Really keys were just the clearest name for these things the way the generator is going to handle them. Keys in puzzles don't take any thought so much as a guess and NPCs either have some strange role they've got to explain or do something the player couldn't have expected without seeing it.
These are generally the most interesting because they have the most involved role in puzzles- both intuitive but not-automatic. You want to be able to get to them before having to go through any of the locks they open. In fact these games don't usually have what you would think of as an inventory for those kinds of items- instead the screen just looks at the trigger and tells you if you've been there yet or not.įor opening up paths there isn't all that glaring a difference between these ways of checking for the key but for generating blocks in the path you care much more about if they can get the item for the door than if they are holding it.Īs for the tools they're just multiple use keys. Logically you need that item like you need a key but any time the item/key only has a single use the game might as well check that you went to where you get it instead of seeing if you are holding 1 or 0 of it. If the NPC is literally napping in the road then are the lock and the NPC that gave you the story item is the key. I think there are several cases in these games where some napping character smells some food thing and wakes up for it and opens a path somehow in exchange for it. Like that the key is actually wherever the player has to step for the NPC to "notice" him and start their little sequence. For example you can have some sequence where and NPC is scurrying around to lower the bridge from the other side of a canyon. So with that said good design in these games usually tries to break that rule, or rather make it look like they've broken that rule. Now NPCs obviously do a lot of things that keys do not do but for the bare bones "did we put this all together in a way that the player can even get through it" metric they are identical. Very few dungeons have NPCs in them and very few overworld areas have literal keys in them so these are areally just two sides of the same coin. If you really want I could call all of the keys triggers and all of the locked paths events- it doesn't matter what I call them, they have the same functional role of your needing to get access to the key and then go over the the lock to get somewhere else. If the same NPC unlocks some other path later they are a different key at that point. If you talk to an NPC (after doing some task for him most likely) and he lowers a bridge that lets you into some area that NPC was the key and the bridge was a locked door.