This week, I played Tiny Rooms Story Mystery. Playing as a private detective trying to uncover the mysteries of a deserted town, you gradually uncover this overarching narrative as you complete puzzles and explore the abandoned town. I’ll briefly describe the mechanics that this game employs to facilitate puzzle-solving and exploration. The game is organized into 3d “blocks” which you can rotate by swiping the screen of your device, providing a more aerial perspective. When you want to interact with doors or objects within the game, you simply tap on it to zoom in on a segment within the game (such as a desk in an office) to have more visual detail and to interact with smaller objects within these subspaces (such as a computer on the desk). The first “block” or level gives a quick tutorial of what mechanisms exist for you to employ (i.e. tapping and swiping) to give rise to the dynamics of exploration and puzzle-solving which are wrapped in the aesthetics of this detective RPG. Given the MDA of this game, the “private detective solving the mysteries of an abandoned town” narrative is deeply integrated into the game design (particularly at the dynamic and aesthetic levels) such that you (as the private detective) have agency in progressing the narrative as you play this game. While the low hint infrastructure of this game does encourage more exploration of the physical spaces, it can disrupt the narrative flow if you’re unsure how to solve a puzzle and incentivized to then abuse the simple game mechanics (i.e. starting to tap and swipe on everything).
Below is a screenshot I took of such an example from my gameplay where after pressing on the desk, it re-oriented my POV to give the illusion that I was sitting at the desk. Objects that are useful for integral for solving puzzles within the physical space are stored in an inventory sidebar when you tap them.
There are usually several puzzles you have to solve to explore each “block” (i.e. a house, bank, etc.)before moving on to the next map. To structure and contextualize the physical spaces that you explore in this game in terms of the narrative, there are cutscenes and text blurbs that pop up at the transition points between levels. The game is organized into Acts which visualize each level as a page within a book. Each level is organized as a “chapter” within an Act, which is within the entire game narrative. After clicking on “play” to start a chapter, a text blurb titled with a chapter number (as shown below) contextualizes the new level / “block” you’re about to explore in terms of its narrative relevance. Therefore, while each physical location and the interaction you have with the physical space progress smaller sub-narratives, these transition animations help architect each level in terms of the more high-level game narrative.
During my gameplay, at points where I was unsure of what to do next (particularly on the more complex Bank chapter, I was unsure of what piece of the puzzle I was missing so I resorted to just start tapping and swiping on everything I could in case I’d missed something. While I liked the challenge that a lack of hints presented in trying to leverage clues from my surrounding environment to solve the relevant puzzles I identified, points where I “lost the plot” disrupted my game flow which correspondingly took my attention off of the story trying to be told. While in some aspects this design choice simulated the frustration of being a real-world detective having to make sense of nonsense items, I could see this becoming a larger friction point as levels became longer and more complex. As such, I might be in favor of more cognitive scaffolding to maintain the rhythm of the narrative and prevent large jumps in difficulty from presenting logic barriers to the player. More specifically, this might be implemented by sensing when a player begins randomly tapping on objects in the environment and instead of statically prompting what the object is (if it’s not something integral for solving a puzzle) it gracefully adapts the prompt be some form of a hint or nudge of where to look next to ensure the game and narrative flow stay intact. 
On the topic of logical barriers that I found to exist while I played this game can be framed as an interesting ethical consideration for game designers. When designing a narrative, exporative, puzzle game like this, a designer might try to find the sweet spot when it comes to designing puzzles that are challenging but that most people can solve. For simplicity and feasibility purposes, this challenge level is static to whatever the game designers thought was this “sweet spot”. However, what obligation do game designers have to make puzzle games like these logically accessible for everyone? When game designers create a target audience for their game, it implicitly suggests that their game isn’t for some people. While I agree this is practical, it started to make me wonder how a game like this could be adapted or re-engineered to account for mental barriers instead of physical barriers. A solution that feels intuitive to me is to add difficulty settings into Tiny Rooms Story Mystery which would simplify the puzzles, provide more hint-scaffolding, and therefore put more emphasis on preserving the narrative flow. While I’m by no means a puzzle savant, there are likely a large group of people who’d love to play a game like this and experience the narrative being told if it were less complex and unstructured. I can think of the audiences of really old or really young users being potential audiences that might benefit from an easier game mode that lowers the cognitive barrier to entry.
