An on-line essayist I know only as ?Columbine? has a catch-phrase relating to computer puzzle-adventure games: ?Give the tuba to the ostrich.? It describes a response to frustration peculiar to the genre. In puzzle-adventure games, one travels about various locations, generally collecting a miscellany of tools to act as keys to get past various obstacles: use a key to unlock a cabinet, which contains a steak, which you can use to distract a guard dog, past which is a notebook containing passwords for? and so on. At some point, the player eventually reaches a conceptual dead end. He only has a few obstacles that he has yet to pass (and can reach), say, an ostrich perched on a huge ruby which it believes to be an egg. He has a handful of items he hasn't used, which makes them good candidates for dealing with the ostrich. He's tried scaring the ostrich, feeding the ostrich, petting the ostrich? no soap. He's out of good ideas. In desperation, he starts doing things no sane person would consider in a real life.
He gives the tuba to the ostrich. Probably doesn't work, but what has he got to lose? The only reason he tries is the fact that he is playing with a puzzle, with a finite number of explicitly defined components (keys, guard dogs, tubas, and so on). He knows a solution exists, and that it must revolve around his finite collection, so he tries to solve the puzzle by brute force. He just goes down the list of verbs and objects he knows exist in the game: give the tuba to the ostrich, play the tuba at the ostrich, tickle the ostrich, count the ostrich?
Sometimes it works. Sometimes the reasoning behind the solution isn't clear even after it works. Badly designed games, whose puzzles don't make sense, or which offer too little in the way of suggestive descriptions, have many such moments, but even the best will stymie a player on occasion. It's as much a function of the player as the game, or really a relationship between the two. A player thinking on the same wavelength as the creator can breeze through a puzzle adventure, while an equally capable player thinking on a different wavelength stumbles along, wondering what to do next. Like abstract art, sometimes you ?get it;? sometimes you don't.
I'm playing Exile (Myst III) now, and I thoroughly fail to get it. The game has taken a step backwards from Riven (Myst II), which went to great lengths to blend its puzzles into the background. Like the original Myst, Exile confronts the player with explicit, obviously artificial puzzles: rather than turning off furnaces to permit crawling through vents, you must push elaborate and arbitrary sequences of buttons using codes found elsewhere. I find myself wondering how a guy smart enough to create self-consistent microcosms could think the best mechanism to open his bedroom closet would be a series of hoops and wooden balls in his front yard, the balls to be thrown through the right hoops in the right sequence.
Since I don't understand Exile, I've given many tubas to many ostriches; it's worked twice so far. Eileene, on the other hand, whipped through the game in just over a day. An opaque puzzle is frustrating. An opaque puzzle that someone else solves within a minute is maddening. It proves the failure is on my part, after all.