Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they provide challenges for you to overcome with brains rather than brawn. For Action Adventures, they offer a break from the hacky-slashy-stabby-shooty element of title.
Every week I’ll bring you a new puzzle, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every once in a while I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
This week’s puzzle comes from Rocksteady’s Arkham Knight, which I’ve been playing during my nightly streams on Twitch.
One of the recurring missions in the Arkham series is collecting Riddler trophies and overcoming his challenges. While I’m not a big fan of the way they were implemented this time around—in that most of them are just lying around, there to be collected without a challenge, clearly padding the game—there are a few gems of puzzle design hidden in the challenges.
This particular puzzle has the Caped Crusader standing in front of a TV surrounded by multicoloured Riddler marks (aka interrogation signs). The purpose is to match the colour on-screen with the corresponding question mark in the order they appear. It’s a memory puzzle. But what makes it worthy of being The Weekly Puzzle, is that it’s also about perception. What show up on the screen aren’t blotches of paint, but words, colour names to be exact. You might not think it much, but when your brain reads “Red” it’ll think Red even if the colour of the text is blue. It’s an interesting phenomenon called The Stroop Effect. Riddler challenges have always been creative, but this particular one—for me—reaches new heights of ingenuity and I applaud it. I only wish there had been more of these.
With four games now released under the Arkham brand, is there a Riddler challenge you like the most? Tell me about it in the comments.
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