JK: In terms of the history and evolution of point and click adventure games, what do you make of the ebbs and flows in the popularity and commercial viability of the genre, and in what ways are more contemporary games, like
Primordia and
Unavowed, building upon elements introduced in earlier works while at the same time forging new ground in terms of story and narrative, player immersion and experience, gameplay and specific game design elements?
Mark Yohalem: For the most part, I don’t think we are “building upon” the older works; at most, we are standing on the shoulders of a
fallen giant, a giant we’ve helped drag down, and it may help us see further than
we otherwise would, but we aren’t seeing further than the giant once did. For instance, outside of
Resonance and
Thimbleweed Park, I can’t think of a single point-and-click adventure game from the past 20 years in which there were even two puzzles at the level of quality of the better puzzles of the 1990s—not the best, I’m talking about very common, good puzzles, which you now almost never see twice in the same game.
In the 1990s, while some puzzles were of the “use item A on static hotspot B” or “give item A to non-moving NPC B,” many were also much more elaborate and involved observing NPC movement or environmental behavior, deducing how to combine non-brute-forcible items based on consistent logical rules, connecting information shared by an NPC with non-highlighted elements elsewhere to figure out
that you could do something, not merely how to do it, etc. Some of those puzzles were hard, but many of them were not especially so, and, hard or not, they were often very satisfying.
Now we spend our time ridiculing the limited number of terrible puzzles, rather than analyzing the greater number of excellent puzzles. We equate complex puzzles with hard puzzles, and hard puzzles with bad puzzles (because if we got stuck, the fault must lie in the puzzle, not us), and thus we make simple, easy, but lame puzzles that reinforce players’ sense that all puzzles are boring and hard puzzles are unreasonable. Adventure game design has failed abysmally in this regard in comparison with interactive fiction. Where is the Emily Short (e.g.,
Counterfeit Monkey) or Andrew Plotkin (e.g.,
Hadean Lands) of point-and-click adventures? We just don’t have one. People have other amazing virtues—Dave Gilbert’s commercial and cultural success, for instance, or the Bischoff brothers’ audiovisual mastery (e.g.,
Beautiful Desolation), should silence any naysayers—but we are failures in the puzzle department.
Pajama Sam was intended for young children, yet its puzzles are more complicated, clever, and engaging than puzzles in games made today for grown-ups.
