Broken Age was actually interesting for me, because it's the game I got closest to finishing without a walkthrough. I only needed to consult one once, for the last puzzle that you encounter in the game.
Consulting a walkthrough generally ruins the game for me so once I use one once, my patience threshold for using it again drops significantly. At that point how much I enjoy a game depends on how much I like the characters, story, etc. Grim Fandango is one of those I still look back fondly for that reason, even though it lost me WAY earlier than halfway.
-----
Somewhat of a tangent, but I've always wondered if this genre of games is good for development of mathematical thinking. Like, in an adventure game you usually know the broad strokes of what you need to do, but you need to solve lots of puzzles to get there. Something I've always struggled with in math is the ability to think laterally, think of analogues, lemmas, auxiliary problems, etc. that can help prove a theorem. It's always felt to me like the two struggles are different forms of the same issue with my cognition.
On the other hand, modern Games like Baldur's Gate 3, while not really an adventure game, gives you so many different ways of solving each puzzle or encounter. It's never pre scripted to only one solution, but you can really use your imagination.
Relevant tropes:
Not at all just like you don't need to save scum in action games. Both are soft cheats used when you are unable to complete the game properly - but that's on you not the game.
Game design was still in its adolescence back then, and EGA/VGA resolutions didn't easily allow for clearly noticeable graphics for every item on the screen, especially in cluttered scenes (like in Fate of Atlantis: https://i0.wp.com/presentperfectgaming.com/wp-content/upload..., what item is or isn't clickable?)
Later games even included hotspot revealers on purpose so you wouldn't have to go pixel hunting: https://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=5220
Don't get me wrong, I loved those games, but some of those early puzzles were just silly.
I wasn't arguing that BG3 is a puzzle/adventure game (sorry if that was unclear), but that it doesn't suffer from that "only one esoteric and preposterous solution" that 90s-era adventure games often had (looking at you, Sierra Entertainment especially, with puzzles like needing to stick a banana into a jetpack to stop a killer robot: https://spacequest.fandom.com/wiki/W-D40#Game_Involvement... and that was the only way to proceed).
By contrast, in BG3 you can beat the game in many different ways, leading to completely different outcomes (and playtimes). I did a physics-based playthrough that mostly just shoved and threw people around and off cliffs, with no idea who they were or what they wanted from me, but the game gave me the freedom to do that. It's also possible to do a mostly peaceful playthrough with a lot of talking (yawn).
The Owlbear cave is a good example (no spoilers... but there's a lot of different outcomes for the mother and child owlbear, depending on your party makeup and actions etc.)
Games these days are a lot better at giving you different ways to solve a situation (or the entire game), not just following a strictly linear puzzle/narrative/questline. It's like the opposite of the "Moon Logic Puzzle" trope.
We definitely agree. I thoroughly enjoyed bg3, and remember feeling no resistance because things would play out the way I wanted them to happen.
Apart from the occasional fighting parts, I’ve wondered quite a bit about what makes bg3 a challenge - and I still don’t have the answer, probably because there’s little to no challenge in bg3. I’ve decided though that the game is not about the technical challenge ( or any challenge for that matter ) but about the fact that you can freely bend the story to your wishes , and do things the way you want, and the problems you solve are the ones that, to some extent, you choose to create / address - what you call ‘problems’ and I agree with you.
This makes the game structurally different from COMI ( which is about solving puzzles so about meeting some kind of challenge ), but neither more nor less enjoyable- they’re just different games.
My older brother loved the Myst series, DoTT, Sam & Max and as a younger brother who used to sit and watch him play games, I got bored. His way of shoving me out the room because I would then hear him play GTA and not be allowed back in...
It's the same with any of those games. Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max. -- You need that logical and forward thinking mindset and an attention span greater than 3 seconds. It's an niche genre and not for everyone and now it's a genre that's lost with time just because how the world is nowadays. Who has four hours to point and click around a realm?
I meanwhile just wanted to frag folk and jump around a CTF map on Quake 3.
I don't do a ton of adventure gaming, but I have gone through most of the episodic Sam & Max games. I estimate about 1 walkthrough consult per 2 games overall, and about a 50/50 split between "oh crap I should have gotten that myself" and "oh, I was never going to get that" results (with the occasional "oh I was right and I just didn't click on the right thing or notice the tiny little widget" that really makes me glad I just looked).
Day of the Tentacle was probably the largest game I've done with 0 consults, though I was probably stuck enough to justify it a couple of times. One of the heights of the genre, there.
The absolute worst puzzle for me remains the infamous Broken Sword/Circle of Blood Irish goat scene:
Not only that but you do need a lot of free time as well. As a kid I had the patience and time to push through point and click games, now as an adult with responsibilities I don't. If I only have 30 minutes per day to spend on gaming it's gonna be too short to invest in those kinds of games but just enough time for a few rounds of Q3 arena or such.