I continue off a thread I left hanging last week by addressing adventure games need and use of challenge.
Where last week I used the example of The Charnel House Trilogy as a game where easy puzzles and clear direction made of a good experience of playing the actor in a script. It challenges the dichotomy of the adventure game and the point-and-click subgenre specifically. Having my mind opened to this new lens, a way of viewing information that had already been bubbling around in my head, I looked at the other end of the scale.
There is a dichotomy regarding adventure games, but it’s not the one people think about when the genre is mentioned. The problems and forces that drove away so many people are problems not of the construction and design of the genre itself, but the self-imposed nonsense of trying to serve two masters. Neither can be satisfied so long as concessions are made to the other and in the end the experience suffers as a whole. This time I looked to two games that kept popping into my head every time I thought that story was incompatible with challenge: Antichamber and Year Walk.
These two games kept me from making such assertions in the last post to instead be much more specific in my meaning. Challenge is antithetical to plot, but if your story doesn’t rely on plot to function, then it could be as challenging as desired without losing focus.
That’s my thesis anyway. Check my post out over at PopMatters.