Adventure Redux

Prepare for a waffling!

WARNING: This post contains Matt rabbiting on, some pixelated pretty pictures and not much else! Hope you didn’t get enough waffle at breakfast!

Once the staple of home PC entertainment, adventure games have seen a steady decline ever since the second half of the 90′s. This, perhaps, is one of the few bad points ever to come out of our increasing fascination with multiplayer gaming. It probably also suffers from the immediate 24 hour support line that we know and love as the internet. Gone are the days that if you hit a block with a game you’d just have to wrestle your brain around it (or worse, BUY A HINT BOOK). These days, and I’ll admit to this myself, if a puzzle takes more than half an hour to figure out, it’s off to plunder the internet for solutions!

And perhaps this was what really hurt the adventure genre. Toward the end of their popularity, many adventure releases were coming up with puzzles either so fiendishly difficult or just downright ridiculous that many gamers simply switched off. My brother will still laugh if I tell him that a Nuctipund Stepping Disk doesn’t work in that manner, which is a childhood joke brought forward from playing the player unfriendly Return To Ringworld. Even for someone who had read the novel it was based upon, the game offered few to no hints on what most items, including the Nuctipund Stepping Disk, were actually for, let alone what you were supposed to do with them. Being fully voice acted, this led to your computer stating over and over again “The Nuctipund Stepping Disk does not work in this manner” in a rich baritone voice as you attempted to find out what the fucking thing was supposed to do.

you can't get ye flask_

This kind of “mix and match” gameplay was mostly a legacy left to adventure gamers by the text adventure. With no graphical hints, it was quite common to sit in a given area trying to use every item in your inventory to see what happened.

>You are in a opulent grotto. Once you’ve finished looking up in the dictionary what a “grotto” is, you can see a bird, a chair and a flickering candelabra.
>sit in chair_
>You relax in the chair. Nothing happens.
>look at bird_
>The bird sits on the table. You notice it has a message tied around it’s foot.
>catch bird_
>I do not understand “catch”.
>use sword on bird_
>You can’t do that.
>stand up_
>I do not understand “stand up”. The bird flies away.
>fucking shitty FUCK cockarse bird!_
>I do not understand “fucking shitty”
>CTRL+Q

And if it wasn’t ridiculous puzzles with no explanation, it could be moving one pixel off an invisible path and dying. King’s Quest 3: To Heir Is Human was most of my first, most beloved and enormously loathed adventure games, where on top of avoiding a wizard who turned up on the hour to check you were doing your chores, if you wanted to leave the house you had to make your way down a paper thin mountain path without falling off.

Err, yeah, thanks for the advice

In fact, a lot of Sierra’s Quest adventures fell into this catagory. Players could be killed or failed for the most minor of mistakes, forcing them to load a previous save. No-one who experienced it could forget the enforced tedium of Police Quest 1, where on top of a hundred other regulations, you could be failed for not walking around your car before leaving the station. Worse than that even, the games could often force you into a no win situation where a save game could already have failed and just not mentioned it yet. This led to a string of save games eight long or further in an effort to avoid trapping yourself. Kind of like the electronic equivalent of keeping your fingers on the previous pages of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book.

But despite their faults, which could be many, the games had story, something that you quite often didn’t get in early computer games and this was the appeal: The ability to play one character through an ongoing plot.

Blending adventure and RPG

There were also early attempts to blend RPG and adventure too, which worked out quite favourably. The Hero’s Quest (later changed to Quest for Glory after the Hero’s Quest board game found some lawyers) games set the player in the boots of a would-be adventurer, and gave them a choice with the way they wanted to play the game. Players could select either a Fighter, Magic-User or Thief to tackle the game, each with their own take on problem solving. The game used stat building activities to increase a player’s modifiers, included a basic economy and gave adventurers the chance to fight battles with monsters in real time. It also had a sense of humour about itself, something which would eventually become synonymous with the adventure genre.

Sierra also went a long way to diversify the genre too.  Sure, Hero’s Quest and King’s Quest were your typical fantasy fare, but they also diversified their games to include sci-fi parody (Space Quest), crime drama (Police Quest) and even forays into the adult market with Leisure Suit Larry, albiet in a rather pixelated and censored way.  All of these series saw progressive sequels too, which was a testament to their popularity.

Bravo toilet humour, bravo!

Sierra made a lot of moves in the right direction, but then the world met LucasArts and thier Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (better known as SCUMM). Maniac Mansion was a revolution for adventure gaming, and it started not on the PC but the Commodore 64 of all places. Rather than typing directions manually into the script bar, a factor which had been with Sierra for most of it’s lifespan, players could select their actions from a menu then combine that action with an on screen element. This simplified things enormously for the player as it gave them a lexicon of words with which to interact with the game. Gone were the days of “I don’t understand x“, replaced with simple inaction on your character’s part (or sometimes a vague hint at a solution).  Maniac Mansion did many things to revolutionise the genre, including allowing the player to choose from a variety of playable characters, and the almost unheard of ability to unlock multiple endings.

SCUMM (in it’s various evolutions) was also to lay the foundations for LucasArts to produce bigger and better adventure games.  By far the most famous was The Secret of Monkey Island, but other games based on SCUMM included Day Of The Tentacle (a sequel to Maniac Mansion), Sam and Max: Hit the Road, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and later The Dig and Full Throttle.

For the most part, LucasArts also removed the ability to die from these games, allowing the player to take the games at their own pace without concern for multi-saving.  This was a refreshing change for more casual gamers who didn’t fancy the baby steps approach of Sierra games, and let them enjoy a game without concern of failing out.  The Secret of Monkey Island even made jest of it’s own “anti-death” rule.  As the game begins, the hero Guybrush admits to only having one talent, which is being able to hold his breath for ten minutes.  Some might have found this a little random, but it becomes surprisingly useful later in the game when he gets dumped in the ocean with a weight on his feet.  Later still, you can have Guybrush fall off a cliff, which causes a Sierra themed “Reload, Restart, Quit” window, but before you have a chance to click anything Guybrush comes flying back over the edge of the cliff after landing on a “rubber tree”.

Amazing graphics for the era

LucasArts also weren’t afraid to diversify.  One of my earliest games for PC was Loom, a LucasArts (then still Lucasfilm) adventure game that did away with the traditional inventory and text parser, leaving the player with only a “look” prompt and the ability to cast spells based on a musical scale.  The player had to decipher spells by listening to the environments around them, and then apply the spells they learnt to solve the game’s puzzles.  What was also neat was the fact that most spells worked in two ways.  If players cast a spell in reverse, it would give the negative effect of the original spell (open would close, twist would straighten, etc.).  Another nice touch was that spells would not remain the same from game to game, which resulted in many scraps of paper next to PCs dotted with notations along the lines of: “open – ceed, dye – cdcd”.  If you were musically inclined enough, you could even play the game by ear: deciphering the spells without visual assistance from the game.

I think Rex Nebular IS a pretty cool guy

By this time, any number of other developers had begun to try their hand at the adventure genre.  As with any genre rush there was plenty of rubbish, but there were also many unique hits.  Games like Simon the Sorcerer, Legends of Kyrandia, Discworld, Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender (a game with real pixelated nudity!), Bad Mojo and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary all added their own unique angles on the adventure theme.

Probably the last of the great adventure games was Myst, a fully 3D adventure-puzzle game.  Myst even managed to hold the title of highest selling PC game for a while before being knocked off it’s post by the introduction of The Sims.  What was so enticing about Myst was that (as the name abbreviates) both it’s goals and setting begin as a mystery.  The player is simply the Stranger, and to discover where you are and what’s going on is a slow affair that mostly depends on your exploration of the island.  It’s a laid back affair, for the most part, which appealed once again to a more casual market who were mostly in adventure games for the puzzles.

There were more sequels and new series yet to come in the adventure genre, but for the most part they had become unpopular as most gamers switched to the instant action titles.  Those interested simply in the logic challenges would move on to new purely puzzle games or head back to their crossword.  Any newcomers to the genre would most likely play a game through on auto-pilot with a combination of online FAQs and help from friends, and while reducing the challenge also reduce the enjoyment.

So these days a lot of the satisfaction has gone from the genre. No matter how insanely difficult a game’s puzzle might be, there is always someone on the internet who knows how to solve it and will post it willingly. Entire sites are built around this theory, in fact, and I don’t blame them.  As game players we’ve become a little too accustomed to having our hand held through puzzle sections of games, and our challenges focused upon action segments.

Guybrush Threepwood: Now In 3D!

This is where the new generation of adventure games comes to the fore, spearheaded by Telltale Games (a studio mostly made up of ex-LucasArts employees, which would oddly simultaneously make them from last generation).  The episodic adventure games under their production provide some new chapters to well-loved older franchises.  They also seem to be trying to accomodate all lovers of adventure games, having created more of a “interactive TV” experience than a game for the hardcore point-and-clicker in all of us.  Adventure nuts love the content, casual gamers enjoy the challenges.  It’s a well organised, long overdue attempt at a revival of a genre most thought dead.  The storylines are back, the off-the-wall puzzles are back and (most importantly) the humour is back.

Now I recent played through season one of the new Sam and Max episodes, and I set out in the spirit of this article to complete the whole six episodes without consulting the internet.  I’ll admit to my shame, I did throw up my hands at one point and run to Google to solve a puzzle, but for the most part I stuck to my guns and remained spoiler-free.  Coming to the end of episode six, I was happy that I’d bothered to enjoy the game for myself rather than just run it through a search engine.  If you want to see what I thought of the game, you can look that over here.

Of course playing adventure games multiplayer isn't always a helpful experience

Another website looking to make a comeback for the adventure games is Sarien.Net.  Sarien has a collection of early Sierra games available for you to play instantly through your browser.  What makes this even more fun is that you can play any game multiplayer.  While you play any of the games on site, you’ll also find whoever else is online wandering around the same areas.  You can even chat to them via speech bubbles that appear above your character’s head.  Not only is the adventure gaming great fun, but playing with a friend opens a huge opportunity to wierd out and make inappropriate jokes while in the game.  My favourite was playing Police Quest, changing into a towel in the locker room then returning to the main hall where players spawn.  The game fails you, but you can remain there motionless as long as you like, which meant that every time a new player joins the game they’d see a towel-covered Sonny saying “Hey, how’s it going?”.  Fun for all the wrong reasons.  Oh, and you know, if you wanted to play the actual games, you can do that too.

So adventure may be back on the rise.  There is a great anticipation after this year’s E3 for the upcoming Tales of Monkey Island episodes, and also the graphically updated by true to it’s original Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition.  All that remains is that by enjoying new games based on old franchises, we can hopefully see the release of some new titles or series.  I await the day, Nuctipund Stepping Disk at the ready.

Now good for you, you’re still reading!  As a present, if you’re now intent on reliving some past glories, here’s some pointers in the right direction.  Firstly, you should definitely be taking yourself over to the Telltale Games site to check out their work, it’s top notch and they know their roots.  Secondly, if you’re looking to the past and don’t much fancy Sarien.Net, the most important thing any adventure fan should now own is ScummVM.  This clever piece of freeware runs a virtual environment that allows older adventure games to play without a hitch on a modern day computer.  Even better than that, it’s not actually just for games running on the SCUMM build!  If you enjoy old adventure games and haven’t yet heard of it, get your puzzle-solving butt over to their website for the details.  I don’t think they support Return To Ringworld yet … something you might want to be thankful for.

-Matt