Challenge, Frustration, and Balancing User Expectations: Level99, Boda Borg, Celeste, and Mao

Bear with me… this essay is going to be a stretch for a puzzlehunt blog. (But hey, posting anything is a stretch for this particular blog, amiright?) Some of the ideas are relevant to puzzlehunts, but I’m mainly going to talk about a video game, a card game, and two escape-room-adjacent Boston-area entertainment complexes. There will be the mildest of spoilers; I will explicitly avoid talking about game content, but I may use some vague references to specific L99 and BB rooms (for example, I might truthfully say that the third phase of Bollkoll at Boda Borg is delightful).

Celeste, a critically acclaimed platformer video game, came back to XBox Game Pass this summer. I’m on leave this semester and have thus had some more time for video games in the summer and fall, so I have Game Pass and decided to give Celeste a whirl.

I finished the main part of the game today, and during that process, I died a lot. (The game tracks how many times you fail, and I think I racked up a four-digit number of fatalities.) This had the potential to be very frustrating, but the game designers paid attention to user experience. When you do die, the reset of the game is almost instantaneous… no Mario flying upside down with a music sting for the 99th time. (Years ago I played Super Meat Boy, another killer platform that benefitted from the same rapid-reload.) And every time you traverse a screen, the game auto-saves, so when you advance in the linear sequence of hurdles, you know you don’t have to worry about the last part again.

Some of those hurdles require a handful of tricky maneuvers in a row, and it did reach a level of tedium a few times. There were at least half a dozen boards where I said to myself that I was going to try three more times before giving up. About half of those times, I actually succeeded within three tries, and in several others I made enough additional progress in one of those attempts that I kept going. This game wants you to keep going. This is explicit in the game’s story, but it’s also implicit in the game design; somehow whenever it was brutally hard, it gave me just enough encouragement to keep going. (I recently found out there is an assist mode for people who want to experience the game without the difficulty, though the given difficulty turned out to be just right for me.) It was after one of these “got it on one of my last three tries” incidents that I started revisiting some thoughts I already had this summer about Level99 and Boda Borg.

If you haven’t lived in or visited Boston, you may not know what Boda Borg and Level99 are, so let me try to describe them, starting with Boda Borg since it opened first (in 2015). Boda Borg is a Swedish “questing” franchise (their only American location is in Malden, MA) where you pay for access to a building full of doors that open to themed challenge rooms. Like a puzzlehunt puzzle, these rooms rarely come with instructions; your multi-person task might involve solving puzzles, pressing buttons at the right moments, or a ninja-warrior-style climb across the room without touching the ground. (Before you scoff at the physical aspects, I want to emphasize that I DISLOCATED MY SHOULDER on my first Boda Borg visit, in a quest called Jungle. I’ve been back, more cautiously, three times since.) Depending on whether you do what you’re supposed to do, you’ll be served a red failure screen and buzzer, a green screen and admission to the next room of the quest, or if you’ve completed the last room, access to an ink stamp to add to your quest card. Quest names range from the evocative (Pirates, Alcatraz, Spook House) to the abstract (Wumplefrump, Nostalgia, Tough Tougher Toughest).

The easiest way to describe Level99 (in Natick, MA, with a second location opening this year in Providence, which is super-exciting) is to steal a comment I saw on Reddit that called it “real life Mario Party.” The second easiest way is to start with the Boda Borg description above and emphasize some differences:

1. At Level99, all the quests (called rooms) are one room, and instead of succeeding or failing, you can earn 0, 1, 2, or 3 stars depending on your performance. Rooms are grouped into categories, so they have names like Space Void, Space Nebula, Retro Pinball, and Retro Vinyl.
2. Instead of stamping a card, you tap into each room with an electronic wristband which tracks your progress on all rooms (progress that is saved between visits).
3. In addition to the rooms, Level99 includes “hunts” (memory quizzes about the local art throughout the building) and “arena games,” one-on-one games such as a Pong climbing wall and a race to press colored panels in order.
4. Although one of the room categories is “mystery,” meaning part of the challenge is figuring out what to do, I personally don’t think any of the room objectives are particularly unclear after two or three attempts.
5. Boda Borg has a taco bar on the premises, and Level99 has a brewery. (Doing well in Level99 rooms earns currency you can exchange for free merch and/or free pretzels or french fries at the restaurant.)

Last month I went to Boda Borg for the first time since before the pandemic (fourth overall), and Level99 for the fifth or sixth time. I like Boda Borg. I LOVE Level99. The progress system might be enough to make the difference by itself; I’m a sucker for achievements and incremental progress, and just writing this makes me want to go back and increase my star count. (I desperately wish they would let you access your account outside the facility… if/when you do go, make sure to tap your icon after tapping into a room and before entering, because there’s a ton of account interactivity available that’s not immediately obvious.) But in terms of the quests/rooms themselves, the Level99 rooms are almost all designed with the care that Celeste is. Some of the Boda Borg quests are too, but some of them are designed like Mao. I’ll get to that in a bit.

As I mentioned earlier, two of the things that make the challenge of Celeste bearable are the frequent saving and speedy restart; these features ensure that while you may be doing a lot of repetition, it’s mostly productive repetition. Since L99’s version of quests are only one room, they avoid the undesirable experience of failing the third room and then having to repeat two previous rooms (possibly with some waiting around if another group is in the next room) before you can try again.

(One of the newest rooms, Wavelength Flux.0, is arguably an exception to this; we put a lot of effort into getting to the very last of a long series of challenges, and we ran out of time before we could figure out what to do with it. We’d now need to do a lot of the same work over again in order to possibly just get stuck again. I feel like this room would benefit from some sort of progress save, but that’s not consistent with the L99 structure. Starship Evacuate also has a sequence of tasks you have to repeat, but the tasks change more from attempt to attempt unless you have a group of six.)

But there’s another thing that kept me going in Celeste, which is that on every replay I knew what I was expected to do. Sometimes it took some thought to decide exactly where I should be dashing/climbing/hanging on, but the objective was generally clear. As I noted in my rundown of the differences between BB and L99, the objective is also generally clear at L99. BB, not so much. The peak of this is where I think BB stops working with their customers and instead works against them.

In at least two quests, Spook House and Potions, there is a room (notably) not the first, where you can passively fail; you walk or crawl in and encounter a buzzer and the failure screen. That’s fine, we’ll try it again… but my group has done each of these probably a dozen times and tried many different things with no additional progress. If every attempt was auto-loading as fast as a Celeste level, I might be more willing to keep spamming attempts. But both of these booby traps occur after a non-trivial physical activity, and repeating that activity just to get the same mysterious rejection is exasperating. And unlike a typical Level99 room, where a failure is often accompanied by an on-screen comment summarizing what went wrong, these two rooms have the same complete lack of feedback.

Just to keep this post somewhat relevant to the blog theme, puzzlehunt design has a similar pitfall, in that some puzzles call for a task or extraction that requires a lot of work with no confirmation that you’re doing the right thing until you’ve done the right thing. These are sometimes called “guess what I’m thinking” puzzles, since without guidance, you have to either read the constructor’s mind or fail. Modern puzzlehunts (at least the hardest ones) have undergone a troublesome trend where few if any solvers solve some of the puzzles without hints. I think some constructing teams don’t mind this, because they enjoy engaging with the solvers through hinting. But if everybody needs hints to progress, the hints should have been in the puzzle. Video games can have DLC, but DLC shouldn’t kick in before the main storyline concludes. Stepping off my soapbox.

Level99 and Boda Borg also have some form of hinting. Level99’s is more formal, as you can access hints from the pre-room tap-in interface. (I’ve only ever done this once, for Pirates Brig, which effectively told me, “No really, we want you to do the thing you think we want you to do.” I have zero stars on Pirates Brig.) Boda Borg has attendants who apparently sometimes give hints, I’m told. But when they first opened, I got the sense that this was not a thing. Even now, the BB decor includes slide shows with memes about how everyone at Boda Borg fails, laughing about how hard their quests are. I imagine this is meant to normalize failing, but what I’ve learned from Level99 and Celeste is that you normalize failing by minimizing the discomfort of the failure process. I think Boda Borg fails to do this in the rooms in question (and some others), and I think their design mentality violates my trust as a player. I don’t want to engage someone I don’t trust in a subjective hinting interaction.

So if these Boda Borg rooms don’t feel like playing Celeste, what game do they feel like? That’s where Mao comes in. I believe I discovered the card game Mao through math competitions where people played it after hours. It’s an Uno-style card game (played with a standard poker deck) where there are secret rules you’re meant to figure out while playing, and breaking these rules is penalized by being given extra cards and no explanation. In theory, this could be a good foundation for a mental challenge. In practice, every social group that I’ve ever played with Mao was a school-aged clique that used it as an excuse to laugh at newcomers. Make it through the initiation and you will share our secret information that we can use to torment others! Or you could just talk to people as equals and make friends. Sorry, I think I’m processing something from decades ago in real time.

Anyway, I don’t get the sense that Boda Borg wants every visitor to figure out Potions on their first visit… I’m not actually sure they want *every* visitor to ever figure it out. A wise constructor (I think Mark Gottlieb, but I may be misquoting and/or misattributing) described a puzzle as a battle of wits between the constructor and solver that the constructor intends to lose. When I got frustrated playing Celeste, I always got the sense that things were set up for me to eventually win, and that kept me going. A challenge where the player is not intended to win, like Mao or Spook House, might be fun for the challenge-maker, but if the challenge-maker keeps frustrating their audience, they’re going to run out of audience.

Now, I realize I’ve been slagging on Boda Borg throughout this essay, and I want to be clear that I still encourage you to go there, and there is lots of entertainment to be had. While some of their content seems unfair to me (and whether or not it’s actually unfair, the net result is unpleasant), I’ve really enjoyed others. In my most recent trip, some of the new quests we completed and enjoyed were Wumplefrump, Access Denied, and especially Eye of the Storm, which for me benefits from the multi-room model in a way other quests don’t. But I went to Boda Borg once this summer, and Level99 three times, and I think it’s likely to be that way in the future. Level99 feels fun and sometimes sadistic, and Boda Borg feels sadistic and sometimes fun. I would recommend trying both. And also Celeste. But not Mao.

I have one more observation to tie things together, but it involves significant Celeste spoilers, which I said I’d stay away from. So if you intend to play that game and don’t want to know how it ends (for some definition of ending), step away from the blog.

All clear?

Okay. Here we go.

The main storyline of Celeste ends with Chapter 7 and an epilogue. Then an unexpected Chapter 8 kicks off. After a few screens teasing a different dash mechanic, I encountered an impenetrable wall. Based on my experiences in previous levels, I assumed there would be a straightforward way to move through, but nothing worked. So I went back a screen to a character I’d just talked to and talked to them again, at which point my character asked about the wall, and was told something cryptic about retracing my steps through the entire game.

So that’s when my Level99 game turned abruptly into a Boda Borg game. It’s also when I stopped playing.