SPHINX 2: Procedural generation of narrative puzzles for open world games

Narrative puzzles in video games are puzzles that require exploration, and logical and creative thinking to solve, and form part of the progression of a narrative. They are useful for advancing, structuring, and pacing a game’s plot while also adding some variation to gameplay. Story Puzzle Heuristics for Interactive Narrative eXperiences 2 (SPHINX 2) is a procedural narrative puzzle generation system developed for implementation in open world video games. The design of the system and its implementation in the video game Curse of the SPHINX are discussed and analysed in an exploratory user study. Inductive thematic analysis of semi-structured interview transcripts, and data collected using the miniPXI indicates that participants used several different methods to solve SPHINX 2 puzzles, SPHINX 2 is mostly effective in communicating puzzles to players, SPHINX 2 puzzles are somewhat fun and engaging, the open world setting of the game influenced engagement with puzzles, and SPHINX 2 can be improved by increasing puzzles’ narrative context, and improving confusing elements like variable puzzle complexity.