It depends on your mouse. If your mouse has nine buttons instead of two, you get the full SCUMM verb interface.
I love the style of the object icons! Some of them are animated.
I’ve noticed that they have use the same sky trick of Thimbleweed Park: it goes from a starry night to dusk.
I didn’t know/remember that. Do you know where I can find what he said, exactly?
I agree. Adventure game developers can infuse complexity in their puzzles either by increasing the quantity of the possible actions or by working on more qualitative aspects of the puzzle itself.
Since Lucasartian adventure games stem from a 12 verbs interface, their public is familiar with complexity by quantity, but that’s not the only way to increase complexity. And, in any case, the direction of the evolution of the command interface (12 > 9 > 3, in the 2D games) was already evident.
You don’t get both those options unless you try to use bone with skull. In that case, use becomes “conk”. So your choices are to use the bone with the skull, or to do your default action on the skull (removing it).
Yet strangely, I’m not seeing the Look At verb choice. I’m not seeing Look At or the “Guybrush’s thoughts” text that seemed to replace it in the previous video.
Edit: “conk the skull” does not appear when hovering the skull, but only when dragging something onto it. So it’s not a spoiler.
“Remove the skull” appears on mouseover, which makes it easier than clicking “pickup” from the 9 verbs. It’s true that we lose the pickup puzzles with modern interfaces.
I’ve noticed that the file size of the Nintendo Switch game is 5.1 Gigabytes. [Source]
That’s a lot of (mainly) graphics! Are you ready to continuously swap all those 3541 floppy disks?
For comparison, TWP size was about 1.4GB.
Edit: anyway, I partially agree with those who think that the video clip suggest an easier puzzle experience.
Even if we don’t know if these clips show the “normal” mode or the “casual” one, I think that there must be a very good reason if the developers have put this game in the Steam category “casual”.
No other Monkey Island game (nor TWP) is classified in that way.
That KeyMouse must be the most unergonomic input device ever. My hands already hurt by the mere look of that thing.
The two action interface is by far the most common in adventures for the last 20 years, I think. And it works just fine indeed. Hence no need to change that.
In Telltale Games objects even have only one action, and the 2nd mouse button is not used at all. And even they made great adventure games up to Back to the Future inclusive, imho.
Of course, those play different than interfaces with multiple verbs at the bottom or in a popup menu. However, the main factor of the difficulty is the puzzle design itself. And thinking about it, puzzles are not just using some verbs, they can also consist of dialog trees, inventory combinations, and sometimes even certain moves.
The latter is the most tricky to get it right, I guess. The plank outside the Scumm Bar kitchen is one such example. The infamous goat puzzle in Broken Sword is another one.
I searched here and there and I couldn’t find it. I’m afraid it could have been a comment in his blog, and comments have been removed now.
100% sure though. He said they were “way too many items”.
