A better Option (Gaming)

by cheapLEY , Thursday, April 20, 2017, 22:37 (2563 days ago) @ Cody Miller

-Thematizes the worst retro adventure game conventions rather than moving past them.

Care to explain that? We talking about pixel hunting and stupid item combinations for puzzle solutions or something else?

To fully explain that would get into spoiler territory, but the non spoiler version is essentially that they joke and wink about things like you mentioned, yet the game is full of them and no attempt is made to make it better or less frustrating by eliminating these outdated design decisions.

In fact, there's a blog post about how Ron Gilbert considers editing the config file to reveal hotspots on a key press 'cheating'. Meanwhile, every modern point and click lets you do this out of the box because that simply makes these games better.

It's like the Simpsons hit and Run making a joke about colect-a-thons being shitty, all the while actually being a shitty colect-a-thon. Funny, but that doesn't change the fact that you are still making your players do this thing you think is so shitty.

ENDING SPOILERS

You are playing a game within a game, which the characters become aware of by noticing all these little adventure game conventions and how they don't make sense.

Man, that sucks. I'm really enjoying Kathy Rain quite a bit, and I suspect that now I've had my taste of point and click adventures that I'll want some more. Thimbleweed Park looked neat on atmosphere alone, but that resolution sounds dumb.