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As much as I love text and point-and-click adventure games, there's always been an inherent contradiction to them. On the surface level, they promise nearly inf

As much as I love text and point-and-click adventure games, there's always been an inherent contradiction to them. On the surface level, they promise nearly infinite freedom, more than any platform or first-person shooter game: That you can go anywhere, talk to anyone, perform and action on any object, and solve problems in whatever way you want. But in practice they're incredibly constrained. The world is an exquisitely constructed stage, with nothing beyond its margins, and there is only a very narrow, winding path to success. Puzzles have a single, usually somewhat tortured solution, and alternative approaches that would work in the real world are either not considered or declared impossible for spurious reasons. Beating an adventure game is often an exercise not just in problem solving, but in building an intuition about how the game designer(s) wanted you to approach puzzles. Tuning into the vibe of the game world and understanding what interactions and approaches are likely to work and which won't. The most you can hope for is that the solutions have at least some logic to them. It's a bit like learning to solve cryptic crosswords, where you need to learn a hidden language to unlock the actual problems. This can be an enjoyable and rewarding experience, but it is definitely not the infinite freedom that the genre seems to offer up front, and I suspect for as many people who fell in love with these games, there were many who gave up in frustration at their paradoxical constrictiveness.

Zhyl 4y ago
To this end, I really enjoyed "Don't Escape: 4 Days to Survive"[1] which was included in the recent Itch bundle for Ukraine. It mixes adventure game with escape room, and whilst there is still a puzzle element to the game, it is much more pragmatic in its combinations. You find a nail, a boarded up building or something that needs building and it's a hammer that will solve all of them. You know that you will die of heat at the end of the day, so you need to find things that will cool your house down. I think this means that the whimsy and jovial aspect of 90s adventure games is lost, but it feels much more satisfying to solve a puzzle when the solution makes sense. If we wanted an adventure games renaissance, I would look to this game as a case study in addition to the points outlined in Ron's article. [1] https://armor-games-studios.itch.io/dont-escape-4-days-to-survive https://armor-games-studios.itch.io/dont-escape-4-days-to-su...
tgv 4y ago
The puzzle conundrum continues to live on, though. Some time ago, I bought a game app from the "escape room" variety. It's got no relation to escape rooms, it's just how it's called/advertised. It consists of a sequence of situations where you have to find a final item, which the game recognizes as exit, so that's perhaps why. After the first level, the puzzles were rather convoluted and opposite to anything that would happen in real life. The "protagonist" decides to go to a bank (i.e., the next level is at the bank), and there passwords are hidden on a scrap of paper behind a ventilation grating in the toilet or as a bar-column in a financial report. Who would ever do that? You open a secret area by making sure the folders in two cabinets are in the same order. Then, when you find a cheque to the protagonist's father, he decides that's all the information the bank will reveal, and since he doesn't understand why that cheque was written in the first place, the next level obviously will be --I bet you already guessed it-- his father's church. At the church, you find a note taped to the inside of the bell in the bell tower. Then you ring the bell a few times, and the thing, which is larger than the protagonist, so must weigh several tonnes, comes crashing down. It lands in one piece on the church floor, and you can access the note. Then you have to move the pews in some pattern in order to access something else. In real life, it would be obvious that there is a mechanism attached to the pews, but the game just makes things visible or invisible as long as it keeps the player on the happy path. So yeah, I gave up on that one.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  YouTube game reviewer SkillUp talks frequently about the importance of great writing in selling mundane, repetitive content to players, particularly when it comes to single-objective side quests in open world games. He references The Witcher 3 as a game with many great examples (like the famous frying pan quest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-aHUyokr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-aHUyokr4), but another one that is often referenced is the Supideo quest line in AC: Odyssey ( https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Supideo https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Supideo). Anyway, I think of this often with respect to real-life escape rooms. I've only done a handful, but of those, so many seem to be completely bare-bones, with little or no scenery, little or no story, basically nothing to justify exactly the type of inanity you describe, where numbers of random objects turn out to be the digits in combination locks or whatever. However there was one for me that really broke the mold— the premise was that your long-lost great aunt had recently passed away, and you'd gone to recover valuables from her house before it got bulldozed to build a new highway. Quite apart from the nod to Douglas Adams, this immediately led to some terrific justification of otherwise standard game elements: - Getting trapped in the house because of her paranoia and multiple locks on all the doors and windows. - Having a time limit, enhanced and communicated by the increasingly loud sounds of construction equipment moving around "outside" the house. - Needing to make random connections, because she was a little batty and forgetful, so used random objects in her house to help keep track of how to get from room to room. Obviously the underlying gameplay fundamentals are exactly the same as any other low-budget escape room, but this particular experience really stuck with me as one that I felt far more invested in than usual, due mostly to how much more motivating even this threadbare "plot" was relative to others I'd seen.
lmm 4y ago
The makers of The Last Express, the only point-and-click adventure game I've played that really worked for me, had an interesting interview where they talked about how they chose the setting specifically to suit the constraints of the medium - it's the nature of an adventure game to be "on rails", and putting you onboard a short train was a way to allow you to move "freely", without artificial constraints, but without exploding the state space.
cainxinth 4y ago
> Puzzles have a single, usually somewhat tortured solution Potential spoiler alert… the forklift elevator puzzle in Grim Fandango springs to mind. It’s so unintuitive and a disappointing part of what is otherwise an incredible game. When I play these types of games, I’ll only bang my head against the wall for so long before I give up and Google the answer. If, upon learning the solution, I realize I should have been able to figure it out myself, I’ll feel bad for not trying longer. But sometimes, I’ll read the solution and say: “That’s what you wanted me to do?!” and be glad I didn’t spend all day trying to crack their impossible code.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  I played Grim Fandango with a guide. Grim Fandango was one of a few point and click games that has a story and world still worth experiencing without the puzzles.
saiya-jin 4y ago
Nice summary on how I felt about adventures without realizing it. I just couldn't bring myself to play any for any significant time anymore. Back when I started with PC in 1993 I enjoyed Kyrandia II, and later Broken Sword, but what makes me tick are simply different sort of games.
RicoElectrico 4y ago
I guess that poorly designed IQ tests often fall into these category as well. Some of the patterns you have to match seem soooo arbitrary. In the real world it's easier to reverse engineer someone's train of thought, as there's more context than some abstract shapes or numbers. In fact, as a programmer or engineer it's a necessary skill to develop.
Bakary 4y ago
Where are you getting that first part about freedom? Maybe it's a generational thing but I can't seem to visualize them as anything but constrained from the outset. The Witness is maybe the 'freest' example I can think of but it's still a range of puzzles
- grumbel 4y ago
  The freedom in a point&click is in the actions you perform. In a point&click there is no limit to your actions, as the actions are a combination of the verbs you have, the environment and the items you collect along the way. Which leaves endless possibilities. The restrictions are just in how crazy the narrative wants to get, but not in the interface. Other genres limit you to run, jump, shoot and a few other core mechanics, that they than run on repeat. You might get bigger guns along the way, but you aren't going to steal a pot from a cook to use it as helmet while joining the circus as you would in a point&click. When other genres want the player character to perform actions outside the core mechanics they often have to fall back to non-interactive cutscenes. In a point&click in contrast it's all part of the core gameplay, cutscenes are reserved to non-player scenes. Another thing to take into account here is the year, we are talking about early 90s here, back when most games were side scrollers that allowed you to just walk left and right. Point&click adventures were some of the first games with a movie-like presentation, you had real 3d scenes you could interact with, close ups, cutscenes, etc, not just abstract flat side-scrolling worlds. In times of GTAV, a point&click might not look all that impressive, but compared to the other stuff you had back then they were quite impressive.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Well 3D in the sense that characters could walk in front and behind scenery and objects. I.e. they could move toward or away from the screen. Growing up in that era I think the complaints about narrow solutions made them feel more constraining. That said I enjoyed them anyway, and still do.
    - grumbel 4y ago
      Yep, also sprite scaling was the big new thing in Monkey Island, as that allowed to create scene with proper perspective, where your character got smaller the further into the scene they went. Maniac Mansion or ZakMcKracken still had a somewhat artificial flatness to them. The box of Monkey Island[1] even called it "Eye-gouging 3d graphics". [1] https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/264596-the-secret-of-monkey-island-atari-st-back-cover.jpg https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/264596-the-secret-...
JohnFen 4y ago
> On the surface level, they promise nearly infinite freedom, more than any platform or first-person shooter game: That you can go anywhere, talk to anyone, perform and action on any object, and solve problems in whatever way you want. What? I never thought that was their promise.
tobiasSoftware 4y ago
I highly recommend a recent game called Outer Wilds that in my opinion takes the adventure game genre to the next level by giving it an open world feel. It does this through three ideas. First, there are no collectible items, the game is about seeking information and it uses that information as the keys to unlock new areas instead of items. This does make the game very spoilerable though, but it removes the "combine item 1 with item 2" type of puzzles that are infamous for feeling constrained. Second, it gives you an information map showing if there is any information left to find in each area. This gets around the problem of "pixel hunting" that early adventure games had where you missed something subtle so you had to wander through the entire game over again trying to find what you missed. Third, "late game" areas are accessible at any time but are locked behind multiple pieces of information. This means that you actually can get to late game areas early on, but most people simply won't. This gives the game a sort of "trust the player" feel, where instead of putting the game on rails to make sure no one goes off the track, the developers remove the rails and trust that most players will loosely follow the path they planned, even though some will inevitably jump the track and go through the game in a weird order.
- Shorn 4y ago
  This game's been sitting in my Steam wishlist for so long. You've convinced me :)
aidenn0 4y ago
The better adventure games anticipated multiple solutions to puzzles[1], which improves the sense of immersion, but the games in this genre are bounded by the imagination (and hard work) of the creator(s). 1: I recently read a review of the text-parser version of Quest For Glory and the reviewer commented on how they made a game out of trying to find something sensible to type in that didn't come with a reasonable response from the game. I haven't played the game in decades, but I remember trying to talk to a tree and getting something like 3 paragraphs of text in response...

Zhyl 4y ago

To this end, I really enjoyed "Don't Escape: 4 Days to Survive"[1] which was included in the recent Itch bundle for Ukraine. It mixes adventure game with escape room, and whilst there is still a puzzle element to the game, it is much more pragmatic in its combinations. You find a nail, a boarded up building or something that needs building and it's a hammer that will solve all of them. You know that you will die of heat at the end of the day, so you need to find things that will cool your house down. I think this means that the whimsy and jovial aspect of 90s adventure games is lost, but it feels much more satisfying to solve a puzzle when the solution makes sense. If we wanted an adventure games renaissance, I would look to this game as a case study in addition to the points outlined in Ron's article. [1] https://armor-games-studios.itch.io/dont-escape-4-days-to-survive https://armor-games-studios.itch.io/dont-escape-4-days-to-su...

tgv 4y ago

The puzzle conundrum continues to live on, though. Some time ago, I bought a game app from the "escape room" variety. It's got no relation to escape rooms, it's just how it's called/advertised. It consists of a sequence of situations where you have to find a final item, which the game recognizes as exit, so that's perhaps why. After the first level, the puzzles were rather convoluted and opposite to anything that would happen in real life. The "protagonist" decides to go to a bank (i.e., the next level is at the bank), and there passwords are hidden on a scrap of paper behind a ventilation grating in the toilet or as a bar-column in a financial report. Who would ever do that? You open a secret area by making sure the folders in two cabinets are in the same order. Then, when you find a cheque to the protagonist's father, he decides that's all the information the bank will reveal, and since he doesn't understand why that cheque was written in the first place, the next level obviously will be --I bet you already guessed it-- his father's church. At the church, you find a note taped to the inside of the bell in the bell tower. Then you ring the bell a few times, and the thing, which is larger than the protagonist, so must weigh several tonnes, comes crashing down. It lands in one piece on the church floor, and you can access the note. Then you have to move the pews in some pattern in order to access something else. In real life, it would be obvious that there is a mechanism attached to the pews, but the game just makes things visible or invisible as long as it keeps the player on the happy path. So yeah, I gave up on that one.

mikepurvis 4y ago
YouTube game reviewer SkillUp talks frequently about the importance of great writing in selling mundane, repetitive content to players, particularly when it comes to single-objective side quests in open world games. He references The Witcher 3 as a game with many great examples (like the famous frying pan quest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-aHUyokr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-aHUyokr4), but another one that is often referenced is the Supideo quest line in AC: Odyssey ( https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Supideo https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Supideo). Anyway, I think of this often with respect to real-life escape rooms. I've only done a handful, but of those, so many seem to be completely bare-bones, with little or no scenery, little or no story, basically nothing to justify exactly the type of inanity you describe, where numbers of random objects turn out to be the digits in combination locks or whatever. However there was one for me that really broke the mold— the premise was that your long-lost great aunt had recently passed away, and you'd gone to recover valuables from her house before it got bulldozed to build a new highway. Quite apart from the nod to Douglas Adams, this immediately led to some terrific justification of otherwise standard game elements: - Getting trapped in the house because of her paranoia and multiple locks on all the doors and windows. - Having a time limit, enhanced and communicated by the increasingly loud sounds of construction equipment moving around "outside" the house. - Needing to make random connections, because she was a little batty and forgetful, so used random objects in her house to help keep track of how to get from room to room. Obviously the underlying gameplay fundamentals are exactly the same as any other low-budget escape room, but this particular experience really stuck with me as one that I felt far more invested in than usual, due mostly to how much more motivating even this threadbare "plot" was relative to others I'd seen.

lmm 4y ago

The makers of The Last Express, the only point-and-click adventure game I've played that really worked for me, had an interesting interview where they talked about how they chose the setting specifically to suit the constraints of the medium - it's the nature of an adventure game to be "on rails", and putting you onboard a short train was a way to allow you to move "freely", without artificial constraints, but without exploding the state space.

cainxinth 4y ago

> Puzzles have a single, usually somewhat tortured solution Potential spoiler alert… the forklift elevator puzzle in Grim Fandango springs to mind. It’s so unintuitive and a disappointing part of what is otherwise an incredible game. When I play these types of games, I’ll only bang my head against the wall for so long before I give up and Google the answer. If, upon learning the solution, I realize I should have been able to figure it out myself, I’ll feel bad for not trying longer. But sometimes, I’ll read the solution and say: “That’s what you wanted me to do?!” and be glad I didn’t spend all day trying to crack their impossible code.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago
I played Grim Fandango with a guide. Grim Fandango was one of a few point and click games that has a story and world still worth experiencing without the puzzles.

saiya-jin 4y ago

Nice summary on how I felt about adventures without realizing it. I just couldn't bring myself to play any for any significant time anymore. Back when I started with PC in 1993 I enjoyed Kyrandia II, and later Broken Sword, but what makes me tick are simply different sort of games.

RicoElectrico 4y ago

I guess that poorly designed IQ tests often fall into these category as well. Some of the patterns you have to match seem soooo arbitrary. In the real world it's easier to reverse engineer someone's train of thought, as there's more context than some abstract shapes or numbers. In fact, as a programmer or engineer it's a necessary skill to develop.

Bakary 4y ago

Where are you getting that first part about freedom? Maybe it's a generational thing but I can't seem to visualize them as anything but constrained from the outset. The Witness is maybe the 'freest' example I can think of but it's still a range of puzzles

grumbel 4y ago
The freedom in a point&click is in the actions you perform. In a point&click there is no limit to your actions, as the actions are a combination of the verbs you have, the environment and the items you collect along the way. Which leaves endless possibilities. The restrictions are just in how crazy the narrative wants to get, but not in the interface. Other genres limit you to run, jump, shoot and a few other core mechanics, that they than run on repeat. You might get bigger guns along the way, but you aren't going to steal a pot from a cook to use it as helmet while joining the circus as you would in a point&click. When other genres want the player character to perform actions outside the core mechanics they often have to fall back to non-interactive cutscenes. In a point&click in contrast it's all part of the core gameplay, cutscenes are reserved to non-player scenes. Another thing to take into account here is the year, we are talking about early 90s here, back when most games were side scrollers that allowed you to just walk left and right. Point&click adventures were some of the first games with a movie-like presentation, you had real 3d scenes you could interact with, close ups, cutscenes, etc, not just abstract flat side-scrolling worlds. In times of GTAV, a point&click might not look all that impressive, but compared to the other stuff you had back then they were quite impressive.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Well 3D in the sense that characters could walk in front and behind scenery and objects. I.e. they could move toward or away from the screen. Growing up in that era I think the complaints about narrow solutions made them feel more constraining. That said I enjoyed them anyway, and still do.
  - grumbel 4y ago
    Yep, also sprite scaling was the big new thing in Monkey Island, as that allowed to create scene with proper perspective, where your character got smaller the further into the scene they went. Maniac Mansion or ZakMcKracken still had a somewhat artificial flatness to them. The box of Monkey Island[1] even called it "Eye-gouging 3d graphics". [1] https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/264596-the-secret-of-monkey-island-atari-st-back-cover.jpg https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/264596-the-secret-...

JohnFen 4y ago

> On the surface level, they promise nearly infinite freedom, more than any platform or first-person shooter game: That you can go anywhere, talk to anyone, perform and action on any object, and solve problems in whatever way you want. What? I never thought that was their promise.

tobiasSoftware 4y ago

I highly recommend a recent game called Outer Wilds that in my opinion takes the adventure game genre to the next level by giving it an open world feel. It does this through three ideas. First, there are no collectible items, the game is about seeking information and it uses that information as the keys to unlock new areas instead of items. This does make the game very spoilerable though, but it removes the "combine item 1 with item 2" type of puzzles that are infamous for feeling constrained. Second, it gives you an information map showing if there is any information left to find in each area. This gets around the problem of "pixel hunting" that early adventure games had where you missed something subtle so you had to wander through the entire game over again trying to find what you missed. Third, "late game" areas are accessible at any time but are locked behind multiple pieces of information. This means that you actually can get to late game areas early on, but most people simply won't. This gives the game a sort of "trust the player" feel, where instead of putting the game on rails to make sure no one goes off the track, the developers remove the rails and trust that most players will loosely follow the path they planned, even though some will inevitably jump the track and go through the game in a weird order.

Shorn 4y ago
This game's been sitting in my Steam wishlist for so long. You've convinced me :)

aidenn0 4y ago

The better adventure games anticipated multiple solutions to puzzles[1], which improves the sense of immersion, but the games in this genre are bounded by the imagination (and hard work) of the creator(s). 1: I recently read a review of the text-parser version of Quest For Glory and the reviewer commented on how they made a game out of trying to find something sensible to type in that didn't come with a reasonable response from the game. I haven't played the game in decades, but I remember trying to talk to a tree and getting something like 3 paragraphs of text in response...