A Point-and-click ramble-o-thon

I appreciate probably nobody will care about this and there's not much point in me posting about it but I finally managed to track down a game I've been looking for for years today: Noctropolis. All I remembered was that it started in a comic book store, there was a succubus and it was kinda dark and cool looking. I have no idea if it's any good and I have no intention of playing it, it's just satisfying to know what it is. Apparently it's a bit sexy

Noctropolis has been on GOG and Steam for a few years. It was definitely an interesting one though, it’s not a great game but also underlooked because of the tits making people put it alongside Voyeur and Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties as some sort of FMV exploitation game.

Pretty good interview with the creators of Beneath A Steel Sky which may be relevant to the interests of people in this thread

metro.co.uk/2021/10/12/beyond-a-steel-sky-interview-with-charles-cecil-and-dave-gibbons-15409843/amp/

It's been a while, sorry. I was unexpectedly restricted by some fun-time trips to the hospital and doctors. Needless to say, playing and thinking about point-and-click adventure games were not on the list of actions my GP and various mysterious doctors and nurses provided. The selfish bastards.

It occured to me though, while sitting in a waiting room a couple of days ago, that as my brother and I have been playing through point-and-click adventure games together (obligatory link), that we've started, subconsciously, to form a kind of ruleset for what works and what doesn't work in these things. Now, you may be thinking, if you've checked the channel out at all, 'Hang on you raggamuffin, you've only played about six of them so far! Surely that's not a strong enough body of work to start waxing expert on the entire genre'. But I say to that, 'don't worry, I've also played probably about 20 others in the past as well, so we're fine'. In fact, I can say with around 36% confidence, that I'm probably the most expert point-and-click player in a 15-metre radius of where I'm currently sitting, and you can take that to the bank, whatever that means.

Anyway, what I'm really trying to say is that right now seems a fabulous time to establish some rules for the genre. If you're making a point-and-click adventure game, or a zesty sponge cake, these are the things I think can help elevate your game or cake into the stratosphere of goodness. These are the things that I want to see in a point-and-click game, every time, no excuses. Some are small but powerful QoL features, some are bigger concepts. All are, in my humble opinion, VITAL. The fewer of these I see implemented in a point-and-click game, the sadder I become.

Also, because everyone loves lists, I'll do it in list format, otherwise the kool kids will get bored because numbers are exciting and reading and patience are too obvious a form of educational benefit. But I won't commit to the total number of entries in the list, because that adds an element of excitement to the format and also because I don't know what I'm doing.

With no further adieu. I present to you; the list.

1. Skipable Screen Transitions.

Point-and-click adventure games, you need this in your toolset. If I click the edge of a screen to exit into a different scene, it should be possible to transition immediately. I do not want to wait for your main character to slowly amble their way lackadaisically towards the horizon, like a poorly selected pooh-stick on a lazy sunday afternoon in August. My required process is to allow the user to choose when this is implemented; one 'normal' left-click for the weekend warriors, a cheeky double-click for the guys in a rush. Do not make me wait. Do not inflate the game time by making me watch a guy walk. Your game is not the first part of Lord of the Rings (unless it is, in which case, sorry). I'd rather your game was 30mins long if the alternative is 5 hours of watching some pixels adjusting their x,y coordinates on a screen.

2. Quick Inventory Access.

I want my inventory and I want it now. I spent a lot of time hoovering up those items and I now want to rub them against each other in a futile bid to complete the game and feel good about myself. You need to make sure I have access to the things I'm carrying, and I'm talking fast like Ash Wednesday. One click and everything is there to be manipulated. I will accept maybe two arrows to scroll through them if space is tight, but ideally I want them all. On no account is it acceptable to provide them to me one at a time and force me to arrow key through them. I'm looking at you, Grim Fandango, and your stupid waistcoat pocket inventory system. And you, Escape From Monkey Island. And all other GRiME games. Oh, there were only those two? Weird. Anyway, stop that. It must be quick and easy to see what you have swipes, and to press it all against each other, because, let's face it, there will be times your clever puzzle design will be utterly bewildering to me, and at that point, I will be angry and need to combine things at random. Don't make me even more angry by also making that a pain.

3. Streamlined Talky bits.

Similar to point one, I guess. Point-and-click games often feature conversation and cutscenes. These should be skipable, BUT importantly must not be so easily skipable that you can accidently skip them due to overzealous clicking. Nothing makes me more depressed than my own lack of self-control. Also, be consistent - don't do it for some of the lines at random, as that's really annoying. Extra special points awarded if a game tweaks its character dialogue to shorten them the second time around, so you can focus on just the pertinent clues you may need to re-read/hear (and also make them skipable because; consistency). Even the most zany hilarious joke loses its edge after the 23rd time. 

4. The Death of the Author Player.

Death is fine. We all have to live with it. While LucasArts (for the most part) is synonymous with the concept of deathless point-and-click which was like the second coming of Jesus at the time, I don't think the death is the problem, per se. The introduction of game-ending deaths or sudden bad endings can be easily remedied by ensuring the game is saved before the potential game ending moment. Implement smartly-placed checkpointing, don't leave it to the player to do it; meaning any fatal moments won't involve losing time redoing sections of the game again. In that situation, death can even be an entertaining part of the experience, though there is a gamble to be had with frustration here. Consider whether you need the tension of death, as that is the big advantage it provides.

The bigger issue relating to death, which in my opinion is inexcusable, is soft-locking. Do not do this. Don't even do it by accident. King's Quest 2 has a bridge in it that will collapse after being crossed a certain number of times, rendering the area beyond unreachable. All this achieves is to stop the game from being completable, and to my knowledge serves no other purpose than to be a dick to the player. It is a dick bridge. Do not make bridges out of dicks. Do not make your game unwinnable without ending it, and do not end it without making it easy for the player to get back to the place they were just before it abruptly ended. Kill me, but bring me back, dammit.

5. Think about your puzzles. 

This may be a contentious opinion, but I do not think the wacky out there puzzles in point-and-click games are a bad thing. I don't mind the Rube-Goldberg-esque nature of the things.

The genre has a reputation for what is called moon-logic, but I think this term is stretched out thinly to essentially mean "anything that annoyed me because getting stuck is annoying." I won't deny those situations exist, or aren't even prevalent, but I think the bigger issue at play here is not that the puzzles themselves are bizarre, but that that they must, in some way make some internal sense within the context of the game, and in how they are communicated to the player. The language of a puzzle is what matters.

Abstract solutions are fine by me, but clarity is everything. Consider the narrative framing and structure of the puzzle; it should have a beginning where the goals should be established, a middle with clues, and a end which is a visible result and progress. These can overlap, be big or small and be as silly as desired, but they must be legible, otherwise a puzzle ends up feeling unfair. I'm talking big red neon, welcome to my puzzle, obvious. Make sure players see the on-ramp and then they'll likely be able to follow the course; otherwise they may never get on the road. 

6. Backtracking

Apply with care. No one likes going back the way they came. It is inherently boring. When I go out for long walks in the British wilderness, I get visibly infuriated if I have to double-back on myself in any way at all. Luckily, there's not usually anyone to see. Sometimes, I admit it has to be done though, and a 'seasoned' point-and-click adventurer like me can stomach a bit of doubling back in games. But forcing people across many screens (and then back again) is considered 'taking the piss', and will result in the game being deleted and the computer being set on fire, as it is now ruined. Try to keep things contained, or use the first point in this list to make this issue almost redundant. 

8. Stop worrying

Point-and-click games are dead. Been dead for years. Aside from the fact that they actually are not dead, the reason they were killed was because of a desperate desire from publishers to embrace 3D and because art is expensive. But I think the strengths and USP of point-and-click games is not technological advancement. It is clear to me that the point-and-click genre reached it's evolutionary pinnacle decades ago. They excel at narrative and problem solving. They are the video game equivalent of the logic problems in quiz books that come with free biros. The engine is the grid. Stop bothering trying to innovate the fairly simplistic requirements around the mechanics and focus on those key things around story and puzzle theory. I look at old 2D point and click games and the art (mostly) looks timeless or at least somewhat charming. Old 3D games look like someone put a jigsaw puzzle together in a poorly lit room. There are good point-and-click games which are 3D, but I would argue that in all cases, the things that make them good have nothing to do with the 3D. Unfortunately, no one has made a point-and-click adventure game since 1999 so none of this can be proved eitherway.  
  
7. Don't be that Guy(brush).

Everyone wants their character to be Guybrush. They also want their games to be Monkey Island. But I dont think anyone really understands how to write those characters. This has gotten less of an issue over time but it still crops up. The late 90s were rife with Guybrush wannabe's, crackin' wise and acting sociopathic but with all the charm wringed out like a day-old J-cloth. The low point of this being Rufus in Deponia, who is just awful company. The original Guybrush was not an asshole. MI2 Guybrush was a little sociopathic, what with his trapping people in coffins thing, but even then, the good things about the character are no those things. Stop making your Guybrushes assholes. Stop making Guybrushes. Likewise, the joke style in MI led developers to focus on hundred of stupid jokes and forget that MI also was tight and crafted. The jokes are often clues. Its puzzle design is good. The humour in the first game is a light sugar dusting on top of a good well-baked point and click game cake. But you can't make a whole cake out of just the icing. That would make you sick. It makes me sick thinking about it. I've just been sick, happy now? Honestly, the things I do for my craft.

9. Hints?

I like it when adventure games come with hints. Because I am lazy and don't want to find the answer on the internet. Also, having to look up the answer on the internet is a defeat-admitting feeling which provides very little joy. At best, from that point on, you can read the solution and maybe go 'oh, I could have got that, I'm a silly bear', but more often the result is 'combine the shoe with my sense of self-loathing and give it to the talking bread-bin at midnight? - how the hell was I supposed to get that?!', which is a non-positive emotion to be attaching to your wonderful game. So think about providing hints. Hints are best when incorporated into the game, as part of the design, but if all else fails have an escape ready. You do not want people feeling like they've gotten stuck, as getting stuck is a very literal thing in these games. There's no payoff for stuck players, so provide an outlet. Ideally use something similar to the UHS format, which aims to provide clues before it provides the answer. But really, the best games remember to bake clues into the game through the conversations, descriptions and visuals. Do that.

10. There is no ten.

I'm not yet talented enough to reel off ten whole things. It's early days and I'm still learning. I reckon it might be nice to add in your own number 10, based on your own incredible experiences. Oh wait. Time limits! Don't put time limits in your... 

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I stopped playing Deponía because it’s so charmless and badly written. Might be the translation from German, though.

Lucasarts’ no deaths was the result of autosaves and checkpoints not having been invented back then. It’s a frictionless experience, but as you say having your character die is not a bad thing in and of itself.

Putting the player in an unwinnable situation because they didn’t get an item or did an action incorrectly 7 hours ago must by far be the worst thing a game can do.

Sorry for the post spam. I also failed to get through the first Discworld game. It was unbelievably convoluted. D2 was fine, though.

Deeky do you and your brother have a upcoming list you will be doing after C4AC?  Or how are you selecting which one you do next each time? 

Regarding T.Park - it is hard to imagine how they could have done any better with it. 

We have a list we put together back at the start, which we've been adding to periodically. It's a big list, and currently roughly ordered with a heavier bias towards older stuff at the beginning. There were only a few other rules for sorting, mostly to split up all the Sierra series, so we will only do one series at a time and split the games in that series up so we do one entry every three games. This was just to break things up as the thought of playing through all the King's Quests in a row feels like it would stop being fun. I am thinking about shuffling in the odd newer thing to also break things up, but haven't decided whether we should or not yet.

The WadjetEye games are superb if you’re looking for modern but retro classics. The Shivah is short but brilliant, and the Blackwell saga is well worth a play through. It’s fun to watch the production values slowly get better and better with each game as the designer really gets a feel for the craft.

Just found this amazing thread, thanks.

Great to hear you're working your way through Cruise For A Corpse, but what I want to know is, will you be reviewing its copy-protection colour wheel of nightmares?!

Just writing that made me look up Operation Stealth's copy protection card - I have no memory at all of playing the game itself, but the colours and imagery of the dreadful attempt at security give me a comforting twinge of nostalgia.

It's been a couple of weeks since our playthrough of Cruise For A Corpse finished up on the channel, and I've had fair bit of time to ruminate on it, cow-style. It's a odd game for me; I've played in a number of times in the past, and under more scrunity it falls apart considerably, but I still love it and enjoyed playing through it this time around, despite what at times feels like an avalanche of issues. 

The conversation system, which provides topics to quiz each suspect on that expands as you learn more feels like a super neat concept, but it is let down by the lack of any earmarking of topics you've already asked, and a lack of depth, meaning that what initially feels cool and interesting is soon reduced to cycling through the topics one by one just to try and hope you unlock something to progress.

Couple that with a pretty tight playing area and progress which is locked by the appearance of specific objects to find which appear only after a certain time means the entire game boils down to doing the same weary loop of the ship, talking to everyone about the same things, clicking everywhere in case there's something to pick up which will trigger progress. It turns into a right slog.

But there's something there. I'm a sucker for a murder mystery, and a double-sucker if it's one of those set in a contained area ones. The idea of time progressing, characters moving around and having a game primarily about uncovering information from talking to people sounds amazing to me. But here it's just limited and soaked in a frustration marinade that leaves a disappointing taste in the mouth, and the lingering sense of what could have been. Those systems are something I'd like to see pushed further in adventure games; something like the main mechanic of Contradiction where you take the statements of characters and find the inconsistencies, bolted onto point and click mechanics for gathering physical clues and characters which work to some sort of schedule or development during the game, a bit like the Last Express. I don't know if there's a contender out there which does all this already? If so, I'd like to find it!

Thank you very much!

Are you recommending those for us to do? If so you'll be happy to hear they are all on the list! In particular I'm looking forward to playing the Kyrandia series, as I had that on my amiga and never managed to get anywhere with it, so it will be satisfying to beat it now.

Way too late, but Grim Beard did a review of it some years ago.

I started playing Flight of the Amazon Queen on my Amiga at the weekend (I missed it back in the day) and it seems pretty good so far.

It's free at the moment on GOG if you need another one to add to your list (it looks like the PC version has added voice work too).