Adventure Gamers - Forums

Kurufinwe - 22 March 2015 04:02 AM

RockNFknRoll, I’m with you here. I was actually thinking about starting a thread similar to your own, and so I’ll be following this one closely.

As an obvious answer to your question, two words: Hadean Lands. I used to avoid text adventures, (mistakenly) thinking they were still stuck in the days of Zork, with dead ends and unfair puzzles, but the glowing review here convinced me to give it a chance, and it was a revelation. As you were saying, it takes puzzle design from grade-school level to college level. And it does it very cleverly, without ever feeling overwhelming or obscure (except maybe for one or two unfair puzzles). Solving the final puzzle was one of the most incredible experiences in all my years of gaming. If I were to describe that final puzzle, it would seem horribly abstract and complex, but the game has prepared you so well and carefully for it that it makes perfect sense when you get to it.

(However, be warned that it may ruin other games for you. Once you’ve solved puzzles at that level, going back to “pick up item, use it in the next room” feels a bit unsatisfying. It’s frustrating that, while they have made huge strides in storytelling, adventure games have progressed so little gameplay-wise. I mean, Colossal Cave introduced most of the genre’s tenets, Ron Gilbert modernised them with Monkey Island, and then there’s been almost nothing new for a quarter of a century. Except of course for those games that equate innovation with blending in extraneous elements (logic puzzles, platforming, QTEs…), but that’s not what this thread is about. The genre’s lack of innovation and experimentation gameplay-wise, even among indie games, is dispiriting.)

All right, more ideas: Resonance! Now there’s one game that is innovative. By allowing you to collect, use and combine ideas and memories just like you’d with inventory items, it opens up lots of new avenues for puzzle design. It doesn’t fully push its new mechanics to something as brilliant as Hadean Lands does with its own, but it’s still a very engaging and satisfying game to play. (The story’s interesting too, which is always welcome.)

I’ll second Antrax’s suggestion of Death Gate. That one doesn’t really innovate much (though it has a spell system that adds a little bit of variety), but its puzzles are just perfect. I can’t quite put my finger on what makes them so great and satisfying, but they are.

Ghost Trick (on NDS and iOS) is great as well. Letting you play as a ghost who can manipulate his environment and rewind time, it has lots of very clever puzzles that encourage experimentation and can get pretty complex as the game progresses. Great story and characters too.

you, i like you.

Is there an optimal way to play Hadean Lands? Is there any reason that it would be in any way inferior on iOS?

RockNFknRoll - 27 March 2015 05:11 PM

Is there an optimal way to play Hadean Lands? Is there any reason that it would be in any way inferior on iOS?

As I understand, it was meant to be an iOS game, with the desktop version as an afterthought. According to the review I linked to, the iOS app is better, as it “has a built-in map which tracks the player’s location, along with an easily accessible journal tab to view rituals, formulas, facts and even your own notes.”

I personally started playing on my iPad, before switching to my iPhone (holding the iPad in portrait mode while trying to type just felt uncomfortable), and it played great. I constantly used the map, the journal and the notepad, so if the PC version doesn’t have those, then I’d definitely suggest avoiding it.

RockNFknRoll - 27 March 2015 05:11 PM

Is there an optimal way to play Hadean Lands? Is there any reason that it would be in any way inferior on iOS?

I couldn’t imagine playing a text adventure on a touchscreen. That would be awful.

I bought the PC version and will print out the map before playing. I’m used to drawing my own maps but since it is provided I don’t see a problem with using it. They tell you in the manual ‘feel free to draw your own’, so I don’t think it’s essential.

SirDave - 22 March 2015 06:47 PM

I would put Myst 3 Exile up there for a vote (though Riven remains my number one):

One of my favorite puzzles is/was the ball/marble/pinball/bowling ball (or whatever those balls were supposed to be ) puzzle in Amateria of Myst 3 Exile. In fact, most of Amateria is one big ball puzzle consisting of 3 or 4 sub-puzzles in which you get the balls to move correctly over various tracks. It is an ingeniously designed puzzle.

Myst 3 Exile is one of the most underrated adventure games of all time and I maintain that it’s almost as if it got lost in the shadow of the great Riven and if the latter had never existed, Exile might well be looked on as the best Myst game ever.

Exite shines with great puzzles from the opening reflector-light puzzle to the very end. All said, a particularly great feat for Presto Studios to have created a Myst game almost indistinguishable in quality and ingenuity from the 2 Cyan games that preceded it!)

Absoultely. Exile has the best puzzles out of Myst series.

man i started hadean lands. it’s complicated. i’m not used to text adventures, and it starts out the gate with hugely confusing vocabulary to decipher and tons of variables to visualize. this is gonna take a while.

Another vote for Hadean Lands here. Plotkin thinks a lot about puzzle design, and his knack for making neat “puzzle systems” that interlock really shines here. Some of his earlier work, like Spider and Web, also has great puzzles, but in a more fiddly/picky, less polished way. But HL is an amazing pure-puzzle work.

Another text adventure with impressively smart puzzles is Savoir Faire by Emily Short. Not only do many of the puzzles have multiple solutions, the ways in which you solve the puzzles are absolutely wonderful. You need to do some pretty wild stuff, but it’s all fairly clued.

Outside of text adventures, The Secret of Monkey Island is kind of a canonically good example here. This game’s been so tremendously influential that it’s easy to forget how amazingly creative some of those puzzles were. You can almost divide up adventure game puzzles into “pre-MI” and “post-MI.”

The Riddle of Master Lu is an often-overlooked puzzlefest that had some stinkers, but overall a great array of lovely, complex, challenging puzzles.

The Mulldoon Legacy (back to text adventures!) is another gigantic puzzlefest with lots of great puzzles. The author later went on to make the fantastic Sorcery! games for iOS, based on Steve Jackson’s gamebooks.

The Sierra games were not known for being particularly good at puzzle design, but I have a soft spot for the ridiculous, outlandish puzzles in Coktel Vision’s Lost in Time, including a goofy puzzle involving a magnet. They might not be the best, but they were pretty memorable. Gabriel Knight 1 had some very good puzzles that tied in well to the story, too. Just… let’s not discuss that mime.

Death Gate is getting many nods here, but the Legend catalog in general was filled with good puzzles. Eric the Unready had some fun ones, and the first Gateway game had some nifty ones centered around virtual reality simulations.

In the Telltale stable, the puzzle design in the Wallace and Gromit games tended to range from “okay but not that interesting or challenging” to “actually surprisingly good.” The last W&G game had some really fun puzzles that rewarded experimentation and a ready embrace of the game’s cartoon logic, and were decently challenging (if short) if you turned hints off. If you combined episodes 3+4 of the W&G games, you’d have one adventure game with overall high puzzle quality, in my opinion.

Whew.

I bought Hadean Lands after all these recommendations. I wasn’t sure about the text adventure part, but I love to do puzzles. I’m playing it on iPad.

I just finished Hadean Lands. I’ll admit I needed hints at times. Very smart and enjoyable game, but I didn’t think it was flawless. There were a few puzzles/connections I found virtually impossible to even pick up on which felt unfair. Though in hindsight I can see the logic, it just wasn’t really accessible for an honest player. There was lots of trial and error and tedium. I’m also not a huge fan of magic spell recipe puzzles, which it is basically 100%, though it lent itself really well to lateral thinking which I loved. Also the story kinda never went anywhere.

However, it really hooked me to the end, I got addicted and I’m now wide open to the text adventure. Though I found the map and automated notes system really helpful. Are there are other problem-solving, hard-but-fair masterpieces that I should play?

So far I’m enjoying Hadean Lands, though I’m still getting my mind around how to phrase things. I haven’t played any other text adventures, but I did try a freebie game mentioned in the freeware reviews. It was a good puzzle game, if you don’t mind the smaller screen.It’s called Mu Complex:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/studiocime/mu-complex-episode-one
They have another game called Abandoned, a more traditional point and click. It was good as well.

RockNFknRoll - 13 April 2015 02:03 PM

I just finished Hadean Lands. I’ll admit I needed hints at times. Very smart and enjoyable game, but I didn’t think it was flawless. There were a few puzzles/connections I found virtually impossible to even pick up on which felt unfair. Though in hindsight I can see the logic, it just wasn’t really accessible for an honest player. There was lots of trial and error and tedium. I’m also not a huge fan of magic spell recipe puzzles, which it is basically 100%, though it lent itself really well to lateral thinking which I loved. Also the story kinda never went anywhere.

However, it really hooked me to the end, I got addicted and I’m now wide open to the text adventure. Though I found the map and automated notes system really helpful. Are there are other problem-solving, hard-but-fair masterpieces that I should play?

I would check out Curses and Plotkin’s other games. Some Infocom favorites of mine are Lurking Horror and Trinity. Then there’s Bureaucracy, which is probably the hardest text adventure I’ve played. I never got far in that one.

RockNFknRoll - 13 April 2015 02:03 PM

However, it really hooked me to the end, I got addicted and I’m now wide open to the text adventure. Though I found the map and automated notes system really helpful. Are there are other problem-solving, hard-but-fair masterpieces that I should play?

Off this list (2015 Interactive Fiction Top 50) here are some that fit your description.

Counterfeit Monkey, Emily Short (2012)
Probably the best puzzle game in recent years before Hadean Lands. It’s a fantasy-esque land where the puzzles involve wordplay.

Anchorhead, Michael Gentry (1998)
Straight Lovecraftian horror, with possibly the most horrific moment involving realizing the solution to a puzzle.

Jigsaw, Graham Nelson (1995)
Giant time travel story. The Enigma machine puzzle is mind-blowing.

Jason: The best thing about Anchorhead is that I can think of at least three places where that description could apply. An absolutely fantastic melding of puzzle, atmosphere, and story.

are you thinking of the well, the birthdays in the archive, or the meathook + locket?