Whither The 7th Guest-Style Puzzle Adventure?

Deunan writes "While poking around on the Internet, I discovered a DirectX front end for the classic The 7th Guest CD-ROM puzzle adventure. After some further searching, I stumbled across a more recent pitch for 7th Guest III: The Collector [apparently the game was in development in 2002/3, and there's an interview with designer Rob Landeros about it, but it seems to be stalled.] I was wondering what killed interest in it - are 'thinking' games just not popular anymore?"

Comments

don't remember 7th guest

[NeMon'ess]

The best puzzle or adventure games were like Grim Fandango, where the puzzles didn't all have to be solved in order. If one puzzle had the player stumped, they could work on another one. Completing one puzzle took items out of inventory so the other puzzles were a little bit easier. Games that don't let me move forward until I figure out one hair-rippingly hard puzzle, suck.

They killed themselves.

[eggstasy]

The problem of adventure games is that they were very easy to code, and so there was a flood of utter crap where the gameplay consisted of hunting the right spot to click, and the puzzle solving was so illogic that people had to brute force it by trying every item with every other item...
The ones that were actually logic (like the lost files of sherlock holmes and most of lucasarts's stuff) got labeled as "too easy" which encouraged people (*cough*sierra*cough) to churn out crappy illogical ones.

They died, because they were pretty poor idea.

[Channard]

Because, let's face it, if you want a puzzle game, there are loads of shareware games you can download off the internet. Puzzle games like the 7th Guest were really the first wave of CD-Rom games. When CD-Roms first came out, no-one seemed to know what to do with them, given most games then could fit on floppies. Hence we had people shoving as much FMV onto a CD as they could and linking it with a few puzzles. Whereas now CD-Roms are needed because todays games are so big, and some games actually come on DVD-Rom.

It wasn't unlike the now-deceased Mega CD - when that first came out, you had two basic game types. There were Mega drive games with the odd FMV sequence thrown in, and and then there were the full FMV games along the lines of Dragons Lair/Cobra Command etc. But whereas CD-Roms become commonplace, so few people actually bought the Mega-CD, it died a death. FMV heavy games such as the 7th Guest are best left dead and buried. If you really want puzzles, you can buy a decent paper and pen puzzlebook for about two pounds.

Who killed adventure games?

[Wylfing]

Old Man Murray answered this question long ago.

Re:Look harder, young grasshopper - they're out th

[Pluvius]

I can't stand puzzle games that force you to solve puzzles for nothing more than plot advancement, where it feels like half of the puzzles were only put in for the sake of having puzzles, with no thought to how they relate to anything.

You mean like Myst? Though that game didn't even have plot advancement, really.

Myst singlehandedly ended the LucasArts/Sierra Golden Age of computer adventure, and we're all the worse for it.

Rob (Sam & Max 2, RIP)

separating out the bad

[sdedeo]

I agree with the poster who mentioned that the very low barrier-to-entry for adventure/puzzle style games kind of saturated the market. If you are looking at, say, an action game, defects in the rendering or graphics are very obvious and you can save your time.

Meanwhile, an adventure game doesn't reveal its wonders (or failures) for at least an hour, perhaps more. It is hard to separate out bad games from very very good ones, and I think the market soured as people gave up after too many bad experiences.

Essentially, adventure games have similar problems to literature. You don't need a million dollars and a team of writers to code together a game, and you have such freedom to innovate that there is no easy box-checking to do to determine if what you've written is up to scratch.

The interactive fiction people have really come together to produce detailed game reviews and open competitions (see IFcomp) as a sort of homebrew version of the book-review and annual prizes that help readers cull through the tens of thousands of books each year.

Was there ever a 7th guest style?

[codexus]

It had rather poor gameplay, just a collection of old puzzles. The whole interest of this game was that it was the first PC game that was available only on CD-ROM and was based on videos. As such, most people who bought a CD-ROM drive at the time bought it, just so that their expensive device would have some use (or at least some respectable use ;)

There is no such thing as an adventure game?

[Anonymous Coward]

how did this nonsense get a slashdot thread?

Isn't it bad enough that every single time a pc magazine/site reviews an adventure game they insist on putting in a paragraph about how adventure games are a dead genre? (Missing the obvious logical problem...)

They're not as prevalent as they were, but they exist.

Re:Look harder, young grasshopper - they're out th

[October]

I can't stand puzzle games that force you to solve puzzles for nothing more than plot advancement, where it feels like half of the puzzles were only put in for the sake of having puzzles, with no thought to how they relate to anything.

You mean like Myst?

Every puzzle in Myst is part of a larger system of puzzles - they may not appear to have any connection to each other at first, but when you look deeper, you realize that each puzzle in an area relates to all the other ones. Together, they form a complete system, and that system exists in the game world for a purpose. Figuring out that purpose is the key to solving the puzzles. Once you understand what the system exists to do, solving it becomes rather simple.

Though that game didn't even have plot advancement, really.

The Myst series does, in fact, have a plot. A rather good one, especially if you read the accompanying novels. The plot doesn't jump out and beat you over the head, and like the puzzles, it takes a while to figure out, leading to the (apparently common) perception that Myst had no plot. It's there, but you have to think to see it. And isn't that the whole point of a "thinking" game? :)

As the series went on, the plots have gotten more and more obviously stated. Myst 3 focused on the plot a lot more than Myst or Riven did - it helps that the technology has advanced to the point of allowing them to insert actors into their world more convincingly. Myst 3 had Brad Dourif in the prominent role, who you might recognize from A recent movie.