Another (Water)World

I’m just playing Another World at the moment. It turns out I lost my old password. I found another one but it’s quite early in the game. It is at a quite memorable, yet infuriating puzzle. Actually, it would have been one of my favorite puzzles in the game if I didn’t get stuck at it every time.

This might have been a mistake.

You find yourself in a cave. You need to jump across a couple of gaps in the floor to get to a spot right underneath a huge water basin. You need to shoot at the wall at this spot to destroy the ceiling and to let the water into the cave. With the water gushing in behind you, you need to quickly run back through the cave and climb out before you drown. It’s a spectacular sequence. For some reason I always enjoy puzzles that involve water. I remember enjoying a similar puzzle in Zelda: A Link to the Past where you need to open a floodgate at one place to empty a lake at another. And yes, I even enjoyed the Water Dungeon in Ocarina of Time. I’m that hardcore.

But this is actually a prime example of a badly designed puzzle. After that difficult sequence you get into a series of screens with a lot of challenging battles. If you die there, you get reset in the cave every time. It takes hours to finally get trough the cave and through all the battles without dying. If you do so, the reward is .. nothing. You get stuck and it’s not really clear why.

The solution is (and you WANT to read this spoiler) to jump down in one of the gaps before you let the water in. Most of them will kill you but there is one where you survive. There is yet another tunnel there with a door at the end. If you open that final door, backtrack and THEN let the water in, it will flood another chamber and prevent you from gettung stuck later after the fights. If you do that, you will also get a more advantageous save point, should you die during the fights. It turns out the save point was so punishing because the game always set me back to a time before I made my initial mistake.

The puzzle is bad because.

• It requires players to do something that has been punished before without telegraphing that things are different now.

• A mistake is not immediately obvious and irreversible

• Players need to overcome other difficult challenges before they can notice they made a mistake at the beginning. It renders their eventual success useless.

• It’s generally difficult to create the connection between action and consequence. If you find the door at the end of the tunnel, it’s not clear why you would need to open it. If you get stuck after the fights, it’s still not clear what your mistake was.

• Finally, it’s a puzzle that is designed to lead players astray. Players can only do the right thing if they fail big time at least once.

Actually, this reminds me of some of the puzzles in Braid. But even Braid wasn’t that cryptic and punishing. Of course, this is an old game. Games were difficult and much less forgiving back then. I wonder. It seems like Éric Chahi, the game designer of Another World is now back and working on a new, very different game called From Dust. I’m curious to see if his design philosophy has also changed. And here is where I find myself being torn. Looking at Another World’s beautiful, silent storytelling, I almost wish it has not.