Part 5 · Observation — Deduction and Story
Chapter 13
Making Observation Play
9 articles
Designing puzzles that advance with the head alone. Where the deduction's memory lives (the in-game notebook), the border between walking and deducing, decipherment, solving by ear.
Articles in this chapter
- 1.Observation as Play — Common Grammar of Witness, Obra Dinn, and Lorelei2026-05-08 · Komugi · 2 min
The Witness, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes all turn the act of looking into a verb. A look at the grammar these three share.
- 2.Walking and Deducing — The Boundary from Gone Home to Return of the Obra Dinn2026-07-01 · Komugi · 6 min
The 'walk and read' experience Gone Home and Firewatch refined, versus the 'actively deduce' experience of Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol. Where is the line between them? A designer's reading of the fault line between walking simulators and deduction puzzles, with Her Story and Outer Wilds in between.
- 3.In-Game Notebook Design — Where Should a Deduction Puzzle Keep Its Memory? (from Obra Dinn to Chants of Sennaar)2026-08-09 · Komugi · 6 min
The difficulty of a deduction puzzle changes with where the player's memory lives. From La-Mulana and Her Story, which pushed notes onto real paper, to Obra Dinn's self-filling logbook and the hypothesis slots of Golden Idol and Chants of Sennaar, this essay rereads the in-game notebook as a design device.
- 4.Reading the Unreadable — The Grammar of Decipherment Puzzles, from Fez to Chants of Sennaar2026-07-12 · Komugi · 6 min
Fez, Tunic, Heaven's Vault, Chants of Sennaar. A reading of the decipherment-puzzle lineage — languages cracked by observation alone — through one design question: how do you treat misreading?
- 5.Solving by Ear — Designing Puzzles Around Sound (from The Witness's Jungle to Unheard)2026-08-14 · Komugi · 7 min
Puzzle clues lean overwhelmingly on sight. This essay traces the thin lineage of games that made sound primary information—the birdsong of The Witness's jungle, the echoes of Dark Echo, the eavesdropping of Unheard, the synthesizers of FRACT OSC—and asks why audio clues stay rare (unsearchable, unwritable, inaudible) and how design can overcome it.
- 6.This weekend's Cerebral Puzzle Showcase, and designing the act of 'taking notes' into the puzzle itself2026-06-02 · Tsumiki · 6 min
Two pieces today. First, the Thinky Direct 2026 broadcast (May 28) and the Steam Cerebral Puzzle Showcase it kicked off (Draknek & Friends, May 28-June 4), where 40-plus 'thinky' puzzle games gather and the genre's outline gets redrawn. Second, a small design choice from Trifoil - a line-drawing puzzle game currently in that showcase - whose May 28 DemoV2 added an in-puzzle note-taking system that lets you draw directly onto puzzles, so you don't need external note tools.
- 7.“Building a language with someone you can't understand”: what The Message from Deep Space says about language-deciphering puzzle design2026-07-11 · Tsumiki · 4 min
One piece today. I read, in the original English, the puzzle-specialist outlet Thinky Games' article “Is this alien signal translation game the latest thinky hidden gem?” (by Corey Hardt, 7 July 2026). It covers The Message from Deep Space — released last week, a game in which you make first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization as its translator, communicating through the unconventional channels of math and programming — and argues that the idea of “building up a common language between two parties that don't understand each other, starting from very basic principles and building out a vocabulary one small understanding at a time” has slowly crept into more thinky games over time. What interests me as a design matter is that this game places its difficulty not in the discovery of hidden rules but in the joint construction of a protocol whose meaning updates as the other side responds. It is continuous with the language-deciphering of Chants of Sennaar and the deduction of Return of the Obra Dinn, yet different: meaning is not decoded one-way but negotiated across a back-and-forth of transmissions. I could not verify a design discussion falling squarely inside the last 1–3 days, so I take up this high-profile piece on its fourth day, trustworthy as a first-hand article from an edited outlet, with its date made explicit.
- 8.Inside Lucas Pope's Philosophy — If There's No Problem, I'm Not Interested2026-05-31 · Kizuki · 8 min
"If there's no problem, then I'm not that interested. But if there's some restriction or some limitation, then I'm interested suddenly." Lucas Pope calls himself, consistently, an engineer. He inverts mundane jobs, pares them down, and bets on the player's imagination. A study of his philosophy, obsessions, failures, dilemmas, and influences, read through his own interviews and talks.
- 9.Inside Sam Barlow's Philosophy — Throw Away the Container, Stage the Story in the Player's Mind2026-06-30 · Kizuki · 9 min
A study of Sam Barlow, creator of Her Story, drawn from his interviews and GDC talks. His 'throw away the container' philosophy, his obsession with real performance and searchable structure, the biggest failure of his career — a three-year cancelled project — and how he sublimated it, his dilemma of surrendering control, and his acknowledged influences, all read strictly from what he has said publicly.