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Digital Antiquarian: Ron Gilbert's 14 Deadly Sins of Graphic Adventure Design

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Ok, forget sierra and the argument stays the same. These things lead to (some) good games. Its all a question of audience and execution, of course LSL style walking dead scenarios are bad, but stuff like missing whole parts of the game either because of critical INT failure like in Azrael's Tear / early death branch that tells you what you did wrong like KGB, isn't even if it ends in death. A prescriptive set of rules is absolute nonsense.
This is the kind of thinking that would lead (led) to real time adventures to not get made.
 
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MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
MRY You should post that in his comments.
It would take too much work to clean it up, and I don't really want to argue with DA. I think what he's doing (generally) is great, and my days of serious Internet debating are long over.
 

Fowyr

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Mar 29, 2009
Messages
7,671
It’s not often that anyone manages to out-Sierra Sierra in this department, but, astonishingly,Uninvited just about pulls it off. You encounter a ghost…
…and this happens the next turn if you don’t do the one arbitrary right thing — and no, trying to just back out of the room again won’t save you.
You can expect to die and a restore a few dozen times here alone before you figure out how to proceed, if you’re even lucky enough to be carrying the item you need in the first place. If not, hope you have a recent save handy. How is this fun again?
It's one of the most easy puzzles in the game.
"No Ghost" bottle is clearly labeled and even tells itlself that it need to be opened.

When you leave your wrecked car in Uninvited, the first scene you encounter is the “Front Yard” above. If amidst all the excitement you happen to neglect to look in the mailbox tucked away in the right side of the frame, that’s it for you. As soon as you go inside, you become a walking dead, albeit of another stripe from the mansion’s inhabitants: the front door locks behind you, rendering the front yard inaccessible forevermore.
If you missed sticking out like a sore thumb mailbox - you are moron (or very, very unlucky bastard).
Well, no. It turns out that it’s simply sitting on top of an item you need, nothing more. If you happen to be carrying a bird in a cage and fling it at the creature, it becomes “utterly fascinated” and “gives chase to eat it.” Nothing anywhere indicates that it has any special fondness for birds, making this yet another example of a completely inexplicable puzzle solution (ref: Sin #1), but whatever. This puzzle destroys your experience as a player even more so than the usual crappy puzzle because, given Uninvited‘s malicious glee in locking you out of victory as subtly as possible (ref: Sin #4), you’re doomed to spend the rest of the game wondering what more you needed to do here before scaring the creature away. In reality, there’s nothing else you can do — but you can’t know that. And so that nagging worry will remain every time you come upon another puzzle, whether it be sensical or nonsensical, leaving you unable to trust that you aren’t about to beat your head against a puzzle you rendered unsolvable hours ago.
The puzzle is pretty unclear, but, fuck, you get this bird from animal puzzle just two screens north. Considering that it's the only item that you previously found in the maze and it's entire maze between you and house, clicking with cage (just opening it is suffice) on ball creature is no brainer. Though I indeed tried to cast "Specan Heafod Abraxas" to communicate with it first.
At one point in Uninvited you need to enter the combination to a safe. Trouble is, even once you think you’ve figured out what the combination should be you don’t know what format the game expects. (It turns out to be XX-XX-XX, for anyone unwise enough to be playing along at home.) So, you’re left to not only contend with piecing together three numbers from clues spread all over the game and then trying to guess their order, but you can never feel quite sure whether a rejected input was rejected because you actually had the wrong combination or because you didn’t type it in using the exact format the game expects. Would it have killed the designers to allow a range of possible formats? And weren’t graphic adventures supposed to get us beyond stuff like this?
Format indeed is iffy (but pretty typical for other games with combination locks), but guessing order is no brainer as well, because scroll clearly states that "Gold, silver, mercury. Together they form a key."



BTW, I got bug in PC version of Uninvited. Animals were movable by hand and were not placed in cage, but it broken the maze itself so I could not reach ball creature. Reloading made animals properly unmovable and restored the puzzle.
 

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