Adventure Gamers - Forums

Making the puzzles easier could involve spelling more out or just giving (more) hints. Doesn’t need changes to the puzzles themselves.
This is why I don’t agree with things needing to be easy (and/or simple) to be accessible (TWD thread for example, but applies to all genres not just adventures), as they could be designed to be adequately hard, then made optionally more easy/accessible without compromising either the puzzles/gameplay or the story.

Dag - 07 December 2012 10:59 AM

It’s not at all obvious to me atleast. To me it sounds like you are saying that decreasing or increasing the difficulty of a puzzle is entirely impossible unless the puzzle itself has absolutely no relevance to the story.

Let’s have an example then (spoiler): In SoMI Guybrush needs to figure out where the swordmaster lives. The actual solution is to ask the shopkeeper you want to see the swordmaster and then follow him through the forest to the secret location.

Now add a “Hard Mode” to this, where in addition to this you find that the shopkeeper’s shop is locked, so Guybrush tells us he needs to find a lockpick. But you don’t have any money so you need to make the lockpick by smelting iron by going to the forest and mining it yourself from the mine. Alas, you don’t have a pickaxe in your inventory so you have to steal it from the miner in the town. To do this you have to distract him. He tells you after a long dialogue that there’s a nearby woman he’s keen on so you need to convince her to go and talk to him. But she wants a reward for this, so you need to find her earrings which the pirate in the Scumm Bar will give you in exchange for a rootbeer, which you must get by clicking “push” on the rootbeer machine three times, whereupon a piece-of-eight comes out of the change slot allowing you to buy the rootbeer. So you give it to the pirate, get the earrings, convince the woman to distract the miner, get the pickaxe, mine the iron, make the lockpick and finally get into the shop so you can talk to the shopkeeper.

*Phew!* See what I mean now? What does any of this add to the game? It’s tedious and dumb and doesn’t add anything or relate to any of the other events in the game. All it does is extend the game by adding meaningless challenges. A lot of adventure games do this so unfortunately we’re used to it, but the fact is it’s a terrible way to make a game.

Oscar - 07 December 2012 08:09 AM

The puzzles in BOUT were such a chore. The story was fun and the jokes were usually funny, but I got the impression the way they went about making the game was to pen a story first, and then fill it with obstacles to be passed by collecting whatever the game lets you collect, combining whatever the game lets you combine and then using your remaining inventory items on whatever the game decides they should be used on. I always wanted to move the game along but found myself faced with the task of finding an object to combine with something else to fix a random item that was only there in the first place to block my progress.

If Critter Chronicles is no better, I doubt I’ll like it much without a good story like BOUT’s. The fact it has “normal” and “hard” difficulty levels confirms the puzzles aren’t really integrated much at all.

Well, for your information, Critter Chronicles is EXACTLY like that. I don’t know how somebody can say that the game is easy and short with puzzles that have no logic at ALL and you have to do “trial and error” ALL the time with ALL itens in the inventory with ALL spots on the screen and with ALL characters in the game. Sometimes, you get lucky and FINALLY do something right in the game. I’m in chapter 4 and spent over 6 hours already (in a row) and I admit it is getting frustrated to continue with no walkthroughs yet.

Really liked this game when I played it in German. I must say I didn’t like Nate from the first game, and indeed liked Wilbur much more. But the critter was very loveable in this episode, and I enjoyed it.

Lucien21 - 07 December 2012 12:17 PM

I see your point.

I really only comes down to two options if you want multiple difficulties.

* Add in extra Puzzles (But that just lenghtens the game and might not affect difficulty.
* Replace puzzle with a harder one.

In the SoMi example above. Maybe you make it harder to follow the swordmaster, by making him go a more difficult route or by making him faster or make it easier for him to detect you following him.

Absolutely, which is why I said the puzzles weren’t “really” integrated. There are always ways to do things better. And maybe COMI’s Mega Monkey Mode did things better than Critter Chronicles did. It helps that the original mode’s puzzles in COMI were certainly far more interesting.

When I said that this game’s puzzles have no logical at all, I’m trying to say that the game is not logical. It was build this way, I guess. It is funny. But what I don’t like at all is the WAY they put the puzzles into the game. To try everything you have to see if they combine and THEN try everything you combine to see if it has an effect IN game? And if you don’t succeed, try passing out the things you have to another character? With no logical explanation of why I have to do that? It makes you go forward and backwards all the time, which just makes you spent time playing but with no porpuse at all for the story of the game! Just to make you feel you acomplish something at the end, after hours trying to go through the chapters. They could do it better if they just cut half the itens you have to collect and cut half the “trials and erros” whit the itens you collected. And focus on the story, that is, by the way, interesting.

Maybe you are right, Dag. Or maybe I’m getting old pretty fast! Or maybe I was not in a good day when I posted before. I’m from the time before Internet and was able to finish Leisure Suit Larry 1, 2 and 3, King’s Quest 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 with NO WALKTHROUGHS at all at that time!!! That was something. But, really, some puzzles in Critter are just “trial and error” and illogicals or ” to use a bellows on someone to inflate him and make him fly like an helium ballon (mind you: I said bellows which only blows air)” is logical? Sure, AFTER you do that, as a final resource, you could say “Yeah, that makes sense”. But who with a good sense would had thought of it? But, never mind, the game is still good.

+1 for the No-Walkthroughs-Or-Hints Club! As soon I use them I automatically lose a little interest in the game. I don’t know why it happens, it just does. It took me a long time to acknowledge it until I noticed I was rating games in which I used hints or walkthroughs lower than games I didn’t.

Developers who add hints are unwittingly sabotaging their own game.

Ok, now that we all agree that walkthoughs are “evil”, and I will not use them anymore, can I at least get a hint on one puzzle that I tried three hundred times with no success? I’ll put in spoilers - In chapter 4, there is a time you have to paint a canvas for the arch-mage. Do I really need to paint it, exactly? Or there is another way? Because I’m a terrible painter, and every time I show the canvas that I paint with the grapes and bottle of wine to him, he tells me that it’s no good. Help, please!.