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That's a leftover from this game's IF roots. Given the amount of research Cryo probably had to do for this game, it wouldn't surprise me if when they started work on it they didn't expect for it to be a point n' clicker. I love this game (as can be seen by my comment in the RPS article as well). I love it so much that though I've finished it a couple of times, I'm still reading the thread because you seem to be pretty exhaustive in your coverage and that's great. The posts on Soviet daily life by Xander77 make this thread extra worthwhile. Thank you to you both.
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Oct 14, 2013 15:51
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Ah, I love the feedback you get here about your suspect attitude. WendyO: Again, sorry to sound like a broken record, but the deciding influence is from text adventures (or as they are called nowadays, interactive fiction), here. That path for adventure games that you are rightly lamenting they didn't take was actually explored quite a bit in the pre-graphical days. I can't remember any spy games right now, but there certainly were a lot of private investigation ones, where you had to have figured out what was going on and to be at the right place on the right time, or you were walking dead, a la KGB. So you could play some of the Infocom classics for more of this sort of thing! Often IF players lament the move to point n' click graphics and call them 'pointless clickery' exactly because these latter games had puzzles you could brute force by clicking everything on everything until you found the one solution that worked. The one solution the development team could afford to create the assets for. Those IF players would have no such complaints about KGB, where (almost) everything the player does must be according to some preconceived plan and there's even variable, sub-optimal ways to achieve success. I think the main reason we didn't see a lot of that in the graphical point n' clicker days of the genre was twofold. On one hand yes, they're very difficult and require the player to wrap their mind around a completely different way of playing than either the winning Sierra or LEC paradigm. On the other hand, it's a matter of creative/programming limitations. If you play KGB you'll notice there is little to no animation. Characters enter and exit rooms via a weird rectangular form that puts their picture in and out of the background. When you want to use the verb HIDE, you get that weird icon of yourself hiding, you don't actually get your sprite walking up there and hiding behind a door or anything. When you drag a body from one screen to the next, it's again highly abstracted, that sort of thing. Portraying highly variable and dynamic situations and play-spaces is obviously not the strong suit for a graphical adventure game, at least one not designed by a small team. But it's considerably easier to do with a pure text UI. Graphical adventure games were the AAA titles of their time. They had gorgeous graphics and animations and stories and characters, that's how they got their audience, that's how they sold computers, VGA cards and soundblasters, not with clever puzzles and adult themes. It's no wonder the evolutionary branch of KGB became vestigial. Even in our modern times with the adventure game resurgence there's very few adult themes in the new crop of games and there's certainly no dynamic systems and ruthless walking deads like KGB's.
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Oct 16, 2013 11:01
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