Idiots should have known to use the honey on the skeleton, causing ants to carry away the bones but leave behind the clearly visible key that I was clicking on for 15 fuckingijfiejbfitkbeofniwkwhofh
Oh seriously???
yes 80s adventure puzzle games were shit
The way I suspect some of them were made: get 10 random people, present the problem to them and ask each person what they think the solution is. Say no to the first 9, then say yes to whatever the 10th person guesses. If they guess something previously guessed, then keep prompting for more information until the solution is so specific even people on the right track will be confused by it.
Also add endless segments where several specific squares of the grid have mandatory items, something prevents you from systematically searching the entire grid, and if you go too far, you die.
Hey! Spoilers!
Going into it cold without knowing the tropes of the genre and the visual design language would be a massive disadvantage. Gamers in the 80s would have a set of expectations and strategies that we wouldn’t lean on today. Giving someone from 1985 Factorio might lead to some similar confusion until they got the hang of it.
Similar to giving an English reader some Chaucer.
Factorio spends a lot of time optimizing the first 30 minutes of game play for this exact reason. Check out these blogs on it:
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-241 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-327
True, maybe a bad example. Although there are a few conventionts it might not bother to explain, like WASD for directional input, or scroll wheels, or whatever.
I think Factorio perfectly proves your point.
The Devs spent a lot of time making sure you understand the game in the first 30 minutes. 80’s Devs didn’t do that and it shows in how hard the learning curve of the game is.
It goes even farther than that: games in the 80s didn’t even necessarily have consistent designs that could be trained in the first 30 minutes. Especially the adventure games. They were also perfectly willing to let you lose the game in act 1 but not tell you about it until act 3, where the way they do “tell you” is you don’t have any possible solution for a problem.
Like if you don’t get that delicious pie plus another food source early on, you’ll either die of starvation or the yeti will eat you later in the game.
But if you know what to do, the game becomes trivial.
A very common thing even back then. Finishing a game was not a given. It was an achievement.
I read something years ago that those games were designed to have illogical puzzles so that you’d pay to call the help line (yes, there was a phone number you’d call for help) or sell paper game guides
Nintendo had a Hotline… I called them once because I got stuck in donkey kong country. (The guy was like ‘at the first ledge just drop straight, there’s a hidden cannon that lets you skip the level’)
That’s frustrating. How were you meant to find that?
The Secret of Monkey Island 2 famously mocked this where you could simulate literally call the helpline in-game as the PC while lost in a jungle.
I need to play this again!
In particular, ‘Maniac Mansion’ has pathways for the characters to die or the player to be stuck without a recourse — which later adventures avoided, allowing successful completion from any point in the game.
I recently tried playing through it for the first time (on an Android tablet with ScummVM), and pretty sure I hit such a dead end.
Because that was the beginning of the adventure game era where there was no concept of game design and ensuring that the games made logical sense, hence the birth of “moon logic”, thanks Roberta. These games were also made to be obtuse because games were very expensive back then and making obscure logic was an incentive to make things more “worth” it, often intending to make the game last months of play time to solve their “logic” puzzles and you had to be in tune with the game designer to get them.
Not to mention that due to intention or lack of game design, these games were notorious for allowing you to put yourself into a unwinnable state with no way to correct it, things like Space Quest with the alien kiss of death that won’t trigger until the very end of the game or that Kings Quest game where you had one shot to throw a boot at a cat or you’d be dead man walking.
Not being able to finish these games wasn’t even unusual back then without the help of friends or BBS. Heck I had games adventure games I bought from that era that I never finished until the got re-released on Steam.
Roberta liked fairy tales and the first KQ game was just as many of them crammed into one place as possible. Did she not think that the Rumpelstiltskin puzzle was not crazy? There was one hint in the game of ‘sometimes it is best to think backwards’ but who the fuck would get it?
Also Rumpelstiltskin’s name had to be spelled with the alphabet backwards! That made no damn sense!
excuse me his name was nikstlitslepmur and heaven help you if you mispeel it
IFNKOVHGROGHPRM! It was IFNKOVHGROGHPRM in the original AGI version!
i spent too much time trying to figure that out. I thought it was ROT13 or something but that was meaner.
4 hours is pretty cruel.
I mean I beat that game for the first time, in the first way, when I was ten. But it took me a lot more than 4 hours. Now I could probably do it in two. But only for the Bernard involved endings, and where you can make use of the glitches, like the switch character-pause-freeze Edna in her bedroom.
Lol only 4 hours given? Sounds like the study runners also didn’t have enough patience to really study this. Or designed the study for the conclusion.
Maniac Mansion was designed to be replayed, which is why the cast of characters you picked could be different each playthrough. It also meant a lot more red herrings.
Lucasarts was much cleaner. We finished DOTT as kids without hints.
Maniac Mansion 2 (DOTT) was way easier (and even came with Maniac Mansion 1 as an in-game easter egg)
Yep. That’s how I played Maniac Mansion!
In those people defense, that number of success was the same in the early 90’s too.
Edit: Moon logic was a bitch back in the day. LucasArts and Sierra were the prime offenders.
Use the staple remover on the gopher, duh
I grew up with Maniac Mansion on the NES and never used a guide for it as a kid while managing to beat it. I’d also fail this test, probably. 🤷♂️
now i want to play Day of the Tentacle. Time to boot up ScummVM
damn, that’s one of the ones i could have passed. you have to start with specific characters or you’ll lose.
also, [turn on microwave.]
