Adventure games from last 10 years with challenging puzzles

[Maxie]

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.

may be that your fond memories stem from the fact that you've played it whole 15 years ago back when you were younger etc. the reception proper is marred this way for many people on countless things

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Wow, nostalgia actually exists? You don’t say. Thank you for the insight.

I don’t think this is nostalgia. I was in my mid 20s when I played the game. The fact that I don’t remember the puzzles means they’re probably bad or mediocre. The fact that I remember the writing (and have read the short story several times subsequently and am generally familiar with the overall high quality of Ellison’s work) suggests that the writing is very good.

 

[El Pollo Diablo]

Finished "Galador - The Prince and the Coward". As already noted it's older than 10 years, but I saw it at a discount at GOG and remembered it was mentioned in this thread. Although there is an English translation I played it in German as the former only applies to text and not the voiceover. I was worried I might miss some hints because of the language barrier (German is my 3rd language), but that's OK since this game doesn't give you any.

This game is an asshole.

I managed to beat it (without using a walkthrough) in just over 30 hours, which is quite a long time considering the game doesn't really have that many locations / hotspots. The puzzles range from pretty sensible to, as far as I can tell, completely random. But since I said I don't mind moon logic, I shouldn't complain too hard about those. You might think that with the limited amount of hotspots it might be easy to get yourself unstuck by "try everything on everything" method, but oooh no, not here. Without giving away too much, there are some puzzles that won't really work like that and it is 2 of those that got me stuck the longest. One of those I consider fair play, the other not as much. Also, god forbid that the game should tell you you're on a right track if you try to do something very similar to what you are supposed to do. However it's impossible to get stuck permanently so at least you know you're not stuck because of that.

tl;dr unlike the other games I played from here I consider it somewhat past the limit of "unfair", but it's still beatable if you're feeling up to it. Despite giving me some frustration I can't say I dislike it completely.

 

[V_K]

Without giving away too much, there are some puzzles that won't really work like that and it is 2 of those that got me stuck the longest.

Can you actually give away too much (i.e. an example) under a spoiler tag? After that recommendation, I'm definitely not going to play it, but I'm curious as to how an Adventure game might resiste bruteforcing.

 

[El Pollo Diablo]

Sure!

Example 1:

Spoiler

There is a location where you go to and as soon as you walk anywhere you get chased out by monsters back to the main map. During that, your mouse cursor disappears which leads you to believe this is scripted and you can't do anything. (There is another location in the game where you get chased away in a similar fashion and the solution there is to do something in a third location.) In this location, however, you are supposed to click (even though the mouse cursor is not visible), which makes the mouse cursor visible and then you can actually do stuff.

Example 2:

Spoiler

In another place you need to use an item on a character, but you need to stand in a specific place in order to do that. If you use the same combination or object/character while standing anywhere else, the game gives you a generic "can't do that" text. Even though it seems unfair, I actually consider this one more fair than the previous one, as the game puts you in a right place deliberately, depending on how you enter the location. It's just if you click anywhere or do any other action, you lost your chance until you re-enter the location into that specific spot.

 

[V_K]

Wow, that brings back memories of Space Quest. And not of the fond kind.

 

[Neuromancer]

Sure!

Example 1:

Spoiler

There is a location where you go to and as soon as you walk anywhere you get chased out by monsters back to the main map. During that, your mouse cursor disappears which leads you to believe this is scripted and you can't do anything. (There is another location in the game where you get chased away in a similar fashion and the solution there is to do something in a third location.) In this location, however, you are supposed to click (even though the mouse cursor is not visible), which makes the mouse cursor visible and then you can actually do stuff.

The invisible mouse cursor actually sounds more like a bug to me.
It's a long time ago, that I played this game and I remember it had some pretty shitty puzzles, but I don' recognize this type.

Did you use ScummVM?

 

[El Pollo Diablo]

Did you use ScummVM?

I used the GOG version, which does use ScummVM. But actually

Spoiler

I just replayed that part to make sure it behaves the way I remember it behaves and it doesn't Actually, the cursor does reappear, I just never noticed it because of character walking from the scene. So this is totally on me haha

 

[Neuromancer]

Thanks for the info.
Even with the cursor, it's still a shitty puzzle anyway.

Wasn't there some other puzzle where you had to

Spoiler

steal some shoes from a homeless guy?

 

[El Pollo Diablo]

Yep.

Spoiler

Stealing the shoe I actually considered the straightforward part of that puzzle. I mean, as soon as the beggar takes off the shoe and it becomes a highlightable object it's pretty much a classic adventure game puzzle. The part I found completely random though is that you have to give the shoe to the merchant. After you give it, the merchant mentions some kind of "Steal from the poor, give to the rich" guild. I think this would have been a pretty good puzzle if the existence of such a guild was mentioned before solving the puzzle, not after. As such, it is rather nonsensical and I solved it mostly by observing that when I got stuck in the early game, it was because I needed to give something to someone.

 

[wishbonetail]

Here's my 5 cents into piggy bank. Game's called Still There. You playing a space-lighthouse keeper with issues, doing mundane and not-so jobs around the station with a help of annoying little AI. Basically it's a puzzle game with a story, where you left to your own devices while fuguring out how shit works by reading manuals, switching levers, pushing buttons, pulling your hair out. And there's a lot of shit you can click on, and i mean a lot. I, being techonlogically impaired, had to resort to skip button for couple of major puzzles, which did a number on my boner concerning further walkthrough. But story is surpirisingly good, if a bit too melodramatic, so i persevered.
Besides, interactions with other characters are reminiscent of talking to codexers and your space station urine recycling bin have the form of a lips, so this game does have that extra kink.

 

[Rincewind]

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.

That is a very good way to put it into words how I've always felt about story-heavy games vs ones where the story is more emergent and non-verbal, as you put it, but couldn't "formalise" it so clearly even for myself in words. You quoted Dungeon Master but that's exactly how I felt about my recent Eye of the Beholder replay; I was scratching my head when the CRPGAddict wrote about it that it lacks a story. To me, the whole experience of exploring the dungeon, solving the puzzles, defeating the enemies, and so on, is one big emergent story -- just it's largely non-verbal. Same for Another World, you really can't say it doesn't have a story (although it's less emergent than a dungeon crawler).

Another example, in many open-world RPGs I don't actually care too much about the "main quest" (the story), much more about "my own story" (the narrative) that I create by exploring the world, leveling up, solving various side-quests, escaping from dangerous situations, and so on. It all falls into the emergent gameplay category, really. One thing that I particularly liked about ELEX was that there are so many side-quests that interlock in various interesting ways is that you're basically creating your own narrative by realising some of these outcome-permutations, if that makes sense.

 

[Maxie]

games were not meant to be an alternative source of text to read and imposing this folly on them is akin to saddling a cow

 

[Falksi]

More a visual novel with puzzle sections than an adventure game, I'd still say that Zero Time Dilemma is worth playing for fans of the genre.

Just finished it myself and, whilst it nosedives a bit towards the end, it's full of generally good and rewarding puzzle sections which include a nice range of tests too. There's the odd stinker, but overall it finds the right balance in having to think, but not being too obtuse either.