The Random Adventure Game News Thread

[V_K]

So guys, what is the adventure game with the best "seriousness * quality" value ? Genuinely interested.

Whispers of a Machine, probably. But its puzzle-solving is also less about items and more about using MC's augmentations. It's also fairly easy, though not down to Unavowed level.

 

[Tramboi]

Thanks, man.
I've got it in my backtrack but didn't begin it.
I was thinking "in the whole gaming history" (but maybe Woam is history stuff, though).
Goetia was great, too.

 

[V_K]

Thanks, man.
I've got it in my backtrack but didn't begin it.
I was thinking "in the whole gaming history" (but maybe Woam is history stuff, though).
Goetia was great, too.

Well, it's older than Interrogation
Historically, I think maybe Shadowgate?

 

[Tramboi]

Well, it's older than Interrogation
Historically, I think maybe Shadowgate?

I'm not looking for the oldest ones, I'm looking for the best ones

Edit: AMFV must be in there, probably. It is damn serious.

 

[Sceptic]

For what it's worth, I've harbored a long grudge against the "lack the courage of their convictions" or "sacrifice the story" type arguments, since they were deployed against Primordia on the theory that Crispin ("a tonal wrecking ball") was inconsistent with the story's mood and themes. My objection to the argument is that it's perfectly fine to say, "The game's story sucks because you can't mix oil and water, and the serious moments and comedic moments constantly undermine each other." But the inference that the author wrote that story that way because he "lacked courage" or whatever is stupid.

You'll recall I don't exactly hold Maher in high regard, we've had this conversation a couple of times over the last few years and it turns out you and I agree completely on this

The Ardai review is interesting to me personally. At the time UKM came out (and remember, it came out before even Phantasmagoria) I was wowed by the technology. Then the CGW review came out and I thought sacrilege! how dare he slam the game so hard! Ardai's writing always came across as a bit pompous and self-important (I couldn't believe when I found out, much later, that he must've been in his early 20s when he started writing for CGW; he always sounded like an even older curmudgeon than Harlan Ellison, and that's quite a feat) and I was willing to write off his opinion as contrarian and irrelevant. After finishing the game and thinking it over I realized he's not wrong. The problem he has with it isn't necessarily that Jones and Conners tried to mix the serious and the comedy (he actually praised BASS for doing the same thing just months before - in before Roxor), but specifically that they undermine a pretty grim plot with cheap and lame humour. Ardai doesn't complain that there are gags in there, but that they are being stuck where they don't belong in a way that destroys the atmosphere the same writers try so hard to build. And you know what? when it comes to UKM specifically I can't say I disagree with him. I'm a pretty big fan of mixing comedic elements in a serious story, and I've seen it and praised it in pretty much every medium. And you know which game pulls this off much, MUCH better? none other than The Pandora Directive, written by and starring the same exact people (having Adrian Carr direct certainly helped, but that's the FMV direction, not the writing). They managed to pull it off decades later with Tesla Effect too. Chris Jones is no amateur, by any stretch; but the writing in UKM is amateurish. I pointed this out when I wrote about Tesla Effect when playing it; those old scenes from UKM that play as flashback look downright embarrassing compared to how well written the main game is. Mixing elements is hard; sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

What I completely don't agree with is what Maher does with Ardai's quote, the fact he takes out of the context of Ardai's other writings and reviews (and conveniently forgets that Ardai specifically praised the mix in other games where he thought it was pulled off well) to spin this narrative about how adventure games always mix elements and are therefore always amateurish in writing. It's the kind of sweeping generalizations and conclusions he likes to make, that allow him to rewrite the narrative of entire genres and companies, and it's this kind of thing that has made me stop taking anything he says seriously years and years ago. As I said to MRY back in 2017 or so, he just wants to wrap is personal (very, very personal) opinions in this aura of respectability ("hey look even CGW agreed with me 25 years ago!) because, quite frankly, his opinions are just lame.

So guys, what is the adventure game with the best "seriousness * quality" value ? Genuinely interested.

Trinity, no contest.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

What really sets the tone for the genre for me is the sheer chutzpah of adventure game designers letting the player character carry inordinate amounts of items without the tedium of weight limits or inventory tetris, making for absurd visual jokes like the animation of George Stobbart producing all sorts of awkwardly large items from his jacket

Encumbrance limits existed in Zork (1980).

 

[Tramboi]

Encumbrance limits existed in Zork (1980).

Though I don't think managing this "knapsack problem" is an interesting part of Infocom games.
And Zork manages lot of silliness even without this constraint

 

[Tramboi]

Trinity, no contest.

Don't know, man. It is serious.
But IIRC there was silly stuff. Coconuts and lemmings ?

 

[CryptRat]

Limited inventory is great in games with resource management, different weapons to choose from, etc..., especially simulationist ones where a character with high strength would be able to wear more than a weaker one, but in classic adventure games it always annoys me a lot (Black Sect comes to mind, Hitchicker's Guide too I think), much more than other generally scorned features such as dead ends which are fun once in a while.

 

[Tramboi]

Oh yes. It's just useless micro-management.

 

[Infinitron]

to spin this narrative about how adventure games always mix elements and are therefore always amateurish in writing.

Wait, isn't it MRY who's saying this (kinda) rather than Maher? He doesn't really make this point in the article, he's mostly just interested in talking about UAKM's goofy Mormon dad humor and how nice it is.

 

[Sceptic]

Wait, isn't it MRY who's saying this (kinda) rather than Maher? He doesn't really make this point in the article, he's mostly just interested in talking about UAKM's goofy Mormon dad humor and how nice it is.

Quoth the Maher:

Ardai isn’t precisely wrong about any of this; the game’s tone really is all over the map, in that way all too typical of adventure-game writers — and, yes, amateur writers of all stripes

 

[LESS T_T]

Monkey Island 30th anniversary box release is coming via Limited Run Games:

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

So...its only going to have the remakes of the first two? Why? What's the point of an anthology if its missing shit?

 

[Baron Dupek]

No Escape?
welp

 

[LESS T_T]

No Escape?
welp

Apparently it will have that.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Speaking of Tales of... - they recently returned to GOG
https://af.gog.com/game/tales_of_monkey_island?as=1649904300

 

[jfrisby]

https://fmvworld.com/article_deanerickson.html

 

[LESS T_T]

After listening to her grandma's mad stories about the coming of a giant wave, Noon takes her submarine fishing. Unfortunately, she gets her submarine stuck underneath a drifting city and finds herself helplessly lost at sea in an attempt to find her way back to home. Noon discovers that there might be more to her grandmother's rambling tale about destruction and tidal waves and that she might have the only key to stopping the destruction, a mythical Tideshell.

Follow Noon as she travels through a thousand year old thunderstorm, visits a dried out lake in a desert where fish still swim at night and explores a sunken city.

The Tideshell Keeper takes you on a classical point and click adventure, filled with humor in an interesting world with a great ensemble of characters. Learn a language called Drift, by talking and listening to the mysterious drifters, inhabitants of the drifting city and use your tideshell to manipulate water in order to stop the impending doom that is about to hit your family and hometown.

Hand drawn frame by frame animation.

Language puzzles inspired by how you would learn a language in real life.

3D water set in 2D hand painted backgrounds for optimal viewing pleasure.

Fully voiced dialogues by talented voice actors.

An original soundtrack inspired by cultures from all over the world.

Mysterious locations and an important story to explore.

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Infinitron]

Well-timed article: https://www.filfre.net/2020/07/beneath-a-steel-sky/

The writing in the game is a touch weaker than its visuals; scriptwriter Dave Cummins isn’t incompetent by any means, but nor is he another Alan Moore. As tends to happen constantly in the adventure genre, the overarching “dark, serious” plot gets immediately overrun in the details by a collapse into comedy, a genre which seems far better suited to the outlandish puzzles that are the driving force of most adventure games, this one included.

Still, the blow of this failure of the game to stick to its dramatic guns is eased immensely simply because a lot of the humor is really, truly funny; it never feels forced, something which is by no means the case in all or even most of this game’s competitors. This is wry British humor at its best: it’s sneakily smart, and also a bit more deviously risque than what you might find in a contemporary American game of this ilk. (One running gag, for example, has to do with a skeezy character’s collection of “pussy pictures” — which, yes, turns out just to be pictures of cats.) You begin the game with a sidekick already in your inventory: your childhood friend Joey, a synthetic personality on a circuit board who can be transplanted into various robots as you go along. His sarcastic banter is a great source of fun and oblique hints, such that when he’s not with you in some sort of embodied form you genuinely miss him. In fact, I’d like the game even more if it had more of him in it. He’s prevented from joining the absolute highest ranks of classic adventure-game sidekicks only by the fact that he’s onscreen less than half the time.

If you hate convoluted adventure-game puzzles on principle, the ones here will do nothing to convince you otherwise. If you enjoy them, on the other hand, Beneath a Steel Sky is a solid implementation of their ilk. It’s not a particularly easy game, but nor is it an unusually hard one for its time, and it is consistently logical in its silly adventure-game way. (In this sense as in several others, it stood head and shoulders above its few competitors among homegrown British graphic adventures, whose grasp on the fundamentals of good game design tended to be shaky at best.) It eschews the contemporaneous interactive-movie trend, with its chapter breaks and extended cut scenes, for a more old-school non-linear approach; for the bulk of the game, you have a fairly large area to roam and multiple problems to work on. There’s never a sense that the puzzles were hasty additions inserted just to give the player something to do; they’re part and parcel of a holistic experience.

Vestiges of Revolution’s earlier rhetoric about creating more dynamic worlds do remain here. Characters are still a bit more active than you might find in a Sierra or LucasArts game, and an unusual number of the puzzles rely on analyzing their movements and timing your own actions just right. That said, the most frustrating aspects of Lure of the Temptress have been excised. For the most part, the designers opted to return to the things that were known to work in this genre rather than continuing to blaze problematic new trails — and it must be said that the game is all the better for it for their conservatism. Likewise, its straightforward one-click interface wasn’t hugely innovative in itself even at the time — this doing-away-with the old menu of verbs was becoming the norm in graphic adventures by this point — but it is a well-executed example of such an interface. All in all, if you like traditional graphic adventures, you’ll find this game to be a sturdy, perhaps occasionally inspired example of the genre.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Jenkem]

 

[Boleskine]

Betrayed Alliance is a QfG-inspired retro adventure. I hadn't heard of this before but it seems to be worth a look.

http://sciwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php?title=Betrayed_Alliance_Book_1

 

[V_K]

Oh wow, that's been a super sneaky release. The website says the original version was released in 2013 - wonder if it was complete back then.