Puzzles are great, but the puzzle design is horribly flawed later on *SPOILERS*

[Xandemar]

So i love puzzles, i love spending hours in adventure games figuring out on how to solve problems. In my view, if a game at any point requires me to get a piece of paper and a pencil to write things down, that is a great game.

I love the fact this game has puzzles most of them are simple, fun and don't require a lot of time to figure out. If there's going to be additional puzzle content in this game and any other potential pathfinder game I'd really like for future games and/or content to avoid the issues that are present in the puzzles in Chapter V.

If you've gotten to that point you know I'm talking about The Enigma and about the Heart of Mystery puzzles. The problem with these puzzles is a combination of poor emphasis, unintentional misdirection and leaps of logic that can only be solved by having 190+ IQ or by googling the solution. Googling the solution isn't a problem if this was an adventure game where you kind of expect moon logic and nonsensical conclusions, but this isn't an adventure game, and most of the puzzles in the game are simple and give you all the hints you need. So, at least for me, i feel stupid needing to google solutions if the game up until this point gave you all that you need to know about solving the puzzles.

Anyway the problems are thus:

The first problem is a misdirection that occurs is with the tile puzzles of the heart of mystery questline. The entire design of the puzzles with exception of the last puzzle which requires you to piece things together from the rest, is based on the relatively simple solution found in the conundrum unsolved area. The problem is that it accidentally misdirects the player because the solution seems to imply that the symbols on the inner tiles need to be the same orientation as the outer tiles, but it actually means is that the symbols on the inner tiles need to be the of the same type and in the direction the outer tiles are pointing at regardless of the orientation of said symbols of the inner tiles. I spend needless few hours trying in vain to orient the inner tiles when that wasn't what was required of me, and only realized this when i got to a point where i realized it was physically impossible to do that up until i had to google it. I was pissed.

The enigma puzzles that stick out are the arrow puzzles, now the game tells you that the symbols in the grid represent numbers and you find those numbers by looking at the descriptions of said symbols in the area; not that hard to figure out. The problem is the game tells you absolutely nothing about what the arrows do. You are left with no information as to how to proceed, no hints, no dialogue, nothing. So i started thinking that this is some sort of math puzzle, but i didn't know whether the arrows represent inequalities, subtractions or additions or if it was even a math puzzle at all i just had 9 numbers. And i spent at least 4 hours looking at this grid and none if made sense, it was made worse by the fact that you can turn the arrows so they point outside the grid which didn't make sense to me at all. So i was forced, yet again, to google the solution. Turns out that it is indeed an addition puzzle, but the numbers are not the numbers given to you but the arrows are, and they represent values of 1 and they need to point to the symbol that has a value attached to it it's also additionally confusing that the arrows can be diagonal and can add to multiple symbols, which is not that big of a deal because you'll figure it out after 15 or so minutes of fiddling, the problem is, again, lack of information on where to start.

The puzzle with the green x and red symbol (it's tic tac toe) is not difficult to figure out, it's just that the hint is poorly worded because it tells you the symbols need to be in a line, but it misdirects you because it doesn't mention the fact you need to take diagonals into account, which is poor emphasis and you can easily spend hours on this and not get anywhere. Also it'd help if both grids would be smaller.

Some additional problems is the Pulura fall puzzle doesn't emphasize enough that you need to go counter-clockwise and that you don't need to light up all the symbols. A minor issue and it's probably on me poorly reading the book. And the wall puzzle in the baphomet maze for the mask is misleading because the pictures say 435- when the five is actually a 6, but that again might be me not reading closely enough.

I've got 2 more puzzles left to do and if they're bad enough I'll make an addendum to the post later. Hopefully somebody from Owlcat will notice this post.

Edit: Heart of the mystery was also bad. It required you to complete Nenio's quest and figure out the arrow puzzles. The fact that you had to go to another zone to get a hint on the puzzle with the only possible logical connection being the architecture is quite a damn leap. Another issue is the jumping to other zones to take notes on the symbols and then having to figure out which orientation is the correct one AND then realizing that only one of the symbols/numbers is needed AND it requires an addition of said numbers with the opposing row. I would never in a million years figure this out. There's too many leaps and assumptions i have to make to figure this out on my own.

Thanks for reading.

[darkholyPL]

I ignored most of the Hear of Misery.. Mistery puzzles. If I wanted to do tile puzzles I would turn on a puzzle game, not a cRPG.
Hey guys, the demons are attacking, the world has gone to sh*t and we kinda in a hurry here... but lets just stick around here and do those freaking puzzles, eh?
Doesn't sit well with me.
Thankfully you don't need to do them. Sure you can just look up a solution online, but that's not how I like to play.

[The Murderous Titanium Puffin]

I too like puzzles.
But the symbols in the heart of the mystery puzzles are terrible.

The symbols (in the puzzles I've encountered) are ornate, needlessly abstract, hard to transcribe, and numerous while being hard to differentiate. They are rotated as they're placed on the floor (which is not a seemless process), and then 'de-rotated' and miniaturised when in the inventory screen to select a new tile, which only adds to the confusion.

When trying to solve the puzzle. I attempted to write a 'legend' with pencil and paper where I matched one symbol to something I already knew: One symbol was now matched with 'T' and another 'E' and so on.

It was not fun. Being hard to transcribe, I had difficulty reproducing the symbols on paper. Being ornate and needlessly abstract, none of my letter labels were intuitive matches for the symbols. The rotation of the symbols throughout the puzzle further complicated attempts to recognise them and therefore get used to the labels I'd given each one.

I was having to rotate, and decode by referring back to my badly drawn legend for each damn symbol. It was too much cognitive effort that wasn't necessary. This meant I had less mental energy for actual pattern recognition (I just googled the answer in the end).

So, if the early puzzles in heart of the mystery were real, I would combat the symbols with paint; erasing each symbol by painting a single colour over it. Goodbye Abyssal Squiggle of Doom: you are Orange. Goodbye Cognitive Malware of Evil: you're Blue. Begone Demonic Glyph of Confusion: you're Green.
This would be a necessary exorcism.

The logic and pattern recognition aspects of the puzzle would become much, much simpler, and so easier to memorise and plan. Colours don't care how they're oriented, and are trivial to recognise if you have normal vision. (You could use the dots on dominoes as replacement symbols if you're colour blind)

It would -admittedly - make the puzzle look like a children's toy. Still, if I want to learn ornate symbols, I think Japanese Kanji are much more reasonable. They have names, meanings, and the decency to stay the right way up!

[seeker1]

For once I will try and be relatively brief.

Puzzles can be good in a CRPG. I don't mind having them. The reality is though, most players will find the solution on the Internet, and just use it. (As long as it is explained correctly, of course.) Conceptually it's not bad to have them. The question is implementation.

I agree with many complaints on how they were implemented. Matching tiles by the design on them when the designs don't look sufficiently unique. That's one.

I think if a certain core CRPG tenet were applied, solving them should depend more on character skill and not player eyesight or attention to detail. That's just MHO.