Make Your Puzzle Games Unbelievably Easy

Puzzle game fans and developers have had to wrangle with culture shock in various ways, compared to their audiences, audience size, etc.

One is the fact that, the thing most puzzle players and developers enjoy is hard stuff that requires long analysis of the level, that actually getting stuck on a level for 5 hours or a week is a high quality interesting and enjoyable experience.
However, I'm pretty sure we're not part of the silent-majority viewpoint on that oneIn fact it's quite likely I've also rather fallen out of being able to do this due to life events unless I'm sponsored .

So check out some exhibits:

Exhibit C

It's quite common Baba Is You and Patrick's Parabox are referred to in the same sentence because they are 'iconic' puzzle games, but not only that but because they take a 'simple' to understand mechanic and promise delivering on it with lots of interesting things, which is an immediate hook.

Now Patrick's Parabox is an easier game than Baba to complete, 'challenge' levels are placed off to the side as optional content, levels are smaller and a few levels in some worlds can be solved without really knowing what happened (I think most often in Flip and Cycle levels).

You may notice Patrick's Parabox has a higher % of positive steam reviews compared to Baba Is You, 99% compared to 97%. Many of these Baba negative reviews are basically difficulty issues about that there is only one solution to things and that their solution often fails to work due to some blocking rule in the level.

Now this is can be interpreted very relevantly or not ('3x negative reviews' vs '+2% negative reviews'), and I mean, we should be grateful most people who can't figure out the game generally aren't negatively reviewing it. However let's look at these stats:

Baba Is You's 2nd world completion is 26.6%.
Patrick's Parabox's full game (not counting 100% extras) completion is 26.8%. (Patrick's Parabox has 17 worlds, not even counting the intro world)

Yes, the percentage of people who saw the ending of Patrick's Parabox is higher than the percentage of people who completed Baba Is You's 2nd world.

Exhibit B

(WARNING: Do not click this link blindly, it has gameplay of one of Patrick's other games Linelith, you may spoil it by looking at it. So I guess you should only click it hearing the audio, wait that's what it means to click a link blindly, wait-)
There's a memorable clip of my favorite streamerSametTheTurk Twitch clipA Twitch clip of streamer SametTheTurk playing Linelith and saying "I hate thinking in my puzzle games" halfway throughtwitch.tv. In that clip, Samet says, "I hate thinking in my puzzle games". It is such a memeable statement, I've quoted it in my videos without even telling people it was a quote.

By the way it's actually Patrick of Patrick's Parabox who clipped that, yes yes small world.

Exhibit A

My game Move Counters that get more cursedMove Counters that get more cursedA puzzle game by me with 50 levels exploring and subverting the concept of move counters. PLAYTIME: about 2 hoursicely.itch.io, is at this moment probably one of my best pieces of art (a fan even did a full 50 level remix of it recently called "Move Counters: Penguin's Remix").

Now it's not like it's poorly rated, I mean it has like 70 positive itch ratings and my own 'walkthrough' video on it has like 80k views, very happy with that as an independent webgame.

Now the thing is that I saw two different puzzle designers play my game on stream, whose games you have very likely played (they have their own quite successful/iconic/well received games in the puzzle sphere). Of course, I have no idea whether they enjoy the troll puzzle genre, or they saw the game on a subpar thinking day, etc. (This is just because it's not like it's some big impossible sin for me to suck at a game on stream in equivalent nature.)

However, it would probably come as a shock to anyone who played my game or watched my video, that anyone would get stuck in such a pacing-ruining way in the points that happened on those streamslike being stuck on consequences of the first 10 levels, of what a Row Counter did, arrangement of diagonal counters, etc. To spare the details I will say it was 'moments' really early on, that involved quite standard non-troll-genre interaction with the mechanics, that would not be called an intended "moment" by the game. Perhaps it's more mindfuzzing to me that the game was blamed for such things happening.
And of course this is not how most seemed to play the game on stream, I'd say most people who video tested the game to me roughly had my intention of how to play it (I have uploaded my favorite streamer's playthrough for contrastSamet The Turk plays my game, Move Counters that get more cursedIcely Puzzles - YouTubeyoutube.com).

Needless to say after watching that, I definitely have a new view on the occasional sentiment of people saying that extremely popular puzzle games like Portal 1 or Portal 2 are overly corner-rounded and 'overtested'.

So let's put all those exhibits in order.

Part of this is how much you, as the designer, would personally feel to 'take the blame' for people being stuck like that.
Even in way more 'objective' situations (some games have had a flood of negative reviews complaining rigged luckThis Dice Exploit Can't be PatchedThrallen - YouTube - This video is mainly for the fact that there was a flood of negative reviews claiming the game was rigged when it was notyoutu.be in a game where it's not rigged, and you could ask the same question: even if it's not something you feel you should 'take the blame' for, you still in another way 'objectively' have a problem with your game).

I think Patrick's viewpoint is that a puzzle's intent is to communicate the idea to the player and that failing is also a failing of the designer (at least I have this memory of Patrick mentioning this from a while back!). This is almost like treating your game as a museum or showcase.

If you are a puzzle designer or longtime player, you experience hard puzzles way easier than a normal player would, which is partially buildup of pattern recognition and lateral thinking from years of making or playing.
This of course creates a huge skew over time, where in a hard puzzle game completing only 25% of a world is a failure, you lose relatability with new players and don't notice.
I know of many puzzle games who didn't have IRL testers in which their testers have also been picked from some pool of experienced players online.
And a 'new player to Baba' is very different if they had like 8 years of puzzle playing before then.
Not everyone has the same free time or interest in these games either.

This 'failing of the designer' comparison is more agreeable to me in genres in which getting stuck on a puzzle for 1 hour is not a great part of the experience. For example, the very well-liked (I like it a lot) game, There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, is technically a 'puzzle' game, but really you wouldn't describe it that way, it's closer to a linear 'walking' simulator or movie, and that is the main appeal. It does have a meta narrative, troll logic, that also has some puzzle sections.

In that game it sometimes has extremely blatant hints from the narrator, and I imagine some players still get stuck anyway. In fact the 'sequel'Crushed In TimeA comedic, fourth-wall-breaking point-and-click puzzle adventure spin-off of There Is No Game by the same creatorstore.steampowered.com (not really, but it is a spinoff) to There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension came out recently (June 10, 2026) and I felt this game had significantly more annoying "point and click moon logic" moments.
It has far less narrator hints as well (although... it still has some... worst of both worlds maybe). And the negative reviews of the game are rather plentiful (90% positive reviews) and heavily reference this as the main issue. Note that the game still has a hint system but people probably don't want to feel the need to press that. (I think more of my games should have had hint systems in retrospect)

So like, I guess it's better to play it safe and make everything easy, all you need to pay is some really blatant text or voicelines I guess.
I regret that some puzzle designers I enjoy and liked, failed to see all the buildup and payoff for my game and ragequit instead.
That problem is probably even worse for a player who bought your narrative game, so now there's a story investment that is being blocked by your fair-yet-difficult-and-pacing-ruining idea!

I considered making this poll like a week ago:

If you are a puzzle designer, and you have a difficult puzzle early on in the game, that every player says it was fair in hindsight, uses all mechanics fairly, except half the players are stuck on it for 1 hour, would you keep it in?

I didn't even post it because the answer just seems so obvious that you wouldn't keep it in and you would make it optional, but it would probably be sad to feel the need to do that if you had built your linear narrative around the puzzle.

This is similar to the unexpected rift in mystery novels, where it probably takes a while before you experience mystery novels and games in any way beyond reading them, maybe passively thinking of theories but moreso thinking of them as a thriller instead of a puzzle.
Part related is not all mysteries are meant to be 'consumed' as fair puzzles.

There's classic writing advice that if you have a plot twist, you should make it 'obvious', because what is subtle to you is impossible to others, and what is obvious to you is subtle to others.
The reason you may not think this is true is because you probably show your work to friends or very observant people who will in fact notice the things you're worried about being too obvious, which gives you another skewed sense of what a normal person will pick up on.

All this is a bit of unnoticed differences in people's personal worlds, similar to my poll on whether people consider some 3D puzzle games slightly horrorYouTube community postPoll about whether people consider games like The Witness or Talos Principle horror, 10% yes, 50% slightly, 40% noyoutube.com. I personally find it is a slight horror that any online interaction involves people with vastly different personal experiences, in unexpected and infinite axis, and meanwhile we still have to roleplay that there is general 'consensus' for things.

Appendix

• This isn't primarily about money or fame to me, it's that you want to appreciate anyone who takes the time to play your game to not have a frustrating experience, whether it's a 10 year old who would find all concepts new, or someone who's never played a game like yours before. Any time the game is pushing you out of flow state is one where someone could leave the game forever instead of being hooked constantly.

• I think it's more "wow a really large amount of players did not see the interesting things of [x game] and it may be shocking if you saw their playthroughs why". I personally highly respect how much effort and depth and surprise that Baba Is You's endgame has, considering how few people who played the game experienced it.

• People seem to strongly think this post is necessarily about difficulty and hard levels but I really intended it to be like "do not lose the players who could have enjoyed all your mechanical setup moments but got stuck on something really dumb and unexpected, especially really early". I don't know if it's others' imaginations still not getting it without seeing what I mean firsthand, but these moments don't even necessarily mean getting stuck on an actual hard puzzle, or players getting stuck in a game where the designer didn't even design it for difficulty at all. For example in many Baba playthroughs you see people making invalid statements or losing statements in the first worlds, which in one way is fully sensible that an inexperienced player has this stumbling-around phase, but on the other hand, that is another moment someone could ragequit (and rarely, leave a negative review).

• It's also not quite about "you designed it so you of course find it easier", I hesitated whether to bring it up but I actually had a very odd/fitting experience I wasn't sure whether to include in the article, which is my own personal playthrough of Penguin's Move Counters fangame, which was basically smooth in the way I'd imagine a player of my own game would ideally be. Testers you find online who are likely most enthusiastic about the genre will also pick up your designs way faster than usual.

• This entire article applies much more of course to the phase where the player may not yet be 'hooked' or impressed by the game yet. Being stuck before the player gets to even appreciate your hook is not good.

• jdelible pointed out that Baba Is You broke through to non-puzzle audiences more, and thus could have more on-the-fence demographics that are less invested.

Update

As an experiment I posted a instructionless puzzle game to some game jamGrass Touches Left: 1 - Nimble Jam rating pageMy PuzzleScript jam "entry" where non-puzzle players got stuck on the first move, used as an (incidental) experiment. PLAYTIME: About 5-15 minutes?? It's literally one level.itch.io of people in a community not familiar with puzzlescript. They are stuck on the first move or even entire concept of the game, you would simply not see that in a puzzle enthusiast community. No other comments are required.

UPDATE: lol it got removed from the jam (the game jam was to promote an AI game tool I think, and I did not use that tool so ) so now you can't see it, but if you did see it, there were 5 comments all completely stuck not knowing how to make any progress.

Update 2

kr0tyara, inventor of desperatea and other puzzle games you may have seen on my channel, invented a horse sokoban game and apparently put it on a site where the dev can watch how the players play the game. Tons of ragequits before level 4 and needing to reduce the difficulty way more than expected.

Update 3

What's very ironic is my latest game "Icely's Arrows Puzzle" had a 'simple'-rule-but-that-was-harder-to-figure-out and things that made it fail the Unbelievably Easy exam and fail to get in an article.

Conclusion

I guess the conclusion is, Make Your Puzzle Games Unbelievably Easy. Oh and also now the 'obvious yellow paint in games' is way more understandable to me, wow. But of course please note that such a title is from the perspective of some designer deep in their own head not knowing about all the people invisible who bounced off the game because it wasn't "accessible" in such a way. I probably can't overly modify some games I've already made, but at least I've turned more objectives in my work into side objectives and secrets due to this methodology.