Phrenetration

Played: Puzzle Chronicles

Setting the difficulty for games is always a challenge. It’s actually so hard and it has been done wrong so many times that I chose to number the title. In this particular case I want to write about Puzzle Chronicles. A game I enjoyed a lot but here I want to discuss an aspect that just bugged me. The difficulty setting does two things (as far as I’ve noticed). It lets the enemies have more experience points and – and this is really a deal breaker for puzzle game fans – it slows the player down. This is a virtual barrier that shouldn’t exist. In the end this doesn’t make the game unbeatable but only because of another gameplay flaw. Items and special attacks often produce unpredictable results. Enemies just defeat themselves most of the time.

So what rule can we educe from this?

“Never take away gameplay elements players can become skilled at for the sake of a challenge.”

I guess the first question that people who are new to this web log have in mind is: “What’s the meaning of the word phrenetration?” Since this little pun is not too hard to decrypt I’ll give you a little more time to think about it while I explain what this blog is all about. I am a die hard video game fan (boy?) and I really enjoy reading game sites/blogs/forums. Nevertheless I found that these sites are always about news hunting, game reviewing or video game technology. On this site I’ll blog mainly about game design but I won’t criticize games as a whole nor will I always write about brand new games. What you can find here are reviews of certain design aspects of games, opinions of well known designers and some other stuff I consider valuable.

…so now why phrenetration? Phrenetration is a combination of the words “phren” (Greek for “concerning the mind”) and “penetration”. So it’s just another word for mindfuck (which of course wasn’t available anymore). The reason I chose this word was because a mindfuck is in my opinion the ultimate goal a designer of any form of media can achieve.