Quote:
Originally Posted by ozzie
Oscar: Reading your post again, I see that this precisely the aspect you don't like. I guess we won't reach any agreement on this one then. 
Portal's puzzles are much more consistent and less arbitrary than those of adventures whose sole mechanic is item combination. There are no cat mustaches, no rubber duckeys. I have to disagree with you on this point Oscar, I don't think that traditional adventure puzzles are very diverse. To generalize, they're always, always the same kind of challenge, to combine one object with another, and recently that's within a interface that doesn't allow you to express your intention very clearly since one click does all! Sure, many excellent games relied on item combination. I'm sick of it anyway, I don't see any way forward with this ancient approach.
By relying on these kinds of puzzles the gameplay in traditional adventures is much too one-sided. There are many, many more possible kinds of challenges that could be designed, so why rely on item combination? |
The reason I say adventure game puzzles are more diverse is not because of their structure. It is true what you say that adventure game are mostly made up of combining items, (not strictly true as there are many involving doing a certain series of actions in the right order or entering combinations on machines to obtain a result). What is diverse about AG puzzles is the way you must analyze the information you have been given to solve them, and do it in a way that isn't uniform. In Portal you know what each thing does - the white wall is used to portal, blue gel bounces, orange gel slides and once you know this it's a simple matter of combining these things to get where you want to be. Slide here, bounce there, portal over there to get the box, open the door. To me, that is all one type of puzzle.
Adventure games have literally billions of ways of creating puzzles, all depending on the situation they put you in, which is why we usually need to go to walkthroughs even though we've played hundreds of them. I think that saying adventure game puzzles are all the same because they're all inventory puzzles is like saying all books are the same because they all contain words. An inventory puzzle where you must realize that using a bottle of oil on someone's back who is sunbaking will remove a tattooed map by burning off the skin is vastly different in quality from a puzzle where you must realize that reading a physics textbook to a horse will make it fall asleep so you can get its dentures. Those puzzles are in no way illogical, they just require a bit of thinking. It's the complex interplay of the story, your own intuition and the information obtained from your environment which means the range of adventure puzzles will never be exhausted.
