Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, agreed. Many games did the same, but that didn't make it good.

On the "cruelty scale", that'd be a "Cruel", since it has a "walking dead" state of "you did it wrong a while back and have to start over":

https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/cruelty.html (and https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/cruelty-revisited.html )

Early King's Quest games were in that same category of "Cruel", where an incorrect choice is not immediately obvious as a mistake.

I think King's Quest V was closer to "Nasty" (because it can catch you off guard with things you fail, but it'll be obvious that you did something wrong). But there are a couple of exceptions that keep it in "Cruel", though: you can eat the wrong item when you're starving, and in some cases if you miss picking up an item you can't go back for it, so if you didn't see it at all then you have to go back to an earlier save. That one definitely required keeping a full array of save files. (Very satisfying to complete, though.)

Even King's Quest VI, which is much more forgiving, has some cases of "you need the right item before proceeding into this section you won't be able to leave (for a while)". But it goes out of its way to advertise those "points of no return", so I'd rate it firmly at "Nasty" rather than "Cruel", with the asterisk that there are ~3 notable points where you might have to go back by more than just your most recent action, but it'll be obvious you want save points at those points to go back to if you find you can't progress inside. (Before the catacombs, before the land of the dead, before entering the castle.) The entry to the catacombs even offers you the chance to go prepare further, if and only if you don't have everything you need.

The cruelty scale is somewhat orthogonal to difficulty, and misses another axis; you can have punishingly difficult puzzles seem to have logic, and punishingly difficult puzzles that do not.

Ending up in "walking dead" with no hints that you are in that state means "Cruel" but it's different depending on where things go next. If the guy buying your skimmer in SQ1 had a visible jetpack, then once you know you need a jetpack later in the game, you have a hint as to where to go back to. This would make it just a slightly more cruel form of "trial by death" (which was kind of expected in a lot of early adventure games).

w.r.t KQ5, not saving the mouse from the cat is something that will get you if you haven't played enough Sierra games to know that missing a single random event with a short timer is likely enough to render the game unwinnable; when I played it I just said "damn, I think I need to reload" when the mouse died. IIRC there are no hints in the cellar that saving the mouse would have helped you, but I could be wrong.

> The cruelty scale is somewhat orthogonal to difficulty, and misses another axis; you can have punishingly difficult puzzles seem to have logic, and punishingly difficult puzzles that do not.

I'd agree with that. I dislike "read the author's mind" puzzles.

> w.r.t KQ5, not saving the mouse from the cat is something that will get you if you haven't played enough Sierra games to know that missing a single random event with a short timer is likely enough to render the game unwinnable; when I played it I just said "damn, I think I need to reload" when the mouse died.

I would classify the mouse as "Nasty", yeah; you know immediately that you missed something.

But, by contrast, you can eat the custard pie rather than the leg of lamb and be in a walking-dead state (and it's not even obvious when you reach the yeti, you don't go "if only I still had a custard pie"); that one is definitely "Cruel".

There are many cases of Cruel that are simply "fail to pick up an item in a place you can't return to" cases (which are more forgivable, I think). But even if you ignore those, there are many other cases of Cruel walking-dead states.

Getting seen by the cat in the castle (not completely obvious you've done something irrevocable) will result in you getting caught later. And the most annoying, I think: if you are too good at the game's moon logic, you can use the peas on the monster the first time it tries to capture you, never get caught, and thus fail to obtain the required item (cheese) from the cell. That one is firmly "you think you solved the puzzle and can proceed" walking-dead.

(Also, the fact that Mordack can just randomly show up in the castle and kill you is just gratuitously obnoxious. You can do everything right, and still fail for reasons of complete randomness that you can't avert.)

KQ4 suffers many of the same issues.

1. Reach location A.

2. You need to "get equipped with Item X" here, though it's for a future puzzle you haven't even encountered yet, so you don't even realize you need said item.

3. Reach location B with the puzzle.

4. Realize you don't have the item required.

5. Location A is permanently inaccessible, so you can't even go back and look for it.

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