Grumpy Gamer – Why Adventure Games Suck

He wrote this piece in 1989, and then went on and designed Monkey Island 2, which did things like having solutions to puzzels depend on other puzzels in differnet islands in the most annoying way possible, on purpose.

So you have that...

I think the genre has gotten smaller, but higher quality. Games are more a work of love than a marketing hype.

Thimbleweed Park, Kathy Rain, whispers of a machine, Disco Elyseum, Unusual Findings, Sexy Brutale, Darside Detective, blacksad, obra-dimm, takes two, Orwell, unheard, shadows of a doubt, 12 minutes…

I actually enjoy these slow-burn games a lot

I see this is a 2004 post of a 1989 article.

Still, I'm not sure what the definition of "Adventure Game" is. To me, it's usually a game with graphics at the top (not required but most common), and 4 or so lines of text at the bottom. Some times you walk a character around. Other times you just type "exit door", "open drawer", "take key" (or pick from a menu)

Those games might have been dead in some form (King Quest, Monkey Island, etc...) but the basic form has been alive and kicking (a) in the form of Japanese story games and (b) as indie games on places like itch.io. It's covered with "story adventure games"

Of course most of those games would benefit from this list of rules.

The linked post about who killed adventure games is pretty good too:

https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/79.html

I appreciate the dig at Sierra games and their reliance on missable items. But he wrote that puzzles should make sense, and went on to give us the rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle!

Ludonarrative dissonance is, I think, my biggest turn off in gaming. Problem is, the vast majority of games have it because they try to be like movies with a set story and cutscenes and dialogue. So yes, to me Adventure games suck and utterly destroy my suspension of disbelief without fail

Noting that it's dated 2004 and starts with:

> I wrote this back in 1989...

Interesting parallels to games today.

> It is bad design to put puzzles and situations into a game that require a player to die in order to learn what not to do next time.

I feel like this is not good advice anymore. Nowadays dying is more common in games and less intrusive. In some games it’s even canonical that the character is dying. It’s become less intrusive and thus more ok. Even for puzzles I think this is bad advice. Puzzles probably engage the player more when they’re solved right or solved wrong; vs when they’re either solved right or in limbo of not being solved yet. It encourages feedback on your solving path.

Related:

Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936015 - Sept 2022 (57 comments)

Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625578 - March 2020 (104 comments)

Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15569221 - Oct 2017 (1 comment)

> Real time is bad drama

That paragraph recounts the reasons why RTS games never work for me. When I'm gaming, I want to do things in my own time, not be on someone else's clock.

I love Ron Gilbert's games, he's vastly experienced, and his association alone is sufficient to get me to buy any new adventure title; but I cannot understand why he thought it would be ok to use Deus ex machina¹ for the ending of Monkey Island 2 and the relatively recent Return to Monkey Island.

Both of these endings are ruinous to the world he so carefully and beautifully imagined. I just can't grasp what message he was trying to send by trashing his own IP that way. I would honestly like to know. Is it like Notch with Minecraft? Were Monkey Island fans endlessly harassing him? The purpose of Return to Monkey Island seemed to be to address that awkward ending, and (spoiler alert) he doubled down.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina

Has anyone tried Lucy Dreaming? It's first of all a British version of games like Monkey Island (which inspired it) including dry British wit

Secondly the puzzles are hard but very very reasonable, as in I never felt they were unfair. I think they did that as a lesson from the classics, where sometimes Brute Force was the only way objects and environment needed to interact to unlock more of the game.

An enormous amount of thought was put into it, and I hope more games come out like it. I'm truly tired of FPS, grinding 'work simulator ' type games, and multiplayer games which predominate on Steam.

> at the beginning the player should have a clear vision as to what he or she is trying to accomplish. Nothing is more frustrating than wandering around wondering what you should be doing and if what you have been doing is going to get you anywhere.

I disagree. Discovering what it is you're supposed to do is one of the most exciting parts of such games. Myst is the classic example of this. It's like those movies, like the Bourne Identity, where the character wakes up and doesn't know who they are or what they are supposed to do, and has to figure it out as they go along.

Out of modern takes I really liked the game "The Captain" that's like a chain of old point and click adventures strung together with sort of rougelite like mechanics.

I prefer to call them interactive narratives as opposed to interactive movies.

Aside: What Remains of Edith Finch is perhaps the most powerful narrative game ever. Not an adventure game per se. But extremely powerful storytelling.

Full title is much less click-baity:

Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It (1989)

> Real time is bad drama

Not necessarily. The ending sequence with the plane on a motorway in "Full Throttle" had me on the edge of my seat when I played it for the first time, and on replays, too.

Not an adventure game, but it’s amusing the degree to which Infocom & Douglas Adams flaunted rules like this to the extreme of high art for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

It's interesting how this was republished just at the cusp of the rise of indie games. And indie games certainly have been exploring lot of the ideas mentioned.

Does anyone else think Guysbrush Threepwood is based off of Burt Lancaster?

Curious about how LLMs for generating graphics can revive adventure games and have a second thought about this article.

Generating images in Adventure Games was a bottleneck since they were mainly static and fixed within a small set. Now you can generate original images based on the adventure situation.

Off topic but I find gendered writing really jarring and every time I read “she” instead of “he” I get jerked out of the flow of understanding.

I get why the authors do it …. they don’t want to be sexist, so they flip he to she.

It’s much easier to read the gender neutral “they” rather than “she”.

For me anyway.

I liked Hugo's house of horrors 1, 2, and 3 back in the day, but probably wouldn't play a modern version of it in this day and age. LLMs would be an interesting technology for the genre however.

Like, how can he be so pessimistic when Grim Fandango was released some years ago?

The game design advices seems fine though.

[edit, some years ago compared to 2002]

I agree with this and don't worry friends! I am going to make the best adventure game ever soon! Have the plot ready already.