Adventure Game Puzzles
The blank page can be hard - this generator will give you some ideas for puzzles.
I initially wrote this with adventure games in mind but it’s equally applicable to RPGs or other games. At that time it was called Puzzle Familiar. For a full introduction to this puzzle system and the thinking behind it checkout the Adventure Game Design Patterns page. I have weighted the solutions here so that shorter solutions are more likely.
Examples
Here are a few of the random outputs from the Puzzle Familiar and then how you might use it in practice to make a puzzle in a game. These are just my ideas, try it yourself and make something even better!
These are quite chunky, so I’ll just do three example adventure game puzzles.
Replicator
Problem: Want FOO
Description: The player requires something they do not currently possess. They need to acquire an item, knowledge, money, skill, or permission.
Solution: Monkey See Monkey Do
Description: The player must observe another character and copy their actions, words, route, or behaviour.
Imagine a sci-fi game set in a Star Trek type universe. You need ice for some other puzzle. So the FOO you want here is ice. Then you’re in the canteen and you’re sitting around watching people walk up to the replicator and punch in a number, most people are getting soup or sandwiches but one person gets an iced-coffee. You watch them press the numbers and see it’s 423 263, you can then go up enter the same digits and you’ve got an ice coffee that you can take the ice from.
Of course these prompts aren’t the law. You can expand on this puzzle, maybe you break the thermostat to make it hot so people want ice drinks first.
Escape the Mine
Problem: Approaching Danger
Description: A threat is approaching and the player must act before something bad happens.
Solution: Repetition
Description: The player must attempt the same action multiple times before success occurs.
You’re being chased by a beast in a mine, red eyes, slow approach. You must kick a beam three times to stop it. The first time you kick it, the player might say “Something creaked”, then another kick might physically change it’s appearance to show it breaching and the third kick breaks the beam and collapses the tunnel. The approaching danger is blocked.
Not everything has to be complicated. Depending on how your interpret it, the approaching danger prompt can imply a lot of pressure to the complete puzzle and then putting in a trick where you have to repeat an action might not feel fair to the player. That’s why in this case I added the “Something creaked” dialog, to try and show they’re on the right path.
Steal from the Lab
1Problem: Temporal Item23Description:4The player needs to use something, but the item cannot easily be used because it disappears, breaks, or expires.56Solution: Change Item State, Monkey See Monkey Do, Sabotage78Description:9The player must transform an object into a new state by opening, breaking, cooking, cutting, or altering it.10The player must observe another character and copy their actions, words, route, or behaviour.11The player must deliberately interfere with something, preventing it from working or changing the situation to their advantage.The setting is a small secret lab in complex investigating UFOs. There’s a field or glass barrier around a piece of recovered craft and a scientist is doing experiments. Occasionally the scientist removes the barrier to take readings or do a test. In this way it’s a temporal item, you can try to interact with it but there’s not enough time for you to grab it, or interact with it before it’s back behind it’s barrier.
You have to copy the scientist’s action to cause the barrier to lift and then jam a stick into a lever to stop it resetting. That’s the Sabotage and the Monkey See Monkey Do, actions. Of course, if you try and do it while the scientist is in the room he’s going to object and stop you. Therefore in an adjoining room you need to open a fuse box and flip the fuse for the lab, then once he’s in the room you can shut the door and lock it trapping him in there. Then you’re free to take action on the artifact or steal it.
The more solution prompts you have the more in-depth the solution is likely to be. Try and keep things simple, unlike what I did here, or break it down into sub-puzzles.
Machine Intelligence Thoughts
Is this an appropriate place on the site for a diversion into the use of LLMs for adventure game puzzles? Probably not. But I’m going to do it anyway.
I know for many people the use of LLMs is distasteful so avert your eyes. When I came up with this classification system LLMs didn’t exist. Now they do. So does this system even have value anymore? I think it does but in the spirit of scientific inquiry let’s try a prompt and see what happens:
Scene: Adventure Game
Goal: Create a simple puzzle to advance
You’re in a UFO lab, there’s a piece of an alien craft you want to take. Assume you’re in a disguise or your presence is allowed. What point and click style puzzle can you think of, that you have to solve before you, the player, can get this piece of craft. Do only one puzzle, you may invent areas, items and characters as needed but try to show some restraint.
Ok, it gave a very long answer that I don’t want to paste here. It also said the material was in “a glass containment case” but the way to open it was; open a drawer, there you find 3 other pieces of alien craft … seems unlikely but go on … and it said you needed to find one that’s a matching color, scan it with equipment on the bench and the containment case would pop-open. That is a puzzle, but to me, it’s not very logically consistent (not that logical consistency is a hallmark of point and click adventure games), if I’m here to steal alien material why not take the stuff that’s just left in an easily accessible drawer?
For the record, that reply was from GPT-5.5 Instant, the model used for ChatGPT webchat at the time of writing.
You know after IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat Gary Kasparov in chess in the late nineties, a new variant of chess appeared called Centaur Chess. Now, if you’re reading a website about computer RPGs, you probably already know that a centaur is a mythical half-horse, half-man creature and therefore can take a good guess at what centaur chess is. No, not chess for horses but a game where a human and a computer chess engine work together to play chess. So each team is a combination of a human plus a chess computer and generally this is a combination that can beat a chess engine playing alone. So, for the next experiment, let’s have the LLM use one of the random generated puzzle prompts.
Problem: Temporal Item
Description: The player needs to use something, but the item cannot easily be used because it disappears, breaks, or expires.
Solution: New Item Perception
Description The player must realise an existing object has another purpose or interpretation.
Can you create a point and click adventure game puzzle based on the above prompt? Try to be brief but complete in your reply.
ChatGPT gave me some borderline incomprehensible nonsense that really misunderstands what invisible ink is. I also tried Kimi 3 and despite using chain-of-reasoning, it was just as bad. I’m not typing it out here but it involved a door lock operated by gunpowder. So no centaurs for us just yet and it looks like we have an AI-eval that current models fall flat on their faces trying to pass. In the field of adventure game puzzles, humans win, for now.