But that would be the same situation: The person didn’t know that the game has to be voices and/or text. If this was the case you can’t conclude that this person has to show immediately that he/she/it was confused.
I always, and I mean always have my phone on mute. Most of the time I want it to be so, because it’s quite annoying if I open up an app while on the train and suddenly there’s loud music everywhere, so I tend to leave it muted and explicitly turn on the multimedia sound when I’m showing a video to my daughters or I need the vocal feedback when I’m jogging.
So, even if I am the kind of person that goes through all menus and options before starting a game, I would expect the text to be turned on by default in an adventure game. And if it weren’t, I’d be upset, I’d be like “why the hell do you expect me to have my volume turned up, of course I’m playing in public, otherwise I’d be playing on my PC!”.
Is it not possible to make the game figure out itself whether or not the phone is muted and activate/deactivate subtitles automatically or ask for it via a pop-up window?
This was already discussed in this thread:
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I can imagine how some people can feel so entitled, but… Wow! that is a very strange attitude to me.
If I download a game, I would expect it to have a multimedia experience (this being the 21st century and all that); and if I wish to play it without sound, I understand that it’s on me.
Why would I expect every single app in the App Store to be mute? That’s why I have a volume control, a “mute all” button and headphones.
But that’s just me.
dZ.
No, Apple does not provide an API. There are several kludgy work arounds that involve starting a short SFX using the raw Apple API (which we don’t use) and then waiting to see if it never finishes. It’s disappointing that there isn’t a API to read not only mute, but also the hardware volume.
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That is unfortunate, but I think if you were to go that way, you enter into the “trying to be smarter than the user” problem, attempting to infer from your own self-defined heuristics what should be appropriate for the user.
A “mute/unmute” flag is fine, but trying to define a threshold of which volume level should enable subtitles is a bit extreme.
Still, it sucks that there is no such flag.
They wouldn’t necessarily know immediately that something was wrong, but it’s reasonable to expect someone to figure it out pretty quickly. After all, if the person gets zero information about an object when they use the “look at” command, talking to someone causes weird cutscenes full of silent mouth movements and seemingly random dialogue choices that take a while to appear, and most commands result only in the character walking up to an item and nothing else, how could they realistically think that’s normal behavior, unless mobile apps are so uniformly awful that a person thinks a buggy, unresponsive app is normal?
Given that the game cost money, they will probably take the time to figure it out, but will still be left with a frustrated feeling. If the game was free (and devs see this a lot), the slightest friction causes players to quit and move on to the next free game. It’s why free-to-play games spend so much time guiding players through the experience. The player has invested nothing in the game and is happy to give up and move to the next.
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Back on the original topic subject (A kid’s review of Thimbleweed Park), I recently showed Thimbleweed Park to a teen who never played an adventure game before.
He liked it, not too much, but above average (he cames from FPS games experience).
Today, I showed him Monkey Island 2 on XBOX (it’s a package including both MI1 and MI2, classic and remastered editions).
After 10 minutes of playing, he told me: “this game is similar to Thimbleweed Park, even if the interface is different.” 
I didn’t say anything, maybe tomorrow I will reveal him the truth…
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How long is “quickly”? 
In TWP you can just walk around. If you pick up an object, it’s in the inventory. So there are many situations where no voice or feedback is needed. Even if I look at an object and I don’t get a response, I would assume, that you can’t look at this object. So someone new to adventure games needs some time to notice that the sound is missing.
Maybe @RonGilbert could tell us how long the person needed to notice that the sound is missing…
It was around 2 minutes. It’s not long, but when they realized something was wrong (they only realized in the since they asked me what they were doing wrong), they didn’t know what it was. I told them at that point, since it wasn’t a “playtest”, it was just a friend that asked to see the game. There was a lot of frustration, also the tendency for new players to assume they are doing something wrong, which contributes to the “giving up”.
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Yeah a similar thing happened with my nephew. I had to guide him and help him reason through the beginning puzzles. He assumed he was doing something wrong, couldn’t figure out what, and was getting frustrated.
Perhaps that’s the solution: every time a newbie buys the game, they can sign up to get a veteran to go to their house and hold their hand and pat them in the back while they get used to the game. 
dZ.
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I would expect someone to figure it out by the time they’ve reached the sheriff. Try muting your audio and disabling text. The conversations with the Pigeon “brothers” and the sheriff are going to act really weird if the agents’ dialogue choices are the only dialogue available. Even without dialogue options, if someone figures out how to get Boris killed, they’re going to be treated to two agents standing around clearly having an utterly silent conversation. I just timed it, and that’s about 65 seconds of two agents having a conversation, with no clue as to what they’re actually saying. That’s a really long time to go without expecting any form of text or spoken dialogue.
And prior to that point, would you honestly think the “Look at” command is working properly if literally nothing prompts a description, including a dead body? I mean, it’s two federal agents investigating a crime scene, and NOTHING prompts a description? With sound and text off, the only way to get a description is to look at the body and then look at the notebook. That method is useless for obvious crime scene elements like Willie’s bottle and especially the drag marks.
Getting back to conversations, the Pigeon “brothers” conversation is unavoidable, and the dialogue quickly reveals that the Pigeon “brothers” are in fact speaking to the agent, but all the player gets is long stretches of silent pecking motions and some dialogue choices that hint at a two-way conversation. Once someone gets out of that conversation, the next conversation is with the sheriff, which is also unavoidable. That conversation again involves largely cutscene silence, and ends up taking place outside and inside city hall. And at that point, the player still doesn’t have access to the to-do list in the notebook. For that, they have to talk to the coroner, which is a third unskippable conversation with extended silence in it, and no audible or readable responses to the player’s dialogue choices. And the player can’t leave city hall without following up with the sheriff for a fourth silent conversation. The dialogue options reveal that other people have in fact been speaking to the agents instead of ignoring them.
And chances are, by the time the player has had those conversations, they’ll have been presented with a gate that Boris opened but the agents somehow can’t, and a city hall door that the agents could enter, but not exit. I see that Ron has already posted a response while I was typing this. Yeah, I can see how a person could easily start recognizing a problem two minutes in. I’m just surprised they were blaming it on themselves instead of realizing that conversations aren’t supposed to mimic silent films. I guess between being a long-time gamer and fixing things for a living, the idea of just assuming everything is working as intended in a case like that is utterly foreign to me.
I assume that a lot of people use to watch a Let’s Play video or a walk-through, when they are frustrated and have paid for the game. Then, they would see how to play such a game.
Being at a live playtest and having to sit silently as people fumble is an eye-opening experience. Once you’ve done that, you will never make assumptions again.
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You assume that the person played from the beginning. But that is not the case: Ron handed over his device (or am I wrong, @RonGilbert ?). If you are once in the town, you can walk around with no need for sound. And you need at least 2 minutes to walk through all streets.
If you start the game from the very beginning, Boris enters the scene and moves his mouth - bot only for a short time. If someone is new to the game this could irritate him - but not necessarily force him to think something is missing. You can then open the gate and walk over to the river. This will take round about one minutes (if someone is new to the game). If he looks at the sign, Boris faces his face to the sign. So the player doesn’t see that there is someone speaking. So you can walk around for two minutes without knowing that something is missing.
But beside that I totally agree with you: If you start the game from the very beginning and try to play the game, you need the voices and/or the text. At least at the discussion with the pigeon brothers the player has to recognize that something is wrong - or he is - sorry for the word - dumb.
You are right. But in the town there are signs and similar objects, where a response isn’t necessarily needed. And as I said above: Sometimes the characters are looking at the objects, so you just see them from behind only nodding.
(side note: There are games where the characters are moving their mouth, but you can’t hear what they say. Examples are The Little Computer People or Machinarium. Ok, Ok, in the latter one there are symbols in the most cases.)
Yes, that surprises me too. But sometimes I’m dumb too. There are situations where I don’t see the obvious - and I get angry about myself. But that doesn’t mean, that I’m a complete idiot (ok, some people might say something else 
) and can’t figure out how to play a game after a while.
Long story short: If you hand over a game to a person that don’t know the game and won’t recognize within 2 minutes that the sound is off, you can’t imply that a lot of players aren’t able to figure out to enable text. And you can’t imply that this person won’t never figure out what’s wrong (without the help from you or the game).
“Broken Sword 1” has over 100.000 players on Android. And it doesn’t seem that these players have such problems. (BS had attracted a lot of “casual players” that were new to adventure gaming.)
Good idea. But I don’t think, that this will help:
It is a difference if someone wants to play an adventure game or if a friend says: “Here, try out TWP, it’s fun.” In the latter case the player is less motivated to figure things out and gets faster frustrated. I don’t think that even a veteran can guide such a person through the game.
I am not surprised at all. It’s a self-esteem or confidence issue, which seems to be a big thing in our modern society, especially with the last generation. Kids are used to always winning (actually there is no “winner” since it implies a loser), getting their way, being entitled to everything they wish for, and generally having someone behind them telling them how special and important they are.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that when they encounter a game they can’t figure out because it doesn’t follow the same patterns to which they are accustomed, they assume it’s their own fault – especially if the game has not granted them an achievement or told them how awesome they are for doing so great so far.
My nephew was totally able to solve the puzzles by himself, but he wasn’t comfortable or confident enough at the beginning. After solving one or two puzzles, he felt so good and smart that he was able to tackle the rest on his own.
I know that the Boris scene is supposed to address this by giving them the tools and confidence to solve their very first puzzles. However, what I noticed is that during that time Dante was grappling with learning the mechanics, getting used to the visual experience, and trying to understand what was going on – so by the time he finished the chapter, he was too overwhelmed to have absorbed it all.
Other than extending that chapter with more hand-holding puzzles (which may just become boring or silly and reach a point of diminishing returns), I do not know how else to address that.
dZ.
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I was joking, of course – but that’s precisely what I did with my nephew: I showed the game to him and he seemed interested so I let him at it. He was very motivated to figure things out, he just didn’t seem to know how and required a lot of initial hand-holding.
dZ.