Quote:
Originally Posted by Oscar
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.
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Unfortunately, what you've described is the outcome of the action - eg. use oil on back causes map to burn off skin. The actual gameplay element in both that example and 'read book to horse to make it sleep' are exactly the same - use x with y. The variation lies in what the developer decides to name x and y. You're right that there are "billions" of things he/she could name those variables though, but it's all still one single kind of gameplay.
Even worse, you don't even have to be aware of what you're doing - you could complete many traditional inventory puzzle games without ever once thinking about what you're doing or why you're doing it. In fact, it would be very simple to write a computer program that completed games of this nature, simply by using every object with every other object/hotspot. It would be far more difficult to write a program that could complete Portal. The player
has to be aware of what they're doing.
