Point and Click Puzzle Design
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- čas přidán 11. 08. 2015
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Point and click adventures get a bad rap. Their loopy logic puzzles often come under fire for being incomprehensible and unfair. So lets look at how adventures can employ more responsible design - to stop you racing towards GameFAQs.
Sources
Wired: "Broken Age brings back a classic feature: unfair puzzles"
www.wired.com/2015/04/broken-a...
Old Man Murray: "Death of Adventure Games"
www.oldmanmurray.com/features/...
Find out more
Innuendo Studios: "Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood?"
• Who Shot Guybrush Thre...
RagnarRox: "Blade Runner - Looking back with Louis Castle"
• Blade Runner - Looking...
Grumpy Gamer: "Why Adventure Games Suck"
grumpygamer.com/why_adventure_...
Games shown in this episode (in order of appearance):
Broken Age (Double Fine Productions, 2014)
Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned (Sierra Entertainment, 1999)
Discworld (Teeny Weeny Games, 1995)
King's Quest (Sierra On-Line, 1983)
Grim Fandango (LucasArts, 1998)
Full Throttle (LucasArts, 1995)
Antichamber (Demruth, 2013)
The Longest Journey (Funcom, 1999)
Day of the Tentacle (LucasArts, 1993)
The Secret of Monkey Island (LucasArts, 1990)
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (Sierra Entertainment, 1993)
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (LucasArts, 1992)
Machinarium (Amanita Design, 2009)
Riven: The Sequel to Myst (Cyan Worlds, 1997)
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (LucasArts, 1991)
The Inner World (Studio Fizbin, 2013)
Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (Telltale Games, 2008)
Gemini Rue (Joshua Nuernberger, 2011)
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (Funcom, 2006)
Thimbleweed Park (Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, 2017)
Resonance (XII Games, 2012)
Technobabylon (Technocrat Games, 2015)
The Last Express (Smoking Car Productions, 1997)
Blade Runner (Westwood Studios, 1997)
Armikrog (Pencil Test Studios, 2015)
Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (Revolution Software, 1996)
Dropsy (A Jolly Corpse, 2015)
Music used in this episode:
Overthinker, Lifeformed (Double Fine Adventure)
Locked Boxes, Lifeformed (Double Fine Adventure)
Gameboy Tune (Machinarium)
Forest Spirit Friends, Lifeformed and Vidboy (Groupees Game Music Bundle)
Cider, Lifeformed (Double Fine Adventure)
Lifeformed - lifeformed.bandcamp.com
Vidboy - vidboy.bandcamp.com
Clip credits:
"MacGyver - Parabolic Mirror" - CBS
• MacGyver - Parabolic M...
"Let's Play: Riven, Fire marbles" - Dilandau3000
• Let's Play: Riven - pa...
"Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Part 8" - Natenator77
• Dreamfall: The Longest...
"Lets Play! Blade Runner, Part 1" - Vyakros
• Lets Play! Blade Runne...
Contribute translated subtitles - amara.org/v/C3BFr/ - Hry
Another rule should be to never involve language specific puns in puzzles. There's that infamous Monkey Island puzzle where you have to use a monkey as a wrench (because monkey wrench...) which makes no sense in other languages.
Oooooh so that was the reason? I'm now fluent in English (not my native language) but it never occurred to me.
That's what localization teams are for
As a native English speaker who never played the games, I can still understand the frustration. I'm learning another language currently and can imagine the feeling of hitting some strange language barrier, as I've done it a few times in conversations recently. English speaking countries/people assuming that the rest of the world should understand their language well can be upsetting.
If you're going to have such a puzzle in a game, either provide an explanation for other region versions of the game, or have a different puzzle depending on the region.
I still dont get it. Maybe im just that bad at english.
My worst puzzle experience is because of bad translation. In "Legend of Kyrandia" there is a puzzle where you have to create a potion. One of the ingredients according to the in game recipe is a "toadstool". In the German version this was translated to "Giftpilz" (i.e. poisonous mushroom). However, the solution to the puzzle ingredient would have been a tiny wooden stool where a toad was sitting on.
Since there actually were poisonous mushrooms in the game nearby, and no way to figure out the English pun in the bad German translation, made this puzzle impossible to solve without looking up the solution in a magazine a month later (the Internet wasn't that common in 1993).
Out of curiosity, is there a suitable German pun which would have fit?
Not that I currently could think of one. And even if, there are sometimes producers that don't like changes. There was an interview with the translator for the German version of the Monkey Island games. One puzzle needed you to hypnotize a monkey, then twist it, to make a "monkey wrench". With that you could close a water valve.
In German, a monkey wrench (or adjustable spanner) is colloquially called "Engländer". The translator asked to replace the monkey graphics with a "typical" Englishman. Bowler hat, monocle, sipping tea. But that was declined.
So he made a book in the Phatt City library complaining about the producer's puns. And tried to hint at the puzzle solution with a book about replacing tools with animals.
But sometimes it can work in German as well.
In Monkey Island 1 you get a leaflet about "How to get ahead in navigation", that you can exchange to literally get "a head" of a beheaded navigator.
In Germany "get ahead" (vorankommen) can't be translated literally to make the pun work.
Instead the translator used the German idiom "mit Köpfchen". Meaning "doing something smart". So "Navigation mit Köpfchen" literally translates to "Navigation with a small head". So that worked for that puzzle.
I had kind of an opposite experience; I played the game in Russian and the translators apparently knew what the correct item was, but there was no way to retain the pun, so they made it a bit vague (instead of calling it a stool they called something like "three legs", referring to the stool having three legs), but it was still pretty obvious.
There was another puzzle in that beginning area that actually was really well-designed (overall I'd say Kyrandia 2 had the best puzzles in the series): it involved a tree with a lot of colored bugs, and if you fed them some blue berries, they'd light up in a sequence which had to be used as a code elsewhere. The thing is, my first PC at the time had a black&white monitor, so the colors were meaningless. BUT the designers must've thought about it, because each bug also produced a unique sound, so we could still solve it (although it was harder than colors).
@@Arminator "So he made a book in the Phatt City library complaining about the producer's puns."
Wow, that is really quite ingenious. As a translator myself, I'm always amazed at the way other translators cope with word play and jokes not working in other languages. Like, you if you can't translate a certain joke, you can leave it be and insert a joke in another part of the text. It is almost like an adventure game - you're solving a puzzle of language. So translating an adventure game would be double the puzzle!
@@AgentAsh that is actually amazing.
Personally, I'd argue the largest reason why the adventure genre disappeared for a while was because it "lost its niche". Back in the day, most games had pretty bland stories. Adventure games were a notable exception to this rule. People were generally not playing these games because of their mechanics, but because they had interesting stories.
However, as the medium evolved, it lost this monopoly on interesting storytelling as other genres "caught up to it". For example, Deus Ex had a good story and was also quite mechanically fun. Or even more modern: Bioshock had a great story and great gameplay, too.
This does not necessarily make the adventure genre obsolete per say, though this will require the game to compete on a mechanical level, not just a story-design level.
Yep, I've thought this too Matthew. You're probably right - games like FF7, Metal Gear Solid, System Shock 2, etc all showed that other genres can do stories too.
Though, PnCs still have the advantage when it comes to comedy, and many stories that don't revolve around combat.
Mark Brown
Agreed. The PnC genre does have a few advantages-particularly for games that don't need a whole lot of combat and more lateral thinking. For example, a noire-style game would probably work best as a PnC. Survival Horror games also work great as PnCs (in fact, some of the first Survival Horror games were PnCs, as you're probably aware).
I'm not sure I'd say PnCs have a real advantage in terms of comedy, though I could see it argued that the culture of PnCs encourages it. TF2 is hilarious and good, and The Walking Dead is good but not funny.
Still, action adventure games are still king. Have you played To The Moon? Then play To The. Fucking. Moon. Terrific game.
I think a lot of the unique story potential in PnC games has to do with the environment. In a strange or foreign world the narrator can comment on so, so much because of the mechanics of pointing and clicking. I think more puzzles revolving around knowledge and logic of the game world could make things more interesting.
True, I think what made the adventure games at the time special was that nobody had seen something like this before. It was the first time that a game looked like a movie and that was very impressive, and while the rest of the games were arcade, action, platform, they lacked this thing. Now, you can have games that are like impressive movies and are arcade/action/stealth/fps, like last of us and all that. So, when a new gamer plays a very cinematic game with also action/shooting and few much easier and obvious puzzles, why would they go to the oldschool pixel hunting/moon logic gameplay? In fact I think the gameplay was filling the gaps, it was basically the story and the characters that impressed and motivated players to play, but then they had to make it feel like a game and not an interactive movie so they added the ridiculous riddles. So adventures lost because they were replaced by more gamey games that also have the story/characters of adventures.
That shift in puzzle design between Act 1 and Act 2 of Broken Age is really interesting to look at, and probably one of the most unfortunate cases of a developer listening to feedback *too* much. Since they ended up going with the episodic release, Double Fine was able to get a lot of critical and fan feedback on the first half of the game, and as overwhelming as the praise was, the puzzles being too easy was an incredibly common complaint.
I was a Kickstarter backer with access to the backer forums where Double Fine would solicit feedback on ideas, and that place was filled with backers pleading for exactly these kind of obtuse, old-school puzzles that everyone is pointing to as poor design. Tim Schafer acknowledged the desire for them and promised to listen, and thus we got all those overly complicated puzzles popping up towards the end. Definitely the weak point of the game.
Unless you ask few hardcore adventure gamers.
Also, usually developers listen too much to gamers and the result is oversimplifying the games.
This happens a LOT- a game in a certain genre will attract the kind of hardcore fans who need things to be more challenging, OR the designers just expected something to be harder and feel the need to crank things up.
Darkest Dungeon syndrome.
People are bad at knowing what they want, make the puzzles chunky and spicy rather than plain sauce.
@@EvanCWaters What happened with Darkest Dungeon?
An excellent video but there's one thing that I think should be covered:
Puzzles that the player has solved but cannot communicate the solution to the game. This came up in Broken Age most recently for me but many other point-and-clicks before it. I'd find a puzzle, figure out the answer, and then struggle to figure out the precise way in which the game wanted something presented.
The most basic example of this would be acquiring an item and needing to "use" it on a character rather than selecting it whilst talking to them. I'd then be left wondering whether I was supposed to bring it to someone else or had missed a step.
One of the worst puzzles ever is in King's Quest 5. The whole game is unfair but there's the part where you get lost in a cursed forest. The exit disappears so you're left wandering around. The way to get out is to squeeze honey from a honeycomb onto a random bit of road and then throw gems at it. The idea is a gnome comes out of the bushes to steal the gems, gets stuck in the honey, and then agrees to get you out of the forest if you'll let him go.
There are SO many reasons this puzzle is just beyond insane. The visuals and writing communicate next to nothing in the way of hints. And there's also the fact that you can enter the forest without the honeycomb and doom yourself.
+Joe Matar Haha this was mine as well. I remember i got lost and was randomly clicking all my items everywhere and suddenly the honeycomb squeezed onto the ground. I didn't even know what i'd done, and wasn't sure if I was meant to do that. After weeks I gave up and looked at the walkthrough. When it said i needed to put gems on the honey and a fucking gnome jumped out of the bushes I realised I'd witnessed the worst 'puzzle' in the history of point and click adventure games.
I remember that! I was only able to make it through this one because a friend was literally walking me through it. There's no indication that the blinking eyes you see in the woods are elves, or that they like gems.
The King's Quest series had some unbelievably dumb puzzles. I think the most famous is the one in King's Quest 2 where, to get past a snake, you have to throw a bridle on it, which makes it magically turn into a pegasus. There was of course zero hints or clues to distinguish the snake or bridle as magical, and even if there was, the completely illogical combination would not occur to anyone unless they tried everything in their inventory. And the puzzle was made even worse because you were able to throw a knife at the snake and kill it (a logical thing to do, right?) but then the game is unwinnable because you NEED the pegasus to travel off the mountain you were on.
My favourite stupid King's Quest V puzzle is still the one where you have to defeat a yeti by throwing a custard pie in its face.
The worst KQV puzzle is still the cat and mouse puzzle - you have to throw a shoe at the cat in an unmarked quicktime event. If you don't you will lose later in the game.
The worst puzzles I remember are the ones based on an English play of words or an idiomatic expression that don't have any equivalent in French. You think the monkey wrench was unfair? Well, think of the translator that had to find a similar play on words in French, or the young myself that played Lucasart games in English with a beginner level.
Oursique I totally relate to that ! I was completely mind blown when I learned that the "hair of the dog that bit you" in Curse of Monkey Island was actually a play on words more than a decade after playing the game !
That car wash puzzle from day of the tentacle is even more obtuse in foreign countries, especially those that don't get a lot of rain...
Apparently afterwards Lucas Arts had a guideline to not make puzzles based on wordplays anymore, in reaction to that puzzle.
@@alexn9856 in day of the tentacle there is a hint that you can see in this video so it was more or less fair.
That is so interesting. I will keep this in mind in the future. Thanks!
I honestly think the problem with adventure games is that these are games that are 99% content, and 1% systems. Meaning that each situation has to be crafted from the ground up (you usually can't recycle puzzles, since figuring them out the first time takes all enjoyment from being confronted to it a second time, unlike combats for instance).
which means that usually, you can't put in difficulty settings adapted to every player.
figuring out how hard a puzzle is gonna be takes even more testing, that can only be done by blind players.
players can't grab the general logic as well as they can get a platforming or shooting mecanic: they have to relearn how to solve every puzzle.
The lack of difficulty settings is what broke broken age for Mark: lots of fans found the first half too easy, so they scaled up the difficulty in part two, and then, non experts get closed from the game.
+Maxime Teppe This is true, it's one of the hardest genres to design, also because the story and puzzles have to be contiguous for them to make sense
As much as I enjoyed and love Deponia, I will never forget this one early game puzzle. So, you need fresh clear water, a rare commodity in the garbage planet of Deponia. Another character has a dowsing rod that belonged to your father that he will give you after revealing he already has water on his property. You can't take this gushing geyser of fresh water, and you can't use the dowsing rod to find water like a dowsing rod is supposed to do, but use the rod on a desk once owned by your father to use it as a key to unlock your Dad's secret stash of water. -grumblebrumble-
Still better than having to mute the game because our character can't remember a secret knock due to the background music being too distracting (Chaos on Deponia)
Or having to click on a star for three times because then you can magically grab it from the sky?? (Deponia Doomsday) I love Daedalic games, but their puzzles often seem to be plainly unfair
citamorc I actually loved this puzzle, because it was clever and there were many hints to its solution.
Kth77 I don't know if it's just me, but I always found it clear that the "water" was in fact alcohol, because who doesn't use alcohol for his special secret espresso recipe xD
I prefer an ilogical puzzle than a fucking horrible unfun minigame. Minigames on Elyseum (Deponia Doomsday) still hurts me.
Point and click adventures never really died, they just stopped being triple A games. In 2000s we've seen release of Syberia, two Broken Sword sequels, Sam And Max and Bone from Telltale, Post Mortem and Still Life, FOUR Myst installments (and remake and a rerelease of the original), Dreamfall (sequel to Longest Journey), bunch of other games like Penumbra series made by the guys who would go on to make Amnesia, Secret Files: Tunguska, Jack Keane and Runaway.
And most importantly - sprawling, bustling Adventure Game Studio scene which lives and thrives to this day, which spawned for example Gemini Rue, Technobabylon and Resonance you have mentioned in the video (and also Shivah, Primordia, The Cat Lady, Blackwell series...).
... I guess as with most genres that have eaten their tail (shootemups, sidescrolling platformers), indies came to the rescue.
"Point and click adventures never really died, they just stopped being triple A games." Amen.
Have you played "5 Days a Stranger", by the way? It's over a decade old now, but it's an excellent point & click that's completely free.
I agree. 5 Days A Stranger, and its sequels Trilby's Notes, 7 Days a Skeptic, and 6 Days a Sacrifice were pretty great.
If anyone here liked the Myst series, the developers made a new first-person adventure called Obduction that's pretty good and carries a lot of the same types of puzzles as Myst while also trying a lot of new ideas. It's unfortunately kind of short though.
to the moon was popular
There's also the mid 00's handheld scene which was a great time for adventures. Particularly on the Nintendo DS with games like Hotel Dusk, Trace Memory, 999, Ace Attorney, etc.
I know it's a few years late but I absolutely have to name Secret Files: Tunguska here, because it has the dumbest puzzle in the history ov ever!
In it, you need to, for no reason, pick up a day-old slice of tuna pizza for no reason.
Then later you come to a house in which a guy is having a phone call which you need to listen in on without entering the house. THere's a cat inside. So what you do is, you put the tuna pizza into the cat's food bowl and the cat comes out to eat. THen you tape your phone to the cat's back. But the cat won't go inside on its own. Oh no. But it's water bowl is, for some reason, INSIDE the house. So you SALT THE PIZZA WHILE THE CAT IS EATING IT to make the cat thirsty. The cat goes inside to drink and your phone records the conversation. TO get your phone back you have to call it from a phone booth outside the house, which spooks the cat and makes it run outside and climb up a tree. All you have to do now is make a butterfly net out of a garden rake and a trash bag which allows you to get the cat out of the tree and retrieve your phone.
God damn that game.
Yeah, I'd say the biggest problem with Secret Files: Tunguska is that it constantly shifted in tone, one minute it tried to be a scary mystery thriller, the next thing you know it's goofy puzzles and stupid wordplay, and it kept shifting back and forth. One scene, we see a Russian soldier be interrogated and tortured, and right after that they tossed in a bunch of toilet humor. The cat puzzle you mentioned probably would have worked better in a straight up comedy game. I could understand the logic if you went by goofy cartoon rules, but it doesn't work in a plot that tries to be serious and have realistic characters.
Yes, I failed to put that into words, thank you. It really is largely a problem of tone. The game puts you into a mental space where real-world laws apply (We can't call the police until we have reasonable cause to think daddy is in danger, because people have a right to disappear) and then expects you to think up zany solutions to straightforward problems. (You want to listen in on a phonecall somebody is having in their own home. Realworld solution: Don't. It's illegal for a reason.)
It's maddening.
Exactly, and I think this tonal problem is especially common in point and click adventures in general, where people think that a game must be dark and serious (dark and serious as in bloodstains on the wall and a psychopath villain) in order to appeal to adults, but at the same time think that comedy is an inherent and necessary part of the genre. Personally I think the second Secret files game felt like an improvement for the tone and story, but they really dropped the ball on the third game, it was as if they'd dropped ten Dan Brown books into a shredder and asked a three year old to put together the pieces, and the puzzles didn't even make sense even by cartoon logic.
"Broken Sword" is up to today my favorite example for how feedback can work.
George tells you like about everything he sees and you don't.
I get furious if other games maybe execute a correct combination (sometimes even without proper animation) but doesn't tell you what actually happened.
These tips were really good at the right time. I'm just starting to design a point-'n-click game and I will make good use of your advice! Thanks.
good luck!
Same
Carlos Matos You're probably not "just starting" now, but I encourage checking out the Humongous Entertainment games. They are award-winning point-and-click adventure games designed to be playable for people at or under the age of 10. This means that you can really see what works and what doesn't in the genre without worrying about the many layers of complexity that you have to deal with in other point-and-click adventure games like, say, Myst. The Pajama Sam series in particular do a really good job at level design, I feel. The HE games really nail using items to solve puzzles and showing the player where you can and cannot move your character in a space, in particular.
Thanks for the tip!
Can you send me a link when ur done?
There's this one puzzle in Chaos On Deponia where you have to learn a secret knock in order to access a secret hideout. The problem is that your character keeps forgetting the knock because he has to pass through a crowded, bustling and loud marketplace on his way to the hideout. I struggled to find a way to either plug up my (the characters) ears or in some other way reduce the noise of the marketplace. Turns out the solution is to manually mute the game audio in the options menu after learning the knock and then turning it back on when you've walked to the hideout. Sure, it's clever from a meta standpoint. But seeing as there were no hints, as far as I could tell, that what you as the player hear also translates to what the character hears. Finding this solution feels almost impossible without the use of a guide. That there are no other cases, if I remember correctly, in the series where functions outside the game world are used doesn't help the case.
But it's likely that I just missed something as well so who am I to tell.
I regularly find that the PnC games developed by Daedalic Games are overlooked and not touched upon in these kinds of videos. They keep more to the traditional Lucasarts style of PnC rather than the newer Telltale model that they introduced with TWD.
The hint was him saying that the music is too loud (in german he literally said "music"). And being used to Daedalic's crazy way of doing things, I think it is possible to think of it. But it was really difficult. (But it did make it hilarious)
I only played it in german so I don't know what he said in english.
They were practically forcing the player to look up a guide, boring and unsatisfying.
I think a hint for that was supposed to be the conversation with the blind pharmacist.
the plot totally makes up for those auful puzzles.
I enjoyed it, mostly because I happened to figure it out. You had to figure out the source of the music. Since there was no source In-game, the logical conclusion is that it is the actual game music. Considering how many people complain about this, it is obvious that there weren't enough hints, I just feel the need to defend it because of my fond memory with it. He should have said something a bit more 4th wall breaking in order to encourage that way of thinking.
Hideo Kojimo would've been proud xD
7:12 "Are you kidding me!"
For those that don't recognize that one, it's an endgame puzzle from Riven (AKA Myst 2) where you need to use marbles on a topographical map of the entire game world showing where a giant globe was in each area, and the marbles were colored so you had to use a specific marble in each area. It was basically guesswork, and they devs threw in an extra marble just to screw with the players. God forbid you used the wrong marble or were off by a single peg.
Hey! Thank you very much for the shoutout. I really dig this show. You have a new subscriber. :)
GREAT SCOTT!! it's the wadjet eyes.
Oh gosh is that the guys behind gemini rue
Versatile sex is good, but crystal money is better.
G
Sort of like the wine-turning-into-vinegar puzzle you referenced in this video, there's a puzzle in Monkey Island 2 where you need to use a monkey on a water pump to shut it off, the joke being that it was a 'monkey' wrench. That's an American term, and I've never heard it in Ireland, so that one went completely over my head. Even if I had, basing the solution to a puzzle on wordplay is terrible design, in my opinion.
That probably would have been fine if they had some other characters talking about "monkey wrenches" - using the same sort of sign posting that Mark was talking about in this video.
Or better yet, show some other character (preferably far away) using a monkey as a wrench. It would do double duty. Many players would recognize the visual pun and get a laugh out of it when they first see it, and then it would be a hint for later as well.
Figure it out here in Italy we call 'em "Parrot Wrench" LOL
@@SaladrielAmrael In German they're literally called 'Engländer' meaning English guy
@@Julia-lg8dt LOL!
Weird, all the Broken Age puzzles you presented as supposed examples of "bad puzzle design" are actually ones I particularly enjoyed because they were of a different flavour to the more typical type of puzzles in the game, and I really appreciated that variety they introduced for point and click adventure veterans who've seen it all. And they all followed clear logic and had lots of clues you could uncover to help you with them.
For example, Vella actually says that the grabby thing is only interested in the boy's belongings. And the Mr. Huggy thing is clue enough that you'll need knowledge from both POVs, which is the sort of evolution of the game you'd expect past the mid-game reveal anyway. The knot puzzle was hilarious and actually my favourite in the game. There was a bug at launch that made it slightly harder than it should have been, but that was promptly fixed. Letting the snake do its thing is a great anti-puzzle to pull the rug from under the player in a fun way, and there's visual clues that you're on the right track when you're doing it.
None of those things were things I got stuck at. I got stuck on others. If you watch multiple Lets Plays, you'll see that there's a lot of variation when it comes to which puzzles people got stuck on and which they breezed through. I think P&C adventures are quite simply very personal experiences and it just takes a bit of humility from the player to realise they're going to get stuck sometimes and there's nothing wrong with that, either themselves or the game, it's just different minds working in different ways.
I know you posted this 5 years ago. But I just wanted to say that I also don't really agree with a lot of things he says about the puzzle difficulty. And when I looked through the comments it looked like most people agree on what he said. So it's nice to see that I'm not the only one who likes puzzle that might be difficult for other people.
I don't like it when games take you by the hand and just show you want to look for next. I don't want to be told what to do or give too much feedback. It takes away the joy of thinking out of the box and finding the solution by yourself. I really enjoyed monkey Island and broken sword
@@Sink_Bread Wow, I don't even remember watching this video at all. But I do remember every single puzzle I talked about in my comment, which I guess shows the value of art vs the value of criticism, ha. I think people who love point-and-click adventures (I love Monkey Island and Broken Sword too!) found the step-up in difficulty in Act 2 satisfying, whereas people for whom the level of difficulty of Act 1 was sufficient didn't appreciate it ramping up like that.
I LOVE how the only example you used from Riven: Sequel to Myst was the infamous Fire Marble puzzle. I actually liked how, for the main 2 puzzles in that game (The Animal puzzle and the Fire Marble puzzle) they basically gave you all the clues you needed for the solution if you were willing to travel the world and observe everything. Except for each puzzle, they left one clue out (A colored light you needed to see was vandalized, or there was an animal you needed to find, but you could only hear it and not see it), forcing you to figure out the core principle of the puzzle and reason out the last clue on your own. Unfortunately, this made the Fire Marble puzzle literally come down to a 50/50 guess, which was not cool. One more thing to mention about that game: shout outs to the puzzle that taught you that world's number system. That thing was out of this world, and opened so many puzzle solutions and LORE once you solved it.
Solving that number system puzzle was one of the coolest moments in my entire gaming history. It was so much fun to figure out, as a geek for math and linguistics.
Yeah, like I figured out the underlying concept of the fire marble puzzle but something about how the island/color thing is revealed made it easy to get wrong and then not know what you got wrong. It's just too finicky.
To be honest, the fire marble puzzle never bothered me, I found the Moiety puzzle far more difficult as there were 3 easy clues, and then the last one was disproportionately more difficult/obtuse. The fire marble was all logical, and gave you the sense of narrowing down literally thousands of options to just 2 which then made you feel like a genius for figuring it out.
I looked it up, it really reminds me of the number puzzle in FEZ
Good sir, how dare you? How dare you make these videos so damn enlightening and entertaining? I had my whole day planned out and I happened to stumble across your channel. There's only one thing I can do now, and that's to watch everything. I hope you're proud of yourself, so proud that you succeed in your endeavors and continue making these. Seriously though, thanks.
I'm currently experiencing the same thing. It's been really fun to listen to all these videos
Grim Fandango -
When the Exploding Dominos are lined up blocking your path, and you have to feed Glottis soft drinks to make him puke and cover the dominos, and then your freeze it, allowing you to walk over the frozen barf to the fuse and deactivate the bomb.
Honestly the most abstract solution I have ever heard to anything
"So, what do they pack canned hams in, anyway?"
This game is full of abstract puzzles. The deflated balloon you fill with gel to gum up the letter tube and the bread crumbs combined with a balloon animal to scare the pidgeons may me shake my head. Needing to flick the deadbolt on the door to progress after the repair guy fixes the tube also frustrated me as well.
This game is full of abstract puzzles. The deflated balloon you fill with gel to gum up the letter tube and the bread crumbs combined with a balloon animal to scare the pidgeons may me shake my head. Needing to flick the deadbolt on the door to progress after the repair guy fixes the tube also frustrated me as well.
Have you considered a video on text-parser games? I feel like they get even more of a bad rap than point-and-clicks, and there will always be things you can't possibly do in a visual medium. Abstract concepts as tools and interactables, because all you need is a name. Physically-impossible spaces without the need to cheat them into a renderer. The gradual reveal of the scenario, in Spider and Web, where a visual game would likely need to make it abrupt and explicit pretty quickly. The sorts of hidden-things you can get in well-written prose is entirely different from the sort you get from hidden details in a rendered scene - I'm thinking of the Gray Men from the Wheel of Time books here, but I'm sure there must be a parser game that does something like that.
If you haven't yet had the chance to play the Cube Escape/Rusty Lake series, you absolutely HAVE to. It's such a good series and there are a ton of games to play. Easily the best point-and-click game series I've ever played.
One of the worst puzzles I ever ran into was in Cave Story, There is a guy stuck behind a locked door and you have to find some kind of object for him, the solution is he had the object all along and you just had to talk to him more, or after some amount of time. I ran back and forth along that small level for a long amount of time, for that slap in the face of a solution.
Me too.
Worst thing in Cave Story is not that, but the fact that for good ending you have to ignore seemingly dying good guy.
The “monkey wrench” puzzle in Monkey Island and that secret entrance in Full Throttle almost broke me.
There was a puzzle in Blazing Dragons for the ps1, you had to pick up dust in a jewel cave that looked like background decoration, and use it on a laundry monster, because soap isn't enough to kill it. I quit at that point about a decade ago and I was only about 20 minutes away from the ending.
I absolutely loved Broken Age.
…
Played with a guide
The second act is unthinkably difficult, but the originality of its puzzles and world was enough to buy me.
Monkey Kombat from Escape from Monkey Island (4th in the series)! My god. You needed like 5 pieces of paper to understand it all and you can't look it up because it's random each time. Oh and after all that, the final boss with LeChuck you have to TIE with him three times! That made absolutely no sense and was a ridiculous ending to what was a fairly good, albeit clunky, adventure game.
That said, my favourite has got to be The Curse of Monkey Island (the 3rd one). Murray was a brilliant character and it was genuinely funny and the art-style is timeless.With fantastic puzzles too! Claiming life insurance by faking your own death? Brilliant. Winning at Poker with 5-of-a-kind 'Death' tarot cards? Fantastic! So satisfying and it actually makes sense in a bizarre way.
I thought winning by having to TIE with him was pretty clever. I remember spending a lot of time trying to beat him and I believe when you tie with him you get a somewhat different response to help you suggest you might be on to something.
I do agree that needing a notepad next to you while playing an adventure game can be annoying, but newer games sometimes do it in-game now.
I figured Monkey Kombat on my own. using paper and pen. Very proud of that. One
To be fair, the tying with LeChuck 3 times was hinted at earlier in the game, when JoJo Jr tells Guybrush that one of the best strategies for Monkey Kombat is to mimic your opponent's moves. That is the first and last time ever that I will defend Monkey Kombat.
You definitly should take a look on Daedelic Entertainement's adventures if you haven't already. Especially the games designed and written by Poki (Jan Müller-Michaelis is his real name). As I learned in this video, you might find some of the puzzles frustrating, however they are so crazy and over the top (and mostly well designed) that you're too busy with laughing to get frustrated. The stories of Poki's games are full of genious metaphors and the dialogues are some of the best I ever experienced. Check out the Deponia trilogy for example. Or The Whispered World, even though Poki wasn't the only creative leader on that one. The Whispered World is probably my favourite P and C game ever, speaking of the deep and metaphorical story.
I left my fingers from Deponia after playing through the first one with a walkthrough, because it was just too frustrating. Which is a shame, as the game is really beautifully designed and I like the humour. But the puzzles are crap.
Flat out, old adventure games need well designed hint systems. Myst: Masterpiece Edition has the best hint system I've ever seen because it builds its hint system as an extension of the game itself. It gives you hints in stages with the direct answer at the end and taunts you when you consult it too heavily but remains apart of the game world through clever writing so you never feel like a cheater when you use it. Even the Monkey Island remakes are hugely benefited by their standard hint systems.
Grim Fandango, on the other hand, was a game I had been dying to play for half a decade but when I finally got my hands on it I quit in frustration only a few hours in because of how exhausted I was tabbing back and forth between the game and the strategy guide. Same goes for Sam and Max as well as Indiana Jones. Point and click games are really, really incredible but when they make you feel like a total moron they stop getting fun fast. Hint systems don't have to be cheat codes, with a little effort they can seriously bolster the overall experience.
Edit: I just noticed you referenced Riven's marble puzzle. Fuck. That. Puzzle.
My favorite genre of games. And at 7:12, where you show a brief glimpse of Riven, I snickered a bit. I finished that puzzle (that whole game actually) without resorting to a guide even once. But that was only because I was utterly cought up in the world, taking notes and making drawings in a notebook. I lived in that virtual world for a couple of days, and it still remains one of my absolute favorite games.
Hey Mark. Great to see a clip from Machinarium rather than just the old point and clicks. Speaking of puzzle games, can you talk about the innovation of the animation techniques used in The Neverhood?
I would love if you did a video like this (or Boss Keys?) on the design of the Myst franchise!
I wish you'd put game titles on the screen, it could be in a form of additional CC.
One of the best point and clicks I played was Fate of Atlantis, and you hardly get anything obscure. It is so well blended with comments and visual sign posting. Check out Memoria also is very good at logical puzzles.
I just wanted to say after stumbling upon your channel I didn't realise it was something I was looking for, but your videos are of a high quality in both analysis and production. I hope you take as much pride in your content as you should, and I hope for much more in the future.
I have to disagree on one comment there Mark. Although some of the puzzles were stupid the "boot loving robot" wasn't unfair. If you talk to the knife he says "moms robotic arms only love grabbing things that belong to Shay", hence why he won't use Vellas shoes.
+Lunarbs I suppose the fact the mark didn't catch it could be an indication of the signalling being too subtle.
The hand isn't interested in Vella's shoes because she's not wearing any--she's barefoot.
endlessrepeat They're in inventory
also the distinction of boots to shoes
The Cube Escape games and games made by Rusty Lake in general are PHENOMENAL 10/10 point and click games
I have been enjoying this series so far, very well thought out! Thanks for making these, we're looking forward to more.
I don't really play too many point-and-click adventure games, but the best puzzle I solved was in Machinarium where there's a giant sleeping robot that asks you geometry questions. my first impression was to answer them all correctly, but then nothing happened. I went through a couple more times, trying to see subtle clues in his expression during and shortly after the test, but then I saw that 3 out of the 4 choices were actually correct, so I chose the INCORRECT option and he got progressively more impatient. then the giant robot, after 3 consecutive mistakes, got too fed up and I could access the next area (don't remember exactly what happened that let me proceed, I just remember that I did. I think he blew a fuse or something). that was one of my favorite puzzles, since it goes against the norms but still provides enough information to be solvable and makes sense once you think about it
One frustrating but smart puzzle is in Chaos on Deponia. At one point you have to turn off the music to continue. But you get hints and it's a way of breaking the 4th wall in videogames, in line with the style of the Deponia trilogy :) I recommend the game, the video should have mentioned it :(
I agree that the Deponia series deserves more attention.
The Deponia games are gems of humor and classic adventure design (and I love that you get to your inventory by scrolling the mouse wheel). I find it kind of frustrating that the Daedalic adventures seem to be mostly ignored internationally. :(
So true. They are gold.
while the deponia games are mostly frustrating(random item and object combining, not enought signposting, unclear signposting (hats=houses in deponia 1), the plot is fantastic.
Most I had trouble with I don't remember. I played the Humongous point and clicks like Spy Fox or Pajama Sam when I was younger. Still have the disks, probably should send them to PBG.
Off topic, but it soooo nice that you included in the description a great done references compilation of games and links used and... well, an actual description of the video. Thank you so much for that. Those details make a channel of quality.
Thank you for these great tips! I loved the first part of Broken Age, but by the second part, I remember getting so frustrated, I looked up a walkthrough just to be over and done with it. I'll be sure to incorporate these tips into our adventure game we're working on. Thanks again!
It's been really long since this video came out, but damn, Disco Elysium nailed it hard.
It made me crave for more, even if it was not a die hard point and click puzzle and was mixed with others genre, with additional mechanics, making for a really sweet experience.
The way everything is interlocked (even if one character won't be able to know all about it due to character sheet and dice rolls), this game was a gem in the way everything was carefully thought, Kim Kitsuragi being your hint bag (along your own perception of what could be going on) as well as being kind of a puzzle in it's own way.
Everything unravel so well in this game, and after watching your video, i have a better understanding of why it felt so fresh and "new gen"
Hey Mark, I love your videos, but I found it interesting that you didn’t mention a specific puzzle adventure game that stuck out to me. Ghost Trick is a pretty nuanced game in the genre and I believe has lots of points in which it could evolve if looked at. I’d suggest giving it a look if you can!
So much research and work went into this video, thank you, well worth a thumbs up.
One of the best sequence in a puzzle clicker I've experienced is the beginning part of Sam and Max 204: Chariot if the Dogs where you have to find where Bosco went.
MYST IV's crystal harmonic frequency puzzle.
Those who played it know how awful it was. What a nightmare.
i agree that timed puzzles didn't really fit in myst games very much. but i wouldn't really say it's my least favorite in m4. i really hate the puzzles around the spirits and the dream world in the last age. the one where you have to take a very fragile thing to a randomly placed spirit that disappears whenever you go to that scene, and is impossible to see from certain angles, is just terrible and frustrating. the one where you need to make everything white is interesting but a common bug with hyperthreading meant that your cursor would sometimes leap across the screen leading to triggering the wrong orb. and the one where you have to put the quotes in the right order is awful because you can miss a clue early on from the pendant and requires you to go back, or just guess at the correct order. but if you know the order, it's actually a pretty nice little puzzle idea.
Every single puzzle in that game is a headache and feels like torture.
Know this is an old video, but the first puzzle that I remember hating was in Curse of Monkey Island, when you needed to get the scissors to cut through some hedge blocking your path.
The only way to get them is to get Rottingham of the chair in the Barber Shop, since you are the next client in line.
The solution? Finding "dandruff" in the theater on an old, dusty coat and put it on the comb.
I never though of looking for that, it was both Pixel Hunting and not clear signposting, so pretty frustrating till I looked up a guide. Papapishu!
Very tough, but there's some logic there
There's this one Point and Click game called Bulb Boy I kept thinking of. I really liked that game- or rather, what I watched of Game Grumps play it. I thought it looked great and I also really liked how they used Light as it's own mechanic- since he was a bulb boy.
But I've never played any Point-and-Click game myself, only watched, so I'm not sure how it feels to particularly play them.
Mark this video is awesome, I watch it a few months ago when I started my game. After your good advice, I had to redesign most of the puzzles to make sure all made sense. Just a quick note to let you know that I'm really thank full for the information you shared! Jan.
They're certainly not dead on mobile platforms: there are some notable examples like The Trace, Lumino City and particularly the Room series. With these, though, multitouch allows some unique new mechanics beyond the pointing and clicking.
+voltlife The room was fucking amazing
+Theresa Blom You're tearing me apart, Theresa!
Oh wait... different Room ?
Don't forget that Lumino City is also on PC. I have a copy and it's pretty fun and challenging.
If you haven't seen it - there are Three "The Room" games now. The third one is pretty cool with multiple endings...
Grim Fandango is one of my favorite games, but has the most intensely nonsensical moon logic in its puzzles that I’ve ever experienced. Every single puzzle out of 100 or so is practically impossible without a guide.
I've been binge watching these videos and I must say I absolutely love them. I love how you don't use a gimmick or a bunch of memes to keep us entertained, but you're straight to the point and use interesting commentary to pull us in. It seems like you like puzzle games. If you take requests, I'd like to see how you would analyze a Professor Layton game someday. Since a classic puzzle fame rarely involve emotional stories, I'd like your two cents on how Layton manages to have emotional stories that are rarely duplicated in other puzzle games. Perhaps you could have your own spin on how to make a successful story driven puzzle game. Love to hear your thoughts! Again, thanks for your awesome thought provoking content!
Couldn't find a single reference to Riven in this - arguably the greatest and most cleverly designed puzzle adventure game ever.
Wonderful episode.
Best P&C I've played since Grim was the Deponia trilogy. The puzzles were smart, funny & well signposted.
It did have some problems - most notably the treatment of the love interest, being a character literally called "Goal" who is deconstructed into three simplified personality traits for an entire chapter - but that aside, where the trilogy really shone was in the writing.
The protagonist, Rufus, largely takes after Guybrush Threepwood, but as the story progresses he develops some genuine depth and progression. By the bittersweet conclusion, it is clear the story is an excellent riff on the classic Greek narrative of call-to-action, passage to the underworld, oracles, nemesis, redemption, all that. We learn of his origins, his motivation and his internal conflict, and eventually he grows to become someone worthy of his role in something of an epic story - but only through tragedy and sacrifice. I've never known a game be so funny and so heartbreaking.
I was sad for a long time that P&C seemed to have passed away, but Deponia made me feel that it is in fact still maturing, largely thanks to the kind of insight and critical approach you demonstrate in this channel.
PyroTyger Deponia was really nice, Mark Brown should take a look at it.
rinserofwinds Agree. Deponia is really good.
+PyroTyger Deponia is great! It's even better in German!
Have you had the chance to play "The Last Door"? It's a point and click game that was inspired on some Edgar Alla Poe books (and I think Lovecraft's too). I totally recommend it, good puzzles, story that creates suspens and makes you wanna play it until 6am and the music/ambient are gorgeous.
I second this recommendation for The Last Door. it's a terrific game and it uses ultra low-res graphics to wonderful effect; the detail is so minimal and pixelated that the player essentially has to fill the blanks in within their own mind and imagine what the world really looks like, much like reading a novel.
I think a game that breaks or bends almost all these rules and still feels fair (although super difficult) is Riven: The Sequel to Myst. It probably helps that all puzzles are based on machinery and codes, which leaves little room for moon logic and there is a fair amout of clues and signposting in the journals you find and read. Except for that colored marbles puzzle at the end (shown in the video) where the last marble can just be chosen randomly - it's the only solution that can't be figured out from clues and must just be stumbled upon. It's frustrating to sit there thinking "what clue have I missed" for half an hour only to find out it doesn't really matter. Argh.
It's a map of Riven, and you put the marbles corresponding to each dome. You get the matching colours and locations from using previous devices (the map table has the same size grid). The randomly-missing colour is worked out with the symbols instead. I don't know why everyone mentions this as a terrible puzzle - I had no trouble with it and thought it was obvious. The bit of Riven I got stuck on the longest and had to look up was having to close the door behind you.
@@OrangeDog20 Ha, same! Pretty sure I know *exactly* which door you mean. I got stuck trying to find that path for ages too, trying to find another way to get to it. I finally stumbled on it by a simple misclick - accidentally clicked on the open door when I meant to click to go through it... and there was the path I'd spent so long looking for. "Always look behind closed doors" has been something of a mantra for me ever since...
@@OrangeDog20 I understood and solved the puzzle, the problem is one of the domes has no color associated with it and with two marbles left, you don't know which one is appropriate, and that's because it's decided at random. It's something that can't be deduced and just has to be guessed or discovered by trial and error. It was the only time in the entire game I used a guide. It's a good puzzle with just one element that's kind of unfair.
But yeah, the passage hidden behnd the open door was super frustrating and probably takes the cake, I forgot about that one.
I think 12 minutes is a perfect picture of a modern day point and click adventure
The design is all there, it's quick to digest, I just wonder how much more you could do with the formula.
This isn't a point and click game, but how about that "the code is on the back of the box" puzzle in Metal Gear Solid? Having to look outside of the game to solve a puzzle is a cool idea, but it doesn't work if the player isn't told that's a possibility. Stumped me for weeks.
+Jack Sparham After a little googling I've realized what the problem was. I first played the Gamecube remake "Twin Snakes", and rather than Colonel saying "the back of the CD case" they changed his line to "the back of the package". The word package was vague enough (and the textures in the remake were good enough) that I just wandered around the game world looking for a code on something in the environment.
I really enjoyed it, enough that I've since played all other MGS games. It's more in line with the GC of remake of Resident Evil, and not just a lazy port. I've heard it's a lot easier due to the inclusion of first-person aiming, especially for certain boss fights.
@@partlyawesome he tells you, but my copy of MGS was a re-release "PlayStation classics" type thing and the codec number wasn't on the back of the box!!! I had to look up a guide and I was pissed off really. I had played MGS 2 first and best that easy enough so tried the first game and that bit stumped me, but other than that it was good
I wouldn't call it a puzzle, more of a 4th-wall break that is one of the things that make MGS series famous (hell, MGS2 is full of them). Also, the first time I came across it I was really sure it was some kind of a classic anti-pirate measure; you know, like plenty of DOS-era games had. Sierra adventure games, like Space Quest, constantly used this: you were allowed to play a bit of the game and then you came across some sort of a code that you had to find in the game's official manual.
Getting instructions to dip your uncle's letter in water (Star Tropics).
Good luck with that.
I LOVE how you used machinarium music! It's such an underrated game.
Drawing sketch of a suspect in "Post Mortem" is by far the most frustrating thing I've ever encountered, although the game itself is one of my all-time favorites.Than some obscure logic near the end of "Riven".....
Anyway, really great video, I agree 100% with everything.It shows why Ron Gilbert is master of point&click genre.
Great video. I grew up on King Quest and other Sierra point and click adventure games of the 90s.
Great video! I was totally not expecting to hear music I helped make in here though! (Forest Spirit Friends) That made my heart jump. Thanks for the inclusion :)
Recently it took my flat mate and I over 45 minutes to get past the piano key puzzle in the first Silent Hill. However it was incredibly satisfying to finally solve.
When I was a child, Point and Click games were on my list whenever I wasn't playing Zelda. I still enjoy them nowadays and it makes me sad that they're barely alive at this point. I really agree with your points and I, like you, hope that the genre can be released of that stigma.
Fun one that's come out since this video, in 2019. Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka with Love. Happy to see that the genre isn't dead, and that one seems to do pretty well with what you mentioned (signposting, etc).
Would love to hear your thoughts on the Myst series, I saw that short clip of the fire marble puzzle in Riven. At first glance it seems like the Cyan made games core design relies on not using any of these three tips as they have no clear goal, don't include any real means of sign posting (having barely any character interaction or even much to interact with at all aside from the puzzles themselves), and no feedback aside from nothing happening. I wonder if somehow they are trying to hint the player in another way through the world design? Personally I think they are still very compelling and they clearly have some fans. Is it the shear challenge that draws people or is there something more? Love your videos and insights, thanks.
I think the thing about Myst is that even when something is really obscure, it's at least logical. Riven is excellent and for me a high point in the series where it strikes the perfect balance between difficulty and direction. That being said, that is helped by the fact that Riven is basically one interconnected world and doesn't have the issue that many puzzle games have where there are different rules in each scene or world. The other games in the series all have some moments that miss that mark a little, but are still generally very solid. I think for me both in Myst IV and Obduction, the actual puzzles were generally pretty good, but just small details made them into a more major issue (for instance in Obduction, there is a puzzle where you have to get a code and then input it into a door. The actual puzzle and the hints to working out the answer are all pretty clear, but the kicker is: the code you get is alpha numeric, but you need to enter it into a number pad. There is a clue to this in the form of a telephone booth, but the issue with the that is that it's located in an area you will probably explore early in the playthrough and then completely forget about because it literally has no other purpose. Other than that though, everything was relatively straight forward after some lateral reasoning [yes, I am still salty about that code])
This video actually got me interested in the genre.
Any games on Steam or GoG you folks would recommend to a point and click newbie?
Reutzer same here! Recommendations would be great!
HerbieCN Reutzer Myst and Riven
Reutzer I think Machinarium is a great game to get started in the genre. It's not too long and I can't remember any puzzles that don't make sense.
If you're looking for something a bit deeper, I can recommend the Deponia games. It's a 3 part series with an interesting story. Though I don't know how good the English version is since I played it in German.
Both games are on Steam and GoG and regularly go on sale.
Reutzer Nancy Drew®: Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake and Nancy Drew ®: Danger on Deception Island are my favorites.
Reutzer Syberia. Really compelling story, not too hard puzzles, incredible world and characters. One of my favorites!
Mark I am loving your videos, I only just discovered them. I am a game designer and love to analyse games too, but you put together well communicated, well demonstrated points in your videos with good examples. It's great to have inspiration like that to improve design as I'm sure you know once you get involved in lengthy production and deadlines its easy to overlook overall design and focus on just finishing the game. Often playtesting is when you first realise you need to make changes but by then its often too late to do anything about it. Education and reminders like your videos really help for people like me to think through designs fully and these videos are inspiring me to think about design in genres I don't usually consider, of course you can also apply lessons in one genre to another. I would like to see more examples from mobile games in your videos as the design there is really interesting and quite different to console/pc games in some cases. I might also suggest a video on Sunless Sea, I played that recently and in terms of design it had so many interesting aspects I haven't seen in many games. Ps do you have an industry background? Are you on Linkedin? Anyway keep up the good work!
Also I would love to see a series here on how designers actually come up with puzzles of different kinds and implement them (like your Braid video). I usually work on action games and always wonder how adventure and puzzle game designers come up with these. Some of my highlights are The Witness, Portal 1 and 2, The Room, Ico, Riven, Zelda Skyward Sword. Also one more game suggestion: Duskers on Pc. Been playing this week and the original design and twist on sci fi survival is great.
+Jigsawn Hey! Yes, puzzles is something I'll be looking at more. I started off the Braid one with a view to doing a general puzzle design video but found Jonathan Blow had such an interesting and unique take on it that I had to give him his own video
Having loved the riddle school series in its entirety, I now think there were a handful of puzzles in RS5 onward tended to be either too easy or too tedious.
Riddle transfer had great puzzles for its first half, but the puzzles in Viz's rooms were starkly different;
For most of Riddle Transfer, you solve puzzles by talking to characters, and solving the locked up creature's problems to unlock your friends. These puzzles are well signposted, but the "tech" puzzles in the last room are pure puzzles.
In the beginning of Riddle Transfer, there is a tile puzzle required to get to essentially the rest of the game. It comes back in the ending, with a different pattern to learn. When I first played it, everything slowed to a crawl at that puzzle.
I suppose it makes sense story wise, to have to solve such puzzles to deal with that technology aspect.
But there's a clear difference between making a shape match other shapes to unlock a Rubik's cube, and freeing a flying pig to use its leftover feathers to make a hat fancier for a Bigfoot-esque monster, whom is in possession of a keycard needed to free your friend. One of those took more words to explain, and one of them is switching tiles around to get to figuring out an unfamiliar algorithm.
TL;DR The "world" puzzles (I.e. finding items, combining them, talking to characters, etc.) are starkly different than the "tile" puzzles (The dreaded color switcher puzzles) in later Riddle School games, and I think in retrospect it makes for a weird shift in pacing.
Or maybe I'm just really bad at tile puzzles.
It's a simple fact that adventure games are a niche market. A point & click adventure will never be the big blockbuster an FPS can be. Also, they're pretty much impossible to "monetize" after the inital sale. So, AAA publishers have no interest in them anymore. Other than, I'd say the genre is doing fairly well. We've had good adventures in the past few years.
As for bad puzzles: Just look at any of Sierra's older games. You'll find plenty there, including fairly random deaths.
Most people thing Broken Age part 2 sucked. I heard from a friend who is hardcore adventure gamer that part 2 is amazing, the puzzles are amazing, etc. Not a common opinion I guess. I myself played 1 and that motivates me to try 2 and see by myself. Maybe there is a niche community who do want their puzzles crazy and some sort of pixel hunting. My friend for example finds the idea of pressing a key to show all the hotspots horrible.
As for myself, I don't mind if some adventure games waste your time a bit because of developer's logic (but I am curious about alternative solutions to this problem). I hate the opposite, the oversimplifcation. I was trying one or two Telltale Games and I felt bad with how these games, while spectacular in presentation, they really help you too much, they give you the obvious puzzle and then have characters even tell you what you already know. It's too hand holding imho, although some people might say TG are not adventures but rather interactive movies with choices. And because they are so pop, too much spectacle, some QTEs recently and dialogues which don't give you time to read carefully (and I understand the mechanics of pushing you with time to make mistakes, but I don't like it because sometimes adventures are like zen where you can take all your time) I am not a fan of them. Meanwhile I liked Life is Strange better, even if it resembles TG games, it's totally the zen where you take the time to talk to everyone, no pressure and it even has complete 360 degrees camera, so you feel you are there and can explore whatever you feel, no forced corridor movement like TG.
My favorite game genre. They’re just interactive books and I love it. These are games for people who love observation and mysteries.
I think a super underrated, but excellent point and click puzzle is "escape Lala" and "escape Lala II", it has a good blend of signposting what you need, and giving you hints to do so, additional hints as well by redeeming in game coins Wich you are sure to collect from clicking around. It also has the excellent long term goal of exploration, showing you there are areas you haven't explored, and such, press you to know more. It also gives you mini lessons in re-usable items, like a time accelerating spell or summoning spell
While point and click is still a genre, if only on the small and mostly indie side of things, I think VR could stand a chance of bringing it back in some way, if VR as a whole does well.
I agree!! I think a sleuthing game where you have to look closely around for details would be great in VR.
Yes! That's exactly what I thought. I'm working on a little concept for VR right now.
Jan Broedersz good luck
Life is Strange is the best contemporary "point & click" adventure I've played in recent years. It manages to be thoroughly modern yet has mechanics that clearly echo the Lucasarts and Sierra classics of yesteryear.
The Telltale games obviously come from that tradition too, although if A Game of Thrones and Tales from the Borderlands are anything to go by they seem to be slowly ditching puzzles and just making their games barely interactive cartoons that are occasionally punctuated by QTEs and dialogue choices.
Telltale is interesting because they started by doing very traditional PnCs, then tried something a bit different in Jurassic Park, and then evolved that into The Walking Dead. Which was obviously hugely successful for them (and also: brilliant).
You can watch them get less and less interested in puzzles as that series goes on. And, as you say, nowadays there are practically zero. Maybe it's for the best: if puzzles aren't your focus, it caaan slow the story down
Mark Brown I'm frankly amazed that they decided to go the Jurassic Park route again with just how terrible JP was.
+Mark Brown I love telltale games. If it wasn't for them i wouldn't like borderlands or Game of thrones of walking dead and many others. They helped me discover them. I didn't know what Game of thrones was and i hated it but when i misclicked on a vid i ended up getting hooked in the first few minutes because of how exciting and interesting it is. One of the reasons these games are good is the possibility of so many outcomes. So many routes it increases replay value as players will want to see what happens if they had went another route.
one of my favorite point and click puzzles was in Pajama Sam No Need to Hide when its Dark Outside, when you ride the railcart down the mineshaft, and are give split second moments to click on secret locations to change direction and head down alternate routes. Or at the end of all the spy fox games, the evil villain will get away unless you click on a special animation que that lets Fox chase after the villain, without giving you a game over screen at the end if you didn't know about it (Instead you just think the villain got away in the end)
It did came back in thimpleweed park + return to monkey island - two awesome games! Good old point and click
Oh: worst puzzle... Broken Age and almost any Sierra adventure offer plenty of choices but my pick is... a slightly less know point-and-clicker called "Amazon: Guardians of Eden". I will try to not spoil anything if someone actually wants to play that game, bu there is a puzzle near the end of the game which relies on you picking up an object from way earlier in the game which is sorta easily missed. So not only are you at that point irreversibly stuck, you aren't even aware of the fact you are irreversibly stuck so you can spend hours and hours on trying to figure out the solution (you have a cheat button which supposedly helps you, but since it refers to the object you haven't got it's not really helping). So - since no Google back then, sorry - you are pretty much done unless you have a friend playing the game who managed to not miss the item so he can tell you what the solution is - and even then you practically have to replay the entire game if you want to solve it yourself and not ask your friend for the save position or something. So yep - worst puzzle ever.
Yep. Dead ends were the worst things ever
I feel vindicated that the Grim Fandango message tube puzzle was mentioned lol
I think I actually managed to solve that one on my own
I thought Grim Fandango was generally superb, and I only really got stuck on that wheelbarrow puzzle in the petrified forest. Oh, and that cat track bet slip / Lola photo puzzle in Rubacava. Okay, fair enough. The brilliant story helped me persevere though regardless.
I didn't find Myst too tricky (and it was one of the few games I played with my dad growing up), but Riven was absurdly tough and huge so half the time we found ourselves backtracking in vain hope. Really hope the genre continues though - not least for that social experience. It's harder to get excited about planning the shooting of some guy together than it is to figure out a puzzle together. I accept multiplayer changes things somewhat, but I do miss the bewildered days of a few people squinting at the same screen before one eureka moment. That seems pretty rare these days.
In recent memory the worst puzzle I remember is from The Wardrobe.
A big flaw in the game is that you have the options to "look at" "use" or "take" almost all interactable in the game.
You find this net full of fish at the sea and you have all 3 options, but the one you need to do is "look at" only then do you approach it, slip on a fish and fall into the pile.
You must then go to another NPC who is in a corner of a room that is tucked away and you thought you completed already, this NPC has a thing for cleanliness and so he will smell you and give you bubble bath formula. There was no evidence at all that this interaction made you smell bad. It really annoyed me 😆
There is little engaging about a lot of the puzzles, though. There's some enjoyment to be had in figuring them out, but using the right item on another isn't very interesting, and it's not something that progresses and becomes more complex naturally like a lot of other gameplay systems.
It's funny that the advice about goals and clarity was mentioned specifically for this when it's a medium-wide necessity. The player needs a goal. It even goes for other media, too - aimless protagonists are difficult to deal with.
Oh - and worst puzzle?
Maybe one of the monkey island games. Had to stretch skin over a manhole to use as a trampoline. Skin doesn't work like that.
I don't remember that puzzle but a lot of Monkey Island and LucasArts puzzles had a sort of Looney Tunes style logic to them, they made no sense in the real world but they had a sort of cartoonish logic to them.
Scooby Doo Mystery for the Genesis is full of these (though I still think it's great fun, with a haunting atmosphere and goofy slapstick that perfectly captures the show).
The one in particular that always drove me up the wall was using a stolen bedspring to bounce onto a roof to grab some Christmas lights to use in combination with a soda tab and a battery to make a flashlight (?!).
The signposting rule of thumb is difficult outside of a cartoon/comedic/slap-stick oriented story, at least for signposting in dialogue. Day of the Tentacle gets away with it because it's a akin to a looney toons cartoon and the player expects that characters talk that way. In Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis the signposting dialogue with Sophia Hapgood seems forced before you even decide on the game-play path you want to take (Action/Balanced/Puzzle Heavy). Signposting needs to fit into the story and the world of the game and that becomes more and more difficult the closer you are to a "realistic" story line and world that the game takes place in.
Signposting also only addresses a symptom of the the underlying problem. Adventure game puzzles seem simlpe at first glance, but the space in which the solution rests is huge ( eg you have 7 items in your inventory and need to combine two of them the potential combinations are 7x6, = 42), and because of the obscurity of most of the logic the item puzzle solving very often breaks down to lets use every item in the inventory with every other item in the inventory, which happens right after lets use every item in the inventory with this thing in the world. This happens because the player feels that this would still take less time than thinking about the designers singular path of thought that produced that particular puzzle (with 7 items in your inventory that ordeal would be 7x7x6 = 294 operations, also note 7 items in your inventory would be considered on the low side of inventory size).
Adjacent to the solution space size is that adventure games disguise puzzles as problems due to the way these are presented to the player. They usually depict a person in environments, containing items, that are recognisable, or can be reasoned about, from the players real life experience. This invites thinking about the puzzles the way the player would think about problems in the real world, which is detrimental to actually finding the solution. This abstraction is at best sub-optimal and it could be argued that it's lying to the player about your game mechanics.
Adventure games absolutely need to evolve in order to be relevant again today, but iteration won't do it, this needs a giant leap. The memories as inventory items is a cool idea, but is used badly in the game and just adds to the problem space problem, talking to electrical objects is just another dialogue tree, essentially these are small iterations on previously established genre staples. Real time adventuring at least is something new, but reminds me of Sierras old timed puzzles, and in the end seems like a gimmick. Bladerunners changing story at least leads to replayability, but also leads to an insane development time increase, relegating it into the realms of AAA studios.
Insightful comment. Is it normal in PnC games to respond differently depending on if you put X on Y, or Y on X in inventory? The possible number of unique pairs with 7 items is 21, unless putting itemA on itemB is different from putting itemB on itemA, in which case you are correct and the total number of combos is 7x6 = 42.
@@gd7681 it shouldn't, and if it doesn't the problem space is absolutely smaller, but it does occur, either as a deliberate decision or because of bad programming. Also, nobody usually tells you, so there is the potential of it being the case and your common sense "cheating" you out of a solution. As a player already is in the "let's try everything" mode at this time they're probably going to try x on y, aswell as y on x just to make sure.
Man I'm surprised you never mentioned the Her Interactive Nancy Drew games. Those can be really hit or miss but there are some lessons to be learned though them on how to lay out puzzles and make it clear which ones you do or do not have the required items to work on.
where's Myst?!
Silent Hill 2: there's a clog in the garbage chute, Use the juice can to unblock it. Turns out there is a key in the chute. No explanation as to why you would care the chute is clogged or why you would use a can of juice to unclog it. Terrible and arbitrary puzzle.
Also, how could you not mention MYST? It's probably the greatest of all point and clicks and the puzzle designs are brilliant.
That one is not more of an arbitrary puzzle as uninspired. The only reason to care about the chute being clogged is because...the chute is clogged, so it means you can interact with it somehow. Outside the hotel, the camera changes where you can obtain the key, and you get the juicebox in the same building as I recalled. The reason for all of this is that every item you can interact within the building works to open something else in the same building.
Using juice to unclog a drain is idiotic
Would like to see more of these; your channel has become The Legend of Zelda Toolkit.
I do believe, Chaos on Deponia's submarine hunting takes the cake: it has a random pattern, if ya screw at one point, you have to keep trying, 'till you can make it.
Coolness
Interesing
"The Dig". All of it. The voice acting and story may be great, but there's barely any signposting, the puzzles are a pixelhunting mess.
Aw god, the Dig. That takes me back. I don't think it's quite as bad as you're suggesting, though I also remember playing it around the age of nine or whatever I DID get stuck for an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out the next step after that German guy bites it.
Weirdly though I recall the opening of the game and the latter portions being pretty simple to understand and relatively easy. It was just that in the middle of the game it became super directionless and impossible to know what to do next without randomly getting your initial intuition right.
Like, I remember at one point there was this whole thing with resurrecting an alien turtle correctly? That was a simple enough puzzle, but there was just a lot going on in that game that was super bizarre. However, I think that was part of its charm, too. I don't think there have been that many games that properly convey the idea of "astronauts end up on an alien world" quite as well as The Dig. Everything in that game nails "alien" without either making it too obtuse (most of the time) or, on the threat level, being either to E.T. or to H.R. Giger.
It just feels . . . alien.
Trying to assemble that darn turtle skeleton was infuriating!
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe @Ivan Isakovic there's a fossil of a turtle alien, in a near place, showing how is the right combination. I still don't get why people says is a hard puzzle.
@@isabellasaleal9364 Well I played that game many years ago as a child so I can't really recollect why I found it challenging at this point, but if I had to take a guess I think it probably had less to do with assembling the turtle bones correctly and more to do with why you need to do it.
As I recall, I brought the turtle back to life many times and watched the sea monster eat it again and spit the bones back out onto the beach several times. So I assume I was either not making the connection that I needed to put an explosive in the turtle, or that I didn't know why I needed to kill the sea monster, or that I didn't have the grenade yet, or maybe that I got to the puzzle earlier in the progression than I needed to so the sequence of events didn't make sense yet. I'm pretty sure the game shows the sea monster spit the bones out onto the beach the first time you go there, regardless of whether or not you know why you'd need to kill the sea monster. So the game lets you mess around with the turtle in advance of when you need to do so, and it can be confusing as to knowing why you need to do all this until you progress forward in another area of the game which explains the reason you want to make the turtle into a bomb.
I’m just sad that the only time the Myst series was mentioned here was the Riven main long-term puzzle as the “are you kidding me?” At 7:12.
Amanita design (Machinarium, Samorost..) has great point and click adventures (didn't found a single flaw in them)
Check out Fran Bow if you haven't already.
store.steampowered.com/app/362680/
You didn't include "The Neverhood" to the discription.
That's actually Armikrog!
+Game Maker's Toolkit
ohh, my fault.
Day of the tentacle is a masterpiece. It was one of the few point and click classics I could beat without ever resorting to a guide. Well structured puzzles and good story, likeable characters etc.
That damn goat in Broken Sword 1, I couldn't believe it when I finally learned the way to solve it, years after I had given up.
With the new version, that scene is almost incredible simple.