schick85 said:
So you're saying you want these puzzle platformers (LIMBO, Braid, Super Meat Boy and the likes) to be cluttered with health bars, experience points, extra lives, and horse amor just so you can get passed a puzzle without doing any figuring? What's the fun in all that? Finding a way out of a puzzle yourself is rewarding enough. I'm sorry if you don't feel that way 'cause you just wasted $$$ bub.
What I'm saying is, why does it need to be so binary?
I don't mind being (temporarily) stumped by a puzzle or encounter, what I do mind is finding myself with nothing else to do or think about in that situation.
I agree there is fun to be had in solving puzzles, but in Limbo everything resolves to either success or fail/scene-reset. Where are the alternate solutions? Where are the mechanics that allow one to modify the parameters of each trial (In Demon's Souls not only was character state and build a variable, but you had manipulable global elements like world tendency to leverage to your advantage/disadvantage), so as to provide multiple ways to tackle the problem?
Why use physics but deny the player any emergent solutions arising from its usage? It reduces a powerful technology to a simple visual effect!
Life/Health systems are useful because if everything resolves to an absolute live/die result every trial that can provide those outcomes is essentially isolated from the rest of the game. What's gone before and what's yet to come are irrelevant because you are absolutely bound to be in a certain predetermined state/position at the start of each.
Its great for developers because its a lot easier to tune difficulty when you are working with absolutes, but it devalues player agency because there are literally no consequences to their performance. You either succeed, perfectly, or fail utterly - no half measures or corner cases to deal with.
My point is that if the mechanics allow you to scrape by a particularly challenging encounter albeit in a weakened state, that has a knock-on effect for any following encounter, modifying its difficulty. The player is allowed some latituide to shape their own experience.
Whereas in Limbo, its just an arbitrary sequence of stand-alone puzzles that could essentially be placed in any order once their fundamental mechanics have been established.
Which brings up the topic of context.
When the whole presentation is so tastefully minimalist as to eschew any kind of overt feedback to the player congratulating them for their successes or indicating any larger sense of progression towards a goal it basically means that the whole game is only as good as the next puzzle.
Essentially the whole weight of the game is supported at any given point by its presentation (delightful, admittedly) and a simplistic puzzle with a binary solution and outcome.
By any standard that's very thin, unadventurous design. Take away the nice graphics and there's really not a lot there, which I'm sorry to say is a bit of a missed opportunity in my opinion.