An option for adjustable difficulty in puzzle design

Puzzle design is one of those tough things to design for variable difficulty. With combat it's trivially easy to adjust difficulty -- simply modify values, easiest being health and damage output, but not too much harder to increase how often they attack and decrease how long their wind-up and cool-down animations are and the threshold for flinching.

But how do you do that for puzzles?

Not too long ago I found a game which has an amazing option for adjusting puzzle difficulty. The game is *Shadow of the Tomb Raider,* and its solution to variable difficulty in puzzle design was surprisingly effective -- no need to have multiple versions of the puzzle.

**Difficulty options for puzzles change how much the player's character will chatter about the puzzle.**

On the easiest difficulty Lara will pretty much walk the player through how to solve it. On medium Lara will give a hint as to the main realization that the player needs to make to solve the puzzle. On hard, the only things Lara will say about it are whether or not a given jump will or won't be possible after you fail at something that looks close.

Now this isn't a 'free' solution. Figuring out just how much advice is needed and *which* advice is needed is a matter of a heck of a lot of play testing -- but given the way puzzles work in the newer games, I feel confident that how they work is the result of a lot of play testing.

I feel like Navi, Fi, Midna, etc. were pretty much default-easy-mode for some of these, often just giving away core realizations right off the bat instead of letting the player realize it.

But I think with significant play testing and *having options for this* I think it's an excellent way to have much more interesting puzzle designs while still making it accessible to lower-skill players.