Lost Woods mazes

One of the later challenges in Megaman Star Force 2 is the Bermuda maze: a fog-filled maze where each room had four exits, but only by going through the correct exit can the player advance. This kind of maze, where the player has to follow a specific route to pass through a repeating maze, has been around since the Lost Woods maze in the original Legend of Zelda on the NES. It remains a very popular kind of puzzle, having appeared in numerous games, such as Devil May Cry 1 and 3, numerous Zelda titles, Brave Fencer Musashi, and many more. It is an iconic kind of obstacle that has a lot of advantages and gives game designers a lot of options to play with.

It is a really interesting kind of maze since it is nearly impossible for the player to guess his way through. Most of these mazes are created by simply warping the player back into the same room he just exited, so it is impossible to tell if you are making progress or not until you either stumble back outside or find your way to the exit. So, a Lost Woods style maze is really more of a puzzle than a true maze, since the game designer needs to give the player some kind of clue in order to pass through the maze. Because of that feature, this kind of maze can also function as a good way to limit the player's access to an area until the story has progressed to a certain point.

One way of handling a lost woods maze is to make it unsolvable until the player is given a solution at one point. For example, the original Lost Woods could only be passed through by going North, West, South, and then finally West again. The instructions are given to the player by an old man hiding out in one of the dungeons. As a functionally identical alternative to giving the player a set of directions, some games give the player an NPC (often an animal) to act as a guide through the repeating maze.

The problem with this kind of maze is that it can be bothersome having to remember the instructions every time you pass through the maze, particularly if the maze blacks access to commonly visited areas. However, this can be made less bothersome if you make the solution fairly simple. A good example can be found in the Mu branch of the Bermuda Maze in Megaman Star Force 2. When it was time to first take that path, I was given straightforward instructions on how to get through: up right, down right, down left, up right, up left. I thought that it was going to be pain to remember those instructions, but then my brother pointed out that the instructions masked a simple solution: all I had to do was turn right at every intersection in the maze. That made passing through the Bermuda Maze a very simple process on subsequent passes.

The second common way of handling a Lost Woods style maze is to build a clue into the maze itself. A good example can be found in the Room of Rites, found at the end of both Oracle Legend of Zelda games. In this maze, there are eight or so statues, whose eyes will point in random directions every time the player enters the room. If the player is just entering or on the right path, none of the eyes will point in the direction of the correct path. However, if the player wanders off the correct route, the eyes will randomly point in all four direction. By looking for this behavior, the player can find his way to the exit. Personally, I prefer this kind of Lost Woods maze, since it is much more mentally engaging than just following a list of directions.

A major pitfall to this second kind of Lost Woods maze is that the clue needs to be possible to figure out (a common problem of puzzles I mentioned before). In Lunar Silver Star Story Complete for the PSX, there is dungeon called Myght's tower that had a Lost Woods maze. At one point the player is dumped into a room with four exits, each of which is marked with a distinct symbol (sun moon, star, planet). As far as I know, there are no clues past those symbols. I ended up getting lucky and stumbling through the maze by moving randomly. A lack of solid clues like that can bring a game to screeching halt, leaving the player to run to GameFAQs in order to progress.

A particular feature of Lost Woods mazes that I haven't mentioned is that they can easily lead to more than one destination if the player follows an alternate route. This lets the developers get multiple challenges out of a single maze, which can be very useful.

All told, I fully expect this kind of maze to show up in videogames for years and years to come. It is both very simple in concept, but allows for countless variations.

Megaman Starforce: Scavenger Hunts

A few days ago, I accepted a side-quest in Megaman Starforce 2 that has lead to me taking a short break from the game. The basic premise of the job was simple enough: the player has to follow a clue and examine the corresponding object, which would give the player a new clue, and so on. However, the moment I read the first clue I was immediately stumped and overwhelmed.

The first clue was two simple words: "Ancient fish". Immediately, several possibilities jumped into my mind, such as the bottom of a lake I visited earlier in the game and the ancient drawings and fossils of sea life in the desert. Unfortunately, getting to those areas could some time, so I was looking forward to spending half an hour running around the game world. Thanks to a suggestion from my brother though, I did find the correct location pretty quickly; it was a fish fossil in the nearby museum. The next clue was where things really got hectic. I was told to look for "four wings that catch the air". Naively thinking the second location was somewhere nearby, I spent a long time checking nearby areas for anything matching that description. Nothing. So I followed my instincts and went to check out the only thing I could think of: a dragonfly fossil tucked away in a remote, hard to reach corner of the desert area. When I finally got there, I discovered that there was no clue, and that the entire trip was one big waste of time. Shortly thereafter, and after having spent an entire hour on this minor sidequest, I gave up in frustration and checked GameFAQs. It turns out I needed to go to the lake town's windmill.

This is a pretty good example of why it can be a very bad idea to put a riddle into a videogame. When some developer came up with the "four wings that catch the air" riddle, he must have thought that the answer was pretty obvious. Unfortunately, game developers can't afford to assume that the players will think the same way that they they do; what may be obvious to one person may be the last possibility on someone else's mind. Compounding the problem in this case, the developers overlooked an obvious alternate solution: the four winged dragonfly. Honestly, I had completely forgotten about the existence of the windmill by the time I accepted the sidequest. I would have figured it out as soon as I saw the windmill again, but the lake town would have been the last place I would look, since it is the hardest area to reach from where I was. After my initial guesses failed, I had only two recourses: go over every area in the game with a fine-toothed comb (which can take hours), or cheat and look up the answer.

Honestly, I think puzzles like this one should never be put into video games. Scavenger hunts with vague clues can be fun only as long as the conditions are reasonable. As long as the area of the scavenger hunt is restricted to a small size, the player has the luxury of getting to know the area in detail and being able to use the brute force approach without wasting an undue amount of time (this was the case in the underwater scavenger hunt earlier in the game). Alternatively, the game can provide the player with additional clues if the player gets stumped earlier on, so the player's brain has more information to chew on. However, demanding that the player go over the entire game world with only a vague clue to go on is simply a bad idea. It only leads to frustration.