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I think the best of the Sierra games was the original Kings Quest, as all the puzzles were based on various fairy tales. Also, some display glitches helped such as items that you could move would be drawn on the screen last.

The worst section of a Sierra game was in Leisure Suit Larry, where the official way of getting money is to save the game state every time you win at the casino. If you lose a round, then restore the game state. To me this was "breaking the fourth wall".

The original King's Quest had a puzzle which required writing down the alphabet forwards and backwards to encode Rumplestitskin as the secret word needed to get the magic beans. (You could "win" the game without the beans but you'd miss out on a really cool portion of the game and your score was far from the max.)

The in-game puzzle hint was far from helpful. I played the game for a year before getting a hint book. Reading the solution left a sour taste in my mouth for the whole game.

I played all the KQ games and don't remember a single puzzle that convoluted in any of the others. I believe they nerfed that puzzle in later releases of the game.

Kings Quest V had TONS of instances where if you didn't react to a situation immediately, you'd lose an item that would be required later and you wouldn't realize it until you got stuck. (Throwing the fish at the bear or that shiny thing in the nest before the bird picks you up).

KQ6 and 7 were setup so it was impossible to get stuck, but 5 was not. KQ3 had that annoying path you had to transverse and time limits until you killed the evil wizard. I think you could get stuck in that one too, but I don't remember KQ1-4 as well.

If I recall correctly, it is possible to get stuck in King's Quest VI; there are items that you require to get out of the catacombs, and without them you're stuck once you're inside. I believe they obliquely warn you by kicking you out first and telling you to "prepare", but you can still come back without the items and they don't specifically list them, and at that point they'll happily throw you in without them.

I found this out when playing this as a kid without knowing how to look up a guide. Fun times.

The Monkey Island games were all set up to not allow fail states, so I was reasonably confident that my 8 and 10 year old kids could muddle through.

I had to come to their rescue a couple times since they didn't get the headhunters pamphlet puzzle because it's based on a pun, but other than that they loved the first game and I'm confident they'll be able to do the sequels.

I remember that puzzle from first time around. I literally tried every object because I couldn’t figure it out.

Then I groaned when I realised what they’d done.

King's Quest 6 is better about it, but there are a few zombie states I can think of. However the game does its best to warn you that you'll have a bad time. Any of the following, without the right items will make sure you can't finish the game.

- Going into the catacombs on Isle of sacred mountain (specifically the hole in the wall is what killed 10 year old me) - going to the land of the dead (funny enough with coins that you need to get from the catacombs) - going into the castle (short or long ending) - telling the druids you're selling these fine leather jackets

If I recall correctly, in the PCjr version of the game it was spelling the name backwards instead of doing a caesar cipher on it. That is the only puzzle that caught me for a while until one day sitting in a math class (in 1986 or something like that) where it finally clicked.

Jade Empire had a gambling minigame you could save-scum like that. Except if you won 20 times in a row, the NPC that ran the game would explode on you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26DsrylKKl8

Wow, I didn’t expect that to be so literal.

I think some of that bad game design was economically driven or at least economically influenced.

Firstly, if you judge the "value" of a game based on how long it takes to complete then having overly-complex/fiddly/obscure puzzles is a great way to artificially inflate the perceived "value" of your game via the reported play time in reviews and among players.

Secondly, in the golden age of software piracy, including puzzles that most players wouldn't be able to solve without help creates a way to extract money from otherwise non-paying players via purchases of hint guides or calls to premium-rate hint lines. A kind of precursor to "pay-to-win" microtransactions in modern "free-to-play" games.

Of course, over time both of those influences waned. With the rise of the Internet you could get a walkthrough for any game very easily, killing the market for hint guides/hint lines, and people came to understand that there's more to the value of a game than how long it takes to play (though some "hard-core gamer" types still don't understand this).

I read an interview a while ago with the founder of Wadjet Eye Games (a modern-day retro-aesthetic adventure game studio), Dave Gilbert (no relation to Ron Gilbert of Lucas Arts fame). He said that designing adventure game puzzles these days is very challenging because he is aware that if they are made too hard players will stop playing and just go look up a guide or watch a recorded playthrough, however if they are too easy the player will breeze through the game. Essentially he has to find the right balance of puzzle difficulty to maintain good pacing in his games.

> This is really the problem with the entire early genre of adventure games.

One person's "problem" is another person's joie de vivre. I loved the original Zork and all the Infocom games back in the day.

I admit, though, that I don't know if I'd have the patience to play them today. E.g., they required making maps with pencil and paper and taking notes, etc. These days, I just want to kick back on the sofa and shoot aliens with space magic guns.

I was able to solve almost everything in Zork except the bell, book, & candle puzzle. I only discovered the answer a couple of years later when they revealed the solution in the Zork books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork_books

I finished the game after that.

True. Infocom games were largely fair, but difficult as they grew out of MIT geek culture where the level of puzzle solving was high. It's the lesser efforts from companies like Sierra that used "moon logic" puzzles that literally nobody could solve other than either by luck or by buying expensive hint books.

I had no idea the "bell, book, and candle" in Nethack were from Zork. I gathered that it was from _something_ (since nearly everything else in it is) but didn't know what.

It is much older than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell,_book,_and_candle

I believe in contemporary use it has become associated with witches, and I have seen it used as a general "occult" reference.

None of your examples are adventure games, they're just choose-your-path books - there is no logical challenge in them. I'm not sure if it's even possible to fail Heavy Rain not on purpose. I would rather say the modern adventure games are stuff like Obduction and The Witness.

I remember not being able to get off the garbage planet in Space Quest III without the hint book. It was a MacGyver-esque exercise to build a spaceshipfrom scattered junk on the planet. And just when you thought you were done a giant rat would kill you.