Ever since the language puzzle in Tunic that got me to fill up 6 pocket sized pages of notes over multiple days while trying to puzzle it out as I tried to and, eventually, succeeded at translating the in-game “paper” manual, I’ve had a craving for games that force you to pull out a notebook and take notes/puzzle things out as part of the actual meta-gameplay mechanics, because the game doesn’t just do that thinking for you.
What other games are like this, even a little bit, that you’ve loved?
And to be clear, I don’t mean things like TTRPGs which are just inherently on paper. Those are cool and all, but aren’t this thing. I want things that force me to engage my thinking beyond what the inputs of a controller and medium of a screen and my short-term memory alone can do for me.
Myst. Surprised this wasn’t mentioned yet.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes has an entire manual that you should print out and put in a binder, and your manual monkeys will absolutely need pen and paper to help you defuse the bomb in front of you
My best friend and I loved playing this together!! So much fun!
Pretty much any 90s point and click adventure game made by Lucas arts, Sierra etc. No objective marker, no journal, you just wander around clicking things trying to mash items together. “Where did I see that symbol before?? flips through notebook Oh right!”
Welcome to my favorite genre of game!
As they’ve already been mentioned before, I will second both La-Mulana (and though not mentioned, it’s sequel), and FEZ.
The Witness didn’t make me break out Pen and Paper, but it was definitely one I had to give my brain a break and come back to to look at things from a fresh angle.
Now for some previously unmentioned finds where your attention to detail will be rewarded. Not all will require notebooks. But there puzzles hidden in all of them.
Environmental Station Alpha is a Metroidvania.
Full Metal Furies is a side-scrolling beat-em up.
INSIDE is a side-scrolling platformer.
Inscryption is a deck-builder / puzzle room.
Maybe not my favorite game but one of the very few games I truly felt required pen and paper were some of the old Might & Magic games - most notably I think of the first 3 games.
Those were first person dungeon crawling RPGs. They didn’t have, what later became termed “automaps”, but what is now just a in-game map. So if you wanted to look at a map you had to either buy real life books they sold called Cluebooks which had maps printed in them or you had to pull out the graphing paper and get to drawing.
It wasn’t just a limitation of the time, the games back then honestly treated it like a feature. I think it was in M&M3 that you could eventually cast the spell “Wizard Eye” and the entire point of the spell was to present to you a minimap of the surrounding area. NPCs and quests didn’t put icons on your map (there was no map), you were given directions and had to figure out how to get there.
I don’t think anything will ever beat Ultima IV for me in this regard.
I did this for the Witness - it really helped to think out some of the puzzles if scribbled possible solutions down. Oh and Obra Dinn to an extent - mostly things like ‘I saw this guy hanging around in this memory - could he be X’?
Yeah, I did this for the witness sort of. If I got stuck on a puzzle and was finishing up a session, I’d take a photo and then draw over the top of it as I went about my day, so I’d come back to the game with a solution.
Mostly old point and click games like Sierra and Lucasarts things. Stuff where you can easily softlock yourself with 1 simple mistake.
Subnautica forced me to draw a proper map. It was interesting.
Return of the Obra Dinn
This was going to be mine as well. The fact that you don’t start to investigate the mystery in chronological order turned out to be quite a treat, as I need some way to organize my thoughts.
Fantastic game, honestly, I’ve had quite a few good detective experiences the past few years that nearly perfected the genre to me.
Its old but I think fits, the original silent hill I needed a pad and paper at all times. Some puzzles were quite tricky.
Definitely Fez when you start looking beyond the golden cubes.
Since you already said Tunic, I’ll throw out Riven: The Sequel to Myst
I played it several months ago for the first time and my desk was completely littered with sticky notes, most of which would have been incomprehensible to anyone else
Tunic is a BIG one. The language puzzles, and the math puzzles. SO MANY NOTES.
No notepad, but an excellent explorative puzzle that had me making and remaking theories the whole time: outer wilds. Several people also mentioned obra dinn
Signalis. Retro horror game with a really messed up plot; I had to write down radio codes and door diagrams in order to remember them.
