Return to Monkey Island dev on crafting challenging puzzles that don't frustrate
Fun without the frustration
The Monkey Island franchise is known for offering all sorts of unique, interesting, and even funny puzzles. Unfortunately, some of those puzzles were also quite frustrating. The dev team certainly recognizes that, and they’ve set out to make sure Return to Monkey Island’s puzzles don’t get your blood boiling.
In an interview with IGN, co-creator Ron Gilbert spoke about the franchise’s history with frustrating puzzles, and how the team is working hard to escape that in Return to Monkey Island. It’s not an easy challenge, but it appears the team is up to the task.
“You still want to have fun, challenging, rewarding puzzles, but I think people have no tolerance for frustration anymore. I think people have so much pulling on them, media-wise, from television shows to movies to games. When the original Monkey Island came out, there were probably ten games or five games that were released at the same time. Now there are 500. They want to play, [but] they don’t want any frustration.
You still want to give them a challenging experience. You don’t want to give them an experience where they just click through the thing. But you want to build puzzles that are more logical, that make sense. You want when somebody solves a puzzle or will accept a hint for a puzzle that they go, ‘Oh, I should’ve thought of that.’ You don’t want them to go, ‘I never would have thought of that.’ And so I think that’s the main thing Dave and I are really trying to do with the puzzles is make sure that everything makes logical sense for the game.”
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