Difficulty Markers and Mechanics Usage

[TheNextToLastSolstice]

I very much enjoyed the game - it is an honest puzzle game that never goes down the awful path that many other Devs seem to be tempted by involving unmotivated or "surprise" mechanics that are not introduced and thereby violate the contract with the player.

So, I very much like the design overall. One thing that stood out to me though is that the difficulty markers don't seem to mean much. While it's true I spent most of my time on "Sun" levels, within that scope it was really 2-3 Sun levels that took almost all of my time and the other "Suns" were indistinguishable from Triangles or Houses. In addition, a couple of the Triangles and Houses were CLEARLY as hard or harder than Suns.

For example, the "Axis Denied" puzzle REQUIRES analysis and experimentation and it's honestly hard for me to imagine somebody beating that in less than 30 or so minutes blind unless they leave it for last. On the other hand, I instantaneously knew that you needed underground piping for Sunken Path (though I got stuck on the bottom right corner pipe for 30 mins, AFTER fully placing the middle path in 2 minutes, due to an unrelated mental block). Most suns I beat in under ~20 minutes from the first time I saw them.

The "Trident" magnetic level is basically the only magnetism-section level that requires doing something that's not exactly the most obvious and telegraphed solution and it took me 2x as long as all of the other levels in that area...which were only ~5 minutes or so each, even though at least a couple were "triangles" so nominally the same as Axis Denied.

The first three ship levels Chair Lift, Block Guard, and Long Reach are fair mechanical reviews/intros but are closer to Eye levels (1-2 minutes) than triangles. There are no distractors and just brute forcing every reasonable combination of keystrokes would solve them in single digit minutes.

The level two-before-last (I'll call it Assembly Line 3) is a good and fair way to teach something but it seems like a very weird time to start introducing something since it is essentially only relevant for a single significant puzzle.

The level before-last (I'll call it Assembly Line 4) is great but the final level (I'll call it Assembly Line 5) is trivial assuming you've beaten the prior levels as there is nothing really "new" and there's nothing to even distract from the most direct solution. Don't get me wrong though, "totally fair but just surprisingly easy" is infinitely better than "it's hard because you have to push a certain pipe against a certain wall and then enter the Konami code" (and it's unfortunately a disgraceful reality that Steam allows games that do this to be labeled "puzzle").


I suppose my question is: did I miss a memo on the rhyme or reason behind these markers? Is it based on something objective that I missed or just user-testing results?


A bonus follow-up question/thought...

I was disappointed by the missed opportunity to have twin-levels or something like that where using the mechanic of pushing pipes over barriers (as in Talos etc.) leads to a solution. The end-of-first-island meta-pipe-roll back to your house is good, but it seemed to lack some of the other kinds of depth (multiple level solutions where hard solution allows you to get pipe through at the end but easier one doesn't, etc. kinds of things).

My Waterloo of this game also happened to be Catapult. I spent ~3.5 hours on it, an insanely large amount of time compared to any other level. It took me on a journey trying to leverage the wide variety of rotation+stacking combinations and the fact you can get the S piece to the right side by pushing it along the top wall but it turns out I missed the near-trivial actual solution, heh. So I am a bit biased but would have liked to see that mechanic have more in-depth use than just "Log Off" (which is definitely a Triangle and not a House unless I missed something super easy there).

[Corey Martin]

Hi :)

Pushing a pipe over a wall into a different puzzle is a fun idea! Especially if the puzzle that's missing a pipe is clearly unsolvable without it. A lot of logistical issues to consider there, but probably worth the trouble. Generally exploring more pipe-on-a-wall scenarios would be interesting, I agree.

Making the metapuzzle only solvable depending on your solutions of individual puzzles would be neat, but I feel a bit too demanding. I think of it as a victory lap, so asking players to resolve individual puzzles in a harder way would affect the pacing there.

Re: difficulty symbols, the reason I decided to add difficulty rankings was to encourage players to explore. For example, I didn't want players to get stuck on Axis Denied for a couple hours before they realised there are easier levels elsewhere. The main argument against that is that difficulty is subjective and inevitably some people will disagree with certain rankings, and that maybe getting stuck on a "medium" level feels bad. In hindsight, i would probably label many of the "medium" levels as "hard" (Trident being an obvious place to start).

The puzzles requiring lateral thinking (e.g. No Escape, Archway, Sunken Path, etc) are probably the most subjective. Some see it right away and some struggle more on these than any other. Depends how your brain is wired, i guess :)

So I think labelling puzzle difficulty is definitely a bad idea, but the risk of people playing this game linearly is worse? Hard to say.