BttF: I have no idea, there should be much more point’n’click adventures about it!
Jurassic Park: It’s an action movie with roaring dinosaurs… I don’t think its typical audience cares much for adventure games.
That’s true. The Jurassic Park movies were action packed. It would have been very difficult to satisfy the audience with puzzles instead of action.
of course man. an adventure is something else.
You and I like it. Indeed I am a total fanatic of adventure games. But now I can at least see why some people do not like it. Puzzles and story are really at odds with each other (they break the pace).
Also, player freedom and story are at odds with each other. Take a good story. if you change it slightly it becomes a poor story. It is so fine-tuned that any small change will break it.
Nor the first sentence you said, nor the second, nor the third are necessarily true (Nor, I’m invoking you!)
Mostly earlier games, the first games from Lucasfilm alumni, but also “Lure of the Temptress” by Revolution Software (directed by Charles Cecil), but also Thimbleweed Park in the five playable characters gaming experience, show something different.
It’s also probably a problem of gameplay not being frustrating for the modern player.
I think that it’s probably the complexity of programming a game in a modular story with elements that can “float” is much more difficult with the quality standards of nowadays and with the niche audience of the genre.
But you probably meant story as a written script with rigid succession of events (puzzles and interactions).
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Yeah, probably I was too general. there are probably stories that can survive slight changes. I was reasoning with Agatha Christie in mind. It’s a game of deceits and tricks which is so delicate than anything will break it.
I don’t think adventure games are an exception. Do you think Sam’n’Max is easy? Well I can consider it easy because is one of those that I finished without help, but I don’t think the interface helped in the solution of the game.
That interface allowed you to talk, pick, push, pull, use, plus you had the whole screen for the artwork, what is the problem with that? I thought it was a great advance.
What I don’t want is to read a book when I’m playing. I have played tons of adventure games, and the only ones that got me where LucasArts’ ones, there have been little adventure games that I have taken the time to finished out of LA’s, I got bored well before wanting to finish the game. I didn’t know what it was what LA’s games had, but I just know those were the best.
Grumpy gamer’s blog has an entry, from years ago (http://grumpygamer.com/why_adventure_games_suck) that I found wandering around after I bought TWP two years ago (I missed the kickstarter and was able to back it from Humble Bundle). It was enlightening, there he explained what made good games good and gave his opinion about how to make good games. I totally agreed with him.
I think the story and conversations can’t have a whole page to read or a 5 minutes of audio/video as if it were a movie, the story has to be introduced little by little well merged with graphic and letting the player discover the story by itself without having him staring at the screen as if it were a movie. I think this was one of the many points LucasArts adventures had apart from the great stories, graphics and puzzles.
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I don’t think adventure games are dead, otherwise TWP would not exist.
Maybe I’m wrong and possible games that may or may not be created after TWP depend on how it sells and the kickstarter was the way to test the market without the need of an investment, I don’t know.
The truth is that call them adventures or not there are games like wadget eyes’ (too simple for an adventure gamer but enjoyable) Machinarium, or The Inner World (this is the first one I really enjoyed after a long time without adventure games although its an easy one) that are created, so they must be selling.
I am amazed to see a new type of games that might be selling (otherwise they wouldn’t have made a second one) like TIS-1000. This is not for everyone although it should have sell otherwise ShenZhen-IO wouldn’t have seen the light.
I think there is room for many kind of games including adventure games. Creating easy and hard modes is a great idea to introduce people that otherwise would not play this type of games because they get stuck. There may be people that after finishing the easy mode will play the game in hard mode and discover the new puzzles to be a new incentive.
It’s funny… one of the most critically acclaimed and best sold games of the last few years was a combination of puzzle, story, AND FPS: Portal.
Let me tell you, Portal was NOT easy at all. The clues were very sparse. It was pure logical. And although there was only a few objects you could pick up and use (you didn’t have an inventory, just what you could hold with your portal gun) it scratched the very same brain itch adventure games do.
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Addendum: another game that scratched that itch was Firewatch. Firewatch was made by Camposanto, which is comprised of people who left TTG
Adventure games lived across those years, but they weren’t not so beautiful, clever and surrounding like Lucas* adventure games.
This is why I expected a very good adventure with Thimbleweed Park, and I am satisfied!
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That one’s missing from my list (released 2013). Real good humour in the intro, but the actual game didn’t reach the same level, so I was a little bit disappointed. Part two is currently in the making, too.
This is mostly a matter of taste, but I also think the Lucasarts adventures set the bar pretty high, and are still among the best, even after all of those years.
My current, personal, all-time favourite P&C adventure is of newer date, however. It’s Memoria, for both the setting (in the Dark Eye universe, the Geman equivalent to D&D) and, first and foremost, the fantastic story. Puzzles are decent, too.
In contrast, its direct predecessor, Chains of Satinav had one of the best puzzle sequences I came across (the Three Impossible Tasks), though the story is darker of tone.
Another one that sticks out is Randal’s Monday: swearing that makes Ransome look like a choir boy, and loads upon loads of in-jokes and references to pop-culture. I guess it’s either hit or miss with that one 
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I think that under this point also enter the so-called walking simulators
I’m thinking more about this possibility:
“Many people who love puzzles don’t want to read a lot of text.”
Maybe they see the story as just an obstacle that separates them from the next puzzle.
I think there is some evidence of this. I recall some people asked Ron to be able to skip dialog with the left button. They said they regularly skipped dialog. Ron said “as a designer I feel totally depressed by this”. But maybe it is a symptom of a bigger problem: they only wanted to arrive to the next puzzles, don’t want to savor the story and wait for the actor to finish talking.
Maybe my memory is failing me, but I have a feeling there are more adventure games being released these days than ever before, and the gaming universe is so much bigger that there are more people playing them than ever before.
The death is mainly about marketshare.
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In quantity, maybe. But if they all suck, because Ron is the only one who can make them good, it doesn’t help.
Thimbleweed park was my favorite recent one but you are doing yourself a disservice if you aren’t trying out some of the other recent ones:
- The Blackwell Series
- Kathy Rain
- The Wolf Among Us
- Her Story
- Gone Home
Those vary in how much point and clicking they have, but they all have excellent stories and are worth playing.
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Just started Kathy Rain. So far so good, but we’ll see how it goes. Also playing Chaos on Deponia, which plays kind of solidly but the game feels trite and vacuous.
I played 3 Blackwells and just started Kathy Rain. I like them, but cmon. They are a sequence of cages. They are story-centric games, whereas Ron’s are puzzle-centric games.
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I’m only an hour in so far but the ambience of Kathy Rain is really good so far, and the voice acting is better than I anticipated. It does seem like it’s going to operate as a sequence of cages, as you put it, rather than ever opening up in a big way.