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I loved this game growing up, but never got around to finishing it. I've been going back and playing point & click adventures like Grim Fandango and Broke Age.

I loved this game growing up, but never got around to finishing it. I've been going back and playing point & click adventures like Grim Fandango and Broke Age. IMO that genre didn't age well. So many interactions are counterintuitive and I inevitably feel like I have to read a guide in order to proceed with the narrative.

doublerabbit 2y ago
You had to have the patience. My older brother loved the Myst series, DoTT, Sam & Max and as a younger brother who used to sit and watch him play games, I got bored. His way of shoving me out the room because I would then hear him play GTA and not be allowed back in... It's the same with any of those games. Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max. -- You need that logical and forward thinking mindset and an attention span greater than 3 seconds. It's an niche genre and not for everyone and now it's a genre that's lost with time just because how the world is nowadays. Who has four hours to point and click around a realm? I meanwhile just wanted to frag folk and jump around a CTF map on Quake 3.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >You need that logical and forward thinking mindset and an attention span greater than 3 seconds Not only that but you do need a lot of free time as well. As a kid I had the patience and time to push through point and click games, now as an adult with responsibilities I don't. If I only have 30 minutes per day to spend on gaming it's gonna be too short to invest in those kinds of games but just enough time for a few rounds of Q3 arena or such.
- jerf 2y ago
  On the plus side, in the modern era, you can easily find a walkthrough to help you through whatever. Though many are not well-structured to avoid spoilers when you drop into the middle of them. I don't do a ton of adventure gaming, but I have gone through most of the episodic Sam & Max games. I estimate about 1 walkthrough consult per 2 games overall, and about a 50/50 split between "oh crap I should have gotten that myself" and "oh, I was never going to get that" results (with the occasional "oh I was right and I just didn't click on the right thing or notice the tiny little widget" that really makes me glad I just looked). Day of the Tentacle was probably the largest game I've done with 0 consults, though I was probably stuck enough to justify it a couple of times. One of the heights of the genre, there.
  - giobox 2y ago
    Day of the Tentacle is also one of the few point and clicks I've finished from beginning to end without consulting a walkthrough. This is actually one reason that I personally prefer it to COMI, the puzzles in DOTT generally are sensible/logical for the most part, especially by genre standards. The absolute worst puzzle for me remains the infamous Broken Sword/Circle of Blood Irish goat scene: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goat_Puzzle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goat_Puzzle
    - jbeninger 2y ago
      I made it so close to finishing without a guide, but I never thought to Close the Door, and wasted hours trying to find the next thing before finally giving up.
solardev 2y ago
Even back then, excessive "pixel hunting" was a frequent complaint of the genre. You basically just had to click around randomly and try different inventory item permutations by trial and error until something happens. On the other hand, modern Games like Baldur's Gate 3, while not really an adventure game, gives you so many different ways of solving each puzzle or encounter. It's never pre scripted to only one solution, but you can really use your imagination. Relevant tropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PixelHunt https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PixelHunt https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoonLogicPuzzle https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoonLogicPuzzle
- Agingcoder 2y ago
  I was a huge adventure game fan back in the 90s, and I also completed BG3 a few months ago ( it took me a solid 6 months to finish the game ). Quite frankly, I truly think there are no puzzles whatsoever in bg3. Very very very occasionally you need object X to satisfy character Y, but that’s about it. I think this is partly due to the game changing directions based on what you do ( so you can’t get stuck and therefore there’s no puzzle solving !) , but I never had the same feeling I had with monkey island, fate of Atlantis etc.
  - solardev 2y ago
    Maybe they're not strictly "puzzles" in the traditional LucasArts or Myst sense, but maybe more like "problems". That is, you have a lot of agency as a player in determining the outcome of your quests, companions, world events, etc., and you're not tied into any one way of achieving those. Given a quest, it's never just "gather X, put them together in Y fashion, then use them to Z". There's almost always a way to talk your way to a different solution, or use violence, or subterfuge, or a spell, or shapeshifting, or jumping/flying over the location, etc. I wasn't arguing that BG3 is a puzzle/adventure game (sorry if that was unclear), but that it doesn't suffer from that "only one esoteric and preposterous solution" that 90s-era adventure games often had (looking at you, Sierra Entertainment especially, with puzzles like needing to stick a banana into a jetpack to stop a killer robot: https://spacequest.fandom.com/wiki/W-D40#Game_Involvement https://spacequest.fandom.com/wiki/W-D40#Game_Involvement... and that was the only way to proceed). By contrast, in BG3 you can beat the game in many different ways, leading to completely different outcomes (and playtimes). I did a physics-based playthrough that mostly just shoved and threw people around and off cliffs, with no idea who they were or what they wanted from me, but the game gave me the freedom to do that. It's also possible to do a mostly peaceful playthrough with a lot of talking (yawn). The Owlbear cave is a good example (no spoilers... but there's a lot of different outcomes for the mother and child owlbear, depending on your party makeup and actions etc.) Games these days are a lot better at giving you different ways to solve a situation (or the entire game), not just following a strictly linear puzzle/narrative/questline. It's like the opposite of the "Moon Logic Puzzle" trope.
t_mann 2y ago
I think the mistake here was using guides. I used guides when I first played them and I remember feeling similar about them. I replayed some games again over the years, without guides, after enough time had passed so that I couldn't remember much anymore - it was a completely different experience, and much more enjoyable. Sure, sometimes you have to basically brute-force your way forward, but often enough you do figure stuff out and it's rewarding, you feel like you're starting to 'get' the humor.
atribecalledqst 2y ago
Point and click games (and puzzle-based interactive fiction games while we're at it) tend to lose me right around the halfway point. The puzzles start to get more difficult and I just can't figure out how to solve them. Could just be a matter of patience, I tend to give up after 1-2 hours at most if I just find myself rotating between locations not knowing what to do next. But I think the genre's reputation for being obtuse is pretty well-deserved. Broken Age was actually interesting for me, because it's the game I got closest to finishing without a walkthrough. I only needed to consult one once, for the last puzzle that you encounter in the game. Consulting a walkthrough generally ruins the game for me so once I use one once, my patience threshold for using it again drops significantly. At that point how much I enjoy a game depends on how much I like the characters, story, etc. Grim Fandango is one of those I still look back fondly for that reason, even though it lost me WAY earlier than halfway. ----- Somewhat of a tangent, but I've always wondered if this genre of games is good for development of mathematical thinking. Like, in an adventure game you usually know the broad strokes of what you need to do, but you need to solve lots of puzzles to get there. Something I've always struggled with in math is the ability to think laterally, think of analogues, lemmas, auxiliary problems, etc. that can help prove a theorem. It's always felt to me like the two struggles are different forms of the same issue with my cognition.
- account42 2y ago
  Most P&C adventures can be reasonably completed on your own if you have the right mindset. But if you do get stuck and don't have the patience to figure things out then consider UHS [0] first before resorting to a full-on walkthrough. [0] https://www.uhs-hints.com/ https://www.uhs-hints.com/

doublerabbit 2y ago

You had to have the patience. My older brother loved the Myst series, DoTT, Sam & Max and as a younger brother who used to sit and watch him play games, I got bored. His way of shoving me out the room because I would then hear him play GTA and not be allowed back in... It's the same with any of those games. Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max. -- You need that logical and forward thinking mindset and an attention span greater than 3 seconds. It's an niche genre and not for everyone and now it's a genre that's lost with time just because how the world is nowadays. Who has four hours to point and click around a realm? I meanwhile just wanted to frag folk and jump around a CTF map on Quake 3.

Rinzler89 2y ago
>You need that logical and forward thinking mindset and an attention span greater than 3 seconds Not only that but you do need a lot of free time as well. As a kid I had the patience and time to push through point and click games, now as an adult with responsibilities I don't. If I only have 30 minutes per day to spend on gaming it's gonna be too short to invest in those kinds of games but just enough time for a few rounds of Q3 arena or such.
jerf 2y ago
On the plus side, in the modern era, you can easily find a walkthrough to help you through whatever. Though many are not well-structured to avoid spoilers when you drop into the middle of them. I don't do a ton of adventure gaming, but I have gone through most of the episodic Sam & Max games. I estimate about 1 walkthrough consult per 2 games overall, and about a 50/50 split between "oh crap I should have gotten that myself" and "oh, I was never going to get that" results (with the occasional "oh I was right and I just didn't click on the right thing or notice the tiny little widget" that really makes me glad I just looked). Day of the Tentacle was probably the largest game I've done with 0 consults, though I was probably stuck enough to justify it a couple of times. One of the heights of the genre, there.
- giobox 2y ago
  Day of the Tentacle is also one of the few point and clicks I've finished from beginning to end without consulting a walkthrough. This is actually one reason that I personally prefer it to COMI, the puzzles in DOTT generally are sensible/logical for the most part, especially by genre standards. The absolute worst puzzle for me remains the infamous Broken Sword/Circle of Blood Irish goat scene: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goat_Puzzle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goat_Puzzle
  - jbeninger 2y ago
    I made it so close to finishing without a guide, but I never thought to Close the Door, and wasted hours trying to find the next thing before finally giving up.

solardev 2y ago

Even back then, excessive "pixel hunting" was a frequent complaint of the genre. You basically just had to click around randomly and try different inventory item permutations by trial and error until something happens. On the other hand, modern Games like Baldur's Gate 3, while not really an adventure game, gives you so many different ways of solving each puzzle or encounter. It's never pre scripted to only one solution, but you can really use your imagination. Relevant tropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PixelHunt https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PixelHunt https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoonLogicPuzzle https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoonLogicPuzzle

Agingcoder 2y ago
I was a huge adventure game fan back in the 90s, and I also completed BG3 a few months ago ( it took me a solid 6 months to finish the game ). Quite frankly, I truly think there are no puzzles whatsoever in bg3. Very very very occasionally you need object X to satisfy character Y, but that’s about it. I think this is partly due to the game changing directions based on what you do ( so you can’t get stuck and therefore there’s no puzzle solving !) , but I never had the same feeling I had with monkey island, fate of Atlantis etc.
- solardev 2y ago
  Maybe they're not strictly "puzzles" in the traditional LucasArts or Myst sense, but maybe more like "problems". That is, you have a lot of agency as a player in determining the outcome of your quests, companions, world events, etc., and you're not tied into any one way of achieving those. Given a quest, it's never just "gather X, put them together in Y fashion, then use them to Z". There's almost always a way to talk your way to a different solution, or use violence, or subterfuge, or a spell, or shapeshifting, or jumping/flying over the location, etc. I wasn't arguing that BG3 is a puzzle/adventure game (sorry if that was unclear), but that it doesn't suffer from that "only one esoteric and preposterous solution" that 90s-era adventure games often had (looking at you, Sierra Entertainment especially, with puzzles like needing to stick a banana into a jetpack to stop a killer robot: https://spacequest.fandom.com/wiki/W-D40#Game_Involvement https://spacequest.fandom.com/wiki/W-D40#Game_Involvement... and that was the only way to proceed). By contrast, in BG3 you can beat the game in many different ways, leading to completely different outcomes (and playtimes). I did a physics-based playthrough that mostly just shoved and threw people around and off cliffs, with no idea who they were or what they wanted from me, but the game gave me the freedom to do that. It's also possible to do a mostly peaceful playthrough with a lot of talking (yawn). The Owlbear cave is a good example (no spoilers... but there's a lot of different outcomes for the mother and child owlbear, depending on your party makeup and actions etc.) Games these days are a lot better at giving you different ways to solve a situation (or the entire game), not just following a strictly linear puzzle/narrative/questline. It's like the opposite of the "Moon Logic Puzzle" trope.

t_mann 2y ago

I think the mistake here was using guides. I used guides when I first played them and I remember feeling similar about them. I replayed some games again over the years, without guides, after enough time had passed so that I couldn't remember much anymore - it was a completely different experience, and much more enjoyable. Sure, sometimes you have to basically brute-force your way forward, but often enough you do figure stuff out and it's rewarding, you feel like you're starting to 'get' the humor.

atribecalledqst 2y ago

Point and click games (and puzzle-based interactive fiction games while we're at it) tend to lose me right around the halfway point. The puzzles start to get more difficult and I just can't figure out how to solve them. Could just be a matter of patience, I tend to give up after 1-2 hours at most if I just find myself rotating between locations not knowing what to do next. But I think the genre's reputation for being obtuse is pretty well-deserved. Broken Age was actually interesting for me, because it's the game I got closest to finishing without a walkthrough. I only needed to consult one once, for the last puzzle that you encounter in the game. Consulting a walkthrough generally ruins the game for me so once I use one once, my patience threshold for using it again drops significantly. At that point how much I enjoy a game depends on how much I like the characters, story, etc. Grim Fandango is one of those I still look back fondly for that reason, even though it lost me WAY earlier than halfway. ----- Somewhat of a tangent, but I've always wondered if this genre of games is good for development of mathematical thinking. Like, in an adventure game you usually know the broad strokes of what you need to do, but you need to solve lots of puzzles to get there. Something I've always struggled with in math is the ability to think laterally, think of analogues, lemmas, auxiliary problems, etc. that can help prove a theorem. It's always felt to me like the two struggles are different forms of the same issue with my cognition.

account42 2y ago
Most P&C adventures can be reasonably completed on your own if you have the right mindset. But if you do get stuck and don't have the patience to figure things out then consider UHS [0] first before resorting to a full-on walkthrough. [0] https://www.uhs-hints.com/ https://www.uhs-hints.com/