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Adventure games from last 10 years with challenging puzzles

Neuromancer

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You know, that puzzles (together with exploration) are practically the basis for an adventure game?
If you take them away, you get a walking simulator or an interactive movie.
 

Neuromancer

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By static puzzles, you mean machine puzzles like in Myst?
Still they belong in adventure games, even if you personally don't like them!
 

Verylittlefishes

Sacro Bosco
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By static puzzles, you mean machine puzzles like in Myst?
Still they belong in adventure games, even if you personally don't like them!

Well, Myst IS a puzzle game after all, but when you are playing, say, Fran Bow or Dreamfall and suddenly stuck in a stupidest puzzles with matching symbols or stones or numbers, or whatever that typical shit is, and need to think about this shit and distract yourself from the story which is very exciting...nigga, not cool. Thank God we have internet now, when you can google this shit for a second and continue the storyfagging.
 

MRY

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A story game that lacks puzzles isn't an adventure game.* A puzzle game that lacks stories isn't an adventure game. An ideal adventure game has a story in which puzzles emerge from and advance the narrative, and the solving of puzzles helps define and reveal the protagonist. I'm not sure any game perfectly satisfies that ideal. Sometime puzzles contradict the story (as when a protagonist is forbidden to take some natural action in order to force the player to do a puzzle), interfere with the story (as when you hit a puzzle that has no narrative basis for existing that halts the story), or add nothing (the typical adventure game puzzle that is inoffensive but uninspired). Sometimes the story prevents good puzzles (as when an adventure game has a serious, real world setting that precludes lateral-thinking puzzles) and sometimes the story overwhelms puzzles (as when there are too many dialogues, cutscenes, etc.).

As best I can tell, Verylittlefishes is reacting to "interfering" puzzles and V_K is reacting to "overwhelming" stories. Both criticism are fair, and of course rhetorical overstatement is always fun, but given the throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater mentality that has afflicted adventure games for years, I nevertheless felt obliged to make my objection.

(* I realize that the label "adventure game" has been applied somewhat haphazardly over the years -- for instance, I think Star Control II was marketed as an "adventure game"! Zelda probably was, too. And then narrative 3D action games with box pushing elements managed to permanently secure the label "action adventure game." Still, I hope we're all reasonable enough to understand the rough outlines of the genre I'm talking about here.)
 

V_K

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I would distinguish between stories and narratives. The story is always something imposed upon you, while a narrative can be quite abstract and emergent - like, going through the levels in Dungeon Master looking for keys to locked doors and stuff does create a narrative, but there's very little story to it. Myst and the better Myst-likes are quite similar in structure - there is an extensive backstory and an end goal, but nothing much happens in the game itself apart from the player exploring the world and solving puzzles.
A well-constructed narrative is necessary to structure the player's experience, providing long-, short- and medium-term goals - but all of this can be communicated through exploration and environment, none of it requires characters, dialogs or stories. And Adventures are actually positioned best to provide such emergent environmental narratives because more and less complex puzzles automatically create longer and shorter term goals for the player.
 

MRY

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I'm not sure what the story/narrative distinction here is. At first I thought you meant "story segments" (cutscenes and dialogues), but Myst has cutscenes throughout the game, and even ends with the player choosing which of the three competing parties prevails. If you mean that you don't like having a defined protagonist, interactions with characters, etc., I guess I disagree as a matter of taste, and also think that your preferences would exclude the overwhelming majority of adventure games.

As to protagonists, some are more defined (like Gabriel Knight), and some are less defined (like Graham in KQI), but it is actually fairly rare in classic adventures that the protagonist is just a stand-in for the player as in Myst (Adventure, Adventureland, and Zork are like that, but from 1983 on it was standard to have a more-than-a-stand-in protagonist as in Planetfall, Suspended, The Hobbit, Hitchhiker's Guide, AMFV, Amnesia, etc.). NPC interactions and dialogues roughly correspond with that same timing, but, if anything, they are even more common than defined protagonists. Even games with stand-in protagonists, like Zork II, had NPCs and dialogues.

To be clear, I agree that a highly defined protagonist and an excessive focus on NPC dialogues can detract from the core gameplay of adventure games. Even given my own preference for designing adventure games with defined protagonists and NPC dialogues, I find that many adventure games go too far in this direction. The issue is especially apparent when playing with my kids, who generally share your view of stories in games (watch a TV show or read a book for a story, play a game to push buttons and see what happens).* But I would not banish those elements from adventure games.

More generally, even aside from wanting to defend traditional adventure game elements, my bottom line view is that story elements enhance the player experience in basically every kind of game. The key is to prevent it from being excessive. But even thinking back to the very most basic things from childhood (an introductory text scroll before an arcade shooter; a barely animated cutscene before or after a level in Ninja Gaiden), through the addition of things like mission briefings to strategy games (Myth, Warcraft, etc.), cutscenes at the end of Street Fighter II, etc., etc. It always just gives the player one more way to involve himself in the game. I've never played a game and said, "I wish there was no story." But I've very often played a game and felt that the cutscenes, dialogues, railroading, etc. impinged on things. Where that balance is struck depends on various factors, including the game type, the quality of the story, the quality of the story's presentation, etc.

But maybe it's just that narrative segments -- like flashing lights, numerical stat increases, new costumes, etc. -- are one of the kinds of rewards that developers can use in the Skinner box. They can also be abused as a way to hook a player despite bad gameplay, just as those other rewards can. Perhaps my preference for narrative simply reflects what kind of cheese works on me as a rat, and it is no more defensible than the other cheeses that I typically deride. :)

(* Not suggesting this is a childish view in any sense.)
 
Last edited:

V_K

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I'm not sure what the story/narrative distinction here is. At first I thought you meant "story segments" (cutscenes and dialogues), but Myst has cutscenes throughout the game, and even ends with the player choosing which of the three competing parties prevails.
A story for me necessarily implies something written - something that uses words and literary devices. A narrative is just a succession of events that has a logic to it - not necessarily literary logic. For example, a symphony has a narrative to it - its musical themes are introduced, culminate and get resolved - but not a story.
Myst has a story in a technical sense, but it's a very minimal story - the only things that happen story-wise are your arrival to Myst and your resolution of the conflict. 95% of the game consists of uneventful exploration and puzzle solving. There is a rich backstory, but that's a different beast entirely. I'm fine with those because they don't impede my agency. A more radical example would be The Witness which has neither backstory, nor any story events happening in-game (for what it's worth, it does make it feel a bit disappointing in the end). Compare that to Secret of Monkey Island for example: Guybrush does the trials, falls for Elaine, Elaine gets kidnapped, Guybrush sets to the rescue - etc., etc. There are lots of story events that unfold exactly as they were written.
If you mean that you don't like having a defined protagonist, interactions with characters, etc., I guess I disagree as a matter of taste, and also think that your preferences would exclude the overwhelming majority of adventure games.
I was exaggerating, of course, and mirroring the other guy's statement. But I am bothered by the ever growing proliferation of stories everywhere, especially where they weren't supposed to be. Every media - games, music, visual art - now has to "tell a story", all other kinds of experiences be damned. But particularly in Adventures it's very tangible, with the demands that puzzles not be too hard so as to not distract from the story - which is very detrimental to the genre.
 

MRY

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Secret of Monkey Island for example: Guybrush does the trials, falls for Elaine, Elaine gets kidnapped, Guybrush sets to the rescue - etc., etc. There are lots of story events that unfold exactly as they were written.

... in Adventures it's very tangible, with the demands that puzzles not be too hard so as to not distract from the story - which is very detrimental to the genre.
But this is why I still think my "exclude the overwhelming majority of adventure games" is a fair charge. Your lead exemplar isn't, say, The Wolf Among Us or Dreamfall; it's a keystone adventure game of the classic era that is widely agreed to have very strong puzzles and fun narrative, and which -- from my "play it with the kids" test -- actually has very little in the way of story segments blocking the flow of gameplay. (Every subsequent MI game has increased story, and by CMI the story was sufficiently intrusive that it made playing the game with my kids hard because skipping the dialogues and cutscenes leaves you with little idea what the hell is going on with puzzles.) If you think Secret of Monkey Island has too much story, then I'm not sure there is a single third-person point-and-click adventure* that passes your test.

I'm not saying that necessarily proves you're wrong about what makes a good game, but I do think it proves you're wrong about what makes a good point-and-click adventure because your standard excludes countless games that are beloved even by old grognardy types. Of course, you're in good company! Andrew Plotkin takes the same position: https://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/longestjourney.html
Those of you who occasion my review collection will have noted that I'm missing a lot of well-known adventure titles. What happened to Grim Fandango? What happened to Day of the Tentacle and Discworld? What about that peerless (or so I am told) pinnacle of pirate-based puzzling, the Monkey Island series?

In truth, there are two distinct strands of graphical adventure gaming. One is the Myst genre, of which I have voraciously devoured every possible example and reviewed many. The other is -- I generally say the "Lucas/Sierra" group, but if we persist in naming these groups for their type specimens, I think it would have to be the King's Quest genre. (If an earlier example exists, let me know.)

The L/S group (as I will refer to it) has a long and proud tradition: from the King's and Space Quests and Leisure Suit Larry to a bunch of Star Trek games, from Loom to The Dig, and so on. And I know barely more about them than their titles. You want to know how many games of this sort I've played? Well, there was Loom, and Grim Fandango, and, mmm, The Ward, and now The Longest Journey. Four. Why just four? Because, by and large, I don't like them.

Which is really strange. I enjoy, and I'm going to be blunt about this, a lot of real crap. I'm pretty good at saying "Okay, aside from all the miserable parts of that game, I had fun." And here we have literally dozens of games, from dozens of development groups and several major publishers. They all rub me the wrong way? The same wrong way?

I've tried to enjoy some of these. Loom is by Brian Moriarty, an Infocom Implementor and author of some of my favorite text games. Grim Fandango kicks around a story-concept -- deadpan Mexican afterlife bureaucracy -- which I purely love. So why, every time, do I walk out thinking "Wow, some nice stuff there. Pity the game drowned it out with a tidal wave of No Fun"?

There must be some commonality here. I want to investigate it.

Let us consider the interface. The most obvious distinction is the appearance of the hero. Literally: whether he appears. The Myst games give a first-person perspective ("through the eyes of the monster", as one subtitle has it); you are a void, a Cartesian observer. The L/S games are third-person; they put your character on the screen, a puppet which you lead around and make to dance.

Is this it? Perhaps. Conventions of viewpoint do matter to me. In text adventures, I am a traditionalist: I strongly prefer the second-person construction ("You are in a small cavern") to the first-person ("I am on the bridge of a spaceship") or the third ("Harry is in his bedroom"). I've played third-person text games, and while I can enjoy them, the viewpoint bugs me throughout. I want to be the protagonist, not command him. Maybe I'm just reacting the same way to graphical games?

But no. The hypothesis does not hold, and I disprove it thus: Ico. And Soul Reaver. And several others. Yea, even Tomb Raider and Super Mario Sunshine.

Those aren't adventure games, of course. They're action games, with some proportion of exploration or puzzle content mixed in. I bring them up simply because they're all third-person interfaces, and I've never had any trouble identifying with the little character image running around the screen. I've had a great time with these games. Whatever problem I have with the L/S clan, the visibility of the avatar is not it.

So what is the problem? I ask myself this, and I feel two answers floating around -- only they may be intertwined. Let's not worry about that yet. The answers are: "telling", "range of action", and "convention".

Damn, they really are intertwined, aren't they. I can't even distinguish them well enough to count reliably.

Okay, let's try this. I'll start talking about The Longest Journey -- remember The Longest Journey? This is a song about The Longest Journey -- and when any of this starts making sense to me, I'll get back to the wild theoretical crap.

(Don't all cringe at once.)

TLJ is a story about April Ryan, an art student in 23rd-century America. How do we know this? Because there's about two hours of voice-over text to listen to, as you examine every object in the game world. And talk to all of April's friends. And plumb the depths of their dialogue menus. Maybe it's three hours. Oh, dear, I've gotten bitter already.

I don't (much) want to get into the history of conversation interfaces in interactive fiction. But I've never liked the menu system. Games use it because it's easy, and it's interactive, right? It's not like a cut scene, where you sit back and listen to pre-scripted dialogue. Everyone hates cut scenes, and dialogue menus are better, right?

Wrong. I call bullshit on that reasoning, now and forevermore. In TLJ, when you talk to a character, you get three to five choices of things to say. If you get a little farther into the conversation, you might get a submenu of four or five topics to ask about. And you know what? The right answer is always to ask about all of them. They're all important clues -- or important background information, or character-building, or some other carefully crafted message from the designers.

And that means each conversation is a cut scene. It is not interactive. I can't put it more clearly than that. You sit back and listen to the pre-scripted dialogue, occasionally clicking a menu option to hear the next paragraph. You could skip some options, or leave early, of course -- but why bother? You're just going to come back later and listen to the rest. It's the shallowest kind of interactivity.

(A game could, of course, have critical choices in its menus. Options which have irrevocable consequences. That would make the interactivity important. But TLJ, like most graphical games, forswears all critical choices. You can never truly make a mistake. There are no wrong options, only options which are not yet the right one. Thus, not interactive. End of tangent.)

(Or, a game could have so many branching options in each conversation -- with certain choices excluding others from the tree -- that no player could explore them all. I'm told that Planescape Torment works this way. But TLJ doesn't. There are just a handful of choices available, and you can run through them all -- except perhaps for a few tiny divergences that are meaningless to the storyline. Thus, not interactive. End of further tangent.)

So: in this here game, the first time you meet a character, you get a ten-minute non-interactive cut scene to listen to. And you meet several characters in the first chapter -- because that's how the designers feed you background material.

It's copious. It's slow, because it's spoken text. It's boring and (effectively) mandatory. What part of this sounds like good game design?

This is what I mean by "telling". In the L/S style of game, most of what you learn about the world is told to you. Printed text, in the older games; spoken text in the recent ones.

Whereas in Myst style games, most of what you learn is shown to you; you see images of the world -- detailed images -- and you must interpret them yourself. Myst itself was nearly wordless (except for other characters and their diaries). Some of Myst's imitators have had voice-overs, or smartass sidekicks; but the bulk of the interaction is still what you see.

"Telling versus showing" is a cliche in narrative, and I don't want to wield it too simplistically. (After all, I'm the text adventure freak, and those are all printed text!) What bugs me here is a matter of degree -- the degree of interpretation which the game provides.

You click on graphical objects in Myst. You click on graphical objects in TLJ. In Myst, the object reacts. In TLJ, a pop-up window tells you what the object is, and the narrator tells you what you can do with it (or why you can't do anything with it). Do you see the distinction? In one case, you act in the world and learn from the result. In the second case, you are told how to act in the world in order to produce a result.

It's a subtle point... or maybe it's just another convention of viewpoint that I'm freaking out about. But I don't think so. I think there's a real difference in the sorts of choices and decisions that these games present you with. When I'm playing a Myst-style graphical adventure, I'm always thinking "What is that? What am I surrounded by? What in this room is important?" Even after I pick up an object, and thus identify it as a discrete manipulable thing in the game world, I'm asking "What is it made of? What shape is it? What properties might it have?"

My options of investigation are limited, yes -- I probably can't do more than click on the object, indicating my desire to "use it somehow". But then, the game designers know that. They make the object visually interesting. Or they make it react in an interesting way, which hints at where else in the game I might use it.

In TLJ, those questions just don't arise. I know what's important in the room, and what everything is, because there are pop-up labels. What the labels don't mention, the protagonist explains. There is rarely any important information illustrated by the game art. A graphical adventure in which you never attain your flash of insight from the graphics! That's it; that's what bugs me. If the graphics aren't critical, what are they there for?

This is not an inherent distinction. I do not think that a L/S game must be shallow and mechanical. I certainly don't think that every Myst-like game is deep and engaging.

Heck, look at text adventures. They're all narration. When you examine an object, the game prints a block of prose -- more or less in the protagonist's voice -- telling you about it. Ideally, that prose leads you to consider certain actions, without blatantly telling you what to do. You try a few actions; they may fail, but you learn more from the reactions. Eventually you understand the object deeply enough to think of the surprising-but-logical approach.

There are text games which do constantly tell you what to do. We call these "boring games". And there are Myst-style games in which every object in the world is blatantly visible, and reacts in a trivial way. Those are boring too.

It's just the conventions of the genres, I think. (Oh, this is going to sound rude. I'm still going to say it:) The games I like, text and graphical, try to be challenging. L/S games try to be easy. L/S players expect clear and simple ranges of action. Clues should be laid out in a line. A puzzle should be solvable, at worst, by trying your entire inventory on the (clearly-labelled) hotspot in front of you.

It's only a convention. It's not a universal truth. You know how I know? Because TLJ has interesting, challenging, engaging parts. The designers went every which way they could to get away from the "conventional" L/S puzzle structure. They have alien machines and symbols, they have computer interfaces, which you must comprehend by studying the game art. They have a particularly nifty set of alchemical potions. They have a three-way popup menu for using objects, which they stretch in as many directions as possible. They have an on-and-off NPC who you can send off on missions. They have monsters that chase you around (though not in a time-critical way). They have an Escheresque labyrinth where nothing reacts as you might expect. They have many puzzles that are entirely beautiful, by any adventure gamer's standards.

And yet -- I can always sense the pull of Grandpa Same-Old-Same-Old, pulling the designers back into the rut. In between the clever puzzles -- and outnumbering them -- are acres of tedious hoops to jump through. Talk to the character to learn the clue. Listen to the blatant pointer on what to do next. Collect the arbitrary piece of junk. Use your inventory to rig the incredibly contrived scenario which just happens to divert/satisfy/scare the utterly implausible NPC. Watch the sense of realism dribble down the tubes, as you follow the designers' monkey dance of plot contrivance.

It all turned into cliches ten years ago -- and everyone forgot to quit. Most of these games have long since passed into self-parody, right? I only saw bits of the Leisure Suit Larry series, but I remember a lot of mockery of its own genre. Certainly Grim Fandango had plenty of winks and nudges. I missed the first three Monkey Island games, but the fourth one had a terrible fetid air of jokes run into the ground. (For the two hours I managed to play, before flinging it across the room.)

And those are games which are supposed to be funny. The Longest Journey is trying to be serious work -- but half the time, it's buried in the same hackneyed game structures! Escape from Monkey Island foists these puzzle formats on us with a wry, "look how silly it all is" shrug. Now I'm supposed to take them seriously? When I'm buying a flute to play for the superstitious sea captain so he'll sign a delivery slip? When I'm cheating the gambler to win the talking bird to give to the lonely sailor so he'll get me a berth on the ship? I'm sorry. It's bunk. If that's what the audience wants, the audience is not on my planet.

It doesn't help that, by and large, TLJ is lousily written. I got through Grim Fandango, despite my annoyance with the game format, because it had a witty and interesting, satirical worldview to get across. TLJ doesn't. I'm sure the authors wanted to invent a rich and detailed fantasy world, but the fact is, it's all stock. There's barely an original note in the whole thirteen-chapter story; and the writing is nowhere near strong enough to breathe new life into the classic elements. Every character is a walking cliche. A walking, talking cliche. Oh, lord, how they do talk. In cliches.

(Okay, not every one. Burns Flipper the geek had a voice -- you know, an actual living character. I could listen to him. And the talking bird had a few good moments. Everyone else -- actors regurgitating lines. One adjective of personality, and a pet name to call the protagonist. Weirdly like Animal Crossing, now that I think of it. ...Niblet.)

The protagonist herself doesn't have the worst speeches of the bunch, but she's not very inspiring either. Her voice work is mostly bland, with occasional patches of bad acting. But then the actor doesn't have a whole lot to work with. The storyline develops her character only in the shallowest strokes -- aside from a family-history thread which leaps onto the stage at the end (and then stands there, looking awkward and embarrassed).

I don't know. I don't usually complain this much about bad writing in games. The field has so much bad writing to choose from. As I said, I enjoy a lot of real crap...

I think it's the sheer duration. TLJ is a long game to play. I don't say "large game", because there are many ways to measure size: number of puzzles, number of scenes, number of rooms. Comparing games of the same type is difficult; comparing games between genres is impossible.

But you can measure total playing time. I spent a whole lot of hours on TLJ. And most of those hours were spent listening to narration or dialogue... and it just wasn't that pleasant.

Look. I prefer big games. Even if the quality is shaky, the sheer weight of determination is impressive; effort and attention to detail always shine through. TLJ embodies great effort and attention. The designers put in all the little details and customizations that I could desire. Objects have long descriptions the first time you examine them, and shorter summarizations on later examination. Labels on NPCs change as you learn their names. Wrong guesses on solving puzzles produce interesting, informative failure messages. Random NPCs wander in and out of areas as the game progresses. The art is evocative, distinctive, and full of tiny detail -- often animated detail.

And I liked some of the imagery, and some of the events, and some of the puzzles, and some of the clever twists. The bit at the end, it did make me smile. Honest.

But... if you're going to spend days of my time building up a world and a story, and the world is just another fantasy mash, and the story is uninspiring... then you have a problem. If your dramatic events leave me saying, yeah, what next?... then you have a problem. If all your political, philosophical, and artistic ideas are sophomoric and soporific, delivered in bowling-ball-sized lumps by cardboard stooges who practically have quotation marks tattooed on their foreheads... then you have a problem.

I am focussing on the negative here, I admit. I have written much on what I disliked of TLJ, and little on what I enjoyed. I did enjoy the game quite a bit. Just... not enough.

Put it this way: If I hadn't spent so much time wincing at the dialogue, muttering about the puzzles, and flat-out bored with the game, I would have said "Nice game. Large and detailed. Nothing brilliant in there, but entertaining." Contrariwise, if there'd been brilliance buried in the game, I would have forgiven the flaws. But as it stands? No thanks.

I hear a sequel is coming out. I might even buy it. Optimism says, the unanswered questions from TLJ might turn out to be more interesting than the answered ones.

Ah, optimism.

(* That is, I'm excluding parser adventures and first-person Myst-likes, which I don't think are fairly called point-and-click adventures in any event.)
 

V_K

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If you think Secret of Monkey Island has too much story, then I'm not sure there is a single third-person point-and-click adventure* that passes your test.
Oh no, don't get me wrong, I wasn't saying MI had too much story - just used it as an example to illustrate what I meant by saying that Myst is a (mostly) story-free game. Would I enjoy MI more if there was less story to it? Absolutely, but it's an open enough game that I don't mind too much. Where I do start to mind is something like Book of Unwritten Tales where story dictates the order of puzzle solving giving you very little leeway to do things at your own pace. Or where the story content itself annoys me, like in Deponia.
 

MRY

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Plotkin is a legit great in the adventure field, so I take his views very seriously. Spider & Web has probably the single greatest moment in any text adventure (I can think of a great moment in Anchorhead that might rival it, but no other ones), and despite looking like a total goof and sometimes taking crazy positions, he is a genius and one of the best puzzle designers ever, even if his puzzles are often beyond my reach.

I disagree with his general attack on point-and-click adventures, but I think his criticism of TLJ are fair and I generally agree with them. And while I like menu-based dialogues, I think his attack on them is fair and accurate, though it overstates its case (it is not actually a cutscene, the experience for a player is meaningfully different, even if there is an intellectual way to say they are the same) and fails to account for the upsides of such dialogue systems.

The single most important part of his argument is this one. I don't have a great rebuttal to it, other than to say that it is only one factor in what makes an adventure game rewarding:
"Telling versus showing" is a cliche in narrative, and I don't want to wield it too simplistically. (After all, I'm the text adventure freak, and those are all printed text!) What bugs me here is a matter of degree -- the degree of interpretation which the game provides.

You click on graphical objects in Myst. You click on graphical objects in TLJ. In Myst, the object reacts. In TLJ, a pop-up window tells you what the object is, and the narrator tells you what you can do with it (or why you can't do anything with it). Do you see the distinction? In one case, you act in the world and learn from the result. In the second case, you are told how to act in the world in order to produce a result.

It's a subtle point... or maybe it's just another convention of viewpoint that I'm freaking out about. But I don't think so. I think there's a real difference in the sorts of choices and decisions that these games present you with. When I'm playing a Myst-style graphical adventure, I'm always thinking "What is that? What am I surrounded by? What in this room is important?" Even after I pick up an object, and thus identify it as a discrete manipulable thing in the game world, I'm asking "What is it made of? What shape is it? What properties might it have?"

My options of investigation are limited, yes -- I probably can't do more than click on the object, indicating my desire to "use it somehow". But then, the game designers know that. They make the object visually interesting. Or they make it react in an interesting way, which hints at where else in the game I might use it.

In TLJ, those questions just don't arise. I know what's important in the room, and what everything is, because there are pop-up labels. What the labels don't mention, the protagonist explains. There is rarely any important information illustrated by the game art. A graphical adventure in which you never attain your flash of insight from the graphics! That's it; that's what bugs me. If the graphics aren't critical, what are they there for?

And if I had to distill his whole article to a single meaningful line:
You click on graphical objects in Myst. You click on graphical objects in TLJ. In Myst, the object reacts. In TLJ, a pop-up window tells you what the object is, and the narrator tells you what you can do with it (or why you can't do anything with it).

My bottom line is that I love the kind of adventures he hates and largely don't like the kind he loves, but I think it's still an interesting perspective that complements V__K's point above.
 

Verylittlefishes

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In Dreamfall they tried to depart the point and click harbour of TLJ...by turning the game 3D and also added horrible, horrible stealth and retarded "combat". To probably market it as the Tomb Raider clone? I didn't remember.

Also the author's latest game, Draugen is a horrible walking sim full of all possible cliches. Just wanted to add that sad fact.
 
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I think Plotkin is clearly a super-smart dude, and I greatly respect the amount of critical thinking/writing he has done over the years regarding game design, but that review seems slightly ridiculous to me. It's less a review of The Longest Journey (which I have not played in many years, but I remember being overall unimpressed with), and more an analysis of a sub-genre that he begins by stating his general unfamiliarity and loathing towards.

I also find it hilarious that he seems to think everyone hates cut-scenes, considering the last 20 years of videogame history.
 

MRY

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Yes, the review is primarily his case against P&Cs generally (and it's not a bad case), and then why TLJ suffers particularly from the failings he identifies.

It's really hard to figure out what makes Plotkin tick, given his intense love of the Soul Reaver series, which I find hard to square with his otherwise logos-centric evaluation of games. But maybe the common thread is that he just enjoys games that let you do stuff, and the more time that you're not in control, the less he enjoys it.
 

MRY

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I have no idea. Off-topic comparison of Soul Reaver and Dark Souls behind the spoiler tag.
I will say that I loved Soul Reaver and quit Dark Souls very quickly, and the absence of puzzles had nothing to do with it. The difference for me was that Dark Souls felt grindy, tedious, and fiddly from the outset, whereas Soul Reaver was basically a proto-God of War -- everything about it was designed to make you feel like a heavy metal bad ass. You got more powerful as you went, but your baseline was fast, strong, terrifying to your enemies, cool to your buds, etc.

The short stretch I played Dark Souls consisted of spending a lot of time to design a weird looking PC (every design looked weird) by making a bunch of opaque choices, then fighting very easy but unfun battles where inexplicably I only did like one damage to skeleton archers but it was no big deal because I could always interrupt their attack animation, then maybe I like ran from some boss in a lame scripted way, got bored, and quit.

I know people love the game, but it was the antithesis of Soul Reaver, which starts with you being the FIRST VAMPIRE WITH WINGS! EVEN KAIN IS JEALOUS! then Kain throws you into a pit where an EVEN MORE EVIL AND POWERFUL ELDRITCH GOD resurrects you to be the vessel of his CYCLOPEAN-SCALE EVIL, also a giant sword comes out your arm like if Wolverine were trying to compensate better, and the first human you see cowers in terror, and oh, even if your foes kill you, you become EVEN MORE POWERFUL IN DEATH and then come back alive... and EVERYONE talks like Kevin Conroy on Batman: TAS only BETTER and they say stuff like, "This charnel house bore the unmistakable marks of Melchiah’s clan. To what depths had our dynasty plummeted, if these ghouls were the descendants of my high-born brother? Were they so debased as to recruit fledglings from the desiccated corpses here interred?" and "Everyone is afraid, sibling. You awake to a world of fear. These times of change are so... unsettling. Do you think I feel no revulsion for this form? Do you believe for a moment that our Lord would risk his empire upon an upstart inheritance?" Like, literally everyone talks the same way, and it is perfect. Utterly glorious, top to bottom.

Meanwhile, Dark Souls is like, "This crappy rusty sword will inflict 3% more damage to skeleton archers. You now inflict 1.03 damage."
 

Verylittlefishes

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I have no idea. Off-topic comparison of Soul Reaver and Dark Souls behind the spoiler tag.
I will say that I loved Soul Reaver and quit Dark Souls very quickly, and the absence of puzzles had nothing to do with it. The difference for me was that Dark Souls felt grindy, tedious, and fiddly from the outset, whereas Soul Reaver was basically a proto-God of War -- everything about it was designed to make you feel like a heavy metal bad ass. You got more powerful as you went, but your baseline was fast, strong, terrifying to your enemies, cool to your buds, etc.

The short stretch I played Dark Souls consisted of spending a lot of time to design a weird looking PC (every design looked weird) by making a bunch of opaque choices, then fighting very easy but unfun battles where inexplicably I only did like one damage to skeleton archers but it was no big deal because I could always interrupt their attack animation, then maybe I like ran from some boss in a lame scripted way, got bored, and quit.

I know people love the game, but it was the antithesis of Soul Reaver, which starts with you being the FIRST VAMPIRE WITH WINGS! EVEN KAIN IS JEALOUS! then Kain throws you into a pit where an EVEN MORE EVIL AND POWERFUL ELDRITCH GOD resurrects you to be the vessel of his CYCLOPEAN-SCALE EVIL, also a giant sword comes out your arm like if Wolverine were trying to compensate better, and the first human you see cowers in terror, and oh, even if your foes kill you, you become EVEN MORE POWERFUL IN DEATH and then come back alive... and EVERYONE talks like Kevin Conroy on Batman: TAS only BETTER and they say stuff like, "This charnel house bore the unmistakable marks of Melchiah’s clan. To what depths had our dynasty plummeted, if these ghouls were the descendants of my high-born brother? Were they so debased as to recruit fledglings from the desiccated corpses here interred?" and "Everyone is afraid, sibling. You awake to a world of fear. These times of change are so... unsettling. Do you think I feel no revulsion for this form? Do you believe for a moment that our Lord would risk his empire upon an upstart inheritance?" Like, literally everyone talks the same way, and it is perfect. Utterly glorious, top to bottom.

Meanwhile, Dark Souls is like, "This crappy rusty sword will inflict 3% more damage to skeleton archers. You now inflict 1.03 damage."

Did you play that two games when they came out respectively or later? Maybe :it's just a matter of time:
 

MRY

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I played Soul Reaver something like four years after its release (I believe I played it in 2003). I played Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition eight years after its release, which makes nine years after its original release.

I don't see the comparison between the two games at all. Honestly. Dark Souls starts with an extended cutscene about some ancient begins fighting each other; Soul Reaver starts with a cutscene of you being so awesome of an anti-hero that the ultimate anti-hero of Blood Omen has to try killing you -- BUT HE CAN'T! Dark Souls starts with grinding your way out of a boring dungeon that incongruously has gameplay explanations on signs on the walls IIRC, and then you encounter a giant enemy in a cathedral area and have to run away. Soul Reaver starts with an eldritch god teaching you to be EVEN MORE BAD ASS and then you go into like a cathedral area where you also encounter a giant enemy and you kill him like a total bad ass. Soul Reaver is devoid of incrementalism, whereas everything about Dark Souls feels incremental/minmaxing.

Again, Dark Souls is apparently a GOAT game, I don't question people's love of it, I just don't see the two as remotely comparable. It would be like comparing God of War: Viking Edition (which I've never played) and Skyrim (which I've never played) or something just because they're both Viking games. Soul Reaver and Dark Souls are both gothic fantasy, I guess, but otherwise, don't see the similarity.
 

Verylittlefishes

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Soul Reaver and Dark Souls are both gothic fantasy, I guess, but otherwise, don't see the similarity.

Gothic fantasy indeed, sir, but I think I had something other in my mind. If consult Wikipedia (what to believe if not this ultimate arbiter?) we see that Soul Reaver is considered to be Action/Adventure, while Dark Souls is Action/RPG. We know what RPG is (leveling, weird PC creation editor, "You now inflict 1.03 damage"), but what consists the "Adventure" part in Action/Adventure? The "action" gameplay, story aside, is basically similar: in both games you are running around in TPV killing gothic creatures and watching pathetic cutscenes and dark scenery around you. Nothing of this is "Adventure", and the Actions sure have their exploration (hello, Half-Life).

I think it's the puzzles. Don't remember them in Soul Reaver 1, but Soul Reaver 2 surely had some very boring ones (my un-favourite, collect&put the stones corresponding to the elements and celestial spheres, pull the levers, rinse, repeat). So I was probably wrong all along and puzzles are genre-defining thing for Adventures (no matter how bad or ridiculuously musplaced they are) and I'm just storyfag who never liked them and probably should focus on books.
 

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