I'm gonna pose a question out there for folks, would love to hear your thoughts.
it's pretty broad but, what do you like in your PnCs? settings, themes, types of stories, mechanics, types of puzzles, types of UIs, etc.
I was playing through Detroit: Become Human with some friends last weekend which reminded me how much I really like Quantic Dream's puzzle design. Their games get tagged as being nothing but QTE's but that's really not the case. Now having played Westwood's Blade Runner I can see it was pretty much the blueprint for everything QD has done starting with Indigo Prophecy.
David Cage also mentions it as a strong influence, himself. The idea to forego lock & key inventory puzzles and create these set piece problem solving scenarios (in addition to the focus on investigation and narrative choice). All that stuff was definitely cribbed by QD from Westwood's playbook.
Quantic Dream gets really creative with it, though. They also smartly recognized that having a simple puzzle with a strict time limit is a great way to split the difference between challenge and frustration. My favorite examples are:
Tracking deviant androids by hacking memories in Detroit and the
antique shop sequence in Heavy Rain (links contain minor spoilers).
In the first example you're tracking down two deviant (malfunctioning and erratic) androids who murdered the client of a futuristic brothel. You deduce that one of the deviants is still in the club. You track her down by hacking into the memory of other sex androids who may have picked up footage of the deviant's whereabouts. The catch is that the memory-footage each android keeps expires every 2 hours. You've got roughly 2 minutes left to use it. So the puzzle is using your knowledge of her trajectory to surmise which of the many androids on display would have witnessed her next move. This would be trivially easy were it not for the
HARSH time limit. If not for that, you could just brute force it by looking at all the video feeds. But when you've only got two minutes it's a genuinely tense scramble to figure out which android has the next bit of relevant footage.
The Heavy Rain example is one that I still recall semi-frequently ever since I played the game back in 2010. I thought it was so clever because It genuinely caught me off guard. The scene starts off with a visit to an antique repair shop. The game has your player character engage in several different, seemingly mundane, activities. Stuff you wouldn't give a second thought like answering a telephone or observing some nick-nack. But then, in an instant, the shop owner is mysteriously killed. The cops were called by the killer -- who has since fled the scene -- to set you up. You have only a few moments to recall everything you touched to wipe your finger prints off each object. Mechanically, it's a very simple memory puzzle. The kind you see all the time in
cheesy web games that get shared around on facebook. But the misdirection and narrative context make all the difference. When you don't see the twist coming, it's incredibly effective.
What I like so much about these is that they're integrated into the narrative in a way that feels custom built from the ground up. Narrative informing gameplay is where I think adventure games shine the most. Bringing it back to Westwood; you can see the roots of this puzzle design in
sequences like this from Blade Runner. Where you happen upon a ticking time bomb with 3 possible targets. The bomb itself, the man attached to it, or his shackles. Take too much time and you die, likewise for picking the wrong target. A simple dilemma elevated by the narrative context and limited time.
It's something that TellTale regrettably failed to borrow from QD and Westwood while they were taking everything else. Which is a shame because these are concepts I'd like to see more games pick up on. The antique shop sequence in particular. I've always wondered why more adventure games haven't done stuff like that.
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I was also gonna write something about dialogue puzzles because they're awesome but severely under-utilized (insult sword fighting is shamefully still the best one 28 years on). However, this post is already too long so perhaps another time.