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Old 07-31-2011, 10:04 PM   #1
Adventure Games Forever
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Join Date: Jul 2011
Posts: 17
Default The Ultimate Adventure Game Difficulty List

There are so many awesome adventure games to play, and they keep getting released. There is simply not enough time to play them all immediately. Some I won’t get to for weeks, months, years, or even ever. In the past I would decide on and prioritize what games to play next based on how much I think I would enjoy each game. However, I can’t do that anymore since my personal list of “must play NOW” games is humungous. There are copious amounts of adventure games that I know I will love, and I will definitely not have enough time to even play a fraction of them in the next year, even though I have a lot of free time. Therefore, I have to plan the order based on each game’s difficulty, and to some extent, length.

I think a lot of you fall into the same boat of not having enough time to play all of the adventure games you want to play. When this is the case, I think that many of you, just like me, would rather play easy games than get stuck a million times playing difficult games. For me, easy and long games are the absolute best (like Lost Horizon). That was a great game! It was very easy and I never got stuck once. There was hotspot finder, great puzzles, interesting characters, captivating environments, and the entire game felt like a dream vacation.

I would like to develop a master list of how hard everyone thinks each game is, based on a scale from 1 to 10, and then average everyone’s scores together. I would also like to add gameplay hours into the list too. Give a 1-3 for games that you find extremely easy and that you never got stuck on. Games given 4-6 include games of average difficulty. Games given a 7-9 include hard games that have difficult puzzles. Give a 10 for a game that made if want to rip your hair out (if you even attempted the puzzles) or for a game that you played entirely with a walkthrough. I will also average everyone’s gameplay hours together.

Please list the games you’ve completed and your personal difficulty rating, and an estimation of how long it took to complete the game in the following format:
Game Name (X:Y) (where X is the difficulty rating, on a scale of 1-10, and Y is the number of gameplay hours)
Please only list games that you have COMPLETED.


As for my gameplay hours, you will notice that my stats are way higher than the average player’s. I think this is because (1) I explore the game environment to the extreme and try to experience everything, (2) I get stuck quite a bit in harder games for long periods of time, and (3) I have a hunch that many people under-report their hours of gameplay, including reviewers, and other players in all genres of games. When I estimated my hours of gameplay, I always rounded up, because for some reason, actual hours seem to be longer than estimated hours for me (Steam games showing hours played prove this).

I LOVE games with hotspot finders, and do NOT consider them to be a hint/help/cheat. I use them for every location, even when I’m not stuck, because I hate pixel hunting. I LOVE games with built-in hint systems, even though I try not to use them at all. However, when I’m completely stuck, and “using everything on everything” hasn’t worked, I like using in-game hints. I hate using walkthroughs, because when I use them I feel like I am cheating and don’t get a sense of accomplishment. That’s why I want to find out what games are the easiest, and play those first. :-)

I will start with my lists… there are 4 of them. I will make a second post for this to keep things organized. The lists include practically every game I’ve completed, or want to play. The reason for the 4 lists is as follows:
- Predicted Must-Play Now List: Games that I am dying to play and haven’t started yet. The difficulty and hours are perceived since I’m basing them on what I know about the game. This part of the list is what inspired me to create this thread. I hope someone can inform me about each game’s difficulty and hours.
- Predicted Will Hopefully Play Later List: Similar to above, but these are games that aren’t next on my “games to play” list, but I hope to play them next year, in a few years, or sometime in my life.
- Recent Games List: A list of games that I have completed in 2009-2011. This list is representative of my current adventure game skill level and experience.
- Classic Games List: A list of games that I have completed in 1995-2008. This list is not necessarily representative of my current adventure game skill level and experience, but then again, it might be. Who knows? (Under A Killing Moon was my first adventure game)

Things that caused me to place games on the easier end of the spectrum:
- lack of puzzles, or easy puzzles
- built-in hint system
- hot-spot finder
- helpful mouse cursors
- multiple levels of difficulty
- mostly inventory-based puzzles
- recently released games

Things that caused me to place games on the harder end of the spectrum:
- HARD inventory puzzles
- HARD Myst/Machinarium style, non-inventory puzzles
- Myst-style puzzles where no goal or method to solve is given and trial and error is required
- puzzles that require knowledge outside of the game world
- puzzles that require certain talents (such as NOT being tone-deaf)
- no built-in hints
- pixel hunting
- having to use everything on everything
- poor puzzle design
- un-skippable dialog (makes it annoying to try everything on everything)
- bugs and crashes (Still Life 2 and Law & Order: Criminal Intent)
- games released in the 90s

I do like death in adventure games. I also like timed events (if they are done right). Neither of these aspects usually make a game’s difficulty harder for me. The exception to this involves death in Maniac Mansion and Still Life 2, which did make it harder. I’ve also heard that death in the King’s Quest games make them a lot harder. I prefer the Black Mirror method of how death is handled… when you die, the game goes back to the point right before you died… this is ideal.

Telltale games are NOT on my predicted lists because I consider them to be all 1s in terms of difficulty, and about 5 hours of gameplay per episode. I don’t think I will ever be stuck in a Telltale game again. Since I’ve played all of their games, it’s almost like I can read the minds of the developer’s, so I don’t think I will ever be fooled by any of their puzzles. This is one of the many reasons why I love and play all of their games!

If you’ve completed the games in my Must-Play Now list, please post your difficulty and hours. We can use these lists to help each other find easy/short games, easy/long games, hard/short games, and hard/long games! We can also have discussions about why we rated certain games with certain difficulty ratings. If there’s anything on my list that looks crazy, please leave comments. :-)

Sorry for the long post, so here is the “too long/didn’t read” version:
I want to play easy games first. If you’ve completed the games in my Must-Play Now list, please post your difficulty and hours like this: Game Name (difficulty: hours)
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