Solving the Mystery Behind Our Puzzles 🧩

The Eldritch Truth may be unknowable, but our process for making puzzles doesn’t have to be!

We asked the developers a few questions to delve deeper into the puzzles in Call Of The Elder Gods.

What is the inspiration behind the puzzles?

We grew up playing games like Myst and Riven, which had a profound influence on us.

In Riven, the puzzles are deeply woven into the world, and you’re encouraged to explore and absorb as much information as possible to understand how the environment and its mechanisms function.

Those games also feature beautiful, mesmerizing settings where you feel invited to get lost and spend hours playing at a slow, relaxed pace.

How do you make puzzles feel like a natural part of the story?

We approached the game design from the general to the specific, so the first step is to establish a difficulty curve that more or less defines how the puzzles would evolve throughout the game. After that, we outlined the puzzle logic in abstract terms, and then integrated the narrative. During this process, we iterate on the puzzle to adjust it to the story, and on the story to make it fit the puzzle.

This process usually involves the entire design department, since it is very important that the puzzles and the narrative go completely hand in hand.

How do you balance the difficulty with each puzzle?

Once we’re satisfied with the result on paper, we move on to prototyping. This is where the most important factor in fine-tuning the puzzles comes into play: being able to test them with players as early as possible.

By observing how players approach the puzzle and the difficulties they encounter, we iterate and make adjustments. At this stage, time becomes the main constraint, since the more playtests you can conduct, the better balanced and refined the puzzles will be.

How do players keep track of the clues?

When we used to play puzzle games, we would often keep a notebook to take notes. We thought we could offer that same tool to players by integrating it directly into the game. Whenever there’s something important and the player examines it, we record it in a journal.

This way, they can review those notes whenever they need to reflect on a puzzle. However, we will never provide the solution.

Do you have any tips for how to solve the more challenging puzzles?

In our games, exploring the environment is always essential in order to gather all the necessary information. If you get stuck on a puzzle, take a closer look at your surroundings. You might find that things start to make more sense.

That said, some puzzles can be more challenging than others, so we’ve included a hint system in the pause menu. Players can access it at any time and request as many hints as they need.

For us, it’s also very important that using this system never penalizes the player in any way. What matters most is that players have fun and don’t feel frustrated.

Don't forget to play the demo!

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