It’s sensible to not have a touchscreen during these times.
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I just finished Delores (with my wife’s laptop 
) and I have to say the puzzles are outstanding. It’s great to be walking around the town, looking at objects that you already know, but trying to see them in a new light. There is a lot of lateral thinking involved. Funny thing: without walking and actually seeing the objects in front of me, I wouldn’t solve most puzzles. Only by walking and watching them, you realize they could fit the description. That’s great.
But sometimes it’s the opposite: you would never go there if you hadn’t already figured out the solution. And that’s even better! This happened to me with the bird’s eye view puzzle and the allergies puzzles. (which were also my two favorite puzzles).
I’m really impressed by the quality. I liked the puzzles even more than TWP. Kudos to Ron Gilbert and David Fox. Puzzles designed by them are really something else.
UI-wise: the UI looked like it got rid of “this doesn’t work”, but it actually introduced a new form of “it doesn’t work”. In fact, you can take pictures of everything. It’s like you have a “take picture of” verb that you can use on everything, but most of the time it doesn’t work. In this game, Natalie’s rejection is the actual “doesn’t work”. We could say that taking a picture is actually like combining an object with one of the 5 objectives. And most of the time you get a “it doesn’t work”.
What I didn’t like: a bit text-heavy. There were some dialog choices (like all the talk in the diner and with Natalie, and all those ads in the bulletin board) that seemed a bit superfluous and gave me a bad first impression. Glad that I kept going!
I don’t want to say this is the best game I played in 25 years but it would be if it were longer and in a more exotic setting
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My favorite puzzle was the “living with cats” one.
It was one of those a-ha! moments that make me love adventure games. A thing you do just for fun whose description seems just a joke but is in fact a hint. Very clever.
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well unfortunately I solved that by chance… I was going through everything and then read the description with the word “cat”. I didn’t solve it by just looking at the object. I needed the description. and the description gave away the puzzle. Same for the mummy puzzle.
You need to pay attention to descriptions in the beginning, but I didn’t apparently.
I am starting to believe that clues disguised as jokes are in fact disguised too well. 90% people miss the clue because it looks like a joke. As a result, they solve it by brute force. (Same for the first puzzle in my game. But as in my game there can’t be brute force, they just quit.)
Maybe it should be clear when something is a clue… 
or maybe a clue disguised as joke is only ok if it has a cutscene (like Largo spitting), but not if it’s a simple text joke…
Which one was that? They’ve already slipped my mind I guess. 
It was the one with the toilet paper. I figured out out by thinking about what cats might play with.
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Oh yeah, that one was immediately obvious to me. Iirc she joked that it was in the cat position or some such while I was just exploring earlier in the game.
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Sincerely, I think that’s not a developer’s problem. Puzzles are meant to be puzzling. If a player misses a clue because it seems like a joke, in a genre that’s mostly based on clues disguised as jokes, then it’s the player’s fault 
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I agree but it should at least be clear that the puzzles can be disguised as jokes… and that you need to read between the lines of everything. You say it’s obvious from the genre… you’re probably right.
Also, if any description can contain clues, there shouldn’t be 1000 descriptions.
When TWP was in dev phase, the devs led us to believe that the option for the paper roll flip was added because of the public demand, but that was not the case. The toilet paper flip was from the beginning a carefully planned ruse, leading up to this very puzzle! #conspiracytheory
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Damn, you figured it out!
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The real conspiracy is that cats prefer it the other way around!
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Looks more like cat trying to put it in the fun position. Stupid humans, aaargh!
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I just figured out something. Delores = De Lo-res = The low resolution! 
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Figured that out long time ago!
That’s how I remember to not to spell it as Dolores.
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I’m still thinking about the new UI in Delores… I think it’s really, really clever. As we know, @RonGilbert has managed to remove the “it doesn’t work” generic error message when combining two objects: if you drag an inventory object over a room object that isn’t the “right one”, the cursor does not react, and the “custom sentence” does not appear, so you can’t release the mouse. This way 1) you will never have “it doesn’t work”, and 2) you will always know exactly what would happen before releasing the mouse.
So far so good. But now, you might think this makes the game more brute-forceable. You think: with this UI, I can just quickly drag one inventory item over every room item, without thinking. As soon as I see the cursor changing, I release the mouse and I have solved a puzzle without thinking. It’s much easier than before.
But no. This isn’t true. Because Ron can simply handle combinations that are wrong. He can handle them with puns or jokes. So if he handles enough combinations, the game will not be brute forceable. So this system shifts some burden on the designer, because he has to handle more combinations and invent more jokes, but it’s something that the designer would have had to do anyway, if he wants to make a good game. So actually there’s no drawback at all in this approach… clever, clever.
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So as a consequence the player doesn’t have to think about a puzzle that much anymore?
Yep. I think this. 
But not only this: You give the player hints (implicitly).
But this is a problem: Ron has to write answers to more combinations. This is much more work. (And the voice actors have to record more lines, which makes the recordings more expensive.)
But what’s the difference to the SCUMM system then? In SCUMM he could write funny reactions to more combinations too. (I refer here to the inventory puzzles - with nine verbs there are much more combinations of course.)
btw: “Edna & Harvey: The Breakout” has different reactions for all possible combinations.
Brute forcing is just “A” possible way to solve any adventure game. Contrary to say completing an action game blindfolded, you just have more chances of getting to the end in an adventure game by simply exhausting all combinations as there are less of those. Or there are less that turn out to be lethal for the in-game character the player is controlling.
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/yay_testertron3000
Unless you kill off the player character (hey Sierra-on-line) and forcing them to reload/restart when solving a puzzle wrongly…
In theory, you could even complete a game that has all of the visuals scrambled AND is in a fictive random language.
Or complete a jigsawpuzzle with the picture facing down, where all pieces are just one out of 4 shapes or so.
And they would all be as much fun as brute forcing your way through an adventure game.
Not a lot! That’s also why you shouldn’t overthink anti-brute-force-measures: the player is punishing oneself enough as it is.
I think you simply need great puzzle design and writing to setup situations that do not drive a player brute force techniques or solving them by accident.
Even the pre-check mechanism in Little girl in Monsterland risks to become like that Madame Morena dialog.
“You see?”
“Yes, I see.”
“But do you really see?”
Etc etc
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I agree. As long as the puzzle is well constructed and logical, there’s no reason to try brute force. Brute force is usually done when you really have no idea, otherwise you’d have tried it. Most of the time, a player already feels ashamed to try. And if the puzzle was logical, the real punishment is the “oh god, of course” feeling you get once you see the solution. It makes you feel a failure of a player.
Of course there are those who bruteforce because it’s the only way they can play the game. You shouldn’t care about those, they’re not puzzle lovers.
But almost all of the times I found myself bruteforcing a game, it was because the game made no sense or was so frustrating that I stopped caring about my playing experience. And when I found the solution, my only reaction was “how the hell is a player supposed to know that?”
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