You wait ages for a bus...

...then two come along together.

I've been thinking about recent adventure games. Though some of them have high production values and excellent stories, I keep reading complaints about the standard of the puzzles. Could it be that, as so many of the recent adventures have leant towards a more "real-world" setting, it's becoming increasingly difficult to create puzzles that fit within the game's world?

Back when we were all playing Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island, a designer could virtually create any kind of puzzle and wouldn't be too worried about justifying its existence. In a wacky world there was a greater scope for a wide variety of puzzles. Even in the Broken Sword games, because they were humorous, it was perfectly acceptable to put in a convoluted puzzle that ended with a dog being dumped into the dock. Yet it's clear that a puzzle of this nature wouldn't fit in Still Life or Fahrenheit.

In order, therefore, to save the adventure genre, we need to revert back to the humorous and wacky games that were previously the mainstay of the genre. Perhaps we should start up the Campain for Actual Frivolous Fun in Exciting Interactive Narrative Entertainment.

:)