"From the perspective of level design, there's no way those six people can be united," Loki said, using his own coat to dry Thor's hair. "Whether it's deduction or a secret chamber escape, the most important core principle behind all design is fairness."
"Deduction can use narrative tricks, but it absolutely cannot lie about important facts described from God's perspective. Otherwise, it's unfair deduction. It also can't hide things from the reader, then suddenly shove in characters and props that weren't established beforehand but play an important role afterward. That's also classic unfair deduction."
"The same goes for secret chamber escapes. The level designer can use psychological and physical tactics in extremely vicious ways to make things difficult for the escapees, but they can't create a certain-death scenario, and they can't create a completely unsolvable problem. In fact, the strength of the level's hints has to be proportional to the level's difficulty."
"Take the level we just cleared, for example. First the cage was electrified, then the water was electrified. That was already difficult enough, so all we had to do was shake it in three directions to pass. If they'd designed thirty directions, that would have been a certain-death situation. That's unfair."
"Likewise, because we had to come up with a countermeasure in an extremely short amount of time or we might be swallowed by the water, the entire mechanism had to be simple enough, without any distracting clues. Every step of deduction had to bring us closer to the answer. Otherwise, if they'd drawn things on the walls and placed other mechanisms to obstruct our line of sight, there would have been no way for anyone to deduce the correct answer in the time it took the water to rise. That would also count as unfair."
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