Scratches - Director's Cut -- It was great. Now I want MOAR!

[Jasede]

First of, I never played a "Myst-style" adventure before. Ever. However, I grew up with King's Quest and Monkey Island and I could write a King's Quest 6 and Sam and Max walkthrough even though I haven't touched either game in ten years.

Scratches!

I acquired this fine gem of adventure gaming just recently for 25$. It came in a nice, solid cardboard box with well-done cover-art, but the manual was on the DVD, which was disappointing. After installing it, and afterwards, the ~450 MB graphics update I started to play.

And now get this: I didn't regret this purchase at all. The game played like a text-adventure [Good Thing]. This must have been the most scary experience since System Shock 2 or Robbing the Cradle. The horror was subtle and intelligent, relying on sound and build-up and the story was intelligent and left room for speculation. The music is exceptionally well done, the puzzles easy but not too easy (perfect for beginners of this style of adventure) and best of all, it's made by some indie developers in Argentinia.

So go play this game.
But that's not the point of this thread - rather:

Please recommend me some more modern adventure games. Prove to me that adventures aren't dead yet. What constitutes modern? Everything past, say, The Longest Journey. I really have no idea if there's still good adventurers around but I think there might be, for they seem to be far from dead (I saw more adventures than RPG stocked in one of the game shops I sometimes browse). So please, recommend some! Are Nibiru, Still Life, Silent Moment [something like that. A strange title with silent and moment in it. I believe ti has something to do with a-bombs?] etc, etc worth checking out?

 

[SuicideBunny]

still life played like the typical point and click adventure, but the story had its moments, and some scenes were rather nice.

dark earth doesn't really qualify as a pure adventure game, or as modern judged by the longest journey, but it was a rather nice game with multiple solutions and killable plot npcs.

if you say tlj, you've gotta say dreamfall too.

there was also some humorous adventure game not that long ago that had skills which increased with usage. problem is that i only read about it, and have no idea what it was called, or whether the implementation was any good.

 

[Karl]

I didn't like Scratches at all.
It was alright for an indie game, but still had everything thats wrong with adventures.

Anyway, lookie here: http://www.adventuregamers.com/ and here http://www.adventure-treff.de/

I suggest taking a look at the recently released adventures, like from the last two years or so. Sam & Max is recommended, maybe even Tunguska or Wintersun too, if you like that kind of style. Overclocked, from the guys who did The Moment of Silence (sucky), is supposedly quite decent. Dreamfall sucks however, just like The Boring Journey.

Keep an eye on the upcoming games like A Vampyre Story, Mata Hari and Grey Matter.

 

[Shagnak]

What's that surreal fully 3D adventure game, where everyone in the town is on schedules and such, and history keeps repeating itself. A recent release, I think. Possibly with dodgy VO.

I read it about it in a magazine a few months ago and can't for the life of me remember.

EDIT:
Found it - Pathologic
Eurogamer review

It's a 6 out of 10 game. I've come to a sort of peace with that in writing this. But it's probably the most interesting and brilliant 6 out of 10 game you'll find. £25 is far too much for a poorly translated, dated game. But at the same time, there's a reason this won every Russian Game of the Year award in 2005. It's the result of extremely clever writers not being married with extremely talented game developers. To think what this would have been in the hands of a funded team is too depressing. As it stands, it's a wonderful obscurity to explore, a thousand caveats accepted and understood, but when it appears on the bargain shelves.

Was released end of last year, so not as recent as I thought, and released in Russia a year earlier than that.

"Interesting and brilliant", but "really broken"? Sounds like something for the SGLF!

 

[gromit]

Re: Scratches - Director's Cut -- It was great. Now I want M

There was some modern adventure game set in Africa or India, forgot the name; stopped playing it after having to check a walkthrough... in order to make nightfall come, so I could go to bed (the current "puzzle.") Turns out you have to walk halfway down a screen that leads only to a previously-collected item and a clearly still-blocked door, so a fucking "oh look, it's nightfall now" cutscene can play. Yes, okay, any 'classic' adventure game had the potential for lots of aimless wandering, but it was as a means to an end, not the literal solution to one of its puzzles, preceded by a pixel-hunt, a couple myst-style 'play with this weird thing' puzzles (like whichever of the Still Life games had the Rubik's fusebox, who designs that in life OR a game?) and one or two other cases of "time to visit this previously featureless screen / click this previously unclickable object," all followed by a "jungle cat eats birds in the zoo" minigame that ran at 0-2 fps on my 9800 because they dropped out the purty Sokal stuff for for nothin-special 3d graphics and didn't optimize.

The trend towards mechanical, puzzle-game, puzzles in adventures... I'm done fighting it, whatever, but some of the other stuff is major. It's like the folk behind some of these new ones don't understand why the genre died, and fill them up with awful bouts of nonsense. Monkey 2 on Mega got pretty dodgy / mean in a few places IIRC, but pixel-hunts and "oh wrong plank" aside, it's not like they kidnapped Wally without showing you, when you weren't on your way to see him anyway, and then put the whole damn show on hold until you finally walk into his shop at an undetermined point in your desperate hunt for gameplay.

TLJ is the last one that really grabbed me. The new Sam & Max is good fun, of course, but gets kind of sparse on the items / objects (which has the thankful side-effect of next to no pixel hunt, but still) and the solutions are usually a lot more apparent resultingly - though the last few episodes were better about at least giving you some lines for "wrong" choices. The first Syberia was a good ride, and even though its got a lot of puzzle-game-puzzles it still has multiple, and even ends with one of. those old-fashioned "fuck up someone's shit" puzzles. I never finished the 2nd. There's that other one people seem to like, too, starts with some clever item and environment usage in a forensic environment and then turns into sliding-tile picture completion and baking cookies with a recipe needlessly obfuscated by cutesy nicknames for its ingredients - have at if you're so desperate for games you'll spend time trying to figure out if "comfort" or "hugs and kisses" is brown sugar. God forbid you follow the recipe explicitly but not please the interface's whims; you'll go mad.

 

[Ratatosk]

You should all try this one: The Snow Prank Redemption

 

[Nedrah]

Well, I hear <A HREF="http://rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=21421">Culpa Innata</a> is supposed to be rather good.

 

[eth]

Re: Scratches - Director's Cut -- It was great. Now I want M

There's that other one people seem to like, too, starts with some clever item and environment usage in a forensic environment and then turns into sliding-tile picture completion and baking cookies with a recipe needlessly obfuscated by cutesy nicknames for its ingredients - have at if you're so desperate for games you'll spend time trying to figure out if "comfort" or "hugs and kisses" is brown sugar. God forbid you follow the recipe explicitly but not please the interface's whims; you'll go mad.

still life played like the typical point and click adventure, but the story had its moments, and some scenes were rather nice.

Wallace it wasn't just that.. it was supposed to be a detective game. At some point your dad makes a comment about that damn cookies. Most people would understand at this point that it was just an irrelevant comment and forget about it. Yes? No! You come back later and you really have to make those damn cookies for no apparent reason. Otherwise the game just stuck there if you don't. So just before you head into the kitchen you think of something like that:
1. By entering the citchen some video will popup that shows you to make the damn cookies, OR
2. You 'll click somewhere in the citchen and you 'll automatically make them.

Yes? No! The damn cookies is a puzzle game! There's a recipie there! Its in fact the most complicated puzzle game you came up until now in your whole detective career in the game! And the worst of it? There is that sick logic behind it which involves finding out how the developer of this specific puzzle correlates terms like "comfort" to "butter" or whatever (without providing ANY clue about it), in the same manner that i could have in my mind "potatoes" correlated to "multi-headed dicks".
And no i didn't like either the start of it when after collecting some but not all the clues in the scene of the 1st murder while trying to either leave the area or leave the tools in the bag you pretty much get a message from the game like: "No, there's more pixelhunting to do"...

 

[ghostdog]

I didn't really like Scratches, the world was dead and the story didn't motivate me at all. Well maybe the story was a bit better than the average myst game (though reading long and poorly written journals is not a good way to get into the plot of an adventure game) and the puzzles managed to fit a bit in the plot, but it still didn't cut it for me. The only recent adventure that has an fps view (but it's not really a myst-clone) that I found really good was Post Mortem. I've tried many other recent adventures like The Indigo Profecy and the Tonguska Experiment but they were mediocre and I didn't bother to finish them.

 

[zer]

Re: Scratches - Director's Cut -- It was great. Now I want M

Please recommend me some more modern adventure games. Prove to me that adventures aren't dead yet. What constitutes modern? Everything past, say, The Longest Journey. I really have no idea if there's still good adventurers around but I think there might be, for they seem to be far from dead (I saw more adventures than RPG stocked in one of the game shops I sometimes browse). So please, recommend some!

Anchorhead. Yes it's text only but also best IF- tittle i 've played so far. One from the best adventures of all time. Exellent imitation H.P. Lovecraft as well.

 

[Jasede]

I played that thrice already. :/

And it's better written than Lovecraft, but that's not terribly difficult.

 

[Lumpy]

Scratches was awesome in my opinion, because it gave you a small environment and had you interact with every bit of it. You ended up getting attached to the house, which can't be said about other adventure game locations.

 

[Sovard]

I've heard good things about Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. He apparently investigates a Cthulhu cult. I just picked it up, but I'm going to wait until tonight to play it properly.

Spooky game+headphones+night time = fun

Might have to pick up Scratches after this one. Hmm...

 

[aries202]

I think you you might like a game called 'darkness within - in pursuit of Load Nolder'. It is a game that's inspired from Lovecraft's Writings, at least that's what I understand from reading reviews etc. at gameboomers etc.

If you can stand the tedius work in Reprobates (next life) there's some nice scary sequences in there. There is a demo out for tow new games, Belief and Betrayal and for Sunrise (in German only, though, but the one for Belief and Betrayal is in English, too). There's demo out for Overclocked which I've played and this game really looks interesting, I think. You can also try the (german) demo for Sinking Island which also looks to be a good, if not great game. For those of you that's able to read Polish there's a demo out for a game called FBI - Art of Murder. The voices in the game is in English, though.

I've also heard good things about Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. Grey Matter is the upcoming Jane Jensen game which looks like it is going to be at least decent. From Sokal also comes adventure games like Nikopol and Aquarica. Sokal also made the game that took place in Africa called Paradise.

Also you should all keep an eye out for little fine Hungarian adventure game called Yoomurjak's Ring.

 

[Monolith]

Have you tried Prodigal? Liked it a lot until I couldn't play on because I missed an item at an early location and couldn't go back anymore.

 

[The Rambling Sage]

Well, I hear <A HREF="http://rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=21421">Culpa Innata</a> is supposed to be rather good.

I didn't really like it. The story goes nowhere, it ends abruptly and in the middle of the story, and most (all?) of the threads that are presented are left incomplete or just hinted at as to create hype for a possible sequel. Including some mayor (and cliched) developments towards the end, that seems to be WAY more important (and cliched) than the main plot.

There was a lot of hype about the "background", but i was dissapointed also by that - And when i played it i was unaware of the hype. It is quite superficial and shallow as a story, and the puzzles are very easy. The only puzzle that i could not solve in "Auto-Pilot" was the one where you get to the right solution (in auto pilot) and think you got it wrong because NOTHING happens - there is no reaction until touch an unmarked part of the background.

Avoid it like the plague.

[edit]Oh, and it has no ending. You just discover a couple of facts, then learn you have to go to other place to continue your investigation, and then it ends. That's it. NOTHING is closed.

I think you you might like a game called 'darkness within - in pursuit of Load Nolder'.

I second that one, but be sure to grab the patch to solve some potentially VERY annoying bugs. It has a very nice atmosphere, the "reading" puzzles are a great idea - as are the "connect the ideas" ones, and it has a very deliberate pace i loved. It has a feeling of "research" few other games even come closer to get.

Found it - Pathologic

A work of art.

 

[avatar_58]

Did you just put down Culpa Innata and then praise Pathologic? o_o

Surely that can't be the same Pathologic to which a demo was released? That thing was a horrible piece of garbage, I couldn't understand what the reviews were seeing. It really isn't worth mentioning at all....

As for Scratches yeah - it seems pretty cool. I just started it though.

 

[Lumpy]

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure/sc ... lt;title;0

Scratches is dull, ugly, a bit short, and a perfect example of exactly why traditional adventure games have fallen out of favor.

How is putting someone who hates a genre review a game from that genre not a good choice?

 

[SuicideBunny]

how can it be too short if it's also dull and ugly?

 

[snowballdemon]

Well you could try Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth if you're willing to play a game that's not pure adventure per se. It's more of a adventure/stealth/fps-with-inventory hybrid but its atmoshpere is very similar to Scratches and kicks ass in general.

The adventure element is quite strong if I remember correctly - clue-collecting, puzzle-solving and branching dialogues I think.

Story is very good, dealing with Innsmouth, Deep Ones and other Lovecraftian stuff. It's very creepy too, I shat bricks on more than one occasion while playing it.

 

[Zeus]

Re: Scratches - Director's Cut -- It was great. Now I want M

This must have been the most scary experience since System Shock 2 or Robbing the Cradle.

What's Robbing the Cradle? I've never heard of it.

 

[coaster]

The Cradle level from Thief 3.

 

[A user named cat]

Sorry to bump an old thread (eat shit and die) but I just recently played through Scratches and the extra little game included in the director's cut. Decent adventure with great atmosphere but the ending was such rushed shit, even the extra content did nothing to tie it up nicely. The whole path they took making it like the Goonies with Sloth in the basement ruined it too, what a stupid idea. Would've been way better taking a more supernatural approach as the beginning half would lead you to believe.

Nice thing about the game though is that it has lead me to play Darkness Within, which is like a much more polished version of Scratches with even better music and awesome atmosphere. Don't care much for the combine thoughts shit but it's a neat concept, just too random. Great game to get someone into Lovecraft too.

 

[Jasede]

Darkness Within? Never seen that in stores before, thanks for the tip. I didn't mind the ending in Scratches because what lead up to it made up for it.

 

[A user named cat]

There are a few games like Scratches out there, Darkness Within is just one of them and a great one. Has a lot of reading though, hope you don't mind that. More of a creepy detective game with your character going nuts. If you like Lovecraft, or at least a Lovecraft vibe, you'll dig it.

Amazon has it (get it from a marketplace seller, cheaper): Darkness Within

Not sure what country you're in, so here is the Amazon UK link: UK version

Someone did a let's play of it if you want to get a taste: LP DW

The other games that are like Scratches that I've found are:

Barrow Hill
Bracken Tor: The Time of Tooth and Claw
Dark Fall: The Lost Journal
Dark Fall 2: Lights Out
Dark Fall 3: Lost Souls

Haven't played them yet but will get to them after DW, they all look promising to me.