LucasArts’ internal puzzle document for Grim Fandango is dated April 30, 1996 — about two and a half years before the game shipped — and it is 54 pages of a designer thinking out loud. It resurfaced on Hacker News this week, where it drew 317 points and 70 comments mostly arguing about how fair the puzzles ever were.

The document is credited to Tim Schafer with Peter Tsacle, Eric Ingerson, Bret Mogilefsky and Peter Chan. It is not a feature list. For each of the game’s four years it leads with a Puzzle Structure chart, then a room-by-room Location Layout, then the cut-scenes and puzzles with a Solution: block under each one.

The charts are the point. Year One escalates the player’s freedom in five labelled tiers:

  • The First Reap — “Three easy puzzles, to be completed linearly.”
  • Stealing a Reap — “Harder puzzles, but still linear.”
  • Tasks for the L.S.A — puzzles that can be worked on side by side, so the player can abandon the roof and go do the teeth puzzle instead.
  • Steal the Bone Wagon — “These puzzles can be done in any order. Get it?”
  • Get Through the Petrified Forest — a non-linear grouping of three linear chains of length 2, with the chart itself joking that the non-linearity is “like a pile of yarn from a sweater that you’re unraveling, but that someone keeps knitting and knitting AND KNITTING!!! AAAAHHHH!!!”

Puzzles are numbered continuously across the four years, Puzzle #1 through Puzzle #80 — Year Four’s chart ends with KILL HECTOR!!!!! — and the document tracks setup and payoff as a debt. When a character explains that the magnesium extinguisher would react badly with the packing-material chemicals, the doc annotates its own scene: [Hmmm…this sounds like the set up for a something. Good thing the payoff's not for another 60 puzzles.] That chemistry is the solution to puzzle #4, and the note is what keeps it from being forgotten across the next sixty.

Two things make the artifact worth reading. First, it specifies structure, not content — most design docs list what exists, this one states how much freedom the player has at each beat, in language a whole team can check. Second, it is written as the player’s route rather than the system’s rules, so the fiction, the jokes and the puzzle logic stay in one file. It opens with a Churchill line about reports defending themselves against being read, and closes asking the reader to restrict their “fallen tears of joy” to a box drawn on the page.

The gap between the chart and the shipped game is the useful part. The plan for growing non-linearity is careful and incremental, and yet the standard modern complaint about Grim Fandango — all over that HN thread — is that plenty of individual puzzles make no sense without a walkthrough. Structured escalation of freedom buys pacing, not fairness; whether each leap is guessable is an authoring problem no chart solves.