Monkey Island and the Complicated Art of Puzzles | Extra Punctuation

[@theescapist]

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[@alex.g7317]

Did u like the part where I said you were old?

[@DuneStone6816]

Funny story: I found the eating contest very difficult because it was TOO simple. I knew I needed to pepper the fish, but it took me a long time to get Guybrush to eat an un-peppered fish. It didn't occur to me that I could just pull a fish out of the inventory during the contest. Surely that's against the rules. There must be some extra step wherein I need to distract everyone so Guybrush can sneak the fish out of his pocket. But no, you just put the fish on the plate and no one notices. Anyway, there's me getting stuck because I expected something more complicated.

[@ciphergacha9100]

Is this what integer overflow means now

[@patrickfiedler5187]

Same!

[@Billyboone]

Same here

[@francesco8000]

Turns out this entire video was simply the solution to the "avoid washing the dishes" puzzle.

[@duffdabsduffdies]

Excellent comment 👍🏻

[@NoOne-fe3gc]

It was a good solution too because I intuitivly clicked on the video

[@20xd6]

Exactly.

[@shadiafifi54]

Needs Moar Likes!

[@wamingo]

Geez, I would never have figured that out... I'm buying the walkthrough.

[@FozzieOscar]

I think its a sign of a good puzzle that even if you cant figure it out, if you look up a hint/guide it leaves you with a feeling of "oh yeah that actually makes sense"

[@dryued6874]

On the other hand, the same Monkey Island game has the monkey wrench puzzle. If English is not your first language (I was like 12 at the time), you're basically fucked.

[@TheGuyThatIsBored.]

@@dryued6874 oh yea a 100% There is no way you would no a sliver and not silver and say to yourself the hell is that?

[@Taiyama2]

It's the feeling of "Oh, I'M stupid!" rather than "Oh, THAT'S stupid!" so to speak.

[@Cephlapodninja]

No I definitely see people decide a puzzle is dumb or stupid depending on whether they got it or not

[@MaurusRehmahrntahn]

My favorite RtMI puzzle is the one where in order to break Stan out of prison, you have to INCREASE his sentence, thereby making him more desperate to break out. Ridiculous, but totally in keeping with Monkey Island's humor.

[@MojoTheClown]

The ease at which you come and go from the prison itself felt a little like a missed opportunity.

[@pulykamell]

It was also fairly telegraphed in the dialog with Stan. After a couple sentences, it was clear what to do.

[@KingOfElectricNinjas]

Reminds me of a BTAS episode; Bruce Wayne is inspecting Arkham Asylum under a new warden and notices three of the villains are looking especially anxious but claiming everything's fine... so he suggests extending the warden's contract for 18 months, which makes them crack and start telling him about the insane horrible shit said warden is doing.

[@hdattila]

The "spice" puzzle is still counterintuitive in Return to Monkey Island. The chef keeps telling you she doesn't have any. I presumed I had to find it somewhere. It never occurred to me, that it magically appeared in her kitchen between act breaks with no explanation.

[@SolaScientia]

I watched someone play the first 2 or so hours. I got thrown when he's on the ship having to convince the various crew members to change their vote. He has to get the chef to make a Scorched Alaska. Because of how much the game brought up that super spicy pepper that the chef was out of, I was thinking that was somehow the solution. No, the solution is to stick a torch in the dessert and feed it to the guy that way. Spicy-hot and temperature-hot are so different to me that it would never have occurred me to stick the torch in the Alaska to make it scorched; at least based on how the lookout guy was describing it.

[@Aycheffe]

@@SolaScientia that puzzle had lots of hints. Flambe was talking about how it has to "stab the tongue" etc. And it's very typical logic in monkey island games for guybrush to come up with a silly interpretation of the thing he needs and it works because everyone around him is a fool. It's a MI trope at this point and fell in line with that trope pretty perfectly and there was at least 1 if not 2 dialogue hints that you'd need the poker instead of pepper

[@drewkillion2812]

@@SolaScientia this is one of the one puzzle I had to use in game hint book for. I was convinced I needed that pepper

[@tharglet]

@@SolaScientia He did say "like a red hot poker" which, by adventure game logic, would mean you need to find the nearest thing that looks like a red hot (fire) poker. I could see the puzzle being an ass for non-native speakers (and maybe younger folk?) if they don't know what a poker is outside of the card game.

[@MojoTheClown]

@@tharglet That did it for me. Quite a middle-of-the-road puzzle, I thought. I had a harder time getting Stan's sentence increased.

[@murphy7801]

Chekhov's spit in full operation.

[@durfkludge]

As an Old Man, something about a severely-pixilated character turning to the camera and mugging pixilatedly is just so good. I love it. No notes.

[@tiberiusdw]

Excellent dissection of what makes good puzzles “good” as well as the all-too-rare synergy between story and gameplay. I believe the true answer to why we don’t see more of either of these is simply that it takes more work-and time-resources which devs and publishers are reluctant to spend. Besides which, as Yahtzee himself has pointed out, many of today’s gamers complain instantly if stuff is “too hard’’ unless it’s the git gud kind of hard.

[@twilightvulpine]

Gamers back then weren't too fond of hard either, but they made up for it with magazine walkthroughs and cheat codes and quarters in the arcade.

[@iandakariann]

Players are ok with hard. What they hate is frustration and repetition. It's less that they can't beat something on the first try. It's that every time you retry you tend to be punished by repeating an older part of the game. Redo the level you already mastered. Grind another level again. Gather a new set of equipment. Run back to the boss. Go through the same 10 minute cutscene. The loss isn't the problem. It's the 'you lose, now stop having fun for 5 minutes before you can have fun trying again'. What makes a puzzle not repetitive, despite looking at the same scenes for a while, is experimentation and thinking. You look at each element in different ways, try different methods, and, As you do, the puzzle gives a bit of itself. You look at the menu of colored drinks. Then after a bit it changes from a drink list to a color chart and you go. OMG THAT'S NEW! now you have this new mixed drink and all the other parts look different to you as you wonder how this new thing fits. And in great games, you get dialogue and jokes and interesting things during all this. Not just when you succeed, but the failures bring it too. So half the fun is finding all the silly things while finding the actual puzzle. In short, you aren't doing the same boring thing over and over and over and over. Dark souls also does this with boss stages. As soon as you get used to the first half of a boss it changes, dramatically, and now you are facing a new thing. And now even the first half is new as you use it to get a better setup and prepare yourself for the second part. It also encourages you as you realize that you went from suffering through the first phase to speedrunning it at full health. This is how you handle 'hard'. And games like Elden Ring show the players still like it. But making that IS hard, and difficult to create preorders or develop a cash shop around. Though when you look at the number of games that were 'oh my you missed, replay the entire game' frustrating, you'll see good design was always pretty rare.

[@iandakariann]

@@twilightvulpine also no choice. Fewer games to choose from. Though some games were crafty at making good design. Super Mario Bros wasn't that long a game and lets you warp so soon enough getting to even world 8 was pretty fast. The legendary Ninja Guardian had unlimited continues and lots of checkpoints so you can keep trying the hard bit without much punishment. Once saved games were possible we slowly moved away from 'redo the game' difficulty. And well, it's hard to say 'we were better back then' when players now Speedrun blindfolded Punch Out and romhack randomizer oupgrade\1health versions of games.

[@philippak7726]

It's a hard line to walk, of making the puzzle accessible without being obnoxious. Or worse, doable without being frustrating. The second one I'm thinking of Skyward Sword. The solution was blisteringly obvious - turn the key so it fit in the lock, but the frustrating part is that no matter how I turned my wiimote the key rarely responded with the right movement. That combined with the yahtzee commented motion-delay meant I gave up before the second temple because I simply could not be bothered trying to get my stunlocked behind through the motion control puzzles. I'm trying to think of a puzzle game where I came away with satisfaction that I'd thought through a complicated problem, but all that jumps to mind is "Baba is you" and that does not invoke satisfaction so much as grief-wracked sobs and acceptance... and occasional satisfaction. Really amazingly fair and brutal puzzle game.

[@zilesis1]

yeah, because for today's gamers the choice of game is infinite. if they get frustrated they can just go do something else. personal example: i suck at 1st person controls. like literally incapable of moving in a direction while looking in a different direction at the same time kind of suck. because of this i've never actually finished Bioshock Infinite. It looked great, the story was super interesting, but every time i got into combat it just became an exercise in frustration. eventually, it just wasn't worth it to continue and i abandoned the game to go play a 3rd person game instead all this is to say, as a dev, you can't account for every person out there an how they will respond to a game's design. if something is intuitive to you, a portion of the player base might find it completely incomprehensible. so you're left with 2 choices: either stick to your vision and accept that the player base will be just the people who think like you. or follow the money and make the game as comprehensible (easy) as possible to get the most people to buy

[@eighthcoda]

I played the Monkey Island games later in life, when the solutions were just a Google away. It must have felt different when the solutions were not readily available. Still, I felt very conflicted playing these games. Sometimes, after a struggle, I could solve the puzzle, and it felt amazing. For instance, the hand-based password puzzle. ("If this is 3, what's this?") In Grim Fandango, I solved the chemistry puzzle, as well as the race ticket puzzle, both of which were stumpers for a lot of people. Naturally, I found these puzzles to be extremely clever, and I was so clever for solving them. Then there were a few puzzles that I solved through trial and error, by randomly clicking everything on everything. The satisfaction of these puzzles was minimal; I basically brute-forced it by trying every combination. Oftentimes, I didn't really understand why something worked when it did. Then, there were puzzles where I gave up, used Google, and felt angry because the solution was so counterintuitive that I would never have come up with it on my own. A good example in Monkey Island 2 is the one where to open a locked door, you travel to another island, hypnotize a monkey by putting a banana on a metronome, and then use the now-petrified monkey as a *monkey wrench* to open the door. That's just cruel. Finally, we have the spitting contest puzzle-- and for me, this is the main problem with these games. Once I know that ridiculous monkey wrench puzzles are a possibility, I can never be sure that any puzzle has a humanly solvable solution. And so, when I gave up on the spitting contest and Googled the answer, I felt deeply ashamed. It's just as clever the problems I did solve, and I could have totally solved it by being more observant, but I could never be sure that it was solvable. And I'd feel foolish if I'd spent 100 hours on it, only to find that the solution was something dumb and unguessable. Instead, I felt foolish for not spending more time on it. This ties back to what you said about the death of point-and-click adventure games: these puzzles are extremely difficult to make well. They usually just end up trivial or arbitrary, making the game alternately too easy or impossible.

[@Descriptor413]

The monkey wrench puzzle definitely broke me, as well. The game Truberbrook even references it, so I guess it's pretty infamous!

[@ShyGuyXXL]

Even if using the monkey as a monkey wrench is a very whacky solution, getting the monkey in the first place isn't. It makes sense to give a banana to a monkey. If you try to, it looks at you all excited, but the bartender tells you not to distract him from playing the piano. Which is why you try to do exactly that. Even if you don't forsee that the banana will hypnotize the monkey, putting it somewhere that the monkey is meant to pay attention to, like the metronome, doesn't seem too far fetched. So then you have a monkey in your pocket. If you pay attention to the monkey's icon, it's drawn to show that it has its arms outstretched like it's trying to grab something. And since it's hyponotized, it's stiff as a board. So there are a couple of clues towards the solution. The pun doesn't work in other languages though, which is more of a problem. Games like these are best played with a friend who knows the solution and can gently guide you in the right direction with subtle clues, when you need a hint. That's better than just looking up the solution online.

[@eighthcoda]

@@ShyGuyXXL Everything seems impossible before it happens, and inevitable when it does. We tend to accept the reality around us without question, no matter how absurd. Repetition helps; each new playthrough gets progressively normalized. In reality, putting a banana on a metronome makes the metronome stop working. The monkey is also so close to the metronome that one would expect it to just eat the banana rather than transform into a wrench. I would never have thought to put it there.

[@lastburning]

@@eighthcoda Good point.

[@stoney5137]

TIL: Crinkle cut potato chips have more flavor because there is more surface area.

[@anthonybowman3423]

More accurately, there's more space to shove in flavorings in a small volume. So you have a higher density of flavorings. But some crinkle cut chips just have shit flavorings so they still don't have more flavor.

[@Kinitawowi]

I always thought it was that the crinkles do a better job of trapping the flavouring powders within the ridges than a plain flat crisp would.

[@somebonehead]

@Average whiteguy 😐

[@natanlevine]

It's not just flavor. They also simply add more total chip in mouth per bite which is more enjoyable apparently

[@gandazgul]

2 more things, it makes the chip more crunchy, at least in mouth feel, although I'll rather have a kettle chip instead. Additionally it gives the chip more structural strength to resist being used to scoop thick dips like cream cheese based ones.

[@cruye9633]

One tip about puzzle design that's often given to people running tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons is to make it so there's multiple hints/ways to solve the puzzle, and you don't need all of them. In the spitting contest example, you could make it so only having two of the three factors is enough to win, so you have some safety nets that means players won't get stuck on the hardest single step, but also gives them enough opportunities to figure stuff out that you feel clever (and you get more opportunities than if you'd just cut the hardest step of the puzzle out)

[@SirSaladhead]

I did that one time, with an intricate system on how to gain clues from villagers or using their characters intuition and intelligence. Then the group took one look at the complicated puzzle I had laid out and said "we don't wanna do that'. Broke my poor heart.

[@TheMightyBattleSquid]

I said the same thing in my comment lol, great minds think alike.

[@TheMightyBattleSquid]

@Average whiteguy It isn't inherently easy, it just isn't asininely difficult. Rewatch the video, each step of the 3 part solution had its own 2+ steps. That SHOULD be where the puzzle has overstayed its welcome when many of these steps require massive backtracking in a game where there is no quick-travel option. Also, the point you're missing is we're talking puzzles vs puzzles, not video games vs dnd.

[@Pingwn]

@Average whiteguy Using different possible solutions makes puzzle more interesting, maybe there is another way to solve the problem I am facing ehich sounds reasonable but it isn't the solution the designer wanted so I am frustrated that something that should have worked didn't. You can always design it carefully so no other solution would make sense but I don't think multiple solutions are a problem, they are a way to engage the player, to let them some agency over the journey. Is it making it a bit easier over having only one solution? Sure, but if each solution is challenging enough it still requires you to think and you can also make some solutions better than others - maybe solution A is easier but it will have undesired consequences while solution B is harder but gives you a better payoff.

[@Gorlokk666]

"combat is not a puzzle" I guess you've never played any RPG with attributes, affinities or types ever.

[@hjewkes]

It would be really interesting to see a GMTK “Boss Keys” style diagram for some of these old school adventure games

[@Bluesine_R]

That is pretty much impossible because adventure game puzzles are nearly always contrived. They can display imagination and personality from the designer but they don’t usually display any kind of rule-based logic.

[@ianglazko3256]

@@Bluesine_R The logic behind the solutions has nothing to do with it. If you can get through these puzzles, you can make the chart for it. It doesn't matter if it's reasonable to figure it out, as long as the solution exists. The point of doing it would be to see how complex the solutions are in terms of number of steps, not the moon logic involved in finding them.

[@chrisprice8112]

There's a guy who did really nice Boss Keys-style diagrams for the first 3 Monkey Island games, and Day of the Tentacle. I won't put a link so my comment doesn't get stuck in moderation hell, but googling 'jerome kunegis wordpress' brings up the right blog at the time of writing.

[@DankFloyd-fe9bi]

I had almost the opposite experience with the spitting puzzle. I found mixing the drinks fine and moving the flags fine. I mean the flags are in a different room from the cannon, but in context it's basically at the other end of the road, and all the people visibly turn their heads so it's not that hard to think "ok, lets try moving the flags now." My big issue was the fucking scarf blowing in the wind. It's such a tiny detail I never even noticed it until someone gave me a hint. The other hint about the wind you mentioned completely flew over my head somehow, I guess. When I realised it was just "blow when the wind is blowing" it felt to me like such a cheap and annoying detail to add when the rest of the puzzle seemed so logical! I suppose part of the difficulty of designing puzzles is guessing how different people might intuit different things.

[@Zademandel]

Hadn't read the comments before posting one, I had the exact same experience with this puzzle!

[@emriesq3096]

The only Monkey Island I HATE is 2. I absolutely love the others, but that game broke me as a child.

[@joemonsters]

I love the game, but I have to agree with you. The wind part is not intuitive at all. I think the video forgets to state one thing: we don’t know we need to do three things to win the contest. Nothing is clearly said on that matter. We just know that we need to win it in one way or another. So, from the very beginning, it’s flawed, IMO. The first time Guybrush spits, he fails. This is just a joke, but I remember this also being frustrating while playing it as a kid. I thought that Guybrush wouldn’t be able to spit. Also, the dialog lines suggest that you need to prepare your spit before… well.. spitting it. Turns out it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry, MI2 is my favorite game, but I don’t think this video made a point. The spitting contest is one of the worst designed puzzles in the game. I feel like fans find this puzzle intuitive because they know about it. That’s it. Most people playing the game for the first time now find it frustrating. I think this analysis is blinded by nostalgia… and again I’m saying that even though I absolutely love MI2, and I played it in the 90s.

[@twofacetoo75]

Honestly intuiting what to do is often the most difficult part. My personal introduction to the series was with 'Curse Of Monkey Island', I played it as a kid when it was new and I was completely stumped numerous times. One of the worst was right at the start of the game, where you get trapped in a capsized ship and your only way out is through a hole in the hull of the ship... which is now the ceiling, which you can't reach. You only have 3 items in your inventory by now, none of which do anything. You pick up 2 more in the room, a bag of pennies and a diamond ring... and everything else in the room is completely useless. Hell even the bag of pennies isn't actually important right away. The end result was I was stuck in that capsized ship for days, maybe even weeks, trying to figure out what to do. I had to use the diamond ring on a porthole, but absolutely NOTHING in the game told me that was even a possibility. Now, the point is to use the diamond to cut a hole in the glass, so the ship fills with water and you can reach the hole at the top. I had no concept of a diamond ring being able to cut glass, so I basically had to try everything on everything until it just suddenly worked. To this day I still argue that puzzle was WAY too abstract for most people to figure out, if only because nothing in the game suggests that it's a possibility. Like Yahtzee said about moving the flags, it just doesn't seem sensible at all. Why would a person use a piece of fancy jewellery to open a window, when there's god knows how many other more useful items in the room he's currently in?

[@poethewondercat7851]

Watching this video for the first time months after the fact and I came to the comments looking to see if someone said this. Seems a lot of someones said this but I can't stress enough that the wind was the thing that broke my brain. In a game filled with little embellishments that were seemingly just for show, finding out one of them was actually an integral part of the puzzle was maddening. I loved Lucasarts games as a kid, but some of the puzzles took me literal weeks to finish. More bang for your buck I suppose. Too bad for them that my dad rented them from a shady computer store that rented the games out... and then made copies. Pirating before it was cool I guess.

[@kevinfelton689]

Remember that in Monkey Island 2 there was an easy mode where half the steps were taken out of the spit puzzle. Playing it was about as much fun as you'd expect though. You didn't even get to do the rat in the soup bit, and that was one of the funniest parts of the game.

[@Dragnfly_mynamewastaken]

I think the clues are the make-or-break in games with puzzles and you gave good examples here. bad adventure games tend to have clues that make no sense, no clues, or clues that only make sense after you've solved the puzzle. good ones make the clues obscure enough that you wouldn't know what it was about right away, but frame them in such a way that you note them as important for later. so how to apply the clue you saw becomes part of the puzzle.

[@EmptyGoat]

Amanita Design brought me back to adventure games. No dialogue, most puzzles are isolated to one or two screens, and all the charm I remember from the old games. Full recommendation for Samorost 3, Botinicula, and Machinarium.

[@henryglennon3864]

Seconded and amen!

[@twilightvulpine]

They are great but even they got into putting guides inside their games, because it's difficult to make the puzzles understandable for players.

[@nobodyinparticular9640]

A fun, charming and simple one is also the recent "lost in play"

[@Melancolombia]

I’m currently replaying Botanicula and I can only agree. I had forgotten how expansive and charming the world is and how every interaction is it’s own little reward for bothering to stay and play.

[@denycast]

@@nobodyinparticular9640 lost in play really is super fun👍

[@octochan]

I thought the puzzle the people mostly remembered from Monkey Island 2 was the completely outlandish 'monkey wrench' puzzle. It's been a while, but I do not remember any kind of signposting that you could use the animal as a tool because of pun. I only remember that it made me angry when I looked up the answer. Also I'd like to hear Yahtzee's opinion of The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, a Lovecraftian horror point and click puzzle game.

[@Twitchy_McExorcism]

Another part of the problem is that the player probably has to _want_ to feel clever, not just get through the content. At least I think so, because that's all I can think of to keep them from alt-tabbing, googling the solution to the most immediate problem, and moving on as opposed to thinking and analyzing things to find it themselves.

[@appelofdoom8211]

Another problem is that a lot of adventure games have a checkovs puzzle. As in a puzzle that gets introduced at the start but that you can't complete until later. Do I have the solution for this puzzle now or do I have to get the key necessary for the solution on the other side of the world and complete this puzzle later? Off to google I go because no one wants to risk spending hours to look for the solution of a puzzle you currently can't solve

[@Pingwn]

@@appelofdoom8211 You can also try to solve a different puzzle until you find an idea for how to solve it, or alternatively a game can be design so it is obvious that you don't have what you need at the moment.

[@kingsleycy3450]

I feel similarly about Soulsborne games. The quests and solutions are intentionally obtuse. If you play them blindly you will get the bad endings 9 times out of 10. I engage with the combat of those games but I never try to figure out the optimal path myself.

[@DanierCZ]

@@kingsleycy3450 None of the default endings in Soulsborne games are ‘bad’ endings per say though. Some of them if not most of them are even possibly the good ones.

[@TheJackOfFools]

@@kingsleycy3450 The problem with Soulsborne games is that they have the "right" idea of not having map markers, but the "wrong" idea having NO CLUES AT ALL! Like I tried to play the original DS blind, and it wasnt till I finally looked up a couple hints that I found out the game even HAS quests, yanno? I dont want ANY game, Soulsborne or otherwise, to give me map markers and waypoints, but a note somewhere in my menus that reminds me of the obscure thing an NPC mentioned would be nice. Something like "X has left the Deepslate Manor and intends to find their lost Geegaw at ScaryLarry Cave." Then it falls to me to FIND ScaryLarry Cave if I care about what happens to X, but even if I do, I gotta work for it. Elden Ring was a little better about this, but the guidance of grace was too direct, and the vast majority of the side quests (though not all) give little or no indication that there can even BE a next step, much less what it might be. Even when the game told you what the next step was, when you get sidetracked on the way to the next step and spend five hours screwing around in a crypt or boss fight or whatever, you can't remember what the next step is! So yeah, I mostly like it, but some basic QOL stuff would be better. They could even still have "hidden" quests. Things that dont get journal entries because the events arent necessarily intended to be solved by the player, but might only continue through happenstance.

[@petergaley314]

The reason I never massively got into these sort of games, even though in theory they should appeal to me, is not so much that the puzzles were obscure or illogical, but that the games often didn't bother with dedicated "failure" material for when you try something obvious. One that I vaguely remember is in Day of the Tentacle where to get something that's stuck on the ceiling, you have to go to the room above, push a speaker over, turn the music up and the vibration makes it drop? Something like that. But in the real world, you'd just stand on a bloody chair. Now obviously, standing on a chair shouldn't work; but you should be able to try it and it should fail in an interesting, perhaps even hint-ful, way. But obviously that would mean the developers creating maybe a dozen "fail" scenarios for every "success" one, which would push the budget up. So I suppose what I'm saying is, I can't get engaged in these games because they don't let me try to behave in a normal way, so I can't identify with the characters and get frustrated.

[@skeleben]

I never thought about it this way, but you absolutely nailed why the majority of puzzle games piss me off. Everyone would think of doing the obvious things, so add something in for that, explain why you CAN'T just jump on a chair and then maybe it won't seem so stupid to have to find a more round about way of doing things.

[@niccolomanahan7775]

I loved Return to Monkey Island, but I do feel the puzzles on Hard Mode could have been a bit more challenging. I'm happy that I never "solved" a puzzle through trial and error, but it felt bittersweet that I never had to resort to using the in-game hint book.

[@rahn45]

Adventure game puzzles should be more akin to Rube Goldberg machines as opposed to a lock and key. Rube Goldberg machines still need to obey the laws of physics, so it has a logical thoroughfare running through it; and the pieces inform their function pretty clearly as well. I suppose these days that niche got replaced with escape rooms.

[@OnyxIdol]

See the bit with the wind tripped me up. I never noticed the blowing scarf.

[@DoggosintheHouse]

My frustration with puzzles in Adventure Games and RPGs is what I call the "gotcha!" That is a situation in which the developer thinks he's very clever in creating a one-of-a-kind key element which fits a one-of-a-kind lock element that's in a completely different area of the game. In THEORY this means that you have to be really clever and save the all-important item for its future, destined purpose. In PRACTICE this means you have to become a super-powered vacuum, hoovering up literally EVERY item you can find that looks even REMOTELY unique so that you are able to have it when you need it several levels later..... and THAT is not fun gameplay. It's not immersive and it's painfully banal, but it's become the go-to puzzle strategy... which means if you want to experience all the game has to offer, you basically have to read the entire walkthrough online before you play. In isolation, Yahtzee's argument makes sense. You explore the world, engage with the characters and figure out how to solve the puzzle. In practice, of course, you're being bombarded with information CONSTANTLY throughout the game and solving the puzzle assumes you're able to retain the endless stream of exposition, items and visual input you receive and then pick out the bits you need and apply it. It's like spending your afternoon cramming for a final exam and there's nothing FUN about that.

[@KingOfElectricNinjas]

While I haven't played it, it does sound like Monkey Island does help that a bit by making the acquisition part often a puzzle in itself, and also involving things that it makes sense to acquire for your own reasons, like a library card so you can read books, and buying drinks so Guybrush can feel like a real pirate. It's also especially funny when you end up using a mundane item for a non-intuitive purpose down the line.

[@guybrushmonkey97]

I mean, the fish puzzle you mentioned from Return to Monkey Island is simpler than the spitting contest from MI2, but it's still not that simple. You have to get the correct fish, put it in the bowl, use the pepper on the bowl and then when the eating contest starts pick a fish without pepper from your inventory. There are still steps you can fail at, for instance if you add the pepper when it's still in your inventory. I didn't mind the puzzles from Return, they also didn't match my expectations when compared to the previous games, but I still found them enjoyable regardless, if a bit too simple.

[@TheKeeperOfKnowledge]

When I hear about moon logic, I often hear about the Babble fish puzzle from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984), but even that puzzle gives a decent amount of feedback and hints that could allow somebody to intuit the puzzle and the sheer smugness from the people who did figure it out is evidence that solving the puzzle does make you feel smart. I suppose the real take-away is the usual: puzzle games need to make me feel smart and game-play should enhance the story.

[@Saber_of_Truth]

A lot of logical hoops for that spitting puzzle lol. Not only do they not notice you moving the flag but they dont realize the flag has been moved at all!

[@Bedinsis]

I actually watched someone play that game the other night, and got to see that puzzle first hand. The thing though was that even though he had figured out that the trick was to get your opponent to eat spicy fish while you would eat non-spicy fish, he couldn't figure out how to do that, even though I as a viewer thought it was obvious. He had accidentally spiced up the fish in the wrong order and that was enough for him to get off tracks.

[@tharglet]

I'd call it an "antipattern" puzzle. It's obvious what needs to be done, but you have to go about it in an around-about way. e.g. if I was Threepwood, I'd just pepper one side of the bowl of fish (though one may suffice as she seemed like the type to have a specific one she'd want), or just pick one from the very bottom of the tub that the pepper couldn't get to. Instead you had to realise that you didn't throw *all* you fish into the bowl, and you should eat one from your pocket.

[@pulykamell]

That’s what I did the first time around. I spiced the fish in my inventory and put it in the bucket (leaving spicy leftover fish in my inventory) instead of putting fresh fish in the bucket and spicing it then, leaving leftover fresh fish to eat in my inventory. It did take a few minutes to puzzle out exactly what to do. (As I also had to realize that when you put fish in the bucket, you still have some leftover.)

[@Kirabetas]

I would also argue that it's an instance of overall accessibility to other games. Back in the age of games like Monkey Island 2, the number of games one could have were much more limited. Sure, you had Minesweeper, but getting a new game was something rarer, even in families that could afford multiple new games. This made it so if one got stuck on a puzzle, the only options were to put the game down and do something else, or literally start trying everything one could wrap their heads around. Today, one could easily create a free account if one has internet access, download a literal plethora of free games on multiple different platforms, and spend time bouncing from one to another. I'd argue that a reason many of us even made our way through games like Myst or Maniac Mansion was due to the fact we had very little else to play. Then, as a result of finding such a solution, our minds absorbed it, and often times even forgot how we reached the solution.

[@Kirabetas]

A good example for me is Zork Grand Inquisitor. I can beat said game on a practical autopilot. My girlfriend watching me play it would occasionally ask how on earth I knew that was a solution, and I couldn't tell her where the hint in game was. It was only when I did a playthrough literally checking every book I came across that I found the solution, something that I had infinite time to do and little other options to play other games as a child. Was the puzzle design good in ZGI? Yes, it had some real brain busters that needed you to think around what you were doing, such as the Hades telephone puzzle. But with so many other options for games nowadays and the landscape for gaming having changed so much since then, I firmly believe that plenty of people would either just give up, or look up the solution online rather than work through it. This leads people to incorrectly cry "Moon Logic" due to the requirement of intuitive examination and immersion in the game's environment.

[@LordSnoodles]

Great article. I found the statement "puzzles should be made to make the player feel clever when they solve them" particularly validating. It supports my process of deleting a puzzle game when I find myself turning to a walkthrough too often and the solutions to the puzzles being too dumb or too outlandish than anything I would have ever been able to come up with.

[@idanbhk3875]

The reason you talk, YZ, isn't to fix adventure games, but so we can learn how to build better games. This video helped me think about the design of a D&D campaign I'm going to run, and of the integration of puzzles, diplomacy, combat and other gameplay aspects into the plot- making them a part of it rather than challenges that stand in the way of it, thus making the plot itself more engaging and the challenges more organic. So thank you!

[@S13gtastic]

King's quest VI The 5 senses puzzle had me feeling super smart when I finally figured it out as a kid especially sense I had a sense of urgency and a feeling of dread if I didn't move quick enough... or accidently ate that damn mint.

[@Mick0Mania]

I'm playing the Monkey Island games with my wife currently. We just finished MI4 which was one of the first games I played as a kid. To me, the problem becomes rather clear when you try getting someone into the genre: They watch you solve a few of the early puzzles (that you already knew how to solve) and appreciate the out of the box thinking you are encouraged to do. Upon which, they start doing the same, except despite a lot of their suggestions being perfectly reasonable, the game won't even acknowledge them as an option. So then they give up and look up the solution, which is often not half as interesting as what they had in mind or is so out of he blue that it isn't even satisfying to learn about. In my opinion, Adventure Games offer an experience that no other game or media can. In the majority of games out there, the design causes most people to tune out the world and the characters, in favor of focusing on the gameplay mechanics. But in adventure games, the immersive elements ARE the gameplay. As a kid, I loved exploring the odd characters and situations in an adventure game to see how they all click together in the end. Adventure games should reward you for exploring the world and the characters within it. In the case of Monkey Island 4, there are simply not enough hints to guide the player in the right direction. Most of the dialogue focuses way too much on trying to be funny and forgets to pull the double duty of contributing to the puzzles. I remember some instances in Monkey Island 3, where I would try to use an item and Guybrush would actually explain why the given item won't work (I think it was the boat with the hole); That makes me feel better as the game acknowledges my efforts and I get guided towards the intended solution. I think there is a market out there for adventure games still, but writing/producing a good one is just too difficult I suppose. Dumbing down the puzzles isn't the right solution in my opinion, because then the satisfaction of feeling clever is robbed from the player.

[@zacharyfreeman3924]

I'm glad these videos are getting longer and longer. I know they must take a long time to script and I appreciate you

[@Modie]

I think this is really important. "The Sexy Brutale" is a game in which your goal is to save everyone in a Casino from certain death. And the deaths aren't super easy. There is one character who gets snatched up by a spider and another one who accidentally summons a devil fish that then eats their soul. Just some of the examples. And the stories being told there are actually interesting if you are willing to interpret them with the twist that comes near the end of the game.

[@wariodude128]

Great game, especially when you figure out how to stop each character from dying. Getting all the playing cards was a bit of a bother to do though.

[@Pandaman64]

Sexy brutal should get more love, fr fr

[@greenredblue]

That game's twist is foreshadowed really early, and for me it severely undercut any drive and achievement I felt for saving the characters. I wish someone could convince me that the ending doesn't negate the rest of the plot, because almost every single aspect of the game up to that point was virtuosic.

[@StabbeyTheClown]

I found most of the puzzles in the Sexy Brutale to be far too easy and simple. They were all very linear and the lacked proper red herrings and alternate solutions, unlike a good point-and-click where you have a bunch of inventory items but don't know which one is the key. I never found an item and had to wonder "what killing will this solve," because you solve them one at a time. I didn't need to actually think or consider what to do until the 6th killing, by which point the game is almost over. I also didn't find the story interesting. Most of it was buried behind hidden collectibles - the main required gameplay had very little emphasis on the stories until after the 6th murder, which is most of the way through the game.

[@Shimamon27]

I really relate with the dialogue tree issue. It's never my choice... It's just being a parasite in someone elses head deciding which spasm is the least annoying to us. Which is why I love Disco Elysium - You are a spasm in a mind having constant debates with other spasms of a lost personality... They made the mechanic feel fully related to the narrative. And you can feel the bias of the writers onto which option is "Correct" to them, and it ruins the whole thing... Unless they are a really good writing team. Very few games know how to make you feel right with such choices.

[@KingOfElectricNinjas]

Oddly enough it can be fun when the dialogue options clearly don't matter to the overall structure, but they change just enough to remind you of your choice, like becoming a running gag. It also provides replay value.

[@Shimamon27]

@@KingOfElectricNinjas Deus Ex : The conspiracy had allot of small interactions of that sort. It doesn't impact the overall game or cosequences, but, it alters just enough to make it highly entertaining! The game has allot of humor in it... It doesn't take itself too seriously, and that's why it works!

[@hawaiidkw1]

Straight talk here. Why did Lucasarts put such ridiculously complicated and/or obtuse puzzles in Lechuck's Revenge? So they could make money off the hintline. They saw how much easy money it pulled in for the first game, then realized that if they filled the second with frustrating puzzles, they could make a lot more. And it worked; the hintline became the company's biggest earner! No joke; the design team _explicitly says this_ in the commentary of the Special Edition. They absolutely did not give a crap about "providing a challenge" or "true satisfaction" or "getting your money's worth" or whatever preachy nonsense. It was a shameless money-making scheme first and last. So why did players put up with it? Because _that was all we had._ Remember, this was before the Internet, meaning no Steam, Apple store, no Google Play, none of the myraid of options we have today. If you wanted a point-and-click adventure, your one and only choice was to go to a brick and mortar computer store and find something that was compatible with your computer (a highly thorny issue in itself). If you got stuck anywhere, you either ponied up for the hintline or just plain had to give up. Hey, I was there, and for a lot of aggravation computer games about 98% of the reason I kept going was I didn't have anything better to do. When the Internet came along, that completely killed the one real purpose for making elaborate puzzles (since you can look up answers or even the whole game played start to finish without spending a cent) _and_ the one real reason for putting up with them (since there are so many other adventure/point-and-click options). There really isn't any point over lamenting this. Times change. Tastes change. We're never going back to the pre-Internet world. That's the reality. Deal. Oh, ah, in addition to the spitting contest and the "monkey wrench", I'd like to nominate getting the Scabb Island map piece. You need to collect a very-easy-to-miss telescope, _and_ find out how to distract the parrot so you can buy the mirror, _and_ know where to put them, _and_ figure out which of the random pieces of junk in the room to pour the super grog and replace it with the near grog in about eight seconds? Yeesh.

[@Carlos-ln8fd]

There should be more videos like these just generally that go into the specifics of why something is good or bad. It's like that essay you posted a week ago about how many TV writers don't know the basics behind storytelling. If we're afraid to talk about how and why something is effective then we're missing an important part of the conversation.

[@samadams8533]

I know it’s not the point and click genre but Neon White does a great job of giving you intuitive puzzles to solve as each levels gold medal for speed is done without doing any sort of skip while to get the platinum it’s generally required to do some out of the box thinking to find a skip in the level which is basically a puzzle

[@rylandnewby]

I feel like part of the problem is probably the accessibility baseline, that is, that everything must be seen by as many players as possible. A game like Monkey Island 2 has these puzzles because that was a climate where you could expect your audience to commit to every game they played. Now, puzzles are trying to be just enough of an impediment that you don't feel like your hand is being held, but not enough that you have any real risk of quitting the game and getting distracted by tiktok. That's why they are almost all single-step solutions. Find an eyeball to shoot, lock and key, flip a lever, etc. These elicit the feeling of a puzzle, but without actually taking on the risk that you'll be too stupid to solve them and just give up. Basically, modern game companies are cowards.

[@OtakuUnitedStudio]

To which I say, "by trying to appeal to everybody, you make something that appeals to nobody."

[@signa8]

Two words to reinforce your point: Elden Ring

[@zackakai5173]

Remember in Morrowind how you actually had to pull out your map and read your journal to figure out where to go next? You know, ENGAGE with the game world? Then in Skyrim the next objective to rush brainlessly toward was just marked with a big floating icon. No thought process required. Obviously a certain level of accessibility is a good thing, but when games start REQUIRING me to let them hold me hand in order to progress, something has gone wrong. The experience of most modern open world games could be faithfully recreated by rendering a bunch of generic figures on a flat grid in an endless grey void, plonking down some objective markers, and barely anything would be lost. When I played RDR2 and Cyberpunk, I turned as much of that shit off as I could. Pulled up my map when I absolutely needed it, but other than that I forced myself to learn my way around the game world. And you know what? I had WAY more fun with those games than I did any of, say, the post-Black Flag AssCreed games.

[@rylandnewby]

​@@signa8 basically every puzzle in elden ring is "find the lever that opens this locked door. it's somewhere in this room."

[@signa8]

@@rylandnewby Oh, I wasn't referring to the puzzles. Just the overall accessibility of the game and having the guts to do what they wanted to do with it. Fromsoft are not cowards. Yeah, puzzles weren't complex in ER, but I think they were exactly what the rest of the gameplay called for. I didn't have issues with survival since I've been going hard at these From games for a while now, but I can't imagine the pain of doing some of these dungeons as a complete noob while also having to juggle some complex puzzle design.

[@weasle5022]

Never a big fan but i did enjoy Day of the Tenticle. Something about solving things like a tree in your way, go back in time and cut it down, now the present character can pass it, just struck me as awesome as a kid.

[@chrisavenell3172]

Though the silent hill games aren't blameless in the find multiple items to solve a puzzle department they at least throw a riddle with an accompanying poem for you to think over in order to find the correct solution. Obviously there's the occasional bits where you need to combine the random item to get another item but these are few and far between.

[@vlim5601]

I know that moustache puzzle seems stupid but I could actually see it making sense if the character looks similar to the picture, but different enough to not be able to pass as him to a trained eye. The moustache gives him a very immediately noticeable feature to help distract from the fact that he's not a perfect doppelganger. The problem with that puzzle was more its presentation than just how stupid it was.

[@TheriusT]

Some games are proud of the level of obscurity of their puzzles, to the point of making it almost an inside joke. To me, "Fez" was a game that was almost mocking me with its "look at the stars and count in binary the blinks of a star to get the code" and if you don't get this CLEAR puzzle there is no real ending. The game becomes an internet forums puzzle. Not an "in-game" puzzle. I was feeling good and clever with the game until I felt like the game was just trolling me and then I lost interest, from that moment on I looked up all the answers because there was no point in trying because I could spend an evening trying to solve it just to find out that the answer is in the back of a cereal box of 1972.

[@SolaScientia]

I was never able to get the hang of adventure puzzles or point & click adventures as a kid. I think it's mostly how my brain works and how I don't always intuit things how most people tend to. Even with both Portal games I'm ashamed to say I had to look up how to solve certain rooms, because the method of solving was not intuitive to me or how I would have gone about solving it. That said, I think I'm a bit of an outlier when it comes to game puzzles and my ability to complete misinterpret what I'm supposed to do to solve the problem. I love what I played of Link's Awakening, but I pretty much require a walkthrough for any Legend of Zelda game. When I was a kid I could never get past the raccoon in the woods, because I didn't understand I was supposed to use the mushroom on him. I think it's Phantom Hourglass that has a bunch of timed dungeons where you have to be in the safe space in order to not take damage and you have to hit switches in the right order with the boomerang. Took me ages and the walkthrough guidebook to do it. I think I just don't have the brain for puzzles in general.

[@smaugthefiredrake7840]

There are some games where I actually really quite enjoy using a walkthrough, particularly games with side quests that are 'collect all of x' or similar. Obviously I'd rather be able to do it myself first time, but with certain games, following a walkthrough can be like following a recipe in cooking - it's an enjoyable and somewhat relaxed way to explore parts of a game I otherwise might not be as interested in.

[@SolaScientia]

@@smaugthefiredrake7840 Yeah, games where I do want to get all the collectables definitely see me looking up where to find the ones I'm missing. I was having issues finding all the music and one last can in Stray, so I had to look up to see where to find the last can and where to find the last piece of music I was missing. I'll use the wiki for FromSoftware games to make sure I keep various NPCs alive for as long as possible, or when I'm having trouble finding a shortcut I know is in the area and I've somehow missed it.

[@thedogmaticdirector]

I always hated puzzles that required outlandish thinking. There were other puzzles in Gabriel Knight 3 aside from the one listed here that made me quit playing it entirely.

[@jimmynyarlathotep6857]

‘Moon Logic’

[@Winkmyster]

I've been so used to reviewers being in the pocket of the companies whose very games they review, that seeing your videos again is so refreshing. I came across your channel around 11 years ago, I was a awkward teenager in the middle of that stretch out phase...where I suddenly am a foot taller and I look like a cross between an alien and Willem Dafoe, who himself looks like an alien, and there's ectoplasm everywhere. Nevertheless... despite the world of gaming effectively crumbling away like the remains of Egypt, your critiques have remained fast, unique, and as witty as a particular Genie.

[@philippak7726]

I'm reminded of a moment in Prey 2015. It's not a puzzle, but a moment where story interplays with the narrative. You find a conversation about a couple who are planning a picnic in a store-room. If you go in the store room there are a lot of treats and collectables... and a transformed human enemy with one of their names. Also remembering Myst and Riven, and the weird moments when you might successfully plot through a puzzle.

[@connormchalehu2351]

See, the reason I could never figure out that spitting puzzle as a kid was because; if you try to drink the blue or yellow drinks on their own, guybrush says he doesn’t want to drink out of a broken glass. I spent so long looking for some kind of beerstein or something that I could combine them in and then drink out of, but never found anything, and only found out you just needed to use them on each other years later, with a walkthrough. And that I think is the rock and a hard place problem that modern adventure games face. With the media saturation we have today, very few people are gonna spend months puzzling their way through your game like we did in Monkey Island as kids. And if you’re making a Sierra style adventure game with deaths and dead ends, forget it. Basically, you can make your puzzles easier, and lose that intricacy Yahtzee talked about, or you design more complex puzzles and face the prospect of your players alt-tabbing into a walkthrough every five minutes. It’s a really difficult balance to walk, and in a lifetime of playing adventure games, I don’t think I’ve ever played one that hit that balance exactly right. No matter how logical your puzzles are to you, the designer, there’s always going to be people out there who don’t follow, and getting help might hurt the experience, but it’s also usually the only way to continue. And once you bust out the walkthrough once, it can be hard to stop coming back

[@knowledgeacquirer2931]

Outer Wilds did this balance pretty well

[@parkerdixon-word6295]

Yahtzee might enjoy the Darkside Detective games. They have a reasonable amount of intricacy, and are intuitive enough that I didn't need almost any guides to beat both games.

[@slothfulcobra]

I guess you could also equate this kind of adventure puzzle with a Metroidvania that may have a complex path to get to the next bit, although many of those nowadays try to push harder on the purity of gameplay or freedom of exploration and not even necessarily trying to directly guide the player along one path (although the Metroid series specifically tends to try to guide the player along the one path). Something else interesting to think about is that while we think of the internet today as being the way around figuring out puzzles, adventure games even back in the 90s expected people to get frustrated and look for help, which was why there were literally phone-in hint lines.

[@alldayagain]

See, I felt Grim Fangango had a lot of unintuitive solutions

[@Mick0Mania]

I think the story and the atmosphere carried that game. The puzzles start fine but get very illogical soon. I still don't understand the logic behind the "getting the bone wagon out of domino's trap" puzzle. The only reason I got a hint on what to do, was because the game mistakenly makes Manny say "I put his stomach through enough" when you try to give Glottis an item (even if you haven't made him drink the cocktail yet).

[@tahutoa]

@@Mick0Mania and that just reinforces the point because I have no idea how that could be a hint

[@Mick0Mania]

@@tahutoa in this particular instance, it made me realize I need to feed him something. Even with this information in mind, the rest of the puzzle doesn’t make much sense.

[@pulykamell]

Yeah, I just gave up on that game about a third of the way through. Can’t remember what puzzle stumped me, but it was frustrating enough that I just said screw it.

[@bugjams]

Thank god other people had the same experience as me. I thought I was just stupid.

[@HCR_Motorhead]

He called crisps 'chips'. We're doomed.

[@BrotherSurplice]

Never forget what they took from us

[@tootsie_]

He could have been talking about crinkle cut fries maybe, and those are called chips sometimes. Maybe the editor didn't think about it and used his American sensibilities

[@nicholasq1941]

Nah bro, his Aussie slipped out. Chips and Chips

[@Hositrugun]

​@@BrotherSurplice Vengeance.

[@BrotherSurplice]

@@Hositrugun Soon brother, soon

[@TheMrMeng]

Aside from the trouble with getting the id for the drinks there's also the problem where the player would only be able to make the connection between the wind and the spitting contest if they had been to the party and stayed in the room long enough to hear the conversation between the two random NPCs that'd you have no real reason to pay attention to. In other words you have to find the specific key for the specific lock. So not that great a puzzle.

[@Sp00nDuck]

I love the puzzle in discworld 2 where you have to get ice, a candle and a wooden arm to get a death certificate. Just a funny puzzle and solution

[@FuNati]

Just finished the game. I agree with most points. The puzzles were pretty fair. And they had to go “let’s not be too hard or else they’ll quit and play something else” which wasn’t really an option in the 90s.

[@ethai1]

Oh man, I remember the great feeling I had after solving the piano puzzle in Silent hill 1

[@crisis8v88]

@8:27 "I don't know who I'm even talking to right now." Even if this insight won't directly bring about some kind of adventure game renaissance, it's still valid for other genres of games. If puzzles are a medium for storytelling in adventure and horror games, then so to can fights be for action and FPS games.

[@snookandrew]

The Room series were excellent puzzle solving games imo. The sound, the creepiness and there was a decent bit of background lore to the whole thing too.

[@inventiveusername5191]

Puzzle solving in The Room: girlfriend's mother is seriously ill? Go play catch with Mark and Denny, and then it'll never get mentioned again.

[@degiguess]

Something I think could really help out modern adventure games is having multiple solutions to each puzzle. A puzzle could have 3 solutions and you only need to get one right or a more intricate puzzle might have 5 and you need to get 2 or 3 right. This allows you to get by on intuition without having to make the puzzles absurdly simple or having to hope your players are just perfectly in sync with the way you think.

[@stevenneiman1554]

My favorite puzzle games are mostly the ones which focus on a clever mechanic which works in a consistent way and demands cleverness to apply to new situations, rather than understanding of the narrative and state of the setting. I think that was what pissed me off about Superliminal: It has a cool central gimmick with the objects that change size to match your perspective, but the game spends a third of its too-short length actually presenting that mechanic and getting you to think about how to use it before switching to inconsistent bullshit and constant rugpulls designed more to let the devs pat themselves on the back for their cleverness than give the player the chance to be clever themself.

[@sasamichan]

regardless, I have seen people in lets plays get stuck on those puzzles. With Monkey Island and Zelda there is a factor of "I did this same puzzle in the last game and the one before that and the one before that so now I know exactly what to do. in games over all there is a feeling of "This was harder in the 80s and today they made it too easy" You can feel this in Mario games, Zelda games and Pokemon games and then for some reason Mega Man games get harder But let's use an example closer to Monkey Island. In Telltale's Sam & Max Save the World the game basically HANDS you the solutions. You can't pick up items that do nothing and every thing is basically spelled out. You don't even get pointless locations and the NPCs are limited to JUST the ones you need for the story. Locations and NPCs you don't need are written out and a lot of same locations and same characters are reused. Even Tales of Monkey Island while fun, still held my hand and I never got stuck and never picked up any thing I never used. in Return to Monkey Island I and others actually get stuck on puzzles some times. and you CAN pick up items that are 100% completely useless and its not just "Put pepper on the fish and win" you have to see the fish, get the fish, put the fish on the plate, spice the fish on the plate, eat your own unspiced fish. If you do spice the fish at the contest you get caught cheating if you spice ALL the fish then you eat a spicey fish too and lose. and THIS puzzle is ONE key of 3 needed to open the lock which the lock is a key, one of five for a lock which is the key to the next lock which you can't open till you pass 4 more puzzles You also have to win the math test but 1st need to light the fire and pay attention to the melting ice and get a joke book to tell a joke. you also have a puzzle where you have to light a lantern under water and you have to pay attention to stuff that was set up ahead of time and there is a puzzle where you have to add spice to a food that's not spicey enough and you have to find the one thing that's hot enough and you can't just pick it up. over all the game was harder then Tales , harder then Sam and Max and harder then Back to the Future a little short, some replay value but not a lot. and while the ending can be seen as disappointing , it was one some people predicted and as far as the art style, not an issue. The game had a new art style every time you plaid one of the other parts. This game was mostly for the nostalgia of seeing familiar faces and locations again. and I think that's what most people wanted. I don't think you can make every one happy. Change too much or too little and some one gets disappointed. It does make we wish we still had physical media and game rental stores. I would have gladly given this a rent over a buy if I still had a Blockbuster. If you love the series or the genre, get it. if you are on a budget maybe find some one who has the game and play it at there house and save your money for some thing with a little longer play time. there's a speed run achievement for a 2 hour play You'll likely 1st time this in 3 or 4 hours and its not as cute to run around in as Goose Game. Still with hard mode, easy mode and achievements and a few other little details you can get some replay value from it as little things done differently do get you a little extra joke now and then.

[@Off1313]

So I was supposed to spit when the wind was blowing! OMG so many years and why didn't I know that??

[@Blake_Stone]

My impression of Monkey Island 2 from a thousand years ago when it was still relatively new was that unlike the first game which was a fun whimsical story with amusing characters and dialogue with some puzzles well integrated in between (most of which were straightforward - one or two were rather oblique), the sequel was MUCH more puzzle-forward. In fact it felt like most of the time you were trying to untangle an absurdly complicated multi-part puzzle and you therefore spent less time enjoying the charisma and wit that you come for with Monkey Island. It was still a good game but nowhere near as dear to my heart.

[@Zademandel]

See the bit as a kid I struggled to work out as a kid was the wind blowing bit. I had no soundcard on my old pc and didn't spot the wind effects, I just kept rerunning the spit competition with different spit dialogue combinations thinking that was the key.. sooner or later I'd just win but it was years before I realised why, just thought the game changed the spit commands each run!

[@ayebraine]

Oh yes, I was incredibly mad at that beautiful Double Fine game, Broken Age, for NOT having any wrong ways to solve the puzzles, NOT having any way to try and do wrong things with objects, and NOT having a way to simply gawk at an object or poke an object and hear what the charaters think about it. Instead it was brutally pared down to 1 or 2 objects in each beautifully animated screen, that you needed to leave said screen and never come back, weakly seasoned with the main character's musings about the main plot. It was all that I've ever loved about adventure games like Space Quest or Grim Fandango, not being there.

[@pulykamell]

Same here. Broken Age was such a disappointment to me. There was nothing at all to figure out in that game. I don’t recall ever having to truly ponder a solution to a puzzle.

[@alt0248]

I think one of the only puzzles in grim fandango I have the hardest time figuring out is the cat race track puzzle. It's not impossible especially if you're following the story and talking to everyone and exploring, it's just really hard when it comes to compiling the info into the ticket machine. But the sign puzzle in the middle of the forest is dumb. I don't remember what the hints were. I just memorized the sign placement.

[@Romalac]

Never played the games, so I'm commenting on this purely as an outsider. But regarding the spitting puzzle, it honestly feels like several acceptable solutions to the puzzle that would each individually make a player feel clever are being mulched into a less intuitive solution. I feel like just having distracting the crowd so you can move the flags would work just as well, no weird drink mixing needed. Honestly, if the concern is making the player feel clever and providing worldbuilding and humor opportunities, I feel like having multiple possible, simple solutions to a puzzle (each with their own unique dialogue and set pieces to make them feel distinct) would be more effective than a single obtuse one. Like, say, in the spitting contest, you can win by paying attention to the direction of the wind, OR by mixing the drinks to thicken your spit, OR by distracting the crowd and moving the flags. If you happen to stumble across one of the solutions, you still feel clever, but other solutions can make you feel clever in different ways. Would incentivize replay value, too.

[@ayebraine]

God, I just remembered the Goblins 2 puzzle where you have to overpepper a meatball that a king is going to eat. My friend told me about this puzzle IN DETAIL, for minutes. I've never solved it, because I never got that far into the game. It's a byzantine torture of a puzzle. But it still belongs to a brilliant, memorable, hilarious game, and its failures and semi-solutions are chock-full of delightful humor and slapstick animation, like all Goblins puzzles are.

[@LemuriaGames]

If you still don't know who you're talking to - I'm searching videos and articles like this exactly because I'm making an old-style adventure game with some humor and (hopefully) interesting puzzles. Understanding WHY the puzzles in the games I remember fondly - Monkey Island, Zak McKraken, Day of the Tentacle, etc. - worked is a great help in trying to replicate that.

[@K4RN4GE911]

I feel like Oneshot often gets overlooked with its puzzle design. It had really neat ideas that it executed flawlessly, all thanks to being able to hold an item to interact with something in the world or combining it with something else from your inventory. There's a hydraulic press and you have a metal pipe? Well, you need a crowbar that you can't find, why not make one? You managed to fix a solar powered battery for the area's generator, but it's not working due to there not being sunlight? Oh wait, the main character is LITERALLY HOLDING THE SUN, so you combine the two and presto!

[@Pedro_Colicigno]

I think one of my favourite puzzels from the monkey island franchise is in the 3rd one (Curse). You need to get hand lotion to remove the cursed ring from Elaine and you former crew has some, but they need tar (or anything sticky). So you get a chisel from a graveyard for another puzzel, and use it in a huge round cheese to get some of it. Then you dump that cheese in an old cauldron in a lava stove that doesn't work because there is no more lava. To get the lava flowing you use that same chisel in a huge piexe of tofu to make a mask like the villagers and go to the sacrifice (a vegetarian sarifice). If you give some cheese to the vulcano the villager tells you it is lactose intolerant and then the vulcano erupts, melting the chesse that you can now trade for the lotion. In the game, all those steps are very telegraphed but none are explicitely mentioned. You can talk to the guys in the sacrifice and they say they don't give meat. The whole point of the puzzel was to make you laugh at the final joke that the vulcano god is lactose intolerant. There is another at the end where you need to remember how to make a hair of the dog beverage (somthing you did before) but using random stuf you can get in the amusement park of monkey island while you are a big headed kid.

[@hourglass1988]

As an escape room owner I spend entirely too much of my time thinking about what makes a good or bad puzzle. The line between a solution being obvious and nonsensical is fine indeed. Especially with the players always being a huge uncontrollable variable. While in video games you have total control over what does or doesn't work for better or worse so almost getting a puzzle usually won't help. At least in the meat space of an escape room getting people close is usually enough.

[@kylekonop4801]

Excellent point - you *can* make an intricate puzzle without descending into moon logic...but it's hard to do, especially repeatedly, and a bunch of players probably won't get it even if you're fairly logical. Folks forget that these games frequently sold more hint guides than actual copies - clearly players at large weren't determined to beat them unaided.

[@matthiasjones]

I think this is accurate and further that it touches on what a lot of AAA games are missing; tying game play to story in a way that makes them inseparable. And having my character shout *especially loud* at the revenge target when I'm murdering them the same way I've murdered the last 400 people is not the way to do it Assassin's Creed. Even otherwise great developers can fall prey to this; there has only been one side mission in Cyberpunk 2077 that really *grabbed* me (the one with the Father/Son braindance editors).

[@Otterinheaven]

I think the problem with the Green Drink justification is that the Spit was "already used" in a previous puzzle, and the UNT UND PRECICIOUSLY ONE" stereotype to Point and Click problem solving. The Split has been used, and blink you'll miss it drink. Ideally, someone in the bar saying "Marty, why do you always give me the Green Drink? I hate what it does to my spit" after the first act would have been a better hint.

[@MaztRPwn]

I just had a revelation when he mentioned that ridged chips are actually bigger. It seems really obvious now. 😂😂

[@WarBuch]

Not point-and-click but the game "Outer Wilds" (and its DLC) incorporated puzzle & worldbuilding very well. Not only were the solutions to puzzles very logical, but they almost all touched on various aspects of the world, its characters, and/or the lore. Very intuitive, rewarding stuff.

[@elegantoddity8609]

This reminds me of what Yahtzee once said about cover-based shooting actually. It works fine if it *connects* the game, like glue holding together the model airplane, but an inventory puzzle game that's nothing but that is like taking the interesting model airplane parts and grinding them up for more glue. Now an action game and a puzzler game can survive on their own if each is good enough, but that's hard to pull off and I think part of the reason why pure point and clicks and pure action died off/merged. Those who insisted on only using point and click puzzles without a good story, or characters, or action, got outdone. Like a shop that insists on only ever serving bread.

[@Schmidtelpunkt]

Point and Click died because the paradigm of games changed from being something to beat to being a ride with the player as a passenger. RPGs allow grinding to compensate for less-than-perfect players, Jump and Runs let you start in later levels, most games play themselves to a degree to allow the player to progress and experience the whole game. A game basically being made from obstacles put in the player's way is anachronistic. Most adventures solved this (and the problem of being unable to create enough content with the production value which is the deciding factor for a purchase) by simply avoiding hot spots, items and too many rooms at once, allowing to quickly try everything with everything without having any reason for it. TLDR; Adventure games make you think, nobody wants to think, so interactive linear cartoons are what replaced them.

[@natanlevine]

Like the surface area of a crinkle cut chip! Yahtzee you fucking genius!

[@NicholasLaRosa0496]

It's all about setup and payoff in an organic way that is good design.

[@LukeDupin]

I did like that puzzle, but I never got the different color drinks and thus never figured out that last part. Perhaps I'm too thick.

[@dojelnotmyrealname4018]

I am once again going to bring up There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension. Yes it's puzzles are on the simpler side, but atleast they incorporate humor and a story worth getting invested into. And some of them can still get you stuck, sometimes for bad reasons, but sometimes also because you weren't paying attention to certain details.

[@pulykamell]

That was extremely fun! I played it with my two young daughters to help teach them puzzle solving skills, and they loved it, too. Great humor, gameplay, and story.

[@dojelnotmyrealname4018]

​@@pulykamell It's a testament for the writing that it can get you genuinely invested in a sentient game problem that refuses to let you play it.

[@JohnnyBurnes]

Silent Hill 1's piano puzzle's my go to favorite. It's simple, but does require a bit of outside thinking. The latter horoscope puzzle does the same trick, but the tie to the solution is less obvious to figure out.

[@hristo.bogdanov]

5:50 - The cannon shot is more engaging as it signifies battle...

[@a.dennis4835]

It doesn't. It signify the mail boat has come.

[@Pandaman64]

I would assume that the hint about wind for the spitting contest was just thematic speech and have ignored it.

[@kallistos87]

I completely agree with your analysis and the fact that the new MI was so insipid made me extremely sad. The old ones were so clever and charming.

[@SirSicCrusader]

Ah the ultimate inventory puzzle, 'Use Fake Work' On 'Partner' To 'Avoid Housework'

[@KainGerc]

Maybe you should turn 'cleaning the dishes' into a fun inventory puzzle. It will probably piss off your wife because it will take 3 times as long, but at least you will get more of a sense of accomplishment and enjoyment from it.

[@TheCreepypro]

to think that making puzzles would be in and of itself a puzzle

[@ianperesmusic]

This really drives home just how brilliant Monkey Island 2 was.

[@chinmail]

Ironically I was stuck on the fish bit for ages because I kept putting the spice on the fish in my inventory rather than putting it on the fish in the bucket. I didn't realise that putting the fish in the bucket first meant that an extra fish would stay in my inventory. Bit of a head scratcher

[@lukeemberson5309]

This reminds me of playing daedelic adventure games where the puzzles vary between good and stupid. Still what made playing them fun was the cheap price and the great story telling. In fact a few of there games had such powerful endings that I remember them to this day.

[@TheIronArmenianakaGIHaigs]

Speaking of point and Click adventure games, I coincidentally started playing Deponia around two weeks back. I only have 2 hours of playtime split between two 1 hours sessions but the game wasn't clicking for me. I enjoyed the aesthetic and the animation style for the characters and backgrounds. But regarding the puzzles some of them was straightforward and I could figure them out but other times I just had no clue what the heck was going on. When I gave up and had to look at a guide I couldn't figure out how I would have progressed if I didn't have the guide. Some characters do give hints to sort of help you along the way but the solution of some of these puzzles are very obtuse. Not quite relevant but the main character doesn't seem to have any redeeming qualities but maybe that might change if I play the game more.

[@lorddarki9936]

The Main character is a bit of a jerk but he develops over time mostly in the Sequels though

[@RealSnarb]

8:45 I have a feeling that this technique isn’t going to work for avoiding doing the dishes in the future now that you’ve said the quiet part out loud

[@leemp8352]

saying it again my favourite series, Brilliant game,story,puzzles etc and got my child brain ticking to complete them

[@ironwolf5802]

I was born after the point and click was big but my Dad would tell me a game he and his siblings would play where you had to kill a vampire I'm a basement with broken stairs. So you needed rope to get down into the basement, a wooden stake, a lit match, and maybe something else. The problem was you could only use one hand to get down the later and the wind would kill the match so no light. He didn't remember if they beat the game but that puzzle lived in his fading mind for over 25 years, even when he couldn't remember I was his daughter.

[@Susimusta]

My dad would try to push a postcard into a little crack in the hospital wall. I am convinced, something in his fleeting remaining mind thought it would open a secret passage. We used to play point and clicks together when I was a kid.

[@vintagevideogamenights2923]

The thing is that people complain when puzzles require some thinking. Like the "silent birds poem" puzzle in Silent Hill. It only requires real world logic, but many people thought it didn't made sense.

[@bobbob3458]

The puzzle breakdown reminds me of how good authors try to use narrative devices like foreshadowing, motifs and repetitive designation to make their work come across as naturally self referential and cohesive without having to literally go "REMEMBER BACK IN CHAPTER 3 WHEN..." every time they want to build on something they hinted at previously. Looks like good adventure games, similarly, try to use narrative devices as tools to repeatedly point their player at the solution to their puzzles (mysteries) without spelling them out. Guess the trick is actually having the chops to use said devices to help the player/reader understand your oh so clever train of logic as a game designer/author without literally explaining it to them them OR leaving them in the dark. I bet we don't see it in games as often anymore because it's a thing that's fucking hard and time consuming to do properly, especially when you factor in all the unique narrative tools that video games can have. There's no design shortcuts, either: even if you just drape your story around a common plot structure and set of recycled narrative devices that sell well, (hero's journey, anti-hero's journey, battle shonen, loser-getting-road-killed isekai, PT hallway psych horror game, etc) you still have to execute well or people will see it as the schlock that it is. It's more "economical" to gut the technical story/puzzle design elements of a work to reduce the number of moving parts knowing it's going to sell on brand name and/or art asset quality alone. Whatever, make that cash. The really shitty thing that Monkey Island 2022 did, more insulting than any phoned in puzzle, was imply that the player was wrong for being so passionate about their craft in the first place.

[@TuffMelon]

Honestly, part of what annoys me about many 'complex' puzzles in games these days is that 99% of the time its just a test of observation than logic or thinking. More about seeing what the game wants you to do, rather than how to do it. More than a few times I've gotten stuck not because a puzzle was hard, but because the bloody obvious solution required an object I hadn't stumbled on yet. (Let's not talk about all those puzzles that could have been solved with many things you have in your inventory, but the game only allows one, but there's also no interaction when using the wrong thing besides the game just going 'nah')