This week on Slightly Something Else, Yahtzee and Marty discuss games that make them feel smart.
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Anyone know what game they are talking about? The one that sounds like "Chance of Xenar"? Tried Google but didn't find anything.
25:50 On "Bosses as puzzles" topic: this is my favorite part of current or synced content in FFXIV. Every group content boss fight (after A Realm Reborn) is a little group puzzle that everyone has to figure out or the party either wipes or has worse DPS. It gives people a thing to do, even if they have a small rotation (like a healer).
I'm a puzzle guy myself, but I have friends that just want to be able to play through a game quickly and brute force their way.
Thank you for your work.
While not a tough puzzle, I quit Shadow of the Tomb Raider because of a puzzle that I understood but was hard for me to align right and every time I had to wait for it to reset.
I was going through my steam list, trying to find a game that had a puzzle that left me feeling smart (and one that was obviously a puzzle as opposed to resolving a challenge with variance in the solution).
There aren't many.
Maybe some bits of the original Final Fantasy VII – there's a few bits in the ShinRa tower and in Wall Market that are problems with solutions. Last time I did the Lost Number safe I did the puzzle manually. I wasn't exactly sitting atop a throne of magnificent intelligence but I felt I had earned it.
Ostensibly a detective game, Disco Elysium never left me feeling clever. It often left me feeling that it was clever, but the actual "puzzles" for the most part seemed to be "wear the best clothes for the problem at hand." Great character writing, but rather failed in its detective aspect.
Not sure whether Kerbal fits my original criteria above, but it had the feeling.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Yes. Every piece of hacking. Several stealthy solutions. Bits I probably can't remember.
Like I say, not very many.
Inventory puzzles' biggest problem is not having enough right answers. Sometimes it makes sense for a puzzle to only have one solution, but contextual puzzles like bypassing a guard at an alleyway or distracting a dog having more than one solution rewards thinking with a watsonian mindset rather than doylist.
the cold has hit me hard as well buddy
"Keep Talking…" IS, not WAS, a bomb defusal game! It still exists, it's still being sold! You keep doing that even with games that are just three months old. This constant use of past tense isn't just aggravating, but factually wrong!
I think the last true AAA puzzler was Portal 2 from Valve.
No mention of Zachtronics games? Very sad.
Beautiful Desolation, Stasis, Stasis: Bone Totem all have great inventory puzzles
I enjoyed Obra Dinn a lot, but The Case of the Golden Idol was a purer experience for me. I’m not sure if it’s because the scenarios had better design, or if it’s because I made a conscious effort not to brute force any of the puzzles. Without playing it again, I can’t say if Obra Dinn is even possible to solve without implementing at least a small amount of brute force/trail and error, though perhaps that was intended by design?
I miss JRPGS that had fun puzzles. There's the dungeon puzzles of Lufia 2, the Clock Puzzles of FFXIII-2, the Millennium Puzzles in Wild Arms 2. All great stuff that I loved trying to figure out.
Will listen to it later, hope they mention the talos principle
I think the Ace Attorney games are really good at making the player feel clever. They're not actually hard, but a combination of atmosphere and clever design makes you feel like a genius
33:45 "Puzzles shouldn't punish you for experimentation." "No. Well that's what adventure games didn't do, of course."
Apparently Westwood didn't get the memo. Some memories of soft locking myself in Kyrandia because you could waste items that you were never able to get back.
I recommand a lot the game "CrossCode" for the puzzles. They can be quite hard ahah. 😉
Where, do you feel, would Zachtronics' Spacechem or Opus Magnum land on the puzzle-spectrum?
The most memorable puzzle for me was in Dishonored 2. At the beginning of a level was a door locked by a randomly generated word puzzle, ensuring the solution couldn't be Googled, and your options were to solve the puzzle or Dishonor yourself through the level to find the keys.
I sat for about 15 minutes with pen and paper, solved the puzzle, put the game down, never played it again, and decided Dishonored wasn't really for me.
For the puzzle in Level Design bits, like using X on Y to do Z style design of Silent Hill like games or the Portal puzzle rooms… I do like the commandments Warren Spector came up with during Deus Ex design, specifically 'Problems,Not Puzzles' where you create a situation where something needs to happen, like buttons need to be hit to open a door so the player can do it however they wish so they're making a solution to how to get the buttons pressed. That way, they're not having to think exactly what the designer wanted like Moon Logic in Point and Click games Monkey Island chicken with a pulley or early puzzle games like the 7th Guest soup can puzzles.
47:00 i feel like a well-written twist should be predictable if you're actively looking for the clues, especially if the twist is tragic. Because then rather than it being a quick shock, the reader instead experiences dread. Knowing what will probably happen and knowing that it's only obvious from an omniscient perspective, so the characters have no way to see it coming.
😠of the Kingdom
While the quality of the series has gone down in recent installments, the Ace Attorney games are probably the closest thing AAA has to a puzzle mystery game series and they do an excellent job of giving you that "AHA!" moment, though most of the time it feels like an "OH NO!" moment instead.
I was waiting for someone to bring up the six-pack of juice in "Silent Hill 2", you were just supposed to know that it got thrown down a dust chute to collect something shiny at the bottom.
In my mind, a clogged chute requires removing things, not adding things 🙃
Danganronpa
Why has he not played this yet!!!
On another note i've a new game section, Yahtzee plays it blind.
Not literally blind, just the games chosen he's not to have play or seen before…..
A game will be chosen that has puzzle or detective games and he'll play it live steam for an hour or so.
Signalis had some decent, challenging puzzles. Similar in style to Silent Hill and early Resident Evil puzzles. I didn't have to look up any solutions but there were a few where I definitely had to sit and think about it for a while.
Everyone, please play Outer Wilds, if you haven't already! That's all.
No mention of Myst or Cyan games makes me feel sad. Riven is a treasure. Also Quern was a fantastic Myst-like that made me feel very clever at times
I love how this podcast went from puzzles in games that make you feel smart to childish riddles for Yahtzee and Marty to solve. Here's a few more-
1) A man reads a book, turns out the lights and goes to bed. The next morning, he reads about a shipwreck, and he immediately commits suicide. WHY?
2) A 5-foot man is found, having committed suicide from hanging. He is hanging on a noose made from rope, also 5 feet long, from a gallows 15 feet high. The only thing else in the room is a puddle. How did the man hang himself?
3) Mary's mom gave birth to 4 daughters. The first one is named Spring, the second one is named Summer, and the third one is named Autumn. What's the fourth daughter's name?
I think Sam Lake writes the lyrics for the band Poets of the Fall. Their music is heavily present in Max Payne 2 and also featured in Contol and Alan Wake.
There's such a wealth of wonderful indie puzzle games: Patrick's Parabox, Baba is You, Can of Wormholes, Stephen's sausage roll, The Case of the Golden Idol, A monster's expedition through puzzling exhibitions, Elechead, Gorogoa, the list goes on.
THERE COULD BE STAIRS LEADING UP TO THE ROOF AND/OR FRONT PORCH OF THE YELLOW ONE STORY HOUSE.
Did no one mention Baba Is You?
I love the "Good Cop/Bad Cop" dynamic between McBiggity and Yahtzee as they respond to comments 🤣🤣
It was an older stream, but I was literally playing Satisfactory just now while listening to the Loot podcast where they had no idea what Satisfactory was and were looking it up on wikipedia 😂😂
I think there is actually a story about a designer banging his head on a wall because a group of players got obsessed with a bit of tile that…just looked liked an arrow. I think the big conflict is always, does solving the puzzle feels good, bad, or annoying. That's actually not an easy thing to judge, because sometimes you might go in expecting a puzzle to be hard, but you might end up in a situation where you bricked a game because the designers just expected you to keep an item in your inventory forever.
I don't think it's necessarily intuitive either, so it's not like I want to razz a game for flubbing it. I just know when I missed it, when I was out of my depth, and when the game wasted my time. The last one is the only one I hope developers really watch out for.
Give us more podcasts that are uploaded to their podcast feed.
Yahtzee, you should REALLY play Outer Wilds
i recently played Escape Room Simulator
each puzzle is unique and repetitative
I recently bought Stardew Valley for my partner, and it occurs to me how much the game either doesn't tell you, or tells you but only once, briefly, in a way that is easily missed. I've replayed Stardew several times, visit the wiki A LOT, and just generally try a lot of random stuff. My partner, meanwhile, was so desperate to avoid anything that might "spoil the game," that they ended up NEVER visiting the wiki or looking up game mechanics, and so missed a TON of stuff. In that way, even a non-puzzle can end up feeling like a puzzle game, just from the sheer amount of things you have to intuit.
I mean really, who figured out you could get those three secret statues without looking it up first?
That RE4 trowel thing seems less like a clever meta puzzle and more like a glitch.
Obra Dinn could easily be a table top style or party game style, the videogame game part just gives it good dressing and autonomy to play by yourself. Portal is very much a hand-eye coordination, and physical skill thing. I think that's why they're in two camps for me.