Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
grumpygamer.com
grumpygamer.com
So you have that...
Loom, I think, was like that sometimes, but Monkey Island wasn't too bad. Sierra's King's Quest series, however, was notorious in this respect, where the thing to do was something arbitrary you could not reason to in a million years.
That's the kind of thing that sucks in adventure games. In real life, I can be creative to a very large degree because reality has content, specifically, to the degree that I grasp that reality. A ball of clay is a ball of clay, and because I understand what clay is, I know what I can do with it. But in a game, a ball of clay is just a symbol. There is no ball of clay. It is a nominal entity, an image or word plus some code that simulates maybe some aspects of it in very constrained ways (in adventure games, this is truly very narrow, as in, if user clicks these two things with this action, then show picture and display text, the end). And this might be okay if the author has arranged things sensibly, but sometimes you end up with truly bizarre ideas. You wonder how these things passed QA.
Then I got the full color walk through book.
As I followed the guide, it was mind boggling not only how little progress I had made, but just how many different ways and paths to different endings I had missed! You didn't necessarily soft lock yourself as easily as others, but you could very easily screw yourself out of other options surprisingly quick.
Then I played The Dig. By comparison, The Dig felt like an accessible masterpiece. I didn't feel like I was straining for the right hidden pixel either across environments. The story wasn't unforgiving. There were only two real endings, and relatively easy to backtrack to.
Can you elaborate? You are making a really strong statement of intent.
I tried to search ("monkey island 2 design criticism") for what you might mean, but I don't see any obvious description.
Give the jawbreaker to Blondebeard to loosen his gold tooth, then give him the pack of gum. When he blows the bubble with the tooth in it, pop it with the pin and the tooth will drop out. Get the gold tooth, then exit the shop. (To get the gold tooth on Mega-monkey, chew the pack of gum to get the chewed gum. Inhale from the helium balloon, use the gold tooth in the chewed gum and then chew the tooth in gum. It will float out the window of the shop and land in the mudpuddle outside. Use the pie pan in the mudpuddle to get the tooth).
You get the hang for these kinds of puzzles once you played a couple of them.
On the other hand what I hate most in adventure games are random logic puzzles to open a door or find out where you need to go next. This is usually a cheap way to slow the game down. Lucas Arts was guilty of this kind of thing after Ron Gilbert left in „The Dig“, too, which still was a great game nevertheless.
Thimbleweed Park, Kathy Rain, whispers of a machine, Disco Elyseum, Unusual Findings, Sexy Brutale, Darside Detective, blacksad, obra-dimm, takes two, Orwell, unheard, shadows of a doubt, 12 minutes…
I actually enjoy these slow-burn games a lot
Only a few weeks after the game's release date was announced, we heard a dorky blond named Ed speak from a hotel room in Hong Kong.
Gameplay was great to that point though.
- Hugo's House of Horrors
- Maniac Mansion
- The Goonies II
- The Cave
- Machinarium / Botanicula / Samorost (put together because they're, at their core, the same idea.)
- Love you to bits.
And I think these also give that adventure story feel (find objects & solve puzzles to progress a story), even if they don't transport the player to far-away locations
- The Room series
- There is no game
- The Rusty Lake series
- The Stanley Parable
- Tangle Tower
- Chuchel
Machinarium / Botanicula / Samorost / Chuchel are all great fun (and can be played with relatively young kids even)
MI2 also break's Ron's own rules ... extensively, including a bunch of things he didn't list that should also be rules, like "don't use a deus ex machina as an ending device" (which he did again in Return to Monkey Island, he's absolutely butchered that IP.)
One peeve I’ve always had is that in a game like disco elysium, I don’t feel like I (the player) am solving a mystery because dialogue trees are always leading you to the answer. Instead I’m just watching the guy on the screen solve it. Dialogue with an explicit tree would be rad
Is that based on the comic?
Still, I'm not sure what the definition of "Adventure Game" is. To me, it's usually a game with graphics at the top (not required but most common), and 4 or so lines of text at the bottom. Some times you walk a character around. Other times you just type "exit door", "open drawer", "take key" (or pick from a menu)
Those games might have been dead in some form (King Quest, Monkey Island, etc...) but the basic form has been alive and kicking (a) in the form of Japanese story games and (b) as indie games on places like itch.io. It's covered with "story adventure games"
Of course most of those games would benefit from this list of rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game#Decline_(2000%E...
They haven't really come back, in that form, except as appeals to afficionados. Deponia (2012-2016), Syberia (2002-), Dreamfall (1999-2017) did quite well, but I don't know how many people who hadn't played an adventure game before would willingly pick them up. Then there are nostalgia-bait games which Ron Gilbert is especially guilty of, e.g. Thimble Park, The Cave, Return to Monkey Island. You could also add the remake of Riven to that list.
If by Japanese story games you mean visual novels... they're not really the same genre, even if technically they have you moving around the place collecting things to solve puzzles. I'd also argue that anything David Cage has done (Farhenheit, Heavy Rain, etc.) are not adventure games, he chases after "interactive movies" as mentioned in the article.
The adventure game and the visual novel once occupied this position. By being a series of (potentially entirely pre-rendered) stills that could only be interacted with in a few predefined ways, you could make impressive-looking scenes even on 16-bit hardware. It would be a very long time before anything as impressive as Myst could be made to run in real time on consumer-grade hardware. I suspect a lot of people only bought these games because they looked pretty, and once that edge was gone, they realised that maybe they didn’t really like the genre in the first place.
Though there is also the simple fact that pure puzzle games can't compete with puzzle+action games (e.g. Zelda), even if the puzzles are somewhat reduced.
You can see a similar thing in movies: Highly successful Pixar movies are typically comedy+action, because mixing in action beats pure comedy in terms of entertainment.
The trend towards action is also present in other genres: Turn -based strategy games got mostly replaced with real-time strategy games, and turn-based RPGs got replaced with action RPGs where fighting is done in real time.
Would you consider them to be the same genre, an evolution, or a different genre (that perhaps Telltale spawned?)
But still very satisfying!
So, while adventure games didn’t take off like 3D shoot-em-ups that doesn’t mean they actually declined even if they aren’t posting 200+ million GTA 5 numbers. Monkey Island 2 special edition sold 459k units on steam that’s far better than the original Money Island 2’s 25k on launch.
They have the presentation of a visual novel (first person perspective, characters look straight out at you, most of game is paging through dialogue), but they also have gameplay elements of traditional adventure games (looking around multiple locations for clues, try every item in the inventory to see what response you get, etc.) - I think in Japan they'd call that an adventure game for being overly interactive, but in the West we'd still call it a visual novel.
I haven't tried the Zero Escape series, but after a quick look at one on Youtube, it does look like that same mix of visual novel with adventure game / puzzle elements?
I recommend people play Life is Strange.
Even so, those aren't akin to the classic adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island, etc. They are more like "Choose your own adventure" novels - but a major criticism is you always end up in the same place at the end so your choices are largely irrelevant.
> They are more like "Choose your own adventure" novels - but a major criticism is you always end up in the same place at the end so your choices are largely irrelevant.
They are like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, but I think it's unfair to say you end up with the same ending. I know games where, based on your decisions, people may die in the middle of the game. Whether they're alive or not does lead to a different story.
Even in The Walking Dead series, there's a game with a very different ending depending on who you choose to get killed.
The games are much easier than the old adventure games of the 90's. For me, though, that's a blessing. I simply cannot devote as much time to solving those types of games, and I appreciate they've made adventure games for someone like myself.
The point is that if you liked adventure games, you'll likely enjoy these games as well.
Everything else is UI. You can have traditional adventure games, first-person adventure games, third-person adventure games that are not really traditional, and so forth.
Just my opinion though. Traditionally "adventure game" meant a sort of text-driven story game without combat or dexterity-based tasks, and it often still does. But I see the term get applied more broadly than that.
Resonance has some unique mechanics that are actually effective at restoring some of the reactivity and world-building flavor that was lost when adventure games moved from parser to point-and-click interfaces (while still using a solely point-and-click interface). It's also a really good game on top of that.
Though some people tend to consider visual novels as being distinct from adventure games, with a stipulation that a visual novel has no "overworld" (i.e. you don't walk around on a map - neither graphically nor textually - you just move from one "scene" to the next. You move forward in time rather than N/S/E/W in space.)
I think the way around this is to make things less trickier, but at some point you get a story-based game/visual novel or maybe a "walking simulators" like firewatch.
Two that always bug me:
- game narrative introduces urgency (“we have to hurry up and catch X before it’s too late!”), but time doesn’t matter at all. And in fact you’re encouraged to grind away on sidequest and collect items before continuing that urgent main story
- early game has a city surrounded by weak monsters and some local needs you to hunt down a few that have been bothering them. two towns over there’s another town of normal people surrounded by monsters 100x stronger but they don’t care or need your help.
But in context dissonance the price scaling is just weird when you start to think about, just how rich comparatively the people in later areas are? Why isn't there any people who retired? Just bring that pile of gold even from middle game area to starter area and well you have enough money for rest of your live...
I'm not just talking point and click adventure games, I mean any game that breaks its own rules just gets on my nerves. If it's a Sci-Fi setting you tell me there's FTL, fine but then when I can't use that in a context where it it follows the other game rules to do a thing I want to do, that just ruins it for me. How many open World RPGs are there with just invisible walls in a place that looks totally passable? When in cutscenes or story elements the characters can just walk through that area or have no problem turning on the FTL.
I know it's a lot of effort, but attention to detail hearing about the end result is the only real fix this kind of shit.
This is describing the rules of a game as related to the narrative of the game.
A ludonarrative dissonance would be the narrative of the game being "we need to hurry and rescue the thing!" but then the rules/mechanics of the game having no punishment for not actually hurrying and rescuing the thing or maybe no support for even understanding the time taken by the player.
Similarly the mechanics of the game can clash with the narrative. The narrative says the player character is a strong hero but then with the game mechanics they're killed by a rat in the forest.
> I wrote this back in 1989...
The guy was making workd wide popular games while I was still at school, And write this as part of a mission to ground his next game design and shared it internally. Plus this was pre www! Then he republished it years later
> It is bad design to put puzzles and situations into a game that require a player to die in order to learn what not to do next time.
I feel like this is not good advice anymore. Nowadays dying is more common in games and less intrusive. In some games it’s even canonical that the character is dying. It’s become less intrusive and thus more ok. Even for puzzles I think this is bad advice. Puzzles probably engage the player more when they’re solved right or solved wrong; vs when they’re either solved right or in limbo of not being solved yet. It encourages feedback on your solving path.
I’d say Super Meat Boy was probably a big turning point as far as that goes.
Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936015 - Sept 2022 (57 comments)
Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625578 - March 2020 (104 comments)
Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15569221 - Oct 2017 (1 comment)
That paragraph recounts the reasons why RTS games never work for me. When I'm gaming, I want to do things in my own time, not be on someone else's clock.
If you like doing that on your own, go for it. But for me it just becomes boring and not fun. Not fun because if I choose to spend a reasonable amount of time I know I’m leaving good things on the table, and boring if I play every turn optimally. With a time limit, the game becomes about prioritization and making the most of a limited resource (time).
It can be badly done in a turn based game too, see XCom 2.
If you don't like RTS games you don't like RTS games, but this is more about, say, a RTS where you also have a fixed time limit for missions.
That wouldn't make any sense, since nothing in Monkey Island moves.
(Exceptions: During Act I, the cook periodically leaves the SCUMM Bar kitchen to visit the tables. Also during Act I, you can trigger the shopkeeper to walk to the Sword Master's house; he will return when triggered by your actions in the shop. Movement can happen between Acts. On Monkey Island, you have to lead a monkey from its location to somewhere else. Herman Toothrot will show up in the cannibal village at some point after you're already required to have picked up the banana picker; his being there is not relevant to anything. Otherwise, nothing ever moves.)
(Among many other ways, which you can find here: https://www.maniacmansionfan.50webs.com/waystolose.html)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240529033339/https://www.mania...
It's still a bizarrely high-pressure moment built into a game that otherwise has no such mechanics. I always hated coming to it.
It would have been at least as easy to tie the disintegration of the mugs to scene transitions, which would have eliminated the time pressure at no cost to the game.
I disagree. I hated turn limits in XCom1 (we're talking about remakes, not original 1993 game, right?), because they weren't really justified by the game world, but in XCom2 when you are the scrappy resistance on quick hit and run missions it really helps build up tension.
Yes.
> not original 1993 game, right?
The original 1993 game has a great example of how to put time pressure on the player without an explicit time pressure: terror missions. Diddle around and you get an army of chrysalids on your butt.
> you are the scrappy resistance on quick hit and run missions it really helps build up tension.
They had a demo day. I played the first mission, or maybe made it to the second. Ran out of turns because I explored an empty corner on the way to the objective. Uninstalled.
And yes, i finished the first xcom remake multiple times. Hated every bomb disarm mission with a passion.
If you ask me, they kinda painted themselves into a corner with the aliens on fixed patrol routes that you could just wait around until the position was perfect. You couldn't do that in the original xcom. But instead of fixing that, they added ... turn limits. It's just bad game design.
Possibly too much world of warcraft. I've seen this trend in games starting a few years after wow was out. People thinking that if Blizzard does it into a MMO, it's okay to do it in a single player game too.
That may work in a rpg, but look where it got the tactics game in xcom 2.
Both of these endings are ruinous to the world he so carefully and beautifully imagined. I just can't grasp what message he was trying to send by trashing his own IP that way. I would honestly like to know. Is it like Notch with Minecraft? Were Monkey Island fans endlessly harassing him? The purpose of Return to Monkey Island seemed to be to address that awkward ending, and (spoiler alert) he doubled down.
Secondly the puzzles are hard but very very reasonable, as in I never felt they were unfair. I think they did that as a lesson from the classics, where sometimes Brute Force was the only way objects and environment needed to interact to unlock more of the game.
An enormous amount of thought was put into it, and I hope more games come out like it. I'm truly tired of FPS, grinding 'work simulator ' type games, and multiplayer games which predominate on Steam.
I disagree. Discovering what it is you're supposed to do is one of the most exciting parts of such games. Myst is the classic example of this. It's like those movies, like the Bourne Identity, where the character wakes up and doesn't know who they are or what they are supposed to do, and has to figure it out as they go along.
Aside: What Remains of Edith Finch is perhaps the most powerful narrative game ever. Not an adventure game per se. But extremely powerful storytelling.
Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It (1989)
Not necessarily. The ending sequence with the plane on a motorway in "Full Throttle" had me on the edge of my seat when I played it for the first time, and on replays, too.
HHGttG was incredibly well written and creative, but I think it was probably a bit 'mid' as an adventure game.
They never made a point-and-click adventure game, but they were the kings of the adventure game when you could make a pretty compelling argument that the images the home computers of the time could produce were much cruder than what words could evoke in the mind of the player.
("flouted" not "flaunted")
Generating images in Adventure Games was a bottleneck since they were mainly static and fixed within a small set. Now you can generate original images based on the adventure situation.
LLMs are terrible for this sort of thing.
I get why the authors do it …. they don’t want to be sexist, so they flip he to she.
It’s much easier to read the gender neutral “they” rather than “she”.
For me anyway.
We learned that "he" is neutral unless the subject is already known to be male. I agree that using "she" in a neutral sense is somewhat distracting.
“They” was more common but came off as very informal or low-register (to those taught the other way, at least).
It did take me a long time to stop going “wait, who? I missed who we’re talking about” and start searching backwards in the text when encountering gender-neutral “she”. Did indeed make things hard to read for years.
When speaking about "the player," you're not just speaking about one player, but anywhere from tens to tens of millions of players. That's a "they." And as they're all acting individually and independently within tens to tens of millions of individual game sessions, it makes sense to treat that "they" singularly.
So from that perspective, it's not really a desexed reference, but a reference to a multitude of people. But even if you're talking about the person hearing a Catholic confession, and it would always be safe to refer to each instantiated member of the class as "he," "they" still makes sense. They are a bunch of priests.
I'm sure you're aware that it's usually obvious in context, like many ambiguous uses of language. For example,
> Every time the player has to restore a saved game, or pound [their] head on the desk in frustration
Changing "his" to "their" doesn't make the phrase any more difficult to read, imo. Maybe it's just something you'll pick up with practice.
I’m from the past and that’s not my recollection.
The game design advices seems fine though.
[edit, some years ago compared to 2002]
The first Monkey Island. Of course the design advice seems fine, since he (and the old LucasArts) applied it in several acclaimed titles that make all the "best computer games ever" lists after the article was written :)
Grim Fandango was very good, but honestly the genre got worse after it, not better. Overall the introduction of 3d to the adventure genre had a pretty shaky start. Although there were a couple of exceptions, the genre in general backpedalled for a while.
It was at first some years ago with the 'indie' studios publishing on Steam I've played nice adventure games again. 'We Were Here'. Quite good but not very polished.
I think the early 3d mix of 2d backgrounds and 3d characters was allright. Like Grim Fandango or Resident Evil. But ye many of the early pure 3d games didn't work out at all.
The article stresses that the game shouldn't be thought of as a movie, but... having played some high-budget adventure games and some low-budget adventure games, it's clear that the quality of the game is basically just the quality of the plot. Good writing and bad art and software make for a good adventure game. Bad writing and good art and software make for a terrible adventure game.