Knowledge-Based Progression - TV Tropes

Most games have some form of progression within them. Be it through difficulty curves, leveling stats, or simply improving one's gameplay. These games are slightly different. Instead of collecting items or honing skills, the progress is measured in how much information one has about mechanics, the world, and the story. Areas or plot may be gated behind things you didn't know existed at the start. These aren't locked: you could do this all along, but you simply lacked the information.

Because of this, the first playthrough and the second playthrough often look drastically different, and they may lose a lot of Replay Value as a result. So why design a game without replayability? Simply put: it's the same reason someone might read a mystery novel: audiences enjoy theorizing and having their theories confirmed or denied. With a game, you can test your conjectures directly. In other words, they are trading replayability for a sense of discovery.

These games tend to have fragmented stories, relying on the player to piece things together. Sometimes, revelations within the story can lead to the discovery of new mechanics, or vice versa.

Since progression is gated behind knowledge, Sequence Breaking is very much possible, though these games are pretty open in nature, the order you learn information differs from player to player. Because of their open but gated nature, these games are sometimes referred to as “Metroidbrainias”.

This style of game has an interesting relationship with Instructive Level Design. Many early secrets are demonstrated through level design, but many later secrets are obscured until a player discovers them organically, asks a friend, or frustratedly scrolls through a wiki.

Common tropes in games with knowledge-based progression:

• Cypher Language: A common way these games gate information is by hiding it in the open.
• Easy Level Trick: Often intentionally, to prevent backtracking from being too bothersome.
• Enter Solution Here: Assuming the input doesn't change from playthrough to playthrough.
• Guide Dang It!: Many of these games focus on intuting or uncovering rules that are never clearly explained.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop
• Interface Spoiler
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot
• Meta Puzzle: Many of these games have dense interlocking puzzles.
• Story Breadcrumbs
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Knowledge comes through failures that kill you.
• Wham Line: It's not uncommon for a piece of information to cause the player to radically reinterpret the story or gameplay.
• Wide-Open Sandbox

Contrast You Shouldn't Know This Already, where a game hinders you for having information.

Compare Metroidvania, for another type of game with a semi-open structure. See also Only Smart People May Pass, Solve the Soup Cans, Alphabet Soup Cans, and Once More, with Clarity. Emergent Gameplay is similar but for organic discoveries rather than hidden information.

By their very nature, these games are easy to spoil. Proceed with caution.

Video Game Examples:

• Animal Well: While you do obtain items to progress, their uses are shown through Antepieces rather than explained outright, and a few of them have secret abilities you have to figure out on your own. The Post-End Game Content is much more knowledge-driven, including puzzles either Hidden in Plain Sight or solved through extremely obscure methods (such as abusing Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits to teleport behind a closed door)
• Antichamber: You explore a labyrinth with Alien Geometries, trying to figure out how the world works, accompanied by philosophical musings. There's no plot, the entire game is figuring out the mechanics. One of the messages even tells you "Solving a problem may require using abilities we didn't realise we had"
• The Case Of The Golden Idol lets you explore any part of the world, and piece together evidence by drawing connections between words you find in the overworld.
• Chants of Sennaar has you try to learn five fictional languages based on context clues and grammar, with several puzzles to test your knowledge of their languages, and later, cultures, as you act as a diplomat.
• Chroma Zero: Every skill you need to progress is accessible to you from the start of the game. Even the ability to Create and Destroy, although you need to ‘unlock’ them first before you can use them through button combinations.
• The Family Tree: You fill out a family tree using various memorabilia. All information needed to fill out the tree is available at the start.
• Fez starts off as a platformer exploiting 2.5D Perspective Magic. As you explore, you keep finding snippets of writing in a foreign alphabet. One particular bit of writing is a pangram with enough information to decipher the foreign alphabet. Upon recognizing this, you can go back and translate all the writing you've encountered, unlocking a whole new set of puzzles to solve.
• The Forgotten City: Set in an ancient Roman city beset by the Golden Rule (essentially, a curse that turns all citizens to gold if certain rules are broken), you're looking for a missing explorer. You exploit a "Groundhog Day" Loop every time you set off the Golden Rule. All of the progress of the game comes from learning the rules of the Golden Rule, as well as information gained from talking to the city's citizens.
• Her Story has you solve a disappearance by combing through a police interrogation using keywords and metadata. As you can explore any part of the interrogation, the only real limit is how much you understand at a given time.
• Heaven's Vault focuses on a Conlang called "Ancient". Almost all of the progress comes from learning the vocab of the language.
• Immortality : There are no unlocks, progress is obtained through noticing recurring symbols and motifs throughout the three movies and jumping between them by clicking. Getting the games true ending requires finding ten hidden clips, which themselves are obtained through the hidden mechanics of reversing clips at specific points, which the player can do since the very beginning.
• La-Mulana focuses on an Indiana Jones Expy exploring an ancient temple. While it does have Equipment-Based Progression (mostly in the form of lock and key puzzles), most of the progression comes from understanding the rules of the various chambers written on tablets, finding and avoiding traps, as well as solving dense Meta Puzzles, to progress.
• Leap Year is a puzzle platformer that only has jumping. However, the implications of the jump are gradually revealed. The goal is to collect days that are in order if played according to learned knowledge, although later days may be collected early if the player already knows how to obtain them (e.g. learning about purple or blue jumps).
• Lingo is a word-based game where you clear puzzles that take the form of words on surfaces that you must type a specific word to go with it, based on the corresponding panel's position and color, and doing so is needed to unlock passages to new areas. While there are zones that demonstrate how words and prompts are affected by colors, one can figure out the rules on their own and solve panels in order to reach any area without having to do so.
• Lorelei and the Laser Eyes: The game features several interconnected puzzles in a mansion where figuring out what any given puzzle does is entirely the point.
• Myst is set on an open island full of interconnected puzzles that don't seem to have a clear goal, but the actual puzzles don't change from playthrough to playthrough. As such, if you know the code to the fireplace it's possible to skip the vast majority of the game.
• Outer Wilds: You're stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, and to get out you must explore the solar system and piece together its history. Written logs scattered across the planets will tell you how to operate the machinery left behind by the Benevolent Precursors, and how to bypass or neutralize the hazards you encounter—or you can discover these things yourself by experimenting with the tools you get at the start of the game. Everything needed to beat the game, you can do within a single 22-minute time loop, but figuring out what to do will probably take far more loops.
• Overboard! (2021): The whole goal of the game is to use information from previous playthroughs in order to eventually get away with a murder that you commited.
• Rain World: The game explains very little outside of basic movement and the core gameplay loop (find enough food to survive, and find a shelter). In order to make any progress, you need to learn how karma works, how other creatures act, how various items work, and figure out Advanced Movement Technique to progress. You can go anywhere, you just need to figure out how to get there.
• Return Of The Obra Dinn: After the death of its crew, you are tasked with determining who exactly died using a pocket watch that lets you see someone's final moments. Aside from the tutorial, you may explore any part of the ship to search for clues regarding each crewmate's name and cause of death.
• The Roottrees are Dead: After the death of the Roottrees (a family known for a major candy company), you work to fill out their family tree and find any surviving heirs using an outdated computer system. You're even given a notebook to fill out relevant info.
• Taiji is a 2D puzzle game directly inspired by The Witness. As such, it also has rules to intuit, several Hidden in Plain Sight puzzles, an open-ish world, and puzzles embedded in the environment.
• Telling Lies has you dig through webcam footage gathered by the NSA and piece together several conversations in order to understand why they were being targeted by the NSA. All parts of the computer system are accessible.
• Toki Tori 2 gives you two moves: a whistle and a stomp, which do different things depending on different contexts. Much of the gameplay is centered on figuring out what exactly you can do with those two moves.
• TEST TEST TEST is about an office worker stuck in a time loop unable to send reports. Much of the game takes place inside your browser, as you visit URLs from the game. A lot of the puzzles revolve around ciphers you find around the train station and in the office, with the website giving you hints toward decrypting them.
• Tunic seems like a straightforward homage to The Legend of Zelda at first, but you pretty quickly find a page of an instruction manual written in a text you can't understand, detailing several mechanics you can't understand yet. Much of the game is about decoding what exactly the manual is trying to tell you. While the game does have stats you can level up (though figuring that out is a process in and of itself), as well as items to find, the bulk of the progress is made through interpreting the manual.
• Twelve Minutes has you stuck in a 10-minute "Groundhog Day" Loop where your goal is to progressively unravel the mystery of a stranger invading your home and trying to kill you and/or your wife.
• Void Stranger starts as a linear Block Puzzle game, but the bad ending reveals a symbol that resembles a room you've been to. If you match that symbol to that room, you find an item that lets you talk to rocks, which reveals more and more secrets, eventually culminating in a massive Meta Puzzle that spans the whole dungeon. Though it seems linear at first, the revelation of various ways to manipulate what floor you are on eventually opens up the structure.
• The Witness: Set on a freely explorable island, the game has you intuit several rules about puzzles where you join lines, and eventually reveals that the environment is made up of these sorts of puzzles.

Non-Video Game Examples:

• 12 Word Searches [1] gives basic instructions on how to search for words. When you reach the end of the book, the reader gets additional instructions on how those words are hidden, and the reader has likely seen existing patterns within the book as well to determine the metapuzzle.

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