MRY
Wormwood Studios
Sorry, France!
I guess this game is for you if you are both and ardent Shakespeare and adventure game fan.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, andParisFrance 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 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.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)
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 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.
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've aired my gripes with the game earlier in this thread:I'm curious which parts you guys found unfair/bullshit
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.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.
Its writing is annoyingly preachy and trying too hard to be clever
its story is annoyingly nonsensical
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.And the map (M button) allows you to go from every location to major location starting points, so that helps.
Neither do I, but when it's so actively bad it's impossible not to notice.Well, I guess I don't really play adventure games for the story
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).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
Yeah, I remember the BS about the restaurant chain leading nowhere at the beginning.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.And the map (M button) allows you to go from every location to major location starting points, so that helps.
Backtracking itself isn't the problem. The snail pace of it is.
Neither do I, but when it's so actively bad it's impossible not to notice.Well, I guess I don't really play adventure games for the story
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).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
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.
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.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..."
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.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 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.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.
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.
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, butand I have to say that is probably my favorite puzzle in that game and one of genuine a-ha moments for me.one other instance where you discover a location outside of hotspot clicking on the map is finding the swordmaster
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.
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 ?