Anybody like this game or any other adventure games? I finally got around to playing both TLJ and Dreamfall. TLJ's definitely a classic. As for Dreamfall...  the story was alright and the visuals were pretty great, but the gameplay was somewhat disappointing with a slew of mechanics that were boring at best and frustrating at worst. Also, it took me a while to get it to work on Windows 7 with the stupid copyright protection. For the €1.50 I paid for it that was sort of acceptable, but otherwise... urgh, DRM is the worst.

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In the case of TLJ sometimes even if something seems obvious, first you have to mention it to the right character or some such. That's usually not a problem because a lot of the fun is in going through the dialog options, but it can throw you off the scent if you do something "too early".

Btw, are you sure you're thinking of TLJ? It doesn't look terribly good compared to Dreamfall. The scenes rendered in real time by your GPU in Dreamfall hugely exceed the quality of even the prerendered cutscenes in TLJ.

Anyhoo, I don't have anything against walkthroughs or other means of "cheating" past the point where it stops being fun. In Dreamfall there was this one part with a bunch of trolls (or grubbers I think they're called) which might've been a reasonable puzzle, but because you had to sneak around while doing it, it was a lot harder. After dying three or four times I just couldn't be bothered and searched for a savegame at the end of that puzzle online. I also didn't care too much for the umptieth evade the killer robot business. Don't make noise so they don't hear you and stay behind them so they don't see you. Yeah, yeah, I get it already. The actual adventure game parts weren't terribly satisfactory, the "action" parts were something like boring at best and frustrating at worst, but all in all the graphics & voice acting were fairly good and the story was decent, so as a sort of interactive movie that returned to Stark & Arcadia it worked.

One thing I really appreciate about a certain variety of adventure games is that you don't die. They just find a way to stick you back to where you were. Dreamfall does that too because it has autosave right before points where you might die, but it's a bit more... traumatic.

Suffering DRM is sort of your own choice if you want to pretend to be on the right side of the law. Entirely optional.

I've bought something like two games with DRM since '03-ish, excluding a bunch of Wii games. I neither buy nor play DRM-encumbered junk, because most of it isn't worth playing anyway. I've only bought DRM-free indie games like Osmos and Achron.

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Well, I'd recommend it if you want to see more of some familiar characters and places. As its own game... I'm not entirely sure. While the controls were probably better than e.g. Grim Fandango and Monkey Island 4, it just didn't sufficiently evoke the adventure genre. But I guess that's why Wikipedia calls it an action adventure. But I wasn't really looking for action, nor was the action particularly well executed. And unfortunately I think both the action and adventure parts suffered from trying to be both. Still, it's a decent interactive movie, like I said. For €1.50 it definitely delivered.

Here's something of interest: a 1989 essay on how to design adventure games by the creator of Monkey Island http://grumpygamer.com/2152210

I did, and absolutely enjoyed, The Longest Journey. As Funcom is an Oslo company, I've visited (most likely the former) premises, and several Funcom employees started to work for Opera, I probably would have tried it anyway, but it was good. The gameplay was fine, like adventure games generally you do get locked in from time to time, but it played out well. More importantly it built up an atmosphere, initially it seemed a bit meh/cliche, but it became more engrossing as you played on. I would compare a bit with Myst, which gameplay-wise was almost pure problem-solving, but the atmosphere was unrivalled, but  in a sense Myst had it easy as there were nobody there.

Dreamfall I bought, but I don't think I played it, and don't know if I have a version of Windows any longer.

They should release the sequel, Dreamfall Chapters, on a whole swath of platforms including Linux. I never played Myst.

Btw, did you ever read Sandman?

There was a kind of quest game (I guess this is what you mean by adventure games) for Sony Ericsson P800 over a decade ago. It was free and basic. For example when the traveller encountered a wolf, the fight consisted in taking-turns-one-by-one instances of attacks, no retreat, no surrender. Whoever started was the winner. Or this is how it looked to me. I never was good at figuring out hidden stuff in games. Not my genre.

Strategy games were more my genre. About two decades ago I was seriously addicted to Warcraft II. So seriously that I actually had to cut the addiction by drastic means. Now I am cautious about playing even chess. But for old times' sake I recently sought up and downloaded Warcraft II music. Awesome.

I have no clue about any of the games mentioned here. I suppose they are all like Doom, except that there's more searching of charms rather than killing enemies. And this feels perfectly sufficient knowledge for me.

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I was also a fan of Glenn Stafford's music for WarCraft II.

Yep. We both have the same favourite tune. Not (entirely) a coincidence, I think

I have no clue about any of the games mentioned here. I suppose they are all like Doom, except that there's more searching of charms rather than killing enemies. And this feels perfectly sufficient knowledge for me.

By the Balance, no.

I have no clue about any of the games mentioned here. I suppose they are all like Doom, except that there's more searching of charms rather than killing enemies. And this feels perfectly sufficient knowledge for me.

By the Balance, no.

Balance of what? Balance of Force? Does this mean adventure games are more like virtual role playing rather than hunt-and-shoot-and-upgrade-weapons-trick-and-cheat games? This would be very much like the quest game on my first smartphone SE P800 was. It had character choice with background stories, lots of emphasis on trick-and-cheat, while shooting was almost accidental aspect, pretty much non-existent. Prince of Persia is far more adventurous.

Balance of what? Balance of Force?

Play TLJ to find out.

Does this mean adventure games are more like virtual role playing rather than hunt-and-shoot-and-upgrade-weapons-trick-and-cheat games?

I suppose you could say that, but gaining experience and upgrading weapons and armor is kind of the definition of a computer RPG.

Prince of Persia is far more adventurous.

Prince of Persia is an action game, more specifically a platformer. Of course, you could argue that just about anything with the faintest hint of a story is a kind of action-adventure. Adventure games are story and dialog driven, like a kind of interactive books or movies. You could call them interactive fiction, although I'm not sure to what extent that term includes graphic adventure games. Some degree of puzzle solving is also implied, because otherwise you'd actually have an interactive book or movie, but from what I know about Myst I think that's probably more accurately called a kind of crossover between an adventure and a puzzle game. One of the most successful adventure game series in recent years has been Phoenix Wright.

Incidentally, you can play Zork (and many other early adventure games) online.

I just purchased Dreamfall Chapters because the €1,50 I paid for Dreamfall: The Longest Journey was money well spent. Dreamfall Chapters is DRM-free and available for Linux, Mac OS, and Linux, so there's no ideological reason not to buy it (like there might be for, say, anything DRM-ed that comes out of EA). I hope to play the game tonight as release is imminent.

They should release the sequel, Dreamfall Chapters, on a whole swath of platforms including Linux. I never played Myst.

Btw, did you ever read Sandman?

Not much, it came at a time when my interest of comix was on the wane, so I read an issue or two. Neil Gaiman and Dave Sim, whose Cerebus I did follow, had a mutual admiration society at the time, but that wasn't enough to fire up my interest.



Myst would be a rather contemplative experience, especially these days, but it would share the scratching-at-the-prison-wall feeling of other adventure games when stuck. It happened occasionally in Myst I think, rarely in Longest Journey.

Myst would do fine on a phone, while Longest Journey would be more of a TV play.

available for Linux, Mac OS, and Linux

One of those Linuxes should be Windows.

Myst would be a rather contemplative experience, especially these days, but it would share the scratching-at-the-prison-wall feeling of other adventure games when stuck.

These days walkthroughs are easy to come by. Well, except for just-released stuff like Dreamfall Chapters.

Yeah, but that is not generally necessary. Perhaps in an adventure game like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was borderline evil. But yes, nowadays we can watch walkthroughs on Youtube, which is a lot quicker than actually playing the game. Like this walkthrough of that Greatest Game of Lore, Nethack:

Here's a short and sweet one of ascending as a valkyrie (using the graphic tile version).

nowadays we can watch walkthroughs on Youtube, which is a lot quicker than actually playing the game.

That would probably take the fun out of it. In a game like Monkey Island I'm always clicking everything while trying to avoid actually doing what's intended until I'm ready. I imagine watching a video of someone doing that wouldn't be even half as fun and you'd rather just watch the story progress instead.

Here is a blog post about the porting of Dreamfall: Chapters to Unity 5. I'd missed it because it wasn't posted on the dev blog.

For the past four months, Red Thread Games has been working on two concurrent and intimately connected projects. The first is Revelations, the penultimate episode of the Dreamfall Chapters serial adventure. The second is a complete revamp -- an extreme makeover -- of the previous three episodes.

Yesterday afternoon, the Dreamfall Chapters Unity 5 engine reboot was released on Steam as a free game update.

This launch caps four months of shifting schedules and development delays, a barrage of bugs and a protracted and painful beta phase, a $100,000 investment, and a cautionary tale of the potential pitfalls of episodic game development.

[...][/quote]

In a week, the final chapter of Dreamfall Chapters will be released. It's currently on sale on GOG, so I'd recommend it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlPYMW4OdIQ

I finished the game yesterday. My basic thoughts are that it was good, but perhaps they did a bit too much overt wrapping up for my taste. Then again, I played The Longest Journey a few years back, while I suppose that some people may not have played it in 15 years. Of course others may not have played it at all, but in that case I doubt they would've really understood what was going on.

You can now grab Syberia on GOG for free as part of their Syberia 3 launch promotion. Of course everyone should already have the CD-ROMs^[1] but it's free so why not. Syberia is a reasonably well-made adventure game lifted greatly above the crowd by virtue of being one of the sole mid-2000s adventure games and amazing visuals. Nice to see that my stance of boycotting nonsense DRM like Denuvo paid off. Plus there's a decent launch discount.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/goliIFzY7sY

¹ Really, you should. ↵

Quoting from the topic on DST:

Incidentally, I just noticed the same person wrote a nice rant about DST.

http://www.phrenopolis.com/custard/

And until just now, I didn't even realize that person was Dave Grossman.

http://www.phrenopolis.com/about.php

The happy gentleman pictured here is Dave Grossman, a habitual perpetrator of interactive entertainments. He is best known for writing and designing such LucasArts computer game classics as The Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, and in his more recent role as director of design and writing at Telltale Games (Sam & Max, Tales of Monkey Island, The Wolf Among Us, etc).

The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and The Wolf Among Us are among my favorite games.

I suppose it's more accurate to say that The Wolf Among Us is my favorite Telltale game. It might still make it to the bottom of the top 20 or 30 though. Monkey Island holds up; I bought and played the special edition from GOG a couple of years ago. I bought DotT remastered when it came out but I actually haven't replayed it yet. I'd like to check out Maniac Mansion first, but I don't want it on Steam. That didn't stop me from enjoying Thimbleweed Park and understanding many references (like the chainsaw and Nurse Edna). Cultural osmosis, I suppose.