Puzzle Games are weird (Side Quest #3)

Games Played: Save Room (2022) Unables (2024), Mystic Pillars: Remastered (2024), When the Past was Around (2020)

At the start of April, I found myself playing a fair few puzzle games. Not by design, it just kind of happened that way. It also happens that each of these games were different kind of puzzles. The main takeaway I got from these experiences is that puzzle games are weird, and must be incredibly difficult to make.

It just so happens that each of these games turned out to be different kinds of puzzle, so it’s helped my self analysis of this. I consider myself fairly smart, so if I was struggling a bit at one of these puzzles, I’d take it harder than I probably should have. To that end, the puzzles in When the Past was Around are more my speed, relying more on spacial awareness and interpretation of the clues presented. A game I struggled a lot more was Mystic Pillars, which is all about numbers.

The general premise of Mystic Pillars is that you are given the solution - numbers on the pillar and you have to match it in a limited number of turns. Each pillar has slots for beads, and the further away the pillar you want to move to, the more beads go. It’s a simple concept, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around some of the levels. In the end, I just used a guide. The layouts started to repeat later on, so my desire fell off alongside my ability to solve the puzzles.

A game I did enjoy, both this time and the previous time I played on PC is Safe Room, which takes the element of inventory sorting in Resident Evil 4 and turns it into a puzzle game. Naturally it relies on knowledge of the original game and it’s frustrating how limited the design can feel but it’s still fun.

Unables is fun too, but to call it a puzzle game seems like we’re stretching the defintion somewhat. it’s a physics based game set in a variety of snowglobe like dioramas. You do not control the characters within, rather you turn the entire world. The objective is to complete a list of objectives in 60 seconds. The only problem is that there’s not a whole lot of control on what happens - you can shake the globe randomly and win everything. This one wasn’t very satisfying.

I had more in mind for this article but I left it for a while. Puzzle games are weird and hard to review, that’s the general premise.