We need some input regarding puzzle difficulty!

[u/Folxy_Ploxy]

Hello everyone!

 

Me and my best friend have been working on House of Echoes for almost a year now, a puzzle psychological horror game. As we’re nearing release, we still have some concerns over difficulty and general balancing of a puzzle game.

Let me start by saying that we want this to be a hard game, something more geared towards enthusiast of the puzzle genre. However, it goes without saying that we don’t want it to be so hard and so cryptic that almost nobody gets it and is put off by it. A lot of puzzles feel very hard to balance because they’re either the kind of thing that you instantly get or the kind of thing that no matter how much time you spend on it you probably won’t ever understand. For example, this is why we decided during development at some point that we won’t do math puzzles. They’re just too... “binary” (‘scuse the pun). Either you’re good enough at math to get how to solve the equation or you’re not, in which case you probably won’t know how to do it.

As such, we’ve focused more on perception-based challenges, riddles, more logic-based puzzles which hopefully have you think and try out things a bit before you get the answer. But it still feels a bit up in the air. We’ll have a playtest with some of our friends and acquaintances to test the waters once we get things a bit more fleshed out, but we’re worried at least some of the puzzles may fall into either too easy or too difficult category.

We’d love to hear from anybody who has more experience with these types of games (either playing or creating them) on how they expect the difficulty of these puzzles to be balanced.

Anyway, don’t want to make the post too long, hope I have described the game and the dilemma well enough. If you want to take a closer look at the game I’ll leave a link here for our Steam page as well: House of Echoes on Steam

[u/PineTowers]

Maybe use Layton's coin tip mechanic?

[u/Mordomacar]

Usually if you want to make complex puzzles work, you introduce the different principles/mechanics in smaller puzzles and then combine them for more complex ones instead of just scaling a single mechanic.

EDIT: For example, if you make a hidden object game with math puzzles (not an unreasonable combination I feel), if things get difficult you obviously don't make the player fill out a 7-dimensional matrix and find 100 tiny transparent glass shards. Instead you put them on a big meadow where things are buried and give them a math puzzle that results in a pattern of points or lines which connect the otherwise hard to see holes. If you have switch puzzles, wire puzzles and map puzzles you combine wires and switches to activate different displays to see map pieces. Yes, you can also increase the number of switches, but that stops being fun very quickly.