Comment by jerf
9 hours ago
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?
Well... We got new stories with Indy and they were less good. lol
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.
"read the author's mind" is a puzzle type closely related to, and in practice often overlapping with brute force.
If the author has a solution in mind but it is not properly hinted, for most players brute force is the only option. In the case of point and click adventure games, if you don't think "I could stick the bubble gum to the mouse to run through the wall and grab the key" you are left trying every combination of item and action, which isn't fun.
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.
The canonical criticism is Old Man Murray's Death of Adventure Games describing one mad puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 (1999) with an improbable solution which admits no simpler or more logical solutions. Not to pick on it, because the adventure game market had been making more and more convoluted puzzles and reached peak idiocy some time ago.
https://oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
> Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.
What I quite like in Joe Richardson's Death of the Reprobate is that Joe breaks the fourth wall and admonishes the player character for feeling sad that Joe told him the puzzle solution and robbed him of a "Eureka moment". "IF THE PUZZLE DIFFICULTY IS PITCHED JUST RIGHT, THAT'S MY TRIUMPH, NOT YOURS" says Joe.
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.
Very much agree.
I'd also observe that "brute force" here is an O(source * target) problem, where a source/target pair is some expressible command. e.g., you can't usually combine two locations on the screen, but you can try to combine any item with any screen location, and in some games, any item with any item. Some games add a term for "verb" to that as well, though most games nowadays wisely realize that's not really helpful.
You can see the core reason why people complain about "moon logic" isn't really that the logic is weird. I don't think that specifically bothers too many people. Often it's part of the fun in a way. The problem with "moon logic" is that it means I can't cut down on that search space with common sense or clever-but-grounded logic. In reality rubbing my cat with a piece of tape to pull some hair off of it so that I can wear that tape as a fake mustache is not a sensible option to consider, which is a real part of a real puzzle [1], not just something I made up. A game that consider that a solution to a problem is a game I have to rub everything on everything and it is not just "gamers being lazy" that they don't want to perform hundreds or thousands of possible actions, where all but one of them will result in failure, and depending on the game, some of them may even result in "game over". That's terrible design and that's not the player's fault.
[1]: The classic Old Man Murray article, for today's 10,000: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/78.html The rest of the puzzle isn't exactly a tour de force of logic either.
> 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”).
Partially agree, but I also think that they were victims of the graphic cards revolution where each year you could have shiny new GFX and visuals, and that drove new games development (and funding). But indeed being contrived and self-referential didn't help.
Or maybe adventure games were always a niche genre for a niche of people, it just happened that the niche of computer/console players in the early days coincided more.
1 reply →
> 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”).
That's a name I haven't heard in a long while. And the "Cat Stache Puzzle", once an infamous case-study of virtual insanity in game design, now nearly forgotten...
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.
I agree but IMO it's better to have a puzzle that's frustrating because, like you say, there is no interesting way to approach it rather than just have easy puzzles.