After almost a decade of courting casual gamers, an interesting sea-change is taking place in the world of videogames… they are getting harder. Unexpected hits like Dark Souls and Super Meat Boy demonstrate a return to the challenge of early games with a heavy emphasis on skill, demonstrating that there is a significant audience out there who like to work for their achievements.
Perhaps more so than any genre, Point and Click Adventures have been guilty of toning down the difficulty in recent years, perhaps as a desperate attempt to cling on to an audience that it has been steadily losing to more modern and gratifying genres. But ask most fans of the genre (of a certain age) what they love about Point and Click Adventures and they will probably tell you about some of the bizarre and complicated inventory puzzles in games like Monkey Island and Broken Sword; the experience of being stuck for days on end, and that Eureka moment when the answer finally hit them.
In spite of this nostalgia for tricksy puzzles, many modern point and clicks seem afraid of stumping their audience, even though we live in an age when walkthroughs are more readily available than they have ever been. Even Jane Jensen’s recent effort, Gray Matter, was a cake walk compared to her classic Gabriel Knight series. I don’t think it’s simply a fear of making the paying customer look stupid, but an overemphasis on being careful not to break the flow of the story. However a good point and click should be an intricate balance of story and puzzle elements, the former to give you a reason to solve the puzzles and the latter to provide the requisite amount of challenge; to make the experience a ‘game’ rather than an interactive novel. A lack of sufficient challenge, and the reduced play time this results in, often leaves the player feeling cheated. Unsurprisingly the desire not to make the game too difficult, so the player enjoys the experience more, usually has exactly the opposite effect.
Machinarium, which in its own way was a sleeper hit as significant as Dark Souls, is a point and click adventure that completely eschewed the trend to lead gamers by the hand. Without a shred of dialogue and barely a tutorial to speak of, the player is dropped into the game as rudely as its protagonist is dropped into the trash heap where he begins his adventure. Like most point and clicks Machinarium does have a built in hints system, but even this is locked behind a mini-game, ensuring the player has to work for it. The game also includes a range of fiendish logic puzzles, and had the guts to not include a skip button with them. In fact it’s interesting that one of its puzzles requires you to gain a certain score on Space Invaders, the inclusion of which seems to be a nod to when games were a test of skill.
The challenge for the genre is to make games that are challenging in themselves and not through bad design. Most modern point and clicks avoid the pitfalls of the genre’s early days (pixelhunting, unclear sign-posting), but they have also thrown the puzzles out with the bath water. Machinarium provides the perfect example of the right level of challenge, and its success is testament to the fact that people want their grey matter to be exercised just as much as they want a good story (after all Machinarium’s narrative is about as bare bones as you can imagine). Let’s hope that Tim Schafer’s new game, which promises a return to the roots of the genre, reminds us all how it should be done.
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