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 A low effort banner, for some low/misplaced effort games! Summary Type Thing My, that thread title's a little provocative, isn't it? But it isn't you, my fellow goons of various stripes, that I hate. It's Hidden Object Games. More specifically, Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure Games. I hate them because they embody a side of game development and marketing I despise. Why? Well, I've handpicked 4 in particular to show you. One is by Cateia Games, two are by Alawar Games, and one by 8th Floor Games. They are Red Crow Mysteries: Legion, The Gift, Eternal Journey: New Atlantis, and Shadows: Price For Our Sins. We're going to be starting with The Gift, and by the time we get to Red Crow Mysteries: Legion... I confidently predict your brains will have dribbled out of your ears, and you will be begging me to stop. Either that, or you'll have stopped reading out of sheer boredom. Think that's bad for an LP? Ahahahano, because either way, it will have proved my point: Hidden Object Games Need To Change, Because Right Now, They're A Shitstain On The Games Industry's Already Crusty Y-Fronts. Some of you, in the course of this LP, will say things that you will regret, regarding the target market for these games. I know this because even some fellow game journalists have tried to say the same things that will most likely be said. But we will deal with each as and when they arise. Sometimes sooner! EDIT: And now that thread discussion has truly begun, we can reveal the real purpose of this thread. I'm not actually sure HOPAs are "Girl Games". And they can do better. This thread will, as mentioned, be examining four HOPAs that represent the spectrum of HOPAs as they stand. They all have flaws. They can all do better. But there are some things they already do well. You, the thread goers, and I, the LPer, will be examining this as we go along. I will be bitchy about certain things. But credit will be given where credit is due, and all along, we're going to be asking questions and discussing. Because it's an overlooked genre, and, for all its flaws, an interesting one. Okay, back to your brains dribbling out of your ears.  Spoilers? Oh, please don't. I'm not going to enforce it or anything, but think... Wouldn't you rather people experienced these games as a first time thing? Wouldn't you rather... Yeah, the reason I'm not really enforcing a spoiler policy is because your guesses as to where the plot is going will, for the most part, be pretty accurate. And in at least one case, the "Sudden Twist" is actually a "Not-Twist" Now... Let us begin by entering the strange and magical world of... The Gift Table of Contents The Gift (Anino Games/Alawar Games, October 2012)  Part 1 - Our First Case In A Long While... Why Did We Bother? Part 2 - Stabby McDeatherson's First Victim(?) Shadows: Price for Our Sins (8th Floor Media/Encore Viva Media, Mar 2013)  Sooooooon your souls shall be reaped. Eternal Journey: New Atlantis (Alawar Games, July 2012)  Ancient Aliens stole the updates. We're getting them back. Be patient. Red Crow Mysteries: Legion (Cateia Games/K.I.D Games, Nov 2011)  Honestly, it'll be a miracle if my sanity survives this far BONUSES Things You Might Want To Read If You Want To Know More As the very first link states, HOPAs are a largely unexplored genre, critically, which is interesting, because it most definitely is a valid genre, for all my ragging, and it deserves further exploration. So to help, here's articles and videos that the thread and myself have put together over the course of this thread. Overlooked: The Hidden Potential of Hidden Object Games (Extra Credits) - A good summary. How Genre Stereotypes Limit Games and Players (Extra Credits) - Proof that yes, HOPAs can potentially do other things. Uncovering Innovation In The Hidden Picture Genre (Gamasutra) - The possibility that this is beginning to happen. JamieTheD fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Aug 19, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 00:10
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The Gift Part 1 – Our First Case In A Long While... Why Did We Bother? Welcome to The Gift. As you can see, the menu is pretty simple, and the options no less so. Things the options have: Fullscreen, volume mixing, aspect ratio correction and the option to show (or not to show) Sparkles (Which tell us what we can interact with). Something the options don't have, and nor will any others: A colourblindness option. This will become important later. But for now, let's get this show on the road, with a cutscene!  The Cutscene is in the image. Also this text. No, I'm not giving you the option of a SSLP version of the cutscene. I'm leaving out suffering as it is by leaving out most of the voice acting. But, to summarise: We are Sarah Mieville, Good Ol' Southern Gal, Medium and Psychometrist, and we used to be an Occult Detective of some standing. Now we're a nobody, because we hosed one job up, and the media leapt all over that. Also note that, outside of cutscenes, facial animation is nigh nonexistent. That is, to be fair, because these games don't have much of a budget.  There are things here the cutscene won't tell us, but the game will... In its own time. I want to preserve every writing problem this game has. Just for you. But for now, our car is buggered (meaning we walk everywhere), and we're on the case! And hey, there's our ex partner Jack! Let's go talk to the guy! Count yourself lucky I'm not including the audio right now, it's... It's not grand. I may do at a later date, and edit it in.  Sorry, Jack, this storm is crazy, I barely made it! Thanks for coming. It's been a long time. How are - Yeah, yeah. So what's this about? That old nut inside won't let me in. Says only Sarah Mieville, Occult Investigator, can go inside her motel. She's the manager. She called me. She kept mumbling something about a murder and a “Nothingman”? For being an expert in your field, you know squat about it's supposed mysteries.I brought what I had on the Nothingman case, like you asked. It's in the box in my car. But we have a problem: My keys are in the car, and the car is locked.  So yes... Our ex-partner is a homicide detective who keeps locking himself out of his own car. Bad Puzzle Justification Counter: 1! Because of course it's a loving puzzle. Now, how the hell are we going to get that open? Well, that inviting window looks good, but it's too small for our strong southern arms to reach into, and the window, surprisingly for the 50s, is too hard to shove down. Also... Nothingman. If you gathered that this...  Nothingman is our main villain, you'd be 100% correct! Now... If we had Sparkles on, there would be some sparklies right near that junk next to the stairs. But I don't have sparklies on, so they'll appear, but inconsistently. Cue about five minutes of pixel hunting, because it's been at least a year, maybe two since I even touched this drat game. Along the way, I discover that not everything you can interact with changes your contextual icon. Jack does, but he just tells us to get those files.  This homeless feller, on the other hand, reveals that he's hungry. I'm absolutely certain that won't come into play, just a local bit of colour! Even if Sarah does (in a fit of social conscience, I'm sure) say that maybe we should feed him somehow (Despite a currently empty inventory.)  We also have a journal we can look at! This is going to sparkle every now and again, and is going to be our source of both plot and puzzle references. In this particular case, though, it's plot. Such as it is.  Now, how does one unlock a car with an open window? Ah yes, with a stiff wire bent into a hook shape, pulling up the latch! So, in true protag fashion, we yank the antennae off this TV...  ...And unlatch the door of a police vehicle. Thankfully, this time, at the behest of our ex partner.     The files are what we're after, but, as we'll discover in a moment, not all we need from here. Nonetheless, the files on the... I'm not even sure I can bring myself to say it... The... The... Nope, they're now referred to as Stabby McDeatherson. The files on Stabby McDeatherson are pretty slim. Two photos, and two articles. Looks like there's more, but that's all we get to see. Still, immediately blamed by the public is both aliens, the Illuminati, and some kind of cult. This blaming on conspiracy theories, we'll sadly see, is going to be a common thread. Luckily, the police are having none of it, but the investigation just shuts down two months later, with no clues. This was a long time ago.  Okay, onto the hote- [blinks]... ...Oh yes, you might have noticed that it's the Voorhees Hotel. As Subtle As A Bag Of Gold Bricks Counter: 1. Luckily, the proprietress is not an axe murderer or, as far as I'm aware, related to one. However... We'll be hitting another obstacle after these two conversations... I went through what you brought. So, what do you think about all this? Beats me. Maybe that lady is one of the wackos obsessed with the case. Or could he be back somehow? I doubt it. I'm just here in case you need me. This is a case for an “Occult Investigator.” Fine. Let me talk with the manager.KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK Sarah Mieville, um, Occult Investigator. You called me, ma'am.Smoooth. Real smooth.  Don't you think I'm gonna let you in just like that. M-M-Mr. Riker said we need to be careful. Great. Another one of Riker's fans. Tabloid reporters should be outlawed. He told me to only let Miss Sarah Mieville in! I need proof you are who you say you are. Wait. Hugo Riker was here?Okay, so Sarah quite handily reveals that Hugo Riker is a tabloid reporter. What's slightly more confusing (right now) is that Sarah is somewhat confused that a) Hugo Riker was here in the first place (Not really surprising, as fictional tabloid reporters have a sense for death and blood), and b) That she was recommended by Riker. There is no explanation for this. Oh well, we need proof. Since we can't leave this hotel area, and our car is presumably a ways away, where are we going to find that?  In Jack's car. In fact, we find two things we need. A copy of our newspaper ad (As an Occult Investigator), and... Our ritual elements for contacting the dead and revealing the past... ...Er, it's very nice they're here and all, but I'm afraid this most definitely comes under Bad Puzzle Justification: 2. Why would Jack carry these things, even knowing Sarah was going to need something like this? How the hell would he get these things? You can't use just any old silver backed amethysts for this kind of job, you know! Those things have to be attuned and everything!  One irritable cup of coffee later, I get back to writing this up, and we shove the newspaper through the letterbox. By the way, this entire first section is meant to be a tutorial of sorts. Just so you know. Oh! It is you. Come on in! Thank goodness you're here. Mr. Riker told me to call you. He said you should be the first one to see it. Sarah, if someone's really dead in there, I have to call it in. I know, but let me look around first. We don't want your fellow cops seeing you with the crazy lady, right?I'll give you everything I find.  Some good ol' Southern Gals talking, and bits I'd missed. Apologies for missing them first time around! Finally. Now we're inside, there's several little clues and foreshadowings. I'll give Alawar this, not a single thing in this game is inconsequential. Everything has a purpose. Specifically, there's an ad for Dino's Diner...  ...Pretty god-drat creepy, if you ask me. Also an advert for an Autovac...  ...Our first intimation that we're going to have Out-Of-Place-Artefacts in this game. Yes, it's what the artist thought a 50s style Roomba would look like. To be fair, I think they caught the essence of it.  The fact that a Rose Myers checked into the place last (Might be important! Ahhh, who am I kidding, I wasn't joking when I said not a single thing we can look at closer isn't a clue, puzzle, or foreshadowing of some sort!), a paperclip (Which we quickly steal, being a lady of little means), and, of course, our equally stereotypical Flower of the South, Mrs. Voorhees (I'm assuming... She's un-named) We're assuming, by the missing key, that it's room 2 we're looking for. Not that it really matters. To our left is a door we can't open yet, going back is currently pointless, and up the stairs is our only method of progression.  Well, isn't this interesting! I didn't know members of the press had forensics kits! I didn't know forensics kits had hacksaws! I certainly didn't think anyone would leave one behind! And, before you ask, Jack says he wasn't allowed in, so it couldn't have been his. Whoopsie! Nonetheless, because we're an adventure game protagonist, we steal the hacksaw (the only thing you can interact with when zoomed into the forensics kit), the bug sprayer, and, ignoring the radiator we can look at for now, go in...  SPECIAL EFFECTS AHOY! WHOAAAAAAHHHH! So... A murder scene! Complete with obviously dead guy and occult mark on the wall! Let's end it here, but with our first demographic firmly crossed off for this game: Not For Kids! HOPA games are often claimed to be for kids or young adults. Young Adults I could sort of get (Barely), but kids? Nope. We'll see even more evidence that this is not a game for toddlers and young-uns soon enough, but let's firmly cross that one off the list for now! Next time, we investigate a corpse, and encounter our first, second, and third Object Hunts! Won't that be a thing to look forward to! JamieTheD fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Aug 19, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 00:13
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Yeah those dramatic zoom-ins were something. It's weird but I never really played any HO games. Like, ever. I have seen a few around, some even looked interesting, but I never tried one out.
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Aug 16, 2015 03:40
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I always thought hidden object games are for bored housewives and stuff. You know, the natural target demographic for paranormal investigator fantasy.
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Aug 16, 2015 06:10
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anilEhilated posted:I always thought hidden object games are for bored housewives and stuff. You know, the natural target demographic for paranormal investigator fantasy.  OHHHHHHHHH!, I'm very sorry, anilEhilated, but for all that you are repeating a commonly held view, there are in fact differences between the majority of paranormal investigator fantasies of the modern era and these games! But you have, by doing so, done a great service to the thread! And so quickly, too!You see... There is evidence for and against this proposition. While I have an effortpost all saved up for the proper moment, I'll briefly note one very important difference between the kind of paranormal investigator fantasy you're most likely referring to (Lilith Saintcrow, Anne Rice, or Dan Brown , as opposed to William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, or Charles Stross): The romance subplots in these novels are often purple prose, emotionally charged, dramatic, lovingly (sometimes too much so) described. It's hot and heavy (In fact, in the case of Lilith Saintcrow, it's rarer for the "Strong Female Protagonist" (quote marks fully intended) not to get into some sort of sexual relationship). In the case of HOPAs, it's generally nowhere near so heavy. In fact, the romance subplot of HOPAs (For lo, there is nearly always one) has more in common with Goosebumps or Point Horror than anything else (Less focus on the burning passion, the hot sweat running in rivulets, much more on the feels, and the "Oh my, how sweet!"... When they bother to focus on it at all, beyond its existence as a motivation at some point or another.) As, indeed, do many of the main plots (We'll see that more clearly as the games progress) Now, this would suggest that Young Adults, not bored parents/housewives (As these games are also, as I've already mentioned, linked in common conception to children, or, more specifically, "family" games) are the real market, except... We both know that Young Adults (defined as 12-17) will more likely hit up Splatoon or Bioshock than these games. Much like many of the housewives we're talking about here, teens ain't as stupid as "Common Knowledge" would have us believe. So for all that you've set off the QI alarm, you've also exposed one of the main discussion points of this thread early. Are HOPAs "Girl Games" (in the same sense that Devious Vacuum used the term), or is something else happening with them? Stick around, anilEhilated. SSNeoman posted:Yeah those dramatic zoom-ins were something. I can confidently tell you, SSNeoman, that we shall be seeing some heavy similarities through all four games, despite the fact that I've taken games from three of the "bigger" publishers of this genre. I really should have included a relative outlier in the mix (Where Angels Cry instead of Red Crow Mysteries Legion), but it really is a relative outlier. This is another core element of this thread, funnily enough. People think FPSes have stagnated? They've got nothing on HOPAs. JamieTheD fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 06:59
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I get the feeling that HO games feel more like something for kids due to their "Where's Waldo" nature. On the other hand, as you said, they deal with some mature subjects so they're definitely for teens/adults. That and they can be pretty pixelbitchy which can count as a difficulty feature in this genre instead of being rightfully called out as bad programming/design. Seraphic Neoman fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 09:09
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Why do I suspect by the end of this thread both the bad puzzle justifications and subtle as a bag of gold bricks counters are going to be well over 100? Have fun with the LP JamieTheD, and hopefully your sanity will stick around after this is all done. Talow fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 11:19
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Let's look at some 'themes' in this first episode. Now, the actual hidden object scenes we haven't seen yet. If you ask me, from personal experience I'd say they're the most boring and annoying thing ever. There exist 'casual puzzle games' by similar publishers that actually have gameplay that isn't quite as stupid, and throws in a hidden object scene every 10 levels or so. I believe some Jewel Quest (Bejeweled but by another publisher) spin-off does that, or maybe the original too. In that case, the HO scenes are still annoying, but if you like that type of game you can ignore the bad story telling and just play the tile-matching game itself. Second point I want to raise is the 'bad puzzle justifications'. Know what other game has a lot of those? The rather popular game Professor Layton! So this is another thing that, by itself, doesn't make a game bad. Third thing is the point-and-click gameplay. Once again, there are some good (mostly old) point-and-click adventures around. I personally think the gameplay in those games is boring, and so is the fact that you're always looking at a static screen. With a good story and the occasional bout of humour, some of those old adventure games manage to redeem themselves, at least in part. I think that the problem with an HO game is the combination of everything. Boring gameplay, bad story, no good reason for most of the things you do, and the boring aspect of completely static screens. So, the time has come to posit my theory. As nobody in their right mind could possibly like this kind of game, they're quickly made on a low budget with the expectation that people who don't know what they're getting themselves into buy them. And to some people (hoarders?), this type of game might even be addictive, making them buy the sequel, and so on. These games are basically a scam, purely made for the publisher's wallet.
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Aug 16, 2015 11:47
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The HOGs made by Artifex Mundi are actually legit good, although they can be pretty formulaic and they still have the janky flaws of bad voice-acting and weird facial animations. They're actually pretty much adventure games with hidden objects sections every so often, which seems what this is game is trying to go for too, but AM 's games are lot more polished about it. They've also gotten quite good at making atmospheric games over the years and their games look really nice. Indie Gala actually has a bundle of a good chunk of their games right now. Accordion Man fucked around with this message at 13:32 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 13:28
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Carbon dioxide posted:Second point I want to raise is the 'bad puzzle justifications'. Know what other game has a lot of those? The rather popular game Professor Layton! There's a difference, though, and I think it's pretty important. In the Layton games, we understand that the puzzles are the main focus of the game, but for the most part, they're out of the way - as opposed to the puzzles naturally occurring during the story, you actually have to go off the beaten path, backtrack in some cases to unlikely places, and poke at things that don't stand out to find all of the puzzles. They're also standalone puzzles - you don't commonly find objects in one place and use them in other places to solve the puzzles. Logic puzzles, not organic puzzles, if you catch my drift. Puzzle adventures differ because the puzzles ARE the story - they're the direct advancement of the plot and the way things happen. Professor Layton doesn't really need to justify its puzzles - people just love puzzles, even the meaningless ones like "which of these silhouettes is different" - whereas a game that's supposed to be more realistic has police officers lock themselves out of their cars and fans of an investigator who don't recognize her just to give the player something to do.
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Aug 16, 2015 14:40
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It warms my heart to see people discussing this, raising counterpoints, their own hypotheses... Keep it up! In essence, the theme of this thread is to put Hidden Object Puzzle Adventures (Differentiated from Hidden Object Games, which exist, and are, as noted by Carbon Dioxide, merely the puzzles themselves, sometimes as a puzzle in other games, sometimes as things on their own) under the microscope, so don't worry about sounding "wrong", because these are viewpoints on the spectrum, and give an indication of how they're perceived.Carbon dioxide posted:A generally sound hypothesis: Shovelware This is, overall, soundly thought out. One important thing to note is the quality of said puzzles. We'll see more about the quality of the puzzles as the LP progresses, but for now, we can assume a puzzle's quality is based on four factors: Accessibility: Are there aspects of the puzzle's design that would make it harder for, for example, the colour blind (hi!) or tone deaf? Are the rules properly explained? Internal Consistency: Do they keep to their own rules? Remember, half the complaints about two particular puzzles in Myst was that they had a hidden rule (The elevator had the "doors close slower on the way down", and the clock tower had the left chain that could be held, not just pulled) that was, effectively, inconsistent with the apparent rules. Adventure Games also had what we know as "Cat Hair Moustache" puzzles (After the infamous Gabriel Knight example), where the logic... Doesn't really hold up, or never had that logic in the first place. Use banana on machine, that sort of thing. Brute-Forcability: Can it be brute forced, and, more importantly, does the game rely on you brute forcing them? Does it stop you from brute forcing what you know you can brute force? Busywork: Not all puzzles are created equal. We all know how to do the Towers of Hanoi puzzle, and many of us groan when forced to do one. Similarly, not for nothing is a "SIMON Game" considered a relatively perjorative term, because it involves nothing more than rote repetition, and you're punished with, at the least, having to repeat that segment if you fail it. At worst, Bad Things Happen. Multi-stage QTEs are a SIMON Game of sorts, but these at least are generally short, with an obvious reward as well as a punishment for failure. In terms of adventure game puzzles, busywork is defined as "an obstacle for the sake of an obstacle." Sadly, as I recall, we'll be seeing a fair bit of that, as the gating in HOPAs is usually much more obvious than the majority of adventure games. Not for nothing will I be using the term "ResEvil Lock" multiple times. When we consider Professor Layton, you're quite correct in that the puzzles are justified in exactly the same way (The people are obsessed with puzzles, including Layton) throughout the series, despite... Well, it only really being mentioned as a feature of the town in the first game. However, the quality of the puzzles is generally high, and it's quite clear they were the main focus. The gameplay meshes better with the rest of the game as a result. As Nidoking states, it's a difference of approach. Another thing to note is that a "feature" of "Girl Games" (Or, more accurately, a common identifying characteristic) is that, while they are generally shovelware in some core aspect, greater attention is paid to the style (Graphics, Music) than the substance (Quality of gameplay or writing). Obviously, exceptions exist, but very often, these are related to game aspects that are shovelled over said substance (For example, the horrifically bad teeth in Dentist Girl Games. So the idea that these games are Shovelware does not, in fact, preclude them from being Girl Games: Games aimed at women with an outdated, often misogynistic view of what women actually want. Accordion Man posted:The HOGs made by Artifex Mundi are actually legit good, although they can be pretty formulaic and they still have the janky flaws of bad voice-acting and weird facial animations. They're actually pretty much adventure games with hidden objects sections every so often, which seems what this is game is trying to go for too, but AM 's games are lot more polished about it. They've also gotten quite good at making atmospheric games over the years and their games look really nice. On the one hand, you can experience 12 games in what I will admit is the best of a genre I heavily dislike, albeit in some respects only, for $3.19 (The majority of Artifex Mundi's catalogue, in fact). On the other, while I did not include an Artifex Mundi game, the main differences are interesting, but not necessarily better. For example, the Hidden Object puzzles tend to have more reward, in terms of usable items, than others in the genre, and can, in many cases, be skipped by playing an entirely different puzzle (In the case of Nightmares From The Deep, it's a Mahjongg Tile removal puzzle, of the type that many folks believe Mahjongg actually is.  ) I can also say that, of the HOPAs, Artifex Mundi's definitely are the highest in quality in terms of production value (Although their claim that the cutscenes are of "AAA Quality" is sometimes (often) stretching it)However, a core aspect of at least the games I've encountered (Nightmares From The Deep: The Cursed Heart and Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden) is that you are returning to these Hidden Object Puzzles to completely clear them, sometimes as many as three or four times. It does, in a sense, have more puzzles. But while they may have gotten better, they are, unfortunately, the highest setting of a somewhat low bar. Shadows: Price for Our Sins is of a similar quality, but this is because, unlike many HOPAs (Even the Artifex Mundi games) it doesn't try to mesh two different art styles (3D and 2D Painted), as many of them do. But one thing I notice about Artifex Mundi games is that it's the same model, but... Stretched. The puzzle solution is more likely to involve finding a Hidden Object pile that you had not, in fact, cleared, for an item, and, as a result, there's more backtracking. So, while I would admit that yes, Artifex Mundi is the best of a bad genre, I am less certain of the claim that they are legitimately well designed in their own right. For all that they experiment, they still have many of the same core design principles and flaws of the genre. I may, if necessary, go through an Artifex Mundi game (Although the "Best in the bunch" for this LP is Shadows: Price For Our Sins at the present time.) EDIT: The next update will be up on Wednesday, barring self-employment prep going horribly wrong, and I will do my best to keep a schedule of Saturdays and Wednesdays for updates. I don't particularly want to spend a year on this LP, as I already have a long term project.  EDIT 2: If people do get that bundle, or play HOPAs, see if you can spot the common threads, design and writing wise of these games before they come up in thread. JamieTheD fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 16:11
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Interesting. Hidden objects games can be indeed quite bad, but sometimes they have interesting stories, so they are occasionally worth checking out.
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Aug 16, 2015 17:39
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grandalt posted:Interesting. Hidden objects games can be indeed quite bad, but sometimes they have interesting stories, so they are occasionally worth checking out. I think on this front you should ask why they didn't just make a visual novel and leave out the stupid king's quest puzzle poo poo.
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Aug 16, 2015 17:57
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I'm here as someone who does enjoy this type of game, although I've not played any of the ones being listed in the OP, and I'm going to try and defend them. Yes, they're probably objectively fairly poor shovelware for the most part, but that's fine, because it's not the point. They're silly little pulp stories about ghosts and museums and thieves and that sort of dross that serve as macguffins for the meat of the game which is the puzzles. They're definitely not aimed at the same audience as people who enjoy fast paced games with lots of action, nor for people who want strong stories. They're for people who want to pick apart pretty pictures and solve logic puzzles, rather than people who want to shoot a demon or fly across space to bang an asari. Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart is a story about rescuing a daughter by exploring a pirate base and finding a love story. The stories, where they exist, are definitely aimed at people who are interested in themes like family and love. They may have pirates and ghosts, but they're definitely more mundane than your average video game, and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the SA audience just isn't quite the right audience because most people here are probably more into dawn of war than solitaire. The story isn't even really the point though. It's just a macguffin to give context to the pictures of junk shops, attics and abandoned buildings. I understand where you're coming from on the puzzle quality busywork thing, but I'd argue that it doesn't really apply here. Sure, there's the occasional towers of hanoi thing, but for the most part, the puzzles are just simple hunting for keys and notes and that sort of thing, at least in the better examples (and I'd rather not paint the whole genre with the brush of a few bad games), or jigsaw puzzles. The main draw is the hidden object scenes, which are probably why most people are there, because strange although it may sound, some of us enjoy where's wally (waldo for most of you probably). It's satisfying to find the last thing you need, or spot something then remember where it is so you can go back for it later. They're full of neat little details to hunt for and remember, which can be every bit as fun as any point and click game, which at least at one point in history was a fairly well respected genre. Given that these scenes are the main point of the game, they're no more an obstacle than a gunfight or a cutscene in any other game. As for brute forceability, yes, most of the time you can just snake your mouse over the scene or tap endlessly all over your tablet until you hit it, but that defeats the point, and of course it's going to be hard. My reaction when I do end up doing a brute force sort of thing is usually "oh, haha, that's tricksy" rather than "that's just bullshit". On internal consistency and accessibility, that varies massively from game to game and while I think there are some limitations, for instance the colour blindness thing, I don't think it's a problem inherent to either the genre or the array coming out now-ish. Are they objectively great games? No. Are they a little bit of chill, satisfying puzzle solving? In my opinion, absolutely. I don't really want to be that guy, but there are good and bad games everywhere and this genre is no exception. From that indiegala bundle, I have enjoyed the Nightmare From The Deep games, and I've heard good things about Grim Legends and Enigmatis, although I haven't had a chance to go through them yet.
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Aug 16, 2015 18:18
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So what is the target audience here? People who enjoy busywork? People who are feeling too lazy to solve actual puzzles? When you say "chill puzzle-solving", I immediately think of something like (two last games of the type I played, feel free to insert Portal or something) Full Bore or The Talos Principle. They're overall great games, they don't really get difficult and provide stories that are engaging aplenty. The puzzles are simple enough and designed in a way that makes you learn new uses of your tools; here, I think, is a difference between hidden objects and an actual puzzle game: hidden objects never force you to expand your limits, think outside the box. They're firmly stuck in the find item/use item zone - maybe it's a comfort zone, in the same way as people who watch the news don't want new information but confirmation of what they're already thinking? I really wasn't trying to sound as sexist as it probably did but whenever I hear a hidden object game mentioned, someone almost immediately chimes in with "Yeah, my mother likes those, it's the only thing she uses the computer for." Well, that and match-3.
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Aug 16, 2015 19:29
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MooCowlian posted:A well worded defense of the genre. MooCowlian, you're also raising some excellent points. It has been noted that, in the macro-story sense at the very least, some of these stories are genuinely interesting (I say again that Shadows: Price of Our Sins is "best of bunch"), if somewhat formulaic at times (The Cursed Heart and Price of Our Sins both feature a ghostly love story, they are both tragic, and they both involve somebody making a deal with the devil... Albeit the Devil in the Details here is that, in one of these cases, the deal was not for noble reasons) Now, time to level with you: I love being proved wrong. As a game journalist, I love being proved wrong. I desperately want Arkham Knight to actually be fixed next month. Actually be fixed. But I know that some things can't and won't be fixed (SPOILER: Oracle gets fridged. And Damseled. Both times are fakeouts... But both are bad and lazy writing. If that were the only piece of bad writing in Arkham Knight, I'd only be slightly annoyed, but it isn't. Not by a long shot..) I desperately wanted Blur to succeed... Because it did something interesting, albeit in a flawed manner. I wanted Nuclear Dawn to succeed, because maybe players would learn to work together in a competitive setting, improving the player base overall. But they weren't. They didn't (Blur's flaws remain to this day, and Bizarre Creations is no more; Nuclear Dawn gave the game to the team that communicated better, and frustrated the newer players away) And that makes me very sad, because I know we can do better. We can do better as a games industry. We can do better as players. God knows, at least some of the time, I can do better as a writer and a person. This, in a sense, is why I'm "picking on" HOPAs (To clarify, that was an outside thread quote). Because they can do better. I mentioned that at least some of the stories can be interesting on the macro level. But on the micro level, they're nearly always filled with things that make me groan, grumble, and mutter. We've both played The Cursed Heart, and y'know what? For all its flaws, I enjoy aspects of it. But other aspects... ...The heroine of The Cursed Heart isn't believable. Not even in the Pulpy fashion, where characters are, at best, two dimensional (The Femme Fatale, The Drunk PI, The Sleazy Mob Boss, The OBVIOUS NAZI, OH GOD NAZI, WHY CAN'T YOU SEE HE'S A NAZI?!?) I used the intro of The Cursed Heart as an example in the first time I tackled why I disliked HOPAs, because she leaves her daughter, who has a fear of the dark, next to the Obvious Zombie Captain, after she's shoved the three cursed artefacts in his grubby mitts, all three of which did obvious occulty things, and one of which (the necklace) grew metal vines over the sodding gem you put back in its setting. That takes a special kind of blase that borders on ignorance (What, do horror movies not exist in any of these worlds?). But her putting her daughter in danger in the first place by doing these things... Ruins her journey for me. Does it ruin the Captain? No. The Captain isn't exactly sinless in the writing sense, but once he'd grown beyond "Obvious, One Dimensional Villain" to "Tragic Dude who Maybe We Want To Save Along With Our Daughter", I was down with that. I just didn't give a flying gently caress about our main character. Which is a Bad Thing. It becomes a worse thing when you already have problems with writing and puzzles as it is. I think we can both agree that most of the rest of the cast were pretty forgettable. Because they were meant to be. As to the Hidden Objects and their Brute-Forcability? I 100% agree that it demeans the challenge. So does the Cursed Heart, in that Expert Mode will do Bad Things if you try and brute force the Hidden Object minigames. When it comes to the puzzle design, I'm mainly referring to things like the puzzle we're going to encounter in the next update on Wednesday, Make The Colours All Match (A common minigame), and, of course, Towers of Hanoi (It's not meant to be brute forced, and isn't actually difficult. But it can be brute forced, with no cost except a little extra time.) ...Except The Cursed Heart also disagrees. Because, Expert or no, it lets you skip any Hidden Object Game with a Mahjongg puzzle. It even gives you separate cheevos for doing that instead. I should know, I'm well on my way to collecting the last of them. Is that a good or a bad thing? That's very much in the eye of the beholder, but I'm not a big fan of it because it cries "Yes, we know these are frustrating for many of you. Feel free to skip them at any time!" It's not alone in that either, as some (not all, but some) HOPAs allow you to skip the hidden object sections entirely, as well as the puzzles. It's not even the case that all of them limit said skips. I love Adventure Games (although I'm just as critical of them as any other. I didn't enjoy the pacing of the first Charnel House Trilogy, but look forward to the fourth installment, coming 2016.) I love Visual Novels (Christine Love's works and Hanako Games are among my favourites, and one of my oft-failed GameJams was a VN Jam... I'm not good at scheduling, you see.) I don't love HOPAs, although I know I could. But you raise excellent counterpoints, and I'd like the thread to keep MooCowlian's thoughts (And hopefully others) as the thread continues. There are better and worse HOPAs, on pretty much every spectrum that counts (Writing, Puzzle Design, Hidden Object Puzzles, Skip Mechanics, Aesthetic, Accessibility, and Voice Acting) than the ones I've selected. But I have picked these specific four for a reason, and not just because of familiarity. I've picked them because they represent that spectrum fairly well, and represent two of the three major publishers of HOPAs out there (Price For Our Sins is not, as far as I'm aware, related to the Big Three of HOPA: Cateia, Alawar, and Artifex Mundi.) anilEhilated posted:So what is the target audience here? People who enjoy busywork? People who are feeling too lazy to solve actual puzzles? This is a core part of this thread... What is the audience? I've always been fascinated by games design, and to ignore the marketing end of things, how a game is targeted, how it's sold, would be doing a great disservice. For example, I have only ever seen reviews of HOPAs on two kinds of reviewing site: Generalists (Hi!), and adventure game specific sites. I specifically mentioned DVac's Girl Games because, at first glance, many of these games appear to be targeted at the same audience: The protagonists are nearly always women, young or old, they're either teens or professionals in their field. There's often (But not always) a romance subplot (Of, again, varying levels of quality)... And yet, HOPAs are neither fish nor fowl. They're not strictly adventure games. They're not strictly puzzle games. They're not strictly Hidden Object Games (A subset of puzzle games, it's true, but a very specific niche that games have been released for.) Also, don't worry. I said in the OP that people would say things regarding the target market they'd probably regret, and that's because, at one time, that's exactly what I believed. I wouldn't touch them, because they're "Bored Housewife Shovelware." One of my sisters plays some (the other two are more into DOTA and LoL). My grandmother plays some. But men play them too. Sometimes ironically, yeah, sure... But I'm living proof that, for all I think they can do better, I still cared enough to make an LP to explore this... ...So I'm not so sure that's the case. I want to wait until we get to the end of The Gift before I post my particular thoughts on this matter, but the gist of my opinion is very simple: I don't believe there is a target market. Or, more accurately, there was, but that market is much less visible now, and just as likely to fork out their £7-£15 on what they perceive as better games. And you know what's really curious about this? I haven't found many, in article form, asking the same question. We do it for adventure games. We do it for FPSes. We do it for pretty much every genre out there. On the upside, while researching, I did find this: Uncovering Innovation In The Hidden Picture Genre. At first glance, it confirms that most of the sales are to older women (For one company)... But as I said... I'm not actually sure. And, judging by this article, people are beginning to notice this genre actually does have potential that it's not using.
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Aug 16, 2015 19:53
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I certainly agree that they could do better, generally, I just felt a little bit like they were being targeted as something that was never good. Perhaps it would have been better to sit on the post for a bit rather than immediately go NUH UH. My bad. I actually originally picked up hidden object games from my father. Some time in the mid-2000s, we were in northern france, it was raining and we'd finished all the jigsaw puzzles the house had to offer, so we opened up his laptop and looked at the free games on it. We then spent an evening sitting in front of the screen, sifting through the pictures and having fun being the first to spot an item or a solution in the same way you sift through a jigsaw box to find the corner pieces. I then swiftly forgot about them until I saw this extra credits episode on them (which kind of agrees, when I remembered I enjoyed them, bought Drawn: The Painted Tower on their recommendation. Having enjoyed that, I then bought a bunch more and now they're kind of my go-to thing when I'm scrolling my steam library and thinking I don't really feel like playing any of these 300 games, because that's what steam does to a person. I think a lot of it is because they are casual games. I think most of the players probably are the bored, middle aged, alone at home all day kind of people, but even when they are people who spend more time with video games, they're still treated differently. I've never really thought about or been bothered about the quality of the story and writing, although you're right and I probably should. They're simple, relaxing and satisfying and that's been enough for me. Just by virtue of it being one of these, I treat them differently to the way I'd treat FPSes or ARPGs, and somehow all that matters less to me because, you know, it's not meant to be good or interesting in that way, it's just one of these dumb little HOPAs I bought for £2 to fill up a couple of hours here and there with something slightly more interesting than pressing the User Control Panel button again. In any case, the target market is so divorced from the standards and experiences "real gamers" (is there a better way of saying that?) have come to expect that they have no real frame of reference from which to think critically. If the only other games you've played are mahjongg and solitaire, and maybe angry birds, these are a step up in a lot of ways and you're probably not going to be writing 2 star reviews on the app store because of the flimsy story and poor voice acting. edit: That extra credits episode, by the way, talks a lot about the use of female characters and how the rest of the games industry can look to HOGs/HOPAs as an example of how to do it. They do brush on a lot of the things that have been mentioned here, but it's mostly about their writing of women. Deformed Church fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 20:27
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MooCowlian posted:I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the SA audience just isn't quite the right audience because most people here are probably more into dawn of war than solitaire.
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Aug 16, 2015 22:01
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It was the first game I thought of. Thanks!
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Aug 16, 2015 23:30
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I've played a few of these games, on purpose, and I'm a woman (and often bored, though not a housewife), so I guess I feed into that stereotype about who these games are for. I kind of resent the implication that people (or bored housewives) who play these games just don't know what good games are, though. Like women just think a match three or a HO game is the height of gaming.* I know there are quality games. I've played quality games. I like those ,too. But these games, for all their faults, are usually pretty chill. Sometimes I just want to mellow out, put a podcast on, and hunt a picture for some doodads. A lot of these games are easy to play even when you are half asleep and there are times when this is a desirable quality (like when you are half asleep) *I haven't really seen that attitude in THIS thread, but I've definitely encountered it elsewhere, including the SA forums. JamieTheD posted:We both know that Young Adults (defined as 12-17) will more likely hit up Splatoon or Bioshock than these games. Much like many of the housewives we're talking about here, teens ain't as stupid as "Common Knowledge" would have us believe. Splatoon and Bioshock are expensive. These games are very, very cheap. You get what you pay for, but at least you (as a 12-17 year old) don't have to save up for it or wait for your birthday or Christmas to roll around. The aforementioned bored housewife would not have to choose between buying one of these and a package of diapers. These have their niche. Feinne posted:I think on this front you should ask why they didn't just make a visual novel and leave out the stupid king's quest puzzle poo poo. I wish they would.  Visual novels haven't really caught on with American audiences and Japanese ones can be expensive or porny (or both). MooCowlian posted:They're silly little pulp stories about ghosts and museums and thieves and that sort of dross that serve as macguffins for the meat of the game which is the puzzles. Exactly this. You mostly pick these things out based on which has cover art you feel like you''ll want to look at for the next however long it takes to go through the story (or I do, anyway). If the story is actually interesting (not to be confused with good, though there's nothing wrong with good), then that's really nice. Out of the HOPAs I've played, I can't tell you the storyline for any of them. I think one had some vampires in it, maybe? I'm sure there was some underwater diving in another. There were probably ghosts in practically all of them. I have no idea what the context for any of it was. I didn't care then and I don't care now. That said, I'll be reading this thread with interest because the one thing I DO remember about the stories was thinking, "this is the stupidest goddamn thing and I wish somebody would LP this and share it with the world." These things are similar to romance novels, not so much in content, but for the role they play. There's better quality stuff out there, to be sure. But however much you may enjoy quality literature that causes you to think and grow and contemplate the human condition, sometimes you just want some cheap fluff that's easy to consume and that you don't have to think about so hard. This is not to say that I don't think quality matters. These games are so obviously slapped together quickly on a shoestring budget. I think that's a shame because I'd like to see what they could do if they set out to make something really good. MooCowlian posted:edit: That extra credits episode, by the way, talks a lot about the use of female characters and how the rest of the games industry can look to HOGs/HOPAs as an example of how to do it. They do brush on a lot of the things that have been mentioned here, but it's mostly about their writing of women. This was another thing that drew me to the genre. I am a woman and I like when I can play games as a woman. The female leads in a lot of these games may or may not be strong or decent characters, but in my experience they're at least not any more helpless and stupid than anybody else in the game. I can get behind that.
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Aug 17, 2015 01:45
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I like the Aritfex Mundi games because they are chill but I agree that they, and it seems the genre in general, aren't as ambitious as they could be. There is the potential there to make really good adventure games if only they had stronger writing, but it seems they're just content with their formula.
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Aug 17, 2015 03:17
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I'm someone who plays hidden object games from time to time. I think that it's important to note that, while some (probably many) people who play hidden object games play traditional adventure games as well, many casual gamers are unfamiliar with adventure game logic. I found a pretty interesting article a while back in which the author wrote about the changes that Dave Gilbert (the creator of the Blackwell series) needed to make in order to better accommodate casual audiences when making "Emerald City Confidential" for PlayFirst. For instance, since playtesting showed that casual gamers would often only read the first and last lines of dialogue in a scene or skip over dialogue entirely, Gilbert needed to significantly trim the amount of dialogue in the game and provide an onscreen task system so players would always know exactly what they needed to do next. The article also mentioned that casual gamers might stop playing a game altogether if they became stuck on a puzzle for more than a few minutes and generally want their puzzles to be integrated into the game world. The author makes a few other points as well so I'll post the article in case anyone wants to read it (he starts talking about "Emerald City Confidential" on pg. 2 but the whole article is worth a read): http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/5889/state_of_the_pointandclick_art.php I think the reason that so many hidden object games are so similar in their design and narrative elements is because the audiences of those games already understand and even expect those features. I'd love it if hidden object games improved in puzzle design but I think that casual audiences enjoy having similar puzzles in each game because the instructions on what to do are always very clear (and keys, jigsaw puzzles, and other common puzzle types are easy to understand even for even people who've never played any games before) and players can usually solve them without any difficulty (and, if they can't, there's always the skip option). Anyways, I'm enjoying the thread and I'm looking forward to seeing where the conversation goes.
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Aug 17, 2015 09:07
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I played a hidden object game once, though I immediately forgot what it was called. It had ghosts in it and the game just kind of stopped at one point with no resolution to speak of. By which I mean the plot kind of just ended suddenly, but also that the game ran in like an 800x600 window. When I mentioned this to a person who plays a lot of hidden object games, they said they had no idea which one I was talking about because apparently that's all of them. Tunahead fucked around with this message at 09:40 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 09:32
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JamieTheD posted:So the idea that these games are Shovelware does not, in fact, preclude them from being Girl Games: Games aimed at women with an outdated, often misogynistic view of what women actually want. If these games are doing well enough to support a shovelware industry funded by women, clearly they know well enough what women want. You are high-horsing it, and oughta recognize a few things: 1. When you list "problems" with these games, you are noting them not as a member of the target demographic or producer but as an outsider gauging a game's worth by how much it appeals to you and your concepts of what makes a game successful. 2. This is an exploitation genre. Just like Candy Crush exploits our urges to make little patterns and juicy light show explosions, just like Conan exploits our urges for violence and titties, these games succeed at soothing an itch. So you say these games have a lot of similarities in their stories with romance novels, and that seems apparent. How much? How experienced are you with romance novels? Why are you denigrating them? Why do you hate Conan? 3. "We can do better as gamers and the games industry" is always a crock of poo poo attitude. From what I see, these are pick-up-and-put-down type games, meant for easy understanding with lots of reinforcement. Games can certainly have more intricate stories with less obvious Nazis, but you haven't made an argument that this genre is good for that. There's something in these games you like. Your demands for them to have greater complexity sounds like gilding the lily. Crono Trigger works as a story because every quest you do is related to a character in your party and it works as a game because every dungeon has it's own little gimmick. It does not rely on its combat, which is stupid and simple but fortunately flashy and short. But what do you spend most of your time doing in Crono Trigger? Fighting. Do you know why? Because combat is an easy puzzle. Don't hate the easy puzzles.
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Aug 17, 2015 11:09
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The idea that something shouldn't be improved because it doesn't have to be is a crock of poo poo attitude. There's enough of them that there's plenty of space to gild a few lilies. If we're not in the demographic they're targeting, and yet they have something that we like, maybe it's worth making some that are targeted at us, and at the very least we're free to have a discussion about whether these improvements should be made, and how that could be done. Sure, they're giving people enough to satisfy them, but like romance novels, there's no reason not to seek improvement. There's no harm in trying to be more than some lovely easy pulp once in a while. TV can be better than Conan, and HOPAs can be better than The Gift.
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Aug 17, 2015 11:18
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All right, let me enter the Wild Mass Guessing game of who the target audience of these HOPAs can be: language learners, people who (first?) started playing games on tablets and people on the autistic spectrum (no, really, this is not going to be a derogatory post about sperglords and -ladies (well, I hope)). On the outset, let me establish a bit of gaming history. I (age 27) know HOPAs from my parents (55 and 56). We, as a family, have been playing games since the old 286s (early 1990s in Hungary, after the fall of communism, lots of old Western computers finding their way to new, Eastern Bloc households). We have been playing Dune 2, C&C, my mother was an avid fan of Knights and Merchants, my father was playing some arcade-ish games, and me and my sister were doing lots and lots of DOS platformers. We have also picked up a lot of adventure games from the classic era, including the original Dune game, which was an adventure game/Arrakis conquering simulator. We have played Simon the Sorcerer and the Legend of Kyrandia series, too. As time went on, we upgraded to 486s and Pentium 100s. Me and my sister gradually moved on to CRPGs, and later, fantasy MMOs, action-adventures, and I even picked up GTA (you see, we were never really a big fan of things with guns in it). I have always had a soft spot for adventure games (I wrote my MA thesis on the Monkey Island series) and I still try to find new titles I like (Life is Strange looks promising, I have enjoyed Broken Sword 5 and The Night of the Rabbit immensely). However, after my mum's obsession with Knights and Merchants wore off, my parents' enthusiasm for computer gaming dwindled. Until we bought our first iPad. Now, my mum picks up 1-hour trial versions of these HOPAs for free from BigFishGames, plays with them, and because she recognises that they are quite formulaic, she merrily tosses them aside after the hour is over and downloads the next one. Every once in a while, she finds a title she really likes (like the aforementioned Drawn, but also the regular ones with haunted house/lost princess/locked room murder mystery stories) and then she buys them so she can complete the whole game. You see, the shallow story is not a problem, because my mother speaks next to no English. But she has gradually accumulated a vocabulary of random household objects and knick-knacks, like 'rolling pin', 'spade', 'tennis racquet', 'shears', 'oars' and she has learnt to recognise the rudimentary HOPA instructions, such as "pick up", "help me find", "I have lost", "I cannot get", "ask the owl about the key", "this door is locked", "this might be useful", and the ubiquitous "I can't use these two together" and "Nothing interesting happens." Whenever she finds something she cannot make sense of, she either looks up a walkthrough (preferably illustrated), or just asks me what those weird words mean and I, sometimes frustrated that she cannot pick up a dictionary (for Heaven's sake!), tell her what a fusebox, an ignition key or a potion is. Sometimes my parents sit down and help each other by finding some more elusive, pixel-hunty objects and toss theories about what to do next back and forth. Over these games, we bond and she slowly gets more proficient at playing these games. I myself have learnt English by playing and reading walkthroughs for the more complex, dialogue-heavy adventure games and the strategy guides for Tycoons in my youth. Mobile gaming certainly helped a lot to establish HOPAs as a genre. This is partially because of the limitations of how long people are willing to wait until an App downloads from the Store, of how long you can focus on a problem when travelling on the bus or the tram, and because you don't need 3D art assets to show static screens with a few animations/cutscenes thrown in. The tablet stores and digital distribution sites thrive on the Long Tail, and the art style caters to those more familiar with the visual lexicon of storybooks and comics, but without the need for hand-drawn animation. Assets can be reused from game to game, sometimes transcending genres. In fact, I would say that HOPAs and HOGs are the closest equivalent to the 16th-19th century chapbooks, because of the heavy reuse of artwork, the focus on formulaic plot elements, the vague sense of adventure, the use of genre and the _supposed_ target audience (see how I dodged that bullet? ), who are presumed to be casual players, the low-end of gaming culture, in a very similar way to how chapbooks were marketed to rural folks in the Early Modern era. The gameplay is simple enough to start playing with no background in digital entertainment, there are plenty of handholding mechanics (an extensive hint system and sparkles) and most of the puzzles are, uhm, 'intuitive.' Whoever plays these games wants to use their brains... a bit. Otherwise, they would pick up a novel or watch a film. But the difference between novels and films on one hand and HOPAs on the other hand is that films and books have _social_ storylines, with plenty of human interest and drama. People have to act and react in a believable fashion, and even run-of-the-mill TV shows present human conflict on some scale: love, cheating, the use of power and violence to achieve one's ends, misery, misunderstandings (and jokes in comedy). Our player is not interested in the human side of the equation, they want to get away from that, and just find a simple solution to a (perhaps) trivial problem. Preferably something with objects. And helping other people. Through the use of objects. Even if other people are objects. Standing in the way to your goal.So that is one of the reasons why I believe HOPAs have a bit of an autistic aesthetic. Besides having problems with using their Theory of Mind and planning and carrying out actions in a flexible manner (i.e. impaired executive functions), autists have something called a detail-oriented cognitive style. This is the tree-in-the-woods perception: they are much quicker at finding some random piece of geometry from a jumble of different objects, whereas a typically developing mind would try to assemble everything into a whole (Gestalt). A bottom-up perception is something well-rewarded in HOPAs, and so is a puzzle design with an exclusive focus on the use of objects to gain entry and to appease people (mind you, this is something that plagued/plagues the whole adventure game genre, to different degrees). A lack of complicated dialogue cuts down on verbal ambiguity, and textual information always veers towards the imperative mode. There are no dialogue puzzles (as far as I am aware), which would ask the player to use language pragmatically, to achieve ends - that would require a fair bit of mentalising, which could go wrong. Now, notice that I am not saying autistic people cannot use language pragmatically at all, merely that they would prefer not to. Puzzles that are not about HOs usually require you to use objects in a fairly mechanistic manner (replace fuses or batteries, connect or connect cables and wires, place traps for animals, and of course, use keys to open doors (a TV antenna is a 'key' in this respect)). I am sure you could add more things, but what I am saying is that these design elements point towards a mode in which all interactions with the world become objective in the sense that everything is mediated through objects. All problems are solved with objects. It's as if the player is only there to make sure objects find their homes. This kind of view does favour a problem-solving attitude that is more prevalent in autistic thinking than in typically developing cognition. The only question that's left to answer is whether this is due to the audience or to the programmers (and object-oriented programming, if I use the term right) who are more likely to be on the spectrum and thus make games which reflect their preferred styles of thinking. Oh by the way, let me just offer you two books for your perusal: One is a book by Marcel Danesi, called The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life, which is a cultural history of puzzles from Ancient times to today's lateral thinking puzzles, riddles and optical illusions The other is by Jesper Juul, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, which explores things like the changing demographics of video game players and the design decisions decried by seasoned veterans
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Aug 17, 2015 11:33
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The fact that I posted the article doesn't mean that I'm of the opinion that HOPAs shouldn't improve; I was just listing some of the reasons why I think the genre has developed in the way that it has. As far as I can tell, most of these games were distributed by and bought on Big Fish Games, at least until recently, and I only infrequently saw HOPAs mentioned on Something Awful and other websites. With an increased presence on Steam and the potential to draw new gamers, I think it's very possible that developers will experiment more and try to create games that appeal to other demographics.
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Aug 17, 2015 12:58
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MooCowlian posted:From that indiegala bundle, I have enjoyed the Nightmare From The Deep games, and I've heard good things about Grim Legends and Enigmatis, although I haven't had a chance to go through them yet. Coincidentally, I just played through Enigmatis 1 & 2 the other day. You're right on the money with the "I have a billion Steam games and don't feel like playing any of them" thing. A lot of the time I'm up at odd hours and don't have the cognitive energy to leap into something more action, strategy, or even story oriented. It also feels nice to be able to work on crossing a few games off the backlog even when I'm not in a traditional "video game" mood. As for the games themselves, it was a rare case where their stories overtook the gameplay by a fair bit. Enigmatis 1 clearly played like a very early Artifex Mundi effort and best I can tell after some digging around, it is in fact one of their earliest games. The HO sections are much, much harder than later games, with poorly lit, low-contrast scenes (find two logs in an image that is entirely wood colored!). The second game is slightly more recent, but suffered from uncharacteristically wonky pacing and bad layouts. It seemed like the game was relying on zoomed-in subscreens more often than normal, which is a problem when at least two of them were barely noticeable (but obviously critical to game completion). There was another unintuitive stuck spot caused by not picking up an item that was ultimately too similar to other items in one of those "rummage through the junk" scenes. Admittedly, all of these could've been avoided if I hadn't been too stubborn about using the hint button (and worrying about achievement credit; I"m not sure which is more embarrassing). Unlike other games made by AM, Enigmatis features an evidence collecting and deduction element, as the protagonist is a proper detective. So as you come across scraps of information on the spooky goings on, they get added to an evidence board where you can make connections and sort out bits of the story in the same kind of low-impact, functional way that the rest of these games work. Anyway, the stories. I don't want to get into a whole plot synopsis, but while these games do have a formula w/r/t supernatural elements and such - I described it to a friend as "spooky Pirates of the Caribbean stuff" (and appropriate since AM has an entire trilogy of games chasing that theme) - Eigmatis goes quite a fair bit darker than I expected from a HOPA. These games love their "open a door and BOO! a skeleton pops out!" jump scares...yeah, well, in both games they have that scene except they're BOO! a mass grave full of victims of demonic ritual sacrifice!  The supernatural elements this time also involve an ancient demon, his immortal followers, and even a cameo by God and the angel Raphael. Another unusual feature of these games is that they end on very explicit cliffhangers. It's a cheap trick, but I admit, it hooked me, and now I'm bummed that Enigmatis 3 has yet to materialize.The one big flaw in the story is that the protagonist ends up being rendered as a complete idiot in the second game. The antagonist from the first game returns, in an initially limited form, locked away in a dungeon cell with only his eyes visible through a slit. He helps the protagonist along ala Hannibal Lector on the condition that she free him. It's only once his cell door is open and his entire form is visible that the protagonist realizes it's the man she's been hunting since the events of the first game. 
John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 13:38 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 13:34
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Wow. I expected discussion, but this really has brought people in, and I'm happy about that, even if some folks are angry.Julet Esqu posted:I've played a few of these games, on purpose, and I'm a woman (and often bored, though not a housewife), so I guess I feed into that stereotype about who these games are for. I kind of resent the implication that people (or bored housewives) who play these games just don't know what good games are, though. Like women just think a match three or a HO game is the height of gaming.* I know there are quality games. I've played quality games. I like those ,too. But these games, for all their faults, are usually pretty chill. Sometimes I just want to mellow out, put a podcast on, and hunt a picture for some doodads. A lot of these games are easy to play even when you are half asleep and there are times when this is a desirable quality (like when you are half asleep) It is a common problem that people denigrate players of casual games, and honestly... It's not deserved. Match-3 fills a purpose. Match-3 is expanding. Heck, we've even seen Match-3 mechanics in the Roguelike Megathread with the enjoyable hybrid Ironcast. Platformers started as the most casual of casual score attack games. Look at them now. First person adventures started with games like Twin Kingdom Valley and The Last Half of Darkness. Now we have Gone Home and Dear Esther and a whole bunch of atmospheric first person adventures in different genres. No, dissing "Filthy Casuals" is seriously counterproductive. Because everything we have today spawns from relatively simple ideas. It's what we do with them that counts, and how they entertain people. quote:Splatoon and Bioshock are expensive. These games are very, very cheap. You get what you pay for, but at least you (as a 12-17 year old) don't have to save up for it or wait for your birthday or Christmas to roll around. The aforementioned bored housewife would not have to choose between buying one of these and a package of diapers. These have their niche. I really should have said something cheaper like Freedom Planet or the like, but you are quite right, they do have a niche. quote:These things are similar to romance novels, not so much in content, but for the role they play. There's better quality stuff out there, to be sure. But however much you may enjoy quality literature that causes you to think and grow and contemplate the human condition, sometimes you just want some cheap fluff that's easy to consume and that you don't have to think about so hard. This is not to say that I don't think quality matters. These games are so obviously slapped together quickly on a shoestring budget. I think that's a shame because I'd like to see what they could do if they set out to make something really good. I'd love to see that, and hopefully we'll start seeing that, if that Gamasutra article is an indication of a good start. quote:This was another thing that drew me to the genre. I am a woman and I like when I can play games as a woman. The female leads in a lot of these games may or may not be strong or decent characters, but in my experience they're at least not any more helpless and stupid than anybody else in the game. I can get behind that. This is a drat good point. As others have pointed out, HOPAs have a better track record of writing women, overall, and that's something to be learned from. Maternal and romantic themes are often used, and when they're done well, they're done well. When they're done not-so-well, we have The Gift. Cinephile86 posted:I'm someone who plays hidden object games from time to time. I think that it's important to note that, while some (probably many) people who play hidden object games play traditional adventure games as well, many casual gamers are unfamiliar with adventure game logic. I found a pretty interesting article a while back in which the author wrote about the changes that Dave Gilbert (the creator of the Blackwell series) needed to make in order to better accommodate casual audiences when making "Emerald City Confidential" for PlayFirst. For instance, since playtesting showed that casual gamers would often only read the first and last lines of dialogue in a scene or skip over dialogue entirely, Gilbert needed to significantly trim the amount of dialogue in the game and provide an onscreen task system so players would always know exactly what they needed to do next. The article also mentioned that casual gamers might stop playing a game altogether if they became stuck on a puzzle for more than a few minutes and generally want their puzzles to be integrated into the game world. The author makes a few other points as well so I'll post the article in case anyone wants to read it (he starts talking about "Emerald City Confidential" on pg. 2 but the whole article is worth a read): http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/5889/state_of_the_pointandclick_art.php Adventure Game Logic is definitely a Specialist skill, and a learned one. One thing I will definitely not rag on is the simplicity of the adventure game puzzles. 95% of them are things you can work out easily, and that is undeniably a good thing. Next update, however, will show that there is a learned skill with HOPAs, and I look forward to the "OF COURSE THIS HAPPENS... Wait... It happens because it's a game, but you're never actually told you can do this. You often have to learn it because it's the last thing you can't find. Oh." It's a little thing, but it's a perfect example of something that hasn't been fixed because it's perceived not to be broken, not necessarily because it isn't. You, me, other HOPA players... We're used to it. But the new player won't be. And that first time they encounter it could indeed lead to the "more than a few minutes" of frustration (Especially if they pick the wrong game first, and are colourblind... More common a situation than you'd think). To take this example into another genre, part of the reason Nuclear Dawn failed was a) It required voice chat or experience for good team play, b) Go listen to a pubbie game voice chat. Some of the time it'll be fun and carefree... The rest of the time, it'll be BITCH gently caress [RACIAL SLUR RACIAL SLUR] COCKSUCKING [CARTMAN VOICE CLIP], and c) The folks who had the experience and communicated well would invariably steamroll any newbies. Accessibility. It's harder than people think. benjoyce posted:More excellent input! Language learning! Now there's a use for HOPAs, and yes, that is a good purpose for them! HOPAs are indeed a potential tool for language learning, due to the visual representations and repeated objects of varying styles! I can also see how the story would be less important in those cases. Also hello, fellow player from the Dawn of PC! Let us share stories about what a pain in the rear end making menus with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT were! I would, however, use caution when assigning styles of play or programming to an "ASD as opposed to Neurotypical" viewpoint. Firstly because it runs the risk of pigeonholing, which can be counterproductive (Folks play X Genre because ASD -> "Oh, that's a 'sperg thing" -> Continued misinformation -> Continued misperception of folks with what is considered an atypical neurology), and second because it's a chain of logic with an assumption at its core (This shares similarities with the products of folks with Autism + The profession shows a higher proportion of folks with ASD -> These games are often programmed by folks with ASD. Sounds logical, until you realise that the first part could be down to other factors, such as similar output from the same company in the same series, or aping the (then) more successful company's practice viz UI/Coding/Placement) Not saying you're guilty of that, I'm not qualified to say. But I do recommend caution in such cases. MartianAgitator posted:If these games are doing well enough to support a shovelware industry funded by women, clearly they know well enough what women want. You are high-horsing it, and oughta recognize a few things: 1. As others have mentioned, just because I'm not currently part of the target demographic doesn't mean I can't be. There are HOPAs with men. There are "action" HOPAs. But HOPAs doing better leads to more cash for HOPAs. Good example, I don't see many HOPAs with People of Colour protagonists. Maybe that means I'm not looking hard enough... But all four of these games I'm showing have characters, in the majority, consisting of white folks. I'm white... And even I can see, from my position of privilege, that HOPAs don't seem to do any better than the rest of the industry in this regard. Women? Yeah, they do that better overall, and that makes me happy. That's something, as the Extra Credits team points out, we can learn from. But everything has room for improvement. As an aside, I honestly don't care if there're more dudes, less dudes, same dudes... I'm mostly well represented enough, thanks. 2. I actually like Conan (The original stories, the Arnie film... Less so the modern incarnation). I love me some Pulp. Hell, some of them have become classics in their own right. But that doesn't mean I'm not aware of the problems. Fifty Shades is perfectly fine junk reading (For enjoyment) so long as you're aware that it's not actually how BDSM relationships work, and copying this poo poo will lead to abusive relationships. It would seem a simple thing to know, right? Except, sadly, it ain't. "Daddy Doms" are totally something subs looking for a relationship have to keep an eye out for. And y'know what? A lot of games are "Exploitation." Battlefield's gun system has nearly always been a Skinner Box. Play our game more, get nice things. ME3's War Progress was a Skinner Box. Play multiplayer matches and do poo poo you don't necessarily want to do, get a better ending. But Battlefield evolved (Not always to the better, but hey). The ME series told a pretty compelling story. And some HOPAs, while being "Exploitation Shovelware", still manage to tell a compelling story. Then you have something like The Gift... More on that as and when it happens. So yeah, games can totally improve. And the reasons they might want to do so are below. 3. Not really. The alternative is to go "Welp!" every time we get a rushed Piece of poo poo. The debacle that was Sword of the Stars 2 made Paradox seriously rethink a few things, and, while it didn't lead to massive improvement, it still made things better. Paradox games are still fairly buggy on release. But they definitely have better tabs on it than they did before. Compare that to Ubisoft, who don't need my cashmoneys, and could reasonably survive without a fair few players... Often buggy, rushed releases, every now and again they try to push Always Online DRM onto poo poo, until it stops working properly, at which point they pull a Doctor Claw (Next time, Gadget! Next... Time!). Ignoring problems in our own industry led to things like DoritoGate, The Publisher Silence (A tactic AAA companies use to this day when faced with awkward questions like "Wait, you have Z-Levels already... Why can't you have pools in the Sims 4 on release again?" or "How exactly did Arkham Knight on PC get released in the state it was again?")... Ignoring problems in our playerbase has led to death threats to developers over stupid poo poo like the ending to a game (ME3) or even joking about how maybe the character could be a woman (Mighty No. 9) It also makes sense from a purely fiscal perspective. More inclusivity, for example, means it appeals, from the get-go, to more folks. Accessibility means more new players can hop on (more cashmoneys for you). Buggy pieces of poo poo lose you sales. Bad writing loses you customers. For all that Candy Crush is supposedly a piece of shovelware (And Zynga are definitely no angels corporation wise), it does its job. It sucks you in with that simple gameplay, and god knows I know, it can suck you in for a while. 108 days clean and counting. Am I asking for greater complexity? Doesn't have to be greater complexity. In fact, Hidden Object Games without story or other puzzles work well, and they do that because they are less complex. I'm not looking for Pride and Prejudice: The Sins Of Society (I'm definitely not looking for that, I've had enough of folks who misinterpret Austen to last a lifetime, thanks!) I'm looking for little things. Like not running the risk of my main character being a museum curator who puts their daughter in danger because of Goosebumps level stupidity. Or sympathy for the colourblind. Or a better mesh with the Hidden Object aspect (Clues! The thing I want being hidden under the junk, and it looks like a logical search, instead of the thing I want being right there in the open! Hell, a particularly bureaucratic demon who demands I find these things is a start! (Okay, the last one's a joke, but you can see possibilities here, right?))... Again, when we get to Shadows, it will turn into more good things than bad. Because the writing's better. The accessibility is better. The variety's better. The aesthetic consistency is better. The only things that aren't are the Colourblind problem (Oh, gently caress me, that loving Lizard... That loving Lizard...  ) and the difficulty curve on the HOPAs (Starts with something like 24 objects and a combo lock puzzle in the first Hidden Object game. Can get harder.)In fact, one of the things I applaud about HOPAs is that the UI is, with few exceptions, exactly the same. And it works. Even games only slightly more complex than HOPAs have hosed this up. And that's one thing that ain't broke, and doesn't need to be fixed. Same with at least some of the puzzles (At least some. Being cautious here, because puzzles, as noted, are actually a somewhat tricky business.) Loving the points raised, and loving the fact that folks are talking about their experiences with HOPAs! 
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Aug 17, 2015 14:01
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JamieTheD posted:Language learning! Now there's a use for HOPAs, and yes, that is a good purpose for them! HOPAs are indeed a potential tool for language learning, due to the visual representations and repeated objects of varying styles! I can also see how the story would be less important in those cases. Also hello, fellow player from the Dawn of PC! Let us share stories about what a pain in the rear end making menus with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT were! Yup, thank you for the logical dissection of my arguments. I am not positing an AS(C) (British scientists have adopted the term 'condition') vs. NT Ragnarök. That is a pernicious, binary view of neurological difference, going against the idea of a spectrum and subclinical autistic traits (the Broad Autism Phenotype). On the other hand, what do you think of Espen Aarseth's subchapter in which he calls the text adventure Deadline the "autistic detective agency" (1997, p. 115-123)? Adam Cadre, a notable IF writer suggests pretty much the same thing on his blog/homepage: Adam Cadre posted:the author does for the player what the autistic person is incapable of doing for himself. No wonder there seems to be a disproportionate number of autistic-spectrum folk in IF fandom: it must be wonderful to wander around a virtual world where surroundings can be completely apprehended without being overwhelming (which isn't guaranteed even for graphical adventures). That's the kind of argument I was hoping to make. I think there is more to this ASC connexion than previously thought of. Nonetheless, the last thing I want is genres being typecast as "only appealing to a certain demographic and therefore inferior". I know people on the spectrum who just luuuurve literature. Even Jane Austen! (Seriously, what's your position on Jane Austen being misinterpreted? Why? And is she even...? You think she is seen as overly conservative and too often high-jacked for 'British heritage' films? Or is it more about having seen too many genre crossover/gaslight romance updaptations?) Anyways, I wonder what you'd make of Phyllis Bottomer's So Odd a Mixture: Along the Autistic Spectrum in 'Pride and Prejudice' . (I don't believe she was autistic, nor that P&P was a showcase for Asperger's in 19th c. England, but I really do wonder about other people's ideas.) Uh, going back to AGs and HOPAs, I don't necessarily think that people on the spectrum are somehow ruling the games industry and bring us subpar games, merely that the constraints and affordances of the genre, its conventions, the expectations of the audience and the design team, as well as the machines on which they are played have all contributed to this object-oriented (in the literal, not the CS sense) gameplay with a reduced focus on nonverbal sociality and sta(b)le patterns of problem-solving. On a lighter note, one of the reasons why I like the Windows/GOG/DOSBOX emulator era is that I no longer have to manually adjust puffers, EMS memory, MSCDEX, or tell that my SoundBlaster is A220, its IRQ is 5 and my DMA is 1.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:31
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benjoyce posted:On a lighter note, one of the reasons why I like the Windows/GOG/DOSBOX emulator era is that I no longer have to manually adjust puffers, EMS memory, MSCDEX, or tell that my SoundBlaster is A220, its IRQ is 5 and my DMA is 1. ...You didn't really have to do that back then much, either.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:47
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Cheez posted:...You didn't really have to do that back then much, either. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 18:55
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Um, in our little corner of the globe, we really had to, because we mostly got copies of shareware stuff, we swapped 3.5 diskettes, and a fair bit of the computers were not purchased from a vendor but bought on the flea market, so we really did our best to make sure everything worked fine. I recall doing this for Pinball Fantasies, Titus the Fox, One Must Fall 2097, an F1 racer and the many animated platformers, such as Lion King and Aladdin. I'm not saying that those memories accurately reflect the actual frequency with which you had to edit CFS and AEB, but I swear it was a staple of our gaming lives here.
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Aug 17, 2015 18:57
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Since this seems to be a very discussion-heavy LP, I'd just like to say that I have no idea what Hidden Object Puzzle Adventures even are, have never heard of them before, and came in to find out what exactly they are. I'm waiting with bated breath to see an example appear in the gameplay.
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Aug 18, 2015 01:01
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Don't worry, that's incoming (In spades!) later in the day. For now, however, I have to make a quick edit, because a) I'd forgotten something, and b) Because it is an excellent opportunity to show you some Quality Voice Acting! The video, for those who don't want to go through the update looking for it, is here. Some clues, and, of course, some Good Ol' Southern Gals talking. I'll continue to reply to discussion after the update.
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Aug 19, 2015 12:17
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The Gift Part 2 – Stabby McDeatherson's First Victim(?) Our journal immediately started sending out the Slow Moving Glowies of I Wrote Paragraphs Down Immediately, Please Read... But we're going to ignore them for a second, because there's a sodding body in the room. No, wait... that case looks enticing, and...  poo poo poo poo poo poo. I'd hoped to have show more things off before this, but no, my Plot Object sense was too strong, and so we're immediately sucked into a Find The Hidden Objects game. I'm not going to show you this one in video form, because, for this game, it's somewhat tame, but you'll note that the majority of these objects weren't in sight before, and yet... All of a sudden, the place is strewn with trash. Trash we have to pick through for 12 objects. See if you can spot everything but the locket in under 1 minute and 45 seconds. That's how long it took me to find everything including the locket. Which, by the way, is inside the teddy bear, and we get it by opening the teddy bear up with a straight razor. Some games, it must be said, are better about showing where these object hunts are. This one... Not so much. Exactly the same contextual cursor as we'll get for looking closer at the body on the bed, and much the same sparklies if we had them on, too. Now... Guess how much of this assorted detritus (Which has no bearing on our scene, the victim, the perp, or indeed, anything but “A collection of random crud that springs up out of nowhere”) we get to keep.  ...That's right. One item. 90% of HOPAs will do this. The most I've seen them let you keep is three items. Three. The other 10% will... Ahhh, but we'll get to that. Not right now, maybe not even in this game... But we'll get to it. Suffice to say, this is my main problem with the “Hidden Object” part of Hidden Object Puzzle Adventures: The majority of the time, they're puzzles for the sake of puzzles. They're plot gates, hiding a single item you need (at most, three) behind a “Hunt The Object” minigame. 95% of the time, the object we need to progress will be right in the open, and it won't end the hunt. Honestly, it makes for a more awkward fit than ResEvil puzzle locks we'll encounter in the genre (Those are often better justified). Other ideas have been mentioned, and, to be fair to the genre, some of the more modern games do try and mix it up in a useful fashion, but, for this game, this is what we have. Still, back to the story.  The mark on the wall immediately nets us another journal entry. So let's read the two journal entries we got in the last... 3 minutes.   Well, Sarah's, er... Surprisingly chipper for someone who has come across the work of the infamous  And we're going to do it with this here staticky TV! Yes, playdies and gentlegoons, a TV is a perfect substitute for a Crystal Ball! Let your witch friends know, if they don't already! (For all my ragging, I actually like this, as it does fit the criteria for a divinatory focus) Nonetheless, we're going to need a sample from our victim here, so...  Snip! This, by the way, shows the general quality of item interaction animations. I hope you're all suitably impressed, because it doesn't really get better than this. In fact, in other games it may get worse. Does it need to better? Honestly, it works, and that's good enough... But not everyone would agree. By the way, we need to do this because the dead body...  ...Isn't too helpful. Either way, the puzzle is quite simple. There are six ritual elements, four quadrants, and four candles. When we get the right element in the right quadrant, the candles flare the hell up...  ...Like so. The picture gets clearer the more we get right (although we have to turn the TV off and back on again to check), and once we get all four right, it's cutscene time. If you guessed that brute forcing is the only way to solve this puzzle, you'd be absolutely correct. It requires only the mental faculty to say “Oh, that's what they meant by the candles burning brighter!” and moving poo poo about semirandomly until you get it right. So you can see how people might think this genre is for children or young adults. But we'll see further disproof of this soon enough. Again, I actually like this particular puzzle, because it's simple, it gives immediate and obvious feedback, and, for our first puzzle puzzle, it fits well on the ol' difficulty curve. Nonetheless, we succeed, aaaaand...  CUTSCENE TIME! (Also a bit of the puzzle) Ahhh, that... Cleared up absolutely nothing. Well, it told us we're looking for a ring now, because it might be important. Also that some lady gave him the ring because “The Veil had been lifted”  . Presumably the lady is also important in some fashion. Either way... He doesn't have the ring. Maybe it's in this door, presumably to a bathroom? ...Locked. That paperclip we found, in an interesting inversion of Adventure Game Logic, doesn't work. Nor does it work on any other locked door in the place. Well, poo poo. This means backtracking. Luckily not far... This time. Just downstairs, back to Mrs. Voorhees. Or, more specifically...  ...To this door. Which is locked by a deadbolt chain from the other side. Somehow. Well, never mind, we'll open it... With our hacksaw. In front of Mrs. Voorhees. Who gives not a single gently caress. Who locked this door again? And how?  Well, it certainly wasn't anyone inside the room, that's for sure! Bad Puzzle Justification: 3! But wait, it gets better! Of interest in this room are precisely three things: Some Bug-B-Gone (Which we put into our bug sprayer, sensibly), a Ladder (Which we pick up), and...  ...A Master Key under the floorboard... Which we can't get yet... Hrm... My puzzle sense is tingling... It's leading me... Up the stairs, to the hallway where we'd cleared out everything but the radiator...  ...And the second Hidden Object game, which wasn't activated until now. See if you can guess what the single object we're going to need is this time! Oh, the batteries are inside the radio, which you need to open with the screwdriver that's somehow balanced on the wall. No, it's not actually resting on the umbrella and the trolley's pushbar. It's resting on the umbrella and thin air. It's almost like there wasn't much effort put into placement of the objects! This, by the way, took a shameful 2 minutes. ...That's right, it was the hammer. Bet you thought it was something interesting, like that fish-hook? Nahhh, unless it's part of an Oblique Puzzle Lock(TM) , it's going to be something bog standard, hidden in among the trash. This is both good and bad. It makes the puzzles easier, which is sensible, but it also makes it more prosaic (There are HOPAs where the inventory solution is still Normal Logic as opposed to Adventure Game Logic, but the results are more interesting, so... It varies.) We go back downstairs, pry up the key, and head back to the only other locked door in this area.  Oh hey, it's a bathroom! Opening the medicine cabinet, we see a magnifying glass, which means we can look closer, which... Wait, poo poo, please don't be a-  A NEW POWER HAS APPEARED! ...gently caress. That's right... Three hidden object puzzles in about ten minutes. The butterfly is actually sort of visible right now, but won't be removable until we've cleaned it. This one I've video captured, all 2 and a bit minutes of it, because I want you to not only have the experience, but see the magical power all HOPA protagonists possess. And no, you will never be told this is the case. Did you watch it? Did you see it? In case you didn't... Sarah scrubbed at a painting which had a butterflyish shape on it already, magically revealed clean line-art of a butterfly, and peeled it off the canvas with a cry of “Ah, yes, that's exactly the thing I'm looking for for arbitrary reasons that have nothing to do with the one item we're getting out of this!” So let's briefly mention another “Target Market” for this kind of game: “Casual Players” (IE – People who like simpler gameplay, taking less time. We're obviously going to ignore the associated perjorative aspect, because it's a bullshit perjorative in the first place.) If you were a first time player of such a genre (Every game in this genre has this little “quirk”), would you think “Yes, I need to clean this mouldy painting, and that butterfly is the very thing I'm after”? Or would you, not having encountered this at all up to this point, point the cloth at various things, be told “Nope” (In an increasingly hostile manner... Enough misses earns you a jumpscare picture of Stabby McDeatherson... I miss that this time, but I'm sure I'll get it eventually), give up and use the Hint Crystal (Which you'd mostly avoided till now, because there's no time limit, and most of this isn't exactly hard to find), and then cry “BULLSHIT!” on discovering what you were actually meant to do? Be honest! Or don't! Now, for all that I am making a bit of a drama about it, it's very important to note that I have not found a single HOPA that outright tells you you can do this. The only way you're going to find out is either by clicking everything that resembles what you're looking for (Remember, this is in direct contrast to the adventure game puzzles, which nearly always use Real-World Logic, not Adventure Game Logic... Although I will say that this game proves an exception later on), or by hitting the hint button when it's the last item you need to find (As the Hint system in most of these games will prioritise from among what can be found without further interactions over the more difficult hidden elements). It's only really going to affect you, as a player, three times at most before you get it (Unless you're particularly bad at pattern recognition), but the first solution wastes time (And is not always permissible... Some HOPAs heavily discourage random clicking in these segments, for the obvious reason that it's cheesing), while the second can hurt a new player's self-confidence and pride. Neither are good for the new player (Because, as has been mentioned in discussion, frustration with a puzzle can be a serious mood killer), and the correction is simple: Outright state it. Suspension of disbelief is not really a problem here, as we're already rummaging through random, often out of place trash for up to three items that are almost invariably in plain sight. Also keep in mind that there are pure hidden object games, and pure puzzle games. So... What's enticing the player to HOPAs that those aren't? and so, with the one inventory item gained from this (The Dental Floss), we come to the final puzzle of this update!  How the heck do we fish out whatever's in the bathtub? We have a ladder, a hammer, some dental floss, and a paperclip. Well, laid out like that, there's only two things that could possibly work...   ...And it's both of them. We went fishing in a plughole, and our reward... The ring we need! Next time, we'll open a lock box, make some deductions, solve some more actual puzzles... And, of course... More hidden objects that are somehow invisible until we zoom in. JamieTheD fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Aug 19, 2015 |
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Aug 19, 2015 16:16
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It's clearly intended for the working housewive that can imagine she's unraveling clues to a murder mystery while dusting. I don't even loving care if it's offensive, this is loving ridiculous. See, it hit me that I never actually played a game like this - and I thought hidden object games were basically supersimplified first person adventures (basically Trapped and its abominable ilk) where you search the screens for an item you need to pass further in a remotely puzzle-like fashion. This, this is different, and people do it for fun...?
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Aug 19, 2015 17:18
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The "peel a butterfly off canvas" thing is something I've seen a lot and hasn't really bothered me until you raised it, but now it sounds really stupid. Thanks. I think that screwdriver is resting on the wooden panelling which probably juts out of the wall slightly in comparison to the wallpaper higher up, rather than actually floating. I've seen floating things, but I'm not sure the screwdriver is one of them. As for what attracts me to these games over pure puzzle or hidden object games, I guess I like some kind of structure, no matter how silly or unbelievable it is, to give me some kind of purpose or goal. It doesn't really have to be good. I think earlier I said that the puzzles being obstructions didn't make any sense because who cares about the story, we're here for the dumb puzzles, but I guess that's not quite true. I do like a theme and at least a vague goal or something to take me from puzzle to puzzle, even if I don't care all that much about the substance of it. Part of the casual appeal is definitely in having some level of structure, but not having to think too hard or concentrate too much on it.
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Aug 19, 2015 17:23
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MooCowlian posted:I think that screwdriver is resting on the wooden panelling Having to put enough of them up that I can comfortably say that that bit of wood paneling is called a chair rail. To weigh in on the who are these for. I know someone who has to call people, who want to talk to her, and then she has to wait on hold for a bit. She likes these types of games because a hidden object + a puzzle <10min and roughly how long she has to wait. In this case it seems to be a solitaire replacement. Who here remembers the hidden objects in highlights magazine? And/or who loved Where's Waldo when they were a kid? And what about I Spy? I think that those games are what cause people to think that these games are aimed at Kids/YA.
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Aug 19, 2015 17:40
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 13:09 |
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Hmm, the images in the second update don't appear to be working right. Maybe its just my computer. grandalt fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Aug 19, 2015 |
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Aug 19, 2015 17:51
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