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.

Aura: Fate of Ages and Sherlock Holmes

Andrea, Given, and I surprisingly finished Aura: Fate of Ages last week. By "surprisingly", I mean it took us by surprise: We finished one world and expected to head to the next, only to find there was a sequel (Aura: The Sacred Rings). My thoughts: The game started with some real quality puzzles that I truly enjoyed, but the quality steadily declined until we got to the end of the game, where the only puzzle was hitting some drums in the right order. There were some pixel hunting problems we ran into (such as picking up a single leaf in a rain forest) that soured our view of the game. I don't know that we'll try the sequel.

Ending early, we tried to find another game to play. Andrea recommended Schizm/Mysterious Journey since she had played it before, had fun, but couldn't remember a single thing about it. It's gotten great reviews and I'm sure it'll be a fun game, but as we started playing, I realized it that it was another "empty landscape" game, and I just wasn't in the mood for another one.

This week I tried to install Tex Murphy: Overseer since I've played it, had a good time, and can't remember a thing (except that there's a cliff-hanger ending that never got resolved in another game). Unfortunately, there's a bunch of hoops needed to go through in order to install it and I haven't been able to find some of the software needed to make this Win95 game work on an WinXP system. So we played Sherlock Holmes: The Silver Earring instead.

It's an interesting game. It brings the idea of pixel hunting to a new level, but since that's your job as a detective, it's not as bad as the leaf example. It starts out with a long exposition ("We're not playing a game, we're watching a movie!" quipped Given), but once gameplay commences it's the standard "ask questions and collect evidence" that I've seen in other mystery games. The level of detail in the graphics, though, was impressive to me. Some things looked like photograph, instead of rendered detail. This didn't stop us, though, from missing a scrap of cloth.

One thing different from standard mystery games is the quiz at the end of each day. Not only do you have to answer questions such as "Can you tell what type of weapon was used in the murder?", you have to back it up with evidence from details in your notebook or evidence collected. It was late when we stumbled across this, so there was some grumbling as I insisted we finish it before heading home. But eventually we got it right, and as we dispersed for the night, the general consensus was it was fun... so far.

Updates on Adventure Puzzle Games

It's been a while since I've jotted (typotted?) down any thoughts on Given, Andrea, and my continued exploration of puzzle-based adventure games.

Myst V - Good game, good interface, somewhat confusing story. The enslaved creatures needed a backstory for me to care about them. In the end, it was basically the same plot as the original Myst.

Agon 4: The Lost Sword of Toledo - Tedious. Spent most of our time doing mini "quests" and questioning characters. Andrea zones out during long talking portions, and it's hard not to blame her in this case. The checkers-like Game of Nations at the end wasn't as interesting as any of the previous ones.

Dracula: Resurrection - A lock and key type game, which offered little in the way of puzzling, and a lot more in the way of "which item from our inventory can we use here? heck, let's try all of them!"

Colour of Murder - Interesting idea, using the real word to make an adventure game. However, in our very first session, we wandered around an art warehouse looking for one specific thing among thousands. Got tedious quickly, so we decided to try something else. Maybe we'll revisit it later; the review in the link seems pretty positive.

Aura: Fate of the Ages - Started two weeks ago and have been very impressed. Just to get started, we've had to solve about ten medium difficulty puzzles, all of which have been logical and satisfying in their conclusion (and in a few cases, very satisfying). Considering the list of stinkers we've played recently, it's been a tremendous joy to have such a quality adventure game meet our needs. The only drawback so far is the poor acting quality, but those scenes have been few and far between so far.

Thursday Night Adventure Game: AGON 4

Given, Andrea, and I hit an annoying puzzle last night during our second session with AGON 4: The Lost Sword of Toledo. So far, we've only come up against two real puzzles, the first of which was a cop-out slider; the rest of the game, we've been talking with NPCs and carrying out their errands.

This annoying second puzzle dealt with a music box that had a hidden portion that could only be opened with an eight letter password. We figured the name of the composer who wrote the music would be our solution. We tracked him down, but his name was only six letters long. At this point, we got stuck for about a half-hour, so I looked up a hint. It said we were supposed to look up the composer's name in the teacher's lesson book, notice that the teacher only taught that song in the sixth class and thus enter the composer's name followed by the number six in Roman numerals: LOZANOVI.

(I love what the hint writer added: "Yes, this will be the solution." [emphasis theirs])

There's absolutely no way we would have got that. It reminded me of how nobody could come up with "FSKEY" in the season finale of Treasure Hunters (until one of them had a "vision"). Very unsatisfying.

At that point, we considered switching to another game, but I convinced my teammates that it'd be good to at least find out who stole the sword. Andrea, though, is really looking forward to putting AGON 4 behind us and starting Dracula - Resurrection.

Silly Obstacles in Myst V

Last night, we finished the first world in Myst V: End of Ages... and I'm disappointed. By the puzzle, sure (a random symbol drawn in the snow indicates steam?), but primarily by the obstacle the provides the excuse for the puzzle.

In this case, it's a frozen puddle. Apparently, it was too tough for us to walk over this solid mass, so we had to melt it enough to reveal a rocky substrata maze. Seriously?

We've run in poor blockades before, where it would have been far simpler just to climb over the obstacle than go through the thirty-seven steps to find the secret passageway. Even Myst V itself has these foot-high gates that you can't get past without unlocking them from the other side.

But I've never seen something as silly as this. It's a solid, flat patch of ground that prevents us from going on. Slippery, sure, and maybe the game makers figured we wouldn't want to risk a Bambi moment. There's really no reason anyone would consider it a legitmate obstacle.

When is a DVD-ROM drive not a DVD-ROM drive?

Our adventure game group had finally gotten to Myst V: End of Ages as our next trek. I did a test install on two computers, both of which worked. However, one only barely met the minimum requirements, and the other belonged to someone else.

So Given donated a P4 computer to the cause and for the past two days I've been trying to install EoA on it. I kept getting error after error. I tried many of the recommended fixes, but to no avail. I reinstalled Windows a few times, and finally decided to match all the installs on the new computer to the one I had successfully installed EoA on. After each program, though, the EoA installation program would fail, but with different error messages or symptoms. I wasn't sure if that was progress or not.

Eventually, on a fluke, I figured it out. The donated computer hadn't had a DVD-ROM drive, so I had plucked one out of another and attached it. Thinking that maybe having it as a slave to the master CD-ROM drive might be causing problems, I disconnected the CD-ROM drive and suddenly the system tells me there's no optical drive attached at all. I go into the BIOS and see that instead of the slave drive being marked auto-detect, it was specifically set to "None". I flipped it, booted to Windows, and suddenly the install has no problems at all.

It seems weird to me that Windows was able to find the drive when the BIOS was telling it there wasn't one.

Wednesday Puzzle Game: Safecracker

One thing I've been intending to write about is my experiences with and reviews of our Wednesday night puzzle game tradition. Andrea, Given, and I started this tradition long ago where once a week we'd get together and play some puzzle adventure game (I think our first was The 7th Guest),

We finished "Missing: Since January - a game that combined interesting research puzzles with really frustrating Flash-style mini-games, as well as the least satisfying ending of any game ever (you receive an email several hours after finishing the last challenge, letting you know whether the police succeeded or not) - a couple weeks ago, and started Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon last week. However, a few hours into the game, a glitch popped up that prevented us from going further into the game (when asking a NPC if they've seen a blonde run by, the game freezes, the NPC doesn't answer, and our character keeps repeating the question over and over again) and a week of troubleshooting has failed to rectify this.

So, last night we started Safecracker and were immediately impressed. Beautiful graphics and complex puzzles (and even a kind of meta) abounded. The storyline was relatively unimportant - one thing I've found is that the stronger the storyline, the weaker the puzzles (and vice versa). Basically, some eccentric guy with a love of unique safes, hid the key to his rich inheritance in a series of safes, and we were hired by the family to break into them all.

Each safe is its own unique puzzle, and thus far, we've enjoyed every one of them. Two of them we found easier to take a photograph of, print out, and work it that way, but oddly enough and in stark contrast to a similar experience with Sentinel/Realms of Illusion, we didn't mind and found it fulfilling (especially since it helped in both cases). Each solve has been well rewarded and not once have we had a "I can't believe they used that as a solution" moment.

So who knows if and when we'll get back to Broken Sword. Having played about two hours of it, we found it more like a platformer than an adventure game. That and the fact that within the first five minutes we were doing the old-fashioned "combine inventory items" trick (something I haven't seen since playing Monkey Island) doesn't bode well for its future in our lineup.

Illusions of Math

Given, Andrea and I are recently started playing Realms of Illusions (otherwise known as Sentinel: Descendants in Time). Last night, we came across a puzzle in Tregett which had eight switches on four consoles that lit up a different series of twenty lights for each switch. Only one switch per console could be on and there were two columns of ten lights each. A quick calculation shows that this means that there are over 4000 possible combinations. We quickly figured out that each light had to have power from exactly three of the switches, so we started mapping out the light pattern, like this:

Switch 1 Switch 2 Switch 3
  1 1      1 0      0 0
  1 0      0 1      1 1
  1 1      1 1      1 1
  1 1      1 0      0 1
  0 0      1 1      1 0
  1 1      1 1      1 1
  1 1      0 0      1 1
  0 0      1 1      1 1
  1 1      1 1      1 0
  1 1      1 1      1 1

Where 1 means that the switch turned that light on, and 0 means off. We mapped out 10 of switches before we began thinking that there had to be a more elegant and deductive way of doing it, such as finding out which switches had power lines going to them (all of them, btw). Eventually we decided that our "brute force" method was going to be quicker than trying to find the "trick" to the puzzle, and proceeded to map out all the switches.

We then realized that that in choosing one light pattern from each switch that there could only be one 0 in any given position from the four switches and that if there were two 0s in a position, we could eliminate that possibility. We did this comparing the switch possibilities from consoles one and two and were able to eliminate three switches from console one, eliminating about 1500 possibilities from the decision tree. At this point, we had spent an hour on the puzzle without actually playing the game, so we checked with UHS and found out that the method we were doing was the only way to do it. At that point, Given and Andrea concentrated on eliminating more paths and I searched for a quicker, more pattern-orientated way of solving it.

Andrea and Given were eventually able to eliminate ten switches altogether, five of which were from the first row. I had come up with multiple ways of pattern solving, but each time it turned out the designers had thought of each my workarounds and specifically designed the puzzle that it couldn't be solved except through extreme brute force. If, for example, the number of 0s for each switch were different, I could find all the different ways of getting twenty 0s, but each switch had exactly five 0s. If there were switches that didn't have a row of double zeroes, I could use that, but every switch had a double zero and every row had at least one double zero. I kept coming up with patterns, but none complete enough to do a solve.

Eventually, we were frustrated enough to just look up the answer. UHS was kind enough to give the switch locations one at a time, so after the getting the correct switch for the first one, we were able to solve the rest of the puzzle ourselves.

When Andrea read off the switch positions, however, it didn't work. After a few minutes of panic, she asked which one did she say for the second console. It was the wrong one, so correcting it gave us the working solution.

Ah, another sxdnex moment.

(And now you know why I've never actually finished a complete puzzle writeup!)