The Great Debate: Pussing out and using a guide in puzzle games

The point of puzzle games is to do a whole bunch of puzzles. If you're looking up the answers, it's like lighting your money on fire.

That said, The Witness is artsy-fartsy and I'm sure some people picked it up because of Jonathan Blow and wanted to walk around some pretty landscapes and hear some audio logs wax poetic. On that point, geez, you sure picked an expensive game to be doing that with. The game has a very pleasing and calming atmosphere around it; something like Myst but there's no bigger storyline to be concerned with and you can just twaddle around and draw lines on shit. But damn, there are prettier walking simulators, and cheaper too. (On that note, go try NaissanceE. It feels like walking around the super structure from Blame!, and that's worth a try.)

But in a slight defense of looking up puzzles, most puzzle games lock puzzles behind puzzles, so if you can't solve one, you may be locked out from even attempting another dozen puzzles. And there's no way of saying if those puzzles would be more difficult than the one gate keeping them. Especially with the format that The Witness presents its puzzles, I think its okay to cheat a little, just to keep the process moving and getting more bang for your buck. If you get stuck on a puzzle half way through and then drop it, you're only getting half of your game. With Layton and The Witness, there are some strikingly difficult puzzles dropped randomly in the middle of the game, and if you stop there, then you'll never get to learn about being a super cool gentleman like Layton, or watch Jonathan Blow masturbate or however The Witness ends.

So, I guess the short version is, don't be afraid to waste a little money to save yourself from wasting a lot of money. And go finish Layton, faggot.

The witness may have been made by a gigantic douche but fuck me it's a really well designed game. If you cheat on a puzzle you'll miss the logical context making you stuck on future puzzles. That said some of them were really obtuse to solve (although the answer might have been much simpler than I thought) so I lost my patience and looked it up, needless to say I got to the final area completely baffled and gave up.

That's weird. Do the newer Serious Sam games work for you?

Should do, haven't played them since I got my new HDD though. TP is pirated but this is the only game I have issues with. Could be AV interfering with the game, it does have a weird steam.dll which I don't get for others.

Don't give up, come at it with fresh eyes!

If it's been long enough that you don't remember the puzzles, why not just wipe your save and try the game again without looking up the solution? Maybe you'll figure out the puzzles yourself and have fun.

Of course I want to see the rest of the game. Do you uninstall Half-Life every time you die in the campaign?

I often do puss out. Sometimes puzzle/adventure games have game breaking bugs and fail states in addition to the nonsensical puzzles. I have completed brutal but otherwise fair games lacking the aforementioned bullshit without using a guide, though.

Maybe you had debate on cuckchan where you are from, but here on 8/v/ there was never any doubt. The game is shit and Jonathan Blow is a feminist cuck.

Sounds like a fun challenge

You might like a source port for Doom called ManDoom. It automatically deletes your save file for you when you die.

There has to be a level of trust in puzzle games. The user has to believe the game didn't bug out and break the solution. (for example in Fallout 4 in the nanny training puzzle if you touch anything before the voice finishes, it's impossible to punish the child) The user has to trust the solution isn't total shit like "choose the right two digit number to enter here by guessing repeatedly at a 1% success rate". The user has to trust the solution wasn't provided by a vendor three levels back he would never think of talking to. The harder a puzzle is the more strained that trust is unless the game never, ever fucks up that way.

Don't forget pixel hunts.

Just play Myst. Fuck you OP.

The first time I played through Stephen's Sausage Roll, I looked up a few solutions. That game has some ridiculous difficulty spikes that lock you into a certain set of levels at a time at first, later on becoming almost entirely linear. The Great Tower is a very well known example of such a difficulty spike, especially since it's the first time you'll ever have to walk on a sausage.
I played it that way when it came out, and a few days ago began over having forgotten just about everything. The residual knowledge of the mechanics made it an amazing game allowing me to logically figure out all the solutions without referring to a guide even once, but still being challenging.

So in my opinion, using a guide can be justified if a game's just really fucking hard and doesn't explicitly tell you all of its mechanics, as long as you minimize guide usage and revisit games a year or two later with a blank mind. Might help to have a shitty memory like I do.
PS play Stephen's Sausage Roll if you haven't, it's amazing. Saves carry over if you pirate it and decide to buy later, so feel free to try before you buy.

If it's a typical point and click puzzle that is overly obtuse then I won't feel bad for looking up the solution. If it's a puzzle in the vein of the games by zachtronics that is based on understanding the mechanics and building a solution, then looking it up is disgraceful.

If the puzzle is bullshit and you just want to finish it to get to other puzzles. I think for one of the bird chirping puzzles in the Witness I either looked up a guide or brute forced it. Even after I knew the answer I couldn't figure out how I was supposed to get it from that particular puzzle.

I was really hard on The Witness before I played it. The whole thing reeks of warning signs:
But once I pirated it out of curiosity, I found it really is a surprisingly well designed puzzle game. The variations and cross-breeds of puzzle types keep the game way more fresh than you'd ever expect. Meta-puzzles, one of my most treasured gameplay fetishes, are everywhere. Using lateral thinking is required for most puzzle sequences, and I can't recall a game that makes you do that even half as much as The Witness. Just exploring the island is fun because it's so beautifully designed. Gradually probing the island to find what's hiding in the inaccessible areas is really satisfying.

I have complaints but, aside from the groanworthy audio logs and film-school-degree-pretentious easter egg rewards which you can skip over entirely, they are relatively minor squabbles over execution. (Shadow puzzles being inconsistent, audio puzzles being shit overall, some puzzles being hard to figure out at low graphics settings, bonus endgame content being confusing on how to access it, etc.) It is most certainly worth a pirate if you like puzzle games. Just pretend it wasn't made by Johnathan Blow long enough to get past the tutorial area and you'll get hooked in.

The nice thing about Zachtronics games is that if you hit a hard wall of understanding, you can ask for a hint rather than look up the solution; if you just have trouble implementing your plan, you can start from scratch and try again and figure it out more often than not.

If I can't figure it out myself, after multiple attempts, I honestly just give up. There's no point in a puzzle game if I just look up what the solution is if I can't figure out on my own.

The original Myst was great to me mostly because I never had to cheat. I had a small notebook next to me and wrote down anything that might be a clue/lore, and that carried me through the game, it's one of the only games that's made me feel like I was smart and on an adventure. If I had ever looked up any answer, I wouldn't have kept playing.
That being said, I cheated on 90% of The Witness, and don't really regret it because 1. It was boring 2. It had a lot of bullshit puzzles and 3. I pirated it. Fuck Blow

There's usually more than one puzzle in a puzzle game. Try actually playing one some time.

I don't get why, The Shitness was piss easy. There's almost nothing actually difficult in it, you just have to find the first puzzle introducing an idea usually since most of them are a mix of two others. I breezed through the game in a few hours, and couldn't be arsed to fill the black pillar things all the way through. It legitimately felt like solving children's mazes most of the time.

The last time I looked up a walkthrough was for Gabriel Knight ages ago and regretted it, did give me an idea of how the game thinks though. Once you figure out whatever odd logic a game is working with it usually gets a lot easier to make progress, unless it pulls some dicky curve ball about how it decides to work.

Unless you're talking about the optional or environmental puzzles that's not true. Every maze puzzle in the game follows exactly the same rules which are laid out in tutorial sections across the island. If you didn't figure it out you just didn't fully understand the rules for each component yet.

I don't think most players will find it a easy as you did. The main portion of the game is straightforward enough, but it's normal to get stuck trying to figure the new mechanics and how they interact with each other. Getting past these feels great and is where the primary enjoyment of the game comes from. That's why the ending of the game feels so easy and a bit of a let down to most - the only new mechanic implemented are cylindrical puzzles and bridges. Environmental puzzles on the other hand are cleverly hidden and still hard to spot if you know what you're looking for. That and the bonus/timed section in the caves provide much more of a challenge.

Overall I really appreciate the game for remaining consistent and communicating solely through puzzles fuck this one though.

I've played adventure games all my life and (for a while) I had only finished Maniac Mansion without needing a hint. Every one since then I usually got a guide at some point. Most of the time I ended up hating myself for it, especially when it turned out it was just one small thing I overlooked. After the same happened in the Longest Journey, which I almost completed without a guide, I decided I'd never get a walkthrough again, I'd simply not finish the game. Plenty of times I've been banging my head against the wall, but I ended up finishing every game without a guide since then. And it's so much more satisfying.

But I get plenty of guides for other games. Stuff like item locations, or other things that would otherwise only be discovered through endless trial and error, or sheer luck.

It depends on the game, if it's an adventure game, shooter, action game, or the like. I'll usually give a puzzle a few tries before caving and finding a guide. In my mind the main gameplay should be the shooting/action and the puzzle is just some bullshit. It's not a big deal to cheat on those.

If it's an actual dedicated puzzle game though, my general rule is that if I spend more than 30 minutes on a single puzzle (or an hour if it's a really big and in depth puzzle) then I look up a guide. However what I DON'T do is say "Well fuck I already used a guide, may as well keep using it." After I go through the puzzle I had trouble with I put the guide away and don't touch it again unless I've spent another 30 minutes on a different puzzle. The one exception to this rule is if the """""puzzle""""" is "figure out where you should go next, what the fuck you should be doing." Because those """""puzzle""""" games are fucking retarded and deserve zero respect.

For La Mulana, I didn't realize I 'needed'' the Holy Grail. I tried to solve the first area, and even used the manual, but didn't "get it" and moved on. I managed to beat Elmac as my first boss and get trapped in the room afterwards, so I looked it up.

I was fine solving smaller puzzles and exploring and eventually beat Bahamut and a few other areas, but getting to Viy or accessing the Tower of the Goddess was difficult for me. I think I got the feather on my own.

After that, I used the wiki extensively to be aware of certain puzzles and items, but not strictly how to solve them, or else I'd see the solution but no idea how to get to said puzzles until later. So even though I cheated in some regard, there was still a fair bit of satisfaction for having things click together

So what do people think of The Witness? Putting aside your prejudices about Jonathon Blowhard, did you think the game itself was good?

There used to be a software which supplied you with incremental levels of hints for games.
1. Look around the room, there might be something you can use.
2. There is a screwdriver on top of the cabinet that can be useful.
3. Use the screwdriver on top of the cabinet with the loose screw.

It really depends on how bullshit the puzzles are or how much I care for the game, what I do it's try to solve it by myself or try to experiment with what I got in hand and I only use a guide when I just have no fucking idea of what I'm doing. I think it also depends of how much I want to see the story of the game, like for example the submachine saga

Depends on the puzzle.

If you're putting puzzles in an action game that bear no relation to the gameplay I will skip that shit instantly.

This

I'd rather cheat at a hard game that has me stumped rather than complete a game that babies me. I understand that makes me a dirty casual but I would never want to impose my lack of skill of a game onto a series that diffuculty is a main selling point. After all I still have to go out of my way to look for a guide afterall, what kind of lazy fuck do you have to be to not do that and demand the dev to dumb down his game instead?

Really depends how fucking stupid the game and puzzle are, but usually not. I used a guide in Zelda to get past "Grumble Grumble" because I was too stupid to realize that a moblin blocking my path and saying "Grumble Grumble" meant that I needed to go to the opposite side of the world, burn a random bush, go into the shop underneath, buy a piece of meat, and drop the meat on him.
Same goes for Zelda II and the fucking mirror. Some girl says "I lost my mirror", so I'm supposed to know to go to random houses in the same town and duck and attack tables that are in the fucking background and you can't otherwise interact with.

Terrible fucking Nintendo Power puzzles.

I'm willing to dump hours into a single puzzle, but there's a limit, and after bullshit like that where you hate the game a bit after finding out what you were supposed to do because it's just that obtuse, I give up on a puzzle after I've been stuck on it for more than a few hours.

No, I keep trying until I figure out what to do

I still try to solve them in action games like Tomb Raider. They were probably put in place not to make the action tedious or boring. You spend a few minutes to an hour on puzzles, making you itchy for the exciting action scenes of them.

Deep-seated self-doubt.
Fear of failure - won't try, might discover you're not the 125% super genius you believe you are.
Lack of mental focus. Never practiced mental focus, doesn't realize mental focus is a skill.
Not getting a dopamine hit every 5 seconds therefore this game is shit.
"Oh, I could have totally figured that out. Dumb puzzle." But you didn't…

Generally a mental pussy, lack of self-worth, lazy, incomplete and unrealistic world view. These are the people that cheat a puzzle games.

It depends, if it's old school Tomb Raider, then fuck yes. I'm not sitting there for hours trying to solve some shitty puzzle those retards cooked up to sell more guides.

The only real hard part is when they make action trigger too specific and you can't figure it out by just looking at it like the stupid trap door you can only open from one single side in IV.

You want my opinion on guides in puzzles?

Let me tell you about a little puzzle called the The Pilgrim from Xafi puzzle, a horrible blemish on one of my favorite games, Legend of Grimrock 2

So you have to open a gate to get into the cemetery. This is not a necessary thing to do if you want to get the normal ending because there are only 3 power gems behind it, and you only need 16 power gems out of 20 to get the normal ending, but if you want to get the true ending, you have to get all 20. Plus, finding 16 when you can only miss one is a LOT harder than if you can find all 20. There are also a few VERY important pieces of equipment in the cemetery and crypt, including the Ethereal Dagger, which is LITERALLY THE ONLY WAY to damage those bastard Air Elementals unless you happen to have Disrupt Elementals, which requires Water Magic (your mage is almost certainly a Fire+Air mage, so you won't have that). So yeah, you want to get into this place. The gate is locked, and you only have two hints on how to open it: the pushable block in front of it, which can be pushed in any of the four cardinal directions (like a D-Pad, kind of), and a Stone Guardian (talking statue) that tells you that "the answers were sealed in the archives". So you go to the archives, solve some more puzzles there which actually DO make sense, and in the end, you find a chamber containing 4 scrolls. Here is what they say:

Scroll 1:

Scroll 2:

Scroll 3:

Scroll 4:

Confused? OK, so the first thing to understand (which is a reasonable leap of logic to make) is that each line of the story correlates to a direction you need to push that block to open the gate. This is kind of annoying because there's no sign that each LINE correlates to a direction; for all you know multiple hints could be on each line, or some hints could take multiple lines. But whatever, that's not too bad. So, the first line, about tundras… well, that's not really helpful, so we'll get back to that. Second line, sun setting. That's easy, the sun sets in the west, so that means west. Third line, burning deserts… no idea. Maybe the hint has to do with home? Or "the path"? Anyway, fourth line, star of the north. Obviously north. And lastly, continued along the path. OK, new complaint, how are you supposed to know that "continued along the path" means "do the same thing again", which means north? How do you know it doesn't mean "the direction you want to go", which is the gate, which is to the east? Or "the direction you came from", the west? Oh wait, the line about the Desert also mentions a path, so I guess that could mean south too! Wonderful! Now let's go back to tundras and deserts. How… the fuck… are you supposed to figure out that "tundra" means north, and "desert" means south? Not only is that not really entirely accurate in the real world, why would you even apply real world logic in a fantasy game? What makes all this EXPONENTIALLY worse is that there is actually a desert area in the game… AND IT'S IN THE FUCKING NORTH!!!!

So yeah, when a game presents you with a massive developer fuckup like that, the only sane option is to use a guide.

If the North star is leading the way to the tundra, then the tundra is to the north. If the desert is behind him, then the desert is to the south. The sun sets in the west. Pretty simple tbh.

It depends. I try my hardest not to, because the moment I look at a walkthrough, I've likely given up on the game. If I'm stuck to the point I don't think I'll ply more anyways I check the internet for the solution, and see if I want to keep playing.

that still leaves the "continued along the path" thing. And there's no indication when you get a part of the puzzle right, so if you make a bad assumption on what that part means, you'll have no idea what part you did wrong. Also it takes a while to push the block so that makes matters even worse.

We just got through figuring out that the PATH is NORTH. The only thing you could possibly argue for is not knowing each line is a direction. But that's indicated partially by scroll 2.

Holy fuck, playing Riven as a kid was like beating my head against a beautiful and eerie brick wall.

I just purchased The Room 2 for $1.69
I imagine it will be exactly like the last game which is a series of virtual puzzle boxes.
I will stare at this shit until I figure it out.
This will likely take me 2 hours.

When you look up the answer in a puzzle game you are effectively no longer playing a game.
To me it is a cardinal god damn sin.

I have a friend who played a 3D Zelda for the first time.
I sat in the room as he went back and forth between the game and his computer to look at a walkthough because the fat fuck wouldn't even attempt to solve the puzzles.
Then he'd eventually look at me and tell me it was a bad game.

One jewtube e-celeb by the name of Arin "I touched dicks to prove I'm straight" Hanson, streamed himself playing OoT along with Christopher "I kissed Arin on the mouth and filmed it" O'Neill.
They yucked it up the whole time, didn't pay attention and used the prima official strategy guide throughout the whole fucking game.
Then Arin made a "review" of OoT on how he didn't like it in the slightest and forgot well into it that he was supposed to be comparing it more to the Zelda he does like, the much more simple 2D topdown game that was A Link to the Past.

There's uhs-hints (dot) com that provides incremental hints for most adventure games(maybe there is something in the room -> maybe there is something in the closet -> have you checked the bottom drawer -> there is a hidden switch you need to press), but as for games that incorporate such a system, there's Tex Murphy Under a Killing Moon(don't know about the other FMV games).

I only play good puzzle games, where a guide is no help to you.

For me the key-word is "frozen", which I associate with North, as in the farther you travel north, the colder it gets(yes I know, that it's also true for South, but that's the common way of thinking for people who live above the Equator, like Europe, North America, most of Asia), and the opposite would be "hot" and "South", because you get closer to the Equator. Again, I know that the game takes place in a magical land, but the developers are from Earth, not from that magical land. Also I remember you complaining about this puzzle in another thread, a long time ago.

I used a guide for the mine cart puzzle in Deponia. I know there were a fixed number of solutions and I could've brute forced it, but those games were so bad, I just wanted to get it over with.

Because suspension of disbelief only goes so far? For all you know, the game's desert zone is probably further equatorward, not strictly northern hemisphere north. Also, if you're on the equator, there are desert climates to the north AND south of you.

Silent Hill 3's Shakespear puzzle.
No regrets looking that one up. I was able to put together a chunk of it, but was at a loss for everything else.

Games are for fun and entertainment. Why would you even continue if you don't like it? I'd just play something else.

what is it with cuckchan-tier threads popping out lately?

Haven't you heard? There's a cure for autism.

Yep, 2 hours.
Really enjoyed it.

It is a shame tripple-a development doesn't value puzzles very much.

I want a tripple-A developer to make a puzzle focused game, but I understand why they can't anymore.

That actually seems pretty obvious even before your exasperated explanation

Ok.

cuck.
how'd you like the puzzle where you have to start drawing the line at the beginning of a full-length pretentious documentary and hold the cursor there so you could finish drawing it at the end?
the witness is utter shit and there was zero reason to expect more than that out of Blow.

Wait, that was a puzzle? I thought he just snuck that movie clip in there as an easter egg because he's a faggot.

Because some puzzles are straight up bullshit. Pic related. You had to make a sentence but it uses words that haven't been used in the English language since the 18th century. I was actually really suprised I had most of the words figured out, because there was like 3 combos minus the missing words I had.

A better question than that, what about using guides for collectibles?

It seems like that's what everyone does nowadays.

My nigger. I really liked both games. I just wished they didn't rely on the supernatural element for some of the puzzles so heavily. I really liked the concept of just strange mechanical puzzle boxes.

Is there a vr version of this game out? Seems like it would be very good.

That's like playing a single-player shooter with aimbot. Unless the "story" is better than the actual game (at which point the developer should have just written a book instead) there is no reason to consult a guide over puzzle games.

Ecgwyn, mother of King Aethelstan?

git gud

I'm just gonna say that the Thysis hub in Hexen II is some messy stuff. In particular, that 3x3 tile puzzle that has random solutions and teleports you away every time you mess it up.

The 7th Guest does this with the book in the library. First time is hint, second is another, third solves it for you. I used that for the cans puzzle as a dumbass kiddo. There's also a part in Ultra Despair Girls where you have to figure out a password based on a bunch of random-ass clues related to birthsigns. The dude in the room does the same thing.

Alright, I'm stumped. Saved it nonetheless, because I like self-torture that way.

There's this one level with the boat (not the ship) where you only need to click just one thing and you're done. I still feel like there was more to it.

It's a Layton puzzle. Layton puzzles suck ass.

It's not that hard, it explicitly tells you she's a technophile. Hints:
It's got something to do with computers and letters.
And directions, the chunks are missing a bit in various directions.

Answer:
Text me. You look at the keyboard key in the direction of the missing bite.