Did Moon Logic Kill Adventure Games?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ส.ค. 2024
- Well, probably not. But it did play a part in our preferences for adventure games. Here I discuss some of the evolution of puzzle design.
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"Lucasarts is dumbing down adventure games by appealing to the people we actively chased out of our market." - Sierra, business geniuses
Sierra regularly outsold most LucasArts adventure games, so I don't think they chased anyone out, or at least not many.
@@bud389 I mean this is an old-ass comment but from context clues I'm going to guess it was more of a figurative statement about moon logic puzzles and the ability to softlock the end of the game by missing something seven hours ago, than a literal assessment of their business success.
@@bud389 I respect that I literally used the phrase "business geniuses" but that's a bad choice of phraseology on the part of past me, which I apologize for
Moon logic caused me to be among the first generation of gamers to bail out of adventure games back in the late 70s. There was a text-based game called 'Pirate Adventure,' which began in a London flat. The door to the hallway was locked. I tried for days to get out of that room. Finally I ordered the hint book. The hint was, "SAY YO HO."
I closed the hint book and decided not to go any further with the game.
The company folded thereafter, so a lot of people felt the same way. The solution was so notorious that the game creator later wrote a regular feature column for a popular computer magazine under the title, "SAY YO HO."
'The hint was, "SAY YO HO."
I closed the hint book and decided not to go any further with the game.
'
Wow, that's literally pure AIDS.
Did you need a bottle of rum? I bet the key was in it after you drink it.
I've played that game. Isn't there a piece of paper you find in that first area that literally says "SAY YOHO" on it?
@@stevethepocket I don't recall anything like that. However, the game was called Pirate Adventure, and there are links in the wikipedia article to download it or play it online, if you wish to ascertain that.
Scott Adams adventure games were hugely popular in the late 70s and early 80s.
I'm firmly in the bad design camp when it comes to these types of puzzles. I don't find solving them fulfilling, just tedious and frustrating. If the puzzles make sense, even if the logic is a little obfuscated, I'll eventually have an "oh, yeah" moment and will feel pretty pleased with myself for working out the solution. On the other hand, if the logic is completely absent, and the puzzle either relies on blind guesswork or knowing events that have yet to happen in game, I don't get that buzz. Same goes for "hunt the pixel" puzzles.
An addendum to the "Don't eat the food" rule: In King's Quest 5, you have to eat the food at one point. To be exact, you need to eat one of two foods, then give the other half of that food to a starving eagle, bearing in mind that either of the two foodstuffs will work in both cases, but you need one specific foodstuff in order to fend off a monster later, and if you eat it yourself or you give it to the eagle, the game has been rendered unwinnable.
King's Quest 5 kinda sucks in hindsight.
Also, in King's Quest 3, there was some food in the kitchen that you could eat with no consequence. Not too many players knew this, but the porridge bowls in the bears' house respawn. So even if you ate all the food in the kitchen and failed to make the cat cookie in time, before Manannan came back, you could just give him the plain porridge and then go get another bowl when he made his next trip.
And then there's the Quest for Glory series; in which you have to regularly eat food, to keep from starving to death. (I personally always stock up on Marrak's pizzas and gyros, when playing Dragon Fire, because I refuse to let my characters eat the garbage that Ann serves at the inn.)
King's Quest is the series that made me stop playing puzzle and adventure games period. There's no such thing as a King's Quest game in which every puzzle can be solved through logical deduction and thoughtful consideration. It's guessing, hoping, and restarting. Over and over. They're not puzzle games because they're not puzzles. They're guessing games.
Gabriel Knight 3 in a nutshell:
Use double-sided tape to tear hair off a cat in order to create a fake mustache in order to impersonate a man who does not have a mustache.
"They make it so you can't defeat Zurg, unless you buy this book! It's extortion, that's what it is!" -Rex, Toy Story 2
Holy shit
GID GUD SCR00B
What a line
well that was more referencing gaming in general not just adventure games.
Yep. Lazy designers.
"Just click every pixel and try every verb and noun combination..!"
Lazy. Barking. Designers.
Hard puzzles is one thing but unwinnable states, or "dead man walking" situations, are 100% assholery. Being able to eat that sandwich and screw yourself over is just not okay from a design perspective. It's silly. Just silly. I'm cross now. Cross at 20+ year old computer games.
they need it to sell those guide books man, they didnt have microtransactions at the time kkk
KGB also called Conspiracy was a great example. You had to collect a box of matches when searching an office very early on in the game, it wasn't until and hours hours later in the game, that you would need those matches and were basically f**ked if you didn't have them.
in games that old. You expected to have every item to have a use and simply just eating most things was probably a bad idea. In some games doing so even killed you. Some of the moon logic wasn't as illogical back in the day. though they were still something that could take way out of the box thinking. The honey is an example. Your actually using it's yellow colour and the glittering of the emeralds to lure out the leprechaun. But the game doesn't outright tell you any of that.
The sandwich is a similar thing. You didn't want to eat it because it would likely be useful.
Dark Souls uses a similar way of thinking because it's roots are in the same basic kind of area even though a bit less outright puzzle based as say things like Kings Quest or the Monkey Island series.
then again. Back then RPG's, Action/adventure games, and things like dark souls predicessors were all practically one genre. (some style of puzzle games were kind of tossed into this mix as well. Such as all the Myst-like games.) They didn't start diverging really until the mid to late 90's and then further in the early 2000's to be the distinct different styles that they are now.
Unwinnable states are just larger-scale puzzles. Rather than just dealing with one situation at a time, you need to consider the overall situation
That's presentism, and it exists because you have no frame of reference so you apply your modern point of view to the past. I can help you, there.
20 years ago and more, you were lucky to get 10 new games a year that you wanted to play. Most of them would be in the 15-40 dollar range with some as high as 50. No INTERNET. No quick and easy walkthroughs. So, if you are going to drop 40.00 on a game, you need to be sure that it will last you well over a month. Today that's known as the sunk cost fallacy, where you think you get value out of something because of what you had to put into it, it was the only way to justify paying those prices. How else would a developer make a game that would be guaranteed to last the customer a month or more? What they ended up doing was making puzzles within puzzles and making games actually have fail states, thus making them challenging as opposed to easy (which was the worst thing that could be said about a game, back then). Nowadays, with the exception of a few titles, you can beat any game with only minor time investment, which explains the disposable nature of the market thanks to the ephemeral nature of digital products.
It's odd. I really like adventure games but I somehow managed to dodge any that would contain outrageous moon logic or feature dead ends. That said, I was born in 1994 so I probably was in the lucky position to have the best of adventure games spoon-fed to me, if that makes any sense.
But one thing I did experience and really hate is having to figure out the right terminology in text-based adventures. For instance in Space Quest, while I don't remember the exact words, I think you were in some vehicle and if you wanted to leave you could go "leave", "exit", "get out", "climb out" all you wanted, the game wants to hear one thing and one thing only: "disembark", and nothing else will work.
Several times I had to realize I figured out a puzzle way sooner but couldn't beat it until the point that I finally used a word the game had in its dictionary. That shizz was frustrating.
The most infamous example I've heard in mainstream gaming media comes from Gabriel Knight III, in which you have to jury rig a disguise by making a cat hair mustache.
And the person you are being disguised as doesn't even have a mustache
That's horrific
Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek of Old Man Murray said it proved no one killed point and click adventure games but instead they committed suicide. The two of them became game designers out of spite from that game and ended up writing and making some of the greatest games of all time.
Early adventure games were Pay-to-Win. Who knew.
I don't know why she was even skeptical in this vid. It became increasingly obvious with nearly every kind of game when Nintendo got really mad at the makers of Game Genie, every gaming magazine suddenly changed their tune around a year after people started posting every trick and walkthrough for games on the internet, and lo and behold, games started changing in difficulty and solve-ability themselves around that time.
Today it's pay to brag. Same diff
I think one of the Monkey Island games had a pun about calling the LucasArts helpline where you need to dialogue with a helpline employee.
@@LieutenantWaldron GameFAQs and CheatCC changed things, that's for sure.
Tzanislav Filipov or just git gud
Moon logic is bad game design. Period. End of story.
It's no longer a puzzle when something like this comes up, it's just a guessing game.
Alex Desilets it’s only moon logic if you are dumb
@@Quincy_Morris What? Some of those puzzles were 100% arbitrary, not based in logic, so not guessing them didn't you were dumb, it meant you weren't psychic.
@@Quincy_Morris if there's a conversation that occurred earlier that tells you how in that forest dwell imps who are attracted by honey, that's a puzzle.
If you just have to figure out you need to randomly drop honey on the ground without any hint, it's moon logic.
Kind of. Some were intentional. They led to bad user experience but did what was intended things such as increasing length, or filling up\mascareding the games flaws. They're bad and often (if not always) result of overall bad design, but in the sense of reaching the intended result they weren't bad design. The intent was wrong in some way.
Theres also pressure and technical limitations. Its akin to how 'nes-hard' games were hard- both because of arcade nature and cartridges perceived value, making games harder made then last longer thus being better perceived value and more profit. To this day you go to steam reviews and short games are burned regardless of how good they are.
The same happened back then. If those old games had logical mundane puzzles they were over in like an hour, many (if not most) less then that, all in a few screens. Theres way waaay better ways of doing then, but technical limitations also helped things leaning toward artificial difficulty.
The simple alternative would be making then longer- that would mean many many more floppy disks, way more expensive games to an already expensive medium... wouldn't work.
And theres the old hard puzzle niche. Heck i remenber theres a famous best seller book that was entirely an hard to solve puzzle, one that led to a irl treasure to be found. It sold a lot just on that, and many loved these kinds of books and games for the difficulty. Different times and different tastes. Its not just product of times either- nowadays we can see those folks in the ARG scene, going over strange links, reverse engineering files, finding hidden audio files to play backward, going to strange places just to see if some numbers are gps coordinates (and in those games they often are)... hardly the mainstream public, reason why the oldschool puzzle games died out.
Yeah, you're not really solving a puzzle so much as winning a guessing game. Moon-logic is just pure trial and error, and I've never felt any sense of having achieved something when I've finally guessed the right sequence.
I noticed that modern puzzle-driven adventure games tend to allow player to work on several puzzles at the time in some way to counteract that frustration of getting stuck. Both Gemini Rue and Broken Age allow player to switch between two concurrent plot threads, so if you got stuck in one story - instead of ragequitting, you could simply try to tackle the other story until tired of it, get stuck there too, or get an 'eureka' moment and have an idea on what could possibly work there.
My whole life is Moon Logic.
My whole fish is a sword. º(°¬°)º
@@Novasky2007 put the dead fish in the walk in freezer then use it as a sword to defeat the ghost ninja
I can't say I ever loved moon logic or appreciated it in any way. Those were testing my patience and not my wit, while I don't have much of either I can at least respect a problem that makes me feel dumb but eventually proud for solving it over a problem that makes me feel bored and ultimately annoyed when I look up the solution.
This video takes me back. Ten year old me getting super angry playing King's Quest V on my brand new 486/DX2 66. I didn't understand how they could make puzzles that made absolutely no sense.
I was playing Kings Quest IV on my 486/DX2 66 when I was 13. After playing Monkey Island 1/2 and then getting onto KQ IV, I just rage quit when I found out you could put the game in an unwinnable state! Even to 13 year old me, after coming from Lucasart's games, unwinnable states and deaths seems like a terrible idea.
Played Kings Quest V and got to the very end but couldn’t beat it because I forgot an item. Made me so upset.
Good lord. I hadn't watched a video of yours in years and clicked on this. Didn't regret it - wonderful work here.
Why thank you.
why not Outlast? xD
Chris Warren
but yeah i too would love to see her play thorugh some kind of newer horror game
I'm not all that into her normal playthrough stuff, but she does excellent discussion topic videos. I wish she would do more.
Scott Rivers When I was a child I had some kind of subscription to scholastic choice games for my C128.. They were kind of like a primitive version of what Telltale is doing now.. I always hoped they made a comeback! My ex colleague says you need the most amount of patience for RPGS that which he doesn't have.. And, then he goes and plays stuff like Hotline Miami & Mega Man.. Good lord.. smh
No, the moon logic is bad design. I played these games in spit of the moon logic. I think it played a large part in the demise of the genre.
a lot of games had moon logic back then which made it satisfying to finally beat the game like 4 years later.
@@Tethloach1 yeah... that's kind of a sunk cost fallacy tricking us I think. Or, if we really want to get extreme, Stockholm syndrome.
@@Elvalley The moon logic in the game would make no logical sense to the rest of the game, meaning you would have to really be out there, the may give you vague hint. " shoot for the morning star" which in moon logic means shoot the sun with an arrow at a specific spot at a specific time, and it wasn't just poetry. explain what sunk cost fallacy means because if I google it the definition may not match yours.
@@Elvalley That is not true at all, some games are valuable and worth playing, others do lose value and you have to justify playing them because of the emotional investment, it only applies in some cases, a game that I put 2000+ hours into did require I literally bought 5 consoles for one series of games, and 5 consoles for like one single game. I just couldn't bring myself to leave that game so yes it applies sometimes but not every time.
@@Tethloach1 I can't say resolving a moon logic puzzle brought me satisfaction. It is often more a sense irritation or cheated. I get more satisfaction from the sense of being clever, not from being persistent enough to work my way through N number combinations of possibilities.
You say "IF YOU HAVE FOOD DO NOT EAT IT" but then you showcase, specifically, an item that Graham *must consume* in order to progress in the game. The game tells you that you're hungry on the snowy peaks, and if you do anything other than eat half of that piece of meat (The game does not tell you there will be leftovers) you will die and there is no way to progress.
The Success of MYST basically killed off Inventory based game design in exchange for Information based puzzles. People discovered a game where problem solving occurred in a realistic way, by applying gained knowledge, actual puzzles; rather than using trial-and-error to test every possible interaction between inventory items and set pieces, which involves absolutely no skill, and offers absolutely no challenge, and technically doesn't even qualify as a puzzle, since there is no thought involved.
Inventory management survived (ha!) in Survival Horror games, which used them as an easy way to control what areas the player has access to, but changed them to tools and keys that have interactions that make sense.
I wouldn't call all inventory item based adventure games "trial-and-error, trying every possible interaction". In a *good* adventure game you don't need to use trial and error since there's always a hint for everything.
Usually "moon logic" refers either to games where the item interactions don't make sense in the real world, OR games where there is no information in the game itself about how to properly use an item until after you use it (if at all).
I'm specifically talking about the second definition which became pretty common in the early 90s, so much so that the genre as a whole was known for this. Adventure fans stuck around because of occasionally a game would come up (those good games you were talking about) that had fulfilling puzzles and exploration; but when alternatives to games came along that offered fulfilling puzzles and exploration without the stigma of moon logic, the demographic as a whole moved to greener pastures.
There are absolutely great games that use challenging logic-based inventory puzzles, but the genre as a whole had moved away from this.
Everyone points to the cat hair puzzle in Gabriel Knight as the king of the moonlogic puzzles in Sierra titles, and I haven't even played this game yet.
Myst's puzzles were somewhat moon-logic if you were unwilling to watch the cutscenes, or couldn't understand them. This is essentially a problem with the technology of the day (a scratch on the CD could render a movie as jibberish, now consider that the brothers videos actually use "noise" as a way to demonstrate the book is missing pages, you could miss the hints.)
I actually liked playing Myst, but it felt way too empty and I kept expecting something to jump out.
Well, see, the problem is that there's no difference. Something making sense *to you* doesn't mean it makes sense to your players, doesn't mean that they'll see what connections are there after brute forcing it, and doesn't mean that they won't brute force it because it involves less thinking.
Discworld 1 is my favourite for moonlogic.
That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! That doesn't work! Yes, using a frog on sleepy Rincewind/octopus in toilet will definitely work!
I think that the whole walkthrough thing is very important to consider. If I play a game these days that has a puzzle in it, I'll try to figure it out. But if I can't logic my way through it, unless it's a puzzle game I WILL go to a walkthrough. So it seems to me that puzzles these days have to at least appear doable, or else you lose the player.
Right, you can even have extremely difficult puzzles but they need to give you a sense of progression as you try to figure them out. If you just get stuck people will quit or google the answer.
I do think that these puzzles are just bad design. It's a bit similar to old school platforming. They were extremely difficult and unfair, at first to make people pay more at arcades, and then to artificially inflate the time it takes to beat the game.
People might feel nostalgic towards games they liked when they were young, but give someone without the nostalgia goggles to compare unfair games to fair games, and I'll bet that almost everyone will choose the fair ones.
I think moon logic puzzles were at least a product of their time in regards to hardware limitations. KQ1 demonstrates this since the entire open world within the game can be explored within minutes. A player who has all the answers to the puzzles can complete it within half an hour. Naturally as hardware capabilities expanded, the game worlds got bigger, sometimes taking hundreds of hours to explore. Now imagine if a world the size of Skyrim employed Sierra's design philosophy. You'd have players dying before they could even reach Riverwood, let alone get to Whiterun and commence the games main plot.
Yes, but we may still disagree on what is unfair and what is fair enough. If a game insists on holding my hand, I might call that unfair. And sometimes, people just miss the hints the game did provide and then blame the game for their fickle attention span.
I think the difference there is in a game like contra or castlevania, I can tolerate the enemies being a bit cheap and unfair at times since they're sort of arcade like in that stages themselves aren't long, it just takes a long time to figure out how to figure out enemy patterns and find a way to get through it one piece. because of that it doesn't take all that long to get back from where you started if there's a game over, since you've probably mastered everything prior to that.
if a game you've spent 6 hours on and have become engrossed in the narrative of gives you an unwinable without saves to go back on, that's another story.
ofcourse people will prefer fair games, but that is not the point, back in the 80s people liked to have games that were super hard and would take months to complete, that was the reason to buy them, anyone who was into adventure games knew it would be frustrating, but that was the charm of them!
Chilledfish of course what's considered "fair" nowadays is every game needs to bash your head in with every tiny detail imaginable, and holding your hand.
"Makes total sense! Food is typically made for consumption!"
- PushingUpRoses, 2017
Great video.
In response to your tweet about Grim Fandangos difficulty btw it is entirely possible that you're right and we're all just really bad at adventure games. In fact that's quite likely I think :P
Or I could just be a genius, something I will also readily accept as truth. Honestly, I think the more you like a genre the more naturally it will come; if point-n-clicks aren't on your radar for enjoyment, they're gonna seem grueling. I will say that Grim has its obtuse moments though, that's for sure. It's also my favorite game of all time, so I admit to that bias. ;) Thanks for watching!
I think I could have liked point and clicks but Discworld killed any chance of that. Even knowing a ton about the Discworld universe doesn't really help. I played 90% of that game with a walkthrough just so I could get the story, prior to the advent of TH-cam.
Discworld is going to kill your adventure game libido, hands down. I appreciate that game for it's beautiful aesthetic and some dry humor, and it stays true to the absurdity of Terry Pratchett's world, but it's it's tragically not enjoyable. I would even say it's the hardest adventure game ever developed. I believe there's a perfect adventure out there for everyone...but it's not Discworld.
Yeah Discworld is truly THE game where you need a walkthrough. As a kid, even with the walkthrough I found it confusing. Damn funny game though and charming.
Probably you're a genius. And when the aliens (or malign A.I. or whatever) attack and the future of mankind is decided on playing adventure games, we know who to call.
"If you have food... DO NOT EAT IT!" *zooms in on the half-eaten leg of meat*
I wonder whether hint books were intended to be the 80s equivalent of microtransactions, but getting all the money up front because they didn't have convenient ways to add cents to your bill for every puzzle you needed help with. You could just wait until you had the resources (i.e. a random idea) to keep playing, or you could pay for the means to progress immediately. The sad part is that most of the puzzles that stumped me weren't even the moon logic ones, but by the time I got to those, I already had the hint books and never had a problem.
A bit surprised not to see any Coktel games in the video, though, aside from the cameo appearance of Goblins 3 in your GOG list. I think "Coktel logic" is either a synonym or a step entirely above moon logic.
I haven't played enough of those games to be comfortable with discussing their puzzles. I literally NEVER think of them; they just aren't my style. I'm sure people are going to say "I'm surprised [this!] isn't on here" a LOT on this video, but in my defense...MOST games aren't on here. ;)
I'm gonna go the opposite and say "I'm surprised Dark Souls is in here!" Have you played it? Like it? Thoughts beyond "It's intentionally difficult"?
No thoughts for this specific video; it's in there to give an example about challenging gameplay players sometimes prefer.
nidoking042 I remember how Leisure Suit Larry famously sold MORE Hint Books than copies of the game, because LSL was one of the biggest pirated games ever.
They were... kinda. There was a big bruhaha about third party printed "guides" to games before the internet was a thing. What people eventually did was acquire hints from BBS's before the internet, and there were entire "hint book" programs you could download or buy... and still can (UHS hints) that were pretty much identical to the content you could get from the official BBS.
One thing that has never changed was that hints ultimately wreck the game experience for new players.
Ron Gilbert (of MI) wrote an article called Why Adventure Games Suck (1989) (grumpygamer.com/why_adventure_games_suck), where he explained why arbitrary puzzles are a bad thing. I recommend you to read it. Also linked Old Man Murray article "Death of Adventure Games" is worth it. What killed adventure games, answer is the last line of the article. I have always prefer LucasArts games as text parser can be hard to use as English is not my first language
Wow, I didn't know they had writing back then.
@SVPortfolio I came here to say that exact same thing, but pointing out his take on "unwinnable situations". :)
Should be noted that the death of adventure games article was written by Erik Wolpaw. He is credited as a writer for Portal and Portal 2 amongst other things. If you think about it, in the fiction, Portal puzzles are literally moon logic.
@@mattd8725 not even close. Portal puzzles shows you specific mechanics and base their gameplays on those mechanics. Almost all of the puzzles can be solved instinctively. You don't need to buy a "hint guide" to solve those puzzles.
@@QaosbringerIt is because the portals literally use "moon dust" to work.
fun fact the term "adventure game " is translated as "graphical adventure" in italian(even if its a text only game!)
I would actually love to see you play through a game you've never played before with semi-moon logic puzzles.
You find you flask, but you can't get ye flask and then you just have to sit there and wonder why you can't get ye flask.
For soothe!
If anyone wants to get into adventure games and isn't sure where to try I highly recommend Day Of The Tentacle Remastered
Funny that I wasn't a big fan of lucasarts games as a kid except sam and max (that game was the shiii)
I never got the chance to play DotT and Maniac Mansion but last year I got the remastered edition along with grim fandango and oh boy those games were a blast to play I spent alot of time on them without using a guide at all.
yes, day of the tentacle and monkey island 1/2/3 are the best adventure games ever made :)
Lucasarts adventures offer a nice blend of linear and nonlinear adventuring. There's always a chapter with a shopping list (get four map pieces, complete three pirate tasks) which you are free to pursue in the order you please to some extent. But DOTT deserves special mention because the whole game is a nonlinear masterpiece. Not only can you do the majority of puzzles in the order you choose, you can literally go back and forward in time!
Thanks.
Oo nice. How about broken sword trillogy
Discovered your videos last week, have binged watched them all!! Love your work, keep it up! :D
Thank you! Don't binge too hard!
Disco!
Interesting idea! I certainly think it was a somewhat of a factor at the time, looking at Old Man Murray's 'Death of Adventure Games' article. However... I was born in '97, so it's hard for me to get an actual bearing on that timeframe, y'know?
Back in the day, I figured the custard pie would help me in the desert, since pies have moisture. Then I found the oasis after I'd eaten the pie, then I found the yeti I couldn't beat without it...
I heard PUR say Dark Souls, I can tick that off my list of weird things I want to hear
Indeimaus honestly didn't know you watched pushing up roses interesting little fact for my day lol
As much as I love the broken sword series....the damn goat in Ireland.....
Cryptic puzzles is why I'm scared to try them because I'm an idiot when it comes to obvious stuff. My friend wants me to play Grim Fandango as its her favourite game of all time but I just haven't gotten around to it lmao
In that case I really recommend that you give a Day of The Tentacle a try as that game - asides from being one of the best games ever made- makes perfect use of everyday logic.
I bought that during a Steam sale but I still haven't gotten around to it. Cheers for the heads up!
Grim Fandango has some cryptic moments, but being LucasArts even if you do stupid thing you can't make the game unwinnable, and the characters, the humor and the general atmosphere (great settings and music) are very enjoyable and will alleviate your frustration a bit :)
If you're looking to "get your feet wet" as it were with some shorter, more straightforward logic adventure games, look up the Zombie Society - Dead Detective online games. They're browser games, so they're nice and short (most can be finished within a half hour if you know what you're doing in them) but they're not so easy that they're boring either. Some of the puzzles can be a bit tricky the first time through, but other than one or two more obscure ones, if you get stuck it's often because you forgot about something on a different screen or haven't finished a different puzzle to get a certain item. Even in those cases, the games are never unwinnable.
You learn something new every day - I never knew the proper term for the Moon Logic in adventure games, but I sure did experience it quite a few times.
Great video :)
There's at least one unwinnable state in grim fandango, it involves a one time dialogue choice. I remember, Lucas Arts
Wait how? Where?
I don't remember ever getting an unwinnable situation in grim Fandango, but it's been a while since I've played it. So which one was it?
Sorry this is a couple of years late but in case neither of you have found out in the meantime, the dialogue in question is when you're talking to Nick the lawyer. You have to tell Nick you need a lawyer, Nick asks you what for and you have five options. Doesn't matter which one you choose, Nick will ask you a series of questions about how good a lawyer you need and who the best lawyer is. You have to tell Nick you want the best lawyer you can get and that he is the best lawyer in the land of the dead, this prompts Nick to decide he has to see his boss and he walks off leaving an object you need behind. If at any point, you say something funny instead of what Nick wants to hear, he will shut down the dialogue and you have to start again with "I really need a lawyer,only this time you only have four options when he asks you why. Go thru this dialogue five times without giving the correct response any time and you have exhausted all your options, if you try to tell Nick you need a lawyer again he just dismisses you and there's no chance to get him to leave so you can't collect the cigarette case you will need to progress.
I think you're missing the main problem here: the difficult puzzles didn't erode the playerbase into oblivion, though they did erode it, they kept players out, and prevented them from becoming popular, especially due to the variety of games that exist.
I like that the screen you have at the end when you say never to eat the food in your inventory is during the part of King's Quest V where you can starve to death if you don't eat the mutton.
I've always called this insane troll logic and I hate it so much.
Oh those hint-lines. My mom and dad were very concerned about why my 13-year-old self saw fit to drop a fortune on a 1-900 number they weren't familiar with.
Yes... A "hint line" :))
One of my big issues with puzzle games is the language barrier as you point out at around 6:40 on the video when talking about lucas arts, when you design puzzles based on puns then you make the game pretty much broken for any non native english speaker (or any that can understand the pun or the concept that would be use in a determinate object in the game), in my case, the idea of the "monkey wrench" never crossed my mind when playing the game, i just thought of a wrench, the monkey wrench concept didnt come to me at all.
Barely any reviewer that talks about puzzles takes that into account (well obviously most wouldnt as their native tongue is english, nothing to blame here), and that would create a situation where puzzle games wouldn't be much relevant to non-english speaking markets, games like abe's odyssey did quite well outside english speaking countries due to this barrier being taken down... well and also being that it's a platformer mostly, maybe it's a bad example... but hey the new "puzzle-lite" telltale games tend to sell quite well outside the english market at least (if we can call them puzzles...)
Abe's Odyssey is a cinematic platformer, which are essentially light adventure games.
This gaming video is a masterclass on how to talk for over ten minutes about a genre and constantly reward the viewer's attention until the very end. Bravo!
Thanks for bringing up the Hacker book. most of these old adventures game take direct lineage from MIT and California hackers, and that ruthless puzzle design was absolutely on purpose, and was supposed to promote people getting together and sharing secrets and methods of getting past puzzles. I remember the first time I played a console, I think it was like Ocarina of time or something? I felt like I was being strung along an obviously pointed out path, compared to what I experienced growing up on Sierra online games.
Zork definitely had "moon logic" in it. It was well know for having solutions you can't find without doing bizarre things for no apparent reason.
Thumbs up for educating on the etymology of "lunatic." :)
Great job on this, PUR; very well researched and highlights-edited!
I really need a PUR let's play, I miss those
I definitely side with the Ron Gilbert camp of adventure game design. But, I will say, I wouldn't exactly mind getting stuck in games if they game told you that you were in an unwinnable scenario. The stress of knowing that you could do something wrong and not realize for a long time can take away from the experience of playing an adventure game. That said, I still have enjoyed playing through the King's Quest games in recent years. My wife and I have completed through IV, and have avoided extreme frustration for the most part (whale tongue pixel hunt notwithstanding). I am a little nervous about V & VI, since I knew they are much larger games so the consequences of getting stuck can erase more hours of gameplay than was the case in the earlier shorter games.
I loved kings Quest VI, and as far as I can remember, it has no "moon logic", just fairytale logic. I recommended it to a friend and she beat it in just a few days (though she did very little else), and enjoyed it. Kings Quest V I have never beaten or gotten very far in, I guess its because I wasn't putting random bits of honey on the ground often enough. I'm under the impression though, that the games get easier over time, so I bet you'll whizz through if you beat the first 4. Edit: just noticed this comment is 4 years old, lol. Hope you enjoyed the games!
@@alexdp7526 You were right. Enjoyed KQ V & VI immensely and frequent saves were enough to help navigate the few Sierra rough spots.
I'm still stuck in Zak McKracken.
Very nicely done :3 I love your editing in this one!
I've been replaying all of the classic Sierra games out of a need for nostalgia. I absolutely love learning new things about games I've been familiar with for decades... please never stop making these videos!
PS, I got hint books and minutes on the phone lines for birthdays and Christmas. I still have all of my old hintbooks! I know you can find walkthroughs online, but I'd rather use my old dog-eared, broken-spined books with the scribbles in the margin.
I've got to admit, I don't like "moon logic". The most generous way I can describe it as is a mixture of creativity and trial and error. I'm not a fan of that, I prefer real puzzles which require logical thinking, creativity and/or observation. It's one of the reasons why I enjoy Zelda so much. Especially in Breath of the Wild, there's so many puzzles and they can be solved in many different ways. It's interesting to see how other people solve it. Yet it feels very rewarding.
I have played Grim Fandango and some other games though, which are a bit less "moon logic" than the Sierra ones. I do enjoy them when they are more based on hints and you have to figure things out, which is what I thought Grim Fandango was more like. I could solve most of the game by myself.
I've got a recommendation for you. CrossCode. It's a modern 2D Zelda style game with a brilliant combat and puzzle system.
Nobody remembers Zak McKracken. I think even the Labyrinth tie-in game is more remembered than Zak McKraren.
For some reason I hadn't transitioned to watching you here on TH-cam, but you and this video got mentioned on the Co-Optional Podcast by Total Biscuit and LazyGameReviews. I instantly sought you out and glad I did. I'm really happy to see you still making videos and will be planning on checking out all I missed. I just wanted to say thanks!
A very interesting perspective! I literally just started Grim Fandango Remastered for the first time after missing the original so I was thinking a lot about adventure game puzzles when I saw you had made this. You are clearly very knowledgeable about adventure games and I really like hearing your thoughts on them. Thanks for making this! You rock!
I'm curious, have you played any of the more new adventure games, e.g. Deponia?
Very well done, PUR.
I remember playing Kings Quest 6 for months. I started by being able to figure some things out logically, but at some point it was, as you said, click everywhere with every item. And even that didn't net results. To this day I don't know how I got stuck, if I was in an unwinnable situation and just didn't realize it, or if I was missing something precise with all my click-spamming. In either case, I eventually gave up on the game, uninstalled it, and never returned. Many years later I watched a speed-run of the game on youtube and finally saw the ending of it, but at that point I couldn't remember where I had been or what I had missed. My memories of some of the Lucas Arts games is much more fond.
This was great. I've always considered you kind of an expert on these old sierra/puzzle/adventure games and it's cool to see you flexing it.
I think Ron Gilbert had interesting insight as to the demise of adventure games - it wasn't so much that they became less popular, but rather their fan base didn't continue to grow in relation to other video games. If you're a company, what are you going to budget more time and resources for: the first person shooter that has mass appeal or the adventure game that has more of a niche audience? Financially, it wasn't a hard choice for many companies to make. Sierra also had that hostile take over situation too, so I would guess that put a dent in adventure games as well.
Yup. And the genre didn't really die with Sierra and LucasArts and Infocom -- there were years where little indie companies were churning out one-off Myst clones before consoles and MMORPGs completely took over the gaming scene.
*sigh*
The cat-hair-mustache puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3 almost made me HATE adventure games for a while...
I love it when you make these history of gaming videos!!
actually, Dark Souls has some "Moon Logic" quest lines. Aside from almost everything is in the item description as to how people have solved a lot of the mysteries, but there's bits like Saving Knight Soltair by giving the spider sister so many souls and then meet him along the pathway he's not in. Seeing him fall and be torture makes sense in the story of the game but trying to find it is a special pathway that not everyone can unlock. Or like shooting the tail of the dragon magically get the dragon sword into your inventory.
For the record, it's possible to like Dark Souls and classic adventure games at the same time.
I played a lot of the Sierra games when I was younger and they were fine at the time, but I think now people expect a more nuanced puzzle than just try random shit. Unavowed by Wadjet Eye I think is great and the first adventure game I'd played in a long time. It has some difficult puzzles, but no "moon logic" really and has a good story as well.
I guess it was a way to get people to talk about games with each other.
Sharing the answers to getting stuck in a sierra game was a past-time with friends.
I love your video's about old adventure games. It really brings me back to when I was a kid at that age. Every summer I'd go to my cousin's for about a month and we'd always play a new (usually Lucas Arts) point and click adventure. We played Indianna Jones and the fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, The Dig, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, some King's quest but I can't remember which maybe 7? the one with the mother and daughter in alternating chapters. One summer we BEGGED his parents to let us phone a hint line for the dig, the lightbridge puzzle I think it was. Anyway it's great to see the old adventure games getting some love. Keep up the good work.
Deponia sometimes has moon logic xD Diadelic loves that kind of humour :')
Yeah, Edna's escape has some pretty annoying things, where I actually had to look them up. The sequel didn't have those at least.
Guys I don't think Roberta Williams is a good parent
Or a good game designer.
I certainly wasn't left with the feeling that she was being facetious with that remark, either.
@@niallreid7664 She had a different idea of what made a game compelling, and fair enough. But it's not a taste that appeals to many, and it's not hard to see why.
Great Video PUR! I liked and Subbed.
I was a child of the 80s and my first adventure game was Kings Quest 3 then the Space Quest Games and the first 2 Police Quest Games. I still remember getting my Mom's permission to call the hint line. Then mailing off for the Hint Book and checking the mail box every single day waiting weeks for it to arrive. The hint book's used invisible ink and came with a magic marker highlighter so that you could only reveal the answer you absolutely needed. It was so much fun back then! KQ3 was so fascinating to me exploring the Wizard's home and discovering the spell book and working out the spell recipes. Trying so hard not to get killed. It was incredible at the time but looking at them now I definitely prefer modern polish on games. I remember losing interest in some of the later Sierra Games that I played like KQ4, Colonels Bequest and even PQ2 because of their difficulty. I later discovered the Monkey Island games and of course fell in love with those. I just bought on Steam the entire Monkey Island series (original, not Tell-Tale) and the entire Blackwell series for my niece and by extension her younger siblings for her birthday this week. I'm looking forward to seeing a new generation discover adventure games and maybe someday I'll tell them to try a Sierra game if they really want the history lesson.
Well done, you do a stellar job! Subscribed!
People /are/ still willing to pour hours into games--but as you said, they're games where they're constantly doing stuff (Skyrim/Fallout/other RPGs).
I'm really shocked you didn't mention the "cat hair moustache" puzzle from GK3, Roses. ;) But then again, it's not like you had a shortage of examples to draw upon--that's just /my/ personal favorite example of the type. And it /did/ discourage me from playing these games (I never did finish GK3)--I like figuring things out, but only when the puzzles can be figured out by something other than random combinations.
Great video!
I'm ok with screwing in an adventure game, but please just give me a Game Over. Don't make me wander without even know I will never progress.
Yes! And maybe add a hint about what I did wrong so I don't do it again! For example, with the sandwich from the video, instead of letting the player eat the sandwich then never getting another one and not being able to progress past the police officer, have the player eat the sandwich, get to the part where they're supposed to give the sandwich to the officer, then get a Game Over that says something like, "The officer looks hungrier than you were..." That would hint to the fact that you were supposed to give something to the officer that you accidentally used on your character while not outright telling you to give the sandwich to him.
It's good to hear about old games and how they have evolved. Great video!!
Great stuff! Love how you point to the technological limitations that led to games with Moon Logic or other games like the original Zelda with hidden stuff that is never hinted at in the game but pass out the time for the player in an era with so many fewer games
The very best adventure game i played in recent time was the "Blackwell series" (all 5 of them... i think it was 5 ... )
However - one of my all time favourites is still the longest journey series (longest journey, dreamfall and dreamfall chapters)
I do have to acknowledge, that the blackwell series is a MUCH better "game" though - with logic puzzles on the light to medium side (Roses would probably consider the puzzles to be toddler level) .... The longest journey on the other hand are not particularly good "games" - with dreamfall being an utterly dreadful "game" (but a wonderful story - love it)
Then there are the Telltale games that - to me - are mostly interactive movies - with sporadic quicktime events. I do enjoy watching them - but i do not enjoy playing them.
Adventures are unlikely to ever be dead - because adventures are primarily stories. They may evolve into subgenres or cross over genres a bit more - but i am sure that players will always enjoy a good story.
More recent successful adventures like the Vanishing of Ethan Carter show that there is still a demand for good puzzles and nice storytelling out there - just not the kind that trolls the player.
Sjalka Rjadottir You may be interested in a game called "Maize" it's pretty fun more of a comedy really but still charming
my biggest gripe about old adventure games is how player hostile they are. you bring up dark souls. if you die in dark souls, it's because the player messed up, not because the game is being cheap. cheap deaths are bad game design, no matter the era.
*****
that's my point. dark souls is hard because it requires that the player draw on their skill. old adventure games are hard because it relies on cheap game overs and trial and error to succeed.
it would be like if a certain number of coin blocks in mario were designed to kill you when you hit them. you'd have no way of knowing hitting those blocks would kill you until after hitting them. the game would be requiring you to fail multiple times to succeed. it's not fair difficulty. it's cheap and it's lazy.
if you conclude that you only die in dark souls because of messing up yourself, you could conclude the same for adventure games.... since if you did the right thing you would not die or get stuck ;)
but yeah, different demographic, us gamers back then liked to have a game you could work on for months to complete, we knew we would get stuck or had to solve moon-logic before even buying the games, we didnt mind, we would try literally EVERYTHING and it was a great feeling when after days of zero progress you finally found some small silly thing to progress, so i guess the era does matter ;)
raafmaat
that's stretching it too far. if you die in dark souls, it's not because you decided to pick up the wrong item or simply walk into a room at the wrong time. it's because you either did something stupid or your skill level isn't up to snuff. you die or game over to the most innocuous things just because in the old adventure games. no amount of skill can save you. it's trial and error and nothing more.
hard puzzles you have to think about to solve is one thing. i get that. that's not what i'm talking about though. what i'm talking about is the cheap deaths/ game overs that those games are riddled with that have nothing to do with problem solving.
Not just dying, my biggest gripe is in some games if you forgot to pick up an item and went past a certain point you couldn't go back to that location and it was impossible to finish the game and the moment you need that item could be hours away from the time that you missed it, And because you'spent the whole game solving puzzles, you expect that it's another puzzle, and spend hours racking your brain trying to to figure out what the hell you have to do here. :)
I've beaten dark souls 1 and it's a little harder to judge because i was still learning how to play at that point but I'm currently playing dark souls 2 now and I can say it's most defiantly cheap! There are a ton of more insta death traps and enemies that fucking explode! explode! I mean lve only died to enemies a couple of times so far actually, in fact now that I about it the vast majority of my deaths were caused by me jumping off of things......ok maybe it's my fault a little but still lol
I have fond memory of being stuck for weeks at a time on Myst problems and discussing theorys with my sister back when I had more patience.
I'm fully in to these old hard puzzles. It was a social thing. You would discuss progress or lack thereof at school, and after a couple of months, solve the whole thing. Had so much fun with the heroes quest/ guest for glory series.
Rambling video indeed :)
It's easy to lose context when looking back at these games - at the time, the "moon logic" made sense in a way if you were a fan of the series, and as you say fans of the genre had a lot more time to figure things out.
The market for adventure games was never massive, though, and as other games started to incorporate elements of adventure games in them, I believe the genre lost its uniqueness.
Honestly, I never liked the Sierra games because the whole mouse and type thing was very obtrusive, and the insta-kill was obnoxious.
I really, truly, literally cannot fathom why anyone would enjoy moon logic. Not judging, it's no skin off my back, it's just like a foreign language to me. Maybe I'm just too logical (not to be confused with me saying I'm really smart, because that would be wrong), but it practically hurts my soul to see something so utterly incomprehensible. Like, it goes against every fiber of my being, against the very nature of the universe. I didn't have a PC way back when, but I remember trying to play King's Quest VI and getting bored fast. Hell, I get pissed off even playing old RPGs where you have to build a character with almost no idea about what anything means, and then getting your ass handed to you because "you" fucked up for not knowing things they never told you. I'm old enough to have played these games, but I guess I'm glad I was a console kid and rocked out Mario and the like instead.
Yeah, me too. If people like that, then of course I hope they have fun, but as for me I would really enjoy adventure games more if it didn't involve pretty much looking at everything in the screen, taking everything you can, saying everything you can to everyone, and then going to the next screen, repeat, then find that one thing that you can to progress a tiny bit, then repeat the whole process. I might try an adventure game again, soon, though.
The "point and click" adventure genre has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance thanks to community and aggregate gaming sites like MiniClip, Armor Games, Newgrounds, Kongregate, etc. and they've featured games of all types of puzzle difficulty ranging from, "Ah-ha! I get it!" to "Oh, how did I miss that?" to "Wait, what?" to "Who would ever do that in real life?!" to straight "Moon Logic".
I've found that the ones that get the best reviews and ratings are often the ones that feature more straightforward, logical puzzles like "sneak into the pizza place to steal a uniform and impersonate a pizza delivery guy to get past the gate guard" than "sneak into the pizza place, put on a spare uniform, sneak into the manager's office to get the rat poison, wait for the gate guard to call in a pizza order, distract the pizza cook to put the rat poison onto the guard's pizza, lock the delivery guy in the fridge after pickpocketing his car keys, impersonate the delivery guy to get the pizza to the gate guard, wait for the gate guard to eat the pizza, wait for the gate guard to run to the bathroom when the poison makes him sick, sneak into the guard shack to open the gate" because no sane, rational, emotionally balanced person would want to go through all that trouble just to poison some random guy who is just doing his job when it's much easier to just pose as a delivery guy, especially since posing as the delivery guy is part of both solutions anyway.
Really thought-provoking topic! I feel like there's something to be said for the satisfaction of solving a puzzle yourself, even if it is cryptic or illogical. One of my most vivid memories is getting stuck in the Black Cauldron and couldn't escape from a cell. I pondered the situation all day at school and suddenly had an epiphany to use a tin cup to rap on the cell door to get rescued :) Zak McKracken though, that's a whole other story...
I have to write a classification essay for English and I'm writing about the types of adventure game puzzles. I'm definitely using the Roberta quote in the section on moon logic!
this is why i hate point and click. im a man of science and to play a game where theres no logic that can be figured out in a rational way isnt rewarding to me
A lot of modern point-and-clicks aren't like that. Two of my favourite series are Submachine and The Last Door, and both contain only fairly logical puzzles.
Moon logic definitely didn't help. I'm sure the thought of pixel hunting didn't contribute to gaining new fans either.
Sarah your videos are super rad. I’m hooked on them 🏆
I remember when a childhood friend was playing Monkey Island for the first time. He was used to the Sierra-games where you died instantly every time you clicked the wrong thing. But was told that you would not die in Monkey island. So he didnt bother to save his progress. Then the the part with the collapsing cliff happened and a spoof on the classic Sierra "you have died" box appeard. He rage quit and turned of the computer. When he reached the same place the second time he learned about the rubber tree, and saw Guybrush automatically bounce up again, rendering the "you have died"-box obsolete. I think that made him rage again. =)
They're design flaws - I never enjoyed quest games, because of it. Deus Ex, Fallout and a lot of other RPG have great stories and great puzzles.
I sometimes think the moon-logic nature of adventure games is a bit overblown. I think one of the other factors in the death of adventure games is the lack of evolution in their puzzles. Basically the puzzles barely changed since the text adventure days -- each puzzle is basically a locked door where you have two main solutions to open the door. 1 - The Inventory puzzle (ie, use object A on object B to get object C - which may unlock the door), or 2 - The Dialogue puzzle (ie, find person X and say the right combination of things).
There several attempts to make new puzzle types, such as logic puzzles (mainly appearing in fmv-style games), but they mostly fell flat. Logic puzzles in particular just feel forced and not organic. Gabriel Knight 2 had some interesting ideas with the tape recorder (and editing some conversations) but it felt a little underused.
So with these two main puzzle types, the only way to make them hard is to make them obscure. Not necessarily moon-logic (though that works) but just ones which are hard. Shadow of the Comet for instance required you to know how to develop film. As in, which chemicals to use, and so on. The other ways to make them hard is to make it so you can screw up. Use object A on random things and it blows up. Say the wrong thing to person X and then you can't talk about the thing you need. That makes it hard, but also feels unfair since it creates unwinnable situations. The ideal would be to maybe mix this kind of style with a fallback puzzle (which is more obscure). However that's hard.
tldr; basically adventure games had an issue where you could brute force your way through them, due to the puzzle types being very limited.
That tape recorder was terrible. Couldn't figure it out and hated it when I finally looked it up the solution in a magazine. Up to that point in the game all of the puzzles were very realistic and that was what made the game cool; that felt really stupid. There's no way that anyone would fall for that in real life.
But the part I hated the most in the game was when you had to click on everything in the Neuschwanstein museum and there's no way you can know that beforehand, so you had to do the entire thing at least twice and pray you didn't miss anything; That's some horrible game design, man.
King's Quest I is from 1984? I'm feeling fossil....
Oh, and the video is very well made. Good job.
;3
Love that the last scene was just before the yeti you have to pie in the face
who disliked the video?
:/
two people disliked my vid of me drawing, and i have like 15 subscribers! :P rule of YT: If there is video, there is dislike! Roses probably gets dislikes from trolls, (who dislike everything for the little drop of power they think it gives them) and wackos who think tattoos or dyed hair is 'sinful', and/or that women should get off YT and go make babies. and sandwiches. or sandwiches for babies. or sandwiches OF babies. who knows...and who cares :D
You did. He who smelt it, dealt it.
Magus Marquillin no I liked it...
I've hated moon logic puzzles since Zork. So 40 years of burning hatred. Whole game series not played and bought because of them.
Of all the games to say have moon logic, you pick Zork? That game has zero moon logic puzzles.
Randomly just got recommended this in 2019 (!)
I like it! Interesting topic and good presentation so I subbed too
Now to go and check if you're even still making videos...
Nice analysis and research. Well done! I like how both sides of the argument were made, and a pretty good look at the history and how trends/tastes change.
(I ate the pie... I regret it when I saw the Yeti. Entirely my fault though because the game included a freaking hint guide which I foolishly ignored.)
I swear that the old Sierra "Moon Logic" puzzle makers moved on to education. I am in school for Network and Database Administration and the labs we have to solve are off the wall. Need to update the RAM in the computer? Better turn the monitor on and off three times in a row or you will fail!
moon logic puzzles is why i never got into Adventure games; I like talking to everyone and then piece things together to figure it out without being told how to either. I'm sorry there is something different from "challenging" and "impossible." (yes it is possible but frankly people will just google how too these days). There are a lot of extremely challenging games where you don't have to randomly drop an item on one screen, come back from THE OTHER side to then pick it up while then exiting from the north... with NO information at all about this.
This was fascinating to hear about. I never had the chance to play computer games growing up, so it's really wonderful to learn so much about them from someone who did!
I remember teaching my brother how to play adventure games back in the early 90’s. I told them the trick to solving the puzzles had more to do with figuring out how the game designer thought than it had to do with working out a math problem.