Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they provide challenges for you to overcome with brains rather than brawn. For Action Adventures, they offer a break from the hacky-slashy-stabby-shooty element of title.
Every week I’ll bring you a new puzzle, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every once in a while I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
There are many games out there with worlds based on works of fiction. From The Witcher games, based off Andrzej Sapkowski’s books, to the Sherlock Holmes titles and even such adaptations as American McGee’s Alice.
Novel adaptations as games have become a common thing, sometimes more prolific than even film tie-ins, offering a deeper and more compelling experience than those. Novel-based games often have a thoroughly crafted universe to draw from in terms of plot, characters and gameplay design options.
This week let’s do something different. Let’s give Urban Fantasy a rest and instead go to another world, one filled with sand and Spice and supreme beings in mortal flesh. Yes, I’m talking about Frank Herbert’s Dune. While there have been games based on the universe, none of them have tackled the novel, instead going the RTS route to represent the war between the great houses. What we’ll be designing today is the game based on the story, the game about Muad’Dib.
In the past I’ve spoken of Annoying Game Mechanics, of those that we find in games and after so many uneven implementations we instinctively groan when we see them again. But not all game mechanics are annoying, not all have good and bad moments. Some mechanics are just freaking AWESOME!
These Awesome Game Mechanics don’t need further tweaking. They’re the pinnacle of innovation and refining. Sure, you can build on them and add new features, but there is nothing left to fix about them. They are nearly if not completely perfect.
The first one of these I’ll talk about is Pickups:
Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they provide challenges for you to overcome with brains rather than brawn. For Action Adventures, they offer a break from the hacky-slashy-stabby-shooty element of title.
Every week I’ll bring you a new puzzle, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every once in a while I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you! Continue reading The Weekly Puzzle – Lactose Eruption
Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they provide challenges for you to overcome with brains rather than brawn. For Action Adventures, they offer a break from the hacky-slashy-stabby-shooty element of title.
Every week I’ll bring you a new puzzle, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every once in a while I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
This week, and relating this week’s puzzle, I give you a cryptographic puzzle. It’s a simple substitution puzzle. You need to decipher the message. For convenience, every word is separated by ++.
Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they provide challenges for you to overcome with brains rather than brawn. For Action Adventures, they offer a break from the hacky-slashy-stabby-shooty element of title.
Every week I’ll bring you a new puzzle, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every once in a while I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
The answer to the puzzle from the last couple of weeks was A TREE.
This week’s puzzle comes from The Longest Journey as well and it’s one of my favourite sequences in the entire game. About mid-way through it, you must venture into Klack’s castle and face the sorcerer to release the winds he trapped so April can travel the seas. The castle itself is a giant puzzle with gargoyles and the sorcerer himself. You start at the bottom and in front of you is a begging gargoyle. You put a coin in its hand and it starts a chain of mini-puzzles, from putting its fiery hands out to taking pepper and blowing it on an animated wall to open the way to another segment. There is even an alchemy puzzle in which you craft several potions. Finally, Klacks himself is a continuous presence throughout the castle, teasing you and one of the last steps in this multi-layered puzzle of a sequence.
I’ve mentioned it’s one of my favourite puzzles in the entire game and it’s for a couple of reasons. The first is that I love multi-layered puzzles, where you have to complete multiple minuscule tasks in the same room to progress. The goal of this puzzle is to reach the top of the castle, but to do so you need to overcome the defences. It’s a giant puzzle made of smaller parts and I love them, as I mentioned in the Sam & Max Weekly Puzzle some weeks ago.
The Second reason for loving it is that perhaps more than any other sequence it made me believe that Arcadia was magic. A lot of what you do in the castle is reminiscent of classic fantasy. There’s an element of Disney wonder (and a bit of Fantasia) to it all, from sneezing rocks to evil mirror images. It made the child in me—which is always on the surface as I am a big kid after all—giggle with delight.
The Longest Journey is a treasure trove of awesome puzzles, and I’ll probably return to this title in another Weekly Puzzle. If you’ve played this game and have a favourite puzzle, let me know in the comments and we’ll get it up here as a future Weekly Puzzle!
Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they provide challenges for you to overcome with brains rather than brawn. For Action Adventures, they offer a break from the hacky-slashy-stabby-shooty element of title.
Every week I’ll bring you a new puzzle, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every once in a while I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
No one has solved last week’s riddle, so I’ll leave it here again: “He’s old and patient, always moving but never wandering. He’s rough, has seen all branches of life and will share the fruits of it with you if you wait long enough.” Continue reading The Weekly Puzzle – The Mighty Duck!
Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they provide challenges for you to overcome with brains rather than brawn. For Action Adventures, they offer a break from the hacky-slashy-stabby-shooty element of title.
Every week I’ll bring you a new puzzle, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every once in a while I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you! This week has a new riddle, just for you!
Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they provide challenges for you to overcome with brains rather than brawn. For Action Adventures, they offer a break from the hacky-slashy-stabby-shooty element of title.
Every week I’ll bring you a new puzzle, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every once in a while I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
For this week’s puzzle, I’m digging something out of the Sierra bag of goodies again, a nice puzzle from Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, a game that’s already been in The Weekly Puzzle before. But that’s the thing about the classics, isn’t it? There’s always a reason to come back to them. Continue reading The Weekly Puzzle – Thou Art Chosen!
Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they provide challenges for you to overcome with brains rather than brawn. For Action Adventures, they offer a break from the hacky-slashy-stabby-shooty element of title.
Every week I’ll bring you a new puzzle, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every once in a while I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
