Dicksmoker said:
Coyote said:
1) You mentioned being something of a storyfag, so would you be interested in adventure games with good stories but fairly weak puzzles if they were less cartoony/more realistic than BS?
I suppose so. But like I said, the standards need to be pretty high storywise for me to elevate that above other elements. Think PST, Xenogears, Deus Ex, etc. to get the basic idea. And in those examples, the gameplay was also good.
I'm hesitant to recommend any game based on its story alone, in that case. That said, some games which may come close and have other qualities that may make up the difference:
- Grim Fandango. I wouldn't say that it excels as far as plot goes (especially since, as is the case for many of the LucasArts games, I feel that it gets weaker near the end), but it has a great atmosphere and setting and the main characters are effective at the archetypes they're supposed to represent. I might be biased, though, as I've always been a big fan of both Mexican Day of the Dead culture and film noir, two things that had a major influence on the style of the game. It also has slightly above-average puzzles overall IMO, with a few good tough ones here and there.
- The Last Express. This is the main one I was thinking of with regard to a great story but weak puzzles (and very few of them to boot). It's not a good story in the same way Planescape is - in fact, if I were to try to summarize the story, it would probably sound quite generic. But it's excellently executed and manages to be one of my favorite adventure games from a storyfag perspective nonetheless. It also has some interesting features distinguishing it from most other adventure games that help to make up for the lack of strong puzzles, which I think were discussed in more detail in one of the threads I linked earlier.
- Blade Runner. If you liked the movie, you'll probably like this, as it follows a similar story that explores the same sort of themes. It's also got some pretty decent puzzles and a fair amount of C&C, as well as an element of randomness that makes each playthrough a bit different (I think the order in which you complete various tasks also has an effect).
- Possibly Sanitarium, which kind of falls apart but is worth it for the first half of the game alone. I wouldn't describe it as the Planescape: Torment of adventures like you mentioned earlier, but I can see why someone would. It's got a lot of little similarities, both in terms of superficial elements like the perspective, movement, and graphics, and other elements like the bizarre settings and concepts it explores. The puzzles fairly easy, though.
Other possibilities: The Longest Journey and the Syberia series; I find these games good, solid adventures overall, though overrated in terms of story.
Would you prefer a game with a good story and average puzzles or an average story and tough but logical puzzles?
The latter.
Sceptic and Black Cat have got the right idea, then; all of the games they've mentioned that I've played have good-to-great puzzles, many because they force you to explore and try to understand alien environments without giving you much to go on but your own observations about the world around you (pretty much what Black Cat said). One game in this vein that I don't think either of them have mentioned is Zork Nemesis, which has great atmosphere in addition to some nice puzzles.
For some more story-centric games that still have good puzzles IMO: the first Gabriel Knight game, Sins of the Fathers, has a few truly great, difficult puzzles; sadly, the later games in the series take the difficulty from "tough-but-fair" to "artificially tough", in that they require the player to take rather absurd actions to solve some of the puzzles. I've just started playing KGB, so I can't vouch for it entirely, but based on what I've played so far, it has some very good puzzles, as well as a lot of optional content. Also, I actually got quite stumped on some of the puzzles in the third chapter of Curse of Monkey Island, but YMMV; I seem to be in the minority among adventure fans in considering it just as good as or even better than the first two MIs.
There are a few more, but they include the deal-breaker you mention later in your post.
Also, I agree with Sceptic about Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive. It has storyfag elements but also some of the better puzzles I've encountered in an adventure, so I wouldn't classify it as a pure storyfag game.
For the record, I thought Psychonauts was a funny game. If that's example of "cartoony done right" then I guess so. And I suppose it is. I guess the deal with that game is it's funny precisely because it goes for wacky over-the-top things as opposed to stupid cliches (i.e. the dumb American (George), the bumbling museum guard, the stuck up English bitch, etc.).
You might like some of the LucasArts games, then. Tim Schafer, one of the lead designers and writers for Psychonauts, was also involved in the design and writing of several of them, including the first two Monkey Islands, Maniac Mansion and its sequel, Day of the Tentacle (from which you can play the original Maniac Mansion in its entirety via an in-game Easter egg, incidentally), Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango. FT and GF have less of a focus on humor and more serious stories than the previous ones, but still have their share of amusing lines. Among LucasArts's better games are also Sam and Max Hit the Road (whose humor is largely based on American culture in the late 80s/early 90s) and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (which has a more serious story), although Schafer played no role in those. Both Sam and Max and Day of the Tentacle have a sizable portion of cliched/stereotypical characters, but I found them to be played off in a much more amusing way than the Broken Sword game I played.
Oh, and avoid Escape from Monkey Island (the fourth MI game) or at least give the previous games a chance first, as it messes up a lot of the things that they did well without improving anything in return. (For instance, the main character goes from being a slightly oblivious, bumbling pirate/pirate wannabe to a complete moron, losing a lot of his personality and humor in the process.)
Zork Grand Inquisitor is another humor-oriented game that I'd rate as average or higher in all categories - good humor, good atmosphere, good puzzles (though on the easy side, there's a nice variety compared to most games Black Cat described as being inventory puzzle-based), decent enough plot.
4) In terms of puzzles, would it bother you if you couldn't finish the game because you missed something early on in the game and couldn't go back to get it without starting over?
Now that's a deal-breaker. Not only would I hate that as a gamer, but I am fundamentally opposed to it on principle. So no. Just no. I wouldn't touch a game like with a ten-foot pole.
You'll probably want to avoid most of the early Sierra adventure games, then. Most of them have this to some extent. I'm not sure when they stopped, but I think it's minimal (as in, you might have to reload an earlier save, but never more than an hour earlier) in most of their games released since around the time of King's Quest VI. It's even less of an issue in the Gabriel Knights, where I'm pretty sure that you can't advance the storyline unless you have everything that you'll need later, and I don't remember it ever coming up in the Quest for Glory series either. Some Infocom games did this as well, though I think they stopped the practice entirely around the time they switched to graphical games (it might still be present in Return to Zork, not sure). I'm 90+ percent certain that this can't happen in Zork Nemesis and Zork Grand Inquisitor.
BTW, Sceptic:
Sceptic said:
I'm tempted to throw in some of Infocom's toughies (Hitchhiker, Bureaucracy, Spellbreaker, and the best and one of my favorite games in any genre, Trinity), but as an introduction to the genre they'll probably make you rage.
Don't some of these violate the deal-breaker he mentioned pretty hard? I'm not asking that rhetorically; it's been at least a decade since I played most of them, and I can't remember. But I could have sworn that Hitchhiker, in particular, was infamous for easy-to-miss, vital items appearing early in the game.
especially with GK1 as a recommendation. Sam & Max is another one of my favorites thanks to excellent puzzles.
