Why people complains about puzzles difficult?

[Gabo]

I really enjoyed every puzzle in this game, reminds me Silent Hill 3 puzzles in some way, i can't remenber a survival horror of this years with puzzles like this game and not puzzles for people with 10IQ.

[Charles M.]

so we have a mastermind over here

[The Professor]

When you have challenging puzzles, it's almost guaranteed that every player will have to look up a guide for 1 or 2 of them, which kills the sense of enjoyment for most people.

[Stoibs]

I don't recall anything from RE, Silent Hill (on the regular riddle difficulty atleast), Project Zero, Clocktower, Alone in the Dark, Haunting Ground, Forbidden Siren etc. that had similar mindbenders like this.

As has been brought up in the other threads, there's the Myst/IQ aptitude style of 'puzzles' that rely on pattern recognition, code-breaking practices, and general abstract concepts; and then there's the style of puzzles that we saw in those aforementioned list of 90's games or point'n'click adventure titles.

Tormented Souls has definitely decided to go full hog with the former, which isn't going to be agreeable to a lot of us oldschool survival horror fans who didn't go into this game expecting *that* style of pictograph puzzles to be front and centre all the time.

[Fortimbras]

Maybe a lot people expected the survival part to be more present, but right after the first few encounters the resources managment is finished and the survival game aspect becomes a filler for the puzzles.
Probably most players will need a walkthrough for this game to solve a puzzle at least once but never to overcome a difficult fight or something.

[MAGs☢uilleᵗʷᶦᵗᶜʰ]

Personally, it's more the quantity that bothers me.

Puzzles, it's great but eating them every minute it's boring. We don't have time to appreciate having found the solution that a new one is already there and a following one, ...

I'm even amazed that the notes aren't more useful for decoding some areas. With the amount of text, it would have been interesting, instead of sometimes having to guess how to understand the riddle and solve it.

A good example is the clock. You have the clues on the paintings but the date, it was confusing

Personally, I thought it was that the date of the note or the one written on the calendar in the meeting room because note speaks precisely of this area but in the end, no.

[stevo]

I think the issue is the devs use a bit of 4th wally knowledge to get past some of them. Some of them I thought were really clever the door lock with the '8' which is actually an infinity symbol but some, like the monkey puzzle are just atrociously delivered in clue format, when the answer can actually come from secular knowledge, providing you know it (most will not). The clock puzzle also expects outside knowledge, even if it should be familiar to like 95% of people. And as for the musical notes puzzle, it's just awful expecting most of your audience to even indulge such a puzzle. I can't be the only tone deaf person who immediately scowled and went off to look at a guide without a hint of shame.

Some are also just unusually finicky, in the sense you know how to solve them, but specific execution is required (the door in maternity ward only opens if you first grease both gears, then for some reason use a hammer, not a crowbar. Then there's the valve puzzle, which is intentionally visually impossible to get to grips with unless you stick your face right up to the monitor.

But I will say I really enjoyed the time loop puzzles, but that's mostly because I have a lot of experience and knew what to expect right away. I would suspect quite a few of them will leave people somewhat lost, especially when you get to a bottleneck. I was also walking around for an hour before I realized what the stephiscope was for. The clues for it are "there" technically, but you stand a massive chance of missing it.

Sometimes when you have a sheer amount of puzzles, you expand the chance for players to be over burdened with remembering just where everything is, which is why I think the map should've been far better, like it was in RE2 in indicating puzzles still left unsolved.

[Fumero]

Totally agree, the only puzzle that did not make sense for me was the monkey puzzle

[Stoibs]

I just finally figured out and opened the cash register after needing to look up several clues from the forum here..
Ok that seems waaaay unfair and ridiculous that The code uses 2 identical numbers, yet have completely different pictures to represent that number each time
Talk about intentionally throwing the player off and making it needlessly more complicated than it should have been. Plus it doesn't even make sense in the context of the real world explanation of why this is the case - in this instance why would that one employee write the code down in the piece of paper like that with different symbols? (I mean, why is the employee writing it in code in the first place.. atleast in RE a lot of the weird puzzles are attempted to be explained by the eccentric millionaire owners or how the police station used to be a gallery etc; Here a lot of these just seem to exist in the game world to serve the purpose of it being a 'video game' without much else rhyme or reason )

But yeah like everyone else I moreso have a problem with the clues not being the best written or nearly as helpful as they could be. I tired searching this dev team but it's almost impossible to find any information about them, think I landed on them being from Chile from their twitter, which may account for some of the writing in the clues being unclear and throwing some of us off, perhaps?

[Myztkl©-Kev]

I have always thrived on solving abstract puzzles, and most of them are pretty good, but 2 of them completely escaped me, even after having the solution.

[Myztkl©-Kev]

stevo님이 먼저 게시:

And as for the musical notes puzzle, it's just awful expecting most of your audience to even indulge such a puzzle. I can't be the only tone deaf person who immediately scowled and went off to look at a guide without a hint of shame.

I completely forgot about this puzzle! I had to look it up too.

[NoodlePunk]

Only almost at the halfway mark now but so far none of the puzzles have been rage inducing. Feels like I'm playing on my ps2 with Outbreak and Silent Hill 3 sitting on the table with an opened Monster. Very nostalgia for ps2/xbox survival horror games, really enjoying it.

[Bastian]

The maximum amount of time I was stuck on any puzzle in this game was 10 minutes, and it was one of the combination key door puzzles. There was not a single one I needed to look up, and all the solutions made perfect sense once you figured out how to approach them. Sounds like a lot of people need to git gud at abstract puzzles.

Edit: Regarding the cash register, its literally just how many straight lines pass through the dot. How is that hard or difficult to grasp in any way?

[Stoibs]

Bastian님이 먼저 게시:

The maximum amount of time I was stuck on any puzzle in this game was 10 minutes, and it was one of the combination key door puzzles. Sounds like a lot of people need to git gud at abstract puzzles.

Which would be sound advice if we were playing Myst or a puzzle game, but this is a Silent Hill/RE spiritual sucessor, so it stands to reason a lot of people are being blindsided and aren't liking this style compared to what we were expecting.

Why so hostile and condescending?

[Bastian]

Hostile? No. Condescending, yes, a bit. Because there's been a lot of people saying the puzzles are badly designed or flawed just because they failed to understand them. That doesn't make them badly designed.

[Stoibs]

Well it's all subjective. Loads of us aren't at all understanding what we're even supposed to be doing for a lot of stuff, with the hints being unclear. This isn't something or as much of a roadblock that I ever ran into in the 90's games, and I was a much younger, dumber kid back then.

Unfortunately it is indeed something that the devs can't really 'playtest' and workshop themselves since they all obviously know what the answers and what the clues mean.