Adventure Gamers - Forums

Simon_ASA - 23 October 2012 05:26 AM

Agustín Cordes - 21 October 2012 08:40 AM

Myst ( -> -> -> -> -> ) : It just keeps getting worse every year.

Really ? So you don’t really like the Myst series ? I thought you did when I see Asylum.

I never did. I disliked the game from the very moment I tried it in 1993. You have to understand where I come from: to me, Myst had stripped the greatest trait from adventures, which is narrative. Aimless wandering, no sense of purpose, and puzzles mostly depending on trial and error (and I did enjoy some of the logical ones). But still, it didn’t feel like there was any point to the whole thing. Also, don’t get me started on literally one of the worst un-endings in adventures.

An empty shell; that’s what Myst felt to me back in ‘93, and over the years I gave it more than one chance, but nothing has ever changed my opinion.

Zifnab - 23 October 2012 11:42 AM

What about the sequels? They had more storytelling, especially the fourth one.

I felt physical pain while playing Riven. I don’t believe it improved on the narrative aspect, but the reliance on trial and error was much worse. Way too many abstract puzzles and obscenely difficult to boot; but an “unfair” difficulty because many were intricate contraptions with endless combinations. To me a perfect puzzle is one that if you understand the underlying logic or its purpose can be solved immediately. In Riven, even if I knew what had to be done, I still found myself tweaking, and twisting and pushing buttons to make it work. I hate that. RAWR

So if it makes you feel any better, Myst > Riven all the time.

I played a bit of Exile and yes, the story got better but I just wasn’t caring anymore.

Agustín Cordes - 21 October 2012 08:40 AM

It just keeps getting worse every year.

Yet, you still play it each year. Now there’s a fan!

diego - 23 October 2012 12:13 PM

Agustín Cordes - 21 October 2012 08:40 AM

It just keeps getting worse every year.

Yet, you still play it each year. Now there’s a fan!

LOL UR FUN!!

Oscar - 23 October 2012 12:16 PM

Unfair difficulty…aha. So why does Scratches have us wandering around the house waiting for us to do some random event like using the telephone?

No arguments there. I’ve always held that the first day in Scratches was badly designed.

(Though those events weren’t random and you were supposed to try using the phone following specific cues)

Agustín Cordes - 23 October 2012 12:08 PM

To me a perfect puzzle is one that if you understand the underlying logic or its purpose can be solved immediately.

That takes away all the fun.

I disagree. If it makes you think, then it’s fun. If it makes you experiment with it, then it’s a time waster. For example, fiddling with some obscure mechanism even if you understand what’s the ultimate goal.

I’m not saying time wasters can’t be fun; I play all them all the time on my phone. It’s just not what I look for in an adventure game.

And trial and error in Riven? I don’t remember any, but if you say so.

I say so. Here, allow me to refresh your memory:

Pay attention to the comments around the 7:00 mark. “I don’t know it did that… This should be it, right?”. That whole puzzle relies on fiddling. Trying one button, understanding what it does, then performing another action, trying again the same button, rinse and repeat. It’s the basis of trial and error and pretty much every puzzle in Riven is like that: understanding how a mechanism works.

Mister Ed - 23 October 2012 01:19 PM

But that “fiddling” as you call it is the process of “understanding the underlying logic” of the mechanism. Once you understand that underlying logic, you CAN solve it immediately, which is what you claim is the mark of a good puzzle. Am I to understand that you want the underlying logic to be immediately obvious as well? Then where’s the “puzzle” aspect? Mechanical puzzles like that may not be to your taste, but they SEEM like they (at least when well designed) fit your expressed criteria.

I can understand having a problem with the storytelling (or lack thereof), but for my part, the puzzles in Riven are exactly what I want from a puzzle, where logic and observation (including observation of how things work) can lead you to the solution. For me, the bad kind of “trial and error” is where you just HAVE to keep trying stuff until you hit upon the right answer (often found in dialogue trees), because there is no internal logic you could use to deduce it from observation. I don’t recall any of that in Riven. (There were some things you COULD solve that way, if you failed to recognize the underlying logic, but that seems more realistic to me, anyway, than making the thing work ONLY if you follow a certain path.)

It’s not quite what I mean. There are puzzles and puzzles, and to some extent all of them require some “probing”. My biggest issue with Myst/Riven puzzles is that it never feels like you’re achieving any progress, just fiddling until you get it.

I’m over-generalizing here, yes, and I won’t get into discussing every puzzle individually, but the video I posted above is a great example of what I mean. Here we have a strange mechanism that doesn’t make sense; let’s try and make sense out of it. So we move a lever and see what it does. Yay, it brings up a panel. Now we push one of those buttons. I see, it rotates the view. OK, let’s try the other lever. Kewl, another panel. Now I should push all those buttons. But what happens if I try another view? And so on.

There’s no reasoning. Just try and see what happens to understand the logic. When there’s reasoning, once you know the solution, you can solve the puzzle immediately. There was not a time in Myst or Riven when I felt that “AHA! I GOT IT!” sense of wonder. Solving those puzzles felt like work. I can’t think of a better way to describe this type of gameplay; it just feels like you’re working.

An example of a fine puzzle that appeals to your reasoning is the Babel Fish puzzle in Hitchkicker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s so good that it was pretty much copied in Eric the Unready. In the puzzle there’s a vending machine that spits a fish you need to get, so fast that it flies across the room and into a hole. Each time you try to block its path, the fish just bounces and disappears in other ways. In the final step of the puzzle the fish is taken away by two cleaning robots, one in the floor, the other in the ceiling. You have a satchel that can block the robot below, but then the fish keeps flying up where the other robot catches it.

What step must be taken to ensure that the upper robot doesn’t get in the way? This is one of the greatest examples of lateral thinking in adventure games: you put junk mail inside the satchel, so that when the lower robot hits the satchel the mail flies across the room and the upper robot goes crazy trying to get it. Pure deduction, no tinkering. You have to think about the puzzle, and once you finally understand its logic that last step is a beautiful moment.

I’m reasonable. I can’t expect every puzzle to be as perfectly executed as the Babel Fish one, but the Myst world is the complete opposite: cold machinery that leaves no room for deduction.

tl;dr: In a well designed puzzle, you should be able to understand what the lever does before you try it.

PS: Sorry for derailing the topic, that’s what you get when you ask me about Myst

PPS: For another example of a perfect puzzle where the solution can be deduced, google Beach VR in Gateway.

I agree with both of you. The kind of insight puzzle Agustin describes is a nice AHA! experience. But Mister Ed is right too: the Babelfish puzzle has no rigorous internal logic. It’s a hypothesis… they’re cleaning robots, what happens if I make them clean something… AHA it works!

For me, one of the most exhilerating AHA! experiences was the non-approved flight in Obsidian, maybe the best Mystlike puzzle game ever. (Which proves that out-of-the-box puzzles are not confined to the games Agustin likes.  ) One of the themes of Obsidian is being a rebel. So when a metallic voice tells you to follow a certain procedure, you must ignore it. Then you have to apply the strategy (not a specific solution!) of a hide-and-seek game learned earlier. A leap of insight at its best, not a hypothesis like in the Babelfish, because once you see it, there can be no doubt this is the correct solution. I’m sure it sounds easier than it actually is. The two sequences don’t look similar at first sight and lateral thinking is required. For most people, this was the most difficult, even “unfair” puzzle of the game.

I found discovering the logic of Riven very satisfying. Insight and lateral thinking are great, but I wouldn’t want all puzzles to be like that. Looking for pure trial-and-error? Play Culpa Innata. It has a few nice puzzles, but the overwhelming majority is shit. Open a gate by pulling left, then right, left again, up, right, in.

BTW, I’d love to hear Agustin’s and Mister Ed’s opinion of Discworld 1, which had a weird but wonderful kind of logic.

This convesation about puzzles is interesting, maybe it could become another thread ?

I read all your arguments, and I find them a bit difficult to follow in english, but I think I got your point of view Agustin.
I know why most people don’t like Myst games : there’s nothing to follow and help them (scenario, tip, characters)... The freedom I do like in this kind of games can become a problem if you don’t like to take your time to observe. And when I say “taking your time”, I really mean “a lot of time”. If you don’t immerse body and soul in this peculiar world, you will miss a lot of the fun. True, some of the puzzles are to be solved strangely by turning levers, BUT most of the time you can find a very good logic. I remember in Riven this building filled with boiling water that you had to purge with levers. You just don’t know which levers unless you try them. You can solve this randomly, but you can also take your time to observe : one lever makes a certain sound, another shows a small animation, etc… If you put end to end these small details, you can solve the thing logically, and from the first time.

I don’t know enough about Myst 1 to give my opinion about the puzzles. But I can give my point about Riven. Everything in Riven IS logic. If you take notes and understand the world, the link between things, then you will solve the puzzles. True, there’s a lot of wandering, but I find this wandering in every adventure game !
Look at my Riven “roadmap” :

I noticed on it everything I thought useful (and it was years ago, I would probably write more now). As a result, I understood the way the world was built and I could finish the game without walkthrough, and almost (true, I have to write “alsmot”) every puzzle seemed logic and well thought.
But you know, what’s really interesting in the Myst series is that you’re left on your own in a totally unknown world. That’s exactly the point : not knowing what to do and finding your way by yourself. So it’s not surprising that some puzzles are strange : imagine you put an alien in a human factory and ask him to push the buttons you know so well in the right order, in order he turns the robots on. Well, if he can’t read the explanations and doesn’t know what button does what, he will have the same resulat than anyone playing Myst. That’s what I feel “realist” in this kind of game.

Sorry that I took long to return…

Well, different strokes, etc. A puzzle that works great for some folks may be a huge miss for another group. There’s probably a scientific research here waiting to happen!

What I prefer all the way are puzzles that rely on your intuition. Fien used the perfect wording: it’s insight vs. logic. The Babel Fish puzzle is far-fetched, but once you understand its internal logic that last step can be performed out of insight and not trial and error. Yes, it’s a hypothesis, but if the puzzle is well-designed it’s an exhilarating moment because you just KNOW that it’s going to work.

This is what I meant by that obscure analogy: “you should be able to understand what the lever does before you pull it”. The beach VR puzzle in Legend’s Gateway has always fascinated me. You must experiment with the environment and understand what’s going on to break the system. It’s a difficult puzzle, but once you understand its logic the solution is pure beauty. It’s your gut feeling telling you that it’s going to work.

I felt none of that in Myst/Riven puzzling because it’s cold logic: “so if this symbol belongs to this thing here, then this other symbol must belong to this other thing here”. I swear, you could analyze every one of those puzzles and notice that most of them depend on this sort of mechanic:

- Set first condition.
- Test action A.
- Set second condition.
- Test action B.
- If B doesn’t work, set third condition.
- If B works, test action A again.
- If A doesn’t work, set fourth condition.
- Rinse and repeat.

It’s probing, probing, probing until all pieces fit in place. I much prefer a puzzle that can be solved by pure intuition. And trust me, those are truly the most difficult ones to design. A logic puzzle can be boring or great. An insightful puzzle can be terrible or legendary.

As for individual games:

Yeah, I do know that crazy puzzles can be found in Myst-clones

I played a bit of Obsidian and was fascinated by its setup. But then it quickly turned into another weird fantasy game with abstract puzzles and the market was too crowded with them at the moment, so I instantly lost interest. Maybe I should give it another chance one day but it’s really, really not my thing…

For instance, I had high hopes for Kairo which I tried recently and the surreal environments were breathtaking, but the gameplay rather “meh” to me. Again, aimless wandering around, logic puzzles here and there, putting it all together but still no narrative whatsoever. Even if there is a plot, it doesn’t blend with the gameplay in any way. The one Myst-clone that I really loved is Zork Nemesis. I’m not sure why; its mood hit the right chords with me, and maybe the puzzles weren’t that Myst-like.

And Discworld: it’s been a long time since I played it and only did once, so I can’t quite remember any particular puzzle. Overall, I loved the game. I also got that feeling of nonsensical yet satisfactory puzzling.

OK, that’s it. I’m stopping now because I owe JackVanian an interview and if he sees me writing this much in the forum he’s gonna kick my arse…