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Adventure game recommendations for a newbie? (still oldfag PC nerd)

V_K

Arcane
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Nov 3, 2013
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Are there any decent adventure game hybrids? RPG adventure games or such?
QfG and successors have already been mentioned, but you can also try The Council, which is a fairly unique take on the RPG/Adventure formula. It's mostly a "narrative Adventure" (you'll spend a lot of time in dialogs and cutscenes), but there are real puzzles and some exploration and resource management thrown in the mix.
Just realized that I forgot to mention too great games that, while not full-blown hybrids, successfully integrate some RPG elements into and Adventure framework. Goetia and Whispers of a Machine both feature some upgrades your character can get that open up alternative solutions to puzzles. In Goetia you play as a ghost and find new ghostly powers through careful exploration. The game is very open-world, and features some unique mechanics due to your character being incorporeal. In Whispers of a Machine, on the other hand, the upgrades are the result of you developing your character's personality through dialog choices. The premise is that her body has been augmented with nanites, which give her new powers depending on her state of mind. WoaM is probably better for a beginner as it's easier (but not braindead easy), and shorter (but very replayable). Goetia has some really tough puzzles, a couple of them even unfairly tough.
 

lophiaspis

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 24, 2012
Messages
379
OP, the best adventure game for a beginner is without question Curse of Monkey Island (MI3). It has everything:
-One of the best interface systems
-THE best graphics in any adventure
-Excellent characters, writing, voice acting and songwriting (!)
-Good to great puzzles
-Cartoonish setting with a lot of heart, fun for the whole family like a good Disney cartoon

The second best choice I would say is Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love For Sail. It was Sierra’s best adventure overall. It has a lot of the things that make MI3 great, in a ribald but not really pornographic setting. LSL7 also has the best adventure interface ever, which ingeniously combines the ease of use of that of MI3 with the power of a text parser. It’s a real tragedy that after these outstanding games were released, the genre promptly shat itself in 3D and then collapsed. Adventure games could have easily survived if they just churned out dozens of great games in this Disney cartoon style with the mature point and click interface.

Also, these games are some of the funniest ever, funny in a way that is all but forgotten today. True gems from a lost era.

After that you could move on to Grim Fandango, Gabriel Knight, QFG, SQ5... great games but somehow flawed that I wouldn’t recommend them to a complete newb.

But Grim Fandango takes it to a whole new degree. The first area of the game involves one bottomless dialogue pit after another, sufficient that my kids just quit.

Your kids are dumb. Shame on you for spawning such incomprehending little Philistines.
 
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WallaceChambers

Learned
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Messages
311
OP, the best adventure game for a beginner is without question Curse of Monkey Island (MI3). It has everything:
-One of the best interface systems
-THE best graphics in any adventure
-Excellent characters, writing, voice acting and songwriting (!)
-Good to great puzzles
-Cartoonish setting with a lot of heart, fun for the whole family like a good Disney cartoon

Not a bad pick, tbh. I think Monkey Island 1 & 3 are some of the most "well balanced" adventure games of all time, in terms of difficulty. I don't like the hold & release verb coin in MI3 but it's a minor issue.
 

DraQ

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Are there any decent adventure game hybrids? RPG adventure games or such?
I see no love for Azrael's Tear ITT, which is fucking shame.

Massively atmospheric and rather nonlinear FPS/Adventure hybrid. Think System Shock (original one) mixed with more traditional point'n'click adventure. POV-wise it's 3D FPP, but in terms of gameplay it's mostly a traditional adventure - you do have a gun, but the times you'll use it will easily be in low single digit and the ammo is super scarce - think of it as an extra option to solve some situations, rather than regular gameplay component. Some nice dialogue trees too.
 

Keshik

Arcane
Joined
Mar 22, 2012
Messages
2,114
Best of all time, hm, probably Grim Fandango in my experience - puzzles are not too outlandish, the game has a great style, music and has a grand scope.

Pretty much all of the LucasArts adventure games are worth playing, as well (yes, even EMI :P)
 
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hexer

Guest
I enjoyed these greatly, check them out:

Monkey Island 3
Sanitarium
Gabriel Knight 2
Phantasmagoria
Tales from the Borderlands
Blade Runner
Broken Sword 2 & 4
The Longest Journey
Toonstruck
Space Quest 5
Beneath a Steel Sky
KGB
Rise of the Dragon
Loom
Dark Seed
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream
Discworld Noir
Simon the Sorcerer
Full Throttle
The Dig
Shadow of the Comet
It Came From the Desert
Flight of the Amazon Queen
Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper
Detroit: Become Human
The Council
Blacksad: Under the Skin
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
The Walking Dead: A New Frontier
 
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Morkar Left

Guest
Quest for Glory, Indiana Jones 3 and 4, Tex Murph games and catch the newly released Blade Runner on gog
 

bertram_tung

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Sunco Gasoline Facility
Insert Title Here
humor is subjective but no game has ever made me laugh as much as Sam & Max: Hit the Road did. It made me laugh with its goofy looney tunes humor at age 8, and it made me laugh again when i played it in my 20s due to the subtle adult oriented humor that went over my head as a kid. it's probably responsible for my love of noir detectives too, even though it was parodying them
 

WallaceChambers

Learned
Joined
Jul 29, 2019
Messages
311
Best of all time, hm, probably Grim Fandango in my experience - puzzles are not too outlandish, the game has a great style, music and has a grand scope.

Pretty much all of the LucasArts adventure games are worth playing, as well (yes, even EMI :P)

Idk dude Grim Fandango is one of my favorite games of all time but I think it's pretty undeniable it has a lot of obtuse puzzles.
 

Keshik

Arcane
Joined
Mar 22, 2012
Messages
2,114
Idk dude Grim Fandango is one of my favorite games of all time but I think it's pretty undeniable it has a lot of obtuse puzzles.

Fair enough, has been a while since I played, just recall most of the solutions making some degree of sense when I played. That tile that somehow drains water through it still strikes me as strange.
 

hexer

Guest
I remember there were some game reviewers in late 90s/early 2000s citing the trend of illogical puzzles as the culprit behind the decline of adventure games genre.
If that was a reason, it certainly wasn't the only one.
I enjoy a challenging puzzle, it does my brain good. :stupid:
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
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California
Idk dude Grim Fandango is one of my favorite games of all time but I think it's pretty undeniable it has a lot of obtuse puzzles.

Fair enough, has been a while since I played, just recall most of the solutions making some degree of sense when I played. That tile that somehow drains water through it still strikes me as strange.
One of the few puzzles I remember getting mad about is in Grim Fandago -- at some point you get some dude's arm (?) and the generic failure message for using the arm on something is like "I don't want to do anything that could damage it, that would be disrespectful" or something along those lines, only it turned out that you were supposed to grind the arm up in a coffee grinder and use it to fertilize a plant or some such silliness. It was a rare example IMO of a genuinely "broken" puzzle since, ordinarily, failure messages are supposed to nudge the player toward the solution, rather than away from it. I also just have a general recollection of finding the puzzles not much fun and, as Wallace says, obtuse.
 

Cat Dude

Savant
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Messages
497
Escape From Monkey Island forced me to look up walkthrough more often than any other game I have ever played due to obscure puzzles.
 

WallaceChambers

Learned
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Messages
311
Some of the puzzles in Grim are just... they're so weird. Plus, you're rarely given the kind of insight into Manny's thought process (or rather Tim Schafer's) that would allow you to understand what needs to be done. Almost all of the "mechanical" puzzles are like that. I solved them just by dicking around until I get some sort of feedback. Not because I'm working toward a coherent goal that I explicitly understand.

The puzzle where you have to wrap your anchors around the ship to cut half of it off, The puzzle where you have to run a wheelbarrow over electrical lines to destabilize a pump, The puzzle where you have to drop a giant chain onto a conveyor belt then reverse it so it makes a knot... Then reverse it again so it ties that knot around a ships anchor. They're all so weird and have extremely particular solutions.

Then there's some stupid ones that don't make any sense. Like when you need to make Glottis projectile vomit over the floor of dominoes, then use antifreeze on the vomit so you can walk across it. Not only is the solution really weird and basically only solvable because that section is so closed off... but it actually wouldn't even work. A huge wave of projectile vomit from a giant demon like Glottis would totally have knocked over those dominoes.

Not to rag on the game too harshly. Like I said before, it's one of my all-time favorites. I'm sure everyone is familiar with all the things it does amazingly well. But I do think Grim Fandango is a title where the adventure genre truly earns it's reputation for obtuse puzzle solutions that turn off newcomers.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
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Messages
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California
Haha, I had forgotten those puzzles, but your post made me start twitching with recalled discomfort. The anchors one in particular I remember being totally befuddled by.
 

CryptRat

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Sep 10, 2014
Messages
3,548
I think cartoon logic not only makes the games more funny but also more fun to solve.
The puzzle where you have to drop a giant chain onto a conveyor belt then reverse it so it makes a knot... Then reverse it again so it ties that knot around a ships anchor.
I actually consider that this one is a very good puzzle. I loved solving the puzzles in Grim Fandango. I enjoyed the chain, I enjoyed the car and the arrow, I enjoyed the big section in Rubacava, it's cool that it resolves overall around a code that you can try, and for example there's a part about a poem and you can ask for the girl in the bar to recite poems but it's useless, that they took the time to implement such nice wrong trails as this one or the one in the car section shows they were trying to make a top notch game.
 

Keshik

Arcane
Joined
Mar 22, 2012
Messages
2,114
Think those cables were pneumatic ones, so the wheelbarrow over it to make the tree unstable made sense to me. The chain one with the anchor did throw me a bit, I guess just thought that crane's motor wouldn't have that much power in the first place.
 

WallaceChambers

Learned
Joined
Jul 29, 2019
Messages
311
The only example of a puzzle from Grim I said didn't make sense was the dominoes puzzle. The mechanical ones all "make sense." As in the solutions could plausibly be done within the game world. I'd specifically call them obtuse because they have incredibly specific and obscure solutions. They aren't the first, second or even third thing most rational people would think of. These types of puzzles are what critics talk bout when they say that "adventure game puzzles are more like guessing what the developer thinks than solving the problem."

For instance, the convener belt chain puzzle is so particular that solving it "properly" hinges on knowing the chain will tangle when the conveyor belt is reversed. Then, also loop around the the ship's anchor when it's reversed again. Which is something that COULD happen but it's not something that necessarily must happen as a result of your actions. It's an extremely specific series of solutions with basically no signposting. There's no real way to know that will happen ahead of time and solve it with intent. Most people will probably just stumble upon the solution after a lot of trial and error.

So despite me thinking Grim Fandango is basically a masterpiece overall I would never recommend it to a self described newbie who specifically says they don't want cryptic puzzles. I mean, Tim Schafer himself has admitted the game has some super obscure puzzles so this shouldn't be too controversial.
 

Cat Dude

Savant
Joined
Nov 5, 2018
Messages
497
The only example of a puzzle from Grim I said didn't make sense was the dominoes puzzle. The mechanical ones all "make sense." As in the solutions could plausibly be done within the game world. I'd specifically call them obtuse because they have incredibly specific and obscure solutions. They aren't the first, second or even third thing most rational people would think of. These types of puzzles are what critics talk bout when they say that "adventure game puzzles are more like guessing what the developer thinks than solving the problem."

For instance, the convener belt chain puzzle is so particular that solving it "properly" hinges on knowing the chain will tangle when the conveyor belt is reversed. Then, also loop around the the ship's anchor when it's reversed again. Which is something that COULD happen but it's not something that necessarily must happen as a result of your actions. It's an extremely specific series of solutions with basically no signposting. There's no real way to know that will happen ahead of time and solve it with intent. Most people will probably just stumble upon the solution after a lot of trial and error.

So despite me thinking Grim Fandango is basically a masterpiece overall I would never recommend it to a self described newbie who specifically says they don't want cryptic puzzles. I mean, Tim Schafer himself has admitted the game has some super obscure puzzles so this shouldn't be too controversial.

I won't even suggest OP to play Broken Age.
 

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