The main games that I am taking inspiration from are 90s point-and-click adventure games, these are most well knonw for there complicated non linear puzzles, that most often use very convoluted logic to solve the puzzles. These kind of puzzles sometimes face critiscm for “moon logic” i.e not making sense to a logical person.
More often than not these puzzles have a charm to them and in the case of the Monkey Island series they allow it to inject their offbeat humour.
Creating these puzzles is a challnge though so I went onto Ron Gilbert’s (one of the creators of the Monkey Island series) blog where he has detailed how he created the puzzles using puzzle dependancy charts. These are different to normal flow charts and allow for organised puzzle design.
They do not include story beats and only focus on the puzzle. You start with the end of the puzzle then work backwards adding items that the solution is dependent on.
The example in the blog. ^
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