Infinitap Games

Due to the interactivity of the medium, you need some control over what happens. Is walking enough? Do you need puzzles to make it a "game"? How important is the structure of the world? Here my thoughts!

I often like puzzles in games, and wouldn't think of them as padding (which is a pretty negative term for adding unnecessary length to a game) as long as they're good. Of course a lot of horror puzzles are more like fetch quests. If you need three stones to open a door in Resident Evil, and you find them by exploring three hallways, that's really not much of a puzzle. Often puzzles in that series don't make a lot of sense within the world either, especially Resident Evil 2, which has the world's most bizarre police station. I will say that the need for backtracking in earlier Resident Evil games doesn't just add length. If you have to pass by a spot several times, it means you might want to take out some enemies instead of trying to avoid them.

I much prefer clever puzzles like those in the Portal games. These fit well with the world, and provide a real challenge. As much as I love the story, it wouldn't be much of a game if you were just walking along listening to GLaDOS insult you. In a horror game, I think more elaborate puzzles might be useful to add variety to the gameplay, and to provide dips in tension, which could then be ratcheting it back up later.

I think it is really, really, really hard to do puzzles as well as Portal. Because Portal is a puzzle game, they can focus 100% of their resources in creating great puzzles. With a horror game, I don't think you can do the same thing. I created the puzzle game A Mobius Proposal to propose to my wife. I thought the co-op puzzle mechanic was pretty clever (This was before Portal 2 came out), and while it's not a polished or amazing experience, it is an example of a puzzle that fits into the world- well, except it's the other way around. The world is structured around the puzzle. If I were trying to do something like that in a horror setting, it wouldn't work.

I'm sure good puzzles can be done in a horror game, but I can't think of any examples. In thinking of what puzzles that I think would fit in the world of the next game, nothing great comes to mind. Especially because I want to keep the interface simple, we might end up with something along the lines of fetch quests. I'm not sure that is necessarily a bad thing. People seemed to really dig A Coming Storm, which was actually a bunch of fetch quests. Perhaps we should have kept with that structure for more of the game? I'm not sure. What do you think?

Fetch quests can be pretty well disguised, I thought Coming Storm did a good job of making it feel like you weren't just getting objects and taking them to another location. The candle has an immediate effect, and it helped that the house changed in some way after you get each item. I think that if you have to backtrack through static locations more than once then fetch quests can start to be really awful, but done well they can give you some purpose.

Puzzles definitely don't work for all games, but I'd like to see more elements of horror worked into the puzzles themselves. For example, for a basic locked door puzzle, what if instead of just finding a key hidden in a safe with the combination given to you in clues, you had to cut open a corpse because you find out through exploring that this person swallowed the key you need before they died. This kind of thing could just be cheap gross-out content if not done right though.

I'm also reminded of a really old indie adventure game (I guess at this point most of them were indies anyway) called Plague of the Moon. This was basically a Sierra-style point and click game, but with some pretty dark content for the time. In it you played a witch (and not a fun Disney witch, a pretty hardcore dark magic, hail Satan type of witch), one of the puzzles I remember was having to make a potion out of various witch-y and disgusting items like eyeballs and lizard tongues or something.

I don't think that it takes lots of resources to make good puzzles. Rather, there are some people that are just super talented at puzzle design. There are games like Escape Goat 1 and 2, which are puzzle platformers, that have a bunch of puzzles designed by a single person.

I think you could even give the Portal games more of a horror theme. They are, after all, about a psychologically abusive AI who forces human test subjects to traverse increasingly deadly traps. As for puzzle based horror games that actually exist, the best one I can think of is Limbo. Mechanically, it's a solid but not revolutionary physics based puzzle platformer. Stylistically, it has a very creepy atmosphere, and you're bound to see the young protagonist meet some gruesome deaths--cut up by sawblades, pulled apart by giant insects, that sort of thing. Have you played Limbo, Matt? Anyone else want to propose good puzzle horror games?

I think one reason the fetch quests in Coming Storm worked well is that there wasn't a lot of repetition. After you got the candle, you started seeing new things, like the dead version of yourself in the dark room, and the ghost following you. Then once you got the ax, the level transformed once again. So you didn't spend lots of time backtracking through an identical area. I liked some of the enemy encounters too, but there probably is more you can do with this sort of gameplay. Maybe combine items and enemies somehow. Let's say you needed a candle to avoid deadly traps, but sometimes you'd have to put it out to keep from being spotted by a monster.

If we do any sort of fetch quests, we will try to keep them interesting and horror themed. I don't want to do things that are just silly gross though. I haven't played it yet, but the brain puzzle in preview builds of the Evil Within seems a bit excessive.

I've met Ian from Magical Time Bean (developer of Escape Goat), and I suspect he spends A LOT of time (most of his development) coming up with good puzzles. That means that other areas of his game receive less focus - ie. the graphics aren't going to win any awards for Escape Goat. It doesn't NEED amazing graphics because the puzzles are what make it shine. For the type of game it is, I think Ian spent his time wisely. Perhaps he is just brilliant at coming up with puzzles, but I think you need to try a bunch of stuff and focus test it and refine it.

I've played Limbo, and I agree that you could make a horror themed Portal, but I'd consider neither a horror game. Perhaps it's my opinion, but honestly, I think the later levels of Limbo where it's more of a standard puzzle platformer, the atmosphere really suffered and it was a worse game since the atmosphere was the best part - even though it was more interesting of a puzzle game.

We never want to lose focus on the atmosphere, which is why I don't think we can make a really interesting puzzle game - nor would we want to. We are thinking about adding some more mechanics, but I don't think they will make the game more puzzle-y.

For the enemy encounters, I think we are actually going to move away from the puzzle based inmates and do something more like creepy set ups with the tormented girl and the tormented Thomas. To do good enemy puzzles, you have to make the mechanics of the enemy understandable, and if the enemies are understandable, they are less scary. My goal is to basically reuse the enemy models but have them behave differently per encounter or at least have a few different behaviors. It's a lot of work though, so we'll see how that works out.

it is always going to be a tough balance between 'stuff to do' and 'immersion' with this title. If you add anything game-y it'll feel more like a game and less like an immersive experience. if you add anything that feels like unnecessary busywork, it can do the same.

I think the popularity of the coming storm was the fact that there is comfort in having progression and clear goals (game-y ideas). By getting an object, you feel like you are accomplishing SOMETHING (even if you don't yet know what/why).By using that item to get another item, that same feeling continues.

If you never want to have the player feel accomplished, in control, empowered, or able to understand anything in the game (so they are truly confused, aimless and disempowered) you would need to eliminate anything that would compromise those aspects.

Personally I like that getting certain objects and items has a bit of a trigger and so changes the landscape of the nightmare. get the candle and the storm rages on, allowing for the environment to alter in how dark it is, the rain visible, audio cues, jump scares, etc etc in addition to unlocking an area of the house you originally couldn't go. Get the axe and after you wake up and grab it again, you are sort of forced out of the main hallway, no longer feeling like you might me alone.

If the game had MORE of that, either additional objects to locate and carry, or possibly progress the level of nightmare's events by how many paintings you viewed/dolls you viewed, portholes into cells you viewed, that would also give a feeling of progression through natural gameplay. Players are going to do those actions anyway, so take advantage of it as a game mechanic that can tweak the setting in some way. Then if they don't do it, fine, they can still progress. if they DO do it and try to be thorough, the nightmare slowly changes and gets worse and the monotonous repetition(i.e. feeling of aimless walking) is changed.

One method to do this would be that as you progress through the first few nightmares in the mansion, if you always check the paintings, progressively the setting has more and more cobwebs. Looking at paintings of faces depicted so clear, yet the character (and also the player) have no idea who they are, feeling as if their mind and memories are full of cobwebs. you already have a lot of tiles and assets for spiderwebs and stuff so potentially layering them on is possible, and would age the house and make it feel more and more "lost" in the webs of time. If you added a shadow spider or hinted at it a few times for scares, that would be perfectly ok. The loss of ones clear memories, short or long term, is also a mental condition many gamers will understand (especially aging ones like me lol).

Or in the Asylum, the more you look into cells, the more you are invading on someone's privacy. As you check the cells and see the horrors within, the more often you will hear the loose nuts running around and screaming (and since you already cited possibly trying different ideas with the inmates, this could tie into that with a graduating frequency or difficulty with them). Having a broken message written across a few cells that indicates a bit of the branching ending could help compel players to keep checking cells instead of skipping them (and so making the game easier).

having gameplay elements that don't FEEL like required elements, and are there in a natural sense (actions most players will do whether you want them to or not) is most likely what the series needs. if you want to avoid it being a game and getting muddled down with things that break immersion, it'll require clever but soft-gloves stuff like this to really work.

Don't get me wrong--I'm sure Ian worked really hard designing all those puzzles. He actually put out a video showing some rejected levels.



Even if you liked the idea of a puzzle horror game, I can see how hiring someone as a full time puzzle designer could strain your budget. But I don't think that the resources required for puzzle design scale in the same way as graphics, voice acting, etc. That is to say, I don't see why making the puzzles for Portal would be a much bigger job than making the puzzles for Escape Goat. And it's no big deal for Valve to hire someone, or even a few people, just to design good puzzles.

I think structuring the game to be more objective based is a good idea, but I'm not sure making results from optional things is the best use of our time. Unless you play through it twice, you don't really know the results you are seeing are from the optional things... If we were going to script that extra stuff, wouldn't it make more sense to just always do it?

That being said, I think having the player pick up objects or do something other than walk will be an improvement.

Assuming we had the extra budget to bring on someone else (which we probably won't for the next game at least), I think bringing on another artist would be a smarter choice just because I think a more common complaint was the lack of art content than the lack of puzzles specifically. The lack of "gameplay" in the traditional sense may be as common, but I think we have an interesting idea to give the player something to do while walking that will make the game more interesting - at least I hope so. We'll see how it works out when we prototype it.

matt wrote:I think structuring the game to be more objective based is a good idea, but I'm not sure making results from optional things is the best use of our time. Unless you play through it twice, you don't really know the results you are seeing are from the optional things... If we were going to script that extra stuff, wouldn't it make more sense to just always do it?

basing the script on how many times a player did an action means where the changes occur (i.e. where in the nightmare the player is standing) and how quickly or slowly it escalates would vary, making the experience more dynamic and so players experiences would feel different. if you had part of the games description hint at this 'the more thorough you are, the better you'll understand your situation. But at what cost?'

otherwise, yes, having simple 'find this and carry it, things change' also works and is only mildly gamey and immersion breaking.

Getting more for your team would always be handy. but yes, there is a cost. I guess it would depend on what kind of salary you offer to the recruit, and what the kickstarter was shooting for overall. Possibly make that a stretchgoal?