Absurd Walls

As I've gotten older I find myself playing fewer and fewer single player games. It seems weird for someone who has devoted most of my life to making games, but I've noticed lately that I struggle to play most new games for more than an hour. Why? I don't really know. Maybe my taste changed. Maybe the industry changed. I can't really put my finger on a succinct explanation, but here's an example.

I bought Blue Prince today. I figured it would be right up my alley. I'd heard comparisons to The Case of The Golden Idol from some coworkers, and the general consensus is glowing. 20 minutes in I closed the game with no plan to revisit it. It starts with a cutscene. I don't know if it was skippable, but it started off with a good sounding score and a pretty effective soundscape that conveyed a strong mood, so I didn't try. One of the first visuals of the game is fading dark blue text on a black background with the studio name and the name of the creator of the game. (Sidenote: I am the rare type of person who really enjoys to learn about who made the game I'm playing, and even I can't stand when people force you to read their name like this). The titles were followed by an old man delivering narration over mostly static images. The old man reads his will, and you learn that you are the grand nephew of this guy, he left you his mansion in his will, but you have to find the hidden 46th room to get it. When the game starts you quickly find a document on a table that tells you the exact same information.

I shrugged it off and started playing. You walk around the mansion and open doors. Every time you open a door, you decide what room will be on the other side. This creates a branching maze that you have to plan. There were tradeoffs in number of doors, number of items, and the way the rooms connected that I found interesting. There is a resource identified by a shoe print icon that goes down each time you enter a room, but there are several ways to increase it. You are shown when you pick a room what's going to be in it (gems, keys, coins), but once inside you have to physically walk around and find them. Most of my session was just walking around rooms looking for stuff. Eventually you find the few items in the room you were looking for, sometimes you'll find papers. Some of these papers were just instructions on solving a puzzle. The others were immediately forgettable. I vaguely remember that one of the letters was someone talking about how they enjoyed playing pool in the mansion. The rooms look decent, but everything in them seems to exist just to fill the space. I think there might be some meaning to the paintings, but they weren't interesting on their own.

As my interest in the maze mechanic started to wear off, I entered a room with three boxes. One tells the truth, one lies, and then there's a third one. There's nothing inherently wrong with logic puzzles like this, but I'm not a fan. I tend to enjoy puzzles that involve learning rules and then facing the challenging consequences of those rules. Logic puzzles like this don't allow much freedom or experimentation, you just have to collect the information and use logic to find the answer. I kept playing for a while and found a breaker box that let me switch the power in rooms that I hadn't drafted yet. It also had several buttons you could toggle on or off with no label. This is when I gave up on the game.

My main problem with Blue Prince, and with most games I pick up lately, is the amount of friction between me and the actual fun part of the game. I was genuinely interested in the mechanics, but there was so much in the way. I wouldn't mind the type of puzzles or needing to decode how the breaker works if I spent most of my time doing that, but instead I spent most of my time walking around and backtracking.

Sometimes friction is necessary. Games have to communicate a lot of information to the player, and one of the hardest challenges as a designer is figuring out how to get that information out in the least interruptive way. My favorite writer Kurt Vonnegut wrote: "Every sentence must do one of two things - reveal character or advance the action." The same applies to games. Everything should serve a purpose and anything that gets in the way should be removed. It seems like many games don't consider this.

A few tips:
1. Never use text or narration to tell the player something they could learn from another part of the game (environment, sound, or even gameplay itself).
2. If you need to use text to communicate something, keep it brief. A few sentences at most. Text has to be so short that reading it doesn't force the player to switch into 'reading mode', and interesting enough that the player wants to read it.
3. Only restrict the players input when absolutely necessary.
4. Remove any interaction that doesn't directly contribute to making the game fun.