How to get started with puzzles

The types of puzzles you’ll find in ARGs vary wildly and is often times only truly limited by the imagination, and/or implementation. But what do I mean by that?

Well, you can make a puzzle out of nearly anything! Ciphers, encryptions, hidden audio, secret messages in text… The possibilities are nearly endless.

In this guide, we’ll talk about some of the more common puzzles used, and briefly touch on some of the lesser types. All while taking a look at thoughtful implementation.

Be advised: This article is not complete. There’s plenty more information to be added soon!

What kind of puzzles can I make?

As previously mentioned, pretty much anything you can think of can be made into a puzzle. ARG players are generally very creative, and intelligent people. We cover this more in-depth, here: argcreator.com/arg-platforms

Puzzle Design:

So when designing puzzles, one major tip I can give is to make the puzzle type relevant to the story, if the story is present. Immersion is a wildly focused aspect of ARGs. Creating puzzles that don’t match your story’s content can absolutely break immersion.

You may be wondering what I mean by this. It’s pretty simple. Say your story is about trying to discover the location of a waitress who went missing, and you’re using Youtube as your platform. In the video, it would make more sense to embed something like location-based information, or a puzzle the waitress may be familiar with. It’s unlikely that the waitress will speak the letter content of a cipher she doesn’t know. In fact, it may very well be unlikely she knows ciphers at all. It’s not to say it’s impossible. But it’s not likely. The career path of cryptography, and hospitality, rarely intertwine.

But you never know. Maybe she does know ciphers. Maybe she went missing because she was a waitress during the day and a hacker at night.

The point is to keep puzzles relevant to the content. This helps create a more believable story and puzzle.

And on the complete opposite side of that… It’s not likely that a super high-tech secret military/government agency will have their password information sitting in binary, on their website.

Again, there could be a story reason it’s there. Maybe the webmaster is trying to expose some secret and is using the website as the platform for the leak.

However the puzzle is designed, consider how it works in relation to the story. Picking the right type of puzzle enhances the immersive value of that puzzle, and creates a more cohesive gameplay experience.

How do I know if my puzzle is too hard?

Determining the difficulty level of a puzzle can be a very tricky thing. If you make it too hard or offer too little information… It could go unsolved for the entirety of it’s existence. If you make it too easy… the complexity (and potentially enjoyability) of the game takes a hit.

So, how do figure out if it’s too hard, too easy, or just right?

This is where you want to have a trusted friend, fellow ARG creator, or an ARG player (or a combination of any/all of them) to test the puzzle. Playtesting provides vital information regarding how a player interacts with your content. We tend to think that “Oh, this puzzle is going to be easy because of this clue” when that’s not always the case. We see the puzzle internally, but the player is approaching the puzzle with whatever information you gave them, and whatever tools they have at their disposal. They won’t always see the puzzle from the same angle you saw it from when designing it.