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Adventure games from last 10 years with challenging puzzles

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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Sorry, France!
 

ValeVelKal

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It annoys me when these political disputes spill into the Adventure Game forum, which is generally not so afflicted. As an ardent Shakespeare fan, a few points, mostly already made above:

(1) Every Shakespeare production I've seen staged (~20?) was modernized in costuming and set design. The filmed ones I've seen are about 50/50. Many good ones (like Richard III and Coriolanus) were modernized. The non-modernized ones are set in the relevant historical era, whereas my understanding is that the norm for Shakespeare was to stage many of them in contemporary (to Shakespeare) ways.
(2) The first Shakespeare production I saw, which won me over forever, was the RSC putting on King Lear, and Paris France was played by a black actor. A dozen years later, I saw a superb King Lear staged at the Folger Library with an almost-all-black cast. While I am loath to make an appeal to authority, it seems to me that RSC and Folger are deeply in love with the Bard and his works.
(3) The question to me is whether a modernization of a Shakespearean work is done to uncover new aspects of the work and attract new audience (good!) or to undermine the play as written (bad).

I don't know what #3 means in this instance, but a lot of the attacks seem to presume that modernizing means contempt, which is not fair or accurate.
I guess this game is for you if you are both and ardent Shakespeare and adventure game fan.
 

ValeVelKal

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It sounds very much like Adam Cadre's Varicella, which I didn't particularly enjoy, even though the concept was really neat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varicella_(video_game)
I had NEVER heard of that game. But yeah, no text prompt in Elsinore. Give it a try, really, it is maybe €10 bundled with Astrologaster, which is a bit too long for its own good but that a real Shakespeare fan should love as well.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/742520/Astrologaster/

Edit : Ah, promotion ended. I got it in a bundle promotion, when I was looking for Astrologaster, which was fun - but Elsinore was really superior.
 
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MRY

Wormwood Studios
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I found that the Lyttle Lytton contest was often ruined by absurdities rather than genuinely clever construction, but I did enjoy reading them for a while. :)

Like, this 2009 winner is very good:
The mighty frigate Indestructible rounded the Horn of Africa and lurched east’ard.

As is this 2019 winner:
“Are you okay?” asks my sister Tlaloc.  “You’re as green as the parrots that inhabit this part of the continent.”

But 2020 and 2018 don't feel remotely like they could exist outside of lame spoof writing and are unsexy sex writing jokes. The same "only in a fake contest" applies to other winners like: “I shouldn’t be saying this, but I think I’ll love you always, baby, always,” Adam cried into the email.
 
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I found that the Lyttle Lytton contest was often ruined by absurdities rather than genuinely clever construction, but I did enjoy reading them for a while. :)

You're such a lawyer.

That said, yes it does appear he gives a little too much credit to bonkers non-sequiters, but they're still quite amusing the first time through. But even just browsing through the most recent year of nominees there are some lines that are worthy of McKittrick-Ros herself:

"The chess master at the park was in full combat mode, making his moves faster than even Albert Einstein ever could."

"Cripes! I yelled. I couldn’t stop saying it. Cripes! Cripes! She was dead."

"Megan realised her marriage was dead the year she lost her mother to a long illness, which had ravaged the latter as Megan’s husband had ravaged the former, early in their marriage."

"He couldn’t choose a favorite child between the apple and orange of his loins."


No joke: my wife just came home from work and asked if I was drunk because I was laughing so hard while reading through these.
 

El Pollo Diablo

Educated
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Continuing going through adventures listed in this thread with Dropsy. The plan is to eventually play through most of these but I can't do it too fast for multiple reasons, one of which is that I found, if I play two adventure games too close to one another, then if I get stuck the temptation to use the walkthrough is much greater.

Anyway, Dropsy. I couldn't call it hard, but it was not insultingly easy either. According to Steam I completed it in ~7 hours, but I was surprised because I thought it would be longer. I complained before about adventures limiting the player to only a couple of locations of the time, and thankfully, Dropsy is the opposite of that, with opening up almost all locations immediately. On the downside, there are usually only a couple of hotspots in each location. However, there is also a time of day mechanics which adds another dimension to some of the puzzles, as the question isn't only "what" to do, but also "when". I usually hate time-of-day mechanics in games, but it actually works here. I'm not sure why the authors call the game "non-traditional", I found it more traditional than a lot of games that intentionally try to be traditional. Overall, another solid entry.
 

El Pollo Diablo

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Next: VirtuaVerse. Again, decent difficulty, pretty much comparable to other adventures I played from this thread (Edna and Harvey: The Breakout, Dropsy). According to Steam it took me 21.2 hours to finish, which makes it the longest adventure game experience I had recently (beating LSL: Wet Dreamd Dry Twice with 18.4 hours). I got stuck for a while bit twice, but not for too long, and in the end the solution wasn't overly difficult.

I found Virtuaverse to be terrible. Puzzles were hard because they were unfair, assuming an understanding of an universe that is never explained. Though I guess if you are OK with Moon logic you will like the game.

Though compared to harder game like e.g. VirtuaVerse, it has almost no bullshit sequences (VV is all bullshit sequences)

I'm curious which parts you guys found unfair/bullshit because I found most things to kinda make sense within the game's internal logic (though that could be for various reasons such as my background, and also, I sometimes tend to stumble across solutions for more difficult problems quickly while struggling with objectively easier ones).
 

V_K

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I'm curious which parts you guys found unfair/bullshit
I've aired my gripes with the game earlier in this thread:
Some of them require utterly random items, not clued anywhere (the altar offering), some require very precise actions (sawing off the branch) or won't allow certain actions until after certain points (painting the action figure). It's not like these puzzles are hard per se - it's that they don't have logical solutions, or the game flatly rejects otherwise logical actions done out of order, making you think you were on the wrong path. Not to mention that much of the time in the game you're doing things without any idea why you are doing them or what you're trying to achieve - which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but combine it with the previous point and you get a game with utter lack of direction. And then there's the issue of backtracking - painfully, excruciatingly slow backtracking through huge locations at uniformly zoomed-in level - without ever knowing whether you're backtracking because you missed something, or because you need to trigger some random event in some random part of the world to proceed, or you already have everything you need and just failed to think of the solution.
I guess my biggest issues with the game is that it's fucking annoying. Its writing is annoyingly preachy and trying too hard to be clever, it's pace is annoyingly slow, and its story is annoyingly nonsensical - all of which just made me want to be done with it as fast as possible. Having puzzles that interfere with that goal just multiplied the annoyance.
 

El Pollo Diablo

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Hmm maybe I got lucky then and did everything in the intended order, because I never encountered an out-of-order issue you described. I did not get an impression that "you're doing things without any idea why you are doing them or what you're trying to achieve" though, I thought that was pretty clear. There is also a journal where this is explicitly written, but I didn't use it much. Backtracking, meh, there is backtracking in pretty much all adventure games so I don't view it as something inherently bad. And the map (M button) allows you to go from every location to major location starting points, so that helps.

Its writing is annoyingly preachy and trying too hard to be clever

We can definitely agree on that one

its story is annoyingly nonsensical

Well, I guess I don't really play adventure games for the story (hence "adventures are about the story" is so annoying for me and hence this thread) so I didn't bother to look too closely into it. I viewed the VirtuaVerse story as a vessel the authors used to stick as many demoscene/cyberpunk/etc references as they could into.
 

V_K

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And the map (M button) allows you to go from every location to major location starting points, so that helps.
I'm pretty sure that was not the case when I played it. Besides, the locations can go quite far from the starting point and you never know exactly where you missed something or need to talk to someone to trigger next plot stage, so you have to comb through them anyway.
Backtracking itself isn't the problem. The snail pace of it is.
Well, I guess I don't really play adventure games for the story
Neither do I, but when it's so actively bad it's impossible not to notice.
I did not get an impression that "you're doing things without any idea why you are doing them or what you're trying to achieve" though
Consider the very first location. On the one hand, it's unclear that the guarded shop is the place you need to go (it's very badly communicated). Plus the solution to how to get rid of the guard is also very unobvious and badly communicated - I can't imagine anyone doing it on purpose rather than stumbling on it accidentally while playing with the terminal. On the other hand, all the while you can go quite far in the restaurant puzzle chain - which is objectively easier, or at least better clued - without any idea why you're doing this. Most of the game's locations are like this. Not to mention all the situations where to solve puzzle A you need first to solve a seemingly completely unrelated puzzle B to get a key item (or, worse still, trigger the plot).
As I've said in my original comment, on its own, none of that is a bad thing. Doing things simply because you can and figuring out the whys later is a staple of Adventures. But in combination with the game's other problems it just exacerbates the annoyance.
 

ValeVelKal

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And the map (M button) allows you to go from every location to major location starting points, so that helps.
I'm pretty sure that was not the case when I played it. Besides, the locations can go quite far from the starting point and you never know exactly where you missed something or need to talk to someone to trigger next plot stage, so you have to comb through them anyway.
Backtracking itself isn't the problem. The snail pace of it is.
Well, I guess I don't really play adventure games for the story
Neither do I, but when it's so actively bad it's impossible not to notice.
I did not get an impression that "you're doing things without any idea why you are doing them or what you're trying to achieve" though
Consider the very first location. On the one hand, it's unclear that the guarded shop is the place you need to go (it's very badly communicated). Plus the solution to how to get rid of the guard is also very unobvious and badly communicated - I can't imagine anyone doing it on purpose rather than stumbling on it accidentally while playing with the terminal. On the other hand, all the while you can go quite far in the restaurant puzzle chain - which is objectively easier, or at least better clued - without any idea why you're doing this. Most of the game's locations are like this. Not to mention all the situations where to solve puzzle A you need first to solve a seemingly completely unrelated puzzle B to get a key item (or, worse still, trigger the plot).
As I've said in my original comment, on its own, none of that is a bad thing. Doing things simply because you can and figuring out the whys later is a staple of Adventures. But in combination with the game's other problems it just exacerbates the annoyance.
Yeah, I remember the BS about the restaurant chain leading nowhere at the beginning.

I also remember that to get an early item, you need to dissassemble a gaming terminal in your own home, which is not communicated anywhere and only make sense if you know that, IN THIS UNIVERSE, that's how the gaming terminals work - which of course is said nowhere.

Now it has cool ideas, like the AR helmet. I sent the idea to the lead of one of our games in production and maybe we'll do that.
 

El Pollo Diablo

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Yeah, I remember the BS about the restaurant chain leading nowhere at the beginning.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on these points. As V_K said, doing things simply because you can and figuring out the whys later is a staple of Adventures. Doing this puzzle because you can and because it's strongly hinted that you should, and figure out the why, or rather, how it fits into the known goals a bit later is sufficient for me.

I also remember that to get an early item, you need to dissassemble a gaming terminal in your own home, which is not communicated anywhere and only make sense if you know that, IN THIS UNIVERSE, that's how the gaming terminals work - which of course is said nowhere.

Heh, this is one of the 2 places I got stuck on for maybe a couple of hours. Still, in retrospect I didn't view it as unfair.
The game tells you that a cabinet on the gaming machine is stuck, and if an adventure tells me that a door is stuck I should have tried to get it unstuck sooner. What made this puzzle difficult for me was the fact that you can open a similar cabinet on the other machine right next to it, so I didn't try very hard to open this one as well. Still, I consider it fair play.
 

V_K

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Heh, this is one of the 2 places I got stuck on for maybe a couple of hours. Still, in retrospect I didn't view it as unfair.
I think it just goes a bit against convention (and habit) to have locations like this - ostensibly disconnected from the puzzle chains you're currently solving - hold key items to puzzles elsewhere. A much worse case of that is the band van - it's presented as simply a means of transportation, while in fact so many puzzle solutions in the second act rely on what you find there. It's extremely counterintuitive. And part of me wants to applaud the game for such a subtle use of convention as a red herring, but in practice it was just another annoyance to add to the long list.
I mean, I can't quite put my finger on it, but somehow it never felt satisfying when I solved a puzzle that got me stuck in VV. It never made me feel clever, only go like "Huh? So that's what I was supposed to do here? Ok..."
 

El Pollo Diablo

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I think it just goes a bit against convention (and habit) to have locations like this - ostensibly disconnected from the puzzle chains you're currently solving - hold key items to puzzles elsewhere. A much worse case of that is the band van - it's presented as simply a means of transportation, while in fact so many puzzle solutions in the second act rely on what you find there. It's extremely counterintuitive. And part of me wants to applaud the game for such a subtle use of convention as a red herring, but in practice it was just another annoyance to add to the long list.
I mean, I can't quite put my finger on it, but somehow it never felt satisfying when I solved a puzzle that got me stuck in VV. It never made me feel clever, only go like "Huh? So that's what I was supposed to do here? Ok..."

I don't think it goes against convention, if I recall correctly, pretty much all of the classics did that. I don't have a perfect memory of those games, but e.g. the circus/cannon puzzle from the original Monkey Island occurs to me as something pretty disconnected from the rest of the chapter.

The larger problem though, is that if the solution to the puzzle must be "close" to the puzzle location ("close" either in physical sense or "close" as in "related"), then the game becomes too easy. You can think of a brilliant puzzle, but if you limit the player to 3 inventory items and 5 places where they can use them, the solution becomes instantly obvious.
 

V_K

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I don't think it goes against convention, if I recall correctly, pretty much all of the classics did that. I don't have a perfect memory of those games, but e.g. the circus/cannon puzzle from the original Monkey Island occurs to me as something pretty disconnected from the rest of the chapter.
I don't remember what was disconnected about that particular puzzle, but I didn't have any problems like that with MI. The one puzzle that I felt broke the contract with the player was finding the fort - since all other travelling on the world map is done by clicking hotspots, requiring to execute a very specific free wandering path was not very fair.

The larger problem though, is that if the solution to the puzzle must be "close" to the puzzle location ("close" either in physical sense or "close" as in "related"), then the game becomes too easy. You can think of a brilliant puzzle, but if you limit the player to 3 inventory items and 5 places where they can use them, the solution becomes instantly obvious.
The solution to puzzle should be logically deducible from available information. A thematic disconnect can work if there are other hints to work off from, but VV isn't terribly generous with those to put it mildly. Come to think of it, that may be the root of my problem with VV - its puzzles are challenging not because they are creatively designed, but because the game tries too hard to obfuscate the solutions. In my book, the best puzzles are the ones that give you all the facts straight, but still require thinking outside the box to connect them. VV has some of those too - my favorite is probably figuring out how to control the drone in the junkyard - but most wouldn't even have been hard if the game played it fair.
 

El Pollo Diablo

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I don't remember what was disconnected about that particular puzzle, but I didn't have any problems like that with MI. The one puzzle that I felt broke the contract with the player was finding the fort - since all other travelling on the world map is done by clicking hotspots, requiring to execute a very specific free wandering path was not very fair.

Hm, I don't remember that one, but
one other instance where you discover a location outside of hotspot clicking on the map is finding the swordmaster
and I have to say that is probably my favorite puzzle in that game and one of genuine a-ha moments for me.
 

V_K

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I don't remember what was disconnected about that particular puzzle, but I didn't have any problems like that with MI. The one puzzle that I felt broke the contract with the player was finding the fort - since all other travelling on the world map is done by clicking hotspots, requiring to execute a very specific free wandering path was not very fair.

Hm, I don't remember that one, but
one other instance where you discover a location outside of hotspot clicking on the map is finding the swordmaster
and I have to say that is probably my favorite puzzle in that game and one of genuine a-ha moments for me.
You don't discover the swordmaster on the world map per se - you enter the forest location, and after you find her, then it becomes a regular hotspot. For the fort, you just have to move Guybrush on the world map itself - the only time it ever happens in the game.
My favorite puzzle in MI is getting out of the water after LeChuck tries to drown you. Another example of the philosophy I was talking about earlier - the solution stares you right in the face but it still takes a leap of logic to find it.
 

visions

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My favorite puzzle in MI is getting out of the water after LeChuck tries to drown you. Another example of the philosophy I was talking about earlier - the solution stares you right in the face but it still takes a leap of logic to find it.

That one seemed immediately obvious to me. Adventure game difficulty is pretty subjective though, I'm sure I've been stuck on puzzles that would seem obvious to many. I remember in Beneath a Steel Sky I got stuck when I needed to

use a credit card to open a locked door. Guess I hadn't watched anything from the 80's recently around that time and had forgotten this trope.
 

V_K

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Played Tiny Room Stories: Town Mystery that Adventuregamers review recommended as being super hard. Didn't find it super hard per se, but quite decently challenging. Although a fair bit of the challenge comes from it being a bit pixel hunt-y, especially in the penultimate chapter - there's no hotspot highlighting even on mouse-over, so you really have to click on stuff a lot. But in this particular case I didn't mind too much because a) low-poly 3D visuals are very easy to read; b) lack of animations (the PC isn't shown in the environment despite the iso perspective) and single-screen locations make backtracking as painless as possible.
Most of the puzzles are of escape room/Myst variety - find and interpret clues to figure out code sequences for various doors, containers and computers. There is a (small) inventory and some inventory-based puzzles but they are mostly very easy - except for a couple of clever sequences where the game makes you think you need to find a code or a key, while in reality you have to use another item to circumvent this. The levels themselves range from short and linear to relatively expansive and open-ended. There's also quite a lot of them - the game took me 14 hours to finish, and it barely has any cutscenes or dialogs.
 

ValeVelKal

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Not at all last 10 years but on the topic of good puzzles versus bad puzzles.

I just finished I have no mouth but I must scream (with some spoilers I will admit). The game has an excellent reputation but I found it terrible, both on the storyfront and the puzzle front. The only thing I like was the thematic of the 5 last humans kept alive for the pleasure of an AI. Anyone here actually liked the game ?
 
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Not at all last 10 years but on the topic of good puzzles versus bad puzzles.

I just finished I have no mouth but I must scream (with some spoilers I will admit). The game has an excellent reputation but I found it terrible, both on the storyfront and the puzzle front. The only thing I like was the thematic of the 5 last humans kept alive for the pleasure of an AI. Anyone here actually liked the game ?


It’s been a long time since I played it (at least 15 years), but I have fond memories of it. I don’t remember much about the gameplay/puzzles outside of the 5 character mechanic though. I’ve always liked the Ellison short story (crazy asshole that he may be), and I thought it was a great expansion on it (almost certainly due to the involvement of Ellison himself).

But yeah, I don’t remember the puzzles, and I think its sterling reputation is primarily due to the writing.
 

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