Adventure Gamers - Forums

Today’s scene features the mean dog that inhabits many an adventure game as an obstacle. This particular dog is from Trev to the Rescue (1997), an Australian game geared towards kids. It’s not bad as far as games for kids go, but it has some of those absurd adventure game scenarios that plague even some of the best of titles.

For instance, your brother who ate some wild berries that were poisonous is lying sick in bed and you need to find a cure, because Australian suburbs apparently don’t have doctors or hospitals and have to rely on old fisherman who know their way around the jungle to give you the cure, but only after doing him some favor to help him with a trivial task he is doing.  This isn’t the example I wanted to give, but it’s kind of funny…

Anyway, your brother is thirsty and asks for some water before he will tell you where he found the berries. There is, of course, not a single vessel capable of holding water in your large suburban home or any of your neighbor’s homes. Instead, you must travel to a remote area on your bicycle and scour the rocky shore of a peninsula until you find a dirty old jar that washed ashore or was simply left there, take it home, fill it with water from your house’s tap (without cleaning the jar first), and give it to your brother.

I don’t mean to pick on this game in particular. After all, it’s a whimsical game for kids that doesn’t need to be or is even meant to be realistic at all, but it just reminds me of all the times similarly absurd crap occurs in many other games in the genre, even the rather serious ones. Like baking cookies in the middle of an intense serial killer investigation for instance…