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Episode 6 - Failure, Death, and Losing
1.9k Plays7 months ago
Rose and Matt talk about the most fun games they've ever played before they launch into a long, philosophical discussion about how various adventure games have handled failure, game overs, unwinnable states, and death over the years.
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- Games Discussed:
- Stardew Valley (SORRY!)
- The Curse of Monkey Island
- Animal Crossing
- Callahan's Crosstime Saloon
- Pokemon Sun/Moon
- A Short Hike
- Untitled Goose Game
- Banjo Kazooey
- Just Ignore Them
- Red Bow
- Kings Quest VI
- Kings Quest V
- Monkey Island II: LeChuck's Revenge
- Uncharted 4: A Thief's End
- Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective
- The Dagger of Amon Ra
- BROK The Investigator
- The Colonel's Bequest
- Space Quest III
- Clock Tower
- Disco Elysium
- Citizen Sleeper
- I Expect You To Die
- The Forgotten City
- The Outer Wilds
- Kings Quest III
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Transcript
Podcast Soundboard and Introductions
00:00:00
Speaker
Now that I'm in charge of the soundboard this episode. Oh no. What, do you not trust me here? Oh my god. What? This is terrible. What's terrible? Oh, it's my theme song. Tell me what you think is terrible. Nothing. Nothing. It's all great. Thank you so much, Matt, for taking over this podcast. Yeah, no, absolutely.
00:00:30
Speaker
I'm all up for the challenge. Because someone is having surgery tomorrow and can't edit this episode. Yeah, why are you doing that? So I have entrusted, why are you doing that? Why are you doing that? I don't know if we're on, I don't know if we're on the show right now or not. You don't know if we're recording? No, I know we're recording, but I don't know if we are, I don't know if any human can listen to this. Like, I don't know if this just ends up in my delete,
00:00:59
Speaker
Excuse me? What do you mean if it ends up in your delete? In my delete? I don't know, where do things go when you delete them? You didn't delete anything though, right? If you're editing and you delete a chunk of the audio, it's not going to do a recycle bin. There's not a recycle bin for it. You know, I don't know where it goes. It's just nowhere. It's just gone. It's just gone. It goes to data heaven.
00:01:26
Speaker
Yeah, I've never thought about that. You're blowing my mind right now. Where does it go? Yeah, somewhere out there, there's just this like abyssal void where it's just all the throat clearing and bad jokes and like accidental hate speech that every podcaster has done over the...
00:01:51
Speaker
15 years. That's amazing. It's all archived somewhere. It's all in some CIA server. Let's start the show.
Surgery and Personal Goals
00:02:20
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to Save Your Game. I am Matt Aucamp. With me here is my co-host, Pushing Up Roses. How you doing, Roses? I believe my name is Special Kitty Cat, Pushing Up Roses. I believe that's what we landed on.
00:02:36
Speaker
special kitty cat I don't like saying that doesn't feel good in the mouth doesn't feel good getting negative feelings from that actually I don't have a nickname hi everyone I'm pushing up roses welcome back how you feeling you got you got some you got a stressful week ahead of you yeah I mean
00:02:57
Speaker
stressful? Is that the word for it? I don't know. I am having my final final skin removal surgery, which has been like, if anyone's been following me, I have a whole video about it. It's been like an eight year long, like process. And this is the very last one. And the first one I had was the worst like I, I would rather get tattooed for eight hours than do that initial surgery I had.
00:03:22
Speaker
It was just that painful. I don't know if it was painful as much as it was very stressful. I was hunched over. I had what is called abdominoplasty, which is skin from your stomach. They kind of go in and they rework your abs. They make them stronger and stuff like that. I got out of that surgery.
00:03:43
Speaker
walking, like I told you, like a croissant. I felt like I could barely walk. I felt like if I stood up straight, I would bust my stitches. And this might be TMI, but I had drains. Do you know what those are? Yeah, I can guess based on the work. Yes. So I had drains that were put in me that I had to get taken out later. Fortunately, I will not have drains this time. This doctor is like, no.
00:04:10
Speaker
I'm not gonna do that. I'm like good. Thank thank God. Good. It's yucky. It's yucky But the goal the goal do you want to hear my sexy goal?
00:04:23
Speaker
Uh, uh, let's say yes. Just, just say yes. God damn it. Yes. Is to wear very cute underwear. That's my only goal. That's the only reason why I'm doing this. It's literally the only reason.
Gaming During Recovery
00:04:42
Speaker
uh you know that's you would do it that yeah totally that's something to look forward to thank you that's something that's something exciting so i'm excited will you get to play games while you are recovering like do you know what the means and to play games while crescented
00:05:03
Speaker
I think this is where my switch is going to come in handy because generally, do you remember I asked you about the steam deck the other day and you said it was a handheld and my response was like total unenthusiasm. I'm like, oh. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's because I don't really like a lot of handhelds, but in this case, I will be in bed, so I think I'll be able to get some stuff up on the switch. Maybe I should restart Animal Crossing. Maybe that's going to happen.
00:05:30
Speaker
Do you hear something, do you know? I hate to continue this never ending trend on this show. Oh boy. But do you know what is released on, let's see, this episode's released on March 13th. Well, okay, because we record a day in advance, but it's gonna be on a record day.
00:05:56
Speaker
Well then we can't record. If you're going to say what I think you're going to say, I'm taking the day off. So yeah, Stardew Valley 1.6, release date announced March 19th. I'm so excited. Really? Yeah. I can't believe it ended.
00:06:15
Speaker
I'm gonna be really stoked for that. And concerned, he says the update will work with your current save files, but he suggests you start all the way over. He recommends starting a brand new farm to put all the new stuff in context. And he says, you may even want to start with a new farm type.
00:06:39
Speaker
Damn, I wish I hadn't done that just a few months ago.
Efficient Stardew Valley Strategies
00:06:43
Speaker
I read it. In preparation for this update, you started a new farm, and now he's like, hey, that was a bad idea. Gotta grow the melons and get the fucking parsnips out. God damn it.
00:06:58
Speaker
Have you gotten it down to a science again? Man, I really hope that people listening to this have played Stardew Valley and so don't absolutely hate when we talk about this non-adventure game on the show.
00:07:14
Speaker
Do you have it down to the science where you can finish the community center in the first year? Yeah, I think so. Or if not very close because I think I was having an issue with the red cabbage because you can't grow the red cabbage in the first year. So the only way to beat
00:07:32
Speaker
like bought it. The only way to be at the community center in the first year is if you visit the, what is it? It's two days a week that special merchant is there. The traveling cart, yeah. The traveling cart. So you want to get a bunch of money and always have money in your inventory on those days, just in case they have one of the things that you can't get to the second year, which I think the red cabbage is one. There might be a second one. I don't remember.
00:07:58
Speaker
I definitely know the red cabbage gave me crap, but like, you know what? I try not to do that anymore because why? Why? Why am I stressing myself out? Yeah, that's a good point. I know what's going to happen. I know I can kind of like I don't have to beat this whole farm. I don't have to appease grandpa. He can fucking wait.
00:08:21
Speaker
Last time I played, I even tried to get all the legendary fish in the first year, which was stupid. That's not even a reasonable goal. No, it's not. I do like the fishing, but I am pretty lax on the legendary fish.
00:08:38
Speaker
We are not giving any context here. So again, I just hope people have played this game. I just need you guys to know that it makes me very happy. Stardew Valley equals happy roses. And that's all you need.
00:08:53
Speaker
it is up there with, I think, top, I don't know, three happiest games. What are your happiest games? Not just nostalgia, not just nostalgia, not just like, because we could say King's Quest, Monkey Island, and whatever, because obviously they just bring us a lot of pleasure, but games that you can just put on whenever, and you feel great playing through them.
00:09:20
Speaker
Honestly, none of the King's Quest games, if that doesn't say that. But I am gonna say specifically Curse of Monkey Island, not any of the others. Curse of Monkey Island is always, to me, that is a happy game. It is happy in its graphics, it is happy in its voice acting, it has jokes in it. Oh, I would almost say Callahan's Crosstime Saloon,
00:09:46
Speaker
but there's like, there's a lot of dark parts in it though. So maybe not, but I do love, but I do love
Favorite Happy Games
00:09:52
Speaker
it. It does make me happy. But in terms of like, this is a happy game. It's curse that it's, it's curse all the way. Okay. What do you have? All right. Curse Stardew Valley. Do you have one more?
00:10:05
Speaker
What have I been playing? Oh, Animal Crossing. Okay. Animal Crossing is nothing but like bubbliness and happiness and helping people. And it's like, this is so pleasant. This is just very pleasant. I don't know that any of my top three would be adventure games, to be honest. Like they all have an intro of mine are kind of simulation, you know? Yeah, because I'd also say Stardew Valley.
00:10:32
Speaker
I would say Pokemon X and Y. Either one of those. Or you know what, I'm gonna switch that out with Sun and Moon. I've played Sun and Moon like seven times. I could just start that game and I feel good about it every time I play. And a short hike, have you ever played a short hike? No, but I know about it, I think because of you. I think you have told me about this.
00:10:59
Speaker
A short hike for anybody who doesn't know is like an adventure platformer where you play a little bird who is trying to get her mind off of something you don't really know. And so you're on a, you go to visit your aunt on this little beachy island and your whole goal is to get cell phone signal by getting to the top of the,
00:11:28
Speaker
getting to the top of the mountain that is on the island. And so as you're going up this island, and again, it's just this really floaty, really nice feeling kind of open world platformer. There's a lot of little mini games and a lot of little tasks that people put you on. Some guy asks you to find a bunch of shells or some guy wants people keep wanting to race you.
00:11:57
Speaker
around the island or you run into two people playing a game called, I think it's just called, it's called like stick ball or something like that. And it's just baseball, right? It might not be called stick ball, but it's, it involves a stick and a ball. And it's every time you, you'd have to hit the ball before it hits the ground. And they're just like, let's see how many we can get. So you just play this stick ball game with them. Uh, where you're hitting this ball back and forth for
00:12:27
Speaker
as long as you possibly can keep the ball in the air. And the one big mechanic, like the central mechanic is that you have a certain amount of feathers and those relate to either flying or climbing. The feathers are like effort, right? So- How old is this game? When did this come out? I think 2019. Okay.
00:12:50
Speaker
So, you know, if you have three feathers, you're not going to be able to climb very high and you're going to need to go find more feathers if you want to climb up like a larger cliff face or something, which you'll need to do to progress. Right. And same with flying. If you want to fly
Game Reviews and Experiences
00:13:07
Speaker
a certain amount of distance, you're going to lose feathers as you go.
00:13:11
Speaker
so you're going around this island completing all these little tasks playing these little games to get these feathers so cute oh my god I'm looking up screenshots and it looks so cute it is absolutely adorable it is so fun and so it's just so
00:13:31
Speaker
Nice to play, it's got a nice soundtrack. Everything that it asks you to do is satisfying and it's funny. Like it's legitimately funny. Yeah, it looks funny. This reminds me of Unentitled Goose Game. That game, as soon as I opened it, made me laugh. I just started laughing because it was so, it's very pleasant. And I also want to go back and add Banjo Kazooie.
00:14:00
Speaker
That, I play that game every year. I'm not even joking. That game does something to me. It is changed. It was one of the first games I played on the N64. It's changed my life, man. I think that's where I was going. But that changed my life. Like I call, listen, have you played Banjo-Kazooie? No. I was going to say, there's these little mini games in Banjo-Kazooie. And one of them, you're in the body of a small little crocodile.
00:14:29
Speaker
And you have to eat more yumblies than the other crocodile. And there's also like grumblies. And that's what I call food now, is yumblies and grumblies. Okay. And you eat both the yumblies and the grumblies or you eat the yumblies and avoid the grumblies. Avoid the grumblies. Avoid the grumblies. You'll like hack up and like gag. But yeah, do you want to go get some yumblies with me? Yeah. Let's get some yumblies first.
00:15:03
Speaker
Listen, first I gotta tell you, you know what, I was going to say first, what have you been playing? But no, I want to talk about a short hike somewhere. See, there's this character, like there's a tutorial character at some point where you talk to them and they teach you how to jump and glide and stuff. You can go back to them and ask them and they're like, Oh,
00:15:22
Speaker
Oh, I already told you this. I guess you forgot. Okay. Well, and then they explain it again. And if you come again, they're like, really? I told you this twice. Okay. Well, okay. Here's how you jump. And then you come back to them and then they're like, are you serious? Until at one point.
00:15:42
Speaker
you click on them and they just say, no, with just like, oh. You just, you can drive this, it's so sweet. And there's another guy, like later in the game, you come across a bird who scams you, who like tries to extort money from you. And then if you talk to him again,
00:16:06
Speaker
you find out that he's just trying to save money to go to college and then you take pity on him and then you raise the money for him to go to college. That's wonderful. It's so good. I just I had to share those two things because I feel like those those are like
00:16:27
Speaker
the two moments in the game that made me say like this is one of my favorite games of all time I love it I'm gonna you've inspired me I'm gonna play it okay so we've talked about
00:16:41
Speaker
non-adventure games pretty much exclusively so far. Have you been playing any adventure games this week? I have not. I have not played. I've been prepping for surgery, but now I feel very inspired. So while I'm recovering, I'm going to play a short hike so I can tell you exactly what I thought about it. Hopefully next week, hopefully, unless I die.
00:17:04
Speaker
If I died our surgery, Matt's gonna take over the podcast and he's gonna take over my Twitter and he's gonna act like I'm haunting it, yes? That would be absolutely, please, please, please, write an email that's scheduled for like three days after your surgery with all your passwords and stuff in it. And then the day after surgery, just cancel the email if you're still alive.
00:17:34
Speaker
But if you're dead...
00:17:37
Speaker
that I get to be your ghost. Yeah, I get to be my ghost. I consent to this. I don't know why I'm giving Matt all my stuff. There's probably other people I could give myself to. There's at least one account. There's at least one account that you have that I have no idea how I'll keep going. But look, we'll see. I know which account you're talking about. Oh, I know. I think you know how you would keep it going. No. OK.
00:18:07
Speaker
Just have to do it. I'm sorry, what are we talking about? Games we've played this week, you've played none. No, I have not. Because I was on vacation, we just talked like three days ago. So in that time, I have finished Red Bow. Oh, you did? Okay. Yes.
00:18:31
Speaker
And I finished Just Ignore Them. So I got through both of the stranger games that I was playing. So are you as mad as I am about Just Ignore Them? I'll say we're gonna have more to talk about later in the episode with these, I think, because failure is a big part of them, I think. Yes. Red Bow definitely has a loop.
00:18:59
Speaker
And in each loop you make choices. Some of those choices just restart the loop. Like you made a wrong choice, you just restart. And some of them you keep going and you've just, you don't really know that you made the wrong choice. Now you can beat the game, but you'll get, there's three endings. There's like a good slash bad ending. There's a bad ending and there's a good ending. Now,
00:19:25
Speaker
here's the thing that's puzzling to me about Red Bow and I'm gonna have to do some research on this because I reloaded every time I made a bad choice. Just because I wanted the achievements and I wanted to see the full game and see what would happen when I made the bad choice. So it's like when I figured out what the good choice was, I would go back, make the bad choice and then reload my game and then do the good choice, right? I got to the end of the game and I got the exclusively bad ending.
00:19:57
Speaker
I got the ending that it is 100% bad choices. And so it's like, I don't know if it... And again, it seems like just a little RPG maker game. So I don't know how it would be this complex. And the game is full. And we'll talk about this with just ignore them too. It is full of bugs. There's so much quirky finicky weird stuff. Like you use an object, but if you go to that spot,
00:20:26
Speaker
it'll still, you can still interact with the object that's not there any longer. I did notice some design, some little design flaws. But I don't know if somehow they keep track of the paths that aren't on your primary save.
00:20:45
Speaker
And it's just like, if you ever did the bad thing in any of your loops, you get the bad, like that now counts towards the bad ending. I don't know. Well, you said Red Bow only has one save slot. Correct.
00:21:00
Speaker
Ugh. Oh God. I'm thinking you just have to start over if you, but did, did you start over? Okay. What I would do is then I'd get to the next choice after having made the, you know, made the right choice in the first sequence. And now I'm in second sequence and I find the choice and I will make the wrong choice. Relo, save, make the wrong choice, reload, make the right choice. Right. Okay.
00:21:28
Speaker
So technically my saves file should only have the good choices on it, but I got the, again, I got the 100% bad. You did everything wrong. The worst thing you could get, you got. Yes. Yeah. So, uh, so yeah, maybe I'll try the games only like an hour long. If you know where, what you're doing.
00:21:48
Speaker
Even if you don't, it's probably going to be at most two hours long. So I might try it again from the very beginning, but there was some chatter on like the Steam discussion boards that it might read your achievements. And that's how it knows what ending to give you.
00:22:05
Speaker
In which case, what the hell? That means it's impossible. Oh, no. Yeah, that can't be that can't be right. But it seems that seems impossible. Right. But yeah, it does like that cannot be right. Now, you know, we've both probably played games in the past that do interact with steam.
Failure in Adventure Games
00:22:25
Speaker
So it's not. Yeah, it's not totally impossible. It's just unlikely. It's just weird. It would be a strange little.
00:22:34
Speaker
I don't know, flaw, I guess. Or it's done intentionally, but they didn't maybe explore those themes enough to make that feel satisfying. Like if you were playing Undertale or something where they really explore that idea. Yeah. Anyway, and then just ignore them. Okay, so just ignore them. You told me there's an unwinnable situation. Yeah, I got into an unwinnable.
00:23:02
Speaker
I finished the game. Okay. I never gotten to do an unwinnable situation. God damn it. And I got the good ending. Good. I did both. So what did I miss? So it sounds like...
00:23:18
Speaker
There's a lot of different paths in this game. And me and you just ended up on totally different ones. Yeah, you guys aren't gonna hear it because it got spoilery, but we just realized that we played the end game totally different ways and my mind is blown right now. I'm a little actually impressed with that.
00:23:38
Speaker
Thank you. I'm a little, well. Thank you, I break everything I play, thank you. I'm a little impressed that that game is that complex, it didn't feel that complex to me. So what I'll say is I really loved the early sequence in that game, just ignore them, of the haunted house. I was pretty, I felt pretty good about the next sequence, like suddenly there's a time jump and you're an adult. Right.
00:24:07
Speaker
and the next sequence is a little less fun, but it's not bad. I was still engaged. I was still engaged in the next sequence. I'll say that. Then there's a sequence on an airplane where your suspension of disbelief has to go so high because nobody acts like anybody would act. You end up in an emergency situation on an airplane and everybody's just like,
00:24:37
Speaker
And all the authoritative people in the situation are basically just like, huh, that's weird. You handle it. And you're just, I thought that's because everyone was. Oh yeah, you're right. So there is a reason for that. Yeah. I was just playing and I was like, what the hell is happening? But yeah, I guess it was done on purpose.
00:24:57
Speaker
I think so. That part reminded me of the Langoliers by Stephen King. Uh, where I don't know if you've read or seen it, but if you haven't seen that movie, it's gold. Please go watch it. Um, where there's a group of people playing and suddenly doesn't play in my, uh, sorry. Gold doesn't play in my V VHS player in your VHS.
00:25:21
Speaker
Yeah, gold doesn't play. It doesn't do gold. Matt is 70. I don't know if you guys knew that. He looks very young for his age. For some reason, my VHS player doesn't do gold. Have you tried CDs, though? I'll see if my CD player does gold. I'll put some gold in my CD player and tell you. Please do that. And where are you getting gold from? Apparently, the Stephen King movie.
00:25:51
Speaker
Okay, touche. All right, tell us about the Langoliers.
00:25:57
Speaker
such a dork the langoliers uh you start in that movie but there's a group of people who uh are on a plane and they fall asleep but a small amount of people fall asleep during their ride on the plane they wake up and everyone's gone and it's only them and they're like all of their stuff is on the seats it's actually very like frightening that's a very frightening concept to me and then it goes off the rails but it's steven king made for tv what can you do
00:26:24
Speaker
right that's what it does so just ignore them was yeah there's it's a little more impressive than i thought now that we're talking about it but yeah it's there's there's definitely good thing i i would suggest if somebody if you find it on sale uh
00:26:46
Speaker
Give it a try. There's definitely some really interesting concepts in there. There's definitely, it does some very interesting things, but there are definitely some pretty big flaws.
00:26:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think the first time I talked about it, I'm like, it's a bit like finicky. There's some things. Finicky is the word. Yeah, finicky. But I got it on sale for like $2 and worth it. It was worth it to me for two bucks. Hell yeah. Yeah. I think I got it for like four and I still feel like it was worth it. Nice. So roses.
00:27:20
Speaker
Yes, Matt. I wanna talk to you about the concept of... You do? Yeah, I would love to talk to you. Can we do that? Yeah, we can talk. Okay, you know what I wanna talk to you about? Yeah, what's up? The concept of failure in adventure games. I am so down for talking about that. I am mentally aroused just by hearing about it.
00:27:47
Speaker
okay all right i'm gonna play swanky max amino and then we'll call him well which is my favorite game and then i'll come back in a second
00:28:15
Speaker
Hey, everyone. We're back on Pushing Up Roses. And with me from before is Matt Aucamp. He's still here. Hi, Matt. No, we're both. Hey, we're both back here. How is how is your break? Just in case people thought only I was coming back or like if we did this post-surgery and I died during surgery. And I was I was doing your voice. Well, if you did die during surgery, this is going to come out posthumously.
00:28:45
Speaker
That's true. Oh, God. That's true. Oh, in memoriam. Pushing up roses. Do your best. Do your best pushing up roses impression. Let's hear it. Hey, everybody. Pushing up roses here. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Wow. Hey, hey, everybody. Oh, my God. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Pushing up roses here.
00:29:09
Speaker
You're fired. Get out! I'm taking over this podcast. Hey everybody, push the process. Okay, so... It does, I mean, honestly with that background music, it kind of like is... Yeah, I was like, oh yeah, that is me. How was your break? How was your break? Did you enjoy your little break?
00:29:37
Speaker
It was good, I disassociated for a little while and then I came back. Very cool, yeah. You know, depression. I found some nail clippers and I started stabbing myself in the hand with them. Why would you do such a thing?
00:29:53
Speaker
Uh, I don't know. I couldn't tell you. I really couldn't tell you. You need to not do that. Although I do, I try to do the same thing, so I can't really, I can't really sit here. Like I swear it wasn't any sort of like self-harm thing. It was just, oh, what happens when I jam this into this? Oh my god. Too many adventure games. Like too many illogical... Well, I'm ready. So, what are we talking about today? We are talking about...
00:30:25
Speaker
I'm sorry. That's a good segue actually. Did you see what I just did there? I failed. We're talking about failure in adventure games Yeah, I think it's an important thing because it's it's it's such a
00:30:51
Speaker
Oh man, it is such an important part of the whole thing. Yeah, the whole genre, the whole history of adventure games. Right. I think it's why most people can't play old adventure games. Yeah. Is because of the high consequence value of failing. Yes. And now granted, I granted
00:31:18
Speaker
They were, I know a lot of people say that this is just designed very poorly when in reality games like that, those really intense hard games coming off of like Colossal Cave Adventure, they were done like that on purpose. Roberta Williams kind of went on record and said she loved Colossal Cave Adventure so much. It took up all of her time. She loved it. She loved kind of that failure aspect of it and writing notes. That went into King's Quest because that's what she liked about it.
00:31:48
Speaker
She loved the fact that, I think we're gonna need to give some context here, but yeah, she loved the fact that in order to succeed at Colossal Cave, you had to just fail, try different things, start completely over, spend hours and hours and hours, like spend, this is the thing about these old adventure games is you would often have to spend 40 hours playing a game that had about three hours runtime.
00:32:15
Speaker
Yeah, or less even sometimes, just ridiculously short games. Right. So do you mind if I step all the way back and kind of give a context to what we're talking about here? Yes, what shall we call this segment? The context segment. I don't know. Sorry, I was trying something new here. I don't know if it works. No, no, the context segment.
00:32:45
Speaker
All right, so this is the context segment. You know, adventure games are like a blind cat. Sorry, that's the name of this. Adventure games, like, I think have two rewards. And tell me if you feel differently about this. But I think there are two major rewards to any progress, any
00:33:13
Speaker
challenge in an adventure game. The one reward being more story, you overcome a puzzle or you find a new area and you get the next piece of the story, right? The other is that Sherlock Holmesian aha moment, that feeling of, oh my God, I'm a genius, I solved this puzzle.
00:33:40
Speaker
So you're saying one is like very tangible and it's like, this is the progress that's being made and that's my reward is the progress. And the other reward is more like mental, like I am the best. So I just think. I am the smartest person. Well, because that's adventure games, you're role-playing, okay, in an action game, you're role-playing the toughest guy, right? Yeah. Or woman or person or non-person, right? But you are the toughest
00:34:10
Speaker
in the world and you can beat up anybody. And if you can't beat them up, you're gonna be able to beat them up by the end of the game. But in adventure games, you are a genius, right? You are the only person that can solve all the problems and answer all the questions.
00:34:32
Speaker
even if your character's a complete idiot, they are undoubtedly the smartest person in the entire game because they're the only one who can put all this stuff together. So to me, that gives you a really personal connection to the game. You are driving that bus. You are making this story happen. Your brain is the catalyst
00:34:59
Speaker
towards any progress, right? Rather than say an action game where it's just like, you almost get the sense that the game continues around you as you die, right?
00:35:15
Speaker
and you're gonna try a thousand times maybe in say if you're playing like a Dark Souls game right you're gonna try a thousand times over and over and over again to be a person who can survive in this world but the world continues without you an adventure game you are
00:35:33
Speaker
If you're not there, there is no world, right? Or there's a world, but it's a world that just is in complete stasis and nothing ever changes. And the same dude stands on the street corner wanting a password or something for all eternity.
00:35:54
Speaker
I'm just thinking about the world of King's Quest VI and how many things would not change and it would be so depressing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That lamp guy would never sell any lamps. I feel bad for him. Or that eagle or whatever will just keep swooping through the same section of forest over and over and over with no one to grab onto his talons. His life is meaningless.
00:36:21
Speaker
The other thing, the thing that causes, right, in a Dark Souls game, you can play that boss, again, literally a thousand times, but when you beat that boss, you're gonna feel like a champion. You're gonna feel incredible. Like, oh, I finally got good enough to do it. But in adventure games, you have one, basically one shot at that aha moment to like, oh, I solved it.
00:36:46
Speaker
And if you do that wrong, it feels bad, right? If you just try every inventory object with every other one and finally something works, you're not like that rules. You're like, oh God. Like, okay, fine. I guess I saw, like you feel like an idiot who just stumbled. You're an idiot stumbling through the world. You're not the smartest guy in the room anymore.
00:37:10
Speaker
I mean, I feel, I feel better about combining everything with everything versus, and then getting it versus God damn it. I have to look up a walkthrough and then I see the answer and I'm like, such an idiot. I can't, I can't believe this. It's like anti enthusiastic.
00:37:30
Speaker
Right, to me trying everything with everything is like if you were Sherlock Holmes, so to continue the Sherlock Holmes metaphor, you're Sherlock Holmes, you're at the parlor scene, and you gather everybody together, and you detail painstakingly this long series of causes and effects, and you're like, and that's why it has to be Margaret.
00:37:55
Speaker
and everybody in the room looks at you, and they're like, nah, it wasn't Margaret. And she's like, okay, then I know what happened, and then you do this other long series of it. That's why it's Jared. And everyone's like, no, it wasn't Jared. Like, right? It's like the movie Clue. Right, it's, yeah. So to me,
00:38:24
Speaker
That's the problem that adventure games have been wrestling with since their inception, right? How to get people to have that aha moment and feel smart.
00:38:37
Speaker
Yeah. And I gotta say it's got to be so difficult as a dev because even in these kind of dream, these like dream logic puzzles, it clearly made sense to
Designing Logical Puzzles
00:38:50
Speaker
them. You know, you know what I mean? Like, somebody came up with this puzzle and it clearly made sense to them. And in that moment, you probably feel like well, I figured it out. So the player can definitely figure it out because I did.
00:39:02
Speaker
right right sometimes okay so I did comedy for a number of years and I did sketch comedy for a long time and one thing that we would discover we would come to our sketches by coming up with like a funny scenario we thought was funny and then
00:39:20
Speaker
Choosing characters and then improvising the scene over and over and over and like narrowing down jokes. But one thing that we would find is sometimes like on run through number 30, we have now written jokes about jokes that we cut.
00:39:41
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? And so now there's things that we think are the funniest things in the world, but because nobody else was there for the, and we used to have to like stop and talk about these things. Like, okay, hold on. This is the funniest thing to us, but the audience doesn't know all the context of it. So we have to walk this back. And that's what you're talking about, right?
00:40:09
Speaker
in Adventure Game Dev has sat with these things for so long. It can be hard to pull back and be like, okay, what if I'm a person who knows nothing that I know?
00:40:21
Speaker
Yeah, like I just can't, I keep thinking about King's Quest V during this whole thing. Because I'm just like, who thought this? Who thought this was a good idea? And who thought that I would think of this? Now, granted, I want to say something, because everybody brings this puzzle up, unless you have more to say. I do, but we can get to it. I don't want to completely take over. This is Matt's podcast now. He has so many thoughts.
00:40:51
Speaker
But explain, yeah, explain the puzzle and tell me your thoughts. So a lot of people didn't like the pie in the Yeti's face puzzle.
00:41:00
Speaker
But I'm gonna tell you something about that puzzle. I figured it out right away because in Adventure Games, I was conditioned to offer food to characters and that would make them happy. So I thought I was offering this Yeti food and he'd be like, oh shit, custard pie? Hell yeah. And instead, obviously I threw it in his face and killed him, which much to little Wee Rose's surprise was like, what? I just wanted to give him the custard pie.
00:41:29
Speaker
but also like, what? I just want to know how the devs came up with that, or more notoriously, the cheese and the machine at the end of the game. Somebody thought that was a good idea. Somebody thought- Explain that, explain that to listeners.
00:41:44
Speaker
Oh God, I don't even know how. So at the end of the game, there is this huge machine that you find in, um, in an evil wizard's castle. And this machine is supposed to reinvigorate your wand, but it's not working. Okay. Cause this is not working. Can't plug it in. We don't know what's wrong with it. So I randomly throw some cheese into the machine. It has like a well at the bottom and then it works. And then it works.
00:42:12
Speaker
because I threw cheese. Are you hearing what I'm saying? Literally, I had nothing left I could do at the end of the game. I'm like, well, I guess it's the cheese. Yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah, it's it's the. There's weirder puzzles, but there's very few puzzles that are that weird without an explanation.
00:42:39
Speaker
Right, if there's just no and that's why they're called, you know, illogical dream logic moon logic, because there is no logical way to get there, you're just kind of guessing.
00:42:50
Speaker
Yes, and so that brings me back to my point, right? And I'm building to something here. I know I sound like I'm rambling a little bit, but this idea is that adventure games have been wrestling with this problem. They want you to have that aha moment, right? Since it's not like you can just keep trying to jump those same platforms over and over. And when you finally get coordinated enough to do it and you get the golden coin or whatever,
00:43:16
Speaker
you're gonna be like, yeah, I rule. In an adventure game, you have to feel like when you solve the problem, you solved it and that you're smart. So people have come up with all sorts of ways to try and do this. And one of that, one thing that a lot of developers have thought to do since the very beginning is trying to figure out ways to discourage just random guessing.
00:43:46
Speaker
Right. To make sure you don't stumble upon that answer by guessing randomly, they make consequences for wrong guessing. Yeah. For wrong guesses. And one of those, you know, the worst example of that probably is this dead end that we've talked about on the show so much. Yeah, dead end, unwinnable.
00:44:11
Speaker
Yeah, where dead man walking scenario where you have made a mistake six hours ago and you have no idea you made that mistake. And then suddenly you're just like, why can't I not figure out nothing I'm doing is working? Cause you didn't know, like we've talked about this in previous episodes. You didn't know you were supposed to throw the boot at the cat instead of the stick at the cat. Right.
00:44:37
Speaker
One of my one of my like, the most egregious ones, and I kind of talked about this in a very old video, is King's Quest six. And keep in mind in general, I do like that game, I feel by the time they got to King's Quest six, they weren't actively trying to make puzzles that made sense.
00:44:55
Speaker
You know what I mean? There was Kings Quest V was just the king of this moon logic, dream logic. Yeah. And I think I think they knew that. And so Kings Quest VI kind of they did try. They tried to have the characters give you hints. The characters were very clear on what they wanted. You know, one wanted a book.
00:45:16
Speaker
others like wanted just things that made sense for their story, but there is a puzzle in there. It's the bump on a log stick in the mud puzzle.
00:45:27
Speaker
So you get a wonderful rotten tomato in your inventory. He talks, by the way, everything's alive in King's Quest 6 for whatever reason. It's like the Muppet. Everything's alive. And this tomato's alive, and he's grouchy. And you come across, you just pick him up and you bring him in your inventory. Now he's your little buddy. You come across a bump on a log and a stick in the mud. They're separated by a swamp, and they are also both alive, and they are fighting. I don't know why they just are in, they are having a qualm.
00:45:57
Speaker
Um, I, I talked to bump on a log. I'm like, should I, maybe I can throw this rod to your brother and that'll like wake him up and bump on a log. He's like, I don't know if a human like you could do it, but I'm like, you know what? That's not enough of a deterrent for me. I'm going to throw this, this tomato. I throw him. I don't make it. And that's it. You cannot progress. You need, right?
00:46:23
Speaker
and it doesn't seemingly I guess you could like sense that you did something wrong you can like assume but you but maybe not though maybe it's so sad because if you do that rotten tomato like sinks I think he died I mean he must right like
00:46:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. But here's what you actually have to do. You have to give the tomato to the bump on a log, which is so infuriating. Because once you offer it, he sprouts arms. He'd never that's why I didn't have arms. He was a he's a log. He's a log with a face.
00:47:07
Speaker
I don't know the anatomy of this living tree trunk. Like, that is absurd. He literally is called Bump on a lot. Like, that's not a thing that you associate with any kind of mobility. Yeah, but that is the biggest unwinnable life I've ever felt. I was really stuck after. I just could not. And you couldn't get Rotten Tomato back. He dies. He killed him. Right.
00:47:35
Speaker
And I think I even had messed up my saves and my restores too. And I was kind of in a bad situation in Teens Quest VI there. And that was a thing that, yeah, a lot of games used to do back then is they, if there was a thing that could kill you,
00:47:55
Speaker
or an unwinnable situation, you just had to rely on the fact that you had a ton of saves. And you could go- Yeah, but you could mess those up too. You could mess those up. But you can mess them up, exactly. You can save right after you make the bad decision and you don't realize. And then the save that, like the save before that was like an hour previous, right? Yeah. Yep. It's like, oh God, when did I save this?
00:48:22
Speaker
or because you don't know what the thing is that you're missing, you don't know that, you have no idea that what you needed to do to the Yeti was put a pie in his face. So you keep reloading saves and then playing up to the Yeti part and being like, well, no this, I still can't solve it. Until you finally maybe start from the beginning again and go,
00:48:48
Speaker
Okay, the only thing I haven't tried is this pie, and I guess maybe I can give this guy bread instead of a pie. And then I'll still have the pie. That's such a difficult, that doesn't make you feel like a genius, that just makes you feel like you've wasted time. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
00:49:09
Speaker
but you can see what they were trying to do with it. You can see that they were trying, and same with moon logic, right? The solution is so wild and out there that you would never guess, you would never be able to guess it. You would have to have deduced a solution, like the infamous monkey wrench puzzle in Monkey Island 2, where you need to use a wrench on a pipe, like you need to,
00:49:34
Speaker
you know, open some water flow, right? And you have a monkey that you have hypnotized. There's zero chance you're gonna think, I guess I'll use this hypnotized monkey on a bolt. Or on a, you know, a valve. Unless your brain starts going, what I could really use here is a monkey wrench.
00:49:58
Speaker
Oh, I guess when- Which it's not, by the way. I got so stuck on that puzzle and then I was pissed. I was so mad. And it's not even called a monkey wrench in many languages or cultures. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Good call. That, I mean, and so that's the downfall of using moon logic to avoid these things. And so I don't know that I have that solution, right? Like, you can see how all of these
00:50:27
Speaker
different scenarios and we'll go through some of these different types of ways that you can fail in adventure games, but you can see how all of them are leading towards this idea of like developers needing to come up with a solution for how to make it so that the people feel accomplished when they solve a puzzle.
00:50:49
Speaker
Yeah, I don't I don't even know if I mind moon logic puzzles like more absurd puzzles as much as I mind unwinnables. Like, yeah, okay, fine. I put the cheese in the machine. And that was weird in Kings Quest five, but maybe it would have been a lot nicer and even novel and funnier. If there wasn't so many unwinnable situations because I do want right
00:51:12
Speaker
you know, I think we talk about like, the player being punished for exploring and trying different things. I don't want to be punished for accidentally throwing rotten tomato at the wrong thing. I want to be punished for that. You know, I want, right?
Modern Game Design: Instant Retry
00:51:26
Speaker
I don't know. I want a snarky response and being like, really, you thought you could do that.
00:51:30
Speaker
You know? Right, okay, so that brings up an important point. Yeah, so death as a deterrent for guessing is one thing. I remember there's this puzzle, and this is an action adventure game, but in one of the uncharted games, there's this puzzle that, I don't remember the exact mechanics of it, but I think you need to match up something to do with pirate kinks, and you need to match,
00:51:59
Speaker
this thing perfectly, right? And I hadn't found the clue yet. And whatever was the case, I was getting exhausted of the game at that point. And I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna do that adventure game thing where I'll just do that guessing thing where you're just like, okay, one, one, one, two, one, one, one, three, one, one, one, four, one, one, one, five, one, one.
00:52:26
Speaker
or one, one, two, one, one, two, three, two, you know, whatever, right? This game had predicted that some people might do that. And say there is 90 combinations you could have done, right? They let me get to like 85,
00:52:52
Speaker
And then Nathan Drake, if you click on it, says, I guess I don't have enough information yet.
00:53:00
Speaker
Okay. But they let you get to 80. They let you do it so many times. And then he says, I guess I don't have enough information yet. And then they won't let that you can't click on it again until you find the hint. It was frustrating. But I was also like, I, I was not mad because I was like, well, they got me. Yeah. I was trying to cheap out. Yeah. That's a call out. That's like, all right. All right, bud. We let you do this for a long time now. Get back to work.
00:53:31
Speaker
There's some, and Sherlock Holmes consulting detective games are one of these where at the end, when you go to accuse somebody, when you go to have the parlor room scene, it's in front of a judge, and he asks you who committed the crime? How did they get in the window? Who else committed a crime that night? What was their crime?
00:53:58
Speaker
you're supposed to lay out everything that happened in the whole mystery. And if you get anything wrong, he's like, I don't think you have enough information yet. Why don't you head back? Okay, so you don't die, is what you're saying. You don't die. You just have to, you lose a bunch of points or whatever, and then you have the embarrassment of having to go be like, oh, right, I guess I gotta do some more. Oh, God, I'm a bad detective. That- I gotta do some more research. And then you can't go back- What you were describing was- Yeah.
00:54:27
Speaker
Is this at the end, so this is like at the end of the cases, you're like laying it all, like you're deducing or something? You can go to the judge, you can go to the judge at any point, but if you go and you fail, there is, and I think you can, maybe it's not any point, maybe you have to have hit a certain score
00:54:52
Speaker
of like an invisible score of hints that you've discovered, right? Like there must be some sort of invisible discovery score, because sometimes you can go to the judge and he can say, I don't know if you have enough information yet. But if you guess wrong, you have to go get some more clues before you come back. You can't just come back and try again. If you come back right away, he's like, I think you need more information. Like it's so much, it's so humiliating.
00:55:18
Speaker
But I like that though. I like that because you're describing a mechanic that they kind of use at the end of Dagger of Amun-Ra. You are interrogated basically by the coroner because you're playing Laura Bowe, you're playing a reporter, you've collected all this evidence, right? So you are now answering questions about who killed who and who did what. And if you don't
00:55:41
Speaker
This is the infuriating thing. You can get every answer correct. But if you didn't pick up every piece of evidence, you have messed up and you can't go back. You can't go back. You will get the bad ending if you if you mess that up. And yeah, I don't know that I I don't know that I do like that. Like that is similar. That almost seems like the bad way of doing the thing that
00:56:04
Speaker
Sherlock Holmes' consulting detective did in the good way. Yeah, that's how I'm like, oh, I kind of like that they give you another chance because Laura Bogue does not give you another chance. And it can be something as like, oh, it didn't put this, you didn't put this shoe in your purse.
00:56:20
Speaker
You have to have collected every single piece of evidence to back up what you're saying. And if you get it wrong, then the killer goes free somehow, even though you've answered every question right. If you didn't have that stiletto on your purse, if you get every question right, but no evidence, the killer goes free and you die. Wow. It is a bad ending.
00:56:44
Speaker
There's definitely, and I do want to talk about multiple endings in a minute, but I think the other side of this coin that you were just mentioning a few minutes ago is
00:56:56
Speaker
when you try to punish people for guessing, you can accidentally just punish people for trying things, for exploring. Like your example with the bump on the log and the rotten tomato from King's Quest 6, I should be able to try stuff, right? I should be able to walk around and explore the whole game. This was a thing in early Sierra games that they had in spades, where they would give you something interesting, even an interesting landmark.
00:57:26
Speaker
that you're like, ooh, I wanna go see what's over there. And then you instantly die, right? Or you try something you think is gonna be fun. Yeah, when you're walking, yeah, that's what makes me so mad about if you walk under the chandelier. Oh man, Matt is so mad about the chandelier. Don't even get him started. It's just, you shouldn't, why make a part of your game
00:57:56
Speaker
that you want to punish your audience for wanting to see. Like why punish your audience for wanting to see something you made?
00:58:08
Speaker
You know what I think it is, though, I think it's I want to just bring up a point that I think some players and it is obviously a different time. I think they thought those kind of death scenes were kind of novel. So it wasn't always about it at the time. It feels like punishment now, but I wonder if at the time.
00:58:29
Speaker
It was just the devs being novel and putting a gruesome death in their daggers like that. There's a lot of insane deaths in Dagger of Amun-Ra, even more insane than the Colonel's Bequest, as crazy as those get. And they're obviously done for entertainment.
00:58:45
Speaker
And I think Space Quest 3 does this too, because people bring it up. People bring up the infamous death scenes of Space Quest 3. And they're almost looked at as this novelty versus a punishment. But when I play them today, I'm just upset. I'm like, well, I didn't save my game. It would be different if we tried those things and then like respond with a snarky message that's like, why did you do that someday with that?
00:59:13
Speaker
That is exactly what I wanted to talk about next, is this idea of the instant retry. And this is, to me, a step up from that. Rather than death, rather than like a deterrent for trying things, I get wanting to say like, hey, if you try something stupid, you could die. That's how this world goes.
00:59:38
Speaker
But rather than punishing you for that, use it as a learning opportunity. And that is the instant retry. So in a lot of modern adventure games, if you die because you did something stupid,
00:59:56
Speaker
There'll be a funny joke or an interesting scene and then they'll start you over five seconds earlier. Just be like, try again. And I think this is a little different because a lot of these are the action sequences in these games, but all the telltale games are like that.
01:00:14
Speaker
If you die in a telltale game, you just start over 10 seconds earlier, right? I played, I think was last year, I played that game, Brock the Investigator. I remember- Yeah, I've heard great things about that. I haven't had a chance to play it yet, but it's pretty beloved, I think.
01:00:31
Speaker
So it's really good. It has a bunch of branching narratives. It's got an amazing, like, cartoon-y, like Saturday morning cartoon style look to it. It's got a really interesting story and a lot of really emotional story beats.
01:00:49
Speaker
And it is half point and click adventure and half beat-em-up where you can go around and just punch people. It seems like the way you would do in Double Dragon or something. And the beat-em-up segments are not that complex.
01:01:09
Speaker
but they're still fun and it recreates the old, the thing that LucasArts used to do in the old like Indiana Jones LucasArts adventure game, like the point and click Indiana Jones games where it's like does the brains route and the brawn route. And that even affects the branches in Brock. Like if you fight too much
01:01:37
Speaker
even if you don't fight at consequential moments and like don't beat up anybody who's going to change the story, if you fight too much, your character then just becomes like a dumb bruiser and your son likes you less because he thinks of you as just like some dumb brute. So it's like every choice you make in that game has some sort of long lasting consequence, but
01:02:06
Speaker
you can always get to an ending. And again, we're gonna talk about multiple endings real soon here, but the idea of the instant retry, like if I do something stupid and I just die, just send me back 10 seconds in time. Just be like, hey, try something else.
01:02:25
Speaker
And I think people would argue that that takes away the challenge, but I would argue back and say, look, if I'm dying over and over again, I'm clearly stuck. I'm clearly into this challenge at the moment. And I also want to say, in terms of dead ends, going back to King's Quest VI real quick,
01:02:44
Speaker
they did try to warn the player against things. It was just too vague. You know what I mean? So when I talked to bump on a log, he's like, Oh, I don't think you could do it. Only only a person only a creature of the forest could do it. And I'm like, but I can't, I'm still okay. But maybe I maybe I can prove him wrong. Because I am Prince Alexander of Daventry. If he had said like,
01:03:08
Speaker
I think I would be able to throw it better than you then that might have I might have like thought again, right? And they did they do try to do that more in Kings quest six, they try to give you like a logical warning. But some of those warnings, like I said, are just not, they're just not good enough, you know, they're a little too vague.
01:03:29
Speaker
And I wanna argue back against something that you brought up that you mentioned that a lot of people would say that the instant retry, right, is a, it removes the challenge. I think like, I don't get that point, right? Because either way, you've now learned you shouldn't do that thing. Either way, you've gotten the lesson. It's just about time now.
01:03:58
Speaker
Right? If you learn not to use fork with electrical socket, if you use fork with electrical socket and you die, and then you have to reload a save from four hours ago, then you have to replay those four hours. If you use fork with electrical, but the thing you learned is don't use fork with electrical socket. If it reloads you 10 seconds earlier, it's the same lesson.
01:04:24
Speaker
And that doesn't even mean that you solved the puzzle. That just means you did something wrong and the game is like sparing you and being like, well, here's the consequence. Don't do that. This is wrong. Basically, this is the wrong solution. It doesn't mean that you know what to do. It doesn't mean that you don't get stuck. Exactly. An intellectual challenge and drudgery are not the same thing.
01:04:46
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And I know some people do like that. Like I said, Roberta Williams loved that. And when I first got into adventure games, I started with King's Quest III, I did too. I liked that mechanic at that time. But now that I know it doesn't have to be like that all the time, I could have different things and different consequences. And it's just the evolution of the technology, you know?
01:05:14
Speaker
Yeah, that was also a world where you would buy one video game every two years. Like, you wanted games that had these challenges, even challenges that weren't fun. Yeah. Because you wanted to keep playing that game forever.
01:05:32
Speaker
Oh, I played King's Quest 3 for years, for years. And I did like it, but now I have, I don't know how many video games I'm supposed to be playing at this point. And now he's been more, you know, for the podcast. This podcast is just like, oh, okay, I finished a video game and instead of being like, okay, now I'll go read a book. It's like, no, I better pick up another video game very quickly because I need something to talk about.
01:06:00
Speaker
Guys, I didn't eat this week because I was really trying hard to finish this game. No, we love this. It sounds like we're complaining, but we love doing it. Oh, yeah, we do. No, we love this podcast. So multiple endings is something we've brought up a bunch so far. Yeah. And that, you know.
Multiple Endings in Games
01:06:22
Speaker
I think there's a bunch of ways to do that, right? Like there is like you were saying in Laura Bow.
01:06:28
Speaker
there in Dagger of Amun-Ra, there's a good ending and a bad ending. And a lot of games have that, you know. It's actually two bad endings, which is wild to me, but yeah, come on. Okay, in the stranger games that we just played, right?
01:06:49
Speaker
they have good endings and bad endings based on what you choose, what you do during the game. But there's many games where discovering all those multiple endings is part of the point or part of the fun. And I think, for example, Brock the Investigator that we just talked about, discovering all those branches is part of the fun.
01:07:19
Speaker
you even, they even at some point show like this big web of all your decision points and it's covered in question marks. So it's not like it tells you what you should have done different, but it shows, you know, you were traveling this path and then you took this branch. And so, you know, somewhere around there, something you did had a consequence that took you down a different path. You don't know exactly what, but discovering all those branches is,
01:07:49
Speaker
One of the reasons I, Brock was like a six hour game or something and I think I played it for like 40 hours. Like I just kept going back and being like, granted I reviewed it for a website I used to write for. But I just kept going back because I wanted to open every single, I wanted to unlock every single ending, you know.
01:08:15
Speaker
Yeah, I just had a thought because you brought up multiple, multiple endings. And I think like the OG is probably Clock Tower, which came out on the Super Famicom. You can obviously emulate it now. It's one of those early adventure survival horror games. And there's so many endings. There's like S through H or something like that. And some of them are good. Like half of them are good, half of them are bad.
01:08:44
Speaker
But man, I actually really did want to get through those endings. They were so intriguing to me, you know? Yeah, especially early on when that wasn't that big of a thing. Multiple endings in games were often like how many characters were cheering for you in the final screen rather than an actual different ending.
01:09:07
Speaker
Yeah, that's that depressing King's Quest 6 thing, where if you don't save anybody, nobody goes to your wedding, and it's very depressing. Like, you don't save your bride's parents, and no one's... Oh, it's so sad. It's so sad. The same thing happens in the Quest for Glory games, right? There can just be so few people there. And there's other ways of doing multiple endings, right?
01:09:37
Speaker
There's ways that it doesn't feel like good or bad. There's ways where it feels, there's games where it just feels like a culmination of your choices. I'm gonna bring up, these are two games with sort of RPG elements, but I would classify them both as adventure games. Disco Elysium. I would classify that as adventure. And Citizen Sleeper.
01:10:07
Speaker
Okay. Now, I think a lot of people have played Disco Elysium. It's very sort of like tabletop role-playing game based, you know? You are this drunken, drug-addled, very in his own head, depressed, semi-suicidal detective in some futuristic world who gets embroiled in this whole, it gets embroiled in
01:10:36
Speaker
crime and politics and metaphysics throughout these several days that he's trying to solve a crime in this, again, small little futuristic town. And throughout the game, you make so many decisions about not just what you wanna do in the world, but who your character is.
01:11:01
Speaker
and those decisions start to lock off certain dialogue options or certain outcomes of different quests. And by the end, you're going to, you know, he's gonna end up a different person at the end of that game based on what you do, and all of them feel true.
01:11:22
Speaker
So does that make you anxious, though, is what I want to know. Does the does the fact that you know that you're doing certain things and you're not quite sure how things does that make you feel a little bit anxious? Absolutely, because, you know, I want, you know, I'm an overachiever and I want to do everything correct. But yeah, same, you have to give yourself over to it that there is no correct way that
01:11:47
Speaker
you are just building a story along with the game and the game has you. The game is telling you, hey, no matter what you do, we're, like trust us, we've got you. And so, Citizen Sleeper is also a game that has like a,
01:12:08
Speaker
You're in a, it's also a futuristic world. It also has RPG elements. Now, the mechanics of this game, some people call this like a life sim, but I think of it as an adventure game because like a life sim, you're going through day after day after day, and every day you start with a certain number of die.
01:12:28
Speaker
and you roll those dice and you might get three ones and a five. That means you're likely going to fail at three things you try to do that day and succeed at one.
01:12:44
Speaker
you then put your dice rolls to different actions you wanna perform that day, right? So you might wanna put your low dice rolls towards something kind of inconsequential and your high dice rolls towards something very consequential. And there's other things like how exhausted you are reduces or increases the number of dice you have. So that's the mechanics of this game. There's a lot more complicated pieces of it.
01:13:12
Speaker
I wonder if that mechanic kind of even lessens your anxiety of choices because once you make a dice roll in a tabletop, it is what it is. I think those kind of decision makings are interesting because it's not that you didn't have full control of it. If that makes sense, the dice is in control to a certain degree.
01:13:35
Speaker
Yeah, and that's one of the things, so I didn't mention this, but Disco Elysium has that too. Disco Elysium has dice rolls. There's a lot of like ability checks, like there would be in a tabletop role-playing game.
01:13:48
Speaker
But yeah, so in Citizen Sleeper, you are basically this android who, this is a far-flung future. It is the ultimate consequence of capitalism where people choose to go into stasis comas for say 30 years. And- That sounds great. And they have an android clone of themselves
01:14:17
Speaker
that goes out and works for them and earns their salary. And then after the 30 years is up, the Android clone gets destroyed. You get woken up and you get the salary. You get all that money that you earn. Right. So and you play as one of these Android clones who gained a sort of sentience and escaped.
01:14:45
Speaker
And it's like, I don't want to be a sleeper anymore. I want to be a real person. And so you're on this like kind of outlaw space station and you're learning what it means to be a person and what it means to struggle and starve and have to fail and succeed and make friends and rely on people and trust people and have that trust broken. And it's.
01:15:11
Speaker
And again, it's got this like day cycle where every day you have this certain basically amount of actions. So it's very life sim-like, but everything is written so beautifully and so perfectly that when you fail at something, it feels like you've just experienced an important moment. And when you succeed at something, it feels like you've experienced an important moment. So this game,
01:15:36
Speaker
has just dozens and dozens and dozens of endings, and all of them are written so thoroughly that you don't feel like you failed. Right. Even if you didn't get the ending you were necessarily looking for, you feel like you got to the end of a fascinating and meaningful story. Yeah, for sure. I feel like clocktire is kind of the same way. Granted, there are maybe, it's all preference, you know, preference, right? Right.
01:16:04
Speaker
you know, some I would say some people want better endings than other endings, but they're all kind of satisfying in their own in their own little way. Yeah, you know, that's just another way to approach this sort of idea of like instead of failure, how about just
01:16:20
Speaker
life is complicated and games can reflect that too. Do we have that on a bumper sticker please? Instead of failure just think life is complicated. I'll put it up in the merch store that we don't have yet. So there's a couple other things I want to touch on before we end this segment about failure in adventure games. There is
01:16:50
Speaker
some other ways we were talking earlier about like death is a learning experience. And how technically that's the case in like the old Sierra games, but you might, part of that learning experience might be repeating the same actions for an hour that you had just done. Yeah, correct. And in modern games, there's the instant retry. Now there's other sorts of things like short,
01:17:20
Speaker
Like if you die, you die. But short chapters or levels where when that happens it doesn't feel like that bad, right? Okay. You have an example? Yeah, so there's this VR game.
01:17:39
Speaker
that i played it's you know it's on oculus there's three of them now and they're called uh it's the i expect you to die series okay and it's like a james bond pastiche where you are a secret agent um
01:17:57
Speaker
and you have this British man, you know, in your headset, giving you missions and telling you what to do. And it's first person and you keep finding yourself in these situations that are basically like little escape rooms, right? Like you are...
01:18:18
Speaker
window wash. You're pretending to be a window washer outside the secret villain's lair where they're making poison that they want to put into the city's
01:18:31
Speaker
water supply or something um and so you're washing windows uh and then you want to you need to break in and you need to solve all these basically escape room puzzles to neutralize the poison and then somebody notices you're there and they attack you and you have to like have a contingency plan for that right like that sort of thing but in all of these levels
01:18:54
Speaker
You're just gonna die a hundred thousand times. Not that many times. You're gonna die a dozen times per life. No, a hundred thousand times. I hope you guys are ready for it. It's a very long game. You don't have to die. Technically, you could beat the whole any level perfectly if you got a little lucky and you were very, very observant and quick on your feet.
01:19:20
Speaker
or quick on your brain. You're sitting in one spot. It's not everyone is like you, Matt, who is jumping around and being strong and lifting things while playing it while playing adventure games. I play VR while I'm running a 10 mile marathon. It's kind of guys. I've seen it. I don't have any footage of it or pictures, but it's fucking amazing.
01:19:46
Speaker
It's pretty cool. So, um, so, you know, there's so many times in this game where, uh, something happens, you don't expect and you just, you're in a situation. You start panicking. You're like, Oh my God, this submarine is filling up with water. I have no idea what to do. Uh, what do I do? And you start just like, kind of like your VR. So you're just like throwing stuff. And then it is just like you drowned. Nice.
01:20:16
Speaker
You only lost like four minutes of your life, you know what I mean? You start over again and then you're like, okay, now I know when I do this, the window's gonna break and the water's gonna come rushing in. Or, oh, I know when I open the glove compartment, there's seven grenades in there. So I'd better either not open the glove compartment or have some way to catch seven grenades before they blow me up.
01:20:46
Speaker
That is another way of using death as a learning experience, right? Without being that frustrating. It can be funny, it can be interesting, and it doesn't have to... Yeah.
01:21:01
Speaker
I do want to say I do think that the retro games that they can be looked at as both novelty and punishment. I definitely think if we didn't have those, we wouldn't evolve the way that we did. I think games like Sierra that did those snarky death scenes were definitely a proponent of doing exactly that. They were just more punishing at the time than novel.
01:21:26
Speaker
or maybe they were, again, novel at the time and now not novel, because we have no time to spend on adventure games. But I will say it's kind of, it's hearing you talk about like the consequences, those novel consequences. It's like, oh yeah, that's kind of how it started is with novel consequences that were just less merciful. That's a good point. Yeah. And if you had a hundred save slots, if you're very good at saving,
01:21:56
Speaker
then it would feel a lot like I just described, would you? Yeah, for sure. And you'd just laugh and you'd just reload your save and you'd be... Yeah. Yeah. I just want to say there is no excuse for not having unlimited save slots these days. I know we talked about it last time, but I'm still mad about it. No, there's no limit. There's no limit. Do you know how much space I have on my computer?
01:22:22
Speaker
I can have. Yeah. Tell us how much space do you have? Let me check real quick, like a butt load, it says here, but oh, dang, that's official sizing. Yeah, I bought I bought a butt load hard drive. How much did that cost? How much did that run you? Oh, one metric fuck ton. OK, because I was thinking about getting an ass, which is a new
01:22:50
Speaker
Okay, yeah, well, this is a new type of cryptocurrency. Oh, God. The metrics. The metrics. Oh, gonna invest it. Gonna be rich. Oh, no, do not, do not invest in this. No, please do not invest in the metric fuck ton. It is a bear market.
01:23:15
Speaker
Don't listen to us, we give bad advice. Can you imagine after all the stuff we talk about on the show is somebody being like, ooh, financial advice. I think I'll just, I think I'll, you know, I think I'll invest in Dogecoin. That sounds logical.
01:23:37
Speaker
So there's one other example of death is learning that I wanna talk about, and it's sort of similar to the short levels thing, and it's the idea of time loops, time loop games?
Exploring Time Loop Games
01:23:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's more, I feel like you like those kind of games, where I'm just like, fuck this. I just rage quit immediately. I kinda really do like those types of games. You do. There's bad ones. Oh, sure.
01:24:05
Speaker
there was a bunch that came out the other heat, like a couple of years ago. I'm thinking it was like Deathloop, which I didn't play. It's not really an adventure game, but it's also not one that I was interested. But anyway, Deathloop, Forgotten City, 12 Minutes, like a ton of these all came out all at once. And the only one I really loved was Forgotten City. And, you know,
01:24:35
Speaker
Forgotten City is a game where, and I mentioned it a little bit in the last episode, but it was a Skyrim mod. Oh, right, the Skyrim mod, okay. That, yeah, that the developers, it was so successful that the developers then took and turned into its own game, and rather than being lost in the elven city of whatever, it was a forgotten Roman city. Mm-hmm.
01:25:02
Speaker
that had been buried, I guess, deep underground and was being controlled by a vengeful God that was like, you know, punishing these people and then resetting time every 24 hours. And you,
01:25:22
Speaker
arrive there and nobody can seem to detect this time loop. In fact, there's so much to the story that is really, really cool. There is a sin.
01:25:38
Speaker
that everyone is afraid is going to end the world, right? And everyone is trying to not have this sin be committed. But every day, this sin is committed and the world ends and then you restart. We can't tell people to not have sex. I'm just assuming. I assume it's actually not. It's something more innovative than that.
01:26:01
Speaker
Yeah, that stuff is part of it. You have to think like that's part of your the game is like you have to figure out what the sin is and everybody has different ideas in the city of what the sin is. What is causing this? And you, at least as far as you know, you are the only one who knows that time is looping. Okay. Right. It's not how does that mechanic relate to Prince of Persia? Because that when you say time loop, I think about that I think about reversing time in order to complete something.
01:26:31
Speaker
Is it like comparable? No. Well, maybe. I don't know. I never played Prince of Persia, but rather than having like a reverse time button. You are just going through an entire day, right? And you might find a piece of knowledge, like a piece of information.
01:26:53
Speaker
that is only gonna lead to your death, but because the day is resetting, you can go do that. And let yourself die. Right, and then the next day, now you have that information, even though you couldn't have solved this puzzle.
01:27:14
Speaker
on the same day that you got that information because it requires you to die. Oh, Outer Wilds is another one like this. Where Outer Wilds, you are exploring a little star system and every, I forget how many, how much time, I think it's like every 20 minutes, the universe explodes. And you are going from planet to planet trying to
01:27:44
Speaker
put together this mystery.
01:27:49
Speaker
and figure out why this is happening. And you were the only one who knows that time is looping, again, as far as you know. Right. It's just like how you see it in media in like Happy Death Day or Russian Doll, where the same day is happening. But you have to go through them. And honestly, there's a lot of Christmas rom-coms with that exact premise. Have you noticed that? Are there? No, I didn't know that.
01:28:15
Speaker
I'm gonna I'll have to like show them to you later but yeah like reliving the same day and like getting more information about what you should be doing and like trying to kick yourself back into out of the time loop basically to me that feels like in video games that grows out of this this death idea this death is a learning experience idea it's like if death is a learning experience how do we
01:28:42
Speaker
How do we take advantage of that in a way that is cumulative and not subtractive? Again, I mentioned this last episode too, Zelda Majora's Mask is very much like this. It's the follow up to Ocarina of Time and people were really weirded out because it was such an experimental thing, but it was cool. You just relive this day over and over and over and just incrementally
01:29:13
Speaker
Learn about everybody or improve yourself. Right.
01:29:18
Speaker
I do wonder like not because now that we're actually talking about it and since I like that in other media I wonder if I would I wonder if I should like revisit this and play some of these games you're suggesting because I I like conceptually I like it it's just you know as well as I do that when it translates into when it goes into a gaming it can become redundant you know not everything can translate into an interactive thing so I'm curious about it now
01:29:45
Speaker
I'll say this, Outer Wilds is one of my top 10 favorite games that have ever been made. But it can feel very frustrating and tedious if you can't figure out how to make progress. It can feel like you're just doing the...
01:30:03
Speaker
same thing over and over and over again and going
Accessibility in Adventure Games
01:30:06
Speaker
nowhere. As soon as you start making is how tedious and how redundant does it get because that's that's that now we're running into the problems that adventure games have in the past is tedium and redundancy, you know, as soon as you start making progress in Outer Wilds, it's the most incredible experience you'll ever have, but it can be really hard to. So
01:30:30
Speaker
Forgotten City is definitely much more digestible in that sense. From the very beginning, that's the one I would suggest to you, Roses, because from the very beginning, you feel like you get what you want to accomplish next. You have some hints as to how to do it, and you never feel like you're just repeating the same exact day over and over, unless you really screw something up, but even that can be pretty difficult to do.
01:31:00
Speaker
I will, I will actually look into that, I'm pretty intrigued now. Outer Wilds reminds me too much of Myst and that just makes me upset. Yeah, it can be a lonely experience and a lot of the game is about loneliness. Oh good, I definitely need that while I'm recovering from surgery this week.
01:31:26
Speaker
Yeah. Feeling the loneliness of the infinite aspect of time and space.
01:31:38
Speaker
I'll start playing it you're gonna get a call like a phone call from me being like I'm so lonely I'm playing Outer Wilds Everything is ending Everything's so far away Death comes for us all All existence is space
01:32:06
Speaker
It's just void with particles in between. I'm gonna be like hopped up on painkillers. It's gonna be great. You can record it, I consent. I consent to recording my nonsense. All that said, Roses. Yes. How do you feel about the more sort of common adventure game trend?
01:32:36
Speaker
ever since LucasArts sort of perfected this style of just no death and no dead ends, and you can't, there's no consequences, because you can't fail. Right, I think for me,
01:32:54
Speaker
I prefer it that way now. Because we need things to keep changing. You can't listen to the same style of music over and over and over again. You can't eat the same food over and over again. Well, maybe you can. There's one guy that said he ate Big Macs every day. I don't know if I believe him, to be honest with you.
01:33:13
Speaker
Like we're saying, it gets tedious to do those same things over and over again. And we have so many games to play. It's not necessary for us to buy one game and just really chip away at it over years, kind of like it used to be. Now, everything is so much more accessible. So I want more accessible experiences, you know, that being said.
01:33:35
Speaker
And like I said, I don't mind being I don't want to say punished. I don't mind there being consequences to my to whatever I'm doing to my exploration to my bad ideas. I know we're a bad idea. You know, like in Dagger of Amun Ra if you touch all the weapons, yeah, they'll fall on you. And I do that because I know it's it's gonna happen, right? So I don't I don't mind that so much. Why are you snickering at me?
01:34:00
Speaker
That's like, well, this is just so weird. I think it's is that not a funny scenario? It is. No, it is funny. It is funny. So I don't mind getting a novel consequence as long as I don't have to go backwards for hours. But even more so, I want to know if I did something wrong. I don't have time
01:34:25
Speaker
to chip away on these games anymore. And I think those games of the past, they have their place. I think they're iconic, and I still like them, to be honest. I'll boot up King's Quest 3 right now. Let's go. Let's do it. Let's go. Try and stop her.
01:34:45
Speaker
But like in terms of today, I want accessible experiences for people and I want different mechanics. I don't want to keep doing the same mechanic over and over again. And I think we've shown in this podcast that there are so many awesome mechanics and games just for everyone, you know, based on what your
Balancing Challenge and Experience
01:35:07
Speaker
preference is.
01:35:07
Speaker
right yeah because again it is a difficult puzzle to solve as a developer like how how do you make that experience of that aha moment feel authentic i'm even fine with having to reload as long as you know that you died you know what i mean like i do i i think there is no place for unwinnables anymore
01:35:33
Speaker
And I say this as a person who I like the majority of those retro games, but you heard me the other day getting frustrated about just ignore them because of an unwinnable that I had gotten myself into. Matt did not somehow, but I did. And I was so frustrated. I just couldn't believe it. I think, yeah, like we've been talking about this whole episode,
01:35:58
Speaker
there's a lot of ways to solve that problem, that problem of giving players the aha moment so they don't feel like they came upon it cheaply, but also not wasting their time. And as we were talking about with the multiple endings and pathing and stuff, there's also ways to create value with puzzles and exploration and adventure
01:36:29
Speaker
that doesn't rely on the aha moment. Like in Disco Elysium or whatever, it doesn't rely on aha, I'm a genius, it's just you built a story out of decisions.
01:36:43
Speaker
Right.
Podcast Reflections and Future Guests
01:36:44
Speaker
I think we touched on a lot in this episode, actually. I'm very impressed with us. That was an exhaustive examination of the concept of failure in adventure. Listen, if you miss my analytical adventure game reviews, here it all is in a podcast form for two hours. Can't complain. But yeah, you know,
01:37:11
Speaker
I love to, you know what I love? I love like an adventure game developer to listen to this and just like be like, nah, wrong. We put all that thought and work into this exact thing and they're like, nah, that's not wrong. I don't think so. I don't think so, bye. No, I think a lot of modern devs are probably on the same page.
01:37:36
Speaker
All right, well, we have talked about this for a very long time. I'm going to swanky Max Amino my favorite game it up. And we'll come back and say goodbye, everybody. OK.
01:37:56
Speaker
Everyone, we're back, it is I, pushing up roses, my special boy, Matt Aucamp. How was your break? I'm a special boy. It was good, I didn't pee though, I should have. Oh no. Well, you're in luck. It's okay, I'll take care of it now. Okay, maybe, okay. We have to go. It won't stop, it won't stop! Matt, what are you doing?
01:38:25
Speaker
Oh, Matt has broken the podcast. Thank you for that. Thank you for letting me take us out and immediately destroy derailing it. I was gonna say challenge. I was gonna say, so I guess we can tease this now, even though we already teased it kind of on accident.
01:38:48
Speaker
in the last episode, but next week, we're gonna have a very special guest joining us, and I'm so stoked. I am really excited to talk to this person. They are an adventure game enthusiast, an adventure game creator, and they just seem like they're gonna be a fucking blast to talk to, so.
01:39:15
Speaker
You guys make sure you check it out. It's going to be a, it's going to be a real fun one. And they're very popular and talented and I want to talk to them. It makes me feel special. Yeah. Yeah. We're just going to, what if we spend the whole episode talking about how special we are because they are on our show and they're just like, why am I here? Why am I here?
01:39:43
Speaker
Have you seen that sketch on SNL? It's what's up with that and it's written and hosted by Keenan. And the whole premise of that sketch is that he has special guests on his show that never get to talk. That's what it's going to be like. We're going to talk the whole time and he's going to be like, why did I do this? Why did I do this? But yeah, I'm really, I'm so excited to be able to talk to this person.
01:40:08
Speaker
And I'm, I have no doubt that people in the adventure game community will also be very stoked and very excited. Yeah. So definitely keep in tune to that.
Podcasting Partnerships and Humor
01:40:17
Speaker
And also got to mention that we are partners with adventure game hotspot outro is podcast is art. And wait, no. Yes. Wait, no. Yes. Podcast is art. Art is suffer.