Adventure Games – What’s To Love?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 17, 2013

The trailer for DoubleFine’s adventure game – the one that put Kickstarter on the map for alternative funding for game developers – is out. Here it is, in case you haven’t seen it…

I showed it to a friend, mentioning how much I loved Schaffer’s Grim Fandango when it was released (to this day, my favorite adventure game, even beating out Monkey Island 2).

He said he had never gotten into adventure games. As I thought about it, I said (incorrectly, in retrospect) that while I really loved them back in their heyday, I haven’t really gotten back into them since. I wondered what changed. I mean, I have tons of old-school and newer (indie) graphic adventure games sitting on my hard drive that I haven’t played (at least not to completion). Is something wrong? Have I lost whatever it was that made me love the genre back then? I hope that Broken Age might be the one to rekindle that old love.

Upon further reflection, I’m going to have to say not as much has changed as I thought. There have been some games from Telltale that I have really enjoyed and played to completion recently. Granted, these are not the same as old-school, hardcore adventure games (am I *gasp* not so hardcore anymore?).

And… in reality… there were a lot of unfinished adventure games sitting on my hard drive back in 1992, too.  I’m really bad about quitting and moving on to something else when I get killed or stumped in a game, and sometimes I don’t get back to it. Maybe that’s why many of my completed adventure games of the 1990s were the LucasArts titles where you could not die. They were the original “hardcore” casual adventure games!

It’s kind of sad the number of adventure games I profess to love, but I never concluded. Maybe I think on them so fondly because I never had closure. They are unfinished conversations in my head, and my imagination is still filling in the possibilities because I have never really let go. Maybe that’s true of a lot of unfinished RPGs as well. Just as nothing in reality is as terrifying as the unknown, no game – no story – can be as satisfying as I might imagine them to be.  Although it helps that they were really dang cool up until the point where I got stumped, forgot to try again, and lost my saved game…

Trying to explain exactly why I loved adventure games – or Grim Fandango in particular – was hard, too. It’s been so long that I forget the reasons why. But ultimately, it comes down to a few very simple principles:

1. Interesting characters. Probably more than anything else. A good principle character who can respond to really weird interactions with amusing comments really helps.

2. Open-ended interaction potential. While the worlds could be frustrating in how much they didn’t allow you to interact with them, part of the fun in both text adventures and graphic adventures was how few restrictions were placed on the interactive potential.  This, too, was a source of frustration – sometimes you’d want to scream at your monitor, “What am I supposed to do here?” But this was part of what made the worlds come alive — anything in the world could potentially be interacted with, and sometimes in very interesting and amusing ways.

3. Compelling stories. Always a strong reason to play any game.

4. The euphoria of solving puzzles and problems. Maybe the match-3 genre has adventure games beat by letting you do this dozens of times per minute instead of once every few minutes, but I’m pretty sure there are some biochemical reactions to solving the kind of mental puzzles provided in adventure games. It feels good. And while it’s quite possible in the modern era to get solutions to any adventure game more than two days old on the Internet, finally solving the real stumpers by yourself can probably get you high. It’s not like a challenging action sequence where you can chalk it up to just rehearsing things to the point of a combination of good luck, learned responses, and perfect timing. It’s a full-on “Eureka!” moment which potentially opens up any number of roadblocks which have been hemming you in until that point. It feels like it’s a world-changing event all because you had an idea.

5. As a side-note: Part of it possibly came down to being able to tell stories or use settings that would be harder to work out in another medium. It was the ability to explore the worlds and understand the settings at your own pace that maybe made them work. That allowed the weirdness to become endearing rather than off-putting.  This was very true of text adventures as well. The exposition necessary to make it work would slow down a linear narrative to insomnia-defeating levels, but when you can push and pull at the setting and “play with it” in the interactive medium it can come together nicely.

There may be more to it than this. But these are the aspects that I think of. This is also why I like putting a few ‘adventure game’ style puzzles in my RPGs. Not too much, and not too hard – because again, I’m one of those guys who tends to quit after being stumped or lost for too long – but just enough to season my RPGs with a little bit of that remembered flavor.

I suspect and hope that Broken Age will do just fine reminding me why I still hold the genre in such high regard.  Hopefully it will remind a lot of people.

As a bonus – Ron Gilbert just wrote a list of how he’d create a Monkey Island game today. He stresses that he has no plans to make a new Monkey Island game, but it certainly sounds like he is considering launching a Kickstarter or something to make another game or series of games in that style. It has a lot of elements that he considers “key” to what he loves about the classics – and how he would update them in a way that he would have done twenty+ years ago if it had been technologically feasible.

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