Adventure Gamers - Forums

Lovely surprise to see 3 adventures after there were none in the previous AF. Good to see working on Broken Age has given some of the folk at DF adventure ideas of their own…

Seems like an odd choice of genre for that 70’s and 80’s horror-inspired game. I’m all for it, mind, just don’t see it. 

Eras of Adventures sounds great, but my favourite was actually Mnemonic. Even though I much prefer 3rd-person adventures as a rule, I think it looks fantastic.

Hope at least ONE of them gets it.

I believe Derelict is also something of an adventure game. Though Oliver calls it “like the game Gone Home but in an awesome space ship,” he also says on the forums:

It’s skewed more towards puzzles rather than a interactive narrative. For example you find a closed door in a room without energy, so you’ll have to find a way to restore power in order to be able to progress. So nothing revolutionary here, but I hope the puzzles will be motivated by the context.

Also, in Oliver’s list of ideas, there’s this, which could be puzzle-y depending on how it’s done:

Zero-G: The gravity generator have failed at least for parts of the ship, so stuff would be floating and you’ll have to get around it.

In the non-traditional category, there’s also Ether, which is intriguing but hasn’t yet done enough to explain how it sets itself apart from Journey. (The White Birch from last year’s AF had a similar issue of setting itself apart from Ico.) Even so, it might be of interest to adventure gamers who liked Journey.

A lot of good pitches this year. Personally I was surprised to find myself voting all for non-adventures (though two of them propose puzzles in the action/adventure vein). These ended up being my votes:

1. Steed - This one just feels fun to me. It fits the Double Fine style while also doing something new gameplay-wise. There’s a solid design doc to start from with more details on the forums.

2. Great Spirits - The video didn’t have time to go into much more detail than “like Psychonauts but with ghosts,” so initially I wasn’t sure if this had enough of its own spin. But then I read the design doc and the forums and found that the pitch is very well thought out for what the full game might be like if it were to move beyond prototype stage. I wonder if this was previously pitched to publishers, like Headlander was? It feels like that sort of pitch.

3. Dear Leader - Another strong design doc to start from. I like that it focuses on human decisions instead of resource management.

(Last year I also voted with scope in mind, but this year I decided just to vote for the games I’d most want to play if they became full games and let Double Fine figure out how to make a two-week vertical slice of that.)

Of the adventures mentioned, I’d probably be most happy to see Mnemonic or Derelict go through. Eras of Adventure sounds cute (like EvoLand is for RPGs), but we get several nostalgic homage adventure games as it is, even if we haven’t had this kind of chronological mash-up, so personally I’m more interested in new adventures with their own voice than ones that go heavy on the references to the past. What Could Go Wrong? has potential, but slasher horror is not really my thing, so it’d depend on how gory it is. Mnemonic and Derelict I think would each need to set themselves apart from other games with similar premises, but if they can do that, they could be cool. The concept art for Mnemonic is terrific, coming as it does from a concept artist.

Eras of Adventures might have to miss out for me. Neat idea, just not as original as others.

Besides the two adventures, I’m tossing up between Great Spirits, Headlander, Derelict and Dear Leader.

Hmm…decisions decisions.

And I’m shocked and horrified someone on adventure gamers didn’t vote for an adventure game.  Traitor!

Eras od adventures reminds me of Evoland:

Curious about What Could Go Wrong? - hope it wins

What Could Go Wrong? sounds like an excellent Telltale-type game, where your choices influence which one/s of the teenagers survives (if any).

Could actually work better than a point-and-click, actually.

I hope people reading this thread will go look at the entries, since there are a bunch that are adventure-like, not just the three linked in the first post. I voted for Mnemonic, Gone Astray, and Great Spirits.

I like the concept of Eras of Adventure but it’s hard for me to get amped about it without knowing anything about the story… without that it sounds kind of gimmicky.

I voted for Mnemonic, Eras of Adventure and—even though it doesn’t seem to be an adventure game—The White Witch’s Gnome War. The last vote is because I was impressed with Levi Ryken’s Black Lake in the 2012 Amnesia Fortnight. I’m curious to see what he might come up with this time.

fov - 08 February 2014 12:18 PM

I hope people reading this thread will go look at the entries, since there are a bunch that are adventure-like, not just the three linked in the first post. I voted for Mnemonic, Gone Astray, and Great Spirits.

I like the concept of Eras of Adventure but it’s hard for me to get amped about it without knowing anything about the story… without that it sounds kind of gimmicky.

I do think Great Spirits has a much better pitch than two of the three adventure ones…and having a pdf like Mnemonic and Great Spirits did helps a lot.

Eras and What Could… are both quite vague with their pitches, even looking at their official forum threads for them. But I still voted for ‘em in the end. Sue me.

An 80’s horror-inspired adventure sounds right up my alley. The possibility of something akin to the convention-breaking (and hilarity factor) of the most-excellent recent film Tucker and Dale Vs Evil would be just swell.

Eras…has no commercial prospects whatsoever, and would hold very little appeal to anyone outside, well, this website, but threadbare plot notwithstanding, it just sounds like it’d be fun, gimmicky or not.

But meh…I doubt any of the adventures will get through- Mnemonic has the best chance, so fingers crossed for that one- so a part of me felt obliged to vote for ‘em on that basis. (But mostly I liked the sound of all three prototypes). 

Great Spirits, Headlander, Ether, Derelict and Dear Leader were unlucky to miss out.

Really loads of interesting stuff to choose from. Much friendlier to adventurer’s than the last AF, I think.

Eras of Adventure is definitely my choice, especially given my slight disappointment with Broken Age. I really hope there will be pastiches/homages of old adventure titles(like DOTT or Curse of Monkey Island).

Im not sure why, but eras of adventure just did not appeal to me. I think its because iv played some of the several games lately that use this exact same concept in other genres (evoland) and it just doesnt work as well as you might think. Jumping between many styles runs a serious risk of not doing any of the styles particularly well.
I voted for gone astray, dear leader, and mnemonic. I particularly hope mnemonic makes the cut, it would be interesting to see a cerebral dark doublefine game.