In this newsletter, I played some horror video games and I have thoughts!

Role playing games and video games face a lot of similar design challenges and making good puzzles is one of the biggest ones. Puzzles are an important tool to vary pacing, so that a game is not just a series of battles and social scenes. They slow the pace and can bring focus to details of the setting. Solving a puzzle can be immensely satisfying to players. I recently played two video games, one that really nailed puzzles and one that didn’t.

Signalis is a new sci-fi survival horror game about lost love and cosmic horror. You explore an abandoned mining colony on a distant planet to find a woman. The mining colony was populated by human-like androids called Replikas. They’ve died or become unstable and violent. Each type of Replika has odd personality quirks, such as fixating on particular art forms or hobbies. Many of the puzzles in the game reflect these quirks - one model is fascinated with nature, so there are puzzles involving these quirks. One of the Replikas hid a key card in a locked container that resembles a magpie with no keyhole. Instead, it has a microphone. In a separate area, the player finds a way to control a nearby radio antenna and can choose which one of three sound files are played. One of the choices is labeled magpies. Tuning the player’s radio implant to that frequency while in the room with the magpie container unlocks it. It’s a clever puzzle that makes sense in the context of the game’s setting. The Replikas exhibit strange quirks that include collecting unusual objects like a container shaped like a bird. Setting the lock to be opened by a music clip ties into their love of music and dance. It worked perfectly for me as a player. The other game’s puzzles did not work for me at all.

Scorn is a first person horror game set in a strange biomechanical world. There is no real plot, except a vague goal to reach a certain summit in a floating temple. There’s no narration or explanation of who your character is, or what this world is. That actually could work, as an artistic exploration of biomechanical horror. The ambiguity could serve as a kind of Rorschach test, letting players interpret things their own way in. In sections of the game where I just wandered around, I felt immersed, wondering about the story of this alien place. However, complex puzzles that block exploration broke my immersion. The first puzzle that did this was essentially a sliding tile puzzle that took like 10 minutes to solve from trial and error. After that, I just pushed myself through to see the ending of the game. I was no longer curious about it because the sliding tile puzzle felt arbitrary and unconnected to themes of the game.

Puzzles that make sense in the context of the game’s setting, even if they are easier to solve, are a better fit than ones that are clearly inserted as a game mechanic and not for a narrative reason. It’s sometimes unavoidable, but adding puzzles into a game for the sake of adding puzzles is a mistake.

Episodes

​Recommendizer Episode Zero: A more detailed discussion of Signalis and Scorn in a new podcast series!

​Mork Borg: The Goblin Grinder - our first game of this very fun dark fantasy RPG system!

​Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - a detailed review and discussion of the most famous British RPG ever made. If you'd like to discuss this episode, please join the LND Discord server.

​GDW: Should We 2E? Caleb and I discuss making a second edition of Red Markets and Base Raiders.

Links

​Gifaanisqatsi: Take some random GIFs and put them to Phillip Glass music. Brilliant!

​Dicebreaker Award Winners: The best tabletop Games of 2022, according to Dicebreaker.com