meganothing wrote:In a game with turn-based fights you can expect most players to have an aversion against anything which needs nimble fingers and fast reactions. Grimrock is real-time, so timed puzzles are more in line with the game.
Reaction speed deteriorates with age, a challenge that is easy for a 20 year old might be very difficult for someone past 50. In single player shooters old people can play at a lower difficulty setting, but in an RPG the difficulty slider is usually reserved for different tunings. Grimrock sadly doesn't have a slider to adapt the timed puzzles to age/reaction speed.
(A similar case can be made against puzzles that are only solvable if you have specific knowledge, for example of a quote in a shakespeare play. Not a good idea as people who don't know about it just have no chance at all.)
Games with turn based combat are mindful of time, and when time becomes important. There are many games where the exploration part is realtime, and become turn based only when time and sequence become important... as they do in combat. Fallout is a turn based game that had several realtime ~timers that trigger events, and some of them lethal.
The only problem with timers in a turn based game, is if the developer is careless (or clueless) enough to not force the timer to adjust to elapsed time during combat ~per round. Fallout (again, for instance) had realtime detonators that the player could set. These bombs would explode on the clock. If set for two minutes, they would explode two minutes later ~unless the game switched to combat; where at that point they no longer tick in realtime, but in elapsed time.
Of solutions requiring insight... what games do you know that have those, but do not have the solutions present in the game?
(I only recall one title, and that used the questions as an age check ~in a pre-internet era, under the assumption that young kids didn't follow 80's politics.)
Riven comes first to mind for solutions requiring in game foreknowledge. That game [brilliantly] generates passwords on the fly for the game ~making them almost unguessable; and dutifully puts the solution where they are supposed to be found or figured out. It even has a school with toys to teach small children the basics of counting, and other skills... To solve the puzzle, the player uses these to teach themselves the means to understand the answer.
IHaveHugeNick wrote:Timed puzzles are unbelievably immersion breaking. And yes, I hate "teh immersiun" crowd as much as anybody. But the reality is, nothing yanks you out of the game more brutally then failing a timed-puzzle a few times. It just conveys this feeling of battling against something that's completely artificial and arbitrary.
Why on earth would it matter if it was arbitrary? Someone made that puzzle, and probably made it for security. When a thief breaks into business, they might find a blinking number pad on the wall demanding the correct solution, else it triggers an alarm. That is not 'immurzshun' breaking. If it is... then I've no idea what the hell people mean by 'immurzshun'... and I doubt they know it themselves.
A timed puzzle in an old abandoned dungeon is from a time when it wasn't old and abandoned. Such a puzzle can very well be the same thing as the burglar alarm, and is not 'immurzshun' breaking for the same reasons the former is not.
Even if it's not an alarm, the timer means the same thing. It's not arbitrary, it is a minimal amount of time for the right person to solve the puzzle and pass; while the wrong person [hopefully ~in their thinking] won't have enough time to guess the answer.