I don't like adventure games
Point and Click adventure games (short “adventure games” from here on) are a genre of video games. They tell interactive stories, driven by puzzles. The most famous ones in my bubble are the monkey island series, the Edna & Harvey games and Day of the Tentacle.
I have played and finished a few adventure games over the years:
(Others I didn’t finish, like Dropsy and some Sherlock Holmes titles I don’t remember.)
I have fond memories of all of those games. Their stories are nice and the atmosphere is great. Most of them are funny (in a way that only adventure games can be).
But I also remember that I was so frustrated with them. And I just understood why:
Being stuck in an adventure game
Being stuck in an adventure game sucks. At some point there will be a puzzle that you can’t solve. You are lost and just can not find the next step.
The game tries it’s best to help you with textual and environmental clues. Often you know what you want to do but you still can’t do it.
The solution is arbitrary and therefore I couln’t find it
I got stuck in “Escape from Monkey Island” Act 1 at Lucre Island. It is an enjoyable place, many fun places to go (I love the Palace of protheses), many funny interactions. At some point you need fill in some names and there are a lot of options, but only one right combination. How would I know the right names to fill in? I was stuck for days on that puzzle, searching the whole island for clues.
Brute forcing
What do you do when you don’t know how to solve a puzzle? You tried everything you can think of, exhausted all the dialog trees and now what?
You go to every available place and click every single thing. And when that doesn’t work you take every item out of your inventory and try to apply it to every object in the world.
Puzzles with absurd solutions encourage the player to brute force for everything instead of finding a creative solution.
You missed it
After searching through the entire building/town/island twice you finally get frustrated enough to look up the solution on the internet. This is shameful every time I do it.
And what is the solution? What did I miss?
Spoiler
Well, the solution is that you should use a broken sword to open a manhole cover, then examine the cover. The names will be scratched in on the underside of the manhole cover. HOW would I have known to look there? How would anyone guess that?
This was so frustrating to me.
I don’t want to be frustrated in a video game
Maybe I don’t have it in me. Maybe I don’t get it. But I am 34 years now and I don’t need the respect of gamers anymore.
Walking my kids to the playground a few hundred times has told me an important lesson:
You don’t tell people they are playing the wrong way.
If something is fun - great. If something isn’t then they won’t play it. And that is exactly how playing games should work.
So the conclusion is very simple: When I am stuck in a game and it frustrates me I will just walk away and stop playing.
(I did that with Dropsy and it felt really good)
The one adventure game that I just enjoyed
I want to end on a positive note. Recently I played the game Return to Monkey Island (the latest installment of the Monkey Island series). And I wasn’t frustrated a single time.
It was a breeze. I got all the adventure and none of the frustration.
This was mainly for two reasons:
- There are two game modes (easy and hard). I chose the easy mode and didn’t regret it for a second. (Now that I know the game a bit I might replay it on hard someday)
- There is an ingame-hint-system that you can use when stuck.
This is better than your standard walkthrough on the internet in two ways:
- The game knows what puzzles you could currently solve and you can choose which of them you would like help with.
- You don’t get the solution right away. Instead you get a few levels of hints, just enough to get you unstuck.
Both of these work wonders. So I still have hope for the genre of adventure games.