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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?"
There are plenty of "casual games" that are puzzle based out on the market. Heck, research says they're the dominant economic power in gaming, not EverQuest. But tied to a story / adventure game? Not anymore, not since marketing flacks decided the adventure genre was "dead".
Frankly, the 7th Guest series hasn't helped. 11th Hour was just pathetic. Terrible merging of puzzles and story with the little "PDA" showing all the cutscenes; it wasn't mixed into the surreal astmophere of the original game very well, where the puzzles were blocking your progress because of the nature of what was happening.
The best you can do right now is the Myst games, which carry on the notion of merging adventure with puzzles. Uru does a decent job of it and Myst IV is coming down the pipe.
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.
...but only if you're 'thinking' about picking hookers and killing people while playing.
7th Guest was my first adventure game after Myst, and I loved it; between the music, the characters, and the atmosphere, I was entertained for hours and still look back with fondness upon those simpler days. I recently saw footage for The Collector, and while it did bring back some memories, I do not believe such a game can succeed anymore. The prime thing to consider is that these days, games as a whole can and are more complex so why should gamers be forced to play mostly mundane puzzles to progress a decent plot? There are different adventure-puzzle fans, some like them woven into the story, others like them part of the environment, and others still prefer the 7th Guest style of actual puzzles placed throughout the game.
These days, many years later, I personally lean towards the first two options, since these days it is technologically possible to weave puzzles into games & environments, where as 7th Guest smells slightly of playing puzzle games just to play puzzle games. We've all heard the mantra, 'Adventure games are dead' which I wont bother debating for or against since I think the statement is a bit overly dramatic, but games like 7th Guest lived for a reason, and they have died for a similar reason. Gamers no longer need games-within games to enjoy them, for the games themselves are plenty enough, so the successful adventure games have moved on with this for the most part.
I honestly hope that 7th Guest style games move on, and start with something new; I feel we need games that make the environment an intrical part to the story & gameplay, not abstract puzzles placed in locations, a tired concept. We need games in which the story is not merely a device to drive gameplay; we need games that the gameplay has many levels of depth, and offers freedom for different types of players; we do not need another adventure puzzle-game. Harsh and sad words, especially coming from a genuine fan of these games, but honestly spoken...
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Or, if you really miss those old masters, check out Tierra Entertainment, who have remade King's Quest 1 and 2 (so far) so that it's playable on modern computers.
Long Live The Adventure Game!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
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.
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.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Another popular (but horrid) game in this genre was Phantasmagoria. Horror movie inspired hackishness.
The Myst games were great, but Riven was silly hard. The marble puzzle at the end haunted my very dreams. Uru seems to be much easier, so maybe Cyan got complaints about Riven's difficulty.
Cliff Johnson is still working on his excellent puzzle-driven games. He has always (intelligently, in my opinion) kept the graphics and sound simple and out of the way of the real, fiendish puzzles and metapuzzles. You can download the old games, like The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three, from his website; he's even updated them to work on Mac OS X and modern Windows. The second in the Arcanum series (The Fool and His Money) is due out this fall.