Sulphur on 16/2/2024 at 05:06
I'm making this because, as far as I'm concerned, it's better we have a thread dedicated to adventure/puzzle/exploration/narrative games than have people's thoughts buried in some random thread lost to time and entropy.
I suppose it's helpful to define what an adventure game is. Unfortunately, the definitions on the internet are pretty wide-ranging, and the name itself isn't particularly helpful. What constitutes an adventure game, and what doesn't? Is it just someone (or something) going on an adventure? In that case, pretty much any game that has any kind of focus on exploration and/or mystery is one, from Uncharted to Dark Souls to Minecraft. Clearly, that's not going to suffice. So let's put some guardrails down: usually, when we say 'adventure game', what we mean is something that's engineered to focus on narrative in concert with thoughtful, even cerebral challenges (to wit: puzzles) while de-emphasising the need for twitch reflexes and action. Sometimes you may have more narrative and less figuring things out, sometimes it's the other way around, but usually ginormous action sequences aren't the main draw of such games. I think that helps circumscribe everything from Zork to Monkey Island to The Witness and Fez.
So where, then, does something like Zelda fit? Metroidvanias? Is Ocarina of Time an adventure game? Well, not really, because the balance of its experience is on action, which makes it more of an action-adventure. Does that mean you can't talk about it here? Of course not. The nature of a genre term isn't to confine or prescribe, in my opinion, but to describe; and single-word descriptors can only do so much to encompass the nature of an experience. I think the Zelda games balance out their action with puzzling fairly well; and even if it's not an exact 50-50 split between action and exploration, then at least there's large chunks of Zeldas that require you to use your noggin. And what we want to do here when we talk about an Adventure Game, I feel, is discuss how that experience felt, how the game's thoughtfulness spoke to you.
Now I know the objection here already will be 'well shit, that makes Thief and Deus Ex adventure games, dunnit?', and sure, they could fit in here too if you really wanted to monkeywrench them in. But, clearly, immersive sims have their own philosophy, of which brainwork is possible a side-product, so you'd perhaps be best served talking about it in its own sub-forum or an ImSim thread.
With that preamble out of the way, I hope this thread serves as a repository for your thoughts and musings on adventure-y stuff you've been playing. Fuck knows it'll be easier to find them at least if you post in here.
Sulphur on 16/2/2024 at 06:41
So let's talk about Tunic. And yes, in my very first entry here I'm already contradicting the definition I just made. Or am I? Anyway, there are spoilers here. I won't spoil most of the big surprises, but frankly, if you intend to play Tunic, do not spoil yourself even on the small things, just go and play it first. Okay?
Okay.
On the face of it, Tunic is a Zelda-Dark Souls game. A Zouls-like. You hit stuff with sticks. Then you hit them with a sword. Then you throw bombs at them, and then you
redacted and
♑︎□︎■︎♏︎ and
↑ ↑ ↓ ↓↔↔↗ ↖�� and then you beat the bosses, and you finish the game. End of story, good game, it doesn't fit in this thread, my dude would you kindly do me a favour, etc.
Except, since I (
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152498&p=2511707&viewfull=1#post2511707) posted about it last, I've thought more about it. How does a game that looks like this:
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/7bxclUIl.jpegtake seven years to make? Answer: because it's more than it seems.
At first blush, you're a fox who's dressed like Link, which is clearly a statement of intent. You go through the Zelda motions, find out that the combat has a stamina gauge, and is sort of punishing, and there's shrines that reup your health but also respawn the things that caused you to lose it to begin with. Ugh, Miyazaki-san claims another victim. So anyway, there's still something compelling about this game - it feels sort of, maybe, tactile. There's an enjoyable palpableness to dodge-rolling, to the way a stick glances off a shield, the way sunlight sinks into grass and stone. Clearly, the creators of the game were in love with both craft and craftwork, as evidenced by its angular painted cardboard world and its penchant for diorama.
But even here, you get the feeling there's something more to what you're seeing. Why is everything a foreign language in this place? Why is the in-game manual itself in this foreign language? What am I supposed to even
do? And then you find a manual page that is, thankfully, written at least partially in English; and then you roll your eyes, because you're playing Dark Souls again. Ring this bell, and that one. And then what? Find out!
It's a solution to a self-inflicted problem: what if everyone's hostile and there's no one to guide you? Well, give the player breadcrumbs to find. At this point, though, even if it seems uninspired, you're starting to see where this game's real priorities are - in forcing you to scour the environments and find things to help, it helps you to find a reason to even keep playing, because there's these small things that register off the side of your vision that you might keep in an index of Things that Made Me Go 'Hmm!' in your brain. Doors that won't open, hidden rooms with things you don't understand, dialogue boxes you can't grok, places you know will be reachable at some point, just not this minute.
So far, so Zelda. You ring the bells. And then... well, it's a McGuffin hunt. Your toolset expands, the challenge does too, and you have bosses to fight. You find out how to be better at combat, and upgrade your little fox's abilities. You suss out what the manual's saying in some places which helps you negotiate the challenges better. More odd things in the world show up. Tuning forks? Hooks? When do I get to use them? Meanwhile, the game shows you its tricksy nature by hiding shortcuts in plain sight - or just beyond your sight, behind a wall, or obstructed by a building, say. You take notes, you note landmarks, you note those things that remain unexplained. You now have a map, thankfully, for some of these places at least. And the manual hints at a narrative and some more odd things; there's notations in there? Someone made notes?
You press on, and you finish the bosses, and then... you die. At this point, I feel, most people would give up on Tunic, because the game continues, but it's inordinately punishing because all the upgrades you scoured the world for and fought so hard for are now gone, and you have to fight again at square one. But this is also where you finally get to see what the game's about - using the information you've gained to progress. Because at this point, you're still equipped with the thing the game can't take away from you: knowledge.
And because of this, I've never been so impelled to just figure out a game like this in a good, long while. It teases you with mysteries just out of reach, then looks you in the eye and says, 'Okay, boss. Now what are you going to do about them?'
One of the coolest things about Tunic is that if you started it with the complete manual, and could read its language, you're equipped to end the game in a fraction of the time a full playthrough would have taken. But since you don't know any of that at the start, you have to earn it, and when you do it literally changes how you play the game. Tunic's genius is in knowing that information is its most valuable currency. At the start, you stumble and falter around, threading your way through its innocuous landscape. At the end, you're criss-crossing the place at speed, aware of what almost every feature of it really does, and how you can use it. The game world has reconfigured itself in your mind from simple craftwork cardboard and mowable shrubbery into interconnected layers of meaning and secret pathways. Secrets being hidden in plain sight and how the process of discovering them reframes what you knew about the world: this is the game's strength, and also its biggest weakness.
You see, I've never found a game that's also so in love with making you figure it out, and I've fucking played Riven. The difference is in Riven you usually know something's a puzzle that you need to come back to when you know more. In Tunic, if you want its good ending, you need to go on a scavenger hunt, which involves some observation and cogitation. This is fine, nominally, but some of its puzzles are incredibly arch and the solutions easy to miss. This is complicated by the fact that there's almost always something hidden around the corner, or next to the corner, or sometimes the corner is a misdirection, but sometimes you need to step back and take a look at all the corners, while sometimes the corners need to be lined up so you can solve something else. And then, just maybe, all the corners come together to answer something grander that's only hinted at elsewhere. So the problem is you're bumping into secrets next to secrets at such a pace that it's sort of ridiculous at times. You get the sense that if you asked Tunic's architects to design a castle, they'd lace the thing with hidden passages and fake walls and rooms within rooms until getting yourself a sandwich meant you'd have to travel through the underworld and back out the other side before you got to the kitchen, but then the sandwich was locked under a glass case that you had to dance a three-step jig in front of before it lifted off and allowed you to touch it. It's a bit much, in other words. And
then, after you've finished the game, you can take a stab at translating the rest of its manual from the hints strewn within it (if you want).
This is why it took seven years to make. Starts to make a lot more sense now, doesn't it?
Thankfully, despite all of that, it's more enjoyable an experience than it is frustrating, most of the time. There are some questionable design bits (did you
really need to have enemy attacks that reduced my life bar, Andrew Shouldice?), but in the end I loved my time with it. Most of all, because the empowerment it brings to the player isn't from having shinier armour or a superior sword, but from the sense of having learned things that refract your understanding of how the world works, then using that knowledge to forge your way through it.
In short, Tunic's a great adventure. The world needs more games like it.
WingedKagouti on 16/2/2024 at 11:24
Quote Posted by Sulphur
One of the coolest things about Tunic is that if you started it with the complete manual, and could read its language, you're equipped to end the game in a fraction of the time a full playthrough would have taken. But since you don't know any of that at the start, you have to earn it, and when you do it literally changes how you play the game. Tunic's genius is in knowing that information is its most valuable currency. At the start, you stumble and falter around, threading your way through its innocuous landscape. At the end, you're criss-crossing the place at speed, aware of what almost every feature of it really does, and how you can use it. The game world has reconfigured itself in your mind from simple craftwork cardboard and mowable shrubbery into interconnected layers of meaning and secret pathways. Secrets being hidden in plain sight and how the process of discovering them reframes what you knew about the world: this is the game's strength, and also its biggest weakness.
This point is very evident in the various speedrun categories, Restricted 100% (ie. get all items, but basically no glitches allowed) is under 1 1/2 hour long. And No Major Glitches (most unintended warps not allowed) True Ending is around 27 minutes. HowLongToBeat lists Tunic as 12 hours average for the Bad Ending and 17-21 for the True Ending.
Sulphur on 16/2/2024 at 14:41
Ah, I didn't look those speedrun times up. Makes a lot of sense, and I think I already clipped into some unintentionally non-solid geometry in the late game, so there's definitely glitches that can make it even quicker to get to the end. Speedrunning Tunic makes a whole bunch of sense, even if it wasn't purpose-built for it, so much respect to those guys.
Aja on 16/2/2024 at 16:03
The way you're describing it, particularly this sentence,
Quote:
Most of all, because the empowerment it brings to the player isn't from having shinier armour or a superior sword, but from the sense of having learned things that refract your understanding of how the world works, then using that knowledge to forge your way through it.
makes it sound like Outer Wilds, which I suppose is also an adventure-adjacent game and is also possibly the best game ever made, so if you haven't played that I wholly recommend it. It's not for everyone, but the things you're saying about Tunic are exactly what captivated me about Outer Wilds, with a nice dose of the sublime for good measure. And then play the expansion, which itself has some of the most goosebumpy discovery moments I've ever experienced in a game.
Sulphur on 16/2/2024 at 17:36
That's just about what another person on Ars just told me, and yes, Outer Wilds is next up on my list of things to finally, for real, get to stat.
Aja on 16/2/2024 at 18:20
Outer Wilds fans are weird about telling other people they have to play it because the only way we can experience that wonder again is vicariously. It would really be the one upside to having a massive stroke; that I could play it again for the first time.
Harvester on 16/2/2024 at 18:45
Outer Wilds is high on my wishlist. Would you recommend getting it on PC or PS4, Aja? I like the comfort of my couch over sitting at my desk but I’m better with mouse and keyboard than I am with a controller.
demagogue on 16/2/2024 at 19:28
The game is made for a controller, and it makes some parts easier to have it.
Even if you were playing it on PC you'd probably want to use a controller. IIRC I did that.
That's unless you're just really better with the mouse & kb even with controller-type games too.
The game deserves the hype, but I think everybody has heard that by now. And I think it's fair to categorize it as a classical adventure game. It has puzzles, tells a story, you meet characters and learn things about the worlds and the situation, and you actually go on an adventure and make progress towards the thing, and then it throws in some light platforming and spaceflight for good times.
Aja on 16/2/2024 at 20:26
Quote Posted by Harvester
Outer Wilds is high on my wishlist. Would you recommend getting it on PC or PS4, Aja? I like the comfort of my couch over sitting at my desk but I'm better with mouse and keyboard than I am with a controller.
I'd recommend PC with a controller, as demagogue said. The PS4 version is capped at 30 FPS, and the spaceflight feels a lot better at 60. For a graphically simple game, it's doing a lot of calculation under the hood, keeping track of orbits and the location of your probes and stuff like that.
