General RPG Populaces Are Dumb as Hell

A fairly common component of the RPG genre is the puzzle.  While not as ubiquitous as battles, you’re nonetheless almost guaranteed, at some point, to encounter some mild brainteaser to solve while traversing a dungeon.  There are crates to push into the correct spots, switches to pull, passwords to infer from clues, gaps to (somehow) cross with whips and monkey arms, tiles to move into place, ice to slide on, connected floor panels to turn the correct color, golden rings to rotate while tearing your hair out of your skull at how unintuitively designed they are, card sequences to memorize, items to combine into the right tool, walls to lay bombs in front of, riddles to solve, enemies to kill or spare in designated order, piano keys to play in a specific order, mazes to navigate, and so, so much more.  Hell, even combat in an RPG often has a puzzle element, as you’re expected to ascertain bosses’ weaknesses and conceive strategies to deal with new circumstances and scenarios.  Yes, puzzles of all forms are everywhere to be found in RPGs, and if there is 1 thing that can be gleaned from their existence, it is this:

Everyone who lives in an RPG world is a frickin’ moron.

I mean, take a moment and LOOK at the level of difficulty for most RPG puzzles.  These are not exactly stumpers, more often than not.  The majority of switch-flipping puzzles’ solution just involves backtracking until you find a door that’s opened now.  Most mazes are single-tiered and half the relative size of the ones made for childrens’ activity books.  Quite often, if you have a grasp on which colors mix together to form other colors, you know the answer to at least 1 puzzle you’re gonna encounter in the game.  Half the time the solution to crate-pushing puzzles is just being able to understand the concept of height--they’re less complicated than the tests we administer to monkeys to see if they can figure out how to stack stuff high enough to reach a banana, and the monkeys ace those things.

Can you distinguish shapes?  If you can, a good 10% of RPG puzzles are going to be utterly defenseless against your mental might.

And yet these fundamentally facile puzzles are considered, by countless ancient temple-building civilizations in RPG worlds, not to mention quite a few organizations in the present, to be adequate defenses for all their most important places and stuff.  And keep in mind, the extinct cultures that build dungeons in RPGs are usually the smartest ones, known for all their lost knowledge and wisdom.  The lauded Ancients who had mastered science and magic are also the ones that designed a door and key both clearly marked with the same symbol, and then considered the door secure enough if its key sat prominently on a glowing pedestal 2 rooms away.

And the ancient temple-builders were actually right. That’s the thing! These temples with their Fisher-Price puzzles are left safely undisturbed for centuries at a time by any intruder!  Until some adventurer who’s uncommonly clever (by comparison, that is) comes along, these dungeons and towers and so on are just largely left alone, because not a single visitor ever thought to move a statue a few paces to the right so that the room is symmetrical.  I mean, you’d think by mere chance someone with OCD would happen along at some point or other and open the dungeon entrance just by accident, but nope.

There’s a sealed temple in Pokemon Generation 8 whose clue for entrance, written on the outside, directs the reader to “walk together with a living crystal of snow.”  Basically, if you approach with a Cryogonal following you, it’ll let you in.  Even assuming a reader somehow didn’t know what a Cryogonal was and couldn’t on his/her own infer, while living in the Pokemon world, that a living crystal of snow might be some kind of Pokemon, Cryogonal are indigenous to the area surrounding the temple! Anyone looking to get into the temple has already SEEN the damn Cryogonal merely during the act of arriving there!  And yet somehow, by the time the game’s protagonist gets there, who knows how many years after the temple’s creation, the place is still locked up tighter than Bobby Kotick's ass clenches at the word "ethical."  How is this possible?  The only explanation has to be that the people of the Pokemon world--or at least the Galar Region--are basically all knuckle-dragging dipshits.  Considering that this is the land that idolizes Leon, it’s not exactly at odds with the canon.

And make no mistake, it’s not just low-energy yawn-fests like Pokemon Generation 8 that have these infantile puzzles.  Genuinely great RPGs are filled to the brim with’em, too.  A bunch of the locked doors you find in Horizon 0 Dawn, for example, have pass codes that are invisible to the naked eye...but brightly displayed in neon holograms to anyone looking at them with a Focus device.  For context, at the time these holo-locks were created, that’d basically be like writing your password down in invisible ink that reveals itself if you hold your cell-phone up to it, or really just anywhere in the same room.  Great security system if you’re trying to keep a pathetic Luddite like myself out of your secret base!  Maybe not so great if your intent is to bar access to any of the remaining 95% of the planet’s population, though.

Okay, look, every now and then, yes, you will get an RPG that has a few genuinely difficult puzzles that bar passage, which take a goodly amount of thought and intelligence to pass through.*  Maybe not so much that it seems likely that no one in over 100 years has managed to solve it, but still more legitimate a security measure than a rotating panel puzzle that anyone could brute-force their way through because it has less than 100 total possible combinations.  However, worlds like that of Alundra 1, with these actually challenging brainteasers, are relatively few in number.

And I do get why, from a developer perspective.  The focal story elements of RPGs may invite an older audience, but gameplay-wise, the genre is a pretty all-ages one, in no small part due to just how many of its combat obstacles can just be overwhelmed by the simple process of level-grinding.  So to have all other elements of the playing process be simplistic baby-stuff, and then suddenly some fiendishly difficult puzzle is gatekeeping the next area of the game from anyone who isn’t thinking about applying to Mensa, would be problematic.  Hell, I’d probably be annoyed if I had to hit Ecosia 5 times per dungeon in every game I played.

Still, there probably is a happy medium between needlessly frustrating stumpers and the ones where the big secret is to put an object on a button so it stays pressed when you move away.  Because as things stand, the IQ of the average NPC in an RPG is probably about the same as their shoe size--or even lower, if Nomura was doing the character designs.













* Ones which aren’t just outright unfairly cryptic, that is.  “Palm trees and 8” can go to hell.