Thimbleweed Park, Kathy Rain, whispers of a machine, Disco Elyseum, Unusual Findings, Sexy Brutale, Darside Detective, blacksad, obra-dimm, takes two, Orwell, unheard, shadows of a doubt, 12 minutes…
I actually enjoy these slow-burn games a lot
Still, I'm not sure what the definition of "Adventure Game" is. To me, it's usually a game with graphics at the top (not required but most common), and 4 or so lines of text at the bottom. Some times you walk a character around. Other times you just type "exit door", "open drawer", "take key" (or pick from a menu)
Those games might have been dead in some form (King Quest, Monkey Island, etc...) but the basic form has been alive and kicking (a) in the form of Japanese story games and (b) as indie games on places like itch.io. It's covered with "story adventure games"
Of course most of those games would benefit from this list of rules.
> I wrote this back in 1989...
> It is bad design to put puzzles and situations into a game that require a player to die in order to learn what not to do next time.
I feel like this is not good advice anymore. Nowadays dying is more common in games and less intrusive. In some games it’s even canonical that the character is dying. It’s become less intrusive and thus more ok. Even for puzzles I think this is bad advice. Puzzles probably engage the player more when they’re solved right or solved wrong; vs when they’re either solved right or in limbo of not being solved yet. It encourages feedback on your solving path.
Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936015 - Sept 2022 (57 comments)
Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625578 - March 2020 (104 comments)
Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15569221 - Oct 2017 (1 comment)
That paragraph recounts the reasons why RTS games never work for me. When I'm gaming, I want to do things in my own time, not be on someone else's clock.
Both of these endings are ruinous to the world he so carefully and beautifully imagined. I just can't grasp what message he was trying to send by trashing his own IP that way. I would honestly like to know. Is it like Notch with Minecraft? Were Monkey Island fans endlessly harassing him? The purpose of Return to Monkey Island seemed to be to address that awkward ending, and (spoiler alert) he doubled down.
Secondly the puzzles are hard but very very reasonable, as in I never felt they were unfair. I think they did that as a lesson from the classics, where sometimes Brute Force was the only way objects and environment needed to interact to unlock more of the game.
An enormous amount of thought was put into it, and I hope more games come out like it. I'm truly tired of FPS, grinding 'work simulator ' type games, and multiplayer games which predominate on Steam.
I disagree. Discovering what it is you're supposed to do is one of the most exciting parts of such games. Myst is the classic example of this. It's like those movies, like the Bourne Identity, where the character wakes up and doesn't know who they are or what they are supposed to do, and has to figure it out as they go along.
Aside: What Remains of Edith Finch is perhaps the most powerful narrative game ever. Not an adventure game per se. But extremely powerful storytelling.
Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It (1989)
Not necessarily. The ending sequence with the plane on a motorway in "Full Throttle" had me on the edge of my seat when I played it for the first time, and on replays, too.
Generating images in Adventure Games was a bottleneck since they were mainly static and fixed within a small set. Now you can generate original images based on the adventure situation.
I get why the authors do it …. they don’t want to be sexist, so they flip he to she.
It’s much easier to read the gender neutral “they” rather than “she”.
For me anyway.
The game design advices seems fine though.
[edit, some years ago compared to 2002]
So you have that...