Adventure Gamers - Forums

Do any of you take notes? I never have, and I’m wondering if I should start. When I was playing Syberia the other day, I got stuck and had to go looking for hints. Turns out there was a puzzle I had yet to complete. I had run into it earlier while playing, and couldn’t figure out how to solve it. I left it alone and ended up forgetting about it. Had I noted it down, I probably could have fiddled with it more and figured it out.

The problem is, I never know what to take notes of. Should I just reserve it for stuff like that (unsolved puzzles), or should I be noting down everything? It feels tedious to write down a note on every thing I stumble across and every thing somebody says; on the other hand, it isn’t always obvious what’s important and what’s not until after the fact.

As for mapping, I find that they can be useful in larger graphic adventures and that they’re indispensable in text adventures. But I haven’t really found a style of mapping I’m comfortable with. I alternate between simple lines and labeled boxes to represent locations, and more detailed maps modelling the actual shape of the settings. The latter can help with navigation a bit more, but I find it time-consuming, and disruptive to immersion. And again, It seems like the usefulness of maps depends on the game. Syberia has small, defined locations, for instance. Maps aren’t really necessary. I find that true with most graphic adventures, actually. Unless they’re confusing/gigantic, they can be kept in the head.

Of course, maps are available for most games online, but that feels a bit like “cheating”, so I try to stay away.

What do you guys think? Do you find notes helpful? How about maps? Are they handy, or just a waste of time?

For me, it really does depend on the difficulty of the game.  A large 1st-person open-world game like the Rhem games or Riven would have been impossible for me to complete on my own without copious notes because clues are scattered throughout the game world and anything could be important.  I tend not to take as many notes with 3rd-person games with inventory puzzles, simply because the items themselves and the main character’s comments tend to jog my memory.  If a game has a map, I will gladly use it, but otherwise I’ll draw my own, especially if the game has a maze.

BlakouttheMM - 24 May 2015 07:20 PM

Do any of you take notes?

Oh yeah - I love taking notes
That is almost half the fun of the game for me, and I can easily fill up several pages in my notebook with a single game. Unfortunately many (but not all) modern games doesn’t actually require it, and will instead remember everything for you - I still make the notes though

BlakouttheMM - 24 May 2015 07:20 PM

The problem is, I never know what to take notes of.

Well that is the tricky part because you never know in advance what you will actually need. The general rule I follow is that it is better to take too many notes than too few. It is also worth mentioning, that the more you use notes, the better instincts you will also develop for what you actually need a note of and what you don’t. 

A typical must-take-note moment is if you come across some numbers or symbols, it might be a phone number that you need to call, or some symbols that are required for a later puzzle, most modern games remember this for you, so you basically just have to click on a phone to dial it, but many older games required that you wrote this down yourself, and I still do that just to be on the safe side.

Making notes of what people tell you can also be very useful, for example in a recent game you are told a story, and later in the game you are required to recreate that story, if you didn’t took notes then you are forced to rely on your memory and trial and error, whereas if you did took notes then it is actually a pretty easy puzzle. But also simpler things like “You should talk to Mickey about that” or “The cleaning lady arrives at 7” can be useful information to take note of.

Then there are the puzzles themselves. There are many puzzles that are simply simpler to solve on paper than in game. Nowadays I just as often take a screenshot or shots of the puzzle instead of writing it down, for example for a particular puzzle in The Pandora Directive I took 4 screenshots, arranged them side by side on my desktop, and then solved the puzzle on paper before returning to the game.

As for maps then I only use them for outright mazes. I generally have a pretty good sense of direction, and as you said, most games only have small locations, so I only very rarely need them. When I do make maps they are always very simple with just some lines on paper, perhaps with different signs for dead ends or interesting objects I might need to return to. I do however sometimes make notes like “Mickey is in the alley next to the grocery store”.

Antrax - 25 May 2015 08:15 AM

Which is why it’s a stupid puzzle. It’s either unfair or trivial, so who exactly is the target audience?

Like all other types of puzzle they can either be well or poorly designed, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with puzzles that require that you actually pay attention to the details in the game.

(The particular puzzle I had in mind, might not be the best puzzle ever made, though it is neither unfair nor trivial, but its strength is more the way it is integrated into the whole story, than the actual puzzle itself.)

It depends on the difficulty of the game and the in-game help. If the game has an in-game map or an in-game journal that keeps track of most things, then I’ll only take notes when faced with a particularly gruesome puzzle, but most of the time I’ll avoid it.

Unless the game is very large, I usually don’t bother with maps, relying on memory. Objectives are usually condensed to single sentences, and if the game allows it, I’ll just name my savegame after my current objective.
To give an example, my Grim Fandango savegame list has names like “Rubacava - forge betting stub” or “Rubacava - get metal detector”. You know, so I’d remember what I was doing when I saved the game.

Large and difficult games with plenty of objectives (and no in-game journal to keep track of them - questionable design if they’re large and with plenty of objectives imo), will have me penning down lots of things. Or keeping them in a notepad doc on my desktop if I don’t feel like bothering with pen and paper.

Needless to say, it doesn’t happen all that often, and usually I’ll only take notes in (mostly old) games where I need to memorize codes or telephone numbers, or to assist with difficult puzzles.

The “secret password” puzzle in Monkey Island 2 for instance (“if this is 5 and this is 3, what’s this?”) is one I solved by writing it down after twenty minutes of randomly failing at it in-game. I think I solved it within two minutes when I started to write it down. The pattern was suddenly VERY obvious. And fiendishly clever.

I also often take note of puzzles that I can’t solve yet. If I encounter a puzzle in the living room of a mansion, I’ll usually write that down. For instance “piano puzzle in living room - musical note sequence needed?” is a good example of what I’d write down.
When I encounter a trunk full of sheets of music in the attic, I’ll know where to use them then.
I’m very enclined to take notes like this if there’s a very real chance that I’ll forget. Which usually means the game is rather large (I’m not bothering if there’s only 10 rooms in the entire game), and there’s a real life event approaching that could put the game on hiatus for several days (or something similar).

My note taking generally consists of lots of scribbles on lots of pieces of paper torn from lots of 6x4” perforated pads of paper. I generally scribble using a felt-tip pen, which makes the backside of each piece of paper useless.

If the game doesn’t have an integral map I will look for one on the internet. If I am forced to make my own, I’ll start off with an 8.5x11” piece of graph paper. The center of which is “ground zero,” and I move out from there.

I don’t like taking notes and I hate making maps. As far as maps for mazes is concerned, most designers make “right-hand” mazes. That is, when you enter the maze you put your right hand on the wall. Then you continue through the maze without allowing your right hand to leave the wall. It may take a bit longer, but it works 99% of the time.

Agreed. That strategy works only in simple real life mazes, certainly not 99% of the time. More like 40-50 percent, at least in adventure games. Try that in a fffff Zork maze. Or a maze with up and down. Or in a maze with one-way traffic. There are some pretty ingenious mazes, like the Riddle of the Maze.

I have been taking notes ever since the old text adventures. When I like the game I like taking notes, although drawing a map can feel like a chore and I’m glad when a map is provided.

Antrax - 25 May 2015 11:53 PM

I don’t know about most of the time - off the top of my head, that strategy won’t work for The Pandora Directive, Resonance and The 7th Guest.

It should work in The 7th Guest, that was a regular maze. Of course, there it was just easier to actually look at the giant clue they provided and just run through the thing using the shortest path.

Depending on which maze we’re talking about, it also worked in Pandora. Although to be fair, if you actually touched the wall with your right hand you would be electrocuted.

TimovieMan - 26 May 2015 06:38 AM

It should work in The 7th Guest, that was a regular maze. Of course, there it was just easier to actually look at the giant clue they provided and just run through the thing using the shortest path.

The 7th Guest was tough because the game turned the player automatically at an opening, which I found a bit disorienting, despite the map.  Of course, Stauf’s persistent “Feeling loooonely?” didn’t help either.

I only take notes when there’s insurmountable encrypted message puzzle before me. Silent Hill 3 puzzles fit the description as well as Charles Cecil’s games (Broken Sword, Da Vinci Code).