[HN Gopher] Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
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       Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
        
       Author : ZeljkoS
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2022-09-22 08:01 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (grumpygamer.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (grumpygamer.com)
        
       | cammikebrown wrote:
       | What an interesting article. In 2004, I also agreed that
       | adventure games were dead, and I was 15 at the time. As it turns
       | out, we were both right. I loved the famous ones, like Myst and
       | Monkey Island, along with a bunch of random games (does anyone
       | remember The Journeyman Project? My absolute favorite! And
       | Titanic Adventure Out of Time, and so many other unique
       | projects). I also was able to play/replay a lot of classic text
       | adventures, like Zork and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
       | (which, let's be honest, aren't always the most intuitive games).
       | 
       | However, since 2016, when The Witness came out, I've given them
       | another chance, and I really have hope. There are a lot of indie
       | games which I hope others can go into detail about, and, most
       | exciting of all, I saw that Ron Gilbert (the author of this
       | piece) was making Return to Monkey Island, and I'm delighted to
       | see that the reviews are great.
       | 
       | PS: It's been awhile, but some of the IF (text adventure) games
       | I've seen in the last decade have really been pushing the genre
       | to new limits. Check em out!
        
         | JackMorgan wrote:
         | "Looks like... nasty weather."
         | 
         | I remember playing Journeyman Project 2 and being so confused
         | by it all. Time travel, aliens, disguises? Fascinating game.
        
         | talideon wrote:
         | They never died out in Europe, and they were paricularly
         | popular in Germany.
         | 
         | Interactive fiction had an underground renaissance, and some of
         | the beat work in the genre were produced when it was
         | technically a dead one. I agree that people should check out
         | the IF Archive, and take a look at the state of tooling for
         | creating them, which have made producing games much more
         | accessable.
        
       | user3939382 wrote:
       | The only game I really enjoyed in the past 15 years was an
       | adventure-type interactive fiction game called Vespers.
       | 
       | Everything else might be good enough for a distraction but I
       | wouldn't say I was actually intrigued.
        
         | bspammer wrote:
         | I would highly recommend Disco Elysium if you want a more
         | recent interactive fiction game. My personal game of the decade
         | for the 2010s :)
        
       | eloisant wrote:
       | I think the situation for point and click adventure games is much
       | better now than in 2004.
       | 
       | They rebirthed from their ashes as a healthy indies niche. We've
       | have great adventure games in the recent years: Timbleweed Park,
       | Deponia, Unavowed, and of course the recent Return of Monkey
       | Island.
       | 
       | Yes, they're no longer the dominating AAA genre, probably because
       | their main draw have always been to tell a story (and a 2D
       | platformer wasn't great for that), but now there are other genres
       | that are also very good at telling a story. Basically the
       | Action/Adventure/RPG/OpenWorld bucket.
        
       | pteraspidomorph wrote:
       | It's interesting how the horror game genre is currently actually
       | still making almost all of these mistakes, yielding the same
       | predictably frustrating outcomes (and yet people keep making
       | them).
        
       | FrankyHollywood wrote:
       | I always loved adventure games, with Grim Fandango (1998) being
       | one of my favourites.
       | 
       | Nowadays Amanita design still makes great adventure and puzzle
       | games, some are point & click. Really enjoyed them, and most are
       | without text so my non-English speaking kids also love them
       | https://www.amanita-design.net/
        
       | izacus wrote:
       | This was written before the best adventure game of all time,
       | Disco Elysium, was released.
        
         | quchen wrote:
         | You just made me realize it's an adventure game. It's also an
         | RPG and choose-your-adventure game and so much else, that I
         | filed it as >>Disco Elysium<< without ever thinking about
         | genres.
        
           | izacus wrote:
           | It's kinda amazing how many wishes from the original post it
           | covers isn't it?
           | 
           | I really love the modern evolution of the genre - we have old
           | style point-and-click games, new style Telltale games,
           | experiments like Disco and Detroit: Become Human. The genre
           | has expanded a lot.
        
           | nwellnhof wrote:
           | The game is branded as RPG and there are a few "meta"
           | dialogues where it's explicitly declared that you're playing
           | an RPG, but I found that a bit strange. It always felt like a
           | point-and-click adventure to me. But don't get me wrong, the
           | RPG elements are excellent and it's one of the most
           | innovative games ever.
        
         | bilvar wrote:
         | Disco Elysium itself suffers from those problems. Spoilers
         | ahead:
         | 
         | From the very first couple hours in the game you know the most
         | important thing you should do is visit that 'island' - but the
         | game does not give you any option to do so. You have to go
         | through a very tedious grind to unlock the option, even though
         | there is no real reason you shouldn't be able to. The game just
         | doesn't allow you to do so.
         | 
         | Personally, after I managed to get there, I realised the rest
         | of the game was pointless.
        
           | revolvingocelot wrote:
           | !!! SPOILERS AHEAD !!!
           | 
           | >From the very first couple hours
           | 
           | I disagree. The plot thread you speak of isn't immediately
           | apparent -- it takes hours to surface, and the likelihood of
           | the island being the correct place to investigate is
           | considered by Visual Calculus to be very low. We who have
           | beaten it can opine about the ultimate conclusion being
           | forgone, but the equally-important non-investigative plot
           | threads took, at least in my case, enough time that I didn't
           | really "notice" the ludic preventative of denying you a boat
           | until endgame.
           | 
           | !!! SPOLIERS END !!!
           | 
           | >Personally, after I managed to get there, I realised the
           | rest of the game was pointless
           | 
           | I find this personally astounding. By contrast, I found the
           | non-investigative plot threads, few of which have any real
           | measureable outcome on the game's conclusion, to be the real
           | stars of the show. When you watch police procedurals, do you
           | just fast forward to the last ten minutes? Isn't the
           | statefulness of the investigating characters interesting?
        
       | elf25 wrote:
        
       | prvc wrote:
       | What's the message behind this submission, being so soon after
       | the release of an adventure game by this article's author?
        
       | MomoXenosaga wrote:
       | Hollywood envy? Pretty funny now that the gaming industry has
       | eclipsed Hollywood. Lot has happened since 1989!
        
       | drunkenmagician wrote:
       | article from 2004. Title update?
        
         | chrismorgan wrote:
         | Hmm, could fairly be labelled 2004 or 1989. Previous
         | submissions here have been labelled (1989).
         | 
         | March 19 2020, 150 points, 104 comments:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625578
        
         | dang wrote:
         | It's a wave-particle, but the bulk of the page is an article
         | written in 1989, without which the submission wouldn't be here,
         | so we've gone with 1989.
        
       | BlargMcLarg wrote:
       | What even is the definition of 'adventure game' used here? Dozens
       | of adventure games were released in the 10 years prior to 2004.
       | One of the most wellknown series, Legend of Zelda, never stopped
       | producing. Is LoZ not considered an adventure series by these
       | critics?
        
         | cammikebrown wrote:
         | Adventure games have always been a somewhat specific genre.
         | Whether through text , 2D, or 3D, they're generally puzzle-
         | driven, choose-your-own-adventure style narrative outings.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game
        
           | anthk wrote:
           | >choose-your-own-adventure style narrative outings.
           | 
           | Not in this context.
        
         | eloisant wrote:
         | He is talking about "point and click" adventure games like
         | Monkey Island, the Sierra games, etc. Legend of Zelda clearly
         | isn't a point and click game.
        
         | ehnto wrote:
         | The term Adventure has been overloaded, but it used to be a
         | fairly concrete concept. Something like Legend of Zelda has
         | adventure game elements in it, but it's much more action,
         | combat and movement, something "traditional" adventure games
         | don't have.
         | 
         | Text adventure games are really the best example of the
         | concepts that an adventure game usually has, even though they
         | can also be graphical, like Monkey Island or Full Throttle. A
         | more recent game series like Deponia fits the bill as well.
         | 
         | I would say that there are a lot more games with old school
         | adventure mechanics coming out than people might realise. A lot
         | of them get bundled into the "Walking Simulator" category, but
         | are far more Adventure game than anything else.
        
         | vanderZwan wrote:
         | I think _Legend of Zelda_ series is considered an  " _action_
         | -adventure game", not an "adventure game". The former tends to
         | occupy the "gameplay space" of an action RPG with little to no
         | stats or loot/inventory juggling, optionally with platforming
         | (if 3D).
         | 
         | It's a bit tricky because the definition of "action-adventure"
         | broadened as LoZ added more gameplay elements, and more games
         | became "LoZ adjacent" (although it's not as muddled as the
         | definition of "rogue-like", which got all messed up because of
         | Spelunky being a surprise hit).
         | 
         | Adventure games are almost always narrative driven and puzzle-
         | oriented though, and without RPG elements (because if they had
         | strong RPG elements they'd just be called RPGs).
        
           | BlargMcLarg wrote:
           | By those standards, it feels like the author blindsided
           | themselves immensely. Not only did the genre evolve to be
           | more, the old style was picked up by indies. RPG maker games
           | in particular (ironically not RPGs most of the time).
           | Simultaneously, narrative became far more important in the
           | other genres. Bing-bing-wahoo expanded beyond a cake
           | invitation.
           | 
           | All of these were true prior to 2004, and other genres
           | evolved too.
        
             | vanderZwan wrote:
             | Most of article was written in 1989, including the
             | headline. Which includes the date it was written. It also
             | was written by the design lead of The Secret of Monkey
             | Island I and II. It was _made public_ in 2004, and the
             | author included this statement in the article:
             | 
             | > _Some people will tell you that Adventure Games aren 't
             | really dead, they have just morphed into other forms, or
             | that other genres have absorbed Adventure Games. If this is
             | true, they've done a pretty bad job of it._
             | 
             | So I don't think it's blindsighted so much as old-man-
             | yells-at-cloud disagreeing with you on what a Real
             | Adventure Game is. Although in Ron Gilbert's defense, he
             | also writes:
             | 
             | > _As I read this some 15 years later, I 'm not sure I
             | agree with everything in here anymore. I learned a lot from
             | Monkey Island 1 and 2, plus countless kids Adventure Games
             | at Humongous Entertainment. At some point in the near
             | future, I will do an annotated version of this article,
             | talking about things that have changed, or were just plains
             | wrong. But in the meantime, there is something interesting
             | on TV right now._
             | 
             | So still not so much blindsighted as "never elaborated upon
             | what he really thinks of the 1989 article these days".
        
             | grumbel wrote:
             | I wouldn't say the genre evolved, it pretty much peaked
             | back in the early 90s and hasn't seen any serious
             | improvements since. The pie-menus of Curse of Monkey Island
             | were about the last lasting improvement I can think of.
             | Everything else turned out a short lived gimmick, an
             | outright failure (e.g. controls in MI4/Grim) or just a
             | watering down (e.g. casual hidden-object games).
             | 
             | And while narrative have become far more important in other
             | genres, those style of narratives are completely different
             | to what a point&click would offer. Action games are about
             | action, you shoot or slash through things. You kill stuff.
             | Narrative happens in cut-scenes without player control.
             | It's not part of the gameplay. That's what makes
             | point&click games special, as the there is no disconnect,
             | the narrative is driven by the players the actions.
             | 
             | And while there are certainly some RPGs that cross the
             | line, not many do. The mainstream RPG is still obsessed
             | with stats, collecting dozens of the same item and stuff
             | like that. In a point&click almost everything is unique,
             | there are no faceless copy&paste NPCs, no mountains of
             | useless items to collect. If you find an item in a
             | point&click, it's very likely part of the plot in some
             | form.
        
           | chongli wrote:
           | _Adventure games are almost always narrative driven and
           | puzzle-oriented though, and without RPG elements (because if
           | they had strong RPG elements they 'd just be called RPGs)._
           | 
           | The games of the _Quest for Glory_ series [1] are most
           | definitely adventure games, not RPGs, despite having some RPG
           | elements. They also happen to be my favourite adventure games
           | due to the way most puzzles have multiple solutions (intended
           | for the different character classes but not strictly required
           | by them).
           | 
           | The series is also one of the very few where you have the
           | ability to export your character at the end of each game and
           | import him into the next, allowing you to play all 5 games
           | with the same character. This is made particularly
           | interesting by the wildly different settings of each game as
           | well as the evolving technology of the series.
           | 
           | Not everyone likes all of the games, however. My personal
           | favourite is the 4th game, Shadows of Darkness, which is
           | fully voice acted and narrated by John Rhys-Davies. I think
           | they're all worth playing through, however, especially by
           | taking the same character all the way.
           | 
           | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Glory
        
             | svachalek wrote:
             | You're both right, "strong RPG elements" and "some RPG
             | elements" are not equivalent phrases.
        
           | lucideer wrote:
           | > _Adventure games are almost always narrative driven and
           | puzzle-oriented though_
           | 
           | LoZ is highly puzzle-oriented. Not so narrative driven though
           | so if both are required, that fits... but:
           | 
           | > _and without RPG elements (because if they had strong RPG
           | elements they 'd just be called RPGs)._
           | 
           | What are RPG elements in this context if not narrative?
        
             | ehnto wrote:
             | Most RPG's really boil down to point accumulation and skill
             | trees that don't affect the plot at all.
             | 
             | Which is a shame, because roles and skills could play a
             | huge role in narrative if developers are able to put in the
             | time. Some games do, the Fallout series often gives you
             | different paths through the story depending on the
             | abilities you've acquired.
        
               | lucideer wrote:
               | Ah this is all a good point, yeah. I guess I was more
               | thinking of the presence of/emphasis on a narrative
               | (quantity of dialogue, cut-scenes, character
               | personalities, etc.) rather than the direct bearing that
               | narrative has on gameplay (you're right that it's often
               | relatively little).
               | 
               | I hadn't really thought of Fallout as an RPG, nor e.g.
               | Deus Ex, I guess the FP nature makes them seem more
               | different. Witcher is more of one, but I guess they all 3
               | have commonalities.
        
               | vanderZwan wrote:
               | You hit the nail on the head and I should have been more
               | clear about that, thanks.
        
         | msh wrote:
         | He thinking things like kings quest, monkey island and so on. I
         | would not consider zela an adventure game in this genre.
        
         | elondaits wrote:
         | I would call Legend of Zelda an action RPG. Although it has
         | some puzzles, the main activity is exploring and fighting, your
         | equipment and skills improve as you advance (allowing you to
         | face against tougher monsters) and part of the challenge is
         | administering consumable resources (e.g. healing items).
         | There's always been a big overlap between adventures and
         | rpgs... but the article talks about issues characteristic of
         | the purest examples of the adventure genre (most Infocom text
         | adventures, Sierra, Lucasarts, etc)
        
         | dwighttk wrote:
         | "I wrote this back in 1989 while I was designing Monkey Island.
         | It is now the futuristic year of 2004 and we are all driving
         | around in flying cars and wearing sliver jumps suits."
        
         | talideon wrote:
         | No, the LoZ series aren't adventure games in the original
         | sense, which encompassed text adventures (now termed
         | "interactive fiction") and point-and-click adventures.
         | 
         | You also have the extra hint that this is Ron Gilbert's site,
         | and if you know anything about him, the context for "adventure
         | game" is pretty clear.
         | 
         | Such games are story and puzzle heavy rather than having much
         | in the way of action.
        
       | nayroclade wrote:
       | As much as I love text and point-and-click adventure games,
       | there's always been an inherent contradiction to them. On the
       | surface level, they promise nearly infinite freedom, more than
       | any platform or first-person shooter game: That you can go
       | anywhere, talk to anyone, perform and action on any object, and
       | solve problems in whatever way you want. But in practice they're
       | incredibly constrained. The world is an exquisitely constructed
       | stage, with nothing beyond its margins, and there is only a very
       | narrow, winding path to success. Puzzles have a single, usually
       | somewhat tortured solution, and alternative approaches that would
       | work in the real world are either not considered or declared
       | impossible for spurious reasons.
       | 
       | Beating an adventure game is often an exercise not just in
       | problem solving, but in building an intuition about how the game
       | designer(s) wanted you to approach puzzles. Tuning into the vibe
       | of the game world and understanding what interactions and
       | approaches are likely to work and which won't. The most you can
       | hope for is that the solutions have at least some logic to them.
       | It's a bit like learning to solve cryptic crosswords, where you
       | need to learn a hidden language to unlock the actual problems.
       | This can be an enjoyable and rewarding experience, but it is
       | definitely _not_ the infinite freedom that the genre seems to
       | offer up front, and I suspect for as many people who fell in love
       | with these games, there were many who gave up in frustration at
       | their paradoxical constrictiveness.
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | > On the surface level, they promise nearly infinite freedom,
         | more than any platform or first-person shooter game: That you
         | can go anywhere, talk to anyone, perform and action on any
         | object, and solve problems in whatever way you want.
         | 
         | What? I never thought that was their promise.
        
         | tgv wrote:
         | The puzzle conundrum continues to live on, though. Some time
         | ago, I bought a game app from the "escape room" variety. It's
         | got no relation to escape rooms, it's just how it's
         | called/advertised. It consists of a sequence of situations
         | where you have to find a final item, which the game recognizes
         | as exit, so that's perhaps why.
         | 
         | After the first level, the puzzles were rather convoluted and
         | opposite to anything that would happen in real life. The
         | "protagonist" decides to go to a bank (i.e., the next level is
         | at the bank), and there passwords are hidden on a scrap of
         | paper behind a ventilation grating in the toilet or as a bar-
         | column in a financial report. Who would ever do that? You open
         | a secret area by making sure the folders in two cabinets are in
         | the same order. Then, when you find a cheque to the
         | protagonist's father, he decides that's all the information the
         | bank will reveal, and since he doesn't understand why that
         | cheque was written in the first place, the next level obviously
         | will be --I bet you already guessed it-- his father's church.
         | 
         | At the church, you find a note taped to the inside of the bell
         | in the bell tower. Then you ring the bell a few times, and the
         | thing, which is larger than the protagonist, so must weigh
         | several tonnes, comes crashing down. It lands in one piece on
         | the church floor, and you can access the note. Then you have to
         | move the pews in some pattern in order to access something
         | else. In real life, it would be obvious that there is a
         | mechanism attached to the pews, but the game just makes things
         | visible or invisible as long as it keeps the player on the
         | happy path.
         | 
         | So yeah, I gave up on that one.
        
           | mikepurvis wrote:
           | YouTube game reviewer SkillUp talks frequently about the
           | importance of great writing in selling mundane, repetitive
           | content to players, particularly when it comes to single-
           | objective side quests in open world games. He references The
           | Witcher 3 as a game with many great examples (like the famous
           | frying pan quest:
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-aHUyokr4), but another one
           | that is often referenced is the Supideo quest line in AC:
           | Odyssey ( https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Supideo).
           | 
           | Anyway, I think of this often with respect to real-life
           | escape rooms. I've only done a handful, but of those, so many
           | seem to be completely bare-bones, with little or no scenery,
           | little or no story, basically nothing to justify exactly the
           | type of inanity you describe, where numbers of random objects
           | turn out to be the digits in combination locks or whatever.
           | 
           | However there was one for me that really broke the mold-- the
           | premise was that your long-lost great aunt had recently
           | passed away, and you'd gone to recover valuables from her
           | house before it got bulldozed to build a new highway. Quite
           | apart from the nod to Douglas Adams, this immediately led to
           | some terrific justification of otherwise standard game
           | elements:
           | 
           | - Getting trapped in the house because of her paranoia and
           | multiple locks on all the doors and windows.
           | 
           | - Having a time limit, enhanced and communicated by the
           | increasingly loud sounds of construction equipment moving
           | around "outside" the house.
           | 
           | - Needing to make random connections, because she was a
           | little batty and forgetful, so used random objects in her
           | house to help keep track of how to get from room to room.
           | 
           | Obviously the underlying gameplay fundamentals are exactly
           | the same as any other low-budget escape room, but this
           | particular experience really stuck with me as one that I felt
           | far more invested in than usual, due mostly to how much more
           | motivating even this threadbare "plot" was relative to others
           | I'd seen.
        
         | Zhyl wrote:
         | To this end, I really enjoyed "Don't Escape: 4 Days to
         | Survive"[1] which was included in the recent Itch bundle for
         | Ukraine.
         | 
         | It mixes adventure game with escape room, and whilst there is
         | still a puzzle element to the game, it is much more pragmatic
         | in its combinations. You find a nail, a boarded up building or
         | something that needs building and it's a hammer that will solve
         | all of them. You know that you will die of heat at the end of
         | the day, so you need to find things that will cool your house
         | down.
         | 
         | I think this means that the whimsy and jovial aspect of 90s
         | adventure games is lost, but it feels much more satisfying to
         | solve a puzzle when the solution _makes sense_. If we wanted an
         | adventure games renaissance, I would look to this game as a
         | case study in addition to the points outlined in Ron 's
         | article.
         | 
         | [1] https://armor-games-studios.itch.io/dont-escape-4-days-to-
         | su...
        
         | tobiasSoftware wrote:
         | I highly recommend a recent game called Outer Wilds that in my
         | opinion takes the adventure game genre to the next level by
         | giving it an open world feel. It does this through three ideas.
         | 
         | First, there are no collectible items, the game is about
         | seeking information and it uses that information as the keys to
         | unlock new areas instead of items. This does make the game very
         | spoilerable though, but it removes the "combine item 1 with
         | item 2" type of puzzles that are infamous for feeling
         | constrained.
         | 
         | Second, it gives you an information map showing if there is any
         | information left to find in each area. This gets around the
         | problem of "pixel hunting" that early adventure games had where
         | you missed something subtle so you had to wander through the
         | entire game over again trying to find what you missed.
         | 
         | Third, "late game" areas are accessible at any time but are
         | locked behind multiple pieces of information. This means that
         | you actually can get to late game areas early on, but most
         | people simply won't. This gives the game a sort of "trust the
         | player" feel, where instead of putting the game on rails to
         | make sure no one goes off the track, the developers remove the
         | rails and trust that most players will loosely follow the path
         | they planned, even though some will inevitably jump the track
         | and go through the game in a weird order.
        
         | Bakary wrote:
         | Where are you getting that first part about freedom? Maybe it's
         | a generational thing but I can't seem to visualize them as
         | anything but constrained from the outset.
         | 
         | The Witness is maybe the 'freest' example I can think of but
         | it's still a range of puzzles
        
           | grumbel wrote:
           | The freedom in a point&click is in the actions you perform.
           | In a point&click there is no limit to your actions, as the
           | actions are a combination of the verbs you have, the
           | environment and the items you collect along the way. Which
           | leaves endless possibilities. The restrictions are just in
           | how crazy the narrative wants to get, but not in the
           | interface.
           | 
           | Other genres limit you to run, jump, shoot and a few other
           | core mechanics, that they than run on repeat. You might get
           | bigger guns along the way, but you aren't going to steal a
           | pot from a cook to use it as helmet while joining the circus
           | as you would in a point&click. When other genres want the
           | player character to perform actions outside the core
           | mechanics they often have to fall back to non-interactive
           | cutscenes. In a point&click in contrast it's all part of the
           | core gameplay, cutscenes are reserved to non-player scenes.
           | 
           | Another thing to take into account here is the year, we are
           | talking about early 90s here, back when most games were side
           | scrollers that allowed you to just walk left and right.
           | Point&click adventures were some of the first games with a
           | movie-like presentation, you had real 3d scenes you could
           | interact with, close ups, cutscenes, etc, not just abstract
           | flat side-scrolling worlds. In times of GTAV, a point&click
           | might not look all that impressive, but compared to the other
           | stuff you had back then they were quite impressive.
        
           | danjoredd wrote:
           | I think they might be talking about games like Until Dawn,
           | Life is Strange, or Heavy Rain. It feels very free on the
           | first playthrough, but in practice they are restrained when
           | you replay them.
        
         | saiya-jin wrote:
         | Nice summary on how I felt about adventures without realizing
         | it. I just couldn't bring myself to play any for any
         | significant time anymore. Back when I started with PC in 1993 I
         | enjoyed Kyrandia II, and later Broken Sword, but what makes me
         | tick are simply different sort of games.
        
         | lmm wrote:
         | The makers of _The Last Express_ , the only point-and-click
         | adventure game I've played that really worked for me, had an
         | interesting interview where they talked about how they chose
         | the setting specifically to suit the constraints of the medium
         | - it's the nature of an adventure game to be "on rails", and
         | putting you onboard a short train was a way to allow you to
         | move "freely", without artificial constraints, but without
         | exploding the state space.
        
         | aidenn0 wrote:
         | The better adventure games anticipated multiple solutions to
         | puzzles[1], which improves the sense of immersion, but the
         | games in this genre are bounded by the imagination (and hard
         | work) of the creator(s).
         | 
         | 1: I recently read a review of the text-parser version of Quest
         | For Glory and the reviewer commented on how they made a game
         | out of trying to find something sensible to type in that _didn
         | 't_ come with a reasonable response from the game. I haven't
         | played the game in decades, but I remember trying to talk to a
         | tree and getting something like 3 paragraphs of text in
         | response...
        
         | RicoElectrico wrote:
         | I guess that poorly designed IQ tests often fall into these
         | category as well. Some of the patterns you have to match seem
         | soooo arbitrary.
         | 
         | In the real world it's easier to reverse engineer someone's
         | train of thought, as there's more context than some abstract
         | shapes or numbers. In fact, as a programmer or engineer it's a
         | necessary skill to develop.
        
         | cainxinth wrote:
         | > Puzzles have a single, usually somewhat tortured solution
         | 
         | Potential spoiler alert... the forklift elevator puzzle in Grim
         | Fandango springs to mind. It's so unintuitive and a
         | disappointing part of what is otherwise an incredible game.
         | 
         | When I play these types of games, I'll only bang my head
         | against the wall for so long before I give up and Google the
         | answer.
         | 
         | If, upon learning the solution, I realize I should have been
         | able to figure it out myself, I'll feel bad for not trying
         | longer. But sometimes, I'll read the solution and say: "That's
         | what you wanted me to do?!" and be glad I didn't spend all day
         | trying to crack their impossible code.
        
           | MomoXenosaga wrote:
           | I played Grim Fandango with a guide.
           | 
           | Grim Fandango was one of a few point and click games that has
           | a story and world still worth experiencing without the
           | puzzles.
        
       | TheFattestNinja wrote:
       | Related discussion from Yathzee (an internet-famous videogame
       | critic) (possibly NSFW language)
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0gQ0ed8R6A
        
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