Loaded up Post Mortem the other day

[IncendiaryDevice]

And my God that was shit.

Well, I must admit I didn't get very far so my claim might be wrong...

But when it gave me a "puzzle" where I had 5 lock-pick keys to fit into 4 sockets in a keyhole, each socket having 3 different positions, and no sound indicators at to when one key was in the right place, I worked out the permutations and...

UNINSTALLED

Fucking "The Adventure Company", what a bunch of fucking absolute retards. "If you get stuck in the game, go to our website where we farm clicks for advertising space - Haaaaapppy adventuring!"

CUNTS

And their game of the book And Then There Were None...

I've read the book twice, seen countless film and television adaptations, I know that book inside out and, yes, the first five chapters of this game are amazing... then... what the fuck are you on with a door with a combination safe-lock? And no fucking clues whatsoever, what-the-fuck do you mean you have to combine 3 random notes to get the solution? Who in all that's fucking mortal would even try the permutaions of combining 3 random bits of paper from an inventory of 15 bits of paper? Who would fucking combine notes in the fucking first place?

And then going through the walkthrough from that point... oh, a medicine bottle is hidden in some long grass in one random screen out of 100, like it's a fucking where's fucking wally game only Wally is only on one page in the entire fucking book. How about the medicine is in the fucking Doctor's bag, which you can click on all game but it tells you not to take anything from it, EVEN WHEN THE DOCTOR'S FUCKING DEAD - WELL, HOW ABOUT I COULD HAVE TAKEN HIS STETHOSCOPE, YOU KNOW, FOR THE COMBINATION SAFE, THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN FUCKING LOGICAL.

Fucking assholes "If you get stuck in the game, go to our website where we farm clicks for advertising space - Haaaaapppy adventuring!"

The fucking Adventure Company

WANKERS

And then I'm just getting into the groove of Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, breezing through the excellent logic problems until... suddenly, out of nowhere, I'm stuck on the streets of Paris with not one fucking thing to do, a complete and absolute dead end. Talked to everyone, played with everything in the inventory with everyone, pixel-hunted every single square inch of the available screens for anything, absolutely anything, that would advance the game. Fucking NOTHING.

"If you get stuck in the game, go to our website where we farm clicks for advertising space - Haaaaapppy adventuring!"

The Fucking cunting wanking Adventure bolloxing Company

COMPLETE AND UTTER DICK GOBBLING SHEEP SHAGGING TURD MUNCHING SMALL PRICKED FUCKFACES

 

[WhiteGuts]

 

[FeelTheRads]

And then I'm just getting into the groove of Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, breezing through the excellent logic problems until

Perhaps you were looking for Sokoban and not adventure games?

 

[abnaxus]

 

[1451]

This is a problem most adventure games have. Because most of them are garbage. It is the easiest kind of genre to make a game for and this is the reason it attracts talentless hacks who aim to be game developers.
Inane puzzles are my bane and the sole reason I came to stop playing adventure games altogether. My final ounce of patience ran out when I was playing daedalic's games. Now I stay away. This is why adventure games died, because of the over saturation of mediocrities used as quick and easy cash grabs.

My only hope for now is book of unwritten tales 2, it comes out near the end of February and I hope it will be good as the first one and not like the abomination that was the expansion.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Perhaps you were looking for Sokoban and not adventure games?

Yes, I know, I can appear over the top in my posts, but I like to get it all out, you know, because if you don't, if you mealy mouse your wording some people simply wont understand that there's a problem, they'll chime in with "Oooh, that bit, what you have to do there is... blah blah blah" when, yes, I am quite capable of looking at a walkthrough thank-you very much, the issue with these games is not the puzzles themselves, not the stories, not the cut-scenes, not the camera view, it is entirely and completely how they choose to present the game to the player and what they choose to include in that particular game. That's it. The first post is how I respond to these games when they fuck it up. The first post is honest feed back. And I'll get onto how they could improve their games incredibly easily later in this discussion post.

This is a problem most adventure games have. Because most of them are garbage. It is the easiest kind of genre to make a game for and this is the reason it attracts talentless hacks who aim to be game developers.
Inane puzzles are my bane and the sole reason I came to stop playing adventure games altogether. My final ounce of patience ran out when I was playing daedalic's games. Now I stay away. This is why adventure games died, because of the over saturation of mediocrities used as quick and easy cash grabs.

The issue I have with these games is two-fold, and both overlap into each other:

1. How to improve the presentation of the game

In the above example for Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, the reason I got stuck was entirely due to presentation. For this particular task you are sent back to a location you are familiar with, a street in Paris, having explored it all already, only this time it is night-time. Everything is exactly the same except 3 of the NPCs have moved and 2 of the NPCs are no longer there and all your previously open doors are now locked. And the game starts you at the street.

However, you do not need to be at street level for the next stage of the game. The only things you get at street level are two meaningless fluff dialogues with the three remaining NPCs. So... what is the game asking me to do? It's asking me to potentially re-walk over the entire level, re-click everything I have already clicked. In this re-clicking they still make all the doors to every single property clickable, you see a door, you can click on it. After clicking on 10 locked doors, having to wait for a mini-cutscene while the character tries the door and tells you that, alas it's locked and you can't interact with it, you are pretty damn fed-up of clicking on doors.

I am at the stage where my brain just say's "locked door usual, move on". Now, for this particular stage all you needed was to be placed directly outside the relevent door and restricted from moving anywhere else until you had unlocked that one relevant door. Simples. But, no, by the time I get to the relevant door, I'm so fed up of clicking on locked doors I'm not even registering the character cut-scene dialogue any more and I miss the relevance of the "supplemental" addition to the cutscene where the character says "I can see the key in the lock". That's it, that's all it was.

There was no need to have the character start at street level, and there was no need to have all the doors clickable with their own cut-scene. If the player had been started in the right place and the game kept you there until you had done the puzzle and the game didn't waste your time so much, everything would have been fine. Instead, it's designed to be fucking irritating, either by design or because the people who make it are fucking retarded trolls. It is not a puzzle to have to look for the puzzle in the first place... that's dickheadery. It is neither fluff nor puzzle to have countless meaningless stop-start red-herring false-click cut-scene breaks ad nausea... that's dickheadery.

Like-wise, in And Then There Were None, you have no end of false-click barely even fluff horrific cut-scene inducing, time wasting, fucking infuriating objects throughout the entire house. And every single time you have to look for a new whatever it is your looking for, you have to go round every fucking room again and re-click on all this horseshit, over and over and over and over again. So, finally, when it asks you to look for some medicine, will you finally get to have use for that clickable in each and every bathroom? in each and every suitcase? In each and every personal bag? Of course you fucking don't, it's hidden in some long grass on screen number 67. That's not puzzling... that's dickheadery. That's called "wasting people's time". And, if it is a game where you're supposed to be a detective, why is there no "clue" as to the whereabouts of the medicine. I did not buy a game called "where's waldo, the insane edition", I bought a detective adventure game.

2. What belongs in the game

In And Then There Where None, the game was great while it adhered to the book. Really nice. I was right on the verge of imagining the texts of praise I was going to lavish it with on the codex and fuck the moaning minis, but, no, it suddenly decides to completely forget about the source material and completely invent it's own complete game that has nothing whatsoever to do with the book, starting off with a safe-lock puzzle on a door. Why the fuck was this even there? Nobody attempts any elaborate ways to try and get off the island in the book and there was no need to do that here, all that door leads to is a means to fail to escape the island (and hide some crucial objects).

It's like they got hold of the text and just said fuck-you we're adding our own convoluted horseshit to this because we're fucking mental. And why does the door even have a combination safe-lock on it? And why does the clue have to be a mish-mash of completely unrelated items? Why not the stethoscope from the doctor's carry-case? Why does it have to be insane to qualify as a difficult puzzle? What is wrong with simply finding the code by looking at one sheet of paper that meant nothing to you until you found the safe-door, not "easy, this is the code", but just something that obviously fits to the door but requires a bit of a logical work-out? What is with all this horseshit?

At one point in the game you have to attach a submarine's propeller to a fruit squeezer in order to put apple juice on a thorny bush so some goats can clear a way for you through a fucking bush... And you're sitting there just thinking "what meds are these fuckers on?" and more to the point "what the fuck has any of this got to do with Agatha Christie's classic And Then There Were None"??????

Now look at Post Mortem. The puzzle is 5 lockpicks for 4 slots each slot having 3 different positions. Right, the guy you are playing is the detective. He's the pro at using lockpicks. I've never used a lockpick in my life. This guy would know when one of his lockpicks slips into the right position. He would hear a click and say "ahh, that's got it!" and move to the next lockpick. NOT having this feature is what takes you out the game, because what the fuck is a porfessional detective doing fumbling around with lockpicks for 3 hours? He's a fucking crap detective.

What exactly is the problem with just having the lockpick case and then assuming this guy knows what he's doing and lets himself in with them, like any other game on this planet. The puzzle was getting the lockpicks, not fucking using them. But let's be kind, let's just accept that the game wants to give us a puzzle. What is this "puzzle"? It's trial and error. Fucking infuriating trial and error, doing the same thing over and over and over again. Where have we seen this mindset before...? Oh yes, all the other games. This isn't puzzling... this is dickheadery.

If they are desperate to have a puzzle of that nature at that point in the game, why not just the good ol' safe-box in the room for some important clue (see above for safe-box puzzles).

Summing up

When you play an adventure game, the story is the most important aspect. Anything that fucks that up fucks the game up. Does what we are doing "fit" within the game? Secondly Adventure Games are about solving logic problems, or performing some kind of activity before moving on with the plot, something which makes you feel uniquely engaged with the game, from puzzles, to quests, to NPCs manipulation/dialogue to making things from items you find, but these only work if they are NOT designed to hinder you enjoyment and flow of the core narrative.

We live in a world of walkthroughs where people will play almost the entire game with a walkthrough and then claim it's a great game because the story was good. That is so not the way to approach these games, that's akin to the people who want to remove combat from RPGs. How about just an icon in the corner of the screen that says "hints", you can have either a level 1 hint or a level 2 hint or a level 3 hint, by using a hint your score is reduced. A 1st level hint is still quite tricky, a 2nd level hint is kinda giving it to you and a 3rd level hint is sticking it right in your face, like a line from a walkthrough. At the end of the game you are given a skill rating. Each player can play however they want, no different from turning friendly fire on and off in an RPG, or many other examples where such a system is used. Instead, what do we see devs doing? Just a "skip puzzle" option, what the fuck good is that, if I'm "skipping" a puzzle, I'm skipping the fucking game...

 

[FeelTheRads]

Yes, I know, I can appear over the top in my posts, but I like to get it all out...

Actually I was baffled by your claim that The Sleeping Dragon has "excellent logic problems" which I assumed to be the retarded crate moving every two steps. Hence the Sokoban reference.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Actually I was baffled by your claim that The Sleeping Dragon has "excellent logic problems" which I assumed to be the retarded crate moving every two steps. Hence the Sokoban reference.

Ahhh, gotcha.

Yes, it does like its boxes. No, what I mean is, for example, you see a bird's nest is clickable, but out of reach, the obvious item to reach it is your newly acquired metal rod, and, joy of joys, the metal rod pokes the bird's nest to the floor. You then get outside and see a clickable fire-required puzzle, so you place the bird's nest on it and use the magnifying glass to start a fire. This is all wonderfully common-sense and based on basic logic (it's early in the game so you'd be expecting things to be 'easier' if you consider this kind of stuff 'too easy', but it nevertheless, either way, bodes very well for the future of the game).

Had this been The Adventure Company at their very best worst then you'd have been told the rod was incorrect and you'd've had to find a microwave oven to take the plate to frizby at the light fixture to make it swing at the nest. Once you'd got outside you'd have been told that the magnifying glass isn't correct and you'd've had to go back and search the previous 43 screens for a match hidden underneath a rock, the rock not clickable and only the back-end of the match sticking out, one pixel square of clickable.

Likewise, the quest in the streets of Glastonbury was both funny and followed a logical path of going round all the NPCs and taking an interest in what they were saying. I thought that was a great NPC quest in every regard. It's just so funny when you're in conversation with a guy at the end of this problem and the John Cleese character wanders past you in the background of your conversation saying, "off to get birdie" and then watch him pass by again a few sentences later with a 12 bore in his hands. It's these kind of extras that really boost a game's overall bonuses. Heck, that's even better NPC'ing than Bioware at their best.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Finished off Broken Sword 3 The Sleeping Dragon a few days ago.

This one didn't turn out to be that bad in comparison to the other two ranted about here. I had to use a walkthrough a total of 3 times, each time for retarded game presentation reasons:

1. The one mentioned above about the over-use of door cut-scenes.
2. One of those combine two random objects then attach them to a random environment object 'puzzles' - Dip your wick in a tub of grease paint then put it in a crushed plastic cup then attach it to a hot stage light - when the puzzle just asked for a liquid grease, why not just take the already existing pot of grease? Why did a stage light have to be the liquidating source, why did they even use the phrase liquid instead of melt if melting is what it wanted and not liquidation, that would stop me running to all the sources of water and get me to run to heat sources...
3. You get this wig from a suitcase that, obviously, needs bleaching to make a disguise. You then have to distract the chef to get the bleach. But there is no means to distract him. Unfortunately, it turned out you needed to re-click on the empty suitcase that no longer had the intractable cog-wheel option because for that one solitary 'puzzle' you had to ignore the rules of the game and interact with something where it suggested you no longer needed to interact with it, to get to a secret compartment in the suitcase (while many objects in the game had cog-wheels that never produced any form of interaction).

But, essentially I was overall happy with the game aside from the retarded methods of presenting it. I didn't even mind the box puzzles, though I was slightly insulted by them. There were plenty of puzzles that made me very happy, such as the light beams and the floor traps and the characters across the river genuine puzzles. The humour was consistent and fully in keeping with the series. Definitely a decline from one and two, but mostly acceptable to good.