Do we need to comment that in the TWP forum? 
donāt get me wrong, I am a big fan of pixel art, and especially the Gary Winnick style. The fact remains that no matter how much you spend, people will think itās cheap.
It wasnāt so in 1990. People used to look at monkey island (or sierra) graphics in awe.
I also perceive the expression āwalking simulatorā as a derogatory one but Iāve learned that other peopleās dismissal of games that I like means to me pretty much nothing, especially when this kind of behavior has its roots in the habit of defining exactly what the term āgameā describes and treating more favorably whatever fits their definition.
My unscientific hypothesis is that some people need to define boundaries, different classes and walled spaces because thatās a way to feed their internal need to create the concept of āothersā and show confrontational behaviors towards those who are not inside the lines or whose who threaten to move or redefine the borders. The point is: thatās OK, thatās part of human behavior.
Visiting a museum is not a āgameā but it entertains me nonetheless because sometimes I like to contemplate or ponder about things in a relaxed way: with this goal in mind, other peopleās remarks about the fact that it would be possible to reach the museum exit in under three minutes are meaningless as meaningless are other peopleās attempts to clarify that an art exhibition is not a game: I already know that and itās irrelevant. What about finding shapes in clouds? Is that a game? Does it matter what it is and what other people think it is as long as you enjoy it?
Iām sorry that you were driven away from gaming news just because you perceived an unfair coverage of the things that you enjoyed, but maybe you shouldnāt expect too much from sources who try to review an art exhibition using the same criteria that they usually adopt to review a hockey match. None of the two kinds of entertainment is intrinsically better than the other: they just deserve to be evaluated under different lenses.
A few days ago a colleague asked me if I was a āgamerā and while Iām aware that this term is on paper very generic and inclusive, the probability that he actually meant āsomeone who plays action gamesā was so high that I answered ānoā, even if I play a few adventure games now and then. And my assumption was correct: my adventure games on Steam were not for him āgame enoughā to consider me a gamer.
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That actually is a sport to some.
Thank you, exactly what I was trying to say earlier!
fixed for your convenience
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Iām fine with walking simulators and even calling them like that. I donāt care about its derogative tone but it helps me classifying the type of game e.g. when reading reviews or Steam tags.
It just means that a lot of attention is in exploring the environment. It helps more than e.g. just having the game in the āAdventureā category of a shop (e.g. Firewatch on GOG is in the categories Adventure - Mystery which just doesnāt indicate anything about its gameplay).
Oh wow, classic speedrunning! They could have saved some frames at the security guard.
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Which people? There are a lot of people out there that like pixel graphics and pixel art. Even younger players.
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People I read on twitter and in videos (one was a video where Ron was invited to present twp). They clearly looked underwhelmed when they saw the graphics. I was suprised by that.
The most comments in/under reviews I read were positive respective they liked the pixel graphics. But I have to admit that these people were germans.
Of course there are people who donāt like the graphics. Thatās fine. But there are a lot of people who like(d) the pixel graphics.
Iāll just put here a link to a new Kotaku opinion article that uses the incredibly click-baity title āPoint-and-Click is Dead (Again)ā.
The author addresses the topic of the (alleged lack of) evolution of PnC adventure games.
Thimbleweed Park and Ron Gilbert are cited among the others, but I will not tell you why.
I agree with the author when he cites several games that in his/my opinion have contributed to the evolution of adventure games. The article, though, is a bit ruined by the fact that its probable intent was to create controversy.
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Good article, which isnāt at all ruined by any possible extra-curricular stuff IMO. Itās not a hot take but it is a very relevant and meaningful discussion to have right now regarding the genre and if their intent was to further stir a discussion and continue to put the topic under the microscope then that can be more or less the same as ācreating controversyā. Their intent is probably what generated the inspiration to write the piece in the first place and it distills much of the topic.The only part I can criticise is the commonly used tactic of somewhat click-bait titles as to garner a greater readership, but then, Iād rather the thoughts be read by as many folks as possible. I gotta say, that Sexy Brutale game sounds very intriguing.
I hadnāt dreamed of it sounding derogatory until reading this exchange. Perhaps a name like āexplorersā would sound far more romantic.
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Thereās plenty written about it if you want to at all study intergroup bias, which of course goes much deeper than the opening acts of creating separation and demarcating the living experience ā though āothersā is probably more the effect of the cause of āselfā. Also, humans have a penchant for clearly defining and categorising things in order to understand things as concretely as possible, which leads to systems like MBTI typology where those who casually study come absolute conclusions based on crude dichotomies. As such, you could argue that the effect of the self is the cause of constructs derived from epistemological pursuit.
As useful as definitions and categorisations are, to control them (or interpret them) as to not lead to intellectual complacency and conceptual constipation is very difficult. The idea of Kuhnian paradigm shifts echo through much more than just Science.
The real killer for adventure games was the sheer unsolvability and or frustration. Kings quest involved you dying at silly times, and only made you want to go kill things in Doom. There was a puzzle where to escape a situation, you had to pour honey on the ground, with no hint that the ground was selectable where no other scene had this. And there was no logical reason to try it. Even worse, if you didnt have the honey with you at the time, your game was screwed. Ron Gilbert learned from Zak McKracken which had dead ends, but most other adventure game designers didnt. The sheer number of poorly thought out puzzles, illogical solutions that defied rational solving mixed with bad or weak plotlines meant that this neat and fun genre has struggled against things like Doom which had no dead ends ā¦ just restart and this time Go straight to the hidden rocket launcher. Add in IDDQD and IDKFA and you have even more fun. (How sad is it that I know all the doom and doom 2 cheats off the top of my head). Adventure games arenāt dead, but they have a reputation for being boring or impossible and both are unfortunately deserved. There is just enough out there to keep them alive, and I am very thankful for the sheer quality of TWP to keep this art alive.
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About the sexy brutale gameplay: (you start over many times, until you are able to prevent all the murders.)
this seems to violate an established rule of adventure games:
āit must never happen that you need to die in order to learn how not to dieā.
in the sexy brutale game, only by failing you learn how not to fail the next time. And this looks to me as a violation of the rule above.
And yet, this is considered a good gameplay by the reviewer. Makes you think.
Is this some ultimate law or is it a guideline created by one mind which is then parroted? Rules can create restrictions and breaking them can yield new, interesting and satisfactory results (as you know). Iāll just have to see how that game works for me.
What happened is that people (Ron in particular in his famous article) tried to analyze what sucked in old adventure games such as space quest. They tried to isolate the problem. And the best they could come up with is that: death is not bad per se, but it is bad when you had no way to know your action would lead to death. In other words, it is bad when only by dying you learn how you might not have died. So, this was born as a rule of thumb, as an attempt to express the problem with adventure games at the time. And it came to be commonly accepted. Because violating that rule tends to produce bad adventure games. But nowhere it is written that a game that violates it must be bad.
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Indeed.
It seems in the case of Sexy Brutale that the mechanic has been thought out very carefully and is extremely integral to the flow and design of the game, in which case a new set of expectations is fostered and, based on reviews, seemingly well accepted. From what I can tell, theyāve adopted an element that is typically frowned upon in the micro sense of the gaming experience and transformed it into a core and fully integrated macro system within its niche. The discussion reminds me a bit of the old music meme that every time one writes a parallel 5th, Bach kills a kitten.
I hope the integration is as thorough and rewarding as Iām imagining it to be. There are too many games I want to play right now.
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Iām curious to try it too. Right now I canāt imagine how it could not be boring to replay the same dialogs over and overā¦
The gist of the article seems to be that other genres evolved in the way they tell a story, while P&C adventures did not, hemming the natural flow of the narration by throwing obstacles (read, puzzles) into the way of the player. Which takes us back to this discussion.
Obviously, there seem to be a lot of people that place an emphasis on story in a game, even to the point of sacrificing actual game play (i.e. interaction) to help the story unfold its biggest potential.
Classic P&C games seem to fall into an area of the spectrum where there is a story present, but the whole point of the game are the puzzles. One might see the story as pure backdrop for the puzzles, perhaps as a motivation to play along, or even as reward for solving puzzles (if that in itself isnāt reward enough). In my view, the very best of the genre do indeed tightly integrate puzzles and story, and try to keep the story progressing at a steady pace, sometimes at the risk of becoming too easy.
The article seems to be saying that to evolve and survive, P&C adventures should place a higher emphasis on the story telling aspect. But that would, IMO, turn the game into something different. To me, a true P&C adventure is a mix of story and puzzles, and I draw satisfaction from both aspects. Before I play a game that is not at least a little bit challenging (and thus rewarding), Iād rather read a book, or go see a movie (should they ever make one again that is to my liking ;))
A first-person p&c game is literally the hidden-object genre.
You have an inventory, you move around solving puzzles and combining objects to advance in the story. Yeah, there are hidden object puzzles, they are the most frequent puzzle, but there are other sort of puzzles too, mostly logic.
Although most of these games are intended to be mystery/thriller/creepy, there are also fantasy ones.
The main difference I find with the classic adventure genre such as monkey island is that you need less esoteric logic and/or mcgiveresque solutions. Puzzles are intended to be not that hard.