Adventure Gamers - Forums

Horses for courses, I guess…
I don’t remember there being any real trial and error being needed in Myst/Riven. You probably could brute-force things, but when things “clicked”, you knew what you needed to do…

Yeah, definitely different strokes. For me, if a puzzle REQUIRES intuition to solve it, then it is kind of a failure. I MUCH prefer puzzles that can be solved through reason alone. Because the thing is, when the puzzle requires intuition, that means that it might be really rewarding if you happen to intuit the correct thing, but if you don’t it ends up being either an annoying roadblock, or you have to resort to just trying everything.

Like the Babel Fish puzzle. I didn’t solve that through “intuition” or “knowing what would happen”, I just tried what I could, until finally it worked out. I could look back in HINDSIGHT and say, “Yeah, I guess that makes a kind of sense. Not sure how I was supposed to FIGURE that out, though.” Whereas in Riven, I collected all this knowledge through observation and experimentation, and then was able to apply it to solve the puzzles. The “Aha!” moment came when I realized that I had a good idea of how to put what I’d learned together, and the satisfaction came when it proved out. There was never ANYTHING in Riven where I brute-forced a solution and then, after finding the answer, wondered how anybody was supposed to reason that out.

(Well, actually, that’s not QUITE true. There was one puzzle where I got through by guessing, BUT the established nature of the game was already such that I ASSUMED I had simply missed some important bit of information, rather than that the answer derived from intuition. And later that turned out to be right. I startled my wife with the literal “AHA!” that I let out when I saw what I had missed after the fact.)

I must say in advance that I am aware there are many games that I loved when I was very young and now I’m afraid to play again since they’re very likely to suck (a prime example is Phantasmagoria). So I just don’t play them again. In some cases I did, though:

Operation Stealth ( -> ). I loved it as a kid, but didn’t actually ever finish it then.

Loom ( -> ). This game gets better each time I play it.

Simon the Sorcerer ( -> ). Gets so slow and boring after a while.