Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)

Interesting and amusing read. Of course Ron Gilbert is a well-known authority on Adventure Games, but the original Old Man Murray article is even better (and funnier). In case anyone hasn't read it yet: "Who Killed Adventure Games?" http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html (As an amusing aside, point-and-click adventure games were considered to be for "clever" gamers in 90s Spain and Latin America; gamers who mocked action games as simplistic. But there was nothing "clever" or "cerebral" about most adventure…

He wrote this piece in 1989, and then went on and designed Monkey Island 2, which did things like having solutions to puzzels depend on other puzzels in differnet islands in the most annoying way possible, on purpose. So you have that...

As much as I love text and point-and-click adventure games, there's always been an inherent contradiction to them. On the surface level, they promise nearly infinite freedom, more than any platform or first-person shooter game: That you can go anywhere, talk to anyone, perform and action on any object, and solve problems in whatever way you want. But in practice they're incredibly constrained. The world is an exquisitely constructed stage, with nothing beyond its margins, and there is only a…

This was written a while back, and I feel like newer adventure games like Telltale games fix a lot of these issues.