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Nakar posted:I don't consider the use of meta-knowledge from a death to be fair puzzle design unless the game is specifically built around it in some way. For example, ManxomeBromide recently did an LP of the IF game Hadean Lands where looping actions and acquiring information from dead end gamestates was acceptable, but that's because the structure of the game is meant to work that way and you can't beat it without forcing unwinnable states, and part of the game's final puzzle is figuring out ways to stretch your resources and accumulated knowledge far enough to not render the game unwinnable en route to the part where you actually win. It's kind of interesting, because the jump between MadMaze and Hadean Lands here wasn't a jump. MadMaze is following the rules of a lot of the earliest adventure games, where you learned not to do bad things by noticing that they killed you, after the fact. This kind of stunt was pretty central to the games like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and it wasn't hard to run afoul of it in the early graphic adventures too. But in the late 1990s, you had a number of well-received adventure games—Varicella is the one everyone cites, with good reason, and Lock & Key and Spider & Web from the same era are kind of similar—where the player is expected to flail and fail a lot at the start, but ultimately grow into the role. In the premise for all of those games the PC is notionally a master plotter, and the game is about executing their grand design. In practice you were creating the grand design as you worked through the game over dozens of tries, but the implication is that you need to work harder to fill the PC's shoes. It got the name Accretive PC, and it occupies a comfy niche right between "learn by dying" and "repetition is part of the in-universe story as well as the story of the player mastering the game." In Lock & Key, for instance, the main character is a master dungeon designer filling one last dungeon with sinister traps as one final contract before you retire, and while your first few runs will fail ignominiously, you'll learn from those failures and manage to evolve a proper combination of traps to do in the pesky adventurers you hope to contain. But in fiction, the idea would be that the PC is drawing upon his years of experience, and is relying on caution and foresight rather than knowledge of alternate futures. MadMaze can't reasonably be described as using the accretive-PC approach, though. The decisions that are being made are too brute-froce, and there's no real sense in that the player is becoming more skilled at some task the PC is good at. At best, the player's diligence is manifesting in a winning playthrough as the Runner's dumb luck. ManxomeBromide fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Jul 25, 2018 |
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Jul 25, 2018 05:34
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There's also the issue that some decisions are clearly wrong, and are intentionally so for comedy. Choosing to retire forever in the nice little temple area in the green is obviously wrong, so much so that nobody would ever pick that option except to see what funny response results from it. In that respect, MadMaze is often encouraging the player to die, if only to see what results from choosing an obvious game-ending option. This happens in IF as well, though I think it's more common in single action or short IF where trying wacky and potentially narrative-derailing options isn't a huge investment of the player's efforts, and where trying many different things is expected because in some instances "trying different things to see what happens" is the gameplay. EDIT: It's also worth noting that some of the jokes in MadMaze don't pay off unless you die. The thing about the monster in Castle Perilous eating heroes with relish seems like a weirdly comic thing for one of the prisoners to tell you, and only pays off if you fail to kill the thing and discover that it secretes something that looks a little bit like relish. So I do get the sense that dying was supposed to be happening throughout, if only for the player to try things that they know will end the game to enjoy the game's sense of humor about it. And that's all fine, I think... but not so much when dealing with a serious puzzle state. Nakar fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Jul 25, 2018 |
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Jul 25, 2018 07:10
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