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0 pointsStillBored6y ago0 comments

Well by the time of riven you could look up the puzzle solutions on the internet, which is what I did when I got stuck one of the problem that turned out to be audio (and silly me I though they were just playing sound effects).

Anyway, I really view those games as the last of the nearly impossible games that were everywhere in the 1980s. And not just adventure games, a lot of arcade games were the same way, I played conan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan:_Hall_of_Volta for probably 4 months straight before I beat its 7 (?) lousy screens. 99% of the difficulty was basically being able to play it perfectly for the ~15 mins it takes to win. If you added a save game feature it would have probably only taken a couple hours.

If you watch the playthroughs on youtube, the difficulty is completely not evident. Another one like that was Dragons Liar.

On the plus side, the incredible rush one got when figuring out a puzzle after spending days on it is maybe part of the reason a lot of modern games simply aren't fun.

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WorldMaker6y ago

Riven was among the last games in a category where I included its official strategy guide in the base cost of the game. I had a bad habit of reading the "novelization" part of the official strategy guides as a book in school before I could actually play the game. The only game I recall that this sort of spoiler "ruined" the experience was the original Myst when the problem solving part of my brain untangled the dependency map of the game and arrived at the "ten minute solution" speed run of the game, which was my first playthrough because I couldn't believe it would work.

(It's possibly something that helped my love of Myst itself long term for me, though, in that I really struggled with the tone puzzles in later playthroughs, and it was good knowing they didn't keep me from the end of the game. Relatedly, that a tone puzzle is the reason I recall having never yet finished Myst IV.)

The official strategy guide as a book that a kid could read in school, with a full first person retelling of the narrative, was such an interesting artifact of a past age. I believe I've kept a bunch in a box somewhere as interesting tokens.

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0 pointsStillBored6y ago0 comments

If you watch the playthroughs on youtube, the difficulty is completely not evident. Another one like that was Dragons Liar.

On the plus side, the incredible rush one got when figuring out a puzzle after spending days on it is maybe part of the reason a lot of modern games simply aren't fun.

0 comments

WorldMaker6y ago

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