Adventure Gamers - Forums

Need I say more? 

From Gabriel Knight to Secret Files, cat puzzles have always been a staple of adventure gaming. I want your best, cleverest, most devious puzzles involving felines.

Milo and the Magpies is all about cats, but the cleverest puzzle in the game is the laser puzzle with the Sphinx cat.

LadyKestrel beat me to it. Milo is a fun little game.

I’m sure there are lots of cat puzzles out there that I’ve forgotten all about. But there’s one cat that left a strong impression on me: Franz in Bad Mojo. Avoiding him was not always easy when he was eager for a little snack between meals.

Throwing the boot at the cat to rescue the mouse. For sure.

No wait…turning the cat into a cookie and feeding it to his master.

Either way, KQ has the kitties cornered.

No matter what everyone says, I loved the cat hair mustache puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3 the moment I solved it. In fact up until the mid-2000s I had no idea it was advertised as “one of the worst puzzles that killed the adventure genre” by some critics, and I still find that statement absolutely ridiculous. Sure, it’s a bit silly, but so do most traditional adventure puzzles, and as such it was a great throwback to older times (gather several items to construct a disguise) and a nice introduction to the long, complex story that starts on the light side and slowly moves into darkness. Gabe’s witty character makes it work even better. And the angry cat too.

Doom - 12 May 2022 09:12 AM

No matter what everyone says, I loved the cat hair mustache puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3 the moment I solved it. In fact up until the mid-2000s I had no idea it was advertised as “one of the worst puzzles that killed the adventure genre” by some critics, and I still find that statement absolutely ridiculous. Sure, it’s a bit silly, but so do most traditional adventure puzzles, and as such it was a great throwback to older times (gather several items to construct a disguise) and a nice introduction to the long, complex story that starts on the light side and slowly moves into darkness. Gabe’s witty character makes it work even better. And the angry cat too.

It’s a classic. It didn’t kill the genre, it just incapacitated it through the supreme power of moon logic.

Nelza - 12 May 2022 04:02 PM

I’m surprised no one has mentioned the Cat Puzzle in Day of the Tentacle!  That’s got to be one of the best!  So classic!

*Squeak squeak squeak*

It’s not even the only cat puzzle, there’s several. Because there’s also “the skunk” puzzle.

But like most of DoTT puzzles, they’re are golden.

millenia - 14 May 2022 01:20 PM

Nelza - 12 May 2022 04:02 PM

I’m surprised no one has mentioned the Cat Puzzle in Day of the Tentacle!  That’s got to be one of the best!  So classic!

*Squeak squeak squeak*

It’s not even the only cat puzzle, there’s several. Because there’s also “the skunk” puzzle.

But like most of DoTT puzzles, they’re are golden.

Was thinking the same thing. I thought that squeak puzzle was one of the hardest in the whole game.

I actually read some reviews of DoTT where this particular puzzle was referred to as a prime example of “moon logic”. Personally I thought it was quite clever (unlike the skunk one).

i am not sure, but KQ’s last puzzle is an example of moon logic for me, MI’s ‘monkey wrench’ was also, so I guess before DoTT, moon logic existed

This is probably a personal interpretation, but moon logic got a bad rep that I think it doesn’t deserve and might’ve been detrimental to the genre. I also apologize in advance.

The genre was past it’s heyday. Puzzle solutions had gotten convoluted or random. They were often weirdly specific and completely arbitrary at the same time. This is the nature of the beast. Anything can be the solution: if you can imagine it, you can try it. But 90% of what you try won’t work. The input is open, there is nothing in the core mechanics of the game that informs you of the rules and at the same time, it’s strictly guarded by authorial intent.

That’s generally considered bad design. Things have to be intuitive, immersive and easy to write about. And it’s pretty much how adventure games work. How is it possible that some of these games have received popular and critical acclaim, while using the same mechanics as all those guessing games that had overstayed their welcome by a decade or so?

Moon logic. Thinking of things that only made sense in the author’s mind. There’s logic, there are good riddles, there’s signposting for the stuff that might be a bit out there and then there’s the territory you really want to avoid.

I feel defining moon logic on these terms and trying to avoid it hasn’t served the genre well. Here’s a different interpretation of the term that may or may not be useful:

Moon logic relates to (real world) logic as Moon gravity to gravity on Earth. It’s not about lunacy, or being “out there”, it’s about translating the logical steps from your experience into the leaps caused by the different but specific gravitational pull of a place that is both familiar and different. I think pretty much all narrative media works like this and good moon logic is established by communicating the general “physics” in the orbit occupied by the player and the npcs. If you can somehow establish that magic works, under defined circumstances, the presence of these circumstances becomes the logic.

Moon logic is an amazing tool. A well designed adventure game can explain the general structure and what action and reaction means in world of the game and base puzzle solutions on extrapolation. It’s also a way of problem-solving that incorporates so-called unstructured and structured thinking. It kind of warps your brain, but in a weird way, it becomes a skill. I heard the phrase “Neurons that fire together wire together” today, in regard to problem solving in real life; I think it applies here as well.

TLDR; moon logic is good, leaps of logic are fun if the leaps make sense in relation to the steps they represent in the logic of daily life. As long as the leaps can be consequently explained by the game’s internal logic, there’s beauty in this type of game design.

And cats intuitively understand moon logic. In fact, a healthy specimen can master any form of gravitational pull. Make of that what you will.