Comment by arexxbifs
8 hours ago
I played it when it was released and mostly enjoyed it, though I can't remember what difficulty setting I picked. I bought it mostly because I like Mark Ferrari's art, but ended up completing it. Some characters and jokes were intensely annoying, especially Ransome. I did like Delores, though.
Afterwards, I revisited some LucasArts games I'd played before (Monkey Island 1 and 2), and tried my hand with some I hadn't (Fate of Atlantis, Sam'n'Max, Full Throttle and also Flight of the Amazon Queen, which isn't from LucasArts). I think what you describe is actually fairly representative of the overall LucasArts experience. Character building is limited, even the funny jokes get tiresome after you've clicked through them a fifth time, some puzzles are illogical even for games with a sillier tone (monkey wrench, anyone?), and there's often a lot of walking about, repeating conversations, and clicking randomly just to see what happens. Some of them (Thimbleweed Park, MI2) also have exceptionally poor endings.
Out of the games I played, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was the best, though I got stuck (by forgetting some object in a room outside a complex labyrinth) close to the end and didn't bother completing it. The main character is pre-established, the plot feels like an Indy movie, and I can't recall any genuinely preposterous puzzle solutions (though it was a few years ago now).
I love the Monkey Island games, they're a part of my childhood. But I mostly love them for the music and graphics, not necessarily for the puzzles or the many gags that other people always seem to find a lot funnier than I do.
The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good... partially because the episodic format forced the designers to keep things reeled in. A single 3 hour episode can't get to the point that you have a couple hundred possible solutions to the problem and nothing but brute force to resolve it.
This style of game died for a reason. I'm not saying it needs to stay dead, but I do think every entrant to the genre needs to grapple with those reasons and have an answer to them. The episodic format provided one decent answer, even if I don't necessarily love it as a monetization technique. Adventure games all tend to pass through episode-like gates anyhow because the combinatorial state space becomes overwhelming without them, but they often still carry over state from the previous phases of the game. The full clean-slate wipe of the episodes prevented that from becoming a problem.
> Fate of Atlantis was the best
A better Indy movie than the last 2, IMO. I go back and replay it every so often.
> The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good
Some of them were funnier than others. It helps if you were attached to the characters having read the comics or watched the show. (The comics had the most concentrated humor - see: the comic about Dracula)
I recall the episode featuring the Abraham Lincoln statue running amok was very funny.
Adventure games can have amazing stories - I still think Star Trek: A Final Unity could be a great movie, or novel even.
People keep saying that about Atlantis but why can’t the game be enough without a movie remake .. don’t you all want new stories? Isn’t that why Disney star wars sucks?
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What these games need is a good old-fashioned Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill.
(Though I guess in the context of these games, that would be considered new-fangled.)
> What these games need is a good old-fashioned Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill.
For those who are out of the loop:
> https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Aperture_Science_Material_...
They need an editor who will go through and identify the puzzles that must be solved through brute force, and require alteration.
> They need an editor who will go through and identify the puzzles that must be solved through brute force
Barely any adventure game has a puzzle that requires brute-forcing. The problem is rather that sometimes players don't have the same kind of thinking as the developers.
This issue can be aggravated if the player comes from a different culture or is playing a translated version of the game; for a famous example: the "monkey wrench" puzzle only works if the player is used the the US-American English name of the respective tool.
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Interestingly, with AI/LLMs now the large combinatorial state space problem could be somewhat fixed (alongside having much richer dialogue trees).
This style of game died because the median attention span across the population decreased over the last 2 decades and something. I don't see a problem in getting blocked and try to brute force your way out of it. Games should be fun but this trend to have perfect, non frustrating gameplay 100% of the time is also part of the problem, IMO.
And now, I'll go back yelling at some cloud.
I disagree. I write and play in long-form puzzle competitions, so for many people I know attention span isn't the issue. What is the issue is that writing fun puzzles is a skill. A totally different skill from designing or implementing video games.
Anyone can design a hard puzzle. Guess the number in my head. Unscramble this 200-character anagram.
The real magic is in the "Aha!" moments where the solver makes a connection and is able to proceed. Great puzzles are supposed to make the player feel like they are smart, not that the author is smart.
Many point and click games fall apart here. Brute force isn't fun. Games where you think you'll need something in the future but the game won't let you take it now just so you'll have to backtrack when the game wants you to do that aren't fun.
A lot of modern point and clicks are by people who don't understand that and think suffering and click mashing are the point. I don't remember much of playing Thimbleweed Park, but VirtuaVerse was very much that.
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Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).
But the rest of your point stands. I keep reading young gamers complaining about adventures and role-playing games being “too difficult” whenever they don't put big flashing arrows on the next character or place to interact with. I cannot understand that: if one can solve a puzzle without grit, what pleasure does that bring? It's the same as watching TV.
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I reckon there's an important difference between a challenge being frustrating because it's hard, and a challenge being frustrating because there's no interesting way to approach it. Hard puzzles can be fun and satisfying to solve (albeit frustrating at some points along the way) when the process of solving them involves doing something clever or creative. But when the difficulty arises because the solution is basically arbitrary, and so I just have to do a brute force search, that's a tedious waste of time.
The boundaries can be blurry, and a puzzle can wrongly seem to fall into the tedious category because I'm missing something. But, in my opinion, classic adventure game puzzles too often really are arbitrary and boring.
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> (monkey wrench, anyone?)
Tell me about it. I played the French translated version, and the pun does not translate at all. "Monkey wrench" was translated as the french equivalent, "clé à molette", which does not reference monkeys at all. I remember being stuck for ages, and finally checking the solution online and concluding that the only way to find the solution is to systematically try all combinations as there is no way to apply logic. Only years later I realised that in english, "clé à molette" is "monkey wrench".
If you like the vibes but not the humor you might like The Dig. It's more serious, and has Orson Scott Card and Stephen Spielberg credited as writers. I last played as a kid it in the 90's, but still I have very vivid memories of it.
It's not that I dislike the humor, I just don't think it's as hilarious as it's often made out to be. Insult sword fighting, for example, is at best a sensible chuckle and gets pretty long in the tooth after the first two attempts or so.
I like Maniac Mansion the best. The sequel wasn't bad either.