Issues with Puzzle Solutions

[ItsDarthChaos]

So, I'm sure I am not the only one, but is anyone else feeling like some of the solutions to these puzzles are a bit absurd? I mean... Don't get me wrong. I greatly appreciate a puzzle game that doesn't hold your hand, but at the same time, I feel like there are a lot of puzzles here that could have seriously used some polish on their hints in the world.

To name a few examples, as much as I enjoyed the Picture Pairings puzzles, some of them required very specific knowledge to complete. The instance that comes to mind is Stage and Sage. I don't know anything about plants, so I sat there for 30 minutes trying to figure out what I was looking at. That puzzle overall I thought was really great and played really well into the map building mechanics, but I would say a good 15% of the solutions in that puzzle are difficult even for native English speakers. Then honestly, the hint that the puzzle gives you isn't that great. They try to blanket apply it to the entire letter safe series, where they keep the hints just vague enough, you are forced to take some seriously large leaps in logic on some of them. The most aggregious of these to me was the Drawing Room puzzle. From what I've found out after the fact, something in the Freezer is supposed to help with this puzzle in particular, but I never found that hint, because the Freezer's effect makes trying to actually USE the Freezer really difficult. And the latest problem I have run into is the CASTLE puzzle. Not gonna lie, by this point I was so tired of these puzzles not giving you enough information by this point, I just looked up hints online. And my God, I am glad I did. Because the locations for finding the cypher fragments are so obscure, and not always the most obvious individually, that even if I had 2-3 of them, I don't think I would have recognized that they are part of the same puzzle. And the fact that one of them is in the Kennel, a room I have STILL not unlocked, because I didn't find its effect particularly helpful... and the one on the BACK of the Secret Passage is just plain mean.
The only reasonable way you would ever find this naturally requires you to build the secret passage, and then NOT USE IT. If I tried to do this puzzle without looking anything up, I likely would have never finished it.

[jagholin]

Puzzles that rely on word play are absolutely atrocious. They don't require any logical thinking, and it just comes down to whether you know the right word(or combination of words) or don't. If you are non native english speaker(or don't know english well enough), good luck.

In addition, it is impossible to translate them to other languages. Try to find another popular game that only has english language. There are no non english voiceovers or subtitles, and there never will be.

[Gorlom[Swe]]

I don't know what clue you are refering to in the freezer , but the clue I know of that relates to the drawingroom puzzle comes in the "a new clue" book.
Usually the game has a few redundant clues.

[meep]

Originally posted by jagholin:

In addition, it is impossible to translate them to other languages. Try to find another popular game that only has english language. There are no non english voiceovers or subtitles, and there never will be.

How is this a negative? Tonnes of works of art lose their meaning when translated from their original language. You wouldn't slight a novel because it's not written in simple English. Blue Prince's puzzles *are* logical, and it's not a bad thing that they play around with language for them to work.

[ChickenStrip]

Originally posted by GorlomSwe:

I don't know what clue you are refering to in the freezer , but the clue I know of that relates to the drawingroom puzzle comes in the "a new clue" book.
Usually the game has a few redundant clues.

The Freezer sets up the Small Gates / Art puzzle and has a long list of additional rules to guide the player. It's like, 4 or 5 hints that players may not find elsewhere. It clarifies the overall form, with space, with comma, with comment that it relies on the space it is at and you don't need to copy dates down from letters and ♥♥♥♥.

Which sucks, because the Freezer sucks.

Everything with the Freezer and the CASTLE puzzles are going to be thing that leave a really bad taste in the mouths of some players. Seriously, there's like 3 or 4 distinct parts of CASTLE that totally ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ such in a way this is wildly beneath the rest of the rest of the puzzles in this game, or the absolute worst of what the Myst franchise had to offer.

[Wolfram359]

I thought this was a 5 star game and thought all the people complaining about the RNG were missing the point... if your objective gets messed up due to RNG, just be flexible and learn what you can from this run and start fresh. I love that no matter what happens in a run, you almost always either LEARN something or UNLOCK something. Primo mechanic!
However, I've found enough puzzles now that are just so forced an unnatural in their logic that they make me legit angry that anybody could be expected to solve them. Some things are intentionally easy to overlook... not as a matter of missing the logic, but literally hard to see in the first place.
Here are some specific examples, and I caution you that I do spoil a lot of things here:
I wasted soooo much time on the clock tower puzzle because I didn't realize handwritten red notes were "fake lies".. I looked at that memo in the security room but it's intentionally hidden in such a way that half of us just aren't going to spot the microprint half-obscured by a notebook line. Yeah there's a magnifying glass, but you can technically see it without that just as well, and it's designed to be missed. It seems almost mean-spirited. And the gaits/gates puzzle in the parlor? How can anyone be expected to make that leap of thought, and THEN be able to translate that into a code by counting certain pictures that are both tiny in frame size, and feature people with short strides (gaits)? The word puzzle room is obscure AF, and I'm half-tempted to look up that spoiler too. Wouldn't be surprised if that one also makes makes me mad. Some puzzles are brilliant, because they can be logically achieved without Google, by thinking things through, maybe a little trial and error to see what happens when I try this and that (like the chessboard puzzle underground - I was always excited to run down to that chamber to test out different pieces on different rooms I drafted that day). The office safe though, omg.. that's another one that had me pulling my hair out. The meta picture puzzle said 8 dates for 8 safes, after the "gate/gates" thing. These are not dates though! These are leaps of logic that make no complete logical progression from the information we are given, and the solution we are expected to process that information into.
Anyway, what started off feeling like such a purely brilliant game of logical deduction, really devolved into obscure overreaching of any semblance of reasonable cognitive connections one should be expected to make.
I don't feel stupid for not being able to solve a lot of this game; I feel frustrated for having been jerked along by a sadistic developer who included elements that were intentionally constructed to lead the player to frustration. Either that, or several of the puzzles were designed by folks who simply don't have the experience or understanding as to what makes a puzzle satisfying or even possible without cheating. As someone who loves puzzles (and there are so many good ones in this game) it really gets to me how badly designed certain puzzles in this game are. It feels like there was an A-team working on one stack of puzzles, and a D-squad working on the other, and they just mixed everyone's work together to complete the final product.

[ItsDarthChaos]

Originally posted by Wolfram359:

I thought this was a 5 star game and thought all the people complaining about the RNG were missing the point... if your objective gets messed up due to RNG, just be flexible and learn what you can from this run and start fresh. I love that no matter what happens in a run, you almost always either LEARN something or UNLOCK something. Primo mechanic!
However, I've found enough puzzles now that are just so forced an unnatural in their logic that they make me legit angry that anybody could be expected to solve them. Some things are intentionally easy to overlook... not as a matter of missing the logic, but literally hard to see in the first place.
Here are some specific examples, and I caution you that I do spoil a lot of things here:
I wasted soooo much time on the clock tower puzzle because I didn't realize handwritten red notes were "fake lies".. I looked at that memo in the security room but it's intentionally hidden in such a way that half of us just aren't going to spot the microprint half-obscured by a notebook line. Yeah there's a magnifying glass, but you can technically see it without that just as well, and it's designed to be missed. It seems almost mean-spirited. And the gaits/gates puzzle in the parlor? How can anyone be expected to make that leap of thought, and THEN be able to translate that into a code by counting certain pictures that are both tiny in frame size, and feature people with short strides (gaits)? The word puzzle room is obscure AF, and I'm half-tempted to look up that spoiler too. Wouldn't be surprised if that one also makes makes me mad. Some puzzles are brilliant, because they can be logically achieved without Google, by thinking things through, maybe a little trial and error to see what happens when I try this and that (like the chessboard puzzle underground - I was always excited to run down to that chamber to test out different pieces on different rooms I drafted that day). The office safe though, omg.. that's another one that had me pulling my hair out. The meta picture puzzle said 8 dates for 8 safes, after the "gate/gates" thing. These are not dates though! These are leaps of logic that make no complete logical progression from the information we are given, and the solution we are expected to process that information into.
Anyway, what started off feeling like such a purely brilliant game of logical deduction, really devolved into obscure overreaching of any semblance of reasonable cognitive connections one should be expected to make.
I don't feel stupid for not being able to solve a lot of this game; I feel frustrated for having been jerked along by a sadistic developer who included elements that were intentionally constructed to lead the player to frustration. Either that, or several of the puzzles were designed by folks who simply don't have the experience or understanding as to what makes a puzzle satisfying or even possible without cheating. As someone who loves puzzles (and there are so many good ones in this game) it really gets to me how badly designed certain puzzles in this game are. It feels like there was an A-team working on one stack of puzzles, and a D-squad working on the other, and they just mixed everyone's work together to complete the final product.

It's not that I don't enjoy the RNG elements... What I don't enjoy is that some of these puzzles take so many leaps of logic to solve that you're never going to figure them out on the first, third, fifth attempts. And it's not as simple as just giving up and coming back to them later... Because who knows when you'll get another chance to try again. There was one point where I was sure I needed the Drafting room and the Study to be able to solve each other's safes, that I spent 2 hours just going over every inch of those two rooms and gaining nothing, just because I didn't want to end the run and have to wait for another opportunity to have both rooms available.

And to continue what you said about the Drawing room, I DID manage to come to the conclusion that I needed the picture's 'gaits' on my own... What I absolutely never would have guessed was that I needed both the old man and the lady. I was so absolutely determined that I needed the SMALLEST gait, which was the old man, so the lady would have absolutely never crossed my mind without looking up the solution.
The hint is just too vague, because the game wanted to try to be clever and use ONE hint to solve 8 (7) different puzzles.

[Gorlom[Swe]]

Originally posted by Wolfram359:

And the gaits/gates puzzle in the parlor? How can anyone be expected to make that leap of thought, and THEN be able to translate that into a code by counting certain pictures that are both tiny in frame size, and feature people with short strides (gaits)? The word puzzle room is obscure AF, and I'm half-tempted to look up that spoiler too. Wouldn't be surprised if that one also makes makes me mad.

There are additional hints that helps you solve that one.
One is in the freezer behind an icewall.
The other one is in the book a new clue. This clue litterally makes the leap you were talking about for you.

Originally posted by ItsDarthChaos:

The hint is just too vague, because the game wanted to try to be clever and use ONE hint to solve 8 (7) different puzzles.

It's technically solvable with one hint, but the game gives you more. I've found quite a few redundant hints.