Adventure Gaming: Lights Out vs The Longest Journey

Adventure games have some fairly well-defined genres of puzzles. There's the inventory puzzle, the logic puzzle, the task puzzle, the dreaded slider, and a few others. Perhaps one additional genre should be the talker.

We started out The Longest Journey with high hopes. The voice acting was so much above some of the previous adventure games we'd been playing that it was so refreshing. It wasn't long, however, before we found out how much we would be hearing it. At least we could skip past some of the dialog, unlike some others that would torture us with it.

We hit a certain point in The Longest Journey where basically we needed an encyclopedia's worth of knowledge to continue and only had one way to get it: A lecture from one character. As it started, it became clear that we needed about an hour's worth of talking to be able to continue. It was pretty much at this point that Andrea gave up in disgust and Given wasn't far behind. (I'm more persevering than most, I guess — I grew up on a ranch and had to put up with a lot of crap, quite literally.) Too much talking is the kiss of death for an adventure game for us.

So I installed another game I had handy, Light's Out. This was one that I saw while walking by in a store and was impressed that it was pretty much all put together by one person. We were immediately drawn in by the spooky atmosphere and the minimal dialog.

Finding a floppy disc while being in the early twentieth century didn't hurt, either.

Basically, we played a mapmaker called to a lighthouse, where its three keepers had mysteriously disappeared. The game play was fairly similar to Myst and hotspots were pretty easy to find. The puzzles were enjoyable except for one: The dynamite puzzle, which actually wasn't a puzzle, despite the interactive interface.

I really enjoyed the game, although afterwards the explanation for the disappearance was less than satisfying. It was more like a hand wave than anything else.