How To Avoid It

I'm sick of calling it 'use everything on everything', so I'm going to give it an official name. From now on, it's called Keyring Syndrome. Make a note of it. The name implies that playing is like standing at a door with a bunch of keys patiently trying them all to see which one fits. This is what we're trying to get away from. Our assignment now is to use more puzzles that rely less on the 'get A from B use it on C to get D use it on E to get F' ad nauseum procession, so that a degree of logic on the player's part once again becomes necessary.

So, what are the alternatives?

There are more phases you could add to the inventory item use process. Perhaps the 'key' needs to be combined with another object first, or treated in some way in another location, before it can be used (e.g. tying a comb to a bit of string to act as a little grappling hook in The Pandora Directive). Taking it from the other angle, maybe something has to be done to the 'door' first (e.g. coercing the founding fathers to light a fire in Day of the Tentacle before you can stick a rug over the chimney). But neither removes Keyring Syndrome entirely.

What we are overlooking here are puzzles that do not require any inventory items at all, completely curtailing the ritual of fiddling with the contents of your bottomless pockets. At the most basic level, merely having someone Interact with a hotspot to solve a problem isn't going to stump anyone, especially not with today's minimalist approach to verb lists, but there are so many other possibilities. Here are a few that spring to mind:

- Dialogue puzzles, where you have to select the right conversation options to bring an NPC around to your way of thinking, such as talking to the electronics shopkeeper in Under A Killing Moon.
- 'Obscure Knowledge' puzzles. Telling the player through hints of varying subtlety a secret code required to open a door, or a secret action far too obscure for them to think of by themselves, such as in Full Throttle when you are advised to kick a particular section of wall.
- Exploration puzzles. Making new possibilities arise after the player examines certain things, or visits certain rooms. There are numerous examples in the Broken Sword games where the player looks at a hotspot, and from then on can discuss it with a relevant NPC, sometimes even coercing them into action.
- Timed puzzles. Pressing a button in room A causes something in room B to activate for a limited time, giving the player a short period to figure out what they're supposed to be doing. For example, distracting the old woman near the beginning of Hook in order to pinch her dirty laundry (this being perfectly acceptable behaviour among pirates).

Of course, these are just off the top of my head, and there could be many other additions to this list that escape me at the moment. One puzzle that I can't seem to fit into any of the above categories is the puzzle involving the cliff and the rock catapult arrangement in Secret of Monkey Island. That's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about — just a simple sequence of pushes and pulls combined with a degree of logical thought, and we've got a clever, thought-provoking puzzle that doesn't even have to rely on fetch questing to challenge the player.

A Game That Does This Well

The amateur game to use as an example in this case is No-Action Jackson, the recent AG award winner by Cerebrit. NAJ marries excellent Day of the Tentacle-esque graphics with a firm grasp of puzzle structure that is almost LucasArtsian. The game gets away from the above-described complaint by (a) having a number of different objectives that can be solved in whatever order and (b) incorporating many puzzles which require complex interactions rather than simply throwing an inventory item at the problem. Take for example the use of the family cat, whose path must be cleared before your torment has desirable results, or the manner in which the VCR cables must be arranged to work the TV.

So, in conclusion to this half-bright rant, it's about time we got back to what adventures have always been about: using our brains. It's supposed to be one of the more intellectual of the genres, and it's difficult to be snobby when your first person shooter friends next door are having such a good time while you stand out in the rain messing about with your keyring.