The Magic of Old Adventure Games

[Gizmo1990]

To this day I still love Monkey Island, every last one of them even 3,4 and Tales. It makes me sad that Disney Have apparently shelved the series to focus on Pirates of the Caribbean. Screw Jack Sparrow the world needs Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate!

 

[Ryleh]

Cyan worlds had the right idea, but ever since they wrapped up the myst series they've just been re-releasing the first game over and over again on every single platform. Although their games started off a little on the hard side, the last 3 were easy enough for everyone to solve, but not so simple that you felt as though the game was patronizing you.

 

[Keiichi Morisato]

Yahtzee, what is your opinion on the game "The Whispered World"? it's about a clown that is supposed to destroy the world, and no not that one, or that one.

 

[mjc0961]

Actually the WORST adventure games are the ones that allow you to break the "chain" and never complete the game.

Looking at you, KING'S QUEST.

So let's not pine for the mechanics of the classics too much, or someone will make one of those travesties again.

Which one? I have King's Quest 7 on my to-play list and I don't want to make a no win situation.

I think all of them. Especially 7, which I played a lot when I was younger and about half the time I would find myself unable to finish at the end of the game because I forgot to pick up one single item. Very frustrating.

Spoiler

Shovels are your friend, always get shovels.

Did anybody else notice that his insult example differs only in the fact that the insults and responses aren't literally in your inventory? They're in a hidden inventory. That's all. That's the only difference. You're collecting keys which go in locks, and at the end the locks are displayed differently. Yippee. It was neat and clever (and trivially easy), but everything that's wrong with Adventure gameplay was still wrong with it.

Well, yeah, I suppose that's true. But it's the presentation that makes it so great.

And that's really the thing about adventure games. They aren't about the gameplay. The gameplay is always the same in the end. It's about the world, the characters, the story, the writing. Monkey Island's insult swordfighting was fun because it was a different take on the item chain thing. Like you said, it was neat and clever. That's basically all they have to do. Thinking of all my favorite adventure games, I like them because they have really good stories and worlds. Maybe they made me laugh, maybe they made me sad. But I can't think of a single adventure game I've played that I like because the gameplay was some new radical thing that changed the genre.

Except the aforementioned King's Quest (or other Sierra games) which would just frustrate me when I accidentally screwed myself into a game over, and that's more of a negative change than a positive one. And when you don't accidentally screw yourself, they're no different than any other adventure game.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Did anybody else notice that his insult example differs only in the fact that the insults and responses aren't literally in your inventory? They're in a hidden inventory. That's all. That's the only difference. You're collecting keys which go in locks, and at the end the locks are displayed differently. Yippee. It was neat and clever (and trivially easy), but everything that's wrong with Adventure gameplay was still wrong with it.

Adventure gameplay inherently sucks for the reasons given, and always did. The only saving graces of the genre are the cleverness of the writing and puzzles, but good writing is difficult and good puzzles are even harder, with most being either trivially easy or requiring less logic and more mind-reading and/or exhaustive combining and/or walkthroughs and/or obscure references (which, if you do know, convert the puzzle to trivially easy).

I came in here just to post this (well, your first paragraph, anyway. I never cared for the genre to begin with, but I can't say for sure if it's bad or just not for me). When you boil it down to the extent Yahtzee did, everything he described is a lock in key inventory puzzle, including the things he said didn't boil down to lock in key inventory puzzles.

Then again, when you boil it down to that extent it's true of pretty much every game ever made, even games where the only solution to any of the "puzzles" is "use on alien."

 

[Pyrian]

Then again, when you boil it down to that extent it's true of pretty much every game ever made, even games where the only solution to any of the "puzzles" is "use on alien."

Obviously you could boil everything down that far, the difference is that in Adventure games there's no really boiling. Collecting keys and figuring out which key goes in which lock is the beginning and the end of the gameplay (for the most part - there are exceptions, but the insult game isn't one of them).

In an FPS, "use gun on alien" is the required action, and figuring out which gun to use on which alien (if it even matters) is barely a sideline, but that's not the gameplay challenge. The gameplay is primarily aiming and avoiding being hit too much in return (while managing ammunition, etc.). You can't just "boil that out" and still have any meaningful comparison. And, let's face it, simple FPS's doesn't exactly win awards for innovative gameplay, either.

The equivalent of aiming/dodging for Adventure games is figuring out puzzles, and IMO linear puzzle gameplay is extremely difficult to get right. In fact I doubt it's possible to simultaneously satisfy the masses and puzzle aficionados.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Then again, when you boil it down to that extent it's true of pretty much every game ever made, even games where the only solution to any of the "puzzles" is "use on alien."

Obviously you could boil everything down that far, the difference is that in Adventure games there's no really boiling. Collecting keys and figuring out which key goes in which lock is the beginning and the end of the gameplay (for the most part - there are exceptions, but the insult game isn't one of them).

In an FPS, "use gun on alien" is the required action, and figuring out which gun to use on which alien (if it even matters) is barely a sideline, but that's not the gameplay challenge. The gameplay is primarily aiming and avoiding being hit too much in return (while managing ammunition, etc.). You can't just "boil that out" and still have any meaningful comparison. And, let's face it, simple FPS's doesn't exactly win awards for innovative gameplay, either.

The equivalent of aiming/dodging for Adventure games is figuring out puzzles, and IMO linear puzzle gameplay is extremely difficult to get right. In fact I doubt it's possible to simultaneously satisfy the masses and puzzle aficionados.

Oh I know. But even in adventure games you have to abstract it a bit to get down to the key in door level. It's just weird that he took it to the point of figurative keys in doors (in a genre that has plenty of literal examples) and then gave examples of the same thing with a separate inventory and called it a different kind of puzzle. It wasn't. It was very much "solve this puzzle (use this key) to go on to the next part of the game (open the door.)"

 

[Pyrian]

Agreed. I think it's revealing, in a sense. The point was never really gameplay; that was just rationalized in Yahtzee's head. The point is that it was funny, clever, and well written. If you can achieve that, simple key/lock puzzles seem much more satisfactory than they would be otherwise.

 

[Orekoya]

I don't know if I should bring this up or not but alot of the foreign adventure games look like interesting elevations of the concept, stuff like Virtue's Last Reward really seems to build further on the whole lock-and-key item chain when the keys are memories and information from alternate realities where different choices were made.

 

[Thanatos2k]

Actually the WORST adventure games are the ones that allow you to break the "chain" and never complete the game.

Looking at you, KING'S QUEST.

So let's not pine for the mechanics of the classics too much, or someone will make one of those travesties again.

Which one? I have King's Quest 7 on my to-play list and I don't want to make a no win situation.

They made a 7th one!?

 

[Thanatos2k]

Also tried Testament of Sherlock Holmes and it's actually a rather tough Puzzle Adventure game with a lot of logical and deduction based puzzles and somewhat interesting mechanics and minigames like the "deduction board" with a new one called "Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments" coming out soon too:

I played Sherlock Holmes too and was surprised by how good it was. Highly recommended.

 

[TheUnbeholden]

the reason why we are not seeing that gameplay innovation with adventure games is because there are barely any true Adventure games anymore, they died out and survived in the form of "hidden object games", a subgenre of casual games. So the few adventure games we get with DoubleFine and TellTale, they haven't gone that far out of their comfort zone (possibly because they are stuck in the past).

 

[Kahani]

Agreed. I think it's revealing, in a sense. The point was never really gameplay; that was just rationalized in Yahtzee's head. The point is that it was funny, clever, and well written. If you can achieve that, simple key/lock puzzles seem much more satisfactory than they would be otherwise.

Exactly. This is I thought it very odd for Yahtzee to mention Telltale as one of those at the root of the problem. Far from just repeating key/lock puzzles over and over again they've removed them almost entirely and instead focussed very heavily on the writing end. In The Walking Dead, for example, the only "puzzles" that exist are trivially easy ones which are only there to get you to look around the area, not to actually give you something to work out. You don't just blindly pick up every object knowing there will be a lock it will fit in later, the puzzle is instead in wondering if you should pick it up at all and what the consequences of doing so might be. This is exactly the kind of elevation of the genre Yahtzee claims to want - the dictionary entry for "adventure" does not read "endlessly click "use X on Y" until something happens", and Telltale's recent games are actually much closer to the real meaning of the word than the point and click adventure games of yore.

 

[-Dragmire-]

Actually the WORST adventure games are the ones that allow you to break the "chain" and never complete the game.

Looking at you, KING'S QUEST.

So let's not pine for the mechanics of the classics too much, or someone will make one of those travesties again.

Which one? I have King's Quest 7 on my to-play list and I don't want to make a no win situation.

They made a 7th one!?

There was also an 8th one but it wasn't really an adventure game. People are highly mixed on that one.

I haven't played it yet so I can't give an opinion on it.