Unmechanical is not a word

But environmental is.  And this is exactly what the game designers for Unmechanical did unbelievably right with how they designed their puzzles.  I have been developing this theory about puzzles in games as having a line dividing them: on the one side are inductive puzzles (puzzles that implicitly communicate their parameters to the player via the environment and leave the player to discover the solution) and deductive puzzles (puzzles that explicitly communicate to the player the rules that govern the parameters of the puzzle and leave the player to deduce the solution).  Now why did I use the word discover with inductive puzzles yet deduce with deductive puzzles?  Could I have used induce instead of discover?  Yes I could have.  Should have I?  No.  Why?  Because discover is much more engaging of a word.  That is exactly the attitude you need when attempting to solve inductive puzzles.  You need to engage every....... single...... goddamn...... object......... because sometimes you never know which one will lead to the solution.  Now I must admit that this strategy is used predominately in adventure games with what I call pixel treasure hunt.  But Unmechanical did an "amazing" job at implicitly communicating the expectations of its puzzles using solely elements from the game.  (If it weren't for this puzzle I would be able to take that amazing out of the parenthesis but leaving the player to figure out how to solve a puzzle can have some backdraft if not properly designed into the environment, as I will now address.)

The only issue I have seen with the inductive form of puzzle design is that heavy reliance on the environment to communicate the parameters of a puzzle means the designers have to heavily rely on solid environmental design.  It is very easy to make mistakes here simply because humans are not accustomed to this form of communication.  Imagine this: You need to tell your GF that you are going to be late from work.  You can either call her and tell her directly (deductive) or devise a way for her to figure it out as she interacts with her environment (inductive).  The latter is MUCH MUCH MUCH more enjoyable from a game design point of view...IF DONE CORRECTLY!!!!!  However, nothing is more frustrating than knowing the game wants you to do something before progression in the story in allowed yet having no clue what to do.

In the end though, I applaud the design team behind Unmechanical for taking the inductive route of puzzle design simply because I don't see it often.  Don't get me wrong, both forms of puzzles are wonderfully fun in their own right but too many developers take the easy route of writing a story for a game, then jerking the gamer out of that story every time a puzzle is introduced to explain the rules behind it.  The rule of thumb I would have towards whether a game should have inductive vs deductive puzzles would be - respect the gamer's expectations.  If you have inductive puzzles put every single drop of design juice into the environment to ensure that the gamer is communicated clearly what is expected of him to solve the puzzle without ever being jerked from the story.  If you have deductive puzzles then take advantage of them by making puzzles with interesting rules that require back door logic, or crossword thinking to solve.  DO NOT make a game that doesn't know what it is because the gamer will immediately know it and hate you forever for it.