Adventure Gamers - Forums

This week I’ll focus our attention towards unique gameplay elements that had been featured in some adventure games. Now, I know this sounds like a broad topic so i’ll try to stay away from all the elements that turned out to grow into a fundamental part of the genre (like the first appearance of graphics in text adventure, or the first usage of the verbs interface, etc.). We already have the most impactful ag theme. This one is about bold and untypical gameplay decisions that somehow didn’t evolve into an obligatory adventure game element but still stood out as a trademark of their own franchise.

I’ll just mention a few examples but I’m encouraging any of you to share their own experience. I’m more than interested in titles that feature unique gameplay that tries to break the chains of typical adventure gaming. 

Discworld Noir

Discworld Noir has a classic ag written all over it. You have a solid plot, tons of good dialogue and inventory puzzles. You’ve been playing for a good amount of hours and the story has been almost unfold but still no sign of anything that’s been remotely different from every other ag you’ve played. And then all of a sudden /no plot spoilers here, but I’m putting the tag for the sake of the surprise element that the gameplay feature offers/ you gain a whole new ability to smell every single location in the game. Puzzles are now becoming tough. You gather different items. You gather clues and conversation topics which you write in your journal. And you gather smells from people that had visited a certain location. And you can combine all of these three groups of evidence. Try everything on everything seems almost impossible here.

Resonance

This title has again covered itself behind a 90’s golden era outlook that reveals nothing more than an ordinary ag with dialogue and inventory puzzles. And some mini-games here and there. And just like Discwolrd Noir it manages to deal with the old “try-everything-on-everything” problems of ag gameplay in a unique way. It introduced the short-term memory inventory along with your normal inventory for items that you pick up. All these parts of the environment that catches your attention but seem impossible or meaningles to be picked up can now be stored in your short-term memory inventory. Of course, everything you gather can be used in a conversation. This means that the dialogue puzzles require some actual thinking and not just exhausting all the given dialogue options. When I played the game I immediately though that this element would turn into a trend for future ags. But so far I didn’t see a game that’s making an use for it.

Day Of The Tentacle

Not much to talk here. Lucas Arts games had always been typical. Most of them share the same logic, so gameplaywise nobody’s expecting anything unique. The same can be said about Day Of The Tentacle with the exception that instead of many different locations you explore a single house in different periods of time (200 years in the past, 200 years in the future, and nowadays). This feature not only gives us a good amount of rooms to explore but also gives an opportunity for really clever time-travel puzzles. Like taking a blueprint of an alien tentacle in the present, send it to the past, switch it with the american flag design, which in the future turns the flag into tentacle shape, which you can use as a disguise. I’m guessing that’s not the only game that uses time-travel puzzles like these, so I’m willing to hear about similar ones.

Honorable mentions of games that I haven’t played yet.

Ghost Trick and the ability to posses and manipulate objects from the location.

The Last Express with its real time passing which gives one more layer to the puzzle solving.

Loom and its sound puzzles.

I’m sure there are lots of other titles that feature something unique (just browsing through the Obscure Adventure Games thread gives me a headache ) I wanted to give a broader list but my head is kind of empty right now. So if you have something in mind, please share it here. I’d like to see some more interesting examples.

diego - 02 October 2017 04:08 PM

Advie - 02 October 2017 02:46 PM

i think dropsy as well is one of a kind

Why?

Btw I was thinking of mentioning Dropsy, but not because of surrealism. I found the day/night cycle in the game intriguing. It kind of simulates real-time (but not on The Last Express level). You have different time zones and characters switch places depending on these zones. Some places close at night, others open and stuff like that. Not an actual real time but it gives one more layer to the countless locations of Dropsy. And lots of headache

Sherlock Holmes games feature a rather unique game mechanic (as far as I can tell): the “deduction board”, on which clues appear as you discover them, and which allows you to form links between them to build conclusions. Some clues can have different interpretations, and you have to build a coherent case with what you have. Even though the system warns you of contradictory elements (flashing red), there are still several combinations you can make, and only one of them holds the correct solution.
The Testament of Sherlock Holmes already had a system of this kind, but it became fully mature and got a neural-inspired makeover in Crimes and Punishments.

There also feature several ways to visualise what isn’t there, to reconstruct past scenes or see elements that are gone or simply not visible. For instance, they’ve borrowed the smell mechanics from Discworld Noir, but only when you play as Toby the dog. As you can see, they look pretty similar (though Toby only gets to smell boring green…).

badlemon - 02 October 2017 08:40 AM

Ghost Trick and the ability to posses and manipulate objects from the location.

Goetia also has an object-possession system in lieu of an inventory, though I’m not sure they work the same way.

I haven’t played Ghost Trick, but the name reminded me of the magic trick system in Gray Matter, another feature I don’t think I’ve ever seen elsewhere. As a magician, the protagonist can play tricks out of her reference book, but you have to prepare them first by collecting the right objects and building the correct sequence.

(white zones are edits so as not to spoil the puzzle)

Gorogoa

It’s a not yet released game (and also one of the most anticipated titles for me). Some of you might have played the demo which shows a really unique gameplay that almost defines a whole new genre. Basically all you that you have to interact with are these four slots where you can switch/stack/order/investigate little squares which resemble a deck of playing cards. The narrative and the puzzles progress through the way you interact with these cards. Can’t really describe it with words, but you can get a sense of it in the game’s trailer:

edit: Hey, AG Forum automatically embeds youtube links now. Haven’t noticed this before. Nice one, you guys.

NickyLarson - 03 October 2017 06:58 AM

I haven’t played Ghost Trick, but the name reminded me of the magic trick system in Gray Matter, another feature I don’t think I’ve ever seen elsewhere. As a magician, the protagonist can play tricks out of her reference book, but you have to prepare them first by collecting the right objects and building the correct sequence.

Ooh, good call! I loved the idea of the magic tricks in Gray Matter - basically a system of macros to perform more complex actions than the usual point&click; interface would allow - but found them a bit disappointing in practice. Because as you say, it ended up amounting to ‘put things in the correct sequence’.

Say you were doing a card trick that requires switching face-down cards before turning them over. You input a series of actions that turns over the cards then switches them, and the game tells you ‘no, that’s wrong’. So you try again until you get it right. If the system had had some understanding of why that was the wrong sequence, and shown/told us what would happen if you did things in that order, it could have been amazing. Whether it was a short imaginary scene of the trick going wrong or a voice-over “But then they’d see me switch the cards. I need to rethink this…” it could really sing. But that would have been a lot more work to implement and extra expense for graphics and voice-acting, which is why that kind of attention to detail mostly only happens in text adventures.

Jane Jensen’s next game, Moebius, also had some interesting new mechanics - the Sherlock Holmes-style examination of details to draw conclusions about a person or object:

and matching characters against historical figures to spot similarities:

Sadly both of those tended rather to degenerate into guessing, but kudos to JJ for trying new things!

The Whispered World

Maybe this have been featured in other games as well but right now I can’t think of another one. Lots of AG protagonists have a sidekick (NPC, playable or used as an inventory item Sam’n'Max style). I really like how Spot was used in this game. He had the ability to shapeshift himself in different forms and you could use him in different puzzles depending on this form (normal, bubble, flat, fireball and whatnot).

Sinking Island

In the last CCP, we played Sinking Island. One feature in Sinking Island is the PPA where you have access to material, pictures, documents, prints, and conversations. There, you can compare evidence, and try to find the correct evidence to solve mandates. It is a good system in capturing the feel of investigating a crime.

Thanks for the great examples. I have several more titles in my “to-play” list now.

diego - 03 October 2017 03:10 PM

I love The Whispered World, but Spot is basically a “rehash” of Boogle in Torin’s Passage.

Good to know. I’ll have a look at it. 

Lilly Looking Through

Haven’t played that one but the idea to have two parallel worlds at the same time sounds interesting. It’s not exactly unique because it is most likely a rehash of another game But I can’t remember it now (besides some horrors like Silent Hill/Resident Evil).