Puzzles, what are they good for?

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@the dark side, thomas already explained why they don't make their games hard. Main focus of their games is immersion and experiencing the story. If a player keeps dying on 1 same location and is forced to repeat the same sequence all over again 15 times it 1. breaks immersion 2. annoys the player


FG games are not something that you say "I managed to complete it", its more of a "i managed to experience it"

It's not just about mechanical difficulty but also emotional difficulty. For example:

Spoiler below!

Pulling a lever that's on a timer and getting to the door it controls before it closes (from the Cellar Archives). How difficult is this puzzle? Not very. It's very likely you'll screw up on first attempt but once you understand how long it takes for the door to close simply getting there is easy. In fact, you can probably just run through the water and get there safely. Same for distracting the brute in the sewers. It's almost laughably easy.

And yet these two sections are some of the most horrifying in the entire game. If what Thomas means by streamlining puzzles is something along these lines, then I support it wholeheartedly.

Still, I think he is underestimating puzzles as a pacing device far too much. If the puzzles are fair, they not only create a sense of anticipation but they also allow the player to be spoonfed exposition in a seamless and non-transparent manner. The fact that some puzzles take a long time to finish makes the payoff all the more satisfying, but only if they are perfectly balanced. Puzzles that are too easy break immersion even more than difficult puzzles in my opinion, because if you encountered an actual "puzzle" in real life, that served the purpose of obscuring or protecting something, chances are it would be not only difficult, but impossible to anybody other than the designer to solve.