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Adventure Game Scene of the Day - Wednesday 12 August

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Total Posts: 3933

Joined 2011-03-14

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  Not The

Or The Mystery of the Missing Puzzle!

I know there is a lot of members that still haven’t played Dreamfall Chapters, so I will do my very best to keep this weeks Midweek Puzzle or rather Not The Midweek Puzzle, as spoiler free as technical possible.

You are in an underground complex. For every few meters there is a door that has to be opened manually by pulling a lever, unfortunately the doors will slam shut the second you let go of the lever. Fortunately you have a companion with you, who can pull the lever while you go through the door, and then you can pull the lever on the other side of the door ...

Now you are probably thinking “And? .. What more? .. Is it a diabolically difficult cooperation puzzle, where you have to switch between the two characters, and find a tricky combination that will allow both characters to pass through all the doors?”

And you would be right to ask those questions .. that was also the question I asked when I reached this point .. but the answer is .. no .. nothing of the sort!
That is all there is .. I’m not joking, there really isn’t anything more to it .. it is not actually a puzzle at all!!!

The big question or mystery here is of course WHY??????

WHY go through all the trouble of making the doors, the animations, the mechanics for opening them and explaining how it works to the players, and then not actually use it for anything at all!

WHY NOT use it to create a diabolically difficult cooperation puzzle, where you have to switch between the two characters, and find a tricky combination that will allow both characters to pass through all the doors?
It doesn’t even have to be diabolically difficult, just .. you know .. a puzzle!

I don’t have the answer to that question, in fact it is a big mystery to me. But I imagine that it was originally planned as a cooperation puzzle, and the during one of the test phases someone said something like: “You know, that door puzzle. There is as such nothing wrong with it, but kids today, they don’t want puzzles. It just gets in the way of the storytelling and breaks the immersion, so I will recommend that you scratch it” - “But we have already made all the assets for it” - “No problem, you can still keep the doors themselves, that way there is still some interaction in the scene, and the kids like interaction, even if the interaction is completely meaningless”

It is of course also possible that it was originally planned like this, but why anyone would do something like that, is an even bigger mystery for me.

Either way, these kinds of phoney interactions, that only exists to give players the illusion that they are actively playing a game instead of passively watching a film or a cutscene, is a scourge that is plaguing modern adventure games, just as pixel hunting and random deaths used to plagued games in the god old days. At least that is my opinion.


Note that even though this is not the only missing puzzle in DC, then it is not an entirely puzzle free games, and even though that they have gone way to far down the same route as Telltale for my taste, then I still don’t think it is a bad game.
Just that they have squandered the opportunity to make a great game.

     

You have to play the game, to find out why you are playing the game! - eXistenZ

Total Posts: 117

Joined 2006-12-03

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I quite agree, the puzzle design is often horrible, and like you say, they probably believe it gets in the way of storytelling (which is btw often too esoteric for my taste). I postponed playing the third chapter, and when I started they made me doing chores like in a Nancy Drew game (locating the drawings), so I stopped playing for some time. It is completely uninspired design (like locating the bottles in Life is Strange). And, as you will agree, it’s not only the lacking door puzzle of course. The vast environments don’t seem to be designed to interact and solve puzzles but to make sure that the player keeps running around.

     
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Total Posts: 8998

Joined 2004-01-05

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Indeed a terrible moment, not sure what was the point. Even worse when you had to follow the beep signal. If you mada a mistake you had go back through those open door animations again. So tedious.

     

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