I'd say that the shift from a list of specialised verb commands to having the specialised interactions embodied in inventory items was accompanied by a simultaneous movement in these games away from focusing on "player agency" taking place within a gameworld and more towards focusing on abstract representations of those gameworlds themselves.

I don't think I've played a Myst game in the last ten years (myst...) but I kind of remember the structure of it being: find these isolated reactive elements spread out over some location. Observe how you can engage with them and look for patterns, similarities, possible connections between these reactive spots. From these connections, build up a picture of the world you're in. Extrapolate these fragments of reactivity and information into a wider cohesive whole, typically one with an embedded narrative inside. Most of the later adventure games I've played follow pretty much this structure. I'm actually not sure how important it is that this cohesive whole being hinting at does not actually exist outside of rigidly constructed simulations. It still seems to me an approach with some potential as a sort of compromise between implementing Hard Reactivity (text roguelikes 4 life) and just click-to-unlock-new-content-bloc. Get around the problem of trying to >PULL STEREO without having to implement new content by making it clear from the outset that you're dealing with abstracted exploratory gestures more so than actions with a real-world equivalent, that you're poking at these things from outside rather than in.

More traditional later adventure games kind of go the same route by having all the structural relationships of a gameworld cached inside inventory puzzles. I'd say part of the frustration of this comes from the fact that it's still kind of masquerading as actual events and narrative that you can take part in, when really it's so formalised as to bear only the vaguest resemblance to anything resembling life. These people will wait forever inside their isolated rooms, waiting for you to provoke or terrorize them into activity with some arbitrarily "signficant" collectible items so that you can progress into the next location and repeat the process. I haven't played any of the Myst games in a long time (myst...) so I might be giving them too much credit but I guess I would see a potential in the idea of adventure games which push even further towards abstraction and externality (did they even have "usable" inventory items in that series, the last remnants of the curated verb list?) rather than narratives of even a flexible, multiheaded kind. I'd say that the primary thing seperating even superlinear adventure games from just being content-delivery-systems is the sense of actively probing the limits of the world in order to gradually build up a picture of the whole which is more than the sum of its parts.

Anyway, I am rambling wildly by this point but would definitely agree that even this approach would tend more towards the Maniac Mansion mode of a relatively smaller selection of objects with widespread and multifaceted uses and responses rather than rigidly specific, prescribed uses and ways of progression.

Natural language" here meaning "brutal cave-man imperatives."

i haven't played myst in at least a decade (and i was pretty young so it seemed strange anyway) but to that end the whole thing seems even more disconnected and surreal. the little bit i remember it felt like a series of postcards or photos loosely connected by general monuments and landmarks. i always think of noir films or something where there is a series of photos that illustrate the mystery to be solved- slowly uncovering facts and characters portrayed gives new meaning to the whole story. it begins to form connections between images and so on. however in the case of myst-like games it is done literally where they are actually directly connected rooms or areas.


i think that would be a neat concept for a game like that though. you have a stack of images at the beginning of the game and those are the only clues to solve the mysteries. as the world develops and things change they are put into new contexts and you have to delve into these details and correlate the ideas between them.


another possibility would be to actually have the whole game be a series of photos that have no obvious connection. you are in a small room that is locked and there is no obvious way out. however you start with a set of tools to examine the photos and uncover details that help you understand what the common traits in certain photos are. somehow this could reveal the pass code. i really have no idea where i'm going with all this but my point is there are a lot of possibilities with the "photo gallery" theme. games have always felt like assisted dreaming in a way and these sort of adventure games give a glimpse into really tiny and abstract sections of their respective worlds through that method.

i haven't played myst in at least a decade (and i was pretty young so it seemed strange anyway) but to that end the whole thing seems even more disconnected and surreal. the little bit i remember it felt like a series of postcards or photos loosely connected by general monuments and landmarks. i always think of noir films or something where there is a series of photos that illustrate the mystery to be solved- slowly uncovering facts and characters portrayed gives new meaning to the whole story. it begins to form connections between images and so on. however in the case of myst-like games it is done literally where they are actually directly connected rooms or areas.


i think that would be a neat concept for a game like that though. you have a stack of images at the beginning of the game and those are the only clues to solve the mysteries. as the world develops and things change they are put into new contexts and you have to delve into these details and correlate the ideas between them.


another possibility would be to actually have the whole game be a series of photos that have no obvious connection. you are in a small room that is locked and there is no obvious way out. however you start with a set of tools to examine the photos and uncover details that help you understand what the common traits in certain photos are. somehow this could reveal the pass code. i really have no idea where i'm going with all this but my point is there are a lot of possibilities with the "photo gallery" theme. games have always felt like assisted dreaming in a way and these sort of adventure games give a glimpse into really tiny and abstract sections of their respective worlds through that method.

is there a ludum dare over christmas break? let's all make adventure games.

After pulling what appears to be a serious all-nighter on Fake Moon (with over 20 hours logged into it), our hero is ordered to bed by his angered mother, right as he's about to kill the final boss. Not wishing to incur the wrath of an angry parent, he obediently turns off the GameStation and the TV, and trots over to his bed... but what's this? The TV has turned itself back on! And when our hero gets up to investigate, he finds himself being pulled in... into the world of Moon!

Things inside this "Moon World" are quite a bit different than they appeared in the game, however. Everything looks more vivid, more real. The townsfolk, though disproportionate and super-deformed, look distinct and unique, and bear a much greater resemblance to the speech portraits from Fake Moon than their earlier character sprites did. As the boy gathers his bearings, the hero of Fake Moon limps by to enter the castle, struggling under the weight of his own obscenely long sword and outrageously heavy armor. Your character attempts to speak with the townsfolk and find out what's happening, but they seem aware only that someone or something is talking to them. They can't see you, and they can't hear your words. You're... not of their world.

As Love-de-Lic's first game, Moon actually started a trend in voice-acting that's carried over to every subsequent game they've made, without fail. The best way to describe it, really, is to say that the characters' voices sound like chewed-up cassette tape recordings -- but that sounds rather negative, when the actual effect is something quite distinctive, unique, and amusing. Basically, it seems like each character's voice-actor (who may have been hired for the job, but could just as well have been taken from an old radio recording or something) has one or two spoken sentences that have little or nothing to do with Moon, and indeed are often in foreign languages that the majority of Moon's players would never be able to understand anyway. These lines of dialogue are then chopped to pieces, and rearranged in a random order, each time that character "speaks." This makes it a bit different from simple gibberish, since you can occasionally pick out individual words or phrases (be they in English, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, or any other language), and it does give each character a distinctive voice, even if the actual content of what he/she says is complete nonsense.

i haven't played myst in at least a decade (and i was pretty young so it seemed strange anyway) but to that end the whole thing seems even more disconnected and surreal. the little bit i remember it felt like a series of postcards or photos loosely connected by general monuments and landmarks. i always think of noir films or something where there is a series of photos that illustrate the mystery to be solved- slowly uncovering facts and characters portrayed gives new meaning to the whole story. it begins to form connections between images and so on. however in the case of myst-like games it is done literally where they are actually directly connected rooms or areas.


i think that would be a neat concept for a game like that though. you have a stack of images at the beginning of the game and those are the only clues to solve the mysteries. as the world develops and things change they are put into new contexts and you have to delve into these details and correlate the ideas between them.


another possibility would be to actually have the whole game be a series of photos that have no obvious connection. you are in a small room that is locked and there is no obvious way out. however you start with a set of tools to examine the photos and uncover details that help you understand what the common traits in certain photos are. somehow this could reveal the pass code. i really have no idea where i'm going with all this but my point is there are a lot of possibilities with the "photo gallery" theme. games have always felt like assisted dreaming in a way and these sort of adventure games give a glimpse into really tiny and abstract sections of their respective worlds through that method.