Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
grumpygamer.com
grumpygamer.com
Beating an adventure game is often an exercise not just in problem solving, but in building an intuition about how the game designer(s) wanted you to approach puzzles. Tuning into the vibe of the game world and understanding what interactions and approaches are likely to work and which won't. The most you can hope for is that the solutions have at least some logic to them. It's a bit like learning to solve cryptic crosswords, where you need to learn a hidden language to unlock the actual problems. This can be an enjoyable and rewarding experience, but it is definitely not the infinite freedom that the genre seems to offer up front, and I suspect for as many people who fell in love with these games, there were many who gave up in frustration at their paradoxical constrictiveness.
First, there are no collectible items, the game is about seeking information and it uses that information as the keys to unlock new areas instead of items. This does make the game very spoilerable though, but it removes the "combine item 1 with item 2" type of puzzles that are infamous for feeling constrained.
Second, it gives you an information map showing if there is any information left to find in each area. This gets around the problem of "pixel hunting" that early adventure games had where you missed something subtle so you had to wander through the entire game over again trying to find what you missed.
Third, "late game" areas are accessible at any time but are locked behind multiple pieces of information. This means that you actually can get to late game areas early on, but most people simply won't. This gives the game a sort of "trust the player" feel, where instead of putting the game on rails to make sure no one goes off the track, the developers remove the rails and trust that most players will loosely follow the path they planned, even though some will inevitably jump the track and go through the game in a weird order.
It mixes adventure game with escape room, and whilst there is still a puzzle element to the game, it is much more pragmatic in its combinations. You find a nail, a boarded up building or something that needs building and it's a hammer that will solve all of them. You know that you will die of heat at the end of the day, so you need to find things that will cool your house down.
I think this means that the whimsy and jovial aspect of 90s adventure games is lost, but it feels much more satisfying to solve a puzzle when the solution makes sense. If we wanted an adventure games renaissance, I would look to this game as a case study in addition to the points outlined in Ron's article.
[1] https://armor-games-studios.itch.io/dont-escape-4-days-to-su...
After the first level, the puzzles were rather convoluted and opposite to anything that would happen in real life. The "protagonist" decides to go to a bank (i.e., the next level is at the bank), and there passwords are hidden on a scrap of paper behind a ventilation grating in the toilet or as a bar-column in a financial report. Who would ever do that? You open a secret area by making sure the folders in two cabinets are in the same order. Then, when you find a cheque to the protagonist's father, he decides that's all the information the bank will reveal, and since he doesn't understand why that cheque was written in the first place, the next level obviously will be --I bet you already guessed it-- his father's church.
At the church, you find a note taped to the inside of the bell in the bell tower. Then you ring the bell a few times, and the thing, which is larger than the protagonist, so must weigh several tonnes, comes crashing down. It lands in one piece on the church floor, and you can access the note. Then you have to move the pews in some pattern in order to access something else. In real life, it would be obvious that there is a mechanism attached to the pews, but the game just makes things visible or invisible as long as it keeps the player on the happy path.
So yeah, I gave up on that one.
Anyway, I think of this often with respect to real-life escape rooms. I've only done a handful, but of those, so many seem to be completely bare-bones, with little or no scenery, little or no story, basically nothing to justify exactly the type of inanity you describe, where numbers of random objects turn out to be the digits in combination locks or whatever.
However there was one for me that really broke the mold— the premise was that your long-lost great aunt had recently passed away, and you'd gone to recover valuables from her house before it got bulldozed to build a new highway. Quite apart from the nod to Douglas Adams, this immediately led to some terrific justification of otherwise standard game elements:
- Getting trapped in the house because of her paranoia and multiple locks on all the doors and windows.
- Having a time limit, enhanced and communicated by the increasingly loud sounds of construction equipment moving around "outside" the house.
- Needing to make random connections, because she was a little batty and forgetful, so used random objects in her house to help keep track of how to get from room to room.
Obviously the underlying gameplay fundamentals are exactly the same as any other low-budget escape room, but this particular experience really stuck with me as one that I felt far more invested in than usual, due mostly to how much more motivating even this threadbare "plot" was relative to others I'd seen.
What? I never thought that was their promise.
The Witness is maybe the 'freest' example I can think of but it's still a range of puzzles
Other genres limit you to run, jump, shoot and a few other core mechanics, that they than run on repeat. You might get bigger guns along the way, but you aren't going to steal a pot from a cook to use it as helmet while joining the circus as you would in a point&click. When other genres want the player character to perform actions outside the core mechanics they often have to fall back to non-interactive cutscenes. In a point&click in contrast it's all part of the core gameplay, cutscenes are reserved to non-player scenes.
Another thing to take into account here is the year, we are talking about early 90s here, back when most games were side scrollers that allowed you to just walk left and right. Point&click adventures were some of the first games with a movie-like presentation, you had real 3d scenes you could interact with, close ups, cutscenes, etc, not just abstract flat side-scrolling worlds. In times of GTAV, a point&click might not look all that impressive, but compared to the other stuff you had back then they were quite impressive.
That said I enjoyed them anyway, and still do.
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/264596-the-secret-...
1: I recently read a review of the text-parser version of Quest For Glory and the reviewer commented on how they made a game out of trying to find something sensible to type in that didn't come with a reasonable response from the game. I haven't played the game in decades, but I remember trying to talk to a tree and getting something like 3 paragraphs of text in response...
Potential spoiler alert… the forklift elevator puzzle in Grim Fandango springs to mind. It’s so unintuitive and a disappointing part of what is otherwise an incredible game.
When I play these types of games, I’ll only bang my head against the wall for so long before I give up and Google the answer.
If, upon learning the solution, I realize I should have been able to figure it out myself, I’ll feel bad for not trying longer. But sometimes, I’ll read the solution and say: “That’s what you wanted me to do?!” and be glad I didn’t spend all day trying to crack their impossible code.
Grim Fandango was one of a few point and click games that has a story and world still worth experiencing without the puzzles.
In the real world it's easier to reverse engineer someone's train of thought, as there's more context than some abstract shapes or numbers. In fact, as a programmer or engineer it's a necessary skill to develop.
However, since 2016, when The Witness came out, I've given them another chance, and I really have hope. There are a lot of indie games which I hope others can go into detail about, and, most exciting of all, I saw that Ron Gilbert (the author of this piece) was making Return to Monkey Island, and I'm delighted to see that the reviews are great.
PS: It's been awhile, but some of the IF (text adventure) games I've seen in the last decade have really been pushing the genre to new limits. Check em out!
Interactive fiction had an underground renaissance, and some of the beat work in the genre were produced when it was technically a dead one. I agree that people should check out the IF Archive, and take a look at the state of tooling for creating them, which have made producing games much more accessable.
I remember playing Journeyman Project 2 and being so confused by it all. Time travel, aliens, disguises? Fascinating game.
They rebirthed from their ashes as a healthy indies niche. We've have great adventure games in the recent years: Timbleweed Park, Deponia, Unavowed, and of course the recent Return of Monkey Island.
Yes, they're no longer the dominating AAA genre, probably because their main draw have always been to tell a story (and a 2D platformer wasn't great for that), but now there are other genres that are also very good at telling a story. Basically the Action/Adventure/RPG/OpenWorld bucket.
From the very first couple hours in the game you know the most important thing you should do is visit that 'island' - but the game does not give you any option to do so. You have to go through a very tedious grind to unlock the option, even though there is no real reason you shouldn't be able to. The game just doesn't allow you to do so.
Personally, after I managed to get there, I realised the rest of the game was pointless.
>From the very first couple hours
I disagree. The plot thread you speak of isn't immediately apparent -- it takes hours to surface, and the likelihood of the island being the correct place to investigate is considered by Visual Calculus to be very low. We who have beaten it can opine about the ultimate conclusion being forgone, but the equally-important non-investigative plot threads took, at least in my case, enough time that I didn't really "notice" the ludic preventative of denying you a boat until endgame.
!!! SPOLIERS END !!!
>Personally, after I managed to get there, I realised the rest of the game was pointless
I find this personally astounding. By contrast, I found the non-investigative plot threads, few of which have any real measureable outcome on the game's conclusion, to be the real stars of the show. When you watch police procedurals, do you just fast forward to the last ten minutes? Isn't the statefulness of the investigating characters interesting?
I really love the modern evolution of the genre - we have old style point-and-click games, new style Telltale games, experiments like Disco and Detroit: Become Human. The genre has expanded a lot.
It's a bit tricky because the definition of "action-adventure" broadened as LoZ added more gameplay elements, and more games became "LoZ adjacent" (although it's not as muddled as the definition of "rogue-like", which got all messed up because of Spelunky being a surprise hit).
Adventure games are almost always narrative driven and puzzle-oriented though, and without RPG elements (because if they had strong RPG elements they'd just be called RPGs).
The games of the Quest for Glory series [1] are most definitely adventure games, not RPGs, despite having some RPG elements. They also happen to be my favourite adventure games due to the way most puzzles have multiple solutions (intended for the different character classes but not strictly required by them).
The series is also one of the very few where you have the ability to export your character at the end of each game and import him into the next, allowing you to play all 5 games with the same character. This is made particularly interesting by the wildly different settings of each game as well as the evolving technology of the series.
Not everyone likes all of the games, however. My personal favourite is the 4th game, Shadows of Darkness, which is fully voice acted and narrated by John Rhys-Davies. I think they’re all worth playing through, however, especially by taking the same character all the way.
LoZ is highly puzzle-oriented. Not so narrative driven though so if both are required, that fits... but:
> and without RPG elements (because if they had strong RPG elements they'd just be called RPGs).
What are RPG elements in this context if not narrative?
Which is a shame, because roles and skills could play a huge role in narrative if developers are able to put in the time. Some games do, the Fallout series often gives you different paths through the story depending on the abilities you've acquired.
I hadn't really thought of Fallout as an RPG, nor e.g. Deus Ex, I guess the FP nature makes them seem more different. Witcher is more of one, but I guess they all 3 have commonalities.
All of these were true prior to 2004, and other genres evolved too.
> Some people will tell you that Adventure Games aren't really dead, they have just morphed into other forms, or that other genres have absorbed Adventure Games. If this is true, they've done a pretty bad job of it.
So I don't think it's blindsighted so much as old-man-yells-at-cloud disagreeing with you on what a Real Adventure Game is. Although in Ron Gilbert's defense, he also writes:
> As I read this some 15 years later, I'm not sure I agree with everything in here anymore. I learned a lot from Monkey Island 1 and 2, plus countless kids Adventure Games at Humongous Entertainment. At some point in the near future, I will do an annotated version of this article, talking about things that have changed, or were just plains wrong. But in the meantime, there is something interesting on TV right now.
So still not so much blindsighted as "never elaborated upon what he really thinks of the 1989 article these days".
And while narrative have become far more important in other genres, those style of narratives are completely different to what a point&click would offer. Action games are about action, you shoot or slash through things. You kill stuff. Narrative happens in cut-scenes without player control. It's not part of the gameplay. That's what makes point&click games special, as the there is no disconnect, the narrative is driven by the players the actions.
And while there are certainly some RPGs that cross the line, not many do. The mainstream RPG is still obsessed with stats, collecting dozens of the same item and stuff like that. In a point&click almost everything is unique, there are no faceless copy&paste NPCs, no mountains of useless items to collect. If you find an item in a point&click, it's very likely part of the plot in some form.
Not in this context.
Text adventure games are really the best example of the concepts that an adventure game usually has, even though they can also be graphical, like Monkey Island or Full Throttle. A more recent game series like Deponia fits the bill as well.
I would say that there are a lot more games with old school adventure mechanics coming out than people might realise. A lot of them get bundled into the "Walking Simulator" category, but are far more Adventure game than anything else.
You also have the extra hint that this is Ron Gilbert's site, and if you know anything about him, the context for "adventure game" is pretty clear.
Such games are story and puzzle heavy rather than having much in the way of action.
Nowadays Amanita design still makes great adventure and puzzle games, some are point & click. Really enjoyed them, and most are without text so my non-English speaking kids also love them https://www.amanita-design.net/
Everything else might be good enough for a distraction but I wouldn’t say I was actually intrigued.
March 19 2020, 150 points, 104 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625578