8/23/2023 0 Comments Classic block pushing puzzles![]() I was dimly aware that the game was developed by Atlus, the same team behind the beloved Persona series, but I knew absolutely nothing about Catherine’s story. While the initial appeal of Catherine for me took its roots as a lecherous adolescent, glancing at the titillating box art in my local GameStop, I had no idea what I was in for when I launched Catherine last year. This idea of a puzzle’s objective being “clearly defined” is what brings us to Catherine, the first puzzle game that I’ve ever truly loved. But it works because the goal is clearly defined, even if you struggle to execute the necessary tasks to complete it. Freeze, I don’t think the game would be nearly as fun or interesting, nor would this encounter be memorable. If every encounter was as intricate as the fight with Mr. Freeze fondly because it made me think in a different way than games in this genre ever have. More than any encounter in the Arkham series, I remember this encounter with Mr. This is not a fight of endurance or skill it is a fight of mental organization and strategy: a puzzle. You have to use tools that are outside of your comfort zone – an amount of tools that is increasingly dwindled with each successful takedown – in order to overcome this fight. Freeze’s fight takes careful planning and spatial reasoning. Thus, unlike the hundreds of thugs and goons that Batman will wallop throughout the few dozen hours in the game, Mr. Once you have used the stealth takedown from beneath a floor grate, for instance, you will not be able to take him down that way again. Freeze in this boss fight, he adapts and learns your combat tactics, rendering the method with which you just took him down obsolete. Like a puzzle, you are given constraints as Batman that you haven’t had throughout the games so far. Freeze boss fight memorable is that the encounter ratchets up the difficulty the more you play it. The fight in question is Batman’s battle against Mr. Not only is Arkham City an excellent expansion on the already-great mechanics of its prequel, Arkham Asylum, but one of its most memorable boss fight encounters is almost entirely a puzzle. To this end, I think fondly of the middle entry in the Batman Arkham series, Arkham City. There are games where puzzles can feel satisfying, but I have only ever noticed myself enjoying them when the puzzle is baked into the pre-existing gameplay loop that I have found satisfying throughout the entire experience. These puzzles do not need to be there, as they add nothing to what makes those games great, and yet they persist across so many contemporary games. ![]() Whether Kratos is pushing around a mine cart or scoping out an area surrounding a nearby runic-locked chest, every puzzle in God of War kills the pacing of the game. (Luckily, these puzzles are optional.) Another 2018 release that received endless critical acclaim, God of War, has some of the tightest and most satisfying combat mechanics of recent memory, but the game feels an insufferable need to halt that action for puzzles. As much as I loved the 2018 release of Marvel’s Spider-Man for the Playstation 4, for example, I have yet to meet a player who thinks the game’s mediocre Lab Spectographs or Lab Circuit Projects enhanced the experience. When I think of games that funk up their otherwise stellar game design, I typically look to the AAA landscape where no game is considered “complete” without a million different things to occupy the player’s time. Even games like The Witness with its welcoming color palette just strike me as games I would hate because they can entirely be boiled down to their puzzles. Scale up my annoyance with puzzles in games to the genre of puzzle games themselves – games that are purely about their brain-stumping mechanics – and I can’t be bothered to even approach these games. They often feel like an annoying barrier to a story or game world that I am preoccupied immersing myself within, so I resent their existence the vast majority of the time I encounter them. Puzzles usually serve as pacing mechanisms that pad out extra runtime for games that are not otherwise puzzle-oriented. Readers of Epilogue will be familiar with my general distaste towards puzzles in games.
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