We all love secrets don't we? Those little extra surprises and, sometimes rewards, we get for exploring and looking beyond the beaten path that developers signpost out for us. Who needs to walk the trodden path that everyone is going to go down when I can see into the tree's and shoot that little toy frog that someone left in the middle of the Russian wilderness for some reason, or jump down this elevator shaft to witness the carved face of one of the developers into the wall for some other reason. It's an integral part of the evolution of game design and thus, perhaps one of the most consistent ways that developers choose to tie some sort of intrinsic value to their games. Even if ultimately your work will only be truly experienced by a couple of thousand before a guide to scrawled up on the internet for others to mimic like a cookbook; those first entrants will really appreciate the journey and effort that went there initially.
But what exactly makes an Easter egg, and how far can it go? Well, common sense would dictate that it must be an evolution upon the simple puzzle, only with a lot of different philosophies intentionally thrown in there to illicit a different sort of reaction from the participant. A puzzle is designed to be solved, and in that sense there is usually a layout of clues and logical threads to pull on in order to reach your solution. These are designed to make the player feel clever or attentive at managing to pick up on the clues provided and turn that passive knowledge into action, the more obscure the clue the more profound the reaction. Easter eggs, on the otherhand, are usually exclusively ancillary secrets that are too designed to be solved, but often through ways that require no logic and offer no clues. They almost encourage a 'trail and error' approach wherein the solver isn't ever quite sure they're onto any secret whatsoever until they literally stumble into it. Sometimes not even then.
Easter eggs are, in their purest form, entirely devoid of any clues or logical thread to pull upon because they are specifically designed to almost not be found; or at least not without significant effort. Why wouldn't one want a secret intentionally hidden within the game to be found? Well, perhaps that's because the reward for doing so usually pertains to something that is outside of the 'magic box' of the game world you're building, such as references to pop culture or other brands, maybe even an inside joke every here and there. Of course, this can make the process of finding them rather frustrating for those more inclined to solving puzzles and the like as those, by definition, have to follow some sort of logic or offer clues to be intellectually satisfying in any sort of way; otherwise it just feels like you've stumbled upon the answer. In this way, one could compare the act of solving a puzzle as similar to 'moon logic' that one would be exposed to in traditional point-and-click adventure games.
'Moon Logic' is the term created to describe puzzles wherein the clues and logic you follow to reach your reward is usually very unlike the concept of 'logic' and how it's understood on Earth. Which is to say, these puzzles follow their own, nonsensical and often humorous, logic thread to take the solver from one end of the puzzle to the other. The biggest difference between 'Moon Logic' puzzles and Easter eggs is that there is, however obscure, some logical thread of events to be followed. Even in the most off-the-wall point and click, there's no point in presenting a puzzle that isn't fun to solve, therefore 'Moon Logic' puzzles often require immersing yourself into the thought process of the narrative in order to solve. Perhaps this means keeping abreast of pop culture, or taking idioms a little more literally, or just somehow understanding that in order to pass this goat you have to move quickly despite the fact that no other puzzle in this game has been time-based before. These are stories, afterall, and it's in the best interest of everyone that the player can actually progress through the story in a reasonable manner in order to fully enjoy it.
But what happens when you create a game that, whilst ostensible being a puzzle game, is, in itself, one prolonged Easter egg hunt? What I mean by that, is what if there was a game who's entire narrative, progression and reward was defined by the process of solving constant Easter eggs rather than solving puzzles? What sort of experience does that illicit and might that ultimately result in a more, or less fulfilling experience for the players in question? Afterall, one might be forgiven in thinking that the harder it is to solve a puzzle the more rewarding the resulting satisfaction must be, right? Well, lucky for us we actually have a test case for such a game; one that bills itself around puzzle solving whilst containing little to no actual puzzling in it, and that game is 'Hello Neighbour'.
Starting life as a streamer darling that immediately caught the eye of the FNAF crowd for it's masterful art in crafting a mystery too tantalising for people to just ignore; Hello Neighbour managed to stay on a lot of folks radar during it's developing stages due to the fact that the ultimate narrative was just so secretive and alluring. Each update seemed to drastically change up the game, and the act of working one's way through to the end of the WIP builds took hours of trial and error attempting in order to make any remote headway. It was as though each build was more a tech demo for what they wanted to pull off, and finding one's way into the mysterious basement was the surprise ending that few were expected to ever actually reach. Therefore no batted an eye when the solutions seemed devoid of logical deduction or reasoning, because the purpose of the product at that point wasn't to tell a story, but to hint at one. (And to play the game without completely bugging out, that to.)
But when the game finally released the other shoe dropped and things became unpleasantly clear for the first time. This wasn't the way in which the team were teasing their storyline; this, in the team's mind, was them telling their narrative. This is what they thought a puzzle-based game was meant to shape up like. And such the game they ended up making, the one that shipped to players, ended up feeling like a giant Easter egg rather than the giant Puzzle that it was marketed as. So what was the result? Well, there were task that needed to be done such a battling the game's poor physics system to stack boxes and reach certain rooms, sticking certain items in nonsensical places under the knowledge that what effects that object will effect the outside world, and whole host of keys to locks that seemed almost randomly placed for the lack of meaningful placement. Most resoundingly of all, the game just seemed unsatisfying to play.
Dynamic Pixels have very much formed a brand around making their games in this style, but there's certainly a question mark up in the air about how much legs this sub-genre off of Puzzle games will actually end up having. Hello Neighbour is already on the way to making their sequel, but the appeal of the 'mysterious storyline' has long flown the coop and now the only real appeal is seeing if you can survive the nonsensical logic of the game. (Which may just have it's own draw in the same sort of way that Dark Souls draws in the masochists.) So what happens when you make an entire game an Easter egg? You end up being less of a puzzle game than your standard action adventure affair, but does that make the game itself actually bad? Well, that's a lot more nuanced. I think that a sort of no-logic approach to design could work, in the right hands, but it's more a matter of whether that's the intent or if you believe your making something with more puzzling credentials. Hello Neighbour is, in my opinion, not that game. Maybe the sequel will be.
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