What Makes a Good Puzzle?

If there’s one episode of this show that I’ve wanted to make, but have never had the guts to actually attempt, it’s this one: puzzle design. Because I love puzzle games - like the time-travelling platformer Braid, the comedy sci-fi gem Portal, and the cult hit Stephen’s Sausage Roll - but I have no idea what actually goes in to making one of the puzzles for these games. How do you make something that leaves a player stumped and scratching their head, and then makes them feel very smart when they finally figure out the answer? What makes a puzzle too hard, or too easy?

And so that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out these past few months. I’ve been talking to the creators of great puzzle games, tried making my own puzzles in different editors, revisited my video on Jonathan Blow’s puzzle design philosophy, and have analysed loads and loads of different levels from different games. And in this episode, I’m going to share what I’ve found out. So this is Game Maker’s Toolkit, I’m Mark Brown, and here’s what I think makes a good puzzle.

Part One: The Mechanics

Every puzzle game starts with its mechanics: a set of ironclad rules that govern how the game works. So in a game like Cosmic Express, you can draw train tracks on a grid - but you can’t cross over the tracks. One alien can jump into each train car, and then hop out into the first box of the same colour they pass by. These rules, and perhaps more importantly these limitations, are used to create puzzles. The fact that you can’t cross over tracks, for example, might stop you getting back through a tight gap - forcing you to find a different approach.

The overall… let’s say, cleverness, of the main mechanic will ultimately decide the number and difficulty of the puzzles in the game. And so this favours outlandish concepts like time travel and wormholes - as well as funky movement controls like those found in Snakebird. The way these creatures move - how their body follows their head, how they’re affected by gravity, the way eating fruit makes you longer, which is both a blessing and a curse - all leads to creative puzzles.

Of course, temporary tools can be used to augment the main mechanic - like light bridges, coloured paint, and turrets in the Portal games. And they can even be used in place of a main mechanic, as in a game like The Talos Principle which generates all of its puzzles from external sources like jammers, cubes, and repeaters. Mechanics that can combine together create even more possibilities. A puzzle game also needs a goal. This is usually just an exit door, or some kind of collectible.

The important thing is that it’s clear what the player is trying to achieve. The player shouldn’t be figuring out what to do - just how to do it. Okay. Now it’s time it’s time to actually make a puzzle. Part Two: The Catch

So I think a good puzzle is often built around a catch. Which is a logical contradiction, where two things are seemingly in direct conflict with one another. Here’s the absolutely most basic version of that idea, just to help explain what I mean. There’s a door and a button. Standing on the button opens the door, but when you walk to the door the button raises back up and the door shuts. You need to stand on the button. And you need to walk to the door. But you can’t do both, because doing one makes the other impossible.

The solution, of course, is to put a box on the button. So that’s a really crappy example, but I think you can find some version of this conflict at the heart of every good puzzle. Here’s an example from The Talos Principle, where, at this point in the game, we’re using these tripods to route coloured light beams from these orbs, to these panels - which makes nearby doors open. So, after a bit of messing around we’ve got the puzzle like this. Two tripods are being used to get blue light to this panel, and open a door. And one tripod is being used to get red light to this panel, and open another door.

But, unfortunately, we need to put one of those tripods on this pressure sensitive switch. Now the plan actually seems quite simple. Send red light to panel C to open this door, and then use the opening to send blue light to A with just one tripod, instead of two. Except... here’s that catch. You can’t get red light to panel C, without already having blue light in panel A. So if you remove either of these tripods, this door will shut and put a stop to your plan.

Now, resolving a conflict like this can come in many forms. Sometimes it’s about changing the sequence of events that led up to the conflict. Other times it’s about rethinking your spacial position, perhaps starting the puzzle from a different location. But there’s another way, that I think is the gold standard that every puzzle designer should be shooting for. Part Three: The Revelation.

So, the solution to that puzzle in The Talos Principle is to make this tripod connect to the other tripod, and panel A - even though the door is in the way. Because when you then open the door with the red beam, the connection is made and you can remove the second tripod without breaking the link. This puzzle is incredibly simple once you know the answer - and it’s effortless to actually execute the solution, which is always a plus in my book. But it’s still really challenging. And that’s because it asks you to think outside the box, reconsider how the game works, and approach the concept in a lateral manner.

And, beyond that, it also reveals a non-obvious - but also totally logical consequence of the game’s rules that now becomes a part of your toolbox going forward. And, in fact, this Talos Principle solution does crop up in future puzzles as just one part of a larger conundrum. So solving the puzzle is like a revelation. A discovery. An epiphany of some deeper understanding. And I think that’s, often, where those “eureka!” moments come from.

Now they can be quite significant revelations. So in the time travelling puzzler P B Winterbottom, you’ve got this conundrum where you need to record a clone to help you pick up pies in numerical order - but picking up pie three cuts off access to pie four. After a lot of messing about, you’ll eventually realise that clones loop when they reach the end of the recording. So if you have the clone start at pie number four, it will appear there when it finishes its recording and loops back around. Boom. Revelation.

But often they’re just tiny, subtle things that you might not even think of as being important lessons. Like, in Snakebird, where you need to understand that the bird can change shape and fall in the same turn, to create shapes that protect you from spikes. Now, this is actually a very delicate balance to hit. Because when you’re asking the player to think outside the box and do things that are perhaps not obvious, or not entirely intuitive, you could leave the player thinking “oh, I literally didn’t even know I could do that”.

Often after looking up the answer in a walkthrough. Here’s an example of that from Braid, which largely has excellent puzzles but there’s one that stumps a lot of people. So in the puzzle you essentially need to have an enemy bounce off your clone’s head, and then you can bounce off the enemy to jump up very high. Ultimately, yes, it makes sense. It is a natural consequence of a game where characters bounce up when they kill other characters. But for many, it felt more like a trick than a revelation.

And it really didn’t help that there’s only one specific moment when it can happen, meaning players couldn’t easily experiment. So. Anyway. Lemme give one more example of a puzzle with a catch, and a revelation. In Lara Croft GO, there are tiles that crumble when you first stand on them - and then break if you stand on them again. And you can use that to deal with lizards that chase after you - just lead one over a crumbling wall tile, and it will fall to the floor below.

That happens in this puzzle too, but if you go to break the tile, the lizard will kill you before you can get back. That’s the catch. The solution is to pre-break the tile once, then go taunt the lizard, and actually use the tile’s falling effect to make Lara fall down, not the lizard. That’s the revelation. But here’s something else interesting about that puzzle. This other lizard. It’s not really part of the solution. You could actually remove all of these elements and the puzzle would still make sense. So what’s the point? Is it just something to waste your time? No, I don’t think so.

Part Four: The Assumption The first lizard is actually there, I think, to trick you into making the wrong assumption about how the puzzle works. Because you will use the ol’ walk over a tile trick to defeat the first lizard, and most players will assume that they need to do the same on the second - which leads to failure. It’s only when they break that assumption and start thinking about other avenues, that the solution can be found.

And you can find this sort of cheeky misdirection all over the place. Take this puzzle from Stephen’s Sausage Roll. The goal of this game is to roll sausages over grills to cook them on both sides, and like Snakebird, the weirdo movement controls leads to many tricky levels. So this puzzle, The Clover, looks really easy. The player assumes that they can just roll the three sausages onto their closest grills and finish the stage. But actually, no, because doing that means they cannot then manoeuvre themselves onto the exit.

The developer, Stephen Lavelle, has used an assumption to walk the player right into the puzzle’s central catch. And it almost feels like a joke at your expense, with this moment being a cruel punchline. But setting up the puzzle in such a way that the player will make these wrong assumptions, actually offers some key benefits. One is that the player is not completely overwhelmed when they start the puzzle. Luring the player into thinking they know how to solve the puzzle gives them a starting point.

And then, two, while they’re working on this wrong assumption they’re actually seeing how the puzzle works and they get to build a mental model of how this conundrum is put together. Three is that it largely ensures that the player will fail the puzzle their first time. They’re not going to just waltz into the solution, but will be carefully led astray to create that feeling of being stumped. And four is that it really focuses the player’s attention on the catch at the heart of the puzzle. That Talos Principle puzzle isn’t really about “how do I get to the collectible”, but it’s “how do I get these two doors open simultaneously”.

You want the player to be thinking critically and logically about the situation. And getting them to walk themselves into the puzzle’s catch is a good way to achieve this. So here’s an example of the assumption, the catch, and the revelation working wonderfully together, in Snakebird level 10. So, to finish the level, you need to eat these two fruits. You’re too short to get the bottom one, so the assumption is that you should get the one on the left, go down, get the bottom one, and then turn around and come back... except...

You’re now too long to turn around. So that’s the assumption. Which focuses us on the catch: that you’re either too short or too long to get the bottom fruit. And this forces us to reassess what we know, and come at the puzzle from a very different angle - and do this. Yeah. Not only is it a clever solution, but it’s also subtly revelatory as it it teaches you important stuff about how Snakebirds move, which you can use in future puzzles.

Part Five: Presentation.

Now all of this stuff we’ve learnt so far can fall apart if you don’t present the puzzle properly. Check this out. There’s this really cool puzzle in Portal 2 where a laser beam powers up an elevator, and a button opens the exit door. It has a small assumption, where you might think that you can just release the laser beam, and then place the cube on the button. But then you’ll realise that the elevator has gone up without you - revealing the catch.

You need to use this cube to weigh down the button. But you also need to use it to temporarily block the laser beam. Huh! Now the solution is pretty clever. You need to place the cube on a light bridge so that it blocks the laser. Then stand on the elevator and remove the bridge so the cube falls down, releases the laser, and lands on the button - simultaneously lifting the elevator and opening the exit door. I really liked this puzzle. It had that revelatory moment of being like “yeah - I can use gravity to move blocks from afar”. And while it’s a very simple puzzle with very few moving parts, the lateral thinking needed meant it took me a good few minutes to figure out the answer.

It definitely took me longer than when I encountered, essentially, the exact same puzzle in another game, called The Turing Test. Now it’s not because I remembered the solution from Portal 2. I played the games like five years apart and didn’t recognise the set-up at all when I first played The Turing Test. No, the reason it’s so much easier in the second game is because of how the puzzles are laid out. So in The Turing Test, the light bridge is already over the button. You just have to remove it. Whereas in Portal, you have to both make and remove the light bridge yourself.

Also in The Turing Test, the button serves two purposes: it opens one door and shuts the other. So it’s a lot more obvious that you need to press it when you’re in between the two doors. In Portal, you’ve got to juggle both a laser and the button. And finally, Portal requires a bit of manoeuvring to get the cube up on the light bridge, whereas The Turing Test makes it obvious and effortless. So you’ve got two puzzles with almost the exact same concept, but Portal’s presentation is just so much more effective than The Turing Test.

I mean, you could make Portal 2 even harder if you wanted. The puzzle is actually full of pretty obvious hints like how the cube starts off being in front of the laser, showing that you can use it to block the beam. The only wall you can place a portal on will make a bridge right over the button. And when you stand on the semi-transparent bridge, you’ll immediately see the button right below you. But, hey, not every game needs to be as hard as Stephen’s Sausage Roll.

So. Some other presentation tips. I think a good puzzle is pretty minimalist, with almost no extraneous elements. If you ask me, the best puzzles are those that are so small, with so few moving parts, that you can’t believe that it’s not more simple to figure out. A puzzle with too many elements is either too complicated, or - more likely - most of those elements aren’t actually part of the core puzzle and are just busy work that will frustrate you when you need to reset the level.

A puzzle’s presentation should also provide clear feedback. Portal has lines running from buttons to doors, which change colour when powered up, to clearly explain how the room is put together. The puzzle is not, after all, just figuring out how the level is rigged up. But feedback is also really important when working with assumptions. There’s a puzzle in Rise of the Tomb Raider where you make a platform rise up and then run to the exit - but the platform drops before you get there.

You definitely don’t want to make it look like Lara could make it in time if she was just a bit quicker. Instead, the platform is positioned significantly far away so it’s clearly impossible to get there in time - and the player immediately knows to break this assumption and try a different approach. Part Six: The Curve

No puzzle is given to the player in isolation. Every conundrum is designed to build on top of the puzzles that came before. Because if you randomly jumbled up all the levels in, say, Portal, the game would be practically impossible for a new player to get into it. For one, puzzles use all of the stuff you’ve learnt so far. From stuff that’s explained in clear tutorials, to the subtle revelatory moments I discussed earlier. And secondly, puzzles should generally ramp up in difficulty from one to the other.

There are lots of ways to establish a puzzle’s difficulty, but at Square Enix Montreal, where they make the GO games, they use four criteria. The number of possible solutions - the more there are, the easier the puzzle is. The number of steps required - more is more difficult, but too many is tedious. The number of options the player can choose from at each moment. And which mechanics the player needs to be familiar with beforehand.

Those criteria help put the puzzles in a sensible order - but that’s not to mention some heavy play testing - puzzle games perhaps need more playtesting than most other genres, according to the devs I talked to

So that’s what I learned. I think a good puzzle is derived from the game’s rules, and has a catch that makes the puzzle seem impossible to finish at first glance. The player can be made to stumble upon that catch, if the developer exploits an assumption that the player will make. To overcome the catch, and resolve the conflict, the best puzzles ask the player to think laterally, and uncover a hidden nugget of knowledge about the game’s rules.

Does every puzzle need to be exactly like this? No, probably not. But I think you’ll find that any puzzle worth its salt will have some version of this stuff. And puzzles that feel lacking are probably missing a key aspect. Maybe they have a conflict that’s too easy to resolve. Maybe it’s missing the assumption, so many players just stumble into the right answer. Maybe the puzzle doesn’t offer enough of a revelation, and just feels like busywork.

The main thing I’ve learned is that puzzle design is a very difficult craft, and the very best examples of the genre require years of design, iteration, playtesting, and ruthless cutting. If you’re a developer watching and you want to make a puzzle game, be prepared to put in some hard work.

Hey thanks for watching. And a huge thank you to indie puzzle maker Alan Hazelden, Pierre Mongrain and Etienne Jauvin from Square Enix Montreal, and some puzzle making Patrons of mine, who all took time to answer my questions about making puzzles.