My weekly PopMatters post is up on the newly redesigned site. I talk about The Charnel House Trilogy and the thing that stuck out to me the most about it.
I’ve had this idea of point-and-click adventure games as a form of theater without the script given to the player ahead of time for a quite a while. The static nature of the frame of the point-and-click just makes the concept of performance to an outside observer more apparent than other game genres where the camera moves. I thought of it as an interesting lens to look at adventure games through and possibly as a way to correct many of the bugbears that continue to hang around the genre.
I’ve been wanting to bring up this comparison in a piece for a while, but ultimately, I didn’t have much to comment on beyond the base observation. The Charnel House Trilogy changed that by how it crafted the traditional actions by almost making them unrecognizable. It’s important to understand it’s in the execution because it really is the standard way to make a point-and-click adventure game. But the game was made so easy, so simple that the game could be performed fluidly without knowing where it was going.
Once I had seen this done, it opened my eyes to a fundamental problem with how adventure games, as popularly known, were operating this whole time. You know how it is, you can’t think of something until an example is right in front of you and suddenly you can’t understand how you didn’t think of it before. It’s probably how the guy who saw the first person to make the wheel felt.
You can read what is probably going to be the first in a long line of posts with this new thinking on PopMatters. (Maybe not all in row though.)