Top 10 Hardest Adventure Games
August 18, 2012 3:08 PM   Subscribe

 
He doesn't say "unctuous" once.
posted by crunchland at 3:22 PM on August 18, 2012 [2 favorites]


I've been trying to remember a game from that era...maybe Pre-Syndicate?

All I remember is a top-down strategy / adventure thing with a spies vs global terrorist plot. It was the first time I ever heard the name Shining Path...
posted by lslelel at 3:24 PM on August 18, 2012


For more information on Gabriel Knight 3, see the classic Old Man Murray article Who Killed Adventure Games?
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:25 PM on August 18, 2012 [11 favorites]


Gabriel Knight III doesn't belong on this list. It wasn't "Hard," it was fucking impossible unless you shared Jane Jensen's particular flavor of psychosis. Any reviewer who gave that thing a positive review had a walkthrough, and if they say they didn't, then they are a goddamn liar.
posted by Etrigan at 3:27 PM on August 18, 2012 [8 favorites]


*sniff*

Old Man Murray.

Those were the days.
posted by notyou at 3:34 PM on August 18, 2012 [4 favorites]


Indeed... their TTC* rating of games was genius.

* Time To Crate, or how long it took you to be confronted with the hoariest of video game cliches, the crate.
posted by fatbird at 3:37 PM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]


I think Myst sucked up all the oxygen. Now point and click adventure games seem extremely quaint, but are ripe to make a nostalgia comeback.

I think an indie point and click, perhaps released as short 2-3 hour episodes would do great.

Expecially if it was based on something like Sherlock Holmes.

A 2-3 hour mystery released avery couple months for $5.

Someone make it happen.
posted by Ad hominem at 3:40 PM on August 18, 2012 [4 favorites]


Is it possible to italicize 'Until We Win', the first three words of the post?
It took about 4x too long for me to comprehend that sentence.
posted by herbplarfegan at 3:41 PM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]


It says "adventure games," but there's nothing on the list from Infocom.
posted by JHarris at 3:41 PM on August 18, 2012 [18 favorites]


When "Grim Fandango" was originally released, it was impossible to win on some fast computers. (There was one particular puzzle which couldn't be completed.) Lucasarts eventually released a patch.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:41 PM on August 18, 2012


I always thought of Spellbreaker as the Mount Everest of adventure games. That was a very, VERY difficult game, but it was hard in a much more 'fair' way than the later Gabriel Knight games. The later Gabriel Knights weren't 'hard', they were 'random'. (and very stupid) There's a major difference.

I haven't read that Old Man Murray article, but if he says using honey and cat hair to make a mustache was what killed adventure games, well, he was right. That is the single puzzle that put me off Sierra games permanently.
posted by Malor at 3:42 PM on August 18, 2012 [5 favorites]


What combo of things in my jacket pockets do I need to deploy to make Grim Fandango II happen?
posted by notyou at 3:43 PM on August 18, 2012 [2 favorites]


Hero's Quest is missing from the list. The annotated map I had to make for that game was ridiculous. Much, much harder than Gold Rush!. Gold Rush! did not have any live combat, nor RPG elements. Come to think of it, the live combat in Quest for Camelot would also merit a slot on this list.
posted by Brocktoon at 3:46 PM on August 18, 2012 [3 favorites]


And comparing the Sierra games to Lucasarts games is sketchy; I can't think of any Lucasarts adventure games (off the top of my head) in which you can actually die or be killed.
posted by Brocktoon at 3:47 PM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]


Hah! I specifically wanted to see if he put GK3 on the list. I agree with the others, any list which contains GK3 is disqualified. GK3 was difficult in the same sense that Bilbo's riddle to Gollum was difficult. Yeah, it was hard to get right, but it was also bullshit.

Malor shows his good judgment in suggesting Spellbreaker. It is the perfect intersection of brutally hard but also fair.
posted by Justinian at 3:49 PM on August 18, 2012


Does Desert Bus count as an adventure game?
posted by facesonflags at 3:50 PM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]


Sorry, I meant Conquests of Camelot.
posted by Brocktoon at 3:51 PM on August 18, 2012


I still have nightmares about that goddamned chamber pot in KQIII.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 3:53 PM on August 18, 2012 [6 favorites]


Oh, and Maniac Mansion wasn't that tough -- the real brilliance to that game was that in any given game, there would be a bunch of puzzles you couldn't solve. Each set of friends you chose to bring with you would allow you to solve different challenges, often in different ways, so it had a TON of replayability, something adventure games almost never offer.

The 'hard' part of Maniac Mansion was leaving puzzles behind; you only needed to solve a subset of what you could see, but you didn't really know which subset until you figured them out with the friends you'd chosen. So if you're the OCD type, that game would give you hives, but if you were relaxed and flexible, you could make steady progress by thinking and experimenting.

He also didn't mention Monkey Island 2, which in the 'More Monkey' mode (I think that's what they called it) was very, very complex and difficult. The spitting puzzle was brutal. (Heh: "I am, of course, Captain Loogie" would be a great sockpuppet name.) Heck, even the first game had some real toughies in it, like the navigation puzzle, but it was just so silly and fun that that the experimentation and thinking weren't boring, so you didn't get frustrated.
posted by Malor at 3:53 PM on August 18, 2012 [3 favorites]


It says "adventure games," but there's nothing on the list from Infocom.

HHGTTG (playable) is a good example.

Incidentally, I'm a bit miffed I can't get Discworld to run on a modern pc after a number of tries.

And comparing the Sierra games to Lucasarts games is sketchy; I can't think of any Lucasarts adventure games (off the top of my head) in which you can actually die or be killed.

If you leave Guybrush in the water >10 minutes, he dies. Both companies made adventure games but their philosophy was quite different. I never cared too much about cheap deaths.
posted by ersatz at 3:55 PM on August 18, 2012


I think Suspended, Trinity and Bureaucracy were the three hardest Infocom games, but these things are somewhat subjective.
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:02 PM on August 18, 2012 [2 favorites]


Oh, as it turns out, I HAD read that OMM article many years ago, and it was what crystallized my disgust with Sierra into active vitriol. After getting a walkthrough on that puzzle, I had dropped that game in disgust, but had mostly forgotten about it by the time I read the article. OMM showed me WHY I didn't like adventure games anymore, and exactly, exactly where it had happened, the exact spot where cautious optimism had morphed into active revulsion.

It was a powerful enough insight that, years later, I'm repeating his observation without even realizing it's not mine.
posted by Malor at 4:05 PM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]


All simplistic, childlike and transparent compared to the venerable NetHack...
posted by jim in austin at 4:08 PM on August 18, 2012 [3 favorites]


Yeah, I remember the last adventure game I played. The puzzles involved hopping on moving platforms in the right sequence. Miss one and you fall down thousands of feet. The falling videos made me dizzy and sick to my stomach. No more of that crap. Ever.

I prefer historical war games, I haven't been satisfied with anything since the old hex-based V for Victory series. So now I play action war games and I always cheat. I use walkthroughs, or just use god mode. I used to play Medal of Honor over and over, in god mode with a pistol only. Now I'm working my way through Call of Duty 4 in Veteran mode, using cluster bomb grenades and infinite ammo (works best with the grenade launcher). There's no god mode invulnerability cheat, so I get killed over and over. Now it's like a damn puzzle, if you aren't in exactly this spot at this time, you get killed.
posted by charlie don't surf at 4:09 PM on August 18, 2012


People still make quality adventure games - even better they still make them with old school graphics. Resonance and Gemini Rue for example.

Anyway, from the good old days, nothing beats the Police Quests for me for annoying death.
posted by edd at 4:20 PM on August 18, 2012 [3 favorites]


Charlie, have you tried Company of Heroes or Hearts of Iron III?
posted by ersatz at 4:21 PM on August 18, 2012


I most certainly do not miss adventure games, or as I like to call them, how-the-hell-was-I-supposed-to-know-to-do-that games.
posted by laconic skeuomorph at 4:22 PM on August 18, 2012 [2 favorites]


Watching that video, the line about Pratchett's Alzheimer's stank.
posted by edd at 4:32 PM on August 18, 2012 [9 favorites]


Gold Rush! was a game I loved as a kid, but it was maybe a little harder than necessary. It was firmly in the "make sure you've got everything because there's stuff without which you will die that you cannot go back and get" school that Sierra loved so much plus you could die walking down the street. I mean, it would have behooved me to stay out of the way of those wagons, but you'd think they could stop for me.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 4:49 PM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]


Wasn't Adventures of Willy Beamish made for younger kids???
posted by Theta States at 4:57 PM on August 18, 2012


I think an indie point and click, perhaps released as short 2-3 hour episodes would do great.

Bust out your credit card and immediately purchase Sam & Max seasons 1-3.
3 seasons for $40. That is 16 episodes of well-written and enjoyably puzzling point-and-click adventure games.

SO. GOOD.
posted by Theta States at 5:02 PM on August 18, 2012 [5 favorites]


Pfft. GRAPHICS.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 5:03 PM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]


They left out getting across a downtown street in the middle of the block.
posted by Twang at 5:04 PM on August 18, 2012


I played the Infocom game of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, back in the day. There was a very, very, VERY hard puzzle to get the Babel fish.

This puzzle occurs very early in the game. I was unable to complete it, even after sinking an excruciating amount of time ( 2 months, I think ) trying to solve it. Google it-- The amount of hoops you have to jump through in the game just to get that goddamn fish are ridiculous. Without the fish, you can't progress any further in the game. I actually tore the floppy in half, and burned it.

It turns out, Douglas Adams himself was involved in a lot of the puzzle creation, and I assume he's the one who came up with it.

When I heard Mr. Adams died, suddenly and unexpectedly, I'm afraid my reaction was simply, 'Good'.
posted by KHAAAN! at 5:06 PM on August 18, 2012 [8 favorites]


For me, the Sierra games were all unplayable pixelbitching. I had a friend who really tried to get me into the Gabriel Knight series but as the GKIII example linked above shows, the game play required insane bizarre quests to do relatively trivial tasks. Of course, he would tell me how awesome the stories were while bitching about how goddamn hard the games were.

The LucasArts games don't really belong on here; they aren't "hard" in the same sense that Sierra's games were. Hard as in, you had to read the game developer's mind or buy a strategy guide / walkthrough. But damn, they were a lot more fun - I'd play Monkey Island or Loom over King's Quest or Gabriel Knight any day of the week. Because, you know, I could actually find most of the stuff I needed to do inside the game - or, in some cases, in the manual.
posted by graymouser at 5:06 PM on August 18, 2012


I think Suspended, Trinity and Bureaucracy were the three hardest Infocom games, but these things are somewhat subjective.

Trinity is mostly superb but one specific bit strikes me as unfair and, unfortunately, too meta-gamey. There's a specific puzzle where you have to travel through a portal out into space while protected by a soap bubble. However, the only way to solve the puzzle is by first going through the portal while unprotected, dying, and reloading the game. Now you have to use your out-of-character knowledge of what happens when you go through the portal (IM IN SPAAAACE!) combined with the in-character knowledge of the soap bubble to figure out what to do.

You should never have to use out-of-character knowledge to solve the puzzle. So I tought that was a serious mistake on Infocom's part. But the game as a whole is a true classic and one of Infocom's best.
posted by Justinian at 5:08 PM on August 18, 2012 [4 favorites]


Now I remember CGA / amber screen Police Quest.

'starts car'

You die, and have to start all over again, because you didn't inspect your tyres first.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 5:08 PM on August 18, 2012 [6 favorites]


The 'hard' part of Maniac Mansion was leaving puzzles behind; you only needed to solve a subset of what you could see, but you didn't really know which subset until you figured them out with the friends you'd chosen. So if you're the OCD type, that game would give you hives, but if you were relaxed and flexible, you could make steady progress by thinking and experimenting.

This contrasts with most adventure games, where by god you will solve EACH AND EVERY PUZZLE.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:11 PM on August 18, 2012


When I heard Mr. Adams died, suddenly and unexpectedly, I'm afraid my reaction was simply, 'Good'.

Jesus, man. That may be the meanest thing I have ever heard. Tell us what you did to celebrate Jim Henson's & Fred Rogers' deaths next.
posted by laconic skeuomorph at 5:17 PM on August 18, 2012 [12 favorites]


I was huge on adventure games when I was a kid and played through most of them in the video. I think the hardest one I ever played was KGB. I never finished that game even with a walkthrough.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 5:20 PM on August 18, 2012


There was a very, very, VERY hard puzzle to get the Babel fish. --- and oh, so satisfying when you actually solved it. I distinctly remember when I did it, it must be 25 years ago.
posted by crunchland at 5:20 PM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]


All I remember is a top-down strategy / adventure thing with a spies vs global terrorist plot. It was the first time I ever heard the name Shining Path...
posted by lslelel at 6:24 PM on August 18 [+] [!]


You might be thinking of the Tom Clancy game Shadow Watch.
posted by dazed_one at 5:24 PM on August 18, 2012


Also, Sam & Max Hit the Road taught me how to insert the word "fucking" between the syllables of other words.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 5:43 PM on August 18, 2012


Oh man, Willy Beamish! I haven't thought about that game in ages. I loved that game.
posted by painquale at 6:02 PM on August 18, 2012


The video didn't load for me for some reason.

Discworld is at the top of that list for me, if only because my copy was of one of the first sets released on Playstation that apparently had a coding or disc read error that made a certain timed event necessary to proceeding in the game never happen. (I heard that this was fixed in later versions.)

I always wanted to finish that game. I'd love to see a re-release on iOS like the first two Monkey Island games.
posted by Kevtaro at 6:05 PM on August 18, 2012


Tell us what you did to celebrate Jim Henson's & Fred Rogers' deaths next.

AFAIK, Jim Henson and Mr. Rogers never actively participated in the creation of a mental torture device disguised as an adventure game.
posted by KHAAAN! at 6:12 PM on August 18, 2012


All I remember is a top-down strategy / adventure thing with a spies vs global terrorist plot. It was the first time I ever heard the name Shining Path...

Sid Meier's (forgotten semi-classic) Covert Action? It was a little more straightforward than the adventure games here, in that when you needed to do something, you would take an appropriate tool and then do the logical action you needed to do, as opposed to reading the bathroom graffiti four times so you can find a password so you can go into the back room and use the television remote eight times to distract the pimp so you can fall in the dumpster to get a hammer so you can...
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 6:18 PM on August 18, 2012 [2 favorites]


I have fond-ish memories of playing King's Quest II with my father and brother. There were at least two distinct ways in which you could render the game unwinnable and continue to play for (well, for us poor fools anyway) hours. We eventually had to not only get a walkthrough but restart because we gave the wrong inventory item to a mermaid early in the game. The game did have the Batmobile, though, that was pretty awesome.

Really, the memories of playing are all fond, not -ish at all, but fuck that goddamn needy mermaid.

We would have had a lot more fun with Myst if our computer had been new enough to PLAY THE VIDEO PAGES. Seriously. That game is pretty damned impossible without those stupid videos.
posted by maryr at 6:19 PM on August 18, 2012


I got Gabriel Knight III as a gift way back in the day and for some reason I just never opened it. I really wanted to play it too, I always intended to install it but it just never got installed. Some 15 odd years later I hear about that first puzzle and wonder about god.
posted by passerby at 6:44 PM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]


I live in hope that I can get a copy of Grim Fandango on Steam/GOG. Thwarted hope.

King's Quest games did generally give you clues in the death scenes about where you went wrong. (Including, for one of them, clues for a later puzzle.) Of course, it was not uncommon for you to have gone wrong hours and hours ago and to be unable to remember which was the correct save game.

Only two ways you could get into an unwinnable situation with lots more gameplay? They really stepped that up in later games. I think I remember one Space Quest game where a fuckup at the beginning would only kill you at the very, very end.
posted by jeather at 6:45 PM on August 18, 2012


The Cruelty Scale of Interactive Fiction, as expanded by TVTropes, has some pretty amazing/hilarious examples of these headache-inducing games. It's striking how thoroughly Sierra and Infocom were responsible for this approach.
posted by belarius at 7:13 PM on August 18, 2012


Eh, give KHAAAN! a break. I love Douglas Adams, and HHGTTG has influenced me more than I care to admit, but that Infocom game was unnecessarily obtuse.
posted by mollweide at 7:14 PM on August 18, 2012


Wasn't Adventures of Willy Beamish made for younger kids???

No way, Willy Beamish was totally geared toward adults. The jokes, the pop-culture references, heck even the tagline was, "What if you were nine again... knowing what you know now?" I still have it (EGA version!) in the box, on like thirty 720k floppies. The manual, done up like a spiral notebook, was genius.
posted by xedrik at 7:25 PM on August 18, 2012


I played the Infocom game of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, back in the day. There was a very, very, VERY hard puzzle to get the Babel fish.

That was an excellent puzzle. Although it took four or five steps to get the fish, the game always told you what the next bit to solve was, and it showed you when you made progress. So at first the fish flies through a hole; obviously you must block the hole; there's a hook above the hole you could hang something from. Then it slides down to the floor and through a drain; you must block the drain; etc. As I recall, the last step was kind of tricky -- there was a cleaning robot that you had to find a distraction for. The constant feedback was the key to good puzzle design. A nice change from the unexplained "read my mind" verb-hunts of so many other adventure games.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 7:42 PM on August 18, 2012 [2 favorites]


My dad and I got into the Space Quest games starting with the third one, which was the last one that required typed commands. It seemed flippin' hard at the time and all of the games seemed to feature gruesome puns and jokes about death like "she smells like Eau de pain" if you chose to sniff a dead body in one scene..I believe this was SQIV and the typing interface was replaced with "sense icons" hence the bizarre curiosity about what an in game corpse smells like. IIRC, certain things you smelled could kill you instantly. From smelling them. The games are all super bizarre and surreal and twisted and I liked them. Never managed to get into other Sierra games but I remember sneaking on my dad's 386 to play "Conquest of the Longbow" in fleeting bursts, never saving my game since it would leave evidence. I think he wanted to beat the game without help from my 12 year old self after I'd sat with him through everything else. My first adventure game was Adventure Land on the VIC20. YOU HAVE CHIGGERS.
posted by lordaych at 7:54 PM on August 18, 2012


The only game I ever completed was the one based on The Prisoner for the Apple II. Sort of puzzle after puzzle but if you kept the mind set of #6 you could complete them. Kind of satisfying. No real patience for games...
posted by njohnson23 at 8:15 PM on August 18, 2012


@Homeboy Trouble > Slick!!! That's definitely the one. Of course I remember it faster than the video Im watching, but thanks.
posted by lslelel at 8:17 PM on August 18, 2012


AFAIK, Jim Henson and Mr. Rogers never actively participated in the creation of a mental torture device disguised as an adventure game.

Oh? But did Douglas Adams force you to spend hours, days guessing at his obtuse pointless riddles? No, it was you, YOU, who was the torturer. *YOU* the guessing game sadist. YOOOUUUU created this festival of pain for yourself.... and there is only one solution now that there is no one else to blame.
posted by ennui.bz at 8:41 PM on August 18, 2012


Man, I adore adventure games so much. Played most of the ones on that list, and yes they were hard. That was before the internet mostly too, so no easy look up of walkthroughs either!

I can not imagine why Lucasarts isn't re-releasing Grim Fandango - on Steam would be ideal, yes. I replayed the special edition Monkey Island games, and The Dig recently - so much fun.

I like the Telltale games too - Sam and Max are fun, and the new Walking Dead games are great. But nothing beats the old school games...
posted by gemmy at 8:54 PM on August 18, 2012


I loaded up the Laura Bow games on my Mac, along with a bunch of other old DOS games, a while back. Good times. We always played these games in groups, 3 or 4 people sitting around hashing it out. When I play games now it’s still with my wife as Navigator.

I haven’t played adventure games in years, but it does seem that game makers got scared off a long time ago and go out of their way to make sure there’s no puzzle that will be too hard for anyone.
posted by bongo_x at 9:00 PM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]


For a time, Infocom sold t-shirts that simply said "I got the babel fish".

We (and by 'we', I mean my family - my brother, my dad and I played the games together) got through the first two sections of the babel fish puzzle easily. It took a bit longer for the third part, but we got past it, and we still didn't get the damned babel fish. I still remember the wave of despair when we solved part three and then discovered that we had not yet solved the puzzle.

After struggling for weeks, we did what any self-respecting Infocom fan would do - we purchased the Invisiclues for the game. These were hint books where the clues were printed in invisible ink, thus allowing the responsible adventurer to get help with the puzzles that he or she was stuck on. (My brother and I had no such discipline and would reveal all of the hints eventually.)

The Invisiclues section for "How do I get the babel fish?" was incredibly long, with 25 (or more?) clues for the puzzle. We quickly swiped the invisible-ink-revealing-pen over the first twenty clues, which applied to the first three sections of the puzzle, and prepared ourselves for the first bit of daylight shed onto this mean, unfair, and despicably life-destroying puzzle.

The first clue to the fourth section simply read "At this point, grown men have been known to break down and cry."

Thanks, assholes.
posted by suckerpunch at 9:35 PM on August 18, 2012 [6 favorites]


(By the way, we never played Spellbreaker or Trinity, but I can verify that both Suspended and Deadline were pretty much impossible to solve without help.)
posted by suckerpunch at 9:38 PM on August 18, 2012


Quest For The Crown

This game was a lot easier if you read the Official Strategy Guide
posted by ShutterBun at 10:00 PM on August 18, 2012


The Infocom game I beat my head against was Starcross, but I found it was actually pretty clever, and most of the puzzles ended up making sense. I eventually managed to finish it without help, but it took me weeks.

It was set in a near-future space travel kind of universe, where human craft were zipping around the solar system. Your job was to find microscopic black holes to use as energy sources, but that was quickly forgotten as you happened upon a strange alien space station floating through the void, built out of an asteroid. After gaining access to the interior (which was itself a kind of trial-and-error, one-try-only, keep-reloading-until-you-get-it-right kind of thing), you discover that it was recently damaged in an encounter with another alien race. Some other aliens were on-hand as well, some friendly and some neutral, but you had to figure out the station's mysteries largely on your own.

The primary means of progress involved collecting various colored crystal rods scattered in the station's various rooms. Some were quite deviously hidden. There were some other objects in the station, and you had to think carefully about their properties in order to get the proper use out of them.

For example, there was a pair of disks you found in a laboratory, colored red and blue. Whenever you dropped one on the ground so that it landed on the metal floor of the station, there was an audible "click." It turned out, whatever you place on one of the disks would be teleported to the other, and vice versa. There were several quite clever puzzles involving that, and an alternate way of solving one or two puzzles because of them. There was also a ray gun with limited ammo, an observatory, a "maintainence mouse" that went around collecting pieces of refuse, and a dark hallway that, in a funny touch, gave you the message from Zork if you wandered around in it, warning that you were in danger of being eaten by grues -- which as it turned out were on the spaceship too, dammit. The game actually gave you three "lives," if you died up to twice some mysterious entities would revive you, although if some other object was destroyed or made inaccessible when you met your demise the game still might be made unwinnable. The crystal rods were fragile too, and one or two of them it was possible to destroy without even knowing you had done so, if you weren't very careful.

The final puzzle required a good sense of spatial relationships, and relied on the fact that the gravity of the station was actually supplied by centrifugal force. There was a huge chamber on the inside of the station with a grassy landscape all along the interior walls, and populated by herd animals. The control room for the station was up in the center of the vast chamber -- but how to get up there? A very satisfying puzzle to solve.
posted by JHarris at 10:22 PM on August 18, 2012 [6 favorites]


...if you like puzzle adventure games with an odd story, odder characters, and interesting, if not amusing, art than I suggest Puzzle Agent and Puzzle Agent 2 (which I'm not linking to since it gives too much away about the first game).
posted by DisreputableDog at 10:23 PM on August 18, 2012 [1 favorite]


Thanks for this post, just going through the links some more. Be sure to check out the Iceman Wiki and some of the puzzles it had. I never got to play it (it had S-E-X in it), but it looks like it definitely earned its place on the list.
posted by Brocktoon at 10:36 PM on August 18, 2012


The maze in King's Quest 5! I don't know ANYONE who got through it without a walkthrough. The problem was that in most games, North is always up on your screen. But in the KQ5 maze, you started out with north being up, but then if you went west, suddenly west was up on your screen.
posted by IndigoRain at 10:48 PM on August 18, 2012


I suggest Puzzle Agent and Puzzle Agent 2.

I had such high hopes for the Puzzle Agent games, but I thought they utterly failed in execution. Great art style and setting, but the pace was slow, the story got bogged down, and worst of all, the puzzles were terrible. They really needed to get an experienced puzzle writer to work on those games. Anyone who worked on an MIT Puzzle Hunt or something of that sort could have done a great job. A puzzle like this is not even close to acceptable.

Telltale's Walking Dead games, on the other hand, are a triumph of the artform. There are still a few dumb adventure game tropes (e.g. the radio puzzle in the first episode), but the series innovates on the genre in every possible way. I cannot recommend those games highly enough: they are a breath of fresh air for adventure gamers.
posted by painquale at 11:36 PM on August 18, 2012


Hell, I couldn't solve Bedlam. After that, I would never even consider looking at an adventure game again.
posted by Ardiril at 11:44 PM on August 18, 2012


God, I loved Trinity. There weren't many entertainment options back then, and I worked away on that one for such a long time. I'm arguing with myself about whether I used any hints, but I don't think I did.

I've talked about this before, but it gave me an incredibly powerful experience. Warning: longish story with Trinity spoilers. And you may have seen this from me already; just skip it if you have.

The fundamental idea of Trinity is that, at every nuclear explosion, a hole is ripped in reality, a portal to an alternate dimension, one linking all nuclear explosions that have occurred. But the door opens a few minutes before the bomb goes off. As the game starts, you're in London, exploring the city as a tourist during a time of high international tension, just before the start of World War Three. Your goal, though of course your character doesn't know this at first, is to get to Ground Zero and escape through the portal so you don't get vaporized.

That much is basically an extended version of the box blurb, what everyone knows about Trinity. From here on out, THERE BE SPOILERS:

(spoiler space)

(more spoiler space)

The fundamental theme of Trinity is sundials, to the point that you actually got a paper sundial, which you could build yourself, in the box. Many puzzles are sundial-related, starting right away in London.

The alternate dimension, once you pass through the portal, is quite strange. You're in a fairly extensive outdoor area, roughly roundish, with a gigantic tower in the middle. What you discover is that each nuclear explosion, on THIS side of the portal, looks like a huge, white mushroom, with a door in the base. Those doors are usually closed, and you can't pass through. But, whenever the shadow from the central tower falls across the mushroom, the door will open. You can go through for a few minutes, and see the inhabitants, and collect things, as long as you get back before the door closes and the bomb goes off.

After a time, as you map things out, you realize that, hey! The alternate dimension is a giant sundial; the tower in the center is the gnomon, and the shadow moves in a circular fashion as the day progresses.

So that short time window becomes extremely annoying. There are many things that are simply not reachable in the limited amount of time you have. But I just kept at the game, and kept at the game, and kept at the game. I'd probably been beavering away it for a month or more when I finally made a big breakthrough, and figured out how to climb the central tower. (this was a set of really tough, nasty puzzles, only one of which I kinda remember -- it involved an icicle that you had to get somewhere before it melted.)

Realize that, as the game describes the room at the top of the tower, I am absolutely, utterly immersed, more deeply into that game than I have probably ever been into any other work of fiction in my life. It wasn't deliberate. I was just a poor teenager without many entertainment options, who just stayed with the game and stayed with the game and stayed with the game because I didn't have anything else. I had been actively thinking about Trinity for, god, it must have been at least six weeks, for a large chunk of my conscious time every day, so when I say I was in the game, I was all the way in. I was there.

So the the room at the top of the tower was open to the sky, and contained yet another sundial, but this one had a lever, and a brass ring encircling it. No other sundial in the game had either, so this was very interesting. I think that sundial was incomplete, and you had to do some more stuff to finish it, but I don't remember details anymore.

I finally got that small sundial fixed, and the first thing I tried was pulling the lever; all I got was a 'thunk'. Then I tried turning the brass ring. It was stuck. So, I pushed the lever, got another 'thunk', and turned the ring again. This time, it moved freely.

And, smoothly, the sun in the sky overhead moved as I spun that ring around. Remember, I was there; it felt like I was moving the real sun. I recall getting a convulsive shiver up my back, and the strongest case of goosebumps I've ever experienced. I was just blown away, so stunned and disbelieving. It probably seems like an obvious thing to all us old people, but I was a teenager in absolute game thrall, so far into the story that it was one of the most intense experiences I'd ever had.

I had to get up and just get off the computer for a good long while. It was at least a couple hours before I came back, maybe longer. I needed time to process. I think, if I had moved the actual real sun in the actual real sky, I probably wouldn't have reacted any differently to how I did to a simple text game running on an Amiga. After all these years, it feels like it happened last week sometime.

To me, in my head, when I was a teenager, I moved the sun in the sky. And that memory will last as long as my consciousness does.
posted by Malor at 12:10 AM on August 19, 2012 [16 favorites]


You had to put the gnomon into the sundial. I remember, because that game is what taught me the word gnomon.

Whenever you dropped one on the ground so that it landed on the metal floor of the station, there was an audible "click." It turned out, whatever you place on one of the disks would be teleported to the other, and vice versa.

You are standing in the Mess hall, there is a ladder leading up to the observation dome and down to level 3. To your east is an elevator, and passages to the north and south curve eastward. On the table in front of you is a cup of coffee and a snack cake. The cake is a lie.
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:20 AM on August 19, 2012


Oh, I'd mentioned that I'd learned 'gnomon' from Trinity, but I ended up deleting that paragraph, because the post was already way too long.

So yeah, that's where I learned it, too.
posted by Malor at 12:27 AM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]


Time waits for gnomon.
posted by Justinian at 12:56 AM on August 19, 2012 [3 favorites]


Here are some spoilers for Starcross, concerning those disks, because I still think they're interesting items to this day:

(upcoming spoilerzzzzzz)

You find them in the Laboratory (accessing that itself involves solving the problem of the inactive lights in the Yellow Sector) hanging on the wall. If you put them down in the same room it becomes obvious that whatever you put on one appears on the other.

Also in that room is a gray sphere hanging in the room, with a projector pointing towards. The projector has a dial with four positions. The positions correspond to four possible sizes for the sphere. All but the largest size, the sphere is actually hanging in the air in the middle of the room. At the largest size, it's embedded in the floor. At its smallest size, ah -- there's a crystal rod embedded in the sphere. How to get it out?

You can figure out through various experiments (experiments, they are the absolute soul of a good adventure game!) that the sphere is hollow. If you put something beneath the sphere and turn the dial to the largest setting, the item beneath it disappears inside the sphere. If you then turn the dial smaller, the item remains, unharmed.

The solution is put a disk on the ground and the other beneath the sphere, put another item on top of the sphere, then turn the dial to the largest setting. The item that was on top of the sphere will fall through to the disk, activate it, appear on the other disk -- but the rod was in range too, and will also appear!

Another puzzle involves the robot maintenance mouse. It roams the hallways looking for refuse to collect, which it does so cheerfully putting it into a tray on its back. If you leave an object on the ground for a period of time it will eventually be found by the mouse. It's not hard to retrieve the item, but eventually the mouse disappears into a small hole in the wall, through which you cannot pass, and when it comes out again the tray is empty.

The solution is to drop a disk on the ground and let the mouse collect it and carry it through the hole. Then drop the other disk to the ground and step on it. You appear in the Mouse Garage, and can find a rod hidden within.

Oh, what happens when one disk is beneath the sphere and you step on the other one?
Now, some parts of you are inside the sphere, and some parts of you are outside the sphere.

Very untidy.

*** YOU HAVE DIED ***
posted by JHarris at 1:21 AM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]


Oh? But did Douglas Adams force you to spend hours, days guessing at his obtuse pointless riddles?

Yes. One day he said he was going to buy more rope. He didn't return. On the third day I managed to pry a bar loose from the masonry, climbed through a window level with the footpath, and found myself naked outside a disused warehouse somewhere between Putney and Charing Cross.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 1:54 AM on August 19, 2012 [3 favorites]


When I heard Mr. Adams died, suddenly and unexpectedly, I'm afraid my reaction was simply, 'Good'.

When I watched this video, and when I heard Terry Pratchett described as a great writer whose brain was slowly turning to mush, I genuinely thought that would be the most badly-judged, unempathic statement made by somebody about another human being that I would read on the subject of point-and-click adventure games all day.

Imagine my surprise.

Ontopic, Jane Jensen didn't actually come up with the "cat hair" puzzle. It was created by the game's producer, Steven Hill, to replace a puzzle Jensen had come up with earlier.
posted by running order squabble fest at 3:21 AM on August 19, 2012 [2 favorites]


Oh? But did Douglas Adams force you to spend hours, days guessing at his obtuse pointless riddles? No, it was you, YOU, who was the torturer. *YOU* the guessing game sadist. YOOOUUUU created this festival of pain for yourself.... and there is only one solution now that there is no one else to blame.

You can blame me. Many years ago, Douglas Adams came into my store and bought a Kaypro portable computer. I told him he should buy this game Zork, I read his book and it seemed like just the sort of thing he would enjoy. And he bought it.
posted by charlie don't surf at 5:04 AM on August 19, 2012 [9 favorites]


The video cuts out for me about 10 minutes in, leaving me to wonder if I did something wrong earlier in the video that the video didn't warn me about.
posted by kyrademon at 5:06 AM on August 19, 2012 [3 favorites]


The Babel fish puzzle is one of the more fair puzzles in the HHGG game!

But about 85% through you discover that there's something you really, really needed to do in the first 5% of the game, something which it might have occurred to you to do, but which didn't seem to accomplish anything and destroyed one of your items, so it went against gamer instinct to do it. And yet there you were, having to start all over again.

There is also a bit where the parser lies to you, which I think was a new development at the time. I was annoyed to learn that the solution was to do what I had been doing, but do it more, even though I was being told that it wouldn't work.

The Babel fish puzzle plays by the rules, at least.

I remember the other Adams/Infocom game, Bureaucracy, as being more balanced in its sadism, but I played it much later, after walkthroughs were available.
posted by Casuistry at 6:34 AM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]


Leaked design notes for the unfinished Hitchhiker's Guide 2 game suggest including a puzzle whose solution causes the game to become essentially Unwinnable (ignoring a one-in-a-million random chance). Only by not solving the puzzle and losing the points could the player have won the game. This is just how the people at Infocom used to think.
posted by Egg Shen at 6:56 AM on August 19, 2012 [2 favorites]


Does Desert Bus count as an adventure game?

Eh, Desert Bus is more a driving sim.

I think an indie point and click, perhaps released as short 2-3 hour episodes would do great.

Expecially if it was based on something like Sherlock Holmes.

A 2-3 hour mystery released avery couple months for $5.

Someone make it happen.


Tell-Tale has been doing the episodic adventure game thing for years now. With sometimes mixed results. (Even they couldn't make a good Jurassic Park game.)

And there has been a series of Sherlock Holmes games made by Frogwares. Supposed to be not bad, actually. Though their marketing could use a little work.
posted by kmz at 7:17 AM on August 19, 2012


Yeah, the Babel Fish puzzle never struck me as the worst part of the HGTG text adventure game. For me, that would definitely be the evil parser, which is almost a character in its own right. Not only does it lie to you, it demands perfect spelling with no typos.
posted by muddgirl at 7:20 AM on August 19, 2012


When I heard Mr. Adams died, suddenly and unexpectedly, I'm afraid my reaction was simply, 'Good'. -- Let's hope that the people around you when you die are more charitable.
posted by crunchland at 7:27 AM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]


Old text adventures sure have some silly puzzles.
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 7:30 AM on August 19, 2012


Tell-Tale has been doing the episodic adventure game thing for years now...And there has been a series of Sherlock Holmes games made by Frogwares.

Wadjet Eye's Gemini Rue attracted a good amount of attention last year. They offer a few other adventure titles too. Dear Esther and Trauma also come to mind. Broken Sword has been having re-releases, as well.

Most of the indie games that have blown up on Steam etc. have been either platformers, or adventure titles.

And as far as Myst is concerned, the Myst MMO is supposedly on its way....
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:40 AM on August 19, 2012


...and for those who like text adventure, have a look at Choice of Games' titles. (Full disclosure: two close friends of mine are part of the core CoG group.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:41 AM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]


Douglas Adams is not responsible for all of the Hitchhiker's adventure game. Steve Meretzky co-wrote it with him. If you thought it was a good thing he died because long before he put difficult, tricky puzzles into a text adventure game, well, have a little more sympathy. They were all like that back then.

On the Evil Scale, there are much worse games than Hitchhiker's and even Sierra. From one who knows. At least you can save and reload at will. In the arcade game Tower of Druaga you can't do that, finding items is genuinely hard and all appear from doing some secret trick, some of them make the game impossible to win and yet some of them are necessary, and this continues throughout a difficult 50-level maze game.

Game difficulty is relative to player expectations and abilities. When you can save and load games at will, the difficulty decreases, so to be challenging developers put in puzzles that all but require saving and loading's use. If you can't save, or saving is only on a checkpoint basis, then the developer has to be a lot more fair about puzzles; roguelike saving is like this.

Some players expected games to be solveable in a straight-ahead manner, without having to resort to saving except to save you place, but others use frequent, costless saving and loading indiscriminately, and different developers found different ways to deal with that. It's all part of the distortions to gameplay that casual saving causes.

If you can't save, then you'd have to design it in a Lucasarts style to be fair to the player. But the Lucasarts style isn't perfect anyway; it produces something I like to call "plexiglass design," where the player subconsciously knows he can't get into a situation with any real danger or that makes the game unwinnable because all of those situations have an invisible shield in front of them.

At the start of Grim Fandango there's a clown that gives you balloons. He'll give you one of a number of types that you specify. He'll even give you an uninflated balloon, and casually mentions he'll give you as many of them as you need. This is important information because an uninflated balloon is required to solve a puzzle; if you waste one in solving the puzzle incorrectly you'll need another.

But you shouldn't know, when you get the balloon, that it'll be important to solve a puzzle, and you don't know that it'll be possible to waste it. The fact that you can always get another one communicates to the player that the balloon is an essential item, and that is outside-the-game information that takes him out of the story. Add in to all of this that the clown is sarcastic and doesn't like Manny; it's actually breaking character for him to give you as many balloons, for free, that you want.

(Actually, Dermott is a cool character, because around super scientists and bodyguards and wizards and supervillains, not to mention the titular Venture Bros., he's pretty much a normal bastard teenager. He's one of those little touches that helps to keep the show grounded.)
posted by JHarris at 9:54 AM on August 19, 2012


I remember being in a maze of twisty little passages.
posted by Decani at 10:05 AM on August 19, 2012


The Trickster is trying to play his way through as many computer adventure games as possible, in chronological order, and he's already hit a couple on this list. He has some interesting thoughts about adventure games, what makes them work, etc, interspersed throughout his reviews.

I also should note that rogue-likes are generally RPGs, not adventure games. The dividing line can be a little fuzzy, and some games could be classified either or both ways (such as Beyond Zork). But if your character levels up in some way and you have an inventory that isn't just used for puzzles, you're probably an RPG.
posted by muddgirl at 10:14 AM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]


I remember being in a maze of twisty little passages. --- At least they weren't all alike, were they?
posted by crunchland at 11:11 AM on August 19, 2012


They left out getting across a downtown street in the middle of the block.

Frogger is an arcade game.

/obtuse pedantry
posted by perspicio at 11:11 AM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]


No mention of that goddamn gem in shadowgate that killed you 10 turns later without telling you why?

I had to call a freaking game hotline to be told that, and then I had to start from the goddamn beginning. Fuck everything about that.
posted by lkc at 11:26 AM on August 19, 2012


Oh, and good god, Manhunter: New York. I had that on my old amiga, that we got second-hand with lovingly preserved manuals. I wanted to love that game, but it was indeed impossible.
posted by lkc at 11:28 AM on August 19, 2012


... Now that I've caught my breath.

A 2-3 hour mystery released avery couple months for $5.

Someone make it happen.

Ad Hominem

As mentioned above, Telltale Games does exactly that. The current property they are releasing is "The Walking Dead", but previously they did 5 part series on a Monkey Island reboot, and a Back To The Future adventure game (With a pretty compelling voice actor stand-in for Micheal J. Fox, and an Actual Christopher Lloyd!).

I played through, and enjoyed both. I avoided Jurassic Park, mostly based on reviews. They have done a ton of other games though (notably, Sam and Max, which I am unfamiliar with -- heresy, I know!), as well as Bone (which is ruined by crappy action sequences).

There is also Deponia, which I picked up on a recent steam sale, and am currently winning by slamming my head on the keyboard (in a good way).

I can't think of any Lucasarts adventure games (off the top of my head) in which you can actually die or be killed.


Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had many battle sequences, and a weird mish-mash of items that could leave you stuck at the blimp, short on money and health and needing to fight an ex-golden glover that 12-year old me could never get passed, no matter how many fucking time I played up until that point. Also, you could die in combat quite easily, even in one of the first rooms where you are training.

In fact, I think the only LucasArts game where you couldn't die was Loom. A game I still play through every year or two. At one point, I even beat it on hard (where you couldn't see the notes of the random spells coming through, you just had to pick it out by ear), to see the extra animated sequence of what was under that guys hood.

Anyway, I love the genre, warts and all, and if there were a crappy original sierra pack on steam (like there is a LA pack), I would probably play through those as well. My recovering Everquest Addict and Sims maven girlfriend doesn't get it, she thinks they look like boring tedious crap.

I had such high hopes for the Puzzle Agent games, but I thought they utterly failed in execution.

Yeah. I played through both, and they were ... ok. The linked video is one of the crappier puzzles, but there was a lot of problems with just getting around, and navigating through the story.

A much better example is the Professor Layton series on the DS.

Also for the DS, Ghost Trick from the people who made the inimitable Phoenix Wright / Ace Attorney series.

Tell us what you did to celebrate Jim Henson's & Fred Rogers' deaths next.

Since I'm digging up memories of being 12...

Q: What did Kermit the Frog say at Jim Hensons Funeral?
A: Nothing.

I know, I know. I've packed my bags and the bus to hell is stopping here shortly.
posted by lkc at 12:21 PM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]


(oh, and I left out Zack and Wiki for the wii!)
posted by lkc at 12:24 PM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]


Ugh, call for help game centers. How I loathed dialing the numbers, hiding on the basement phone like I was calling a pr0n line.
posted by Purposeful Grimace at 12:45 PM on August 19, 2012


In fact, I think the only LucasArts game where you couldn't die was Loom.

You can't die in most Monkey Island games (as noted above, you can as a joke in one of them), you can't die in Sam & Max, and you can't die in Grim Fandango (actually, you're already dead). I'm pretty sure that attribute holds for most of the others.
posted by JHarris at 1:09 PM on August 19, 2012


You can't die in Sam and Max mostly because it's questionable whether Max is capable of dying.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:40 PM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]


previously they did 5 part series on a Monkey Island yt reboot

That reboot suffers because it takes at least 2 episodes to hit its stride, but episodes 4 and 5 are worth it.
posted by ersatz at 3:35 PM on August 19, 2012


a Back To The Future adventure game (With a pretty compelling voice actor stand-in for Micheal J. Fox, and an Actual Christopher Lloyd!).

Michael J Fox had a cameo role too. The actor they got to play Marty was astounding, but they probably should have also found a voice actor for Doc other than Christopher Lloyd. He sounded old, like he was always speaking through a mouthful of phlegm. The discrepancy between the Doc I know and love and the one voiced in-game took me out of the story. The voice actor they got to play teenaged Doc Brown was very good though.

And yes, Ghost Trick is also excellent!
posted by painquale at 7:58 PM on August 19, 2012


What the heck? Trickster at The Adventure Gamer is going through every single graphic adventure game in order. Gold Rush wasn't easy, but it was far from the hardest adventure game he has played. Ditto Manhunter: New York. We are having a discussion about what the 10 hardest games before 1989 would be right now if you want to join us.

I'd put something on Uninvited myself, just because of how bad it was and how crazily nonsensical the puzzles are.
posted by Canageek at 8:01 PM on August 19, 2012 [1 favorite]


You can't die in Sam and Max mostly because it's questionable whether Max is capable of dying.

Clearly you haven't played the 3rd season of Telltale's Sam and Max...OR HAVE YOU!

/rasies black and white eyebrow
posted by Sparx at 8:52 PM on August 19, 2012 [2 favorites]


When I watched this video, and when I heard Terry Pratchett described as a great writer whose brain was slowly turning to mush...

And this was when I turned the video off.
posted by gregoryg at 10:03 AM on August 20, 2012 [1 favorite]


Oh come on. Khan! wasn't being serious, I'm sure. I'm sure he has no voodoo doll in his room to whomever Ted Rogers is.

I tried playing that damned game when it came on an old computer, and I'm shocked anyone got far enough to even see a Babel fish. After working out how the heck you get on the ship, I spent an eternity stuck on the holodeck, mournfully watching Marvin glide past me, not knowing how the heck you got in there. No invisiclues available for me in 1997, though if I'd had the internet then (good luck with that on an Amstrad 386) I might have found some kind of playthrough.

There was, however, a lot of c: jump ('Now, wasn't that nice?') and c: kill self - I can't remember what the response was to that from the game but it was something maddening that told me that it wasn't prepared to give Arthur even THE SWEET RELEASE OF DEATH.

I wanted to meet some Vogons too. Bastard game. Bastard.
posted by mippy at 3:20 PM on August 20, 2012


I'm pretty sure you can die in the first monkey island if you can't figure out how to get out of the ocean - Guybrush can only hold his breath for 10 minutes.
posted by sid at 8:35 PM on August 20, 2012 [1 favorite]


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