Comment by Arainach
8 hours ago
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.