What types of puzzles do you prefer creating/playing in RM?

I’m almost finished with an RM horror game I’ve been working on for quite a while, and one thing I’ve noticed was how hard it was to create puzzles that are interesting to solve and still work with the setting/story. Because of this, I thought I’d ask a few questions I’m interested in.

I’m really interested what puzzles you guys like to see in rpg maker games. Complicated puzzles? Easy puzzles? What type of games do you like or dislike puzzles in?

What specific types of puzzles do you like? I’ve always noticed how most games have the typical push-box-onto-pressure-plate puzzle.

What games’ puzzles stand out to you? Ib, Witch’s House and OneShot have some amazing puzzles imo.

For me personally I’ve always liked short, simple puzzles that have variety throughout your game. Not only that, but if you’re going to add puzzles, make them a big part of your game. I’ve always disliked puzzles in fighting games because of how they broke up the pacing of the game.

What are your thoughts?

Puzzles that are small and take little time to solve once you see what needs to be done. Like, maybe something with figuring out some kind of pattern. But that's just me as player, lol. I'm not good at making puzzles myself...

I don't recall having a puzzle I like when playing any RM games, neither I'm fond of creating puzzle.

But, if you're making puzzle, I like puzzle that you need to control two or more characters, you need to switch between the character to solve the riddle. This kind of puzzle never gets old on me. Other type of puzzle I knew were pretty standard.

Puzzle I dislike is always anything that need a separate note to solve it. I don't want to take a note when playing games. It just too out of scope of playing games in my book. Or when puzzle is mixed in battle focused games.

I love puzzles. I love RPGs. I prefer that these things be kept separate (although I do enjoy DROD RPG, which might be an example of a puzzle RPG depending on how you classify things).

The problem is that in most RPG games the puzzles just don't fit well. They block progress, or they are relegated to a mini game, or they are poorly designed, or they are poorly balanced in difficulty.

To elaborate on difficulty, a puzzle is either so easy as to be trivial, in which case it's pretty pointless, or it's so difficult that you need to consult a guide. And the worst part is that puzzle difficulty depends on the player, so a puzzle that is trivial to one person might need to be looked up online by another. Final Fantasy X is a good example of this. I found the trials to be pointless busy work, but I know people who got frustrated with them and looked up the solutions.

I mentioned DROD RPG earlier. Since few people will be familiar with it, I'll try to just summarise why it works as a puzzle RPG: the RPG elements (stat-building, managing health, and managing equipment/money) are the puzzle. Every battle has a cost, and you need to weigh the health you will lose against the value of whatever the monster is guarding. Really, this is a puzzle game that is just dressed up as an RPG, and I think it works fairly well if you enjoy the kind of puzzle that it presents.

Perhaps a better known example of puzzles in an RPG would be the Zelda series, where you acquire items that give you certain new capabilities, and you then have to find ways to leverage those abilities to access new areas or treasures. It's important to note that these items have utility outside of their puzzle uses, which makes them fun to discover and play around with.

In summary, my advice is to make puzzles an integral part of your game if you want to include them. Either make a puzzle game (like DROD RPG) or make a game that focuses on the elements that you will use in your puzzles (like Zelda). Including puzzles for the sake of having puzzles in an RPG that otherwise would have nothing to do with them is probably going to fall flat and get your players thinking "If I wanted puzzles, I'd play a puzzle game, not an RPG."

I usually hate puzzles that are time-based. If I can redo them I don't mind them that much, but the kind of puzzles in which you die if you run out of time are, imo, the worst. And the other kind of puzzle that I hate are the completely randomized ones (like the protheses shop in Escape from Monkey Island...), because they are time consuming and they don't feel rewarding.

Other than that I like all kind of puzzles :D The ones in which you have to figure out a code to find some piece of the story plot, or when you need to figure out how to make a path, or when you need to use a particular item and you have to connect the mental dots to figure out which one is the correct one... Even major scaled puzzles are great, as long as you have some method to fast travel between locations.

the solution to puzzles should be evident and work with what the player knows about the game and their inventory (tile-based puzzles, found tiles dropped in map, 'oh, put tiles in mosaic, I get it.')
the *complexity* should come from *the solution set*
you can increase *complexity* by creating *ambiguity* in the *solution set* (pieces that should be single- or multiple-use, orientation or quantity of the pieces, red herrings, etc)

concepts.

For me the most important thing about any puzzle is that the difficulty lies in 'finding' the solution not the 'application' of the solution.

Alundra 2 (which I recently replayed) is an example of this done badly. Over half the puzzles effectively require near pixel perfect positioning and timing. It doesn't matter if you know 'how' to solve the puzzle if you can't actually 'do' the solution.
One such 'puzzle' held me up for over an hour and drew me to insanity. It wasn't that I didn't know 'what to do'... I just couldn't 'do' it due to the ridiculously tight timing (it wasn't even optional).

As someone who is currently making a puzzle game, they are at the center of the experience, with many puzzles being required to progress through the game. I understand that some people may not like this approach, but I've always been fascinated with puzzles and how they work.
I like taking real life logic puzzles and transferring them into the game, or using an ability learned early on (like teleporting) to solve a seemingly impossible puzzle.
I aim to give my player that "Ah ha!" moment and I do my best to design original puzzle ideas.

I like puzzles that you can solve using clues that you find in the game. I'm not a fan of puzzles or riddles which need the players' outside knowledge to be solved... like puzzles in Ib, the witches house, mermaid swamp, the crooked man, misao etc.