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The Random Adventure Game News Thread

taxalot

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Codex 2013 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
Whatever. I checked the trailer and it looked even worse than the Gabriel Knight remake. I do not understand why people who have absolutely no sense of graphic design bother to use such technological advancement to make a game that looks even worse than the SCI version which, however the big pixels were, felt it mastered its technological limitations and created a unique art style.

That video looks way too clean and soulless to make it interesting.

I mean, how is
Gold%20Rush_Remake_Screenshot_02.JPG
Better than these

Gold%20Rush_2.png
ME3050309907_2.jpg

147+James%27+House.JPG


Seriously ?
 

Redlands

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Whatever. I checked the trailer and it looked even worse than the Gabriel Knight remake. I do not understand why people who have absolutely no sense of graphic design bother to use such technological advancement to make a game that looks even worse than the SCI version which, however the big pixels were, felt it mastered its technological limitations and created a unique art style.

That video looks way too clean and soulless to make it interesting.

I mean, how is
Gold%20Rush_Remake_Screenshot_02.JPG
Better than these

Gold%20Rush_2.png
ME3050309907_2.jpg

147+James%27+House.JPG


Seriously ?
The reason that I guess this is the case is two-fold:
  1. You're comparing one of the premiere game studios of the time who could probably reuse a large amount of assets very easily, to some Literally Whos who have only released one other game on Steam.
  2. You're comparing an art medium where good-enough is very effective, to one where (outside of some exceptional talents) you're going to need to do much better than good-enough to get passable results.
 

Tramboi

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I can never find the time to play more than the first game of the ifcomp (being so lame at solving puzzles).
Did someone play the winner ?
 
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pippin

Guest
Daedalic are making a game based on The Pillars of the Earth:

10306481_911681055510369_1719374080591203686_n.jpg


this pic was uploaded to their facebook, along with a link from polygon which I won't add for sanitary reasons.
 

taxalot

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Codex 2013 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
A good opportunity to prove that they're better than Telltale Games with their Game of Thrones. I like that.

Also, Pillars of the Earth is a very good book.
 

Jools

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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Insert Title Here Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
The Old City: Leviathan

http://store.steampowered.com/app/297350/

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/p/theoldcity_leviathan_storefront

The game is on offer on both sites. It seems intriguing to say the least (high chance of being a "non-game" though: yet, it does look beautiful).

steam said:
The Old City: Leviathan is an experiment in first person exploration that focuses entirely on story. All that exists is you and the world. Set in a decaying city from a civilization long past, The Old City: Leviathan puts the player in the shoes of a sewer dwelling isolationist.

 

Jools

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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Insert Title Here Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
Hey, I'm selling these fine leather jackets! I mean, here's a mini adventure game giveaway, from yours truly!!!!

Bl7obtf.png


Please notify when you have successfully grabbed one, so I can update this post and people won't get disappointed.
 

Starwars

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That The Old City looks pretty cool. Anyone play that?

I got it and I played an hour or so. Well, "played". It is a walking simulator, make no mistake. It also features one of those stories where it's up to the player to "figure it out". Often I think those just fall flat on their face and feel pretentious but it's pretty well done in this game. It's a thin line but I haven't run into anything too horribly "omg we r so deep!!11" stuff yet.
Also, you find notes (diaries) in which there is... a lot of text to read. However, they are pretty well written. I enjoy reading them despite their length (still feels odd to do long pauses in "playing" the game to read long-ass stories).
They remind me a lot of "Notes from Underground" by Dostoevsky, I kinda wonder if the writer read that book.

Anyways, I'm not finished yet (again, just "played" for an hour) but if the game keeps up like this it's... well, I suppose it's a good walking simulator. There is no gameplay here, but the story/atmosphere is pretty good. I kinda wish I hadn't paid the full price for it, and I doubt it will be very long. But eh, it's not a huge amount of money at any rate.
 

Starwars

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I just finished it. Took me about 3 hours and I may have missed some stuff here and there. Lots of words to read in this game so if you're not into that, it's definitely not for you.

Overall I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it more and more as it went on. You still don't do anything in the game besides walking and opening doors. But the writing is good (very good I'd say), gives you clues to piece together a story but isn't daft or obtuse about it. Feels like the game is definitely about something, not just "mysterious words!!11 waht could they mean!11?" Think it'll stay with me for a while.

The game looks nice, and occasionally has some *really* nice views. Unfortunately, a lot of it is spent indoors and those locations have a tendency to look a bit boring. The outdoor scenes look great.
The soundtrack is wonderful, mysterious and ambient.

If you're interested in these types of experiences, this is a good one in my opinion. But yeah, at heart it's a walking simulator, no gameplay here. Definitely the best one I've played though (for what it's worth, haven't tried too many).
 

Jools

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I just finished it. Took me about 3 hours and I may have missed some stuff here and there. Lots of words to read in this game so if you're not into that, it's definitely not for you.

Overall I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it more and more as it went on. You still don't do anything in the game besides walking and opening doors. But the writing is good (very good I'd say), gives you clues to piece together a story but isn't daft or obtuse about it. Feels like the game is definitely about something, not just "mysterious words!!11 waht could they mean!11?" Think it'll stay with me for a while.

The game looks nice, and occasionally has some *really* nice views. Unfortunately, a lot of it is spent indoors and those locations have a tendency to look a bit boring. The outdoor scenes look great.
The soundtrack is wonderful, mysterious and ambient.

If you're interested in these types of experiences, this is a good one in my opinion. But yeah, at heart it's a walking simulator, no gameplay here. Definitely the best one I've played though (for what it's worth, haven't tried too many).

Thanks for sharing!
 

ghostdog

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I just finished it. Took me about 3 hours and I may have missed some stuff here and there. Lots of words to read in this game so if you're not into that, it's definitely not for you.

Overall I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it more and more as it went on. You still don't do anything in the game besides walking and opening doors. But the writing is good (very good I'd say), gives you clues to piece together a story but isn't daft or obtuse about it. Feels like the game is definitely about something, not just "mysterious words!!11 waht could they mean!11?" Think it'll stay with me for a while.

The game looks nice, and occasionally has some *really* nice views. Unfortunately, a lot of it is spent indoors and those locations have a tendency to look a bit boring. The outdoor scenes look great.
The soundtrack is wonderful, mysterious and ambient.

If you're interested in these types of experiences, this is a good one in my opinion. But yeah, at heart it's a walking simulator, no gameplay here. Definitely the best one I've played though (for what it's worth, haven't tried too many).
It sounds like the The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Have you played that one? If you have, how they compare ?
 

Starwars

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Haven't played that one so can't make a comparison, sorry. Looking at the description, it does sound similar. But yeah, can't make any more informed comparison than that.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The Digital Antiquarian on the shitty licensed Star Trek titles of the 1980s: http://www.filfre.net/2014/12/simon-schusters-treks-to-nowhere/

But now, at last, Simon & Schuster had the mandate to move in the other direction, to create agame more consonant with what the show had been. In that spirit they secured the services of Diane Duane, an up-and-coming science-fiction and fantasy writer who had two Star Trek novels already in Pocket’s publication pipeline, to write a script for a Star Trek adventure game. Duane began making notes for an idea that riffed on the supposedly no-win Kobayashi Maru training scenario that had been memorably introduced at the beginning of the movie Star Trek II. The game’s fiction would have you participating in an alternative, hopefully more winnable test being considered as a replacement. Thus you would literally be playing The Kobayashi Alternative, the goal of which would be to find Mr. Sulu (Star Trek: The Search for Sulu?), now elevated to command of the USS Heinlein, who has disappeared along with his ship in a relatively unexplored sector of the galaxy.

Simon & Schuster’s first choice to implement this idea was the current darling of the industry, Infocom. As we’ve already learned in another article, Simon & Schuster spent a year earnestly trying to buy Infocom outright beginning in late 1983, dangling before their board the chance to work with a list of properties headed by Star Trek. An Infocom-helmed Star Trek adventure, written by Diane Duane, is today tempting ground indeed for dreams and speculation. However, that’s all it would become. Al Vezza and the rest of Infocom’s management stalled and dithered and ultimately rejected the Simon & Schuster bid for fear of losing creative control and, most significantly, because Simon & Schuster was utterly disinterested in Infocom’s aspirations to become a major developer of business software. As Infocom continued to drag their feet, Simon & Schuster made the fateful decision to take more direct control of Duane’s adventure game, publishing it under their own new “Computer Software Division” imprint.



Development of The Kobayashi Alternative was turned over to a new company called Micromosaics, founded by a veteran of the Children’s Television Workshop named Lary Rosenblatt to be a sort of full-service experience architect for the home-computer revolution, developing not only software but also the packaging, the manuals, and sometimes even the advertising that accompanied it; their staff included at least as many graphic designers as programmers. The packaging they came up with for The Kobayashi Alternative was indeed a stand-out even in this era of oft-grandiose packaging. Its centerpiece was a glossy full-color faux-Star Fleet briefing manual full of background information about the Enterprise and its crew and enough original art to set any Trekkie’s heart aflutter (one of these pictures, the first in this article, I cheerfully stole out of, er, a selfless conviction that it deserves to be seen). Sadly, the packaging also promised light years more than the actual contents of the disk delivered.


This alleged screenshot from the back of The Kobayashi Alternative‘s box is one of the most blatant instances of false advertising of 1980s gaming.


What the game actually looks like…

Whatever else you can say about it, you can’t say that The Kobayashi Alternative played it safe. Easily dismissed at a glance as just another text adventure, it’s actually a bizarrely original mutant creation, not quite like any other game I’ve ever seen. Everything that you as Captain Kirk can actually do yourself — “give,” “take,” “use,” “shoot,” etc. — you accomplish not through the parser but by tapping function-key combinations. You move about the Enterprise or planetside using the arrow keys. The parser, meanwhile, is literally your mouth; those things you type are things that you say aloud. This being Star Trek and you being Captain Kirk, that generally means orders that you issue to the rest of your familiar crew. And then, not satisfied with giving you just an adventure game with a very odd interface, Micromosaics also tried to build in a full simulation of the Enterprise for you to logistically manage and command in combat. Oh, and the whole thing is running in real time. If ever a game justified use of the “reach exceeded its grasp” reviewer’s cliché, it’s this one. The Kobayashi Alternative is unplayable. No one at Microsmosaics had any real practical experience making computer games, and it shows.


A strange new world with a notable lack of new life and new civilizations

The Kobayashi Alternative is yet another contender for the title of emptiest adventure game ever. In fact, it takes that crown handily from the likes of Level 9’s Snowball and Electronic Arts’s Amnesia. In lieu of discrete, unique locations, each of the ten planets you can beam down to consists of a vast X-Y grid of numerical coordinates to dully trudge across looking for the two or three places that actually contain something of interest. Sometimes you get clues in the form of coordinates to visit, but at other times the game seems to expect you to just lawnmower through hundreds of locations until you find something. The Enterprise, all 23 decks of it, is implemented in a similar lack of detail. It turns out that all those empty, anonymous corridors we were always seeing in the television show really were almost all there was to the ship. When you do find something or somebody, the parser is so limited that you never have any confidence in the conversations that result. Some versions of the game, for instance, don’t even understand the word “Sulu,” making the most natural question to ask anyone you meet — “Where is Sulu?” — a nonstarter. And then there are the bugs. Crewmen — but not you — can beam down to poisonous planets in their shirt sleeves and remain unharmed; when walking east on planets the program fails to warn you about dangerous terrain ahead, meaning you can tumble into a lake of liquid nitrogen without ever being told about it; crewmen inexplicably root themselves to the ground planetside, refusing to follow you no matter how you push or cajole or even start shooting at them with your phaser.

Following The Kobayashi Alternative‘s 1985 release, gamers, downright desperate as they were to play in this beloved universe, proved remarkably patient, while Simon & Schuster also seemed admirably determined to stay the course. Some six months after the initial release they published a revised version that, they claimed, fixed all of the bugs. The other, more deep-rooted design problems they tried to ret-con with a revised manual, which rather passive-aggressively announced that “The Kobayashi Alternative differs in several important ways from other interactive text simulations that you may have used,” including being “completely open-ended.” (Don’t cry to us if this doesn’t play like one of Infocom’s!) The parser problems were neatly sidestepped by printing every single phrase the parser could understand in the manual. And the most obvious major design flaw was similarly addressed by simply printing a list of all the important coordinates on all of the planets in the manual.

Interest in the game remained so high that Computer Gaming World‘s Scorpia, one of the premier fan voices in adventure gaming, printed a second multi-page review of the revised version to join her original, a level of commitment I don’t believe she ever showed to any other game. Alas, even after giving it the benefit of every doubt she couldn’t say the second version was any better than the original. It was actually worse: in fixing some bugs, Micromosaics introduced many others, including one that stole critical items silently from your inventory and made the game as unsolvable as the no-win scenario that provided its name. Micromosaics and Simon & Schuster couldn’t seem to get anything right; even some of the planet coordinates printed in the revised manual were wrong, sending you beaming down into the middle of a helium sea. Thus Scorpia’s second review was, like the first, largely a list of deadly bugs and ways to work around them. The whole sad chronicle adds up to the most hideously botched major adventure-game release of the 1980s, a betrayal of consumer trust worthy of a law suit. This software thing wasn’t turning out to be quite as easy as Simon & Schuster had thought it would be.

Sceptic
 
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Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
More DA - on simulationism vs narrativism in adventure games: http://www.filfre.net/2014/12/ballyhoo/

Ballyhoo was Infocom’s fourth game to be given the “Mystery” genre label. As such, it’s also an earnest attempt to solve a real or perceived problem that had long frustrated players of those previous three mysteries. The first of them, Deadline, had exploded the possibilities for adventure games by simulating a dynamic story with independent actors rather than just setting the player loose in a static world full of puzzles to solve; The Witness and Suspect had then continued along the same course. Instead of exploring a geographical space, the player’s primary task became to explore a story space, to learn how this dynamic system worked and to manipulate it to her own ends by judicious, precisely timed interference. While a huge advance that brought a new dimension to the adventure game, this seemingly much more story-oriented approach also remained paradoxically problematic to fully reconcile to the view of Infocom’s games as interactive fiction, as, as their box copy would have it, stories you “woke up inside” and proceeded to experience like the protagonist of a novel. The experience of playing one of these early mysteries was more like that of an editor, or a film director making an adaptation of the novel. You had to take the stories apart piece by piece through probing and experimentation, then put everything back together in a way that would guide the protagonist, from whom you stood at a decided remove, to the optimal ending. That process might offer pleasures all its own, but it kept the player firmly in the realm of puzzle-solver rather than fiction-enjoyer — or, if you like, guiding the fiction became the overarching puzzle. Even Infocom’s most unabashed attempt to create a “literary” work to date, Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging, became abruptly, jarringly gamelike again when you got to the final section, where you had to head off a sequence of events that would otherwise be the end of you. In a film or novel based on A Mind Forever Voyaging, this sequence would just chance to play out in just the right way to let Perry Sim escape by the skin of his teeth and save the world in the process. In the game, however, the player was forced to figure out what dramatically satisfying narrative the author wanted to convey, then manipulate events to bring it to fruition, a very artificial process all the way around. Yet the alternative of a static environment given motion only when the player deigned to push on something was even farther from the idea of “interactive fiction” as a layperson might take that phrase. What to do?

Infocom’s answer, to which they first fully committed in Ballyhoo, was to flip the process on its head: to make the story respond to the player rather than always asking the player to respond to the story. Put another way, here the story chases the player rather than the player chasing the story. (Feel free to insert your “in Soviet Russia…” jokes here.) Ballyhoo is another dynamic mystery with its own collection of dramatic beats to work through. Now, though, the story moves forward only when and as the player’s actions make it most dramatically satisfying to do so, rather than ticking along according to its own remorseless timetable. So, for example, Comrade Thumb will struggle to get a drink of water from the public water fountain at the beginning of the game for hundreds of turns if necessary, until the player helps him by giving him a boost. He’ll then toddle off to another location to wait for the player to enter. When and only when she does, he’ll carry off his next dramatic beat. Later, a certain bumbling detective will wander onto the midway and pass out dead drunk just when the needs of the plot, as advanced by the player thus far, demand that he do so. Sometimes these developments are driven directly by the player, but at other times they happen only in the name of dramatic efficiency, of story logic. Rather than asking the player to construct a story from a bunch of component parts, now the author deconstructs the story she wants the player to experience, then figures out how to put it back together on the fly in a satisfying way in response to the player’s own actions — but without always making the fact that the story is responding to the player rather than unspooling on its own clear to the player. Ideally, this should let the player just enjoy the unfolding narrative from her perspective inside the story, which will always just happen to play out in suitably dramatic fashion, full of the close calls and crazy coincidences that are such part and parcel of story logic. Virtually unremarked at the time, this formal shift would eventually go on to become simply the way that adventure games were done, to the extent that the old Deadline approach stands out as a strange, cruel anomaly when it crops up on rare occasions on the modern landscape.

Depending on how you see these things, you might view this new approach as a major advance or as a disappointment, even as a capitulation of sorts. Early adventure writers, including those at Infocom, were very invested in the idea of their games as simulations of believable (if simplified) worlds. See, for instance, the article which Dave Lebling published in Byte in December of 1980, which, years before Infocom would dub their games “interactive fiction,” repeatedly refers to Zork and the other games like it that Infocom hopes to make as “computerized fantasy simulations.” Or see the flyer found in Zork I itself, which refers to that game as “a self-contained and self-maintaining universe.” To tinker with such a universe, to introduce a hand of God manipulating the levers in the name of drama and affect, felt and still feels wrong to some people. Most, however, have come to accept that pure, uncompromising simulation does not generally lead to a satisfying adventure game. Adventure games may be better viewed as storytelling and puzzle-solving engines — the relative emphasis placed on the former and the latter varying from work to work — wherein simulation elements are useful as long as they add verisimilitude and possibility without adding boredom and frustration, and stop being useful just as soon as the latter qualities begin to outweigh the former.

Which is not to say that this new approach of the story chasing the player is a magic bullet. Virtually everyone who’s played adventure games since Ballyhoo is familiar with the dilemma of a story engine that’s become stuck in place, of going over and over a game’s world looking for that one trigger you missed that will satisfy the game that all is in proper dramatic order and the next act can commence. My own heavily plotted adventure game is certainly not immune to this syndrome, which at its extreme can feel every bit as artificial and mimesis-destroying, and almost as frustrating, as needing to replay a game over and over with knowledge from past lives. Like so much else in life and game design, this sort of reactive storytelling is an imperfect solution, whose biggest virtue is that most people prefer its brand of occasional frustration to others.
 
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