After playing so much Zelda and Ico recently, I’ve been doing some thinking about puzzles in adventure games. Here’s a little method I’m fleshing out right now for creating perceptual-shift puzzles. By “perceptual-shift puzzles,” I’m talking about the kind where the player has to change the way they see a situation in order to solve it. I’m going to focus on puzzles that are embedded in games, but what most of I’ve got to say applies to “pure” puzzles as well. Without further ado, here’s the recipe:

1. Find something with two ways to perceive it - It can be anything, in any modality… it just has to be a good fit for your audience. A visual example would be the figure/ground relationship between 2D shapes: the face and the vase type of thing. A logical example would be the type of item-combination puzzle you are likely to encounter in classic point-and-click aventure games. This, for some people, will be the hardest part aside from actually balancing the difficulty of the puzzle for your audience (which is a tough task, no matter who you are).
2. Set up the context to suggest one method of perception - In order to maximize the impact of the perceptual shift, you need to pick one method of viewing the situation and subtly reinforce it. The presentation of the puzzle is probably a good place to do this, but less direct options are always available.
3. The other way is the right answer - Now make the way of seeing the situation that you didn’t subtly suggest to the player the one that allows them to complete the puzzle. Most of the time you’ll want to drop some clues that a perceptual shift being needed to solve the puzzle, but it depends on your audience.

Let’s think through this methodology by decomposing one of my favorite puzzles so far from The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. **Major spoiler alert, by the way. If you haven’t played the game, please just stop reading right now, because I’d hate to ruin this fun puzzle for you.** Here are the three steps again, applied to the lever puzzle that occurs on the Ghost Ship:

1. Find something with two ways to perceive it - The creators of Zelda DS decided to play on the ambiguity of a string of numbers for indicating order. If I give you a series of numbers, say, 4 5 3 2 1, and tell you to pull the five levers over there in the order indicated by the numbers, you don’t know if I’m telling you to pull the fourth lever first or to pull the first lever fouth. Pretty good premise for a medium-difficulty puzzle, huh?
2. Set up the context to suggest one method of perception - Just a little earlier in the Temple of Courage, the player is required to hit switches in a certain order: ‘up, down, right, left.’ Notice that to people who read left-to-right, there is only one likely way to interpret this instruction: hit the lever that is located farther up first, down second, etc. After finishing this Temple of Courage puzzle and being rewarded with that amazing Zelda puzzle sound, this way of thinking is now the most prevalent schema in the player’s mind for puzzles that involve performing actions in order. The action must be performed on the item indicated by the clue in the order of the clue sub-parts, from left to right.
3. The other way is the right answer - In the Ghost Ship lever puzzle, the player is given a series of numbers, 2 4 5 1 3. If the player acts on this clue according to the schema instilled in them by the Temple of Courage puzzle, they will probably fail to complete the puzzle and be totally caught off guard (like I was!). This time, the action must be performed on the item indicated by the position of clue sub-parts, in the order indicated by the clue. It definitely took me a little while to figure out the bait-and-switch that had been played on my mind… But once I made the perceptual shift, my shock turned into fiero, and I was unhealthily pleased with myself.

Well, there you have it. What do you think? Did I leave any major steps out? Any gaping logical holes? Don’t hesitate to comment below.