Afterwards, I revisited some LucasArts games I'd played before (Monkey Island 1 and 2), and tried my hand with some I hadn't (Fate of Atlantis, Sam'n'Max, Full Throttle and also Flight of the Amazon Queen, which isn't from LucasArts). I think what you describe is actually fairly representative of the overall LucasArts experience. Character building is limited, even the funny jokes get tiresome after you've clicked through them a fifth time, some puzzles are illogical even for games with a sillier tone (monkey wrench, anyone?), and there's often a lot of walking about, repeating conversations, and clicking randomly just to see what happens. Some of them (Thimbleweed Park, MI2) also have exceptionally poor endings.
Out of the games I played, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was the best, though I got stuck (by forgetting some object in a room outside a complex labyrinth) close to the end and didn't bother completing it. The main character is pre-established, the plot feels like an Indy movie, and I can't recall any genuinely preposterous puzzle solutions (though it was a few years ago now).
I love the Monkey Island games, they're a part of my childhood. But I mostly love them for the music and graphics, not necessarily for the puzzles or the many gags that other people always seem to find a lot funnier than I do.
This style of game died for a reason. I'm not saying it needs to stay dead, but I do think every entrant to the genre needs to grapple with those reasons and have an answer to them. The episodic format provided one decent answer, even if I don't necessarily love it as a monetization technique. Adventure games all tend to pass through episode-like gates anyhow because the combinatorial state space becomes overwhelming without them, but they often still carry over state from the previous phases of the game. The full clean-slate wipe of the episodes prevented that from becoming a problem.
A better Indy movie than the last 2, IMO. I go back and replay it every so often.
> The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good
Some of them were funnier than others. It helps if you were attached to the characters having read the comics or watched the show. (The comics had the most concentrated humor - see: the comic about Dracula)
I recall the episode featuring the Abraham Lincoln statue running amok was very funny.
(Though I guess in the context of these games, that would be considered new-fangled.)
For those who are out of the loop:
> https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Aperture_Science_Material_...
Barely any adventure game has a puzzle that requires brute-forcing. The problem is rather that sometimes players don't have the same kind of thinking as the developers.
This issue can be aggravated if the player comes from a different culture or is playing a translated version of the game; for a famous example: the "monkey wrench" puzzle only works if the player is used the the US-American English name of the respective tool.
If the author has a solution in mind but it is not properly hinted, for most players brute force is the only option. In the case of point and click adventure games, if you don't think "I could stick the bubble gum to the mouse to run through the wall and grab the key" you are left trying every combination of item and action, which isn't fun.
And now, I'll go back yelling at some cloud.
Anyone can design a hard puzzle. Guess the number in my head. Unscramble this 200-character anagram.
The real magic is in the "Aha!" moments where the solver makes a connection and is able to proceed. Great puzzles are supposed to make the player feel like they are smart, not that the author is smart.
Many point and click games fall apart here. Brute force isn't fun. Games where you think you'll need something in the future but the game won't let you take it now just so you'll have to backtrack when the game wants you to do that aren't fun.
A lot of modern point and clicks are by people who don't understand that and think suffering and click mashing are the point. I don't remember much of playing Thimbleweed Park, but VirtuaVerse was very much that.
https://oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
> Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.
What I quite like in Joe Richardson's Death of the Reprobate is that Joe breaks the fourth wall and admonishes the player character for feeling sad that Joe told him the puzzle solution and robbed him of a "Eureka moment". "IF THE PUZZLE DIFFICULTY IS PITCHED JUST RIGHT, THAT'S MY TRIUMPH, NOT YOURS" says Joe.
But the rest of your point stands. I keep reading young gamers complaining about adventures and role-playing games being “too difficult” whenever they don't put big flashing arrows on the next character or place to interact with. I cannot understand that: if one can solve a puzzle without grit, what pleasure does that bring? It's the same as watching TV.
I'd also observe that "brute force" here is an O(source * target) problem, where a source/target pair is some expressible command. e.g., you can't usually combine two locations on the screen, but you can try to combine any item with any screen location, and in some games, any item with any item. Some games add a term for "verb" to that as well, though most games nowadays wisely realize that's not really helpful.
You can see the core reason why people complain about "moon logic" isn't really that the logic is weird. I don't think that specifically bothers too many people. Often it's part of the fun in a way. The problem with "moon logic" is that it means I can't cut down on that search space with common sense or clever-but-grounded logic. In reality rubbing my cat with a piece of tape to pull some hair off of it so that I can wear that tape as a fake mustache is not a sensible option to consider, which is a real part of a real puzzle [1], not just something I made up. A game that consider that a solution to a problem is a game I have to rub everything on everything and it is not just "gamers being lazy" that they don't want to perform hundreds or thousands of possible actions, where all but one of them will result in failure, and depending on the game, some of them may even result in "game over". That's terrible design and that's not the player's fault.
[1]: The classic Old Man Murray article, for today's 10,000: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/78.html The rest of the puzzle isn't exactly a tour de force of logic either.
Partially agree, but I also think that they were victims of the graphic cards revolution where each year you could have shiny new GFX and visuals, and that drove new games development (and funding). But indeed being contrived and self-referential didn't help.
Or maybe adventure games were always a niche genre for a niche of people, it just happened that the niche of computer/console players in the early days coincided more.
True as well; the race towards photorealism and natural immersion (mostly first-person 3D across various genres) had an almost suffocative, and sometimes obliterative, quality.
That's a name I haven't heard in a long while. And the "Cat Stache Puzzle", once an infamous case-study of virtual insanity in game design, now nearly forgotten...
The boundaries can be blurry, and a puzzle can wrongly seem to fall into the tedious category because I'm missing something. But, in my opinion, classic adventure game puzzles too often really are arbitrary and boring.
Tell me about it. I played the French translated version, and the pun does not translate at all. "Monkey wrench" was translated as the french equivalent, "clé à molette", which does not reference monkeys at all. I remember being stuck for ages, and finally checking the solution online and concluding that the only way to find the solution is to systematically try all combinations as there is no way to apply logic. Only years later I realised that in english, "clé à molette" is "monkey wrench".
The 4th wall breaking was lame though, especially the ending.
You're given a random balloon dog, there's no reason to be given it, there's no in game meaning behind it, and to finish the game you have to use it on a specific thing that you'd never think to try unless you were just trying random stuff.
That's not "moon logic". It's complete bs and a terrible puzzle to end the game on. When people talk about game developers disrespecting players, this is exactly the kind of thing they mean. Expecting the player to have watched their kickstarter video! Seriously...
Are multiple/simultaneous playable characters a common feature of adventure game design from LucasArts alum? I played Broken Age and thought the idea was novel, but recently played through Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated. So many people say that adventure games are nostalgic, but the ones I played growing up were Kings Quest 6 and Myst (games with only one playable character). These other multiple character adventure games are nowhere near enjoyable for me.
Manic Mansion, MM2, The Cave, Thimbleweed Park, and now TWP2: Gilbert's. Possibly also some of the many kid's games he did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Gilbert#Games
Broken Age is the only one of the many, many games Tim Schaefer lead that does it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Schafer#Ludography
I have generally found it to be some tedious bullshit that stretches out the length of the game far, far too much, and I grew up playing a lot of these point and click adventures.
Day of the Tentacle (which coincidentally I've replayed in the past week) executed the multiple characters mechanic the best I've seen, since each character was confined to their own area (past/present/future) and you could instantly pass items between them.
I've not played that in decades, but I remember liking the mechanic. For the most part it wasn't much different from one character with more freedom to move between areas (timezones in that case), but the need to pass objects through time added some variety and humour (send hamster via freezer, but then how do you warm it up again?).
Thimbleweed park is, if anything, on the easy side of the genre. Not quite as easy as Loom, but it's still on the easy side, and with a built in hint system. Day of the Tentacle's main problem is dependence of US culture. Just like the old "monkey wrench" thing in Monkey Island 2, using an actual monkey as a wrench. Still, in DoTT, you get in-game dialogue that will basically teach you some of it, although it doesn't work quite as well.
The complaint would make more sense if it was limited to Zak McCraken, as that one really s quite tough and random.
I found the game so intensely unfunny (and there are few things I am selfishly rooting more for in life than another great point and click adventure)
This is my biggest problem with adventure games in general, and I'm a huge King's Quest fan, but sometimes the number of cryptic "What you didn't realize you needed to kneel in front of a cliff with a red crystal to summon the tornado Uber? so obvious" stuff definitely can put off newcomers from the genre.
These games definitely felt magical as a kid but I think the feeling of it being this whole rich interactive little world full of characters carried a lot of weak jokes and writing.
Story: Without any spoilers, I'll just say the ending isn't satisfying in the least. He does the equivalent of "I woke up and it was all a dream."
Agree that some moon logic is present/inevitable but I think the Gilbert games are friendlier than most in this respect.
It's been a while, but I think I pretty much agree about the writing and story. I pretty much don't even remember it.