Agency Vs Rails part 1: Action

I really wanted this to work.

On the flip side, some games deny you agency over the solving of puzzles. Half-Llife 2 does this. While going to Ravenholm, I came across a ladder that was locked, the unlocked part wasn't too far up and I had a crate, a pallet, an armoire and a brand new gravity gun to try out. Funny thing about the Half-Life 2 engine is that it hates having 3 three things on top of each other. I didn't do anything weird, mind you, I put the pallet on the bottom, then the larger armoire, then the crate, but the crate kept clipping through the other object and the pallet kept inexplicably shifting back and forth in a buggy fashion, causing the other objects to topple. After half a dozen tries, I saw the lock, felt stupid, shot it open and continued on my way. The thing is, my solution should have worked. Yes, it's more round about, but why should it not have worked? Because it was not what the designers had intended, thus it bugged out and failed. I had another solution denied to me in episode 1 involving a strider. For all my criticism of Half-Life 2, episode 1 and episode 2 being said, I massively enjoyed Portal.

When I play games, I want to impose my will over the player character and solve problems the way I see fit. If the solution I come up with doesn't work because my character can't jump far/high enough, can't move something or can shot lasers from his belly button, that's OK, really it is! But if a game gives me a bunch of tools, tells me what I can do and then, when I try to use them as directed, it fails because it wasn't what the makers wanted me specifically to do, then that's bad design; not my fault for not thinking linearly enough. The worst sin, in my eyes, for game design, is to create a puzzle and then make the player feel stupid about solving it.

In part two I will talk about the pros and cons of having the story on rails.

How about you guys? Have any of you ever come up with a solution so clever you could brush your teeth with it, only to stumble upon the obvious solution later? Has a game ever made you feel stupid about your answer to a puzzle?

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Cronomax   

Cronomax   1