Comic #810: Puzzle Quest (Patreon)

There are some new puzzles in the recent patch, and it's brought up a lot of discussion about puzzle quests in the game. Some players HATE them, some like them. I don't dislike puzzles in the game, but there have definitely been some puzzle quests over the years that I'm terrible at, and have avoided.

That was the main idea behind the punchline here. Not that puzzles are bad, but that some of us will actively choose murder quests over them, which when translated in-lore sounds pretty insane. I also decided to upgrade the puzzle in panel 5 to have 15 tiles rather than 9 to make it that much more confusing for Keydar.

Puzzles in the game are usually world quests, but including actual quest windows allows me to dump a ton of exposition without it feeling clunky. It also allowed me to display the exclamation point quest icon for the joke in the final panel.

Also, I chose human characters rather than the actual in-game Broker NPCs deliberately. The brokers literally have no faces, so it makes facial expressions pretty difficult. I also wanted the first NPC to look really evil, and the second NPC to look really innocent, both of which would be difficult on a faceless character.

I forgot to mention, I made the puzzle have an actual solution, in case a reader attempted it. I marked it on a photoshop layer: