February 15th, 2008
I got my hands on one of the latest quality adventures produced and one of the few I didn’t play yet: Monkey Island 3: The Curse of Monkey Island. I enjoyed playing this adventure but after I finished it I spent some time thinking about adventure games in general. Question I asked myself number of times is: “Why do I like adventure games?” I remember great moments playing adventures and that’s probably the main part of my answer but there are also frustrations when some stupid bug or illogical puzzle prevents me from going on and further discovering the story.
Adventure games always got special treatment from me as a gamer. I like to explore well created environments, discover a new locations, talk to a interesting characters and resolve problems a game is putting before me. Mostly they allow the player to consume the game on it’s own pace and to spend more time on details he’s most interested in. That’s the reason why adventure games produced long lasting memories.
As opposed to today’s games which all looks similar, adventure games used variety of different graphics techniques to set up the atmosphere. Early technology incapable of presenting realistic graphics was a medium on which the designers expressed it’s ideas. Be it cartoonish , realistic or fantasy, hand drawn or prerendered, presentation was part of the game.
Adventure games genre began to die off in the late nineties but I wanted more of them. Especially after I played Gabriel Knight 3 which had a great story and a 3D engine which was actually improvement over 2D. The engine kept a point and click style but allowed free exploration of the scenery. You could freely move the camera around, quickly exploring the scene, without needing to guide the main character around. If you executed some action, character just appeared on the place without waiting for him to walk over. If 2D adventures were live comics, this kind of 3d engine is movie where a game producer is screenwriter while player is in a role of the director, choosing angles and making cuts.
Compared to the Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island, 3D adventures from Lucas Arts, Gabriel Knight 3 have 3D engine more suitable to the adventure games genre. While in Lucas Arts games you need to control and direct the main character with keyboard which feels like playing some arcade game, Sierra’s point and click 3D engine is more in the spirit of adventure gaming. When I saw it I naively thought that industry found the recipe for 3D adventure games and that I can expect more adventures from them. Unfortunately, reality was quite different.
You can look at Postmortem of GK3 where one of the developers talk about what went right and what went wrong in the production. Game wasn’t too successful and with all described problems company didn’t want to invest in the adventure games any more. With that, Gabriel Knight 3 was the last adventure game from Sierra. It is a pity, this was only playable 3D engine for adventures. Modified FPS engines just don’t cut for the adventures.
Searching for some insights into “why they don’t make adventures games any more?” I didn’t find an answer. Except for some random mussing about how most gamers are too stupid for complex plot lines and how evil companies want quick money instead of quality products, I’ve highlighted one answer which I don’t like but it is very true: Nobody killed Adventure Games. They committed suicide. This article summarizes the main problem with adventures. Player is not allowed to solve the problem, he must follow a path a creator carved for him. There is usually only one way to solve the problem and sometimes the solution can be just silly. While humour is appreciated, dumbness is not. I liked the Monkey Island game which inspired this article but I couldn’t solve some puzzles without some tips from the walkthrough. Here’s the example:
To persuade an ex-pirate to come with you you need to show him some treasure. There is no real treasure on the island but you can take a gold tooth from restaurant owner and he’ll come along. Getting the tooth is another story. You need to give him a jawbreaker to loosen his tooth and then a chewing gum. When he blows a bubble, pop it with the pin and the gold tooth will fly out of it and you can take it. You can’t leave the restaurant with the tooth, owner will see it in your pocket and stop you. So, use the gold tooth on the chewed gum, inhale some helium and chew the gum with the gold tooth. The gum will fly out of the window and you can exit the restaurant. You can find the tooth in the nearby mud puddle, so use the pie pan to pick it.
This is a series of stupid things you need to do in order to progress in the game. In humorous games like Monkey Island it’s barely tolerable but in serious games this nuisances stick out and break the atmosphere. If you are experienced adventure gamer you get used to them and fail to notice stupidity in them but every new player will be frustrated with this puzzles and will probably hate the game and whole genre.