[started writing this this morning, but hadn’t the time to hit that reply button. I am sure @guga made a lot of points I’ll be making ]
For starters, it breaks the suspense of disbelief.
Again, you are building something contrived around god-mode/‘w’ to win. That is not the same as brute forcing.
Secondly, it doesn’t allow me to try to come up with the solution. And that basically sucks out all the fun for someone who likes to play adventure games the way they’re intended to be played: by experimenting.
Like I said before: that does open the possibility to brute force ones way through, but really most players only resort to that shamefully.
I don’t agree.
Do you think more people will enable “invulnerability” if it is in the options screen of a fps or say Mario Bros?
I’m not so sure about that. I would imagine that even if you added a button labelled “Instant Win”, quite few people would actually press it (or only to satisfy their curiosity, before playing the game as intended).
Taking a step back, I think the whole discussion fundamentally boils down to: can I, as a developer, get players to play the game exactly as it is intended to be played!?. And I’ve seen that discussion on numerous forums, for different genres, in one incarnation or another.
And my answer for single-player games would always be: you shouldn’t force people to use the product as intended. By all means, make playing as intended the option that offers the most fun. But don’t go out of your way and punish people for doing as they please with something that is rightfully theirs (assuming they bought a legit copy).
Another point to consider, especially with P&C adventures is that there is most often exactly one solution to any given objective. It’s not like people have options to approach situations from various angles as you’d have in many other genres. People will have to figure out what the designer had in mind, and for various reasons that is not always simple (bad puzzles, language barriers, overlooking a clue, required real-world knowledge, etc. …) and brute-forcing their way out is the only way they have to approach a situation from another angle (short of looking up the solution, which will often spoil more of the game).
There might be a reason why my original solution isn’t the correct one. And I won’t know until I try. For example:
Well, not in TWP the joke is that “a sheriff” could be a completely legit solution, but not that Sheriff. And you know only after you tried. Think of the puzzles in Kill Yourself where you can fail, like when you have to hang yourself. The direct solution is “correct”, but not sufficient. It’s only after you fail, that you know why. Trial and error can be fun if integrated like this.
It’s not a matter of how logic the solution is, but how logic the wrong solutions are.
You have to open a chest. You find a key. Of course it’s logical to try the key. Do you really need to add details and/or background to show without any doubt that this is the correct key?
For me that puzzle only clicked once I turned on and off the you-know-what and observed the you-know-what. Only then I had to go back and turn the you-know-what back on.
If you could have predicted any of that in the “correct” order : go in, think “well X might have a dangerous job if only…”, then find a way to achieve that… and then be SURE that is the solution… well… hats off to you.
The “problem” -luckily - is that a good game will not tell you that you have all the info. Imagine your character went into auto-solve mode as soon as you have picked up all items or have seen all dialog or read all information that was needed to solve a puzzle, like in a cutscene, before you as a player have connected all the dots. To me it would be a bad game.
The flipside of the medal is that when you submit an action you are almost certain it will work, you might still be surprised it didn’t work (at all or not completely as planned). If you are like 80% certain that this will be the solution, that is good enough for me. That leaves one out of five puzzles that turn out differently and perhaps a few out of of those that you accidentally solve while trying to do something else. That’s fine.
Even Grumpy Gamers and TWP dev blog had a way of teaching a bit of humility when submitting the answer to a simple math question to which you are sure sure you know the answer.
Some surprise is good, it leads to wonder and wonderful games in the end. Are they perfect? No. Everyone may have a different puzzle they’re stuck on or found too easy or just right. It allows us to go on and on about it and give each other hints.
Embrace it !
It’s like a painter who wants to control the way the audience looks at their work. As long as they bought the entrance ticket to the exhibition, it doesn’t really matter!
How many songs and lyrics aren’t misunderstood?
It’s the fate of any artist who dares to make their work available to the wild world.
Just in case you missed it (like me, until just now), Delores will run just fine on Linux, with a bit of tinkering. See https://www.protondb.com/app/1305720 for the details. Obviously, you still need DX12 capable graphics hardware.
So now I can finally play (provided the weather allows me to spend my time indoors) and look at all those spoilery forum posts afterwards .
So, I loved this game. Personally, I’d be all for mini-games like this set in Thimbleweed Park for the rest of my life and I’d pay $5-$10 every time.
I played through this the other week and it got me excited enough about Thimbleweed Park that I played through the original game again.
Prooooobably going to play through the mini-game one more time now that Thimbleweed Park itself is still fresh in my memory to see if there are little nuggets and references I may have missed the other week.
A question before I go through Delores again that maybe some of you can answer for me:
What stationary / office items did you all ask Natalie to borrow and what puzzles were they for? Literally the only thing I asked for and received were the stamps, so I’m curious if the other items were red herrings or if some puzzles may have had more than one solution?
Just completed the game. Except for one run that took mere minutes, each contained a puzzle that eluded me for a while (In one case I needed to consult a dictionary). In some cases I was overthinking the solution, i.e. to get the bathroom lit, I thought I would have to get my sister and family to move there. That had me stuck for a while, until I found the light switch (who could have guessed it was located on that side of the door!). The poem was also difficult. Before figuring out the bathroom, I would have imagined to find some suitable graffiti there … you can imagine my disappointment.
The engine itself is pretty neat. I liked the subtle graphic effects and the controls were mostly fine, however:
it would have been neat if Delores walked faster when moving the mouse further in the desired direction, like it was done in Ultima 7, instead of the double click and hold.
a way to highlight all hotspots would definitely have saved me from being stuck.
and I really would have liked to skip to the next line of dialogue with the mouse instead of keyboard. Especially since text often lingered around long after I was finished reading. Perhaps a speed setting would help too, as long as there’s no voice over.
I think to highlight hotspots you had to add or change something in a txt file or something. Or maybe that was Thimbleweed Park.
There were definitely some puzzles that eluded me the first time through because they were much simpler than I thought they could possibly be (like just taking a picture of a phone). Or the one in the bathroom where all you had to do was flip over the toilet paper. I had done that just looking around during the first five, so I knew that flipping it was going to be related to an answer, but when I finally got to that clue I flipped the toilet paper & kept leaving and coming back expecting to find a cat playing with the toilet paper to take a picture of!
So middle mouse button, eh? That should be convenient enough.
Perhaps there was. But in case there wasn’t, it would be nice if there would have been . Preferably also achievable using the mouse. After all, if the new engine does require the mouse, it should go full mouse!
Not quite. (Though I just tried button 4 and 5 on mine for the first time, which Firefox maps to go back/go forward, it seems).
I understand that there is a limit on what might realistically be mapped to the mouse, and I’m not completely opposed to having some additional functionality via keyboard only. The issue arises when keys are not easily reachable by the hand that’s not holding the mouse, I did not understand it for a long time, but WASD actually makes total sense! Reaching ‘.’ with the left was awkward.
Anyway, for something like hotspots the middle mouse button might do just fine. As you wouldn’t want to see hotspots during dialogue, it shouldn’t conflict with skipping text.
Of course, if you end up with each mouse button serving x different functions depending on the context, something is not quite right. If only there were some kind of interface elements on screen to click instead …
I only found out about the mini-adventure game a few days ago, but I just finished it and really enjoyed it, great stuff, loved the new interface… and great to hear an extra podcast too!
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the joke is that “a sheriff” could be a completely legit solution, but not that Sheriff. And you know only after you tried. Think of the puzzles in Kill Yourself where you can fail, like when you have to hang yourself. The direct solution is “correct”, but not sufficient. It’s only after you fail, that you know why. Trial and error can be fun if integrated like this.
