Grumpy Gamer

I'm not sure there is one. Not in the sense of old school point&click adventure games.

I mean, I kinda enjoyed Unavowed. But that game didn't really have puzzles, so I'm not sure that it counts. It was mainly just about clicking the next pixel in some of the available scenes, that made the game progress.

But, if I expand the view of adventure games a bit, then I think that Firewatch is the best example. That game really showed that the game should have UI that fits the scenario, rather then established view of what fits the genre. Firewatch's use of an interface consisting of a radio, map and compass was absolutely lovely, and was such a great match of the scenario for the protagonist. In the end, they didn't make us of it as much as they could have (like making more routes optional, having different objectives available at the same time, etc), and they said as much themselves. But as an example of a interface suited for a modern game, it was great.

But, if have to only go to point&click adventure games, I would look at Broken Age. It's main flaw was that it didn't have look/interact on all hotspots as default. Which I presume was because of smartphone/tablet considerations. But other then that, I think that look/interact is really the only alternatives you need to have on objects on modern adventure games.

Disco Elysium felt new and fresh to me.

I am an almost exclusive adventure player (removing the adventures, I only enjoy some soccer games). To be honest, I have not seen anything especially novel and I am worried about this obsession with the novelty. The best adventure since Monkey Island II was Thimbleweed Park, and the next one will be any other that perfectly executes the rules of the genre, not one that subverts them. Not counting TP (which is extraordinary) The last acceptable adventure I've played was Technobabylon.

Loom (happy 30th)

Limbo and Inside felt a lot like classic adventure games to me. More linear, perhaps, but the same concept: a series of rooms that follow a narrative arc, and you need to solve puzzles to access the next story beat. All with this physical interaction of jumping, hiding, and pushing and pulling objects. They even had plenty of Sierra style gruesome deaths!

"Baba is you": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3_yA4HTJfs

The SIlent Age (due to innovative time travel logics and scene switching)

Well, I state that the best interface is still the classic verb interface. VERB + NOUN = ACTION or, in a more "complicated" form, VERB + NOUN + NOUN = ACTION.
it's easy.
Anyway, one of the latest adventure games I liked is Machinarium. The interface is object on object, but even the configuration of the main character (The robot) is important. And there are mostly funny and clever puzzles.

I think VR games have a lot of potential in that regard. I just finished Red Matter and a lot of puzzle that would be tedious in a classic point'n'click felt natural. Other puzzle that involved looking at an object from every angle or handling objects carefully would have been impossible in a non VR game without creating a mini game just for this puzzle.

Oxenfree and Life is Strange. They felt clever and natural.

Besides that there are some games that are interesting more than anything, like Tacoma. I've also heard good things about Return of the Obra Dinn but I haven't checked it out yet.

The new Tomb Raider games also still have some good puzzles in the "optional" challenge tombs. Basically you don't have much inventory there, but you just deal with a self-contained set of objects in the world that you rearrange to some goal. It appeals to me in a similar way. (This isn't fundamentally different from classic Tomb Raider, of course.)

I don't know if I agree that the lack in UI change is a bad thing. Why does something good, something that works, need to change? Chess has been the same for a long time, but that doesn't make it any worse. It would be silly (to me anyway) to suggest that chess needs to change because you're still gripping the pieces with your hands just like you did a century ago. The same is, in essence, true for adventure games.

I think the focus on the specifics of UI mechanics is misplaced anyway. Classic adventures games like Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones III, Monkey Island etc. had this interface for a reason: it was a straightforward way of mapping what happened in-universe to ex-universe actions that the player could take. You wanted Guybrush to open a cupboard and pick up a box of cornflakes? The UI allowed you to tell him to do precisely that. The game would have been considerably less rich if all interactions had been reduced to "use", or "poke at": much more tedious, too, since *now* all you'd be doing was clicking "poke at" until something fit.

With the classic verb system playing the game felt closer to telling a story. IMO this made those games more immersive, more relatable, and more fun. You could get into them more, you would feel for the characters more; you'd suspend disbelief for a while and interact with the in-game world, rather than being  a person in a chair in front of a computer moving a computer mouse or hitting keys on a computer keyboard.

What I found vexing - frustrating, even - in classic adventure games wasn't so much the UI but rather the difficulty. Adventure games are wonderful - until you get stuck, then they suck. It's like reading a book, and coming to a page that, no matter how you try, you find yourself unable to turn, so you can't see how the story continues. That's no fun.

Quite a few classic games had moments like that. Sometimes these were due to untranslatable puns (like the "red herring" in Monkey Island, or the "monkey wrench" in Monkey Island II), sometimes they were just due to the game requiring a very particular and non-obvious solution to a puzzle that the player might well be unable to come up with. Balancing the difficulty of an adventure game so it's neither all-obvious nor too hard is tough, but it's not impossible.

What I think I'm trying to say, in any case, is that the "old" verb-oriented UI isn't bad, and a new game isn't made better solely by replacing it with a generic "poke at" or so. Whether a game is enjoyable or not is due to factors that are largely unrelated to its UI. (I say largely because a poorly-implemented UI that impedes gameplay will still make a game stink, of course.)

I thought Thimbleweed Park was a great game, FWIW: carefully modernized, with a lot of "lessons learned" implemented, while staying true to the spirit of the classics instead of trying to reinvent adventure games as something entirely *new*.

(I don't mind games doing *that* either BTW. But quite a few titles called adventure games these days aren't that in my book, anymore than a newly-created board game could reasonably be called "chess".)

The last innovation i felt in an adventure game was in the "Book of unwritten tales". Every Hotspot, not neccesary for the solution of a puzzle, vanished after you intereacted twice with it. This minimized the phase of trial and error. I really liked the flow of BouT Part one

@Thomas
> Every Hotspot, not necessary for the solution of a puzzle, vanished after you interacted twice with it. This minimized the phase of trial and error.

I prefer the way this works in Phoenix Wright, where the hotspot itself doesn't disappear but it shows you a checkmark on hover so you know you've been there. That way you aren't arbitrarily locked out of reading the text again. This could easily be applied to a MM/MI/TWP-like interface as well.

On the front of the level of your basic, fundamental interactions with the game, I am personally drawing a blank. I think the graphical adventure field has failed to come up with an interaction scheme which simultaneously solves two problems:

- Being vulnerable to repetitive, brute force puzzle solutions, which means you end up getting to advance in the game without understanding *why* what you did was the right thing to do.

- Being resistant to brute-force attacks, at the cost of potentially blocking progress even if the player has worked out the right thing to do because they didn't guess on the right way to express that.

The former issue is what happens with the "just reduce everything to use" system, and which as you point out the verb systems tend to be similarly vulnerable to. The latter issue is the Sierra Syndrome, and is a problem inherited from text adventures, where because you are using a text parser you are less vulnerable to brute force attack, but unless the text parser is very clever it might not recognise a perfectly valid puzzle solution just because the user phrased it in a way the designers didn't expect.

It then comes down to a matter of gatekeeping progress, and how important you consider that to be. There's an argument that given a choice between blocking someone from progressing in a game and allowing them to get progress despite not having "earned" it through puzzling things out, it's better to just allow them to progress - then at least they get to see more of the content and the story and aren't turned back by a bottleneck. I'd say that's particularly true for adventure games putting a very strong emphasis on storytelling and character decision-making as opposed to puzzles for puzzles's sake.

I have seen more promising game mechanics arise away from the immediate sphere of the character interacting with the environment, and more in the realm of what to do with the information they get from the environment.  The Sinking City, whilst it is largely not an adventure game, had an interesting mechanic in here which could very easily be applied to adventure games. As you investigated a case, you'd gather clues about it, and from those clues derive information about what is going on. Then you had a screen where you could take the facts you have uncovered and combine them in different ways to come to different conclusions about what is going on and what you should do about it.

This was a neat way of both flagging what the potential major decision branches were, and also gatekeepimg them (you aren't told a particular option is a viable way to end a case if your character has not encountered the information necessary to come to that conclusion).

But what I thought was really interesting, and the game could perhaps have done more with, is that the process also flagged what you/your character consider to be the important factors in making a decision.. Often (perhaps always, it's been a while since I played) there was no one optimum conclusion to an investigation which gave equal weight to all the facts - instead, arriving at a conclusion required you to decide that some particular factors had more weight than others. Then, when you as the player enact that course of action which led you to that conclusion, you're doubling down on that decision. That strikes me as a really nice storytelling tool.

In Thimbleweed Park you can hold down the tab key and see all the objects.  At first I felt this was going to ruin the game, but it didn't.

When I was young and adventures were still big, the interface was irrelevant: The fascination was with seeing great graphics and animations and the world that was built in the game. It really did not matter whether I was able to play it or had to look up things in walkthroughs.
It was important to experience a great world, with many hidden details and layers of stuff to find out. Like in TP.

TP was absolutely great, but what would also be cool would be an adventure like Maniac Mansion, Zak or Indy 3 again: One where you can get stuck and where there are lots of different ways of solving it. Lots of redundancy, dead ends and stuff to play with. Dead ends can be very funny and interessting: What exactly happens later if you let the edsel go to space early? What happens if you kill the plant?
A great adventure should present me an interessting world with many twists and possibilities.

In the TP blog it was written that the elevator was very complicated and should have been simplified or how difficult the bus in Zak was.
Elsewhere you wrote that it was a bad idea to have so many characters for Maniac Mansion and that you almost could not complete it.
TP might have had more people walking around the town, didn't it?
But these things are the best parts! Playing with that world, with characters, manipulating them, etc.

Have you played Hitman and Hitman 2? For me this is in some way even a new form of adventure game (the interface is of course more the one of a 3D shooter...)
This game has an incredible amount of replayability. It has a few adventure like elements with inventory and manipulating things, but it also has >200 NPC in each world all walking around, interacting, being manipulated.
It's so great to set something off, place an object, let chain reactions emerge, or follow the many challenges and prepared actions.
If you miss ceratain events or kill certain people, some solutions become unavailable until you restart.

The game has ton of alternate paths and you should replay each level many many times, always trying something new, but this way uncovering more story, more characters, more hidden elements.

Maybe at one point we could have an adventure with maybe ultra low production value (like Manian mansion would be today), but endless alternative solutions and hidden puzzles, easter eggs, characters with their own agenda and scenes which can fail, e.g. missing Weird Ed's parcel.

To add to what Octavi Navarro said, Little Nightmares also had interesting interactions with the world. But that's not new. Back in the 90s there was the emerging genre of the action-adventure, represented by games like Another World, Little Big Adventure, etc. What Limbo and INSIDE do is an echo of that largely unexplored area.

Regarding RPGs, I really liked Disco Elyisium's gameplay and narrative and the lack of murdering enemies in a dungeon in this game.

I think it ist more the Story and the atmosphere that makes an adventure great. In SVGA 3D Generation I liked The longest Journey aber Syberia. However, best Interface for me was in Return to Zork.

Wow, this is exactly what I was thinking for sometimes now.
I can't find a new game with real new interface but the crimson diamond has a text parser, which isn't a perfect solution nor is it a new UI, but I liked to have a game with no dead ends that use this method and was light on inventory.
The best system I can think of was the magic spell in loom which replaced both verbs and inventory and I really liked it but it is still an old game and spells required memorization.
I was trying to make my on ideal UI (just for the fun of it) but the best I got was to replace the verb system with a text parser that only serves for verbs but you can click on anything else to interact with it. Now days we can make better text parser but I think it is best to limit it to where it is needed - to give you the ability to use deferent operations without the need of 100 of inventory objects and the challenge of figuring out what to do and not just what to use.
I really hope for more modern and refreshing system because I am getting tried of use.

The most innovative one is
https://forums.thimbleweedpark.com/t/segusos-adventure-game-thread/3209?u=sushi
It started after a long and inconclusive discussion on the forum about how many verbs for "use" you should have in the verb grid... or on a coin interface.

I liked Mutazione quite a bit. It does the modern adventure thing of really stripping away a lot of things. You basically just talk to people, observe things, and pick up seeds for a gardening mini-game. You could imagine a more complex version of the gardening mini-game, where there are all these rules for how you plant things (this plant likes to be next to x, but hates being to the right of y, etc.) but really who needs all that? As a super simple puzzle, it ends up just being a nice exercise in self-expression for the player, and meanwhile you get to just soak in the nice world, characters, and writing. I could think of a lot worse games for future adventure games to mimic.

I didn't see anyone mention Cognition yet.  It was a standard point and click, but primarily you are using physic powers to interact with the environment to learn things; which makes it slightly different than the click every inventory item on every hotspot.  I loved the way they put that mechanic together.

Beside the titles mentioned above I would add the remakes of the Magnetic Scrolls adventures, for example Jinxter:
https://strandgames.com/games/jinxter
They were text adventures, but with the new interface they feel (and behave) like point and click adventures. The interesting thing is, that I (as a player) still have more possibilities and more freedom compared to the old "look/pick up/use" point and click interface. And I really like that. The old Legend text adventure games used a similar approach but they are not that intuitive like the new Magnetic Scrolls interface (IMHO).

Honestly,  I think MI3 did a pretty OK job with their UI.  Opening the chest to look at your items was a bit clunky but being able to just use a few simple, different clicks with the mouse to do most anything was great.

@ping From a game design perspective my major problem with having a single interact button is that it's too intuitive. The player blunders through a succession of events not because they formulated a solution to the puzzles but because the game told them to Press Here (cue song and dance.) And because of this interactivity games are just playing themselves.

Imagine in MI1 when you're trying to get the note of credit from the shopkeeper that instead of watching the combination, you just had to press Action after you've got rid of the shopkeeper.  It seems trivial but removing that creates a far less engaging scene. Guybrush knows what the combination is whereas you technically don't. I'm going to stop here before I write an essay on Player Agency.

Loom was like a big inventory [vocabulary?] puzzle that you could similarly just try every new spell on every new problem. I think that its composition was too concise as each room or area held a spell to proceed. But that's a different discussion entirely.

The text parser was/is pedantic at times but it is expressive. SCUMM in at least its first iteration was a gui of the text parser. Where the verbosity added in describing the would from the main characters perspective; EAT Chuck The Plant? With a one button context action I wouldn't know why that's not a good idea.

I really can't think of any recent games that let the characters live outside of a per-determined context action or encourage the player to think outside of an interact key. But I'm heckuva happy that there's such a strong revival for the old ways.

The verb interface does the job very well. It dilutes the 'poke' at everything mechanic, while creating the illusion that the possibilities are endless. Innovation for the sake of it is the downfall of most contemporary adventure games in my opinion. I hope that if Ron creates an adventure game again he entertains the idea of having a classic/new UI option... just follow the toilet paper roll experiment, it worked like a charm!

Hi Ron!

I thought the radio in Oxenfree was pretty cool! You tune to different frequencies near objects and it causes them to engage with the player. Doors open, portals rip open in spacetime, etc.

I also like how Life Is Strange does it. Instead of the verb wheel you just walk up to objects and they highlight, and the appropriate action happens when you click. Your character looks at something, or picks it up, or whatever the appropriate action might be. It's a simplified UI but it makes for really smooth gameplay.

They didn't do anything new but I also think Deponia does a great job of modernizing the adventure game, check it out if you haven't already!

I never played it, but Zack and Wiki on the Wii was supposed to have a pretty unique interface. Of course that was due to the utilisation of the Wii remote.
One example was that you had to turn the remote around to be able to fit a key somewhere.

Just want to jump in and say that the "push, pull, use, talk, etc" interface was my favorite (I preferred it a lot more than just "click") because it reduced the spamming all over the screen for solutions.

I'd rather have a "pick up" on an item than to be able to just click it and have the character pick it up. I know on paper it sounds better to make it simpler however then the game just ends up being a click-fest where I just click on everything. I prefer having to think about my actions even if it's a bit more tedious.

I don't know of any game with a better interface because it's my favorite one! I disliked the interface in Life In Strange... while that game was well executed, it felt clunky.

Maybe simplying the interface would work. Picking up stuff, using things, interacting / talking to people... but I like the idea of being able to push people. I like the idea of pushing something on a wall, etc.

The answer does not lie in games but in the energy that a person expresses to transmit joy and love.

Untitled Goose Game used puzzles but no inventory and for that matter no hands. I thought it was an extremely interesting take, although I'm  not sure if it can be classified as an "adventure game". Firewatch was pretty good too. Donut County used holes, your only tool to solve the puzzle was a hole and how the world interacted with the hole, also interesting because you didn't have an inventory but whatever fell in the hole could be considered it. I feel like nowadays "hidden object" games have substituted adventure games, but honestly adventure games are better

Tardy on the Switch is super innovative and fun! A must play in my opinion. It has great pixel graphics, too. You can drag these giant inventory items around on the screen. They are always on the screen. You can do things like overlap two objects to look through the cut out holes in one piece of paper to see the letters underneath on a different piece shine through etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMKkWoqM14E

Cheers,
rsn8887
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Myst

No Escape: 4 Days To Survive

The (latest) King's Quest

I just finished Don't Escape 4 and I must say it's one of the best adventures in the last 20 years. Random events and situations even provide replayability, almost like the different paths in the fate of Atlantis. As for the UI, there's only left clicking and right clicking and your inventory, nothing more.

I still think the click-wheel interface used in Full Throttle/Curse Of Monkey Island was great. Something notable in a room is highlighted by the cursor when you move over it, you hold left click and can pick how you want to interact with it. It's fast and yet you have complete control of the game using mostly mouse.

DROPSY and Kentucky Route Zero :)
and what's your list, Ron ?

So...I just got evacuated from Peace Corps, Zambia (Africa), but at least I am reunited with my adventure games!
Seems like the theme is that there haven't been any crazy UI revolutions in P&C gaming...Ron, can you send us your freaking list of games already?

Happy quarantine

Return of the Obra Dinn comes to mind.. though that is not strictly a "point and click" more a first person puzzle game

I do think though the 3D first person/third person view-point is maybe the place that "point and click" style should graduate to, keep all the great writing, puzzle solving and point and click genre structure. But bring it to a more open 3rd dimensional space...

I see VR as a possible place for graduating the style to, games like "Job Simulator" and "Accounting" could be considered a step in the new "point and click" style. A more hands on approach,  you are in the world.

Accounting did great characters and writing.. but had none of the puzzles, and not enough of the locations were freely explorable.

Portal is an obvious touch point in the puzzle solving first person that I would also point to, but that definitely requires more skill at moving and looking than many "casual" gamers or people who never or don't often play games would have. Then turning them off the game.

That is why I see the slower, maybe VR style as the possible way forward in the "Point and Click" UI method... if you understand my meaning.

Just imagine being in VR and entering the SCUMM bar for the first time, with all the wacky characters you can interact with and the ambience of the room, so much going on, so much to look at. Would be a very interesting way to experience a point and click game.

I played Yesterday Origins not so long ago and found the way they handled puzzles 'fresh'. Not as fleshed out as I would have liked it to be, but better than many others are doing it.

I believe the greatest point-n'-click adventure game that came out in 1992 was Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis! I bought this with my mom at the Malloch Elementary School Book Fair in 1997 (I was seven), and I got it to work on my dad's Windows 95 IBM computer! The puzzle structure in Fate of Atlantis is incredible, along with the IQ Point system. Noah Falstein and Hal Barwood were two geniuses in that regard.

The Neverhood and the more recent Armikrog

Very late to the party having just found and finished Delores. Thank you, Ron!

There are two interface ideas I really like: item-based conversation trees and interactive notepads. Notepads are something that I think hasn't been used to full effect and is an idea still waiting for a game to do it right.

The first-item based conversation system I remember was "Sam and Max". I always liked it as an idea because you know before you speak to someone whether you've got something new to talk about. I think it's a particularly great fit for detective games.

And it works really well combined with notepads that keep track of the non-physical information and that can be used as yet more conversation topics. I thought Whispers of the Machine did this well, updating the notepad during a conversation if you learn something new so that the conversation can be developed.

Then there's the option of using a notepad for a deduction mechanic, so pieces of information can be combined just like inventory items.  There's a free game series called Zombie Detective which uses a notepad to enable you to link clues to make a final deduction. I don't think the games are written well enough to really nail it, but it's a fantastic graphical representation.

I'm sure there must be some good ways of using notepads interactively to help with safe cracking or code breaking as well.

Are we still waiting for Ron to bestow us with his thoughts? I've enjoyed some of the comments above and would like to hear from the professional as well!

Hey Ron! We just made our second adventure game, Shikon-X, and we got rid of all the verbs or interface really. If you interact with an object you either grab it or say something about it. If you have another item that works in some way with something else, they just do what they have to do when you interact. So for example, we have a coffee machine, a sink and a coffee jar, if you interact with the sink, the character washes her hands, if you interact with the coffee machine it tells you that it's empty and it needs water, if you grab the coffee jar and then interact with the sink, it gets filled with water, if you then go to the coffee machine, it starts brewing coffee... you have an inventory to watch the items and read about them, maybe get clues of what they do, but you don't need to use it at all. We have a free demo up on Steam you can download and try out if you want.

I don't think game mechanics are soooo much important for an adventure game. As long as there's beautiful storytelling and ambience, i'm 100% in. To me, a good adventure game is just a beautiful story, if it's just required to click-click-click, to play the game, to me that's not an issue (ok i'm exaggerating a little bit here, it's ok to have some good puzzles too).

To answer the question, all of the Wadjeteye games make more or less use of some innovative ways of interacting with the characters.