Video game puzzle designers tread a fine line: If the puzzles are too easy, they're boring, but if they're too hard, nobody will finish the game and you may wind up responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent controllers. The key is to make the difficulty of a puzzle come from a logical place so that solving it will make sense to the players, giving them a sense of well-earned accomplishment.
But sometimes, the closest thing to a 'logical place' that a game designer has is the cubbyhole underneath the toilet that his insane mother kept him in for most of his life. And that's how we get puzzles like these. The Longest Journey is the story of an art student, April Ryan, who saves both her world and a parallel fantasy universe from total annihilation (the fantasy aspect comes from the idea of an art student doing something useful). Naturally, the fate of both worlds revolves around. Early in the game you come across a key stuck on an electrified subway track. Now, this is before you know you're supposed to be a hero - before you even know a second world exists. So as far as April's concerned, at this point in the game, she's just a regular college student waiting for the subway.
It makes no sense for her to drop everything and endanger herself for a piece of garbage on the tracks. But it's so shiny! It controls water pressure, which obviously has nothing to do with subway tracks. But you start screwing with it anyway, because you're an art student: Your whole purpose in life is to fix things that aren't broken. You want to steal that big ol' clamp, which, remember, you have no motivation for doing at this point.
But whatever, maybe you're going to use it to hold your unreasonably large art-kid blunts. The problem is, it's holding down a leak. So you use the gold ring your dad gave you on your 16th birthday to conduct electricity through the cut wire up in the corner, powering the device up and loosening the clamp. Next, it's up to your room.
Glancing out the window gives you this view: 'I have to wade through shit to grab something pointless? Huh, art school prepared me for something.' , who punctures the duck with his bill as he eats. After the damaged ducky floats away, you stuff the clothesline in your pocket, because when your father abandoned you as a child, he accidentally took your favorite stuffed animal with him and you've compulsively hoarded ever since. Then you track down the duck and reinflate it, presumably getting raw sewage in your mouth in the process.
Now you're ready to get that key! Wait, what key?
Oh, right - you were doing something at some point before you got high and started fucking with these birds. Early in the game, you need to get your hands on a Babel fish, which functions as a universal translator if you stick it in your ear., but because this is a video game, it's not as simple as hitting B16 and accidentally getting a bag of raisins instead of what you clearly chose (seriously, why are they always in there? Nobody wants you, raisins).
The first time you try it, a fish shoots out of the machine and falls into a hole below a hook. OK, no problem, you just take off your dressing gown and hang it on the hook so it blocks the next fish. And sends it down a 'hitherto unnoticed drain.' Still, no problem.
You can cover the drain with your trusty towel. The next fish lands neatly on it. And is promptly snatched by a cleaning robot. At which point you lose interest and go play Halo. Well, all right, let's think this through. The robot exits through a little panel at the base of the wall, so you need to block that off. Your satchel will do.
You press the button again, the robot plows into the satchel and the fish soars into the air. Where it's snatched by a flying cleaning robot. At this point, we'd take the hint and start spamming 'stomp robot.' But that won't work here: You have to distract the second robot by putting some junk mail on the satchel, which sends it flying as well. Assuming you bothered to pick that junk mail up earlier. If you didn't, you're screwed.
Oh, and the vending machine only has five fish in it, so a single wrong move means you don't get one. Which means you never understand what the hell's going on, which means you'll be inevitably killed a couple of scenes later and have to start the whole game over. Or just quit and play a different, less painful game, like Russian roulette. That 'click' is the sound of a frustrated gamer loading his gun. Each stanza represents a play, and you have to order them appropriately. The above quote, for instance, is an obscure reference to King Lear. You don't have an intimate, encyclopedic knowledge of King Lear?
'Haha, what are you doing playing video games' the developers of Silent Hill ask, 'when you could be discovering the wonder of literature?' If you do happen to be a professor of Shakespeareology, you eventually end up with a five-digit number. Puzzle solv- wait, shit, the door you're trying to open only takes a four-digit code. That's what the last stanza is for: 'Solve for X and blow thine self, verily.' Now, obviously we don't have to decipher this one for you. But for all the.snicker. little Snugs out there, we'll hold your hand: It's telling you to double the number for Hamlet, triple the number for Romeo and Juliet and remove the number for Macbeth.
King's Quest is among the oldest of the old school adventure games, created back when men were men, every piece of software came on 147 separate floppy disks and there were no newfangled FAQ sites to hold your hand. Back in those simpler days, concepts like 'fairness' and 'logic' were about as important to game designers as 'graphics' and 'having your parents respect your career choices.' King's Quest had way more than its share of baffling puzzles, to be sure, but none were more frustrating than the. It went like this: You come across a random assortment of colored pixels that are supposed to be either a gnome or a deformed Carnivale dancer.
Or Sean Connery out bar-hopping with the Smurfs. And you, the player, must guess his name to continue. Shit, now what? Start guessing? Dude kind of looks like a Fred, maybe? Got kind of an Earl flavor to him?
Ah, but if you happen to have found a cryptic note in a totally different area a while back, you probably won't recall its contents, which were: 'Sometimes it is wise to think backwards.' Oh, OK, so his name is Nikstlitselpmur. Crack 3dm state of decay release.
Frickin' cakewalk up in this bitc- no? That wasn't it, either? 'How about a sort of gargling, gagging noise that's often heard when I strangle gnomes with my dick?' That's because when the game says 'think backwards,' it wants you to invert the alphabet itself - A becomes Z, B becomes Y, and so on. That makes the gnome's name Ifnkovhgroghprm, which is just going to be hell on the voice actors once they reboot this sucker. Read Next To add to the pressure, you only get three guesses. Not all hope is lost if you fail, but you are forced to take a different path to the next area -, which might make the game unwinnable, thus forcing you to restart entirely.
Oh, and technically the fairy tale character's name is RumpELstiltskin. So even if the fable comes to mind, and the phrase 'think backwards' instantly causes the language center of your brain to fold inside out, you'll still only get the answer if you're the exact same kind of dyslexic as the programmer. I think I'll just spend the rest of the game looking at this amazing scenery.' Gabriel Knight is a suave, badass monster hunter. His third adventure, Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, finds him up against a coven of vampires. At one point in the game, he needs to rent a motorbike, but the really sweet one he wants is reserved. So what do you do?
Settle for a moped, and risk looking like a dork in front of Baron Von Bloodmouth? Not bloody likely!
Bribe the rental agent? Nah, that would cost money. Maybe you just steal the damn thing, citing undead-related emergency protocols? That's you on the left, the guy you're impersonating on the right. That's straightforward enough: You're supposed to pretend to be the guy who gets this thing. We can see what you're thinking here, game. It's not like you're asking us to wrap a rubber ducky around a backward-speaking gnome and make him hopscotch across a numbered board to make the Fibonacci Sequence.
Good job so far. So you start by stealing his jacket from his hotel room (so you can steal things?
Why not just take the bike, then? Can you not bear the disapproval of the fatherly bike shop owner?). You also have to grab a hat from the local church's lost and found, to cover up your luxurious locks. Next you have to get Mosely's passport, which he keeps in his back pocket at all times. But hey, no problem - just leave a piece of candy sitting in the hallway, buzz Mosely from the hotel's front desk, and then when he walks by, he'll be so distracted with mysterious hall-candy that you can pickpocket him.
Because we all know that hall-candy is the most delicious candy, for it is taboo. Now, tongue his prostate until the passport falls out of his pocket. Finally, you need a fake mustache to complete the look.
And that's where logic and reason fall to shambling pieces: What you have to do is wander around outside until you find a door with a hole in it, attach a piece of tape to the hole, collect the now cat-hair-covered tape and use a packet of syrup to glue the fur to your face. Jesus, that's like going from point A to point B via the goblin road that lives only in the thoughts of CIA pod-transplants. There's absolutely nothing approaching sanity in that mode of thinking whatsoever. But wait a second. Here's what Mosely looks like again: Remember, this was back when systems weren't powerful enough to render chins. There's something missing. Observant readers may notice that that man does not have a fucking mustache.
Gabriel claims he needs one to disguise the 'obvious disparity' between their faces. So a mysterious instant cat-hair-and-syrup mustache is.
Less disparate? So now Gabriel looks nothing like the picture in Mosley's passport, but you can fix it! You just have to draw a mustache on the passport photo with a marker. The cat-stache and coloring book passport somehow fool the motorbike rental guy, who has an impeccable enough memory for faces to identify the legitimate renter on sight, but apparently suffers from a bizarrely specific type of mustache-induced hysterical blindness. Easy enough: We find peeing on a cop is the most efficient means to jail inhabitation, but you can just dress up like a pirate or whatever floats your criminal boat. Ah, but once you get in there, you find out that the man you need to speak to is deaf.
Herein lies the puzzle! He's in the cell right next to you, and all that separates the two of you is a barred window.
You need to get his attention: If only you could get your hands on some ink and paper. Hey, wait a minute, here's some in your inventory! Now it's just a simple matter of grabbing a tin cup from your cell and banging it on the door until a guard comes by to douse you in fish stew. Oh, did you think you were going to write a note? Ha, that's adorable. 'Now you sit your ass down and just smell like fish for a while!'
You then go back into your cell and shoot the seagull at the prisoner. This gets his attention, because even deaf people find it hard to ignore a terrified bird projectile right in the kisser. You are now able to have a conversation, most of which is probably going to revolve around why your mother is such whore and, follow-up question: Why you just shot him in the face with a goddamn living seagull.
So the video game gives the player a prompt: Get this guy's attention without using your voice. And the correct solution is not to throw a note, or to start waving frantically and wait for him to turn around and notice you.
No, the most logical path of action is supposedly to vacuum-launch a marine scavenger into a stranger's face, and all because some programmer probably had one really weird deaf friend when he was a kid and extrapolated out some faulty assumptions. You can read more from Mark at and. Or check out. For more causes of broken controllers, check out and. If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out. And stop by where we hold a constant vigil for all the A buttons that have been lost over the years.
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Share this:. opens with a series of nightmares, wasting no time before informing the player of the high stakes and gravity of its multi-threaded plot.
It’s a personal story, of family and sacrifice, but the potential consequences are cosmic. In truth, it’s not a single story at all, it’s a collection of stories within stories and about stories, taking the disparate worlds of and weaving a larger tapestry. I’ve played the first three hours and found something quite different to the point and click adventure I was expecting. Share this:. The continues! At the behest of many, I’m carving it into the Internet’s unforgetting crystalline walls – one hefty chunk at a time – because mere ears could not withstand its.
Last time, I gathered Obsidian’s Chris Avellone, Dreamfall’s Ragnar Tornquist, Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail, Introversion’s Chris Delay, and Redshirt’s Mitu Khandaker to discuss what exactly makes each of them “indie” despite their exceedingly different backgrounds, so you should probably and stuff. Then you may now proceed onward to a spirited debate about the increasing uselessness of the term “indie,” Steam Greenlight’s many shortcomings, and the role of Kickstarter for smaller devs vs juggernauts like Obsidian.
It’s all after the break. Share this:.
Let’s try this again. Earlier this week, I posted the audio from a spur-the-moment I put together during Rezzed, but its audio quality ended up a casualty of the fact that everyone at Rezzed never stops screaming. The agony of existence. It is terrifying.
So as a (probably much better) alternative, I’ll be posting a transcription over the next few days. If I did it all in one go, the page would strike the bottom of the Internet and rupture its core (and, you know, take a billion years to read), so here’s part one. In it, ‘s Chris Avellone, ‘s Ragnar Tornquist, ‘s Chris Delay, ‘s Rami Ismail, and ‘s Mitu Khandaker discuss the evolution of the “indie” scene in the gaming industry, the gulf between triple-A and smaller-scale development, and the way Kickstarter-empowered no-longer-triple-A developers like Obsidian and Red Thread are starting to bridge it.
Share this:. Update: embedding fixed, and download links provided! Rezzed was a time of magic and wonder. Indie developers of all shapes and sizes mingled with fans and each other alike, and it was nearly enough to make us all forget that we were trapped in Birmingham.
Honestly though, it was a pretty strange scene. I mean, on one hand, there were devs like Vlambeer and Introversion – outfits who’ve been relatively small since day one – but on the other, folks like ‘s Chris Avellone and creator Ragnar Tornquist roamed the halls. And yet, all of them could technically be considered “indie” nowadays. So I decided to gather a formidable panel of developers for an impromptu discussion about what exactly “indie” means, indie as a reaction to triple-A, the difference between bigger “born-again” indies like Obsidian and tiny outfits like Vlambeer, publishers, creative constraints, the film industry’s approach to similar issues, diversity, and heaps more. Head past the break to hear Chris Avellone, Ragnar Tornquist, ‘s Chris Delay, ‘s Rami Ismail, and ‘s Mitu Khandaker chat about all of the things. All of the things.
Share this:. And by dance move, I of course mean “tectonic shift in creative management affixed to a phrase that happens to sound like it could be a dance move in a universe where things like layoffs and sadness don’t exist.” Given, however, I imagine that actually adding a dance animation titled “The Internal Shakeup” to would elicit a chorus of “too soons” powerful enough to wake the dead just so they could add, “Yeah guys, that’s sort of not-cool” before returning to their grim slumber. Longest Journey mastermind Ragnar Tornquist is stepping down from his role as senior producer and slipping into some striking new creative director pants, while Joel Bylos is moving up from lead content designer to game director. Join me in reading way too far into it after the break.
Share this:. Secrets!
Everybody has them – even you. Maybe you occasionally take two samples at the grocery store, or talk on your cell phone while driving, putting millions at risk. Or perhaps you’re just part of some boring, hum-drum Illuminati that controls the world’s every thought and action. Creative director Ragnar Tornquist used to be like you – except more interesting and with a cooler name. Now, though, his secrets are all gone.
Yep, I snatched up every last one. He’s afraid of liquorice-flavored jellybeans. But also, more pertinently, he thinks Secret World “doesn’t feel like any other MMO” in existence, and he has big plans about how to keep you wayward folk interested long after launch. Read on for all of that and more. Share this:. Playing was but the only way to explore its most secret parts was to sit down with some of the myth-makers who are conspiring together to create this story-led MMO.
So I did what was necessary, gathering together three of the minds behind the game and forcing them to talk at me and each other for many an hour. In the first part of this two-part conversation, you will DISCOVER the reason the game is set in the modern day, THRILL to the origins of the secret societies, CONSIDER the difficulty of inserting narrative into an MMO, and PONDER religion and mythology at great length.