterate than games that have a story with reasonable start and end points. I really enjoyed Portal, Portal 2, and Portal: Revolution. But I never got into the fan-made content since I had no external reason to get into them.
I'm not dumb. My brain just isn't properly wired to solve complex situations. I'm really good at memorizing small pieces of information, so I'm fantastic at simplistic situations, but too many steps and my mind melts.
I like simple puzzle games that don't demand you write down every little detail on a notebook or file and spend days, weeks, even months trying to figure out the game. Totally not me trying to play La Mulana.
I see it more as a convolution issue. A puzzle with multiple facets is interesting. A puzzle where you have to perform sixteen steps in sequence just to push a box to the left is kind of tedious. But of course everyone's threshold is going to be different and some will thrive. That said, I do think over time you can build your skill in that regard. Pushing boundaries is always difficult, but if it's something you want to be able to do, it's probably achievable.
@@freshlymemed5680 Oh yes I have heard of La Mulana and do not have it on my steam library collecting dust because I hated the jumping mechanic so much.
I'd say probably 60-70% of the difficulty of most puzzle games is that they're designed in ways that make thinking hard. We've evolved to be experimental and social thinkers, we need to get hands on with problems, and we need to talk about problems. There's the famous idea in programming of the rubber duck, where you realise the solution to your problem just by telling someone else what the problem is. Most puzzle games though are games where you stare at a screen for half an hour while listening to someone talk about how sokobans are bad. Thesis statement: We need more multiplayer puzzle games, and we need more open-ended puzzle games that work like something like Factorio where there are many routes to success and you discover them via incremental experimentation.
And with *actual* multiplayer, not the "multi"player Islands of Insight have. God the "multi"player in there basically just boils down to "hey look at what I'm struggling with! You can't help me with the puzzle, but you can give me some sympathy!"
I actually loved the multiplayer levels for Portal 2, and do wish I could see more of them. I'm trying to convince some of my streaming friends to do the "We Were Here" series with me. Or some other similar type.
Are you sure about that? Rubber duck debugging method works, but it isn't effective for everybody. I prefer being completely solitary when working on difficult problems (and writing code for that matter), and most of the "social" methods for improvement were either neutral or negative on my productivity, as they often require to re-focus on something which isn't directly related to my work. I find much more success by simple repetition, like when debugging my approach is to remind myself of the system i am working on in it's entirety to understand why specially i arrived at the problem, locate the issue and find out how it clashes with my current approach and come up with a solution to either alter the system itself or problematic element of it.
I spend a lot of my free time playing puzzle games, so probably I am not too bad at them, but I'm very slow to catch up with other people's ideas and am very useless whenever I have to work with someone on a problem...
As a puzzle game maker, I have seen such a wide range of solving speeds depending on the person. Just today someone got to level 12 in my game in about 10 minutes which took some other players 40 minutes
As another game developer I'd like to point out that the specific genre of the box pushing puzzles falls into a category I like to call punishing. That's basically where making a mistake is very costly to the overall experience and for that reason I'm guessing that particular genre isn't feeling as comfortable. You can help correct this problem by ensuring that people can basically undo a certain number of steps so that if they accidentally push the box into the wrong spot at the last moment because their finger twitched it doesn't mean they have to start over again. I would say that particular genre also suffers from just being boring because let's face it what you learn a couple of the basic mechanics it's the exact same puzzle over and over again with slightly different configurations. I'll be honest and this is not a bragging point I did not know that this was a genre. I have put these puzzles into games before, but I've never been aware of the fact that you could make an entire game centered solely around that mechanic. But to the larger question I agree that being too dumb for a puzzle game is not something that should come up very often, rather there are people who aren't patient or tenacious enough for a puzzle game. Often there's just a handful of tricks and logic steps you need to know and then it's like you don't even need to think anymore.
Games in general need to strike a balance between teaching the player and letting them discover, and I think that's a very difficult thing to accomplish- which is partially why it's easy to jump to "this part is just badly designed", because it feels as if the games teaching has failed to prepare you- after all, you learned enough to get to that point, right? And the harder a game is, the more this matters. A simple game can have little instruction, trusting the player to intuit new concepts by simply iterating off of what was previously learned.
Incredibly hard to balance. And honestly very hard to determine from just playing it whether the design was bad or not. Particularly if a game is experimenting with pushing boundaries.
I kinda had this experience as well, I failed a ton at Baba Is You, Paquarette, and Patrick’s Parabox and resorted to just getting my enjoyment through Aliensrock and Icely Puzzles. But then recently I came back to sokobons in a way I decided to not watch from TH-cam by doing Baba Is You’s New Adventures Campaign and almost finishing it with only 2 levels left before stopping and some of the baba is you creator’s games which I was able to beat. But I never really connected the lines of I was doing better and chalked it all up to them just being easy, but I guess now I see I just improved at the games with patience
Improvement can be hard to measure. Especially in the gaming world where opinions on difficulty are so incredibly varied. But if you succeed where you once failed, that's improvement. Regardless.
Clicked on this video because I enjoy hearing people talking about puzzle games. And then I learned the Baba is You is a Sokoban, something I had never considered before, and now that's all I can think about. Fun video :)
The genre is infectious, I swear. But it makes so much sense. The simplest designs are the easiest to iterate on, and it doesn't get simpler than Sokoban without being Pong.
The biggest turnoff for me is the massive amount of time "wasted" trying to solve one puzzle for a half hour+... It's a hard sell spending all that time bashing my head against a wall, with zero acknowledgement from the game for my effort, vs just looking up the solution and finally moving on to something new. I understand that that's the Point of a puzzle, but most of the time there is nothing engaging outside of progression so it gets monotonous quick. =/
I do get that. It's not like a tough boss where you might get a bit further each time. The thing is, I think you *are* getting a bit better each time you run through it, but the feedback isn't as easy to tell.
i'm personally dogshit at any game but puzzle and mystery games, so the idea that people think they're dumb because they can't get the hang of puzzle games baffles me a bit. i can never figure out the strategy to boss fights or managing health or doing any kind of timing, it's all so chaotic and unpredictable to me compared to the steady rhythm of puzzles and mysteries. i've always considered myself "not a true gamer" because i can never get the hang of the skills needed to play the more well known and beloved games, and considered my puzzles easy games and mysteries as nothing more than visual novels, i never knew the people i look up to as the "superior gamers" could ever look at me and see some sorts of freak genius who can solve the impossible puzzles they're "too stupid' to get. we all see each other as better than each other because we have different skill sets, which is kinda fascinating actually
That really goes to show how diverse gaming skillsets are, doesn't it? In my experience anyone claiming someone is not a true gamer is, 99% of the time, gatekeeping for their own ego. If you enjoy playing games, you're a gamer. Though I do think some games have quality issues, that's not reflective on the person playing them.
My reasoning: I am bad at puzzle games because I don't know the tropes of a puzzle game. In a roleplaying game, if a boss is too hard, you could grind out some levels and the boss will be easier for you. You know that if you play roleplaying games. How often is that true? Even if a game is advertised as "you can finish the game without needing to grind," the option is still there, even if it's never explicitly advertised to you. If you don't know roleplaying games, if a boss is too hard, you might just give up on the spot and say the boss is too hard. The idea of grinding out levels is something you're not aware of, never playing roleplaying games, so without another option, you just quit the game right there and then. In platforming games, a differently colored wall containing a secret is such a trope, spread among many platforming games. You're not explicitly told, but if you know about it in one game, you can find them in other games too. To me, that is puzzle games. Surely there must be puzzle tropes that I'm not aware of, and if I knew those tropes, I could apply them to other puzzle games. But with the lack of knowledge of these genre tropes, I can't even come up with the simplest solutions. Do I have examples? No, because I don't know the tropes. Still, I'm sure that's why I'm worse at puzzle games than at other games.
Puzzle games do have an analog to grinding in an RPG, its "hints", if a puzzle game has a built in hint system, then USE IT! If it doesnt, then you can google it. But just like grinding in an rpg, you should only use it as a last resort, otherwise it will spoil the fun.
That *could* be the case. The thing is while we classify a large group of games under 'puzzle' they often have very VERY different central mechanics. Like my issue in the video was finding Sokobans so very different from what I was used to that I dropped them quickly. So Sokobans definitely have certain insights. Among them being "A box against a wall can only move in two directions" and "a box in a corner is functionally dead". But these won't be of any use in a more engineering-themed puzzle game like Talos Principle or Portal. I think it's more that there are no qualitative values in puzzles like RPG levels and no mechanical skills to practice like in...everything else. Your practice is in thinking about it and learning about it.
Can of Wormholes has a very good in-game hint system that i encourage the use of, if you ever want to/have the time to return to it. the hints are actually playable levels, smaller and more straightforward versions of the actual level designed to impart the "hook" or "insight" of the puzzle, without just showing you outright. puzzle games do necessarily rewire your brain in possibly difficult or backwards ways, but systems like these can make that easier, if you're willing to swallow your pride. no-one has to know, right? haha
I did find that system, and it's very well done. But I hit that one near the end of my first attempt at sokobans and was getting increasingly frustrated with them. There's a reason there's so little footage from it in this video.
This isn't just how it works for puzzle games. This is how it works for any type of intelligence. You aren't too dumb for anything. You can learn anything you want to, if you find the right starting point and have enough patience.
Many people are, in fact, too dumb for things. Nature doesn't care about people, and has no reason to make them all have the same potential. Most criminals are **actually** too stupid to truly understand what consequences their actions will actually have, for example. That said, willpower/self-discipline is different from intelligence, and is quite important for being able to put in the practice to get truly good at something. A very bright person who has no motivation won't often amount to much, but a person of reasonable intelligence with a good amount of willpower can usually achieve much more. So while everyone has their limits, most decent people can do pretty well if they put in the practice.
All true. But I think it's still important to point out and demonstrate. I had this issue when I wanted to learn to draw, a sense for decades that drawing was an innate trait I hadn't been born with.
No, stop spreading nonsense. Intelligence is determined genetically and everything relates to g-factor. All the evidence is published for anyone to read.
@@leonardofernandez6488your starting point is determined genetically. Where you go from there, it's up to you. If you care about studies, you can surely find the studies showing how practice affects intelligence, it's probably easier to test for than finding "the gene" for intelligence. The brain is like a muscle. Of course some people are naturally stronger than others, but that can change depending on if they work out or not. All skills are like that. That isn't denying that fact that people have different natural skills, it's just that skills need to be practiced.
@@key37raminus it's not "starting point". Intelligence (or more generally a talent, it's not just about IQ) is not just your base stat (I'm RPG terms). It's also multiplier for everything, and a ceiling for all your various skills. There's only so much one can compensate with more work. I've seen so many people wasting hours of work every day trying to get great at something and never succeeding. You need to realize your weaknesses and find your strengths.
sokoban is a Japanese title that translates to roughly "warehouse duty". i feel like it's become such a well-known word/game that it barely registers as having meaning so i just wanted to share a fun fact
Indeed! I had that in my video originally but cut it because it didn't really flow well with the rest. I have to wonder if in Japan they use the same term for the genre.
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"Meet pack rat." What a weird name. "Her name means daisy." Ah, pâquerette.
Hey I'm doing my best to mimic the way it's pronounced. I have neither time nor money for language coaching.
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@@csidesummit I was just teasing you mate. Of course I don't expect anyone to perfectly pronounce every language. Also the following ones were much better.
It's not my fault they just make the puzzles more and more complicated until it's not fun anymore, until it starts feeling like homework not just trying to think outside the box
If it's not fun, it's not fun. I doubt I'll go back to Baba for that reason. Later levels really abandon the 'look at the cool solutions you can make' attitude of the start in favor of "proceed to step 18 page 2 subset 4C"
@@csidesummit harder and more complicated are two different things, it's like that scene in inception you can make the hardest maze in the world not because there is anything clever about it but because it would take months to complete. Hard puzzles are fun because you feel rewarded just for completing them, complicated puzzles just make you feel nothing or even tired
@@acacacacacacaccaca7666 Absolutely. I touched on that when talking about the way developers tend to strip down and simplify puzzles. Or at least that's something they're supposed to be doing.
@@csidesummit The Talos Principle series has a number of very elegant hard puzzles which I adore, with "Metathesis" from Into the Abyss being a pinnacles of this design.
well that’s subjective, but I understand the feeling. I don’t enjoy the challenge of most action games, it feels too overwhelming, but I love when puzzles are complicated because unraveling them is fun for me
I encounter this exact problem with rhythm games and my friends. They refuse to play rhythm games because they think they are not "good at them." When I tell them it's a skill built over time, not something you can just pick up in a few minutes, they still end up hating the games because they can't beat me. I explain that I'm good because I've played this exact rhythm game with the same mechanics for around 4-6 years, so they shouldn't feel discouraged.
Ah yes. You are 'that guy'. The guy who loved a multiplayer game so much they became too good at them. Too good to be a proper introduction for new players. We've all found ourselves in that place. I used to try to persuade my brother to play Street Fighter II with me by letting him pick my character. I still won. -_-
I feel like the difference is that for most of us (non top players) rhythm games are a battle against the self, so seeing people I try to get into them compare themselves to me makes no sense.
But it's not just that. Musical skills are a great comparison. Some people are born to be great at this, some not and even lots of practice won't make them great musicians. Yes, it's a skill you learn, but your talent determines both how hard it will be and how far you can reach. I think it's the same with puzzle games.
19:28 "There's no deductions". Actually, Obra Dinn is the one without deductions and Sokobans are the ones with deductions. Deductions are logically forced consequences. Obra Dinn uses abductive reasoning.
*grumbles* audience making me look things up *grumbles* So a quick look on Merriam Webster showed me a more refined definition of deductive, abductive, and inductive reasoning. But it also said that "Deduction" is generally defined as "The deriving of a conclusion by reasoning". Which I'm interpreting as similar to the general vs scientific definitions of 'theory'. Where one means a general idea and the other means a hypothesis which has withstood multiple rounds of testing.
ive 100%'d moonleap and linelight and have gotten pretty far on no anglerfish and yet, i cannot shake the feeling that "puzzle games are just not for me" i have dropped: talos principle, witness, baba, catway domino, death drives a bus, frog fractions 2, etc... thank you for this video
So there's a big difference between feeling like you can't do puzzles and simply not finding them fun. You're probably right, and they're just not for you. Nothing wrong with that. :)
I think something you said at the beginning really unlocks the whole reason a lot of people don't like puzzle games. In order to be good at them you have to figure out the process the game wants you to use to solve it. In the case of sokoban block pushers, you HAVE to work backwards from the solution. If you prefer to experiment until things become clear, that approach just does not work and I have run into that wall myself.
Are you sure that's always the case, though? In Baba I could not envision how the solution would look in the more advanced puzzles. And in the early puzzles more than one solution was viable. Paquerette was a bit more forgiving. Even though you weren't given a pre-determined spot, you could use clues to figure out where a spot might be.
@@csidesummit Sometimes you do need to experiment just to figure out how things work and discover the nuances of a puzzle, but then you have to put all those disparate pieces together and form a plan, especially later on when things start to get more complex. That's usually when I end up giving up, when I can no longer just kind of go "I have a good idea of how this works" and wing it until I get it
Oh, also to add: as someone who loves writing and hosting quizzes, the 'make it easier' principle applies there too. The most rookie mistake people make when writing a quiz is trying to make it as hard as possible, except nobody knows THAT much general knowledge. My target is always a round where people on average get 5-7/10; and I like to start and finish each round on a gimmie. Then you have to think about your quiz audience, and what areas of general knowledge they might have stumbled upon at all; and I also really like to shoot for questions that at least let you make an educatd guess if you don't know for sure.
As much as i enjoy the idea of "it's aquired taste" or that "You got to give it time" that still does not explain Baba's insane small number of people that have beaten it.
So it's not really meant to. It's only to help people get past the sense of "I can't do this" that often hits early on. Baba's final levels are an insane challenge irrespective of skill or interest. Those levels are meant to be massive challenges for people wanting to demonstrate complete mastery.
I think part of it could be that Baba is You acquired a much broader player base than most of the rest of these games. I had no idea this genre had a name and had never heard of any of the rest of these games, but I've seen a lot about Baba is You. But that's just a theory based on the vides I've gotten. I haven't looked up the hard data to back it up.
What explains that number is interest, & intelligence. 1/30th of the people that bought the game had enough of both to see it through. Its ok that the other 29/30 didn’t, they should do what interests them.
I know I sometimes struggle at puzzle games, but then I remember something: “everyone needs a hint sometimes, and we’re not playing this game to prove something. We’re playing to enjoy the game.” There’s no shame in struggling, and if you want to get better at puzzle games, all the power to you, but don’t feel like, because you’re struggling, you’re not smart enough for it. Everyone’s smart at something, and no one is skillful in every topic or skill.
Another issue with puzzle games is that, by their nature, they need to obscure the solution. If you compare it to something like a rhythm game, the rhythm game tells you exactly what you need to do and when you need to do it. If you fail at a rhythm game, you just need to do the thing the game is telling you to do more accurately. Meanwhile, if you fail at a puzzle game you can feel completely stuck. I had this experience with Stephen’s Sausage roll. I got stuck on a puzzle where I could have sworn that I had tried brute forcing every possible combination of button presses, but I still wasn’t making progress. I put the game down for something like three years. When I came back to it, I once again got stuck on the same puzzle, but this time only for an hour or two. Somehow I found a solution that my previous brain could not conceive of at all. Puzzle games often ask players to “think outside the box.” But sometimes players just get plain stuck. Many puzzle games try to get players out by letting them complete alternative puzzles or giving them hints, but you can’t do too much of that without letting the game lose its tension. Plus, as you say, some players will just sit there stuck forever because they don’t want to feel stupid.
Right? That comparison kind of hit me while writing it. Sometimes we get so used to doing things a certain way, or things feeling a certain way, and when we aren't presented with that it can feel so uncomfortable as to seem poorly designed.
The frustrating part of a puzzle game isn't being stuck on a puzzle. It's the subtext that I'm not *supposed* to be stuck on it. Other people play through the game and complain about how easy it was. The game doesn't let you progress without finishing this puzzle. And yet, here you are, bashing your brain on this one little section of the game you can't get past when, seemingly, you can do everything else. It's like failing on the opening section of Through the Fire and Flames for the 30th straight time and saying "but I can play everything else in the game, and I bet I can play the rest of THIS song, too, if I could just get past the beginning where they don't give me any freaking star power and I have to use a skill I've legit never used anywhere else!" The difference is that if Guitar Hero 3 were a puzzle game, you would not, in fact, be able to play the rest of the song. You'd just get stuck on another part.
I don't think the subtext is really that you're not 'supposed' to be stuck. Yes, you have to finish it to progress, but the same is true for most games. Precision platformers sometimes work around this by letting you skip a certain number of levels, but sooner or later you will hit a roadblock you have to push through. Not to drag Dark Souls back in but Ornstein and Smough basically block the second half of the game until you prove you can beat them. Hitting roadblocks and brick walls is part of any game going for challenge.
I have played through quite a big part of void stranger, then gotten stuck at a later part and I havent touched the game since, I really want to play it because the depths void stranger has seem so intressting and unique, at the same time I lack the skill to solve the puzzels and that keeps me from going deeper into the game without looking up guides....and looking up said guide for void stranger just made my jaw drop...so many steps and moves in that exact order to solve 1 level! your video really brought home the kind of emotion I am feeling with Sakoban puzzels I might try void stranger agin or I might just go for a video essay explaining it...atleast I found somthing cool not many people know...sorry for the rambeling just wanted to put my thoughts down about all of this...uhh whoever reads this have a nice day ^^
Despite my rules for Paquerette, I don't consider it wrong to look up solutions if needed. Sometimes we just don't grok what the developer intended. That can be on them, or it can be on us. I only ask that when it's done, take time to think about why it worked. It might be useful in the future.
Paquarete is the first puzzle game that really hurt my ego. So I sat down and 100% the whole game without (major) guides in about 1-2 months. I only used a spreadsheet made by the community that shows what baby bunnies are possible.
I had such a different experience with Cocoon. it felt like a walking simulator to me, where all the puzzle solutions were pretty obvious for me to understand the solution, but actually going through the motions to solve the puzzles felt tedious and slow and really dragged the game down for me.
That did happen to me on a couple of puzzles, too. Where I just put the ball on the first thing I saw and that turned out to be the correct one. But I did have a few I had to stop and think about.
Pokemon suddenly makes so much sense. The strength puzzles in most games are sokubans. And pokemon x and y even has a Paquerette like puzzle where you have to catch a Furfrou based on the same rules as Paquerette. The puzzles are of course much simpler then actual sokuban games but still, I had no idea that those puzzles in pokemon are a whole genre of puzzle games.
Great video! Wonderful to see more people making thoughtful content about puzzle games. And I'm glad your premise of "maybe they're just badly designed" didn't stick until the end of the video - I was scared! I only got deeply into the puzzle space in around 2016, and now puzzle games are pretty much all I play. It sounds like we actually had a similar experience, trying some games and not really getting it, but then revisiting them and realising that I was starting to _get_ them. For me, that game was Stephen's Sausage Roll, which is known for being a particularly hard Sokoban game. I played it once and bounced off it because I just found it impenetrable and uncomfortable. But later I returned to it and could actually _feel_ my mentality around Sokoban games changing. Now I play so many Sokoban games (and have created some of my own), and absolutely love them. I loved your observation that puzzle games are just challenging you on something different than you're used to. It's one of the problems of lumping all of these activities under "playing video games", when playing different games can be very different activities. It's easy to see how going from a difficult action RPG to a puzzle game can make you feel like "wait, but I'm not bad at video games! this video game must be bad!", when the reality is that it's like you've switched from archery to gymnastics and are beating yourself up for "not getting it". They're just totally different things. In fact, the fact that puzzle games were offering something different is what drew me to them in the first place. I was pretty tired of games that were just challenging me to do the same things I'd done a million times before - sure, with slightly different systems or narrative around them, but they're still just asking me to smash buttons quickly, manage my health, etc. Puzzle games had this strange property that each and every game felt like it was offering a completely new experience. However, that's not entirely true. It's not like I'm starting from scratch with each puzzle game. In fact, I think it only felt like that at the start because of how new I was to the genre. As with any other genre, there are skills that you build up over time and help you become more comfortable with the genre as a whole. With puzzle games, it's not dexterity or timing or the ability to perform under pressure, but its your reasoning skills, observations skills, your ability to identify patterns and problem solve. However, I'd still say that something feels fundamentally "new" when solving puzzles in one game compared to another, in a way that I don't get from other games. Even when there are common skills across games, I'm still constantly surprised and delighted by the ways in which I have to apply those skills and the fascinating systems I have to apply them to. One of the tricky things with getting into puzzle games, as some of your other commenters have already highlighted, is that sometimes puzzles can get more complicated just by being more convoluted. This is generally not considered good design, but when you aren't super experienced with puzzle games, it can be really hard to tell the difference between "difficult in a good way" and "difficult in a bad way". In fact, even now after years of playing them, I have times where I _think_ a puzzle is badly designed only to later realise that I just missed some key insight. Getting over this requires placing trust in the designer and, occasionally (but not often, in my experience), having that trust broken sometimes. This is not really any different to any other genre though - like a platformer can get difficult by presenting interesting dexterity challenges, or it can get difficult by randomly spawning enemies that will get in your way. Also, as you said in your video, it's really common to see people being self-defeatist about puzzle games, and we can already see it in some of the other comments here! I wish there were some really easy way to show that they _can_ become both better and more comfortable at puzzle games (and will even start to love them!) with a bit of perseverance and self-belief. Like seriously, that's all it takes! And there are truly some amazing games to play. Anyway, there's so much more to say on this topic, but I'll stop there. Really glad to see this video and hope you stick with the puzzle genre and find some of the amazing games it has to offer.
Unfortunately even if people are capable of the game, they just won't always latch onto it. Some people just don't really like solving puzzles. I've dealt with that when it comes to Outer Wilds, which to me is a transcendental experience. And I've had to accept that some people just won't latch onto it. For me, I love puzzles. But I've found that I need *some* external motivation. Some reason to solve them beyond just the joy of solving them. Which is why I also bounce off a lot of precision platformers despite enjoying the genre. Many of them are just an endless string of levels with only the slightest nod to a narrative. And that's just not enough for me to want to stick with something. I was kind of lucky that Paquerette has her interactions with Opheline and the eventual revelations of the temple and other mysteries. It helped tremendously.
@@csidesummit Absolutely - they're certainly not for everyone! I suppose I'm exaggerating on purpose, just to encourage a few more people to push through that initial barrier - because some of them (perhaps even many), I think really would love these games and would start to feel more comfortable with the puzzle solving process. Also, you showed a few clips of A Monster's Expedition in your video - I'm curious if you tried it? I think it's a great example of a pretty pure sokoban game (it has some minor "external motivation") that is a) very approachable, b) has a deeper, extra challenging layer for people who want it, and c) has lots of great puzzles and surprises. Also, I'm with you - Outer Wilds is one of my favourite games ever.
@@JoePlaysPuzzleGames I did play Monster's Expedition but it was a WHILE ago. And I...may have returned it. So the footage there was only from the trailer, not the game itself. That would have been a good one to try if I hadn't already had Paquerette still in my library.
Sometimes I get existential about how many of the puzzle games I love are realistically only accessible to a tiny number of people. Is this how Dark Souls fans feel? At least puzzle games always have an easy mode built in, called "look at a walkthrough".
So that's going to be a yes and no situation. I think just about anyone *could* beat Dark Souls with enough time and experience, which I think is true of puzzle games. But Dark Souls can be finished without beating every challenge. Puzzle games have a habit of locking a 'true' ending behind extreme challenges that will probably frustrate even experienced players. And that's a good point regarding walkthroughs.
I usually quite any game when i run into a level or boss that softlocks me, where i know i cant continue because ive died way too much, and if i try again it just doesnt work. This is what i call the sispyhus softlock, where a level or boss makes you die over and over, and, you, despite trying and attempting to learn, still cannot win and cant move on. You cannot put the rock on the top of the hill no matter how much you try.
In the example of blocktales, everything was ok until i ran into the first boss, and it seems like that boss shows that the game seems to be literally broken and needs to be fixed a bit. Ive tried to learn and keep attempting to win but it still doesnt work. I find dodging in games extremely infuriating and this game was no exception. However most games show you the things you need to dodge, this game just makes you guess WHEN you need to dodge, no actual signs, which would help atleast. In the case of the boss, the attacks are too fast for you to guess when you need to dodge, and on top of that the damage dealt is unusually high then its soppused to, making the fight practically unfair. Theres an even worse enemy i still managed to beat, that has attacks so fast you cant manage to dodge it quickly most of the time, which is also unfair since the enemy kills you in literally 3-4 hits, similar to the boss. For ways to improve the game however, i would suggest they atleast add SOME signs, like atleast and alert noise that signifies when your supposed to dodge or almost supposed to, and to not make me crazy out of my mind they could make the boss less punishing by basically the number one thing that even made it unfair, the enormous amount of damage, compared to how much you deal, which i forgot to talk about. On top of all this, the game doesnt even have stats, or anything to remotely improve the damage you deal significantly. They only give you add ons that raise your damage by literally only 1, so your impossibly weak. They dont even give you any option of improving your weapons, and your supposed to kill all these op enemies and bosses while being this weak. Tldr; its almost always balancing thats breaks the game or not alot of options to atleast make you somewhat able to beat the boss atleast.
Another thing i also said that youtube really decided to delete, is that most games also make it seem like they dont actually WANT you to kill the boss, they make the bosses attacks and stuff super complicated, forcing you to always parry, or else you cant play (in the case of another game i love and hate, pilgrammed) Like dodging is something that REALLY ANGERS ME, because in my point of view, why do i need to always dodge everything, and why does the boss always have to keep on attacking with no end in sight? The game is telling me to kill them, yet.. its also not letting me. Its like the game is making hitting the boss always out of reach because you have to keep parrying, dodge that, dodge this.. At that point your not really even dodging the boss, your just doing everything but THAT, which is what you need to do. Its simply, overcomplicated. Overcomplicating kills many of the games i love. Heck to make things even more complicated and add more onto the punishment of dying which you literally cant avoid, theyll either make you walk to the boss each time and give you a bunch of dialogue you have to skip each time (as if to mock you really, also this example is from blocktales also) or A LITERAL GIANT ROUTE YOU NEED TO GO THROUGH JUST TO GET BACK TO WHERE THE BOSS IS (this example, believe it or not, is from cave story.. Ok, youll also probably mock me when i tell you this isnt even the actual game but a port of it to roblox.. so even a port of a game can make me tweak and go crazy. I mean i like yhe games soundtrack, but really.. making me do all this just because i died is unnecessary, its the first boss.. are you trying to ACTUALLY make me quit already??) Overcomplicating everything just NEEDS TO STOP in games.. like seriously its killing a game people would otherwise enjoy. Seriously stop it... I want to love your game, not hate it
Balancing is always a very difficult challenge in game design. I can't speak to Blocktales as I've never gotten into the Roblox scene. As I understand it, it's mostly player created content in the Roblox ecosystem. And if that's so, they'll probably be drawing on shorter resource pools for development. But , again, I have barely a surface level understanding. It's worth remembering that a game's difficulty is meant to create a challenge for players to overcome. But no challenge is universally interesting to all parties. If you're not enjoying the game, or something about the design is ruining it for you, you don't owe it your time.
Quitting permanently is why you don't get better. Your brain learns better once it has time to digest its experiences. A short break once you hit that wall can work wonders, and a good night's sleep is even more effective. Also, try playing games besides Roblox.
Thank you! I'm glad it was well received. I've planned to do this one for a while but have held off because I wasn't sure I had the skills to pull it off, yet.
Oh this seems like a cool video *explodes as I hear Void Stranger in the first 20 seconds* 8:55 Siffirin plush spotted. You have earned a subscriber The videos really good too obviously. I will binge other videos after this
6:07 this is always my issue with people claiming that a boss fights is too easy and wishing it was more difficult. Gandondorf fight in Twilight Princess? Took me two *hours* the first time I played (around 12 or 13 years old). Kingdom Hearts fight against Riku? Took me *14* tries and my brother cheered as much as I did when I finally beat it (I was 16). Lego games in general? I die constantly, multiple times in each level, even now at 20 years old, super mario wonder? I burn through lives like you wouldn't believe. I love video games, and I play a lot of them, but I'm inexplicably bad at them. Hearing people who are really good at games complain about them being too easy always stresses me out, cause I don't want them to be harder. I see this a lot woth family/kid oriented games, like the previously mentioned lego games. I was watching someone review the Skywalker saga and talk about how everything was "easy even for kids" while talking about something that took me several tries. I think content creators forget how good they are at games, and how many skilled people they surround themselves with lmao
Out of curiosity have you seen GMTK's video about difficulty, particularly with how Celeste handles it? There's a good bit of wisdom in there about how to handle accessibility options in games.
I'm not even bad at sokoban style games. I just lack the patience when the levels become so tedious that I need to take a break between each one, like the post game levels in Patrick's Parabox. I freely admit to looking up videos to see the "trick" that was required to beat some of them. Same with snakebird. I spent 2 days on the final level before just giving up and looking up a walkthrough to see I just needed to wiggle in this weird specific way.
The worst part for me in this genre is that you often have to restart the level if you make a single mistake. In many of these games you have to plan and execute your actions in a very specific way, leaving little room for error. I often got frustrated I had to redo the level for the umpteenth time, because after 9000 moves, I moved my character one step too far and now I have to start at the beginning again. Maybe this can really be compared to other genres like "hardcore" platformers. Celeste is a prime example where later stages require precision and can get really long. And if you do a single mistake, you have to start at the beginning again. The hardest levels of that game are optional and are not for everyone (well, anyone could use assist mode ,though). In my opinion the main part of a puzzle game should be accessible for everyone. They should introduce and teach mechanics in a way to prepare for what's to come. The hardest challenges should be reserved to optional areas.
Sokobans have a bad habit of presenting you with board after board without giving you any kind of break or reward between them. It doesn't surprise me that people burn out on them.
Many puzzles can be solved with enough dedication. But will process be fun for the player? When answer is "no", people say either "I'm dumb" or "game is dumb".
loved the video! I find baba is you to be really hard, but portal, and portal 2 where really easy, but not a bad easy, as there was challanges, but to see the solutions to the puzzles in portal, it didnt take long at all. I think they have a different set of challanges on them. In portal, the difficulty is in seeing the solution, but in baba, the diffuculty is in finding the solution. And i absolutely love puzzle games in general.
One of the criticisms I've heard leveled at Baba more than once is how convoluted the puzzles become as you progress. Which admittedly feels counter to the initial feel. My favorite level is Volcano because you can solve it in multiple different ways. That kind of goes away as the game progresses, unfortunately. Have you tried the recent pro mod for Portal2, Portal: Revolution? Personally I found several puzzles in there harder than in the official games.
@@csidesummit i dont know if i played it. Ive played a few portal mods and i dont remember which ones i did and which ones i didnt. Lol I will have to check it out.
@@matheus-pese It's pretty new. I think it came out February or March. Lots of original content. Voice actors. The works. Basically a home grown portal 3.
@@matheus-pese you've gotta play Portal Stories: Mel. If you want a great challenge, play on Advanced Mode, but otherwise save that for later/never and do Story Mode which is iirc still a bit harder than the Portal 2 base game.
It's funny that Void Stranger is your "sokoban I could finish" - because Void Stranger agrees with you that Sokoban puzzles are really hard. A lot of VS is the game encouraging you subtly to take shortcuts to make things easier on yourself - most of the game's puzzles can be cheesed or skipped if you know how. It's really unique among its peers, because it actively encourages you to "cheat" - VS doesn't necessarily care how good you are at its puzzles for 90% of its runtime, because progression in VS is based on testing the player's observation, memory, and willingness to experiment. In fact, there's several entire rooms in VS whose solutions are "this room is impossible, stop trying to solve it the normal way and figure something else out". Which is probably why the reviews and Steam discussions are full of impatient "bad at puzzle game" people convinced the game is too hard and too unfair and too tedious - people who are so focused on trying to prove they're smart that they've completely forgotten that in order to be smart, you have to prove you're willing to learn in the first place. This concept - neuroplasticity - is the reason for that "Brain Age" effect. Putting your brain in new situations, like a new book, new puzzle game, new anything - causes your brain to adjust itself to make new connections possible - improving your cognitive highways so you end up with less traffic jams. This is why people who "learn throughout their lives" tend to be at lower risk for dementia and alzheimers.
So, that's kind a misinterpretation of my Void Stranger experience. I didn't stop because it was too hard (though I was stuck on one puzzle for a damn long time). I stopped because I needed a video out that month and Void Stranger was looking to take far longer than I had to complete. SO the thing about Brain Age is less about whether Neuroplasticity is a thing and more about whether Brain Age's puzzles actually result in increased intelligence. There just isn't enough evidence that it really does.
@@csidesummit I guess I phrased it weird, because that's not what I meant. OTHER people stop with Void Stranger because of the difficulty. I thought it was ironic that you found VS to be easier than a lot of other sokobans. And yeah, Brain Age itself isn't a special game or anything. Brains just like being challenged by little puzzles or riddles in general
the only ways to fail puzzles, are to either give up or to brute force them, assuming they don't have a time limit, which, why would they? Even if the solution is not obvious at first, it will become clear if you simply give yourself enough time to think, and to try out different things.
My ADHD makes puzzle games almost impossible for me, as I neither have a built in reward system nor any ounce of patience or even any level of perception. If I get a puzzle right, my brain doesn't reward me with any happy chemicals that make doing the thing worth it. If it takes me longer than 10 minutes, my brain gets exhausted and can't focus. If it requires details that aren't pointed out even offhandedly beforehand, I will never process them as anything more than some background texture or something. I prefer games where knowledge and exploration is how you really progress. I can "study" how everything works on the wiki, and then apply it in practice. I don't like games that I inherently can't "study" for. I also am just an explorer at heart, and any impasse feels like I'm not actually supposed to be going in that direction, like an invisible wall so you don't walk off the map by accident.
So that's interesting to me. I haven't been diagnosed as having ADHD. However I have two friends who are diagnosed with it and *both* of them insist I should be tested for it (not sure what that entails). But it's worth noting that there's a bit difference between believing you're not smart enough to do something, and just straight up not enjoying them. If it's not a good fit, it's not a good fit. Out of curiosity what's your take on problem-style games? e.g. games where you're presented with a puzzle but with a series of tools to solve it instead of a single dominant strategy. Examples would be Magnum Opus or Satisfactory?
I was always baffled about why my friends and even people who were playing puzzle games would always talk about they were too dumb to be able to figure it out compared to me, but I never saw it as that but rather simply a lack of repeated and dedicated practice. So I would always tell them, after watching them solve other puzzles, that they are able to do it or whether or not they were on the right track. Often times, puzzle games are more like a form of practice tests to train yourself in developing a new ability, and over repeated practice with gradual increments in difficulty it would become an acquired skill. Much like how a musician becomes better at playing an instrument or how an artist gets better at drawing, it's really just a matter of practice and dedicating your time to it. And sometimes, especially when you're starting out with an ability that you aren't familiar with yet and have no background experience with something similar, you might need a helping hand to begin with. And it's perfectly okay to ask help, and even better to ask for the reasoning behind it, then try to replicate it yourself. It's like when you're a kid and learning basic arithmetic for the first time. You aren't born knowing it. You learn it by dedicating your time into practicing it when you're at school or doing homework. To me, doing puzzles is the same thing. Yes, it can be discouraging at first to you if you can't figure it out right there and then, but even when you were a kid and tried to learn math, you might not have understood it really well at first either. But if you keep practicing at it and get confirmation that you're on the right track, then you start to get better at it. Puzzle games are the same, in my opinion. I play escape room games often because they offer a variety of types of puzzles, which trains and tests you to use a variety of abilities, and in a way it is a great way to give yourself mini-tests in incremental difficulty in order to hone your skills. Because once you get the hang of it and notice the pattern of certain kinds of puzzles, over time with plenty of practice, you will become better at it. And even then, this can apply to any other genre too, like action games, FPS games, platformers, and so on. It's really all about dedicated practice, starting from the basics so that you have a foundation, and then building on top of it. Because you cannot build your house of knowledge if your floor is unstable. Nowadays, I wander around random streams on Twitch to watch people play certain escape room games and sometimes jump in to help them out or give them words of encouragement, because I notice everyone always talks about how they're too stupid to solve something. But I refuse to believe that, so I'll give pointers, vague hints and words of encouragement in order to help them build that ability and mindset over time in order to gain that confidence. Some of my close friends have started to ask me to teach them how to think and solve puzzles the way I do, so I had been playing co-op escape room games to teach them how certain puzzles work and give them practice with it. I really believe that, just like with any skill, it's all a matter of time, dedication and practice. No one is ever truly bad at a game as long as they put effort in. Even with disabilities, it may be a bit more of an obstacle depending on the type of game due to physical or mental disability, but it can be possible to figure out a workaround as long as said game or task has ways to accommodate for such disabilities, whether it is built-in accessibility features or the hardware itself or even approaching things from another angle. And I say this as someone with disabilities too. The amount of time, dedication and practice will be different for each person, but it doesn't mean that it's entirely impossible.
That's funny you mention escape rooms. I just did a stream with my friend Kim (she does ASMR video) playing Escape Simulator. They're a lot of fun to solve cooperatively.
@@csidesummit Yes! I was surprised too since I stumbled upon your stream while looking around to see who was playing Escape Simulator some time after watching this video of yours.
I got into sokoban games thru nethack actually. The classic, ascii, dungeon crawling roguelike has a little wing of the dungeon right at the end of the early game where... you solve sokoban puzzles. It's bizarre, it's curious, it's exactly in line with it's humour, I love it and it's arguably terrible game design. There, cuz it's nethack, you can cheat, using any one of a dozen different methods to bypass, break, move or create boulders to get past puzzles you cock up, but that just means you can't get locked out. What's nice about it is that I play nethack by getting really into it once every 6 months, and have for like, 10 years. So the small set of randomised and tricky puzzles (and a couple more in the variants) get to be seen with mostly fresh eyes. It's cute. I beat Void Strangers puzzles... pretty much without difficulty. Took me a little bit on some of the hard mode ones, I think I had to save and quit a couple times. (at least the sokoban ones, there are... other layers aswell I found a little trickier). Snakebird, on the other hand, was a game I found so hard I refunded it in 90 minutes. Then I bought it again and managed to get further but really come close to beating some of the puzzles. That one is... tight. Also quite sokoban-y. Grid based, turn based, positioning and locking yourself out.
Honestly, yeah... My main problem with puzzle games is that I can't make myself to try to solve level for more than 10 minutes. In most games you at least see hp bar going lower than before. In puzzle games you don't feel that you made any progress
That's actually a point the Jolie Menzel video addresses! One of the measures of difficulty for puzzles is 'how much feedback does the player get'. In Sokobans, you often have no idea if what you're doing is correct or not until you see if it works. But in Portal, your actions often have consequences you can learn from to correct your strategy. But you are right as far as a 'percentage done' bar goes. There's no such analog.
i remember i really hated tunics second half because its golden path puzzle felt like the most poorly designed thing i've ever played and a sharp departure from the things i found fun about the games first half. but now im maybe reconsidering if it was actually poorly designed or if i just basically rage quit and looked up the answer in a "how the fuck was i supposed to figure that out" and actually come to think of it, that's another thing that differentiates puzzle games from other games, its easier to ruin it for yourself if you quit, since in skill based games you can't just look up the answer and instantly win, but in puzzle games you can and then you lose the satisfaction of figuring it out for yourself
The only issue I had with Tunic was the traversal, and my own sense of direction. I'm really bad at navigating (or just never learned how to do it properly). So searching Tunic's world bit by bit trying to stumble on secrets, often re-treading ground or getting stuck in a location that was, as the crow flies, only a few feet from my goal, really frustrated me. The West Garden was an absolute nightmare for me.
I’d describe paquerette in a genre somewhere between drod and sokobon, and drod’s already more or less a sokobon, so it’s basically a sokobon. Sidenote, I really recommend playing a Drod game! the story is shockingly compelling.
2:50 Yes. Most of time after i "resolve" a puzzle i have no idea how exactly i did it, untill the puzzle become too complext for messing around by intution to work
I liken the 'intuition' approach to spamming buttons in a fighting game. It will get you through the early parts, but you haven't really learned how to play yet, and will lose the harderfights.
As a person who likes puzzle games but doesn't finish some I will say this: There are cases where the developer overshoots the mark, and it's a lot more of a brick wall when a puzzle is "too hard" than a boss. However, a lot of times the intention for a puzzle game really was to cap out at a higher skill level than your own.
It can be hard in any game to judge whether there's an error in development or on the player's part. The developer does have some responsibility there. THough that is often a qualitative judgment and one that really can't be left up to a majority rule.
Baba is you is one of my favorite games, but I'll admit it's really hard. I even had to look up the solutions to some levels. But the game has such creative puzzles, and it feels so rewarding to figure out the solutions
See, it just didn't feel that way after the first few areas. Once things got harder and I looked at solutions online, I started to feel like the game was tricking me, instead.
i don't have too much contribute, but i wanted to say im very glad to see void stranger mentioned and i think this mindset will be helpful for when i work up the courage to try out EX mode! i looked up a few puzzle solutions from various parts of the game simply because it felt like i had tried everything already, but only one or two really made me think "i would've never ever solved that on my own" while im sure EX will have plenty of puzzles that would make me think that, at least i can always take a break and come back to try different approaches
I hope it works for you, feel free to let me know! No theory is really proven until its been tested repeatedly, after all. And I wish you a lot of luck on EX mode. I...still have to find time to go back and finish the base game.
@@csidesummit it's definitely worth finishing! i took around 30 or 40 hours to get to the end (for realsies this time (probably)), though a good chunk of that time was spent looking for secrets, of which there are a ton! im still finding things, from dialogue to entire rooms or areas
Sorry about that! I finally figured it out. Apparently we had a short (really short, didn't even notice) power outage while I was recording and an alarm went off to let us know. Since I was in recording mode I didn't pick up on it but the microphone did.
it's also just that people are better than you at certain genres, or well, games as a whole. and hey, that's perfectly okay. you're unique in your own skillset. arin hanson from game grumps is renown for being truly godawful at tons of games, but in certain puzzle games like portal he blows past them and comes up with ideas in such a creative smooth way it just stuns me cause i know i'd have a drastically bigger struggle. it's just the way his brain works, it's very creative and it comes up with a lot of off-the-wall solutions. and honestly, that's perfectly fine. people will be better than you at things, and that doesn't make you any less of a person. i'm awesome the way i am.
Puzzle games are all about the ruleset. The concept is reaching an objective. Now there's two extra steps for it. And now these two rules are mixed and matched while the player combines their previous smaller actions in the head on the fly. Puzzles are like math exams, they just question if you can break down a problem into smaller steps and remember what those steps are. And we know nobody likes math. Most games rely on muscle memory or short-term tactics, people get good at Dark Souls because bosses use the same attacks over and over until you get the timing instinctively. But many puzzles don't tolerate mistakes. You need to write down a 120-step strategy that has no deviations, all in the head or on paper. And you can't work on an intermediate step because you need to see how it'll look like first. In RPG you can level grind. In a puzzle game you'll need to try every physically possible combination until something gets you further. If you've missed that some things can be combined in a certain way, you can't make progress. Sometimes a puzzle throws in a completely new combination and wonders if the player can even discover what it is. You've brought up Talos and I think it's a good research material. One of the early concepts is that if you have two Jammers, you can use both to hold gates and pass any objects through. Later puzzles expect that you understand that this is a thing and start using it as regular steps in larger puzzles. Most puzzles in Talos is something the player has done before and just needs to calculate the action order. I got stuck a lot of times in Talos 2 DLC because certain interactions between items weren't demonstrated before, so I had no reference to base my logic from. Sokoban puzzles also have some patterns the player can recognize. Like, don't push a block into a corner, or if you have three blocks in a row, you can push the edge ones to get the middle one out. But, they have fewer mechanics and a lot of steps. Like in Chess, it comes to player's ability to actively memorize which level state leads to which, the amount of which grows exponentially. Both cases aren't something the games explain explicitly. If the player can't piece together that certain actions will make them stuck 20 steps later, they also won't be able to make progress.
I played A LOT of games, and a lot of sokobons too. I think it is one of the most boring genres, and I love puzzles, BUT Void Stranger is my favourite game of all time. Void Stranger is first a Mistery game, then a Sokoban
As someone who doesn't like Puzzle games, this was an interesting watch. I never thought of the idea of "there's different sets of skills" to solve different kinds of puzzle games, but just like there are different subgenres of let's say, shooters, there are different sub genres of puzzle games. In other hand, thinking is hard and expensive and I don't play games to think and I absolutely despise when a game that isn't a puzzle game puts a puzzle right in front of me that I MUST solve to progress. So yeah I'm definitely too Dumb for puzzle games.
lol okay so I get it when the puzzle is very divorced from the rest of the gameplay. But most of the really good games will employ puzzle solving skills. Like builds in Dark Souls, for example. Or routing in precision platformers.
Puzzle game videos aren't really a way you should measure yourself: they show the puzzle, they struggle for a minute or two, then show you the puzzle finally being solved or at least a major progress at learning it. You don't see the struggle, the person solving them getting stumped and even putting the game down for a few days. I consider myself decent at puzzle games and I often take a while to figure out the solutions. Most people aren't too stupid for puzzle games, just take your time and play at your own pace, go play another game, you don't need to finish everything one go. Sometimes putting it away for a while and coming back with a different perspective really helps out.
8:56 Yooooo Siffrin plushie spotted! How did you like ISaT? Because it has become one of my favorite games in recent times. I consider it on of three siblings alongside Outer Wilds and Slay the Princess due to their themes and their core mechanic (and they're all games which have influenced my perspective on death, change, and moving on)
*deep breath* So I have such incredibly mixed feelings on ISAT. I would call it the best game I ever hated playing. The developer did an incredible job aligning the player experience with Siffrin's experience to the point where I was feeling just as desperate. They achieved what they set out to do. But damn was it a hard struggle at the end. ISAT almost became my shiny new game for December, but as I was trying to write the script it kept getting longer and longer and eventually I gave it up. I'm hoping to do story analysis videos in the future if I can make the time work. And if so I'll probably pick it up again.
@@csidesummit Yes! insertdisc5 did an amazing job at exactly what you described, which is why I personally love it so much. The way it incites so many emotions that tell you "that's exactly what the protagonist is feeling", from the tedious repetition to even calling itself out on how some abilities are easily forgotten (like Odile's quest skill), I love all of it
I'm proud of as much Baba is You I managed to complete on my own. I think had to look up solutions for only six or seven puzzles, but still what I could do without help I'm happy with. 😅
i proud myself in being intelligent and that may be the reason why i was drawn to puzzle games (and that sokoban was my first phone game other than snake) now i want to catch bunnies, but damn baba is you is hard, i think i got to the end but i definitely left a lot of puzzles unsolved, it still haunts me, it’s not that i think i’m dumb but it’s the itch that the game has defeated me (for now) as i also pride myself in defeating games
Something I probably should have addressed is that while no one is too dumb to do puzzle games, puzzle games *do* have varying levels of difficulty. Baba is You is one of the hardest available, and it sucks you in by seeming very easy and creativity driven at the start. Still, just having finished it at all is an achievement.
Yes, but I'm definetively NOT dumb enough to put the blame on the games for my own fallings I'd rather just learn and become smarter or just simply play something more fitting for my level
Nine sols was a great game, i too struggled for hours on the last part, nearly half just getting to phase 3 before taking a break. Its difficult to learn, but like all bosses, its completely consistant and readable to an extent.
The part I struggled with most was figuring out her opening attacks for 2nd and 3rd phase. Especially since the four-slash attack in phase 2 can be a one-move kill. Of course it also became the easiest one to deal with once I finally did get it down.
Obra Dinn is more of a riddle game, like the myst. It's kinda a spectrum, where obra dinn is on the far riddle side, the witness is 50/50 and sokoban is the far puzzle side. Examples of puzzle games are stephens sausage roll, beans and nothingness. Riddle games are obra dinn, outer wilds. I am not good at explaining so I hope you get it.
That really depends on whether you require a board and specific game positions to be a puzzle. The term itself originally had roots meaning to bewilder or perplex. A complicated problem. That still describes games like Obra Dinn and Outer Wilds, where you have to use information to reason out the required steps to reach success.
Excellent video, I absolutely loved it and you have earned a new sub ^^ I also would like to point out that, as opposed to some action game where you have to perfect your inputs until you play a fight flawlessly, puzzle games encourage you to vary your inputs, until you have something that works. If you just play the same way and expect that because you're getting better at entering the same inputs the puzzle will be solved, you'll be there for a while since, if a sries of input doesn't lead to the solution, it is necessarily (at least in a good chunk of puzzle games) the wrong series of inputs
Sorry I'm not completely following. I don't really see many games where you can just enter the same inputs and be as successful as the first time. At least not in anything good.
I don't remember exactly how I got into the puzzle games niche in the first place, and I certainly don't think I'm "just smart". After watching the video, I think I agree with your point, that I have simply developed the skills to enjoy those games. Even after playing many puzzle games, I still feel dumb in front of some of them, and that's okay. No one can say they are good at "puzzle games" in general, it is too broad of a term to make actual sense, so conversely, no one can really say they are bad at all puzzle games altogether. There are all kinds of different puzzle games that test completely different sets of skills, be it logical reasoning and spacial reasoning in games like Sokoban, or observation and inductive reasoning in detective games like Obra Dinn, or some truly unhinged shenanigans in games like Baba Is You. Some games have stories to keep you engaged, and some are more purely about appreciating emergent logical outcomes of a system. I admit that not everyone will enjoy puzzle games in the same way as I do, as many of the games I enjoy would surely seem like "solving puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles" to someone, and they would be right. But if you find "puzzles" enjoyable on their own in any capacity, then it is still too early to give up after failing to get into only some of them.
That's always the sticking point for me. I DO enjoy puzzles for the sake of solving them. But I won't enjoy solving 50+ puzzles without something more. Another side to that coin is how immersive puzzle solving is. Since abstraction is low where puzzle solving is concerned, immersion in the story can be significantly higher. Have you seen the burgeoning 'Metroidbrainia' genre? Because that feels like the next evolution of this concept.
@@csidesummit I won't deny that integrating story and things to create better immersion in puzzle games might help them reach wider audiences, and heaps upon heaps of puzzles without any embellishment does sound daunting even to me. Though for me, whether I enjoy a puzzle game or not still mainly hinges on the elegance in puzzle design, rather than that 'something more'. If you want an extreme example, SquishCraft and PortalSnake are games from the same developer who is known in the community to create games with excellent puzzle design while having intentionally horrible art. Yes, I'm well aware of the thriving genre of 'Metroidbrainia' (though not everyone agrees that it's a descriptive name), and have personally enjoyed them. The success of Animal Well certainly means that there is an audience out there craving for this kind of games, certainly a direction worth exploring imo.
What a great video!!! I feel like a lot of what you've said applies to other genres, and especially the learning curve for people who don't play games to get into games. Also love the Void Stranger mention!!!!!! Try finishing it sometime, the ending is phenomenal!!!!!
@@csidesummit I don't think it's really a label now tbh. Just at some point my brain stops working when it comes to puzzles and I hit an inpassible wall. Same with platformers and fights in games, so it's just general skill issue.
I would say I'm a puzzle game enjoyer. I have definitely given up on puzzle games in the past, but it's more about if it's grown boring/tedious or not. There's always a shiny new game coming out and I only have so much time after work + other responsibilities.
So in the Brett Taylor video, he talks about a drive to iterate on every permutation of a given concept. The goal being to exhaustively explore it. But he quickly came to realize that nobody liked that. I suspect a similar drive pushes other puzzle games to create overwhelming puzzle libraries, which isn't really necessary.
I love puzzle games, and I'm shit at them. But I've always viewed it in the same way I used to be shit at Souls-likes. There just are some puzzle games I haven't developed the skills for to solve them. With Souls-likes, it took bashing my head against Bloodborne before I 'got it'. And I've noticed a similar thing with other genres. I bounce of it, play a game where I suddenly 'got it', went back to the games that didn’t work for me, and ended up loving them. Never stop experimenting with genres you initially think aren't for you
I'd like either a list of games that were shown in the video in the description (or a document linked in the description) like GMTK does, or just having text pop up in the video itself when a game appears like Snoman does. Some of these games that are shown off but not directly talked about look cool, like that cartoony-style game with the buff skeleton named Ian or the pixel art game with the green wolf shooting bubbles at some gemstone/glass thingy boss with the spinny laser, but I have no way of finding what those games are
If I ever reach a point where I'm not rushing to finish my videos before the end of the month I might start doing that. For now, Ian is from Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands and the wolf is from Full Moon Rush.
@@csidesummit Thank you for those two. And yeah, that's understandable. I think the document idea could be the best for this then. Summoning Salt does something like that for the music and it seems like it'd be easier to implement than listing every game in the description every time
My problem with puzzle games is that my method of problem solving is _very_ non-liniar and outside the box. Can be useful irl! But having creative aproaches to games that have a predetermined specific solution? Not super helpful. E.g, I play most puzzle games by spending hours trying to carry out a crazy complicated solucion, usually to the point where I (after much suffering) eventually achieve the win. Then I'll watch someone _else_ play and realise there was an incrediblely simple, liniar solution staring me in the face that didnt remotely cross my mind! And _my_ solution was actually just me somehow brute forcing a win out of a completely unitended route. Makes me feel like most puzzle games for me are just wasting time working harder than I need too. I can very much see the appeal though!
I mean, even in puzzle games with set solutions, the existence of wildly different and almost-working unintended routes that can't be proven to be impossible easily are also widely considered as loose design. Tight design is where you want the player to discover a particular idea, so you restrict the puzzle in a clever way that it forces the idea you have in mind, but also not so restricted that the player could just brute-force the solution. But this does always result in 'linear' puzzle solving you are talking about, I find it just fine and personally even prefer it, but I can see that not everyone would like to 'be told how to solve puzzles'.
I love puzzles that use deductive reasoning and number puzzles, but i find almost all examples of these mind numbingly *easy*. I finish them in like a minute. I've come to believe that many game devs, from the most simple killer soduku collection to the most complicated murder mystery games, feel the need to dumb down the puzzles so those that aren't skilled in them don't get upset. Which leaves to an incredibly unfulfilling game to people who love them.
@csidesummit unfortunately not, and I've become quite suspicious of any game because of it. I haven't tried obra dinn, though, and this is the second time I've heard it mentioned so I might give it a shot
i am very good at pattern recognition, but the part of puzzle games where i need to learn the mechanics is so hard for me. i am so much better when i know exactly what the mechanics are and how to use them.
Hm...most of the puzzle games I play describe the mechanics in the tutorials. Do you have an example of one that doesn't? My first thought is 'rule discovery' games like Leap Year, where mechanics are taught through experimentation and observation.
It's Catharsis. Most people have probably heard Yahtzee's lectures on it for Souls and Soulslikes, but puzzle games brandish the purest resistance and catharsis in the entirety of video games. To beat a hard puzzle game is to aggrandize your own ego directly. Puzzle games offer little to no difficulty in execution, it's all purely in the mind. When you do beat a hard puzzle, there will have been no lucky AI, no RNG, nothing that can challenge the idea you were the one who succeeded. Unless it's a puzzle where it's possible to blindly run into the solution. Though a lot of puzzle games try to keep that possibility minimal. Due to this, puzzle games are also one of the most stressful genres in videogames. To be stuck is to be frustrated and the time you can be stuck in a puzzle game can potentially last forever. There is no guarantee things will click and no guarantee you will "git gud" unlike the manual dexterity training a hard boss can put you through. There is no feeling of progression when stuck in a puzzle game as there is nothing in the puzzle to build on, just where your own mind is stuck mentally. On the topic of fitting into puzzle games, I feel like one of the worst possible attitudes that will result in having a hard time is believing your brain will naturally intuit them somehow just by staring at the puzzle and its bare surface elements. Puzzle games require active thought. Heaps of it. They require focus, concentration, and your full mental load. Which is also why they make for awful streaming games. They're not a genre which can be offloaded to your muscle memory and instincts while talking to a chat or a future audience for a recorded video. As you point out, puzzle games have their own myriads of mechanics to learn. You have to learn them. They're not possible to ignore unlike something like magic or parries in a Souls game. This also flies in the face of any people who like going into things at their own flow. Some puzzle games are more free-form/open-ended, but the more pure ones. The ones that have a single solution and a single way to get there force the player into their flow. Arguably this is what a lot of people consider a strong point of the Souls games when a boss forces them to actually learn and adapt. There's a lot of similarities which is why you already made the Soulslike comparisons. As a guy who likes playing and beating hard puzzle games, my most major piece of advice which has almost always applied across literally all of them is work backwards. This rule is a lot less effective for more open-ended puzzle games or rule-hiding games like the Witness(when you do learn the rules, the puzzles however usually become blindingly simple by this method), but for the more pure and mechanically complex puzzle games, it works extremely well as often they are designed with extremely specific solutions in mind despite their wide range of options. Think of it like branching paths, instead of heading from the start and trying to divine which path is correct, look at the endpoint and look at the path backwards back to where you start. Baba is You is almost entirely this as despite the amount of puzzles and the sheer volatility of what you can do when changing the rules, the vast majority want you to understand simply one mechanic then figure out how to implement it. In that sense it's more of a rule hiding game actually. If you don't see how to work backwards then it means you don't know a mechanic and should be figuring out what it is. This would definitely apply to the original Prison/Jail puzzles which were very contentious in early versions of the game. Puzzle game devs want to teach, but also for the players have the sudden spark of realization or well catharsis. Balancing that is extremely difficult. A game I'm surprised to not see mentioned once in your video is Stephen's Sausage Roll though I understand why you might want to avoid it. It's probably one of the purest Sokobans out there with wide acclaim. Also one of the most difficult. However it's a very plain difficult that is very straightforward and good for teaching. Well until you get to the Tower which is where most people sink or swim, mostly sinking. I really do recommend you try it and even beat it. If you get past the first area, I can 100% say you have what it takes to beat the rest of the game. The Tower is really more a test of will to learn mechanics rather than an actually hard puzzle. Even if it's only a game on the side, I really do recommend it. Puzzle games are perfect for leaving and coming back to. Edit: There's also one final thing I want to add. There's nothing wrong with eventually giving up and just looking up the solution. While the instinct is to avoid it, even the most experienced puzzle gamers won't claim they've never looked a solution up at least once. I admit I have on occasion, rather I feel like most bigger puzzle games have exactly 1 puzzle where I end up doing it. The scope of puzzle games these days also allows for farther meta puzzles that go beyond what can be expected of normal people alone. It is incredibly helpful when you're inexperienced to actually look at a solution to something very difficult for you and actually work through it. Sometimes instead of just continuing on at 5 hours on a single puzzle, it's better to just give up and use the solution to help learn where the blindspots in your thinking are. You might lose a particular puzzle's catharsis and regret it after the fact, but there will be more puzzles in the future to stump you and the act of looking up a solution might broaden your mind in a way forcing yourself to eventually arrive at it blindly might not.
So, I didn't try Stephen's Sausage Roll because A) It looked abysmally hard and B) It just didn't pique my interest. I didn't see anything in the trailers that looked exciting. It kind of reminded me of chess puzzles. Yes, they're a challenge, but they don't feel very rewarding or interesting to complete.
@@csidesummit That is a mistake to assume. It is a very rewarding game when you get into it and I feel like you would start having fun like you were with Paquerette. Maybe I'm entirely wrong and you won't enjoy it all, not even a bit, but I sincerely do urge you give it a try eventually. Probably not now, maybe not even this year or the next, but please do keep it in the back of your mind. It is a puzzle game that sticks in the mind over other puzzle games for those that complete it over games like even Baba is You and the Witness and it is for a very good reason. What you describe is a very dismissive view that could be said of any hard puzzle game and it feels extremely early to say when you haven't tried it at all.
So I'm going off the trailer on Steam, screenshots, and footage I've seen from other videos on the subject. If I'm mistaken, it's because the advertising didn't tell me any different.
I never really considered myself a "puzzle guy." I mean, I played through Portal 1 and 2, but the great writing got me through that game more than a sense of accomplishment. But my curiosity was piqued at the meta-ness of Baba Is You, and with so many people recommending it, I just had to try it. Instead, after bumbling my way through a couple worlds, I bounced off hard. I figured I really just wasn't smart enough for puzzle games. Strategy games like Fire Emblem pushed me enough, this was too much! But hearing you talk about puzzle games (and about the difficulty of Baba Is You) is making me rethink using that particular game as a litmus test for my intelligence. Maybe I'll even check out Cocoon. Who knows!
Cocoon is really cool. If you liked Portal, you will probably gel with Cocoon, too. Though mind you I wasn't kidding about the story. There's something there, but figuring out what it is? No idea.
I rarely think of puzzle games as a test of intelligence and more a test of patience. I am not very patient when it comes to games. I am there to have fun, and being stuck is rarely fun.
Patience is often a requirement. Puzzles often lack the dopamine rush you might get from incremental progress. The kind you might get from hitting a new phase on a boss or getting a bit further in a platformer. There's rarely a sense of "I've almost got it!". Instead there's a revelatory moment where you just have it.
@@csidesummit Yeah 100%, look my Girlfriend loves puzzle games but for me there just isn't any catharsis or aha moment after I have been stuck on a hard one. It's either oh man that's so simple why didn't I see that earlier or How the fuck was I suppose to know that? Definitely one of those were it's love it or leave it. Imagine my dismay when I played Hellblade and discovered it was mostly a puzzle game. I do enjoy things like portal and the occasional puzzle in resident evil and the like, I even played through Hell taker, but yeah I know it's not for me.
I love the legend of Zelda twilight princess. I have 50 hours in it, the world, music and combat is perfect and its my favourite action RPG of all time. I haven't made it pass the water dungeon in 5 years. I think it goes against the game design to look up a walkthrough (even though I used it for those firefly levels) and maybe im just challenged mentally but I think its an interesting case. Revisit it every once in a while and hope to beat it before I die :) (actually I just realized I've struggled with puzzles my whole life from my first in Poptropica and most recent Portal, the only puzzle game I've beaten is pushmo world, after taking breaks the answer comes very easily to me)
If you're familiar with soulslike games, a common phenomenon is that if you're struggling with a boss, stop and come back the next day. The brain processes information even while you're not working on it and you often come back with improved insight.
To expand on your point that puzzle solving is a skill to learn rather than an indicator of intelligence, it really is a ton of skills. You have logical deduction, pattern recognition, creative thinking, perception, spatial reasoning, memorization, literary analysis, brute mental speed, and more. Strength in one does not imply strength in others, which is why every puzzle game may feel like it's starting from ground zero. Eventually, you'll transfer lessons and skills across puzzle games, but you really can only grow them with time spent on puzzle games. I agree that puzzle solving has very little to do with intelligence, but is instead a fun hobby that appeals to a lot of people deep down.
For most people, they just need the right starter puzzle game to get into the genre. Baba Is You and Paquerette are among the top 1% hardest puzzle games I've seen, so there's no shame in bouncing off either. Do consider returning after years and years of puzzle solving however! They are greatly rewarding once you're prepared. As for starter puzzle games, have you played Case of the Golden Idol? Excellent game, especially since you've enjoyed Obra Dinn.
As for sokobans, I've noticed that they often rely too heavily on brute mental speed than other skills. In my opinion, popular sokobans get popular despite their sokoban nature, not because of it.
You've also noticed that it's easier to get into solving mode if you're not talking haha. I also like to shut up and go into the think tank to solve some puzzles, and then cut out the silent thinking because nobody wants to watch me stare wordlessly at a screen. On average, my raw footage is 2x-3x longer than the edited video, take that as you will.
Great video!
Omg it's the guy who thinks aliens rock
Agreed! I usually prefer open world games (for some reason. Idk why cos I always get lost haha), but the right game to get into a new genre is insanely important. I don't play many different games, so I don't have too much experience on multiple styles, but I generally got a lot more interested in puzzle games after playing Baba Is You as my first proper one. I still haven't finished it after having it for at least 1½ - 2 years now, but I regularily revisit and taking a few months as breaks actually helps a lot. Upon revisiting, I sometimes manage to easily solve a level that I had been stuck on before. But of course, Baba Is You isn't for everyone. Especially as your first puzzle game since it is so hard can can be frustrating. I didn't even know it's considered one of the very hard games when I bought it, and in hindsight I definitely don't recommend people getting into puzzle games with Baba Is You as your first game. If I had known that Baba Is You is not a beginner kind of game, I probably would not have gotten it. But I didn't and I guess I was just lucky enough to not get discouraged by how hard it is😅.
Really enjoy your videos, btw :3
Would you mind sharing puzzle cases where literary analysis was important?
Thanks so much for your comment! Love your channel!
I have indeed played Case of the Golden Idol and it's one of my favorites. Really looking forward to the sequel. Investigation and logic games are hands-down my favorite genres. With pattern recognition being a close third.
@@thwartificer chants of sendar and tunic might be ones
Sometimes I'm playing a game and I have no idea how to progress, then I watch a walkthrough and go "I literally didn't even know that was a thing"
That's sometimes a development problem. You need to make sure, as a developer, that the player is either aware of what's possible or has adequate clues to realize it.
It's like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle but you don't realize you're missing pieces
@@k96man nah you aren't missing pieces. often you are only missing the fact that you can sort the pieces in a certain way that makes the solving easier. even for jigsaw puzzles there are techniques and guides that make solving them easier and faster. most people don't know them or only heard mentions of them.
@@dovos8572 I suppose I should have elaborated I was more venting my frustrations with Zelda like dungeon puzzles
Where it can sometimes be unclear if you're lacking an item or are simply overlooking something that's already in your inventory. Hence the missing puzzle piece
exactly! or i take a break for a few minutes, come back, and see something i didnt notice before that helps me progress!
i think it's also the fact that in normal games, you fail because of your mistakes in the moment: "i should've dodged sooner", "i should've jumped further", "i should've been quicker", and you fail when your mistakes pile up, you can still succeed by making mistakes, but in puzzle games, failing is the default state of being, you succeed by solving, aka finishing the puzzle, but as long as the puzzle is not solved, you are in a constant state of failure, and the longer it lingers the more frustrated you get, it's like playing a normal game, but it's just the feeling of you making mistakes repeatedly over and over again for as long as the puzzle takes
I can absolutely get that. But I do think the more you work with a given type of puzzle the better you get at figuring out where you made your mistake and spotting them in the future.
Good point. In combat-focused games you could barely beat a boss, or you can practice to a point you don't even get hit. Meanwhile in puzzles you get it right or you don't. You need exactly the right idea.
That said I had a lot of fun with Portal 1 & 2 because I'm pretty good with spatial stuff and it's also just a really fun experience inbetween.
@@SaHaRaSquad You know there's actually some debate over whether puzzle games should even be counted as video games. The reasoning being that since puzzles don't have an opposing force, only a problem in need of solving, they aren't actually 'games'.
I sometimes watch videos about ouzzle games and they usually say something like "this puzzle only took me five minutes." When i took half an hour to best the puzzle
Well keep in mind people doing puzzle games on stream probably have a massive skillset to draw on by that point. And sometimes things just click. I've definitely been on both sides of that.
There's also the inverse situation happening where you solved a puzzle in two minutes and the other guy is like, "this puzzle was just too hard and I hated it"
also they could just be lying about how quickly they did it
I think i'm just more used to failure on a skill-based environment. A hard boss in a video game may take me an hour at best to beat. A hard puzzle in a video game might take me upwards to 5 hours, and chances are, said game is fully packed with like 50 more of puzzles of this exact sort, and i just don't want that kind of time commitment
That's definitely an issue. I'm far more likely to bounce off puzzle games that endlessly iterate than games that have a story with reasonable start and end points. I really enjoyed Portal, Portal 2, and Portal: Revolution. But I never got into the fan-made content since I had no external reason to get into them.
I'm not dumb. My brain just isn't properly wired to solve complex situations. I'm really good at memorizing small pieces of information, so I'm fantastic at simplistic situations, but too many steps and my mind melts.
I like simple puzzle games that don't demand you write down every little detail on a notebook or file and spend days, weeks, even months trying to figure out the game. Totally not me trying to play La Mulana.
And the way you get your brain wired is by exposing yourself to these games. Practice, proper practice makes perfect
I see it more as a convolution issue. A puzzle with multiple facets is interesting. A puzzle where you have to perform sixteen steps in sequence just to push a box to the left is kind of tedious. But of course everyone's threshold is going to be different and some will thrive.
That said, I do think over time you can build your skill in that regard. Pushing boundaries is always difficult, but if it's something you want to be able to do, it's probably achievable.
@@freshlymemed5680 Oh yes I have heard of La Mulana and do not have it on my steam library collecting dust because I hated the jumping mechanic so much.
@@swordzanderson5352 Personally I prefer Practice makes Progress.
I'd say probably 60-70% of the difficulty of most puzzle games is that they're designed in ways that make thinking hard. We've evolved to be experimental and social thinkers, we need to get hands on with problems, and we need to talk about problems. There's the famous idea in programming of the rubber duck, where you realise the solution to your problem just by telling someone else what the problem is. Most puzzle games though are games where you stare at a screen for half an hour while listening to someone talk about how sokobans are bad. Thesis statement: We need more multiplayer puzzle games, and we need more open-ended puzzle games that work like something like Factorio where there are many routes to success and you discover them via incremental experimentation.
And with *actual* multiplayer, not the "multi"player Islands of Insight have. God the "multi"player in there basically just boils down to "hey look at what I'm struggling with! You can't help me with the puzzle, but you can give me some sympathy!"
I actually loved the multiplayer levels for Portal 2, and do wish I could see more of them. I'm trying to convince some of my streaming friends to do the "We Were Here" series with me. Or some other similar type.
Silent sympathy only ;_;
Are you sure about that? Rubber duck debugging method works, but it isn't effective for everybody. I prefer being completely solitary when working on difficult problems (and writing code for that matter), and most of the "social" methods for improvement were either neutral or negative on my productivity, as they often require to re-focus on something which isn't directly related to my work.
I find much more success by simple repetition, like when debugging my approach is to remind myself of the system i am working on in it's entirety to understand why specially i arrived at the problem, locate the issue and find out how it clashes with my current approach and come up with a solution to either alter the system itself or problematic element of it.
I spend a lot of my free time playing puzzle games, so probably I am not too bad at them, but I'm very slow to catch up with other people's ideas and am very useless whenever I have to work with someone on a problem...
As a puzzle game maker, I have seen such a wide range of solving speeds depending on the person. Just today someone got to level 12 in my game in about 10 minutes which took some other players 40 minutes
It's weird how that works, isn't it? Good luck with your game, btw!
As another game developer I'd like to point out that the specific genre of the box pushing puzzles falls into a category I like to call punishing. That's basically where making a mistake is very costly to the overall experience and for that reason I'm guessing that particular genre isn't feeling as comfortable. You can help correct this problem by ensuring that people can basically undo a certain number of steps so that if they accidentally push the box into the wrong spot at the last moment because their finger twitched it doesn't mean they have to start over again. I would say that particular genre also suffers from just being boring because let's face it what you learn a couple of the basic mechanics it's the exact same puzzle over and over again with slightly different configurations. I'll be honest and this is not a bragging point I did not know that this was a genre. I have put these puzzles into games before, but I've never been aware of the fact that you could make an entire game centered solely around that mechanic. But to the larger question I agree that being too dumb for a puzzle game is not something that should come up very often, rather there are people who aren't patient or tenacious enough for a puzzle game. Often there's just a handful of tricks and logic steps you need to know and then it's like you don't even need to think anymore.
Games in general need to strike a balance between teaching the player and letting them discover, and I think that's a very difficult thing to accomplish- which is partially why it's easy to jump to "this part is just badly designed", because it feels as if the games teaching has failed to prepare you- after all, you learned enough to get to that point, right? And the harder a game is, the more this matters. A simple game can have little instruction, trusting the player to intuit new concepts by simply iterating off of what was previously learned.
Incredibly hard to balance. And honestly very hard to determine from just playing it whether the design was bad or not. Particularly if a game is experimenting with pushing boundaries.
yeah no, aliensrock is insanely good at puzzles, don't feel bad for being worse than him.
I really shouldn't compare myself to someone who's been doing this kind of thing on a professional level for as long as he has.
I kinda had this experience as well, I failed a ton at Baba Is You, Paquarette, and Patrick’s Parabox and resorted to just getting my enjoyment through Aliensrock and Icely Puzzles. But then recently I came back to sokobons in a way I decided to not watch from TH-cam by doing Baba Is You’s New Adventures Campaign and almost finishing it with only 2 levels left before stopping and some of the baba is you creator’s games which I was able to beat. But I never really connected the lines of I was doing better and chalked it all up to them just being easy, but I guess now I see I just improved at the games with patience
Improvement can be hard to measure. Especially in the gaming world where opinions on difficulty are so incredibly varied. But if you succeed where you once failed, that's improvement. Regardless.
Clicked on this video because I enjoy hearing people talking about puzzle games. And then I learned the Baba is You is a Sokoban, something I had never considered before, and now that's all I can think about. Fun video :)
The genre is infectious, I swear. But it makes so much sense. The simplest designs are the easiest to iterate on, and it doesn't get simpler than Sokoban without being Pong.
The biggest turnoff for me is the massive amount of time "wasted" trying to solve one puzzle for a half hour+... It's a hard sell spending all that time bashing my head against a wall, with zero acknowledgement from the game for my effort, vs just looking up the solution and finally moving on to something new. I understand that that's the Point of a puzzle, but most of the time there is nothing engaging outside of progression so it gets monotonous quick. =/
I do get that. It's not like a tough boss where you might get a bit further each time. The thing is, I think you *are* getting a bit better each time you run through it, but the feedback isn't as easy to tell.
i'm personally dogshit at any game but puzzle and mystery games, so the idea that people think they're dumb because they can't get the hang of puzzle games baffles me a bit. i can never figure out the strategy to boss fights or managing health or doing any kind of timing, it's all so chaotic and unpredictable to me compared to the steady rhythm of puzzles and mysteries. i've always considered myself "not a true gamer" because i can never get the hang of the skills needed to play the more well known and beloved games, and considered my puzzles easy games and mysteries as nothing more than visual novels, i never knew the people i look up to as the "superior gamers" could ever look at me and see some sorts of freak genius who can solve the impossible puzzles they're "too stupid' to get.
we all see each other as better than each other because we have different skill sets, which is kinda fascinating actually
That really goes to show how diverse gaming skillsets are, doesn't it? In my experience anyone claiming someone is not a true gamer is, 99% of the time, gatekeeping for their own ego. If you enjoy playing games, you're a gamer. Though I do think some games have quality issues, that's not reflective on the person playing them.
My reasoning: I am bad at puzzle games because I don't know the tropes of a puzzle game.
In a roleplaying game, if a boss is too hard, you could grind out some levels and the boss will be easier for you. You know that if you play roleplaying games. How often is that true? Even if a game is advertised as "you can finish the game without needing to grind," the option is still there, even if it's never explicitly advertised to you.
If you don't know roleplaying games, if a boss is too hard, you might just give up on the spot and say the boss is too hard. The idea of grinding out levels is something you're not aware of, never playing roleplaying games, so without another option, you just quit the game right there and then.
In platforming games, a differently colored wall containing a secret is such a trope, spread among many platforming games. You're not explicitly told, but if you know about it in one game, you can find them in other games too.
To me, that is puzzle games. Surely there must be puzzle tropes that I'm not aware of, and if I knew those tropes, I could apply them to other puzzle games. But with the lack of knowledge of these genre tropes, I can't even come up with the simplest solutions. Do I have examples? No, because I don't know the tropes.
Still, I'm sure that's why I'm worse at puzzle games than at other games.
Puzzle games do have an analog to grinding in an RPG, its "hints", if a puzzle game has a built in hint system, then USE IT! If it doesnt, then you can google it. But just like grinding in an rpg, you should only use it as a last resort, otherwise it will spoil the fun.
That *could* be the case. The thing is while we classify a large group of games under 'puzzle' they often have very VERY different central mechanics. Like my issue in the video was finding Sokobans so very different from what I was used to that I dropped them quickly. So Sokobans definitely have certain insights. Among them being "A box against a wall can only move in two directions" and "a box in a corner is functionally dead". But these won't be of any use in a more engineering-themed puzzle game like Talos Principle or Portal.
I think it's more that there are no qualitative values in puzzles like RPG levels and no mechanical skills to practice like in...everything else. Your practice is in thinking about it and learning about it.
Can of Wormholes has a very good in-game hint system that i encourage the use of, if you ever want to/have the time to return to it. the hints are actually playable levels, smaller and more straightforward versions of the actual level designed to impart the "hook" or "insight" of the puzzle, without just showing you outright. puzzle games do necessarily rewire your brain in possibly difficult or backwards ways, but systems like these can make that easier, if you're willing to swallow your pride. no-one has to know, right? haha
I did find that system, and it's very well done. But I hit that one near the end of my first attempt at sokobans and was getting increasingly frustrated with them. There's a reason there's so little footage from it in this video.
YO SOMEONE TALKING ABOUT PAQUARETTE
I felt it deserved talking about.
@@csidesummit *HOORAY.*
aliensrock did a series on it, if you're interested in watching someone play through it
@@tylerdarlington4269 Personally I'm going to hold off in case I get the chance to go back to Paquerette.
@@tylerdarlington4269 yeah I watched it, it was a really good series
This isn't just how it works for puzzle games. This is how it works for any type of intelligence. You aren't too dumb for anything. You can learn anything you want to, if you find the right starting point and have enough patience.
Many people are, in fact, too dumb for things. Nature doesn't care about people, and has no reason to make them all have the same potential. Most criminals are **actually** too stupid to truly understand what consequences their actions will actually have, for example.
That said, willpower/self-discipline is different from intelligence, and is quite important for being able to put in the practice to get truly good at something. A very bright person who has no motivation won't often amount to much, but a person of reasonable intelligence with a good amount of willpower can usually achieve much more. So while everyone has their limits, most decent people can do pretty well if they put in the practice.
All true. But I think it's still important to point out and demonstrate. I had this issue when I wanted to learn to draw, a sense for decades that drawing was an innate trait I hadn't been born with.
No, stop spreading nonsense. Intelligence is determined genetically and everything relates to g-factor.
All the evidence is published for anyone to read.
@@leonardofernandez6488your starting point is determined genetically. Where you go from there, it's up to you.
If you care about studies, you can surely find the studies showing how practice affects intelligence, it's probably easier to test for than finding "the gene" for intelligence.
The brain is like a muscle. Of course some people are naturally stronger than others, but that can change depending on if they work out or not. All skills are like that. That isn't denying that fact that people have different natural skills, it's just that skills need to be practiced.
@@key37raminus it's not "starting point". Intelligence (or more generally a talent, it's not just about IQ) is not just your base stat (I'm RPG terms).
It's also multiplier for everything, and a ceiling for all your various skills. There's only so much one can compensate with more work. I've seen so many people wasting hours of work every day trying to get great at something and never succeeding. You need to realize your weaknesses and find your strengths.
sokoban is a Japanese title that translates to roughly "warehouse duty". i feel like it's become such a well-known word/game that it barely registers as having meaning so i just wanted to share a fun fact
Indeed! I had that in my video originally but cut it because it didn't really flow well with the rest. I have to wonder if in Japan they use the same term for the genre.
"Meet pack rat."
What a weird name.
"Her name means daisy."
Ah, pâquerette.
Hey I'm doing my best to mimic the way it's pronounced. I have neither time nor money for language coaching.
@@csidesummit I was just teasing you mate. Of course I don't expect anyone to perfectly pronounce every language.
Also the following ones were much better.
It's not my fault they just make the puzzles more and more complicated until it's not fun anymore, until it starts feeling like homework not just trying to think outside the box
If it's not fun, it's not fun. I doubt I'll go back to Baba for that reason. Later levels really abandon the 'look at the cool solutions you can make' attitude of the start in favor of "proceed to step 18 page 2 subset 4C"
@@csidesummit harder and more complicated are two different things, it's like that scene in inception you can make the hardest maze in the world not because there is anything clever about it but because it would take months to complete.
Hard puzzles are fun because you feel rewarded just for completing them, complicated puzzles just make you feel nothing or even tired
@@acacacacacacaccaca7666 Absolutely. I touched on that when talking about the way developers tend to strip down and simplify puzzles. Or at least that's something they're supposed to be doing.
@@csidesummit The Talos Principle series has a number of very elegant hard puzzles which I adore, with "Metathesis" from Into the Abyss being a pinnacles of this design.
well that’s subjective, but I understand the feeling. I don’t enjoy the challenge of most action games, it feels too overwhelming, but I love when puzzles are complicated because unraveling them is fun for me
I encounter this exact problem with rhythm games and my friends. They refuse to play rhythm games because they think they are not "good at them." When I tell them it's a skill built over time, not something you can just pick up in a few minutes, they still end up hating the games because they can't beat me. I explain that I'm good because I've played this exact rhythm game with the same mechanics for around 4-6 years, so they shouldn't feel discouraged.
Ah yes. You are 'that guy'. The guy who loved a multiplayer game so much they became too good at them. Too good to be a proper introduction for new players. We've all found ourselves in that place. I used to try to persuade my brother to play Street Fighter II with me by letting him pick my character. I still won. -_-
I feel like the difference is that for most of us (non top players) rhythm games are a battle against the self, so seeing people I try to get into them compare themselves to me makes no sense.
But it's not just that. Musical skills are a great comparison. Some people are born to be great at this, some not and even lots of practice won't make them great musicians. Yes, it's a skill you learn, but your talent determines both how hard it will be and how far you can reach. I think it's the same with puzzle games.
I’m not too dumb for puzzle games, just too impatient.
Equally valid!
19:28 "There's no deductions". Actually, Obra Dinn is the one without deductions and Sokobans are the ones with deductions. Deductions are logically forced consequences. Obra Dinn uses abductive reasoning.
*grumbles* audience making me look things up *grumbles*
So a quick look on Merriam Webster showed me a more refined definition of deductive, abductive, and inductive reasoning. But it also said that "Deduction" is generally defined as "The deriving of a conclusion by reasoning". Which I'm interpreting as similar to the general vs scientific definitions of 'theory'. Where one means a general idea and the other means a hypothesis which has withstood multiple rounds of testing.
ive 100%'d moonleap and linelight and have gotten pretty far on no anglerfish
and yet, i cannot shake the feeling that "puzzle games are just not for me"
i have dropped: talos principle, witness, baba, catway domino, death drives a bus, frog fractions 2, etc...
thank you for this video
So there's a big difference between feeling like you can't do puzzles and simply not finding them fun. You're probably right, and they're just not for you. Nothing wrong with that. :)
If you can be persuaded, get back to void stranger at some point, it's a game worth finishing.
I will someday...even if it ends up being the first thing I do when I retire.
Solstice was really hard also. I watched a playthrough on youtube recently. So much stuff to memorize ...
I think something you said at the beginning really unlocks the whole reason a lot of people don't like puzzle games. In order to be good at them you have to figure out the process the game wants you to use to solve it. In the case of sokoban block pushers, you HAVE to work backwards from the solution. If you prefer to experiment until things become clear, that approach just does not work and I have run into that wall myself.
Are you sure that's always the case, though? In Baba I could not envision how the solution would look in the more advanced puzzles. And in the early puzzles more than one solution was viable. Paquerette was a bit more forgiving. Even though you weren't given a pre-determined spot, you could use clues to figure out where a spot might be.
@@csidesummit Sometimes you do need to experiment just to figure out how things work and discover the nuances of a puzzle, but then you have to put all those disparate pieces together and form a plan, especially later on when things start to get more complex. That's usually when I end up giving up, when I can no longer just kind of go "I have a good idea of how this works" and wing it until I get it
Oh, also to add: as someone who loves writing and hosting quizzes, the 'make it easier' principle applies there too. The most rookie mistake people make when writing a quiz is trying to make it as hard as possible, except nobody knows THAT much general knowledge. My target is always a round where people on average get 5-7/10; and I like to start and finish each round on a gimmie. Then you have to think about your quiz audience, and what areas of general knowledge they might have stumbled upon at all; and I also really like to shoot for questions that at least let you make an educatd guess if you don't know for sure.
I've started working on a homemade RPG system based on puzzle solving and I suspect I'm going to have to take that to heart.
Are you aware of Ceave's new channel Ceave Perspective? He's been posting a long video essay there every month or two and they are phenomenal.
I wasn't before doing this video. I have since been made aware.
As much as i enjoy the idea of "it's aquired taste" or that "You got to give it time" that still does not explain Baba's insane small number of people that have beaten it.
So it's not really meant to. It's only to help people get past the sense of "I can't do this" that often hits early on. Baba's final levels are an insane challenge irrespective of skill or interest. Those levels are meant to be massive challenges for people wanting to demonstrate complete mastery.
I think part of it could be that Baba is You acquired a much broader player base than most of the rest of these games. I had no idea this genre had a name and had never heard of any of the rest of these games, but I've seen a lot about Baba is You. But that's just a theory based on the vides I've gotten. I haven't looked up the hard data to back it up.
What explains that number is interest, & intelligence. 1/30th of the people that bought the game had enough of both to see it through. Its ok that the other 29/30 didn’t, they should do what interests them.
I know I sometimes struggle at puzzle games, but then I remember something: “everyone needs a hint sometimes, and we’re not playing this game to prove something. We’re playing to enjoy the game.” There’s no shame in struggling, and if you want to get better at puzzle games, all the power to you, but don’t feel like, because you’re struggling, you’re not smart enough for it. Everyone’s smart at something, and no one is skillful in every topic or skill.
Indeed!
The funny thing is that I have had 100% all the games that he originally gave up on and i gave up on the one he played
Even Cats love Boxes?
if you didn't know, ceave is making fairly consistent long-form videos on his other channel "ceave perspective"
Thank you so much! All this time I'd been a fan of his and the algorithm never suggested him!
@@csidesummit wow that's a shame! The algorithm sucks. The new stuff is some of his best yet.
Another issue with puzzle games is that, by their nature, they need to obscure the solution. If you compare it to something like a rhythm game, the rhythm game tells you exactly what you need to do and when you need to do it. If you fail at a rhythm game, you just need to do the thing the game is telling you to do more accurately.
Meanwhile, if you fail at a puzzle game you can feel completely stuck. I had this experience with Stephen’s Sausage roll. I got stuck on a puzzle where I could have sworn that I had tried brute forcing every possible combination of button presses, but I still wasn’t making progress. I put the game down for something like three years. When I came back to it, I once again got stuck on the same puzzle, but this time only for an hour or two. Somehow I found a solution that my previous brain could not conceive of at all.
Puzzle games often ask players to “think outside the box.” But sometimes players just get plain stuck. Many puzzle games try to get players out by letting them complete alternative puzzles or giving them hints, but you can’t do too much of that without letting the game lose its tension. Plus, as you say, some players will just sit there stuck forever because they don’t want to feel stupid.
Acquired taste is such a good way to explain why playing new games is hard if you've never played anything like it before 😅
Right? That comparison kind of hit me while writing it. Sometimes we get so used to doing things a certain way, or things feeling a certain way, and when we aren't presented with that it can feel so uncomfortable as to seem poorly designed.
The frustrating part of a puzzle game isn't being stuck on a puzzle. It's the subtext that I'm not *supposed* to be stuck on it. Other people play through the game and complain about how easy it was. The game doesn't let you progress without finishing this puzzle. And yet, here you are, bashing your brain on this one little section of the game you can't get past when, seemingly, you can do everything else. It's like failing on the opening section of Through the Fire and Flames for the 30th straight time and saying "but I can play everything else in the game, and I bet I can play the rest of THIS song, too, if I could just get past the beginning where they don't give me any freaking star power and I have to use a skill I've legit never used anywhere else!"
The difference is that if Guitar Hero 3 were a puzzle game, you would not, in fact, be able to play the rest of the song. You'd just get stuck on another part.
I don't think the subtext is really that you're not 'supposed' to be stuck. Yes, you have to finish it to progress, but the same is true for most games. Precision platformers sometimes work around this by letting you skip a certain number of levels, but sooner or later you will hit a roadblock you have to push through. Not to drag Dark Souls back in but Ornstein and Smough basically block the second half of the game until you prove you can beat them. Hitting roadblocks and brick walls is part of any game going for challenge.
I have played through quite a big part of void stranger, then gotten stuck at a later part and I havent touched the game since, I really want to play it because the depths void stranger has seem so intressting and unique, at the same time I lack the skill to solve the puzzels and that keeps me from going deeper into the game without looking up guides....and looking up said guide for void stranger just made my jaw drop...so many steps and moves in that exact order to solve 1 level! your video really brought home the kind of emotion I am feeling with Sakoban puzzels I might try void stranger agin or I might just go for a video essay explaining it...atleast I found somthing cool not many people know...sorry for the rambeling just wanted to put my thoughts down about all of this...uhh whoever reads this have a nice day ^^
Despite my rules for Paquerette, I don't consider it wrong to look up solutions if needed. Sometimes we just don't grok what the developer intended. That can be on them, or it can be on us. I only ask that when it's done, take time to think about why it worked. It might be useful in the future.
Paquarete is the first puzzle game that really hurt my ego. So I sat down and 100% the whole game without (major) guides in about 1-2 months. I only used a spreadsheet made by the community that shows what baby bunnies are possible.
Well played, friend!
I had such a different experience with Cocoon. it felt like a walking simulator to me, where all the puzzle solutions were pretty obvious for me to understand the solution, but actually going through the motions to solve the puzzles felt tedious and slow and really dragged the game down for me.
That did happen to me on a couple of puzzles, too. Where I just put the ball on the first thing I saw and that turned out to be the correct one. But I did have a few I had to stop and think about.
Question: Am I too dumb for puzzle games?
Me: **nods his head until he get's whiplash**
Well now I think I know what my next poll will be...
Pokemon suddenly makes so much sense. The strength puzzles in most games are sokubans. And pokemon x and y even has a Paquerette like puzzle where you have to catch a Furfrou based on the same rules as Paquerette.
The puzzles are of course much simpler then actual sokuban games but still, I had no idea that those puzzles in pokemon are a whole genre of puzzle games.
Neither did I until Void Stranger came out. It does make me wonder what other hidden corners of the gaming world are out there.
Great video! Wonderful to see more people making thoughtful content about puzzle games. And I'm glad your premise of "maybe they're just badly designed" didn't stick until the end of the video - I was scared!
I only got deeply into the puzzle space in around 2016, and now puzzle games are pretty much all I play. It sounds like we actually had a similar experience, trying some games and not really getting it, but then revisiting them and realising that I was starting to _get_ them. For me, that game was Stephen's Sausage Roll, which is known for being a particularly hard Sokoban game. I played it once and bounced off it because I just found it impenetrable and uncomfortable. But later I returned to it and could actually _feel_ my mentality around Sokoban games changing. Now I play so many Sokoban games (and have created some of my own), and absolutely love them.
I loved your observation that puzzle games are just challenging you on something different than you're used to. It's one of the problems of lumping all of these activities under "playing video games", when playing different games can be very different activities. It's easy to see how going from a difficult action RPG to a puzzle game can make you feel like "wait, but I'm not bad at video games! this video game must be bad!", when the reality is that it's like you've switched from archery to gymnastics and are beating yourself up for "not getting it". They're just totally different things.
In fact, the fact that puzzle games were offering something different is what drew me to them in the first place. I was pretty tired of games that were just challenging me to do the same things I'd done a million times before - sure, with slightly different systems or narrative around them, but they're still just asking me to smash buttons quickly, manage my health, etc. Puzzle games had this strange property that each and every game felt like it was offering a completely new experience.
However, that's not entirely true. It's not like I'm starting from scratch with each puzzle game. In fact, I think it only felt like that at the start because of how new I was to the genre. As with any other genre, there are skills that you build up over time and help you become more comfortable with the genre as a whole. With puzzle games, it's not dexterity or timing or the ability to perform under pressure, but its your reasoning skills, observations skills, your ability to identify patterns and problem solve. However, I'd still say that something feels fundamentally "new" when solving puzzles in one game compared to another, in a way that I don't get from other games. Even when there are common skills across games, I'm still constantly surprised and delighted by the ways in which I have to apply those skills and the fascinating systems I have to apply them to.
One of the tricky things with getting into puzzle games, as some of your other commenters have already highlighted, is that sometimes puzzles can get more complicated just by being more convoluted. This is generally not considered good design, but when you aren't super experienced with puzzle games, it can be really hard to tell the difference between "difficult in a good way" and "difficult in a bad way". In fact, even now after years of playing them, I have times where I _think_ a puzzle is badly designed only to later realise that I just missed some key insight. Getting over this requires placing trust in the designer and, occasionally (but not often, in my experience), having that trust broken sometimes. This is not really any different to any other genre though - like a platformer can get difficult by presenting interesting dexterity challenges, or it can get difficult by randomly spawning enemies that will get in your way.
Also, as you said in your video, it's really common to see people being self-defeatist about puzzle games, and we can already see it in some of the other comments here! I wish there were some really easy way to show that they _can_ become both better and more comfortable at puzzle games (and will even start to love them!) with a bit of perseverance and self-belief. Like seriously, that's all it takes! And there are truly some amazing games to play.
Anyway, there's so much more to say on this topic, but I'll stop there. Really glad to see this video and hope you stick with the puzzle genre and find some of the amazing games it has to offer.
Unfortunately even if people are capable of the game, they just won't always latch onto it. Some people just don't really like solving puzzles. I've dealt with that when it comes to Outer Wilds, which to me is a transcendental experience. And I've had to accept that some people just won't latch onto it.
For me, I love puzzles. But I've found that I need *some* external motivation. Some reason to solve them beyond just the joy of solving them. Which is why I also bounce off a lot of precision platformers despite enjoying the genre. Many of them are just an endless string of levels with only the slightest nod to a narrative. And that's just not enough for me to want to stick with something. I was kind of lucky that Paquerette has her interactions with Opheline and the eventual revelations of the temple and other mysteries. It helped tremendously.
@@csidesummit Absolutely - they're certainly not for everyone! I suppose I'm exaggerating on purpose, just to encourage a few more people to push through that initial barrier - because some of them (perhaps even many), I think really would love these games and would start to feel more comfortable with the puzzle solving process.
Also, you showed a few clips of A Monster's Expedition in your video - I'm curious if you tried it? I think it's a great example of a pretty pure sokoban game (it has some minor "external motivation") that is a) very approachable, b) has a deeper, extra challenging layer for people who want it, and c) has lots of great puzzles and surprises.
Also, I'm with you - Outer Wilds is one of my favourite games ever.
@@JoePlaysPuzzleGames I did play Monster's Expedition but it was a WHILE ago. And I...may have returned it. So the footage there was only from the trailer, not the game itself. That would have been a good one to try if I hadn't already had Paquerette still in my library.
Sometimes I get existential about how many of the puzzle games I love are realistically only accessible to a tiny number of people. Is this how Dark Souls fans feel? At least puzzle games always have an easy mode built in, called "look at a walkthrough".
So that's going to be a yes and no situation. I think just about anyone *could* beat Dark Souls with enough time and experience, which I think is true of puzzle games. But Dark Souls can be finished without beating every challenge. Puzzle games have a habit of locking a 'true' ending behind extreme challenges that will probably frustrate even experienced players.
And that's a good point regarding walkthroughs.
I usually quite any game when i run into a level or boss that softlocks me, where i know i cant continue because ive died way too much, and if i try again it just doesnt work.
This is what i call the sispyhus softlock, where a level or boss makes you die over and over, and, you, despite trying and attempting to learn, still cannot win and cant move on. You cannot put the rock on the top of the hill no matter how much you try.
In the example of blocktales, everything was ok until i ran into the first boss, and it seems like that boss shows that the game seems to be literally broken and needs to be fixed a bit. Ive tried to learn and keep attempting to win but it still doesnt work. I find dodging in games extremely infuriating and this game was no exception. However most games show you the things you need to dodge, this game just makes you guess WHEN you need to dodge, no actual signs, which would help atleast.
In the case of the boss, the attacks are too fast for you to guess when you need to dodge, and on top of that the damage dealt is unusually high then its soppused to, making the fight practically unfair.
Theres an even worse enemy i still managed to beat, that has attacks so fast you cant manage to dodge it quickly most of the time, which is also unfair since the enemy kills you in literally 3-4 hits, similar to the boss.
For ways to improve the game however, i would suggest they atleast add SOME signs, like atleast and alert noise that signifies when your supposed to dodge or almost supposed to, and to not make me crazy out of my mind they could make the boss less punishing by basically the number one thing that even made it unfair, the enormous amount of damage, compared to how much you deal, which i forgot to talk about.
On top of all this, the game doesnt even have stats, or anything to remotely improve the damage you deal significantly. They only give you add ons that raise your damage by literally only 1, so your impossibly weak. They dont even give you any option of improving your weapons, and your supposed to kill all these op enemies and bosses while being this weak.
Tldr; its almost always balancing thats breaks the game or not alot of options to atleast make you somewhat able to beat the boss atleast.
Another thing i also said that youtube really decided to delete, is that most games also make it seem like they dont actually WANT you to kill the boss, they make the bosses attacks and stuff super complicated, forcing you to always parry, or else you cant play (in the case of another game i love and hate, pilgrammed)
Like dodging is something that REALLY ANGERS ME, because in my point of view, why do i need to always dodge everything, and why does the boss always have to keep on attacking with no end in sight? The game is telling me to kill them, yet.. its also not letting me.
Its like the game is making hitting the boss always out of reach because you have to keep parrying, dodge that, dodge this..
At that point your not really even dodging the boss, your just doing everything but THAT, which is what you need to do.
Its simply, overcomplicated.
Overcomplicating kills many of the games i love.
Heck to make things even more complicated and add more onto the punishment of dying which you literally cant avoid, theyll either make you walk to the boss each time and give you a bunch of dialogue you have to skip each time (as if to mock you really, also this example is from blocktales also) or A LITERAL GIANT ROUTE YOU NEED TO GO THROUGH JUST TO GET BACK TO WHERE THE BOSS IS (this example, believe it or not, is from cave story..
Ok, youll also probably mock me when i tell you this isnt even the actual game but a port of it to roblox.. so even a port of a game can make me tweak and go crazy. I mean i like yhe games soundtrack, but really.. making me do all this just because i died is unnecessary, its the first boss.. are you trying to ACTUALLY make me quit already??)
Overcomplicating everything just NEEDS TO STOP in games.. like seriously its killing a game people would otherwise enjoy. Seriously stop it... I want to love your game, not hate it
Balancing is always a very difficult challenge in game design. I can't speak to Blocktales as I've never gotten into the Roblox scene. As I understand it, it's mostly player created content in the Roblox ecosystem. And if that's so, they'll probably be drawing on shorter resource pools for development. But , again, I have barely a surface level understanding.
It's worth remembering that a game's difficulty is meant to create a challenge for players to overcome. But no challenge is universally interesting to all parties. If you're not enjoying the game, or something about the design is ruining it for you, you don't owe it your time.
Quitting permanently is why you don't get better.
Your brain learns better once it has time to digest its experiences. A short break once you hit that wall can work wonders, and a good night's sleep is even more effective.
Also, try playing games besides Roblox.
@@ZarHakkar ill try the advice, but like theres no other games i can get because they all cost money lol.
The build up to the premise in this video was incredibly beautiful! What a great Video!
Thank you! I'm glad it was well received. I've planned to do this one for a while but have held off because I wasn't sure I had the skills to pull it off, yet.
Thanks for the video. I'll try to pick up some of the abandoned puzzle games in my library. And not give up this time.
Sounds good :) Hope you find some you click with!
Oh this seems like a cool video *explodes as I hear Void Stranger in the first 20 seconds*
8:55 Siffirin plush spotted. You have earned a subscriber
The videos really good too obviously. I will binge other videos after this
Glad to have you!
I'm in the middle of Void Stranger (and by that I mean I have just seen the credits roll) and I share that sentiment
6:07 this is always my issue with people claiming that a boss fights is too easy and wishing it was more difficult.
Gandondorf fight in Twilight Princess? Took me two *hours* the first time I played (around 12 or 13 years old). Kingdom Hearts fight against Riku? Took me *14* tries and my brother cheered as much as I did when I finally beat it (I was 16). Lego games in general? I die constantly, multiple times in each level, even now at 20 years old, super mario wonder? I burn through lives like you wouldn't believe.
I love video games, and I play a lot of them, but I'm inexplicably bad at them. Hearing people who are really good at games complain about them being too easy always stresses me out, cause I don't want them to be harder. I see this a lot woth family/kid oriented games, like the previously mentioned lego games. I was watching someone review the Skywalker saga and talk about how everything was "easy even for kids" while talking about something that took me several tries.
I think content creators forget how good they are at games, and how many skilled people they surround themselves with lmao
Out of curiosity have you seen GMTK's video about difficulty, particularly with how Celeste handles it? There's a good bit of wisdom in there about how to handle accessibility options in games.
I usually solve the puzzles easily but I still have to look up walkthroughs because I missed an obvious entrance or something
Yeah we've all been there. Or we would have been if we had noticed the door.
Ah Yes! Another small channel full of love and passion behind the videos that deserved much more recognition. An excellent addition to my collection.
Thank you for the praise! I do feel like i"m starting to get recognized. I was under 500 back in May
@@csidesummit keep up the hard work!
i'm not too dumb for puzzle games.
i'm just lazy and don't feel like flexing my brain on tedious complicated stuff.
That's fine. No one says you have to play a game if it's not fun for you.
I'm not even bad at sokoban style games. I just lack the patience when the levels become so tedious that I need to take a break between each one, like the post game levels in Patrick's Parabox. I freely admit to looking up videos to see the "trick" that was required to beat some of them. Same with snakebird. I spent 2 days on the final level before just giving up and looking up a walkthrough to see I just needed to wiggle in this weird specific way.
The worst part for me in this genre is that you often have to restart the level if you make a single mistake. In many of these games you have to plan and execute your actions in a very specific way, leaving little room for error.
I often got frustrated I had to redo the level for the umpteenth time, because after 9000 moves, I moved my character one step too far and now I have to start at the beginning again.
Maybe this can really be compared to other genres like "hardcore" platformers. Celeste is a prime example where later stages require precision and can get really long. And if you do a single mistake, you have to start at the beginning again. The hardest levels of that game are optional and are not for everyone (well, anyone could use assist mode ,though).
In my opinion the main part of a puzzle game should be accessible for everyone. They should introduce and teach mechanics in a way to prepare for what's to come.
The hardest challenges should be reserved to optional areas.
Sokobans have a bad habit of presenting you with board after board without giving you any kind of break or reward between them. It doesn't surprise me that people burn out on them.
Many puzzles can be solved with enough dedication. But will process be fun for the player?
When answer is "no", people say either "I'm dumb" or "game is dumb".
Fun and difficulty are often at odds, but really good game designers can have that cake and beat it, too.
I've been playing puzzle games lately and getting over the 'Im not smart enough'. Very cool video.
Good on you!
loved the video!
I find baba is you to be really hard, but portal, and portal 2 where really easy, but not a bad easy, as there was challanges, but to see the solutions to the puzzles in portal, it didnt take long at all. I think they have a different set of challanges on them. In portal, the difficulty is in seeing the solution, but in baba, the diffuculty is in finding the solution.
And i absolutely love puzzle games in general.
One of the criticisms I've heard leveled at Baba more than once is how convoluted the puzzles become as you progress. Which admittedly feels counter to the initial feel. My favorite level is Volcano because you can solve it in multiple different ways. That kind of goes away as the game progresses, unfortunately.
Have you tried the recent pro mod for Portal2, Portal: Revolution? Personally I found several puzzles in there harder than in the official games.
@@csidesummit i dont know if i played it. Ive played a few portal mods and i dont remember which ones i did and which ones i didnt. Lol
I will have to check it out.
@@matheus-pese It's pretty new. I think it came out February or March. Lots of original content. Voice actors. The works. Basically a home grown portal 3.
@@csidesummit interesting! I will play it for sure!
@@matheus-pese you've gotta play Portal Stories: Mel. If you want a great challenge, play on Advanced Mode, but otherwise save that for later/never and do Story Mode which is iirc still a bit harder than the Portal 2 base game.
It's funny that Void Stranger is your "sokoban I could finish" - because Void Stranger agrees with you that Sokoban puzzles are really hard. A lot of VS is the game encouraging you subtly to take shortcuts to make things easier on yourself - most of the game's puzzles can be cheesed or skipped if you know how. It's really unique among its peers, because it actively encourages you to "cheat" - VS doesn't necessarily care how good you are at its puzzles for 90% of its runtime, because progression in VS is based on testing the player's observation, memory, and willingness to experiment. In fact, there's several entire rooms in VS whose solutions are "this room is impossible, stop trying to solve it the normal way and figure something else out".
Which is probably why the reviews and Steam discussions are full of impatient "bad at puzzle game" people convinced the game is too hard and too unfair and too tedious - people who are so focused on trying to prove they're smart that they've completely forgotten that in order to be smart, you have to prove you're willing to learn in the first place.
This concept - neuroplasticity - is the reason for that "Brain Age" effect. Putting your brain in new situations, like a new book, new puzzle game, new anything - causes your brain to adjust itself to make new connections possible - improving your cognitive highways so you end up with less traffic jams. This is why people who "learn throughout their lives" tend to be at lower risk for dementia and alzheimers.
So, that's kind a misinterpretation of my Void Stranger experience. I didn't stop because it was too hard (though I was stuck on one puzzle for a damn long time). I stopped because I needed a video out that month and Void Stranger was looking to take far longer than I had to complete.
SO the thing about Brain Age is less about whether Neuroplasticity is a thing and more about whether Brain Age's puzzles actually result in increased intelligence. There just isn't enough evidence that it really does.
@@csidesummit I guess I phrased it weird, because that's not what I meant. OTHER people stop with Void Stranger because of the difficulty. I thought it was ironic that you found VS to be easier than a lot of other sokobans.
And yeah, Brain Age itself isn't a special game or anything. Brains just like being challenged by little puzzles or riddles in general
the only ways to fail puzzles, are to either give up or to brute force them, assuming they don't have a time limit, which, why would they? Even if the solution is not obvious at first, it will become clear if you simply give yourself enough time to think, and to try out different things.
I don't actually have a problem with brute forcing puzzles. I still consider that a valid solution even if it's not a preferable solution.
My ADHD makes puzzle games almost impossible for me, as I neither have a built in reward system nor any ounce of patience or even any level of perception. If I get a puzzle right, my brain doesn't reward me with any happy chemicals that make doing the thing worth it. If it takes me longer than 10 minutes, my brain gets exhausted and can't focus. If it requires details that aren't pointed out even offhandedly beforehand, I will never process them as anything more than some background texture or something. I prefer games where knowledge and exploration is how you really progress. I can "study" how everything works on the wiki, and then apply it in practice. I don't like games that I inherently can't "study" for. I also am just an explorer at heart, and any impasse feels like I'm not actually supposed to be going in that direction, like an invisible wall so you don't walk off the map by accident.
So that's interesting to me. I haven't been diagnosed as having ADHD. However I have two friends who are diagnosed with it and *both* of them insist I should be tested for it (not sure what that entails). But it's worth noting that there's a bit difference between believing you're not smart enough to do something, and just straight up not enjoying them. If it's not a good fit, it's not a good fit.
Out of curiosity what's your take on problem-style games? e.g. games where you're presented with a puzzle but with a series of tools to solve it instead of a single dominant strategy. Examples would be Magnum Opus or Satisfactory?
I was always baffled about why my friends and even people who were playing puzzle games would always talk about they were too dumb to be able to figure it out compared to me, but I never saw it as that but rather simply a lack of repeated and dedicated practice. So I would always tell them, after watching them solve other puzzles, that they are able to do it or whether or not they were on the right track. Often times, puzzle games are more like a form of practice tests to train yourself in developing a new ability, and over repeated practice with gradual increments in difficulty it would become an acquired skill. Much like how a musician becomes better at playing an instrument or how an artist gets better at drawing, it's really just a matter of practice and dedicating your time to it. And sometimes, especially when you're starting out with an ability that you aren't familiar with yet and have no background experience with something similar, you might need a helping hand to begin with. And it's perfectly okay to ask help, and even better to ask for the reasoning behind it, then try to replicate it yourself. It's like when you're a kid and learning basic arithmetic for the first time. You aren't born knowing it. You learn it by dedicating your time into practicing it when you're at school or doing homework. To me, doing puzzles is the same thing. Yes, it can be discouraging at first to you if you can't figure it out right there and then, but even when you were a kid and tried to learn math, you might not have understood it really well at first either. But if you keep practicing at it and get confirmation that you're on the right track, then you start to get better at it. Puzzle games are the same, in my opinion.
I play escape room games often because they offer a variety of types of puzzles, which trains and tests you to use a variety of abilities, and in a way it is a great way to give yourself mini-tests in incremental difficulty in order to hone your skills. Because once you get the hang of it and notice the pattern of certain kinds of puzzles, over time with plenty of practice, you will become better at it. And even then, this can apply to any other genre too, like action games, FPS games, platformers, and so on. It's really all about dedicated practice, starting from the basics so that you have a foundation, and then building on top of it. Because you cannot build your house of knowledge if your floor is unstable.
Nowadays, I wander around random streams on Twitch to watch people play certain escape room games and sometimes jump in to help them out or give them words of encouragement, because I notice everyone always talks about how they're too stupid to solve something. But I refuse to believe that, so I'll give pointers, vague hints and words of encouragement in order to help them build that ability and mindset over time in order to gain that confidence.
Some of my close friends have started to ask me to teach them how to think and solve puzzles the way I do, so I had been playing co-op escape room games to teach them how certain puzzles work and give them practice with it.
I really believe that, just like with any skill, it's all a matter of time, dedication and practice. No one is ever truly bad at a game as long as they put effort in. Even with disabilities, it may be a bit more of an obstacle depending on the type of game due to physical or mental disability, but it can be possible to figure out a workaround as long as said game or task has ways to accommodate for such disabilities, whether it is built-in accessibility features or the hardware itself or even approaching things from another angle. And I say this as someone with disabilities too. The amount of time, dedication and practice will be different for each person, but it doesn't mean that it's entirely impossible.
That's funny you mention escape rooms. I just did a stream with my friend Kim (she does ASMR video) playing Escape Simulator. They're a lot of fun to solve cooperatively.
@@csidesummit Yes! I was surprised too since I stumbled upon your stream while looking around to see who was playing Escape Simulator some time after watching this video of yours.
I got into sokoban games thru nethack actually. The classic, ascii, dungeon crawling roguelike has a little wing of the dungeon right at the end of the early game where... you solve sokoban puzzles. It's bizarre, it's curious, it's exactly in line with it's humour, I love it and it's arguably terrible game design. There, cuz it's nethack, you can cheat, using any one of a dozen different methods to bypass, break, move or create boulders to get past puzzles you cock up, but that just means you can't get locked out. What's nice about it is that I play nethack by getting really into it once every 6 months, and have for like, 10 years. So the small set of randomised and tricky puzzles (and a couple more in the variants) get to be seen with mostly fresh eyes. It's cute. I beat Void Strangers puzzles... pretty much without difficulty. Took me a little bit on some of the hard mode ones, I think I had to save and quit a couple times. (at least the sokoban ones, there are... other layers aswell I found a little trickier).
Snakebird, on the other hand, was a game I found so hard I refunded it in 90 minutes. Then I bought it again and managed to get further but really come close to beating some of the puzzles. That one is... tight. Also quite sokoban-y. Grid based, turn based, positioning and locking yourself out.
I think STEAM considers Snakebird a Sokoban. But it's definitely far afield in that genre if so.
Honestly, yeah... My main problem with puzzle games is that I can't make myself to try to solve level for more than 10 minutes. In most games you at least see hp bar going lower than before. In puzzle games you don't feel that you made any progress
That's actually a point the Jolie Menzel video addresses! One of the measures of difficulty for puzzles is 'how much feedback does the player get'. In Sokobans, you often have no idea if what you're doing is correct or not until you see if it works. But in Portal, your actions often have consequences you can learn from to correct your strategy. But you are right as far as a 'percentage done' bar goes. There's no such analog.
i remember i really hated tunics second half because its golden path puzzle felt like the most poorly designed thing i've ever played and a sharp departure from the things i found fun about the games first half.
but now im maybe reconsidering if it was actually poorly designed or if i just basically rage quit and looked up the answer in a "how the fuck was i supposed to figure that out"
and actually come to think of it, that's another thing that differentiates puzzle games from other games, its easier to ruin it for yourself if you quit, since in skill based games you can't just look up the answer and instantly win, but in puzzle games you can and then you lose the satisfaction of figuring it out for yourself
The only issue I had with Tunic was the traversal, and my own sense of direction. I'm really bad at navigating (or just never learned how to do it properly). So searching Tunic's world bit by bit trying to stumble on secrets, often re-treading ground or getting stuck in a location that was, as the crow flies, only a few feet from my goal, really frustrated me. The West Garden was an absolute nightmare for me.
Yes, I am indeed too dumb for puzzle games. I do enjoy playing them, but that doesn’t disprove that I am just plain stupid when playing them.
How would you be stupid only when playing them, though?
I’d describe paquerette in a genre somewhere between drod and sokobon, and drod’s already more or less a sokobon, so it’s basically a sokobon. Sidenote, I really recommend playing a Drod game! the story is shockingly compelling.
Huh. Might check it out at some point!
2:50 Yes. Most of time after i "resolve" a puzzle i have no idea how exactly i did it, untill the puzzle become too complext for messing around by intution to work
I liken the 'intuition' approach to spamming buttons in a fighting game. It will get you through the early parts, but you haven't really learned how to play yet, and will lose the harderfights.
As a person who likes puzzle games but doesn't finish some I will say this: There are cases where the developer overshoots the mark, and it's a lot more of a brick wall when a puzzle is "too hard" than a boss. However, a lot of times the intention for a puzzle game really was to cap out at a higher skill level than your own.
It can be hard in any game to judge whether there's an error in development or on the player's part. The developer does have some responsibility there. THough that is often a qualitative judgment and one that really can't be left up to a majority rule.
Baba is you is one of my favorite games, but I'll admit it's really hard. I even had to look up the solutions to some levels. But the game has such creative puzzles, and it feels so rewarding to figure out the solutions
See, it just didn't feel that way after the first few areas. Once things got harder and I looked at solutions online, I started to feel like the game was tricking me, instead.
i don't have too much contribute, but i wanted to say im very glad to see void stranger mentioned and i think this mindset will be helpful for when i work up the courage to try out EX mode! i looked up a few puzzle solutions from various parts of the game simply because it felt like i had tried everything already, but only one or two really made me think "i would've never ever solved that on my own"
while im sure EX will have plenty of puzzles that would make me think that, at least i can always take a break and come back to try different approaches
I hope it works for you, feel free to let me know! No theory is really proven until its been tested repeatedly, after all.
And I wish you a lot of luck on EX mode. I...still have to find time to go back and finish the base game.
@@csidesummit it's definitely worth finishing! i took around 30 or 40 hours to get to the end (for realsies this time (probably)), though a good chunk of that time was spent looking for secrets, of which there are a ton! im still finding things, from dialogue to entire rooms or areas
9:23 DUDE I WAS FRYING AN OMLET AND PANICKED
Sorry about that! I finally figured it out. Apparently we had a short (really short, didn't even notice) power outage while I was recording and an alarm went off to let us know. Since I was in recording mode I didn't pick up on it but the microphone did.
it's also just that people are better than you at certain genres, or well, games as a whole. and hey, that's perfectly okay. you're unique in your own skillset.
arin hanson from game grumps is renown for being truly godawful at tons of games, but in certain puzzle games like portal he blows past them and comes up with ideas in such a creative smooth way it just stuns me cause i know i'd have a drastically bigger struggle. it's just the way his brain works, it's very creative and it comes up with a lot of off-the-wall solutions.
and honestly, that's perfectly fine. people will be better than you at things, and that doesn't make you any less of a person.
i'm awesome the way i am.
it is entirely possible that i am too dumb for puzzle games
Possible, but not that likely.
Puzzle games are all about the ruleset. The concept is reaching an objective. Now there's two extra steps for it. And now these two rules are mixed and matched while the player combines their previous smaller actions in the head on the fly. Puzzles are like math exams, they just question if you can break down a problem into smaller steps and remember what those steps are. And we know nobody likes math.
Most games rely on muscle memory or short-term tactics, people get good at Dark Souls because bosses use the same attacks over and over until you get the timing instinctively. But many puzzles don't tolerate mistakes. You need to write down a 120-step strategy that has no deviations, all in the head or on paper. And you can't work on an intermediate step because you need to see how it'll look like first. In RPG you can level grind. In a puzzle game you'll need to try every physically possible combination until something gets you further. If you've missed that some things can be combined in a certain way, you can't make progress. Sometimes a puzzle throws in a completely new combination and wonders if the player can even discover what it is.
You've brought up Talos and I think it's a good research material. One of the early concepts is that if you have two Jammers, you can use both to hold gates and pass any objects through. Later puzzles expect that you understand that this is a thing and start using it as regular steps in larger puzzles. Most puzzles in Talos is something the player has done before and just needs to calculate the action order. I got stuck a lot of times in Talos 2 DLC because certain interactions between items weren't demonstrated before, so I had no reference to base my logic from.
Sokoban puzzles also have some patterns the player can recognize. Like, don't push a block into a corner, or if you have three blocks in a row, you can push the edge ones to get the middle one out. But, they have fewer mechanics and a lot of steps. Like in Chess, it comes to player's ability to actively memorize which level state leads to which, the amount of which grows exponentially.
Both cases aren't something the games explain explicitly. If the player can't piece together that certain actions will make them stuck 20 steps later, they also won't be able to make progress.
I played A LOT of games, and a lot of sokobons too. I think it is one of the most boring genres, and I love puzzles, BUT Void Stranger is my favourite game of all time. Void Stranger is first a Mistery game, then a Sokoban
That is kind of what I came down to.
As someone who doesn't like Puzzle games, this was an interesting watch. I never thought of the idea of "there's different sets of skills" to solve different kinds of puzzle games, but just like there are different subgenres of let's say, shooters, there are different sub genres of puzzle games. In other hand, thinking is hard and expensive and I don't play games to think and I absolutely despise when a game that isn't a puzzle game puts a puzzle right in front of me that I MUST solve to progress. So yeah I'm definitely too Dumb for puzzle games.
lol okay so I get it when the puzzle is very divorced from the rest of the gameplay. But most of the really good games will employ puzzle solving skills. Like builds in Dark Souls, for example. Or routing in precision platformers.
Puzzle game videos aren't really a way you should measure yourself: they show the puzzle, they struggle for a minute or two, then show you the puzzle finally being solved or at least a major progress at learning it. You don't see the struggle, the person solving them getting stumped and even putting the game down for a few days. I consider myself decent at puzzle games and I often take a while to figure out the solutions. Most people aren't too stupid for puzzle games, just take your time and play at your own pace, go play another game, you don't need to finish everything one go. Sometimes putting it away for a while and coming back with a different perspective really helps out.
Heh, that was more a bit of humor for the video. I do watch Aliensrock on occasion but usually to see how games are before I buy them. :)
8:56 Yooooo Siffrin plushie spotted! How did you like ISaT? Because it has become one of my favorite games in recent times.
I consider it on of three siblings alongside Outer Wilds and Slay the Princess due to their themes and their core mechanic (and they're all games which have influenced my perspective on death, change, and moving on)
*deep breath* So I have such incredibly mixed feelings on ISAT. I would call it the best game I ever hated playing. The developer did an incredible job aligning the player experience with Siffrin's experience to the point where I was feeling just as desperate. They achieved what they set out to do.
But damn was it a hard struggle at the end. ISAT almost became my shiny new game for December, but as I was trying to write the script it kept getting longer and longer and eventually I gave it up. I'm hoping to do story analysis videos in the future if I can make the time work. And if so I'll probably pick it up again.
@@csidesummit Yes! insertdisc5 did an amazing job at exactly what you described, which is why I personally love it so much.
The way it incites so many emotions that tell you "that's exactly what the protagonist is feeling", from the tedious repetition to even calling itself out on how some abilities are easily forgotten (like Odile's quest skill), I love all of it
@@WD_Gaster66 Odile was my favorite :)
@@csidesummit For me it's a tie between her and Isabeau tbh
I'm proud of as much Baba is You I managed to complete on my own. I think had to look up solutions for only six or seven puzzles, but still what I could do without help I'm happy with. 😅
You should be! The comments on this video have really leaned into Baba being a much harder variant of the Sokoban formula.
Ittle Dew and Ittle Dew 2 are worth looking at for those who like sokobans
Dang those are some throwbacks. Hadn't even heard of them.
Yes, I'm dumb. Baba is you killed my self-esteem.
Baba is You is one of the hardest puzzle games out there. That's a high bar to be judging yourself on.
i proud myself in being intelligent and that may be the reason why i was drawn to puzzle games (and that sokoban was my first phone game other than snake) now i want to catch bunnies, but damn baba is you is hard, i think i got to the end but i definitely left a lot of puzzles unsolved, it still haunts me, it’s not that i think i’m dumb but it’s the itch that the game has defeated me (for now) as i also pride myself in defeating games
Something I probably should have addressed is that while no one is too dumb to do puzzle games, puzzle games *do* have varying levels of difficulty. Baba is You is one of the hardest available, and it sucks you in by seeming very easy and creativity driven at the start. Still, just having finished it at all is an achievement.
Yes, but I'm definetively NOT dumb enough to put the blame on the games for my own fallings
I'd rather just learn and become smarter or just simply play something more fitting for my level
Um...good?
@@csidesummit very good, thanks for the vídeo
Nine sols was a great game, i too struggled for hours on the last part, nearly half just getting to phase 3 before taking a break. Its difficult to learn, but like all bosses, its completely consistant and readable to an extent.
The part I struggled with most was figuring out her opening attacks for 2nd and 3rd phase. Especially since the four-slash attack in phase 2 can be a one-move kill. Of course it also became the easiest one to deal with once I finally did get it down.
Love how this video ends the same way The Looker does.
...it does. I did not do that purposely.
Obra Dinn is more of a riddle game, like the myst. It's kinda a spectrum, where obra dinn is on the far riddle side, the witness is 50/50 and sokoban is the far puzzle side. Examples of puzzle games are stephens sausage roll, beans and nothingness. Riddle games are obra dinn, outer wilds. I am not good at explaining so I hope you get it.
That really depends on whether you require a board and specific game positions to be a puzzle. The term itself originally had roots meaning to bewilder or perplex. A complicated problem. That still describes games like Obra Dinn and Outer Wilds, where you have to use information to reason out the required steps to reach success.
Excellent video, I absolutely loved it and you have earned a new sub ^^
I also would like to point out that, as opposed to some action game where you have to perfect your inputs until you play a fight flawlessly, puzzle games encourage you to vary your inputs, until you have something that works.
If you just play the same way and expect that because you're getting better at entering the same inputs the puzzle will be solved, you'll be there for a while since, if a sries of input doesn't lead to the solution, it is necessarily (at least in a good chunk of puzzle games) the wrong series of inputs
Sorry I'm not completely following. I don't really see many games where you can just enter the same inputs and be as successful as the first time. At least not in anything good.
Baba is an S tier game, I'm sure I'll beat it one day
I'm not sure I'll ever go back to it. It just wasn't that engaging once the rules became locked up.
I don't remember exactly how I got into the puzzle games niche in the first place, and I certainly don't think I'm "just smart". After watching the video, I think I agree with your point, that I have simply developed the skills to enjoy those games.
Even after playing many puzzle games, I still feel dumb in front of some of them, and that's okay. No one can say they are good at "puzzle games" in general, it is too broad of a term to make actual sense, so conversely, no one can really say they are bad at all puzzle games altogether. There are all kinds of different puzzle games that test completely different sets of skills, be it logical reasoning and spacial reasoning in games like Sokoban, or observation and inductive reasoning in detective games like Obra Dinn, or some truly unhinged shenanigans in games like Baba Is You. Some games have stories to keep you engaged, and some are more purely about appreciating emergent logical outcomes of a system.
I admit that not everyone will enjoy puzzle games in the same way as I do, as many of the games I enjoy would surely seem like "solving puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles" to someone, and they would be right. But if you find "puzzles" enjoyable on their own in any capacity, then it is still too early to give up after failing to get into only some of them.
That's always the sticking point for me. I DO enjoy puzzles for the sake of solving them. But I won't enjoy solving 50+ puzzles without something more. Another side to that coin is how immersive puzzle solving is. Since abstraction is low where puzzle solving is concerned, immersion in the story can be significantly higher.
Have you seen the burgeoning 'Metroidbrainia' genre? Because that feels like the next evolution of this concept.
@@csidesummit I won't deny that integrating story and things to create better immersion in puzzle games might help them reach wider audiences, and heaps upon heaps of puzzles without any embellishment does sound daunting even to me. Though for me, whether I enjoy a puzzle game or not still mainly hinges on the elegance in puzzle design, rather than that 'something more'. If you want an extreme example, SquishCraft and PortalSnake are games from the same developer who is known in the community to create games with excellent puzzle design while having intentionally horrible art.
Yes, I'm well aware of the thriving genre of 'Metroidbrainia' (though not everyone agrees that it's a descriptive name), and have personally enjoyed them. The success of Animal Well certainly means that there is an audience out there craving for this kind of games, certainly a direction worth exploring imo.
What a great video!!! I feel like a lot of what you've said applies to other genres, and especially the learning curve for people who don't play games to get into games. Also love the Void Stranger mention!!!!!! Try finishing it sometime, the ending is phenomenal!!!!!
Man if I ever have time again I absolutely will. :) Taking on youtubing plus my day job puts a squeeze on my free gaming time.
Absolutely yes. Will update by the end of video.
UPD: still dumb, probably will be able to go through about half of easier puzzle games.
I won't try to convince you otherwise, but don't take that as a label. :)
@@csidesummit I don't think it's really a label now tbh. Just at some point my brain stops working when it comes to puzzles and I hit an inpassible wall. Same with platformers and fights in games, so it's just general skill issue.
I would say I'm a puzzle game enjoyer. I have definitely given up on puzzle games in the past, but it's more about if it's grown boring/tedious or not. There's always a shiny new game coming out and I only have so much time after work + other responsibilities.
So in the Brett Taylor video, he talks about a drive to iterate on every permutation of a given concept. The goal being to exhaustively explore it. But he quickly came to realize that nobody liked that. I suspect a similar drive pushes other puzzle games to create overwhelming puzzle libraries, which isn't really necessary.
I love puzzle games, and I'm shit at them. But I've always viewed it in the same way I used to be shit at Souls-likes. There just are some puzzle games I haven't developed the skills for to solve them. With Souls-likes, it took bashing my head against Bloodborne before I 'got it'. And I've noticed a similar thing with other genres. I bounce of it, play a game where I suddenly 'got it', went back to the games that didn’t work for me, and ended up loving them.
Never stop experimenting with genres you initially think aren't for you
I really need to be doing this with 3D soulslikes. I've enjoyed the 2D variety, but 3D ones just haven't grabbed me yet.
I'd like either a list of games that were shown in the video in the description (or a document linked in the description) like GMTK does, or just having text pop up in the video itself when a game appears like Snoman does. Some of these games that are shown off but not directly talked about look cool, like that cartoony-style game with the buff skeleton named Ian or the pixel art game with the green wolf shooting bubbles at some gemstone/glass thingy boss with the spinny laser, but I have no way of finding what those games are
If I ever reach a point where I'm not rushing to finish my videos before the end of the month I might start doing that. For now, Ian is from Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands and the wolf is from Full Moon Rush.
@@csidesummit Thank you for those two. And yeah, that's understandable. I think the document idea could be the best for this then. Summoning Salt does something like that for the music and it seems like it'd be easier to implement than listing every game in the description every time
My problem with puzzle games is that my method of problem solving is _very_ non-liniar and outside the box. Can be useful irl! But having creative aproaches to games that have a predetermined specific solution? Not super helpful.
E.g, I play most puzzle games by spending hours trying to carry out a crazy complicated solucion, usually to the point where I (after much suffering) eventually achieve the win.
Then I'll watch someone _else_ play and realise there was an incrediblely simple, liniar solution staring me in the face that didnt remotely cross my mind! And _my_ solution was actually just me somehow brute forcing a win out of a completely unitended route.
Makes me feel like most puzzle games for me are just wasting time working harder than I need too. I can very much see the appeal though!
I mean, if you solved the puzzle you solved the puzzle right? A solution is a solution.
@@csidesummit true! 😂
I mean, even in puzzle games with set solutions, the existence of wildly different and almost-working unintended routes that can't be proven to be impossible easily are also widely considered as loose design. Tight design is where you want the player to discover a particular idea, so you restrict the puzzle in a clever way that it forces the idea you have in mind, but also not so restricted that the player could just brute-force the solution. But this does always result in 'linear' puzzle solving you are talking about, I find it just fine and personally even prefer it, but I can see that not everyone would like to 'be told how to solve puzzles'.
I love puzzles that use deductive reasoning and number puzzles, but i find almost all examples of these mind numbingly *easy*. I finish them in like a minute.
I've come to believe that many game devs, from the most simple killer soduku collection to the most complicated murder mystery games, feel the need to dumb down the puzzles so those that aren't skilled in them don't get upset. Which leaves to an incredibly unfulfilling game to people who love them.
Are there any examples where you found them challenging or at least engaging enough not to numb the brain?
@csidesummit unfortunately not, and I've become quite suspicious of any game because of it. I haven't tried obra dinn, though, and this is the second time I've heard it mentioned so I might give it a shot
I'm too smooth brained for puzzle games. 😂
Wrinkly brains can be developed through practice, study, and forgetting the fabric softener after cleaning.
i am very good at pattern recognition, but the part of puzzle games where i need to learn the mechanics is so hard for me. i am so much better when i know exactly what the mechanics are and how to use them.
Hm...most of the puzzle games I play describe the mechanics in the tutorials. Do you have an example of one that doesn't?
My first thought is 'rule discovery' games like Leap Year, where mechanics are taught through experimentation and observation.
It's Catharsis. Most people have probably heard Yahtzee's lectures on it for Souls and Soulslikes, but puzzle games brandish the purest resistance and catharsis in the entirety of video games. To beat a hard puzzle game is to aggrandize your own ego directly. Puzzle games offer little to no difficulty in execution, it's all purely in the mind. When you do beat a hard puzzle, there will have been no lucky AI, no RNG, nothing that can challenge the idea you were the one who succeeded. Unless it's a puzzle where it's possible to blindly run into the solution. Though a lot of puzzle games try to keep that possibility minimal. Due to this, puzzle games are also one of the most stressful genres in videogames. To be stuck is to be frustrated and the time you can be stuck in a puzzle game can potentially last forever. There is no guarantee things will click and no guarantee you will "git gud" unlike the manual dexterity training a hard boss can put you through. There is no feeling of progression when stuck in a puzzle game as there is nothing in the puzzle to build on, just where your own mind is stuck mentally.
On the topic of fitting into puzzle games, I feel like one of the worst possible attitudes that will result in having a hard time is believing your brain will naturally intuit them somehow just by staring at the puzzle and its bare surface elements. Puzzle games require active thought. Heaps of it. They require focus, concentration, and your full mental load. Which is also why they make for awful streaming games. They're not a genre which can be offloaded to your muscle memory and instincts while talking to a chat or a future audience for a recorded video. As you point out, puzzle games have their own myriads of mechanics to learn. You have to learn them. They're not possible to ignore unlike something like magic or parries in a Souls game. This also flies in the face of any people who like going into things at their own flow. Some puzzle games are more free-form/open-ended, but the more pure ones. The ones that have a single solution and a single way to get there force the player into their flow. Arguably this is what a lot of people consider a strong point of the Souls games when a boss forces them to actually learn and adapt. There's a lot of similarities which is why you already made the Soulslike comparisons.
As a guy who likes playing and beating hard puzzle games, my most major piece of advice which has almost always applied across literally all of them is work backwards. This rule is a lot less effective for more open-ended puzzle games or rule-hiding games like the Witness(when you do learn the rules, the puzzles however usually become blindingly simple by this method), but for the more pure and mechanically complex puzzle games, it works extremely well as often they are designed with extremely specific solutions in mind despite their wide range of options. Think of it like branching paths, instead of heading from the start and trying to divine which path is correct, look at the endpoint and look at the path backwards back to where you start. Baba is You is almost entirely this as despite the amount of puzzles and the sheer volatility of what you can do when changing the rules, the vast majority want you to understand simply one mechanic then figure out how to implement it. In that sense it's more of a rule hiding game actually. If you don't see how to work backwards then it means you don't know a mechanic and should be figuring out what it is. This would definitely apply to the original Prison/Jail puzzles which were very contentious in early versions of the game. Puzzle game devs want to teach, but also for the players have the sudden spark of realization or well catharsis. Balancing that is extremely difficult.
A game I'm surprised to not see mentioned once in your video is Stephen's Sausage Roll though I understand why you might want to avoid it. It's probably one of the purest Sokobans out there with wide acclaim. Also one of the most difficult. However it's a very plain difficult that is very straightforward and good for teaching. Well until you get to the Tower which is where most people sink or swim, mostly sinking. I really do recommend you try it and even beat it. If you get past the first area, I can 100% say you have what it takes to beat the rest of the game. The Tower is really more a test of will to learn mechanics rather than an actually hard puzzle. Even if it's only a game on the side, I really do recommend it. Puzzle games are perfect for leaving and coming back to.
Edit: There's also one final thing I want to add. There's nothing wrong with eventually giving up and just looking up the solution. While the instinct is to avoid it, even the most experienced puzzle gamers won't claim they've never looked a solution up at least once. I admit I have on occasion, rather I feel like most bigger puzzle games have exactly 1 puzzle where I end up doing it. The scope of puzzle games these days also allows for farther meta puzzles that go beyond what can be expected of normal people alone. It is incredibly helpful when you're inexperienced to actually look at a solution to something very difficult for you and actually work through it. Sometimes instead of just continuing on at 5 hours on a single puzzle, it's better to just give up and use the solution to help learn where the blindspots in your thinking are. You might lose a particular puzzle's catharsis and regret it after the fact, but there will be more puzzles in the future to stump you and the act of looking up a solution might broaden your mind in a way forcing yourself to eventually arrive at it blindly might not.
So, I didn't try Stephen's Sausage Roll because A) It looked abysmally hard and B) It just didn't pique my interest. I didn't see anything in the trailers that looked exciting. It kind of reminded me of chess puzzles. Yes, they're a challenge, but they don't feel very rewarding or interesting to complete.
@@csidesummit That is a mistake to assume. It is a very rewarding game when you get into it and I feel like you would start having fun like you were with Paquerette. Maybe I'm entirely wrong and you won't enjoy it all, not even a bit, but I sincerely do urge you give it a try eventually. Probably not now, maybe not even this year or the next, but please do keep it in the back of your mind. It is a puzzle game that sticks in the mind over other puzzle games for those that complete it over games like even Baba is You and the Witness and it is for a very good reason. What you describe is a very dismissive view that could be said of any hard puzzle game and it feels extremely early to say when you haven't tried it at all.
So I'm going off the trailer on Steam, screenshots, and footage I've seen from other videos on the subject. If I'm mistaken, it's because the advertising didn't tell me any different.
I never really considered myself a "puzzle guy." I mean, I played through Portal 1 and 2, but the great writing got me through that game more than a sense of accomplishment. But my curiosity was piqued at the meta-ness of Baba Is You, and with so many people recommending it, I just had to try it. Instead, after bumbling my way through a couple worlds, I bounced off hard. I figured I really just wasn't smart enough for puzzle games. Strategy games like Fire Emblem pushed me enough, this was too much! But hearing you talk about puzzle games (and about the difficulty of Baba Is You) is making me rethink using that particular game as a litmus test for my intelligence. Maybe I'll even check out Cocoon. Who knows!
Cocoon is really cool. If you liked Portal, you will probably gel with Cocoon, too. Though mind you I wasn't kidding about the story. There's something there, but figuring out what it is? No idea.
I rarely think of puzzle games as a test of intelligence and more a test of patience. I am not very patient when it comes to games.
I am there to have fun, and being stuck is rarely fun.
Patience is often a requirement. Puzzles often lack the dopamine rush you might get from incremental progress. The kind you might get from hitting a new phase on a boss or getting a bit further in a platformer. There's rarely a sense of "I've almost got it!". Instead there's a revelatory moment where you just have it.
@@csidesummit Yeah 100%, look my Girlfriend loves puzzle games but for me there just isn't any catharsis or aha moment after I have been stuck on a hard one.
It's either oh man that's so simple why didn't I see that earlier or How the fuck was I suppose to know that?
Definitely one of those were it's love it or leave it.
Imagine my dismay when I played Hellblade and discovered it was mostly a puzzle game.
I do enjoy things like portal and the occasional puzzle in resident evil and the like, I even played through Hell taker, but yeah I know it's not for me.
I love the legend of Zelda twilight princess. I have 50 hours in it, the world, music and combat is perfect and its my favourite action RPG of all time.
I haven't made it pass the water dungeon in 5 years. I think it goes against the game design to look up a walkthrough (even though I used it for those firefly levels) and maybe im just challenged mentally but I think its an interesting case. Revisit it every once in a while and hope to beat it before I die :)
(actually I just realized I've struggled with puzzles my whole life from my first in Poptropica and most recent Portal, the only puzzle game I've beaten is pushmo world, after taking breaks the answer comes very easily to me)
If you're familiar with soulslike games, a common phenomenon is that if you're struggling with a boss, stop and come back the next day. The brain processes information even while you're not working on it and you often come back with improved insight.