Blog - Frustrations in Hapland
Monday, June 16, 2008Getting some gaming done here at camp can be a bit tricky, as while I'm watching over my students I can't exactly be playing on a console. There's also a lack of television sets to plug one into here anyway. However, as was suggested in a comment at Brenda's blog not long back, all the various online flash based-games are very available to me. I do spend all day at a computer lab with this job, and flash games are generally 'casual' enough that I can take frequent breaks for answering questions and patrolling the lab to ensure the students aren't lost in their work (or playing games when they shouldn't be, etc.)
Interestingly, right on cue for that observation, one of my coworkers directed me to a site with some flash puzzle-based games he liked: the farcade at foon.co.uk.
He in particular directed me to the Hapland puzzle series there.
Having played them, I think it's a case of the game designer having more fun than the player. The first one I had at least mostly figured out on my own. The only reason I didn't solve it was I didn't understand that certain parts of the puzzle required the timing of simultaneous events. It eventually drove me insane enough that I just looked up the solution. I can't say if I would have figured it out eventually or not, but on seeing the solution to the first game I didn't feel cheated except for one small part that seems to defy my expectations of physics a little bit. Some of the parts I was stuck on involved phenomena I had observed, which made me feel in retrospect like I should have figured it out had I thought about it in a different way. That, I feel, is a great place to be in puzzle design. I don't mind being horribly confused, as long as I don't feel cheated, and instead feel dumb that I didn't think of something that in retrospect seems logical or obvious.
I started the next one however and it was even harder and more frustrating. Eventually I fell to using a walkthrough for that one as well. That one contained a few portions I don't think I would have figured out on my own at all. There are some problems with communication to the player in that one, in my opinion.
From reading the walkthrough though and completing the game just through a walkthrough, I realized that sadly I had more fun doing that than actually racking my brain to solve the puzzle. Maybe I'm just not the puzzle type, but I found the puzzles of this particular game just too frustrating.
Going through it in the walkthrough I got to see the pieces all fit together cleverly and the 'story' advance to its conclusion. That would make for a great thriller movie, perhaps, but as a game I just wish I could have been able to experience that without cheating. I got to see the fun the designer must have had, crafting such an intricate puzzle, with hilarious animations, that all follows a sort of story... but I didn't have fun playing it.
Labels: design
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:50 AM
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