With the release of The Witcher 3 I decided to revisit this little idea I had a few months ago, about writing down the basic design for a game based on a novel. If you’re wondering what that has to do with The Witcher, then you might be surprised to learn that the games are inspired by the works of Andrzej Sapkowski—a Polish fantasy author.
But the trilogy isn’t the only one based on novels. From the Sherlock Holmes adventure games to Amercian McGeee’s Alice, the video game industry has looked to published work for inspiration for at least a decade now and it will continue to do so in the future.
So, let me take a shot at it and see what kind of game I can design based on Simon R. Green’s Nightside series. Do note that this is a simple design, just stating genre and main mechanics. Continue reading Novel Games – Simon R. Green’s Nightside
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 – So Simple It’s Elementary!
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 two weeks I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
Last week I left a nice riddle, and someone solved it! The answer was Eclipse.
For this week’s puzzle I’ll go to a game many of you won’t have played but I enjoyed and even reviewed last year: Dracula 3 – The Path of the Dragon. In this game, you pay as Father Arno, a catholic priest sent to Romania to investigate a candidate for sainthood, a local doctor in a small village.
The puzzle you find in Budapest, in the library of Irina Boczow, the foremost expert on vampire lore, as Arno is trying to find the origins of the mysterious Path of the Dragon Vlad Dracula supposedly went through to become a vampire. At least according to folklore.
(Image Credit: Moby Games) Irina’s office makes me jealous!
For this puzzle, you need to open a box with locker like dials, each with a different letter. To find the keyword you need to solve a riddle:
If you wish to contemplate a hidden, terrible and cruel beauty, yet admirable to the sight, know that the green truth may be read in a circle which you will follow in the right direction…
On top of the box is a page from a medieval book, complete with coloured letters. To solve the puzzle you need to draw a circle that hits just the right letters, so you may find the word needed to open the box.
When I first bought the Dracula Trilogy bundle on GoG.com I didn’t know they were first person adventures like Myst. I didn’t really like that type of adventure. But Dracula 3 made me a fan and with this puzzle it showed me just how creative the designers were. There are many possible letters you can combine but only one circle gives you the answer. Even figuring out what you need to do to get those letters can take some thinking as there’s no obvious hint of what you should use. Of all the puzzles in this game this is the one I remember the most as I spent a while looking for the answer, running around the rooms trying to find a solution before deciding I had to think it through on my own. I thought there would be more clues but I had already been told everything I needed.
I just needed to put the noggin to work. Some say the best adventure game puzzles are those hard ones that lead to a “Eureka!” moment when you figure it out, and this puzzle was it for me!
If you haven’t played Dracula 3: Path of the Dragon, you should do so at once. It has nothing to do with Dracula 1 & 2, so you can skip those. They’re terrible anyway. If you have, tell me about your favourite 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 two weeks I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
As promised and overdue, here’s the new puzzle from my noggin and for yours to decipher. A simple riddle. I’ll admit I’m not the best at making there. I love solving them but they’re not my creative forte. But I wanted to create one as a challenge so here it is. I do apologise, I think I made it a bit too obscure. As always, drop the solution in the comments or wait two weeks for the solution:
“We rarely meet, but when we do, the party’s astronomical. Everyone is welcome to see us, but if you pry, we’ll hurt you.”
Now for this week’s puzzle I’m going back to LucasArts for a three-part puzzle. It’s from The Curse of Monkey Island: the Recruitment. As with every title in the series, the great hero and Mighty Pirate, Guybrush Threepwood needs to find a crew and a worthy vessel. Thankfully for him there’s a trio of pirate barbers in Puerto Pollo. The barbers are Haggis McMutton, Cutthroat Bill and Edward Van Helgen.
The big puzzle is to get them all to work for you, but each of them has a requirement. Haggis won’t go with you unless he respects you, and he won’t unless you show him how strong you are. Being Scottish, he goes for caber tossing and that is too much for spindly Guybrush. You need to challenge Van Helgen to a duel and beat him, and he’s just too good with a pistol. Finally, Bill wants to know how good you are at treasure hunting, and no, those wooden coins in your pocket won’t be enough.
The finest Pirate Barbers in all the seas!
The three puzzles are all about cheating. For Haggis it’s finding a light and bouncy log that doesn’t require much strength. For Van Helgen it’s choosing something non-lethal for the duel and then change the rules midway, to prove to him just how much of an underhanded bastard you can be. And Bill, well, you just need to be extremely friendly, get his jawbreaker candy and use that to relieve someone else of the pressures of jewelry teeth.
What I loved about this sequence is how ridiculous it gets. Bill’s starts out simple, just Guybrush screwing over someone to take advantage of the situation, but when you get to the end, you’ll have met a guy terrified of a giant chicken, El Pollo Diablo. Haggis’ challenge can go on forever unless you realise how to bend the rules to your advantage. And nothing beats Ven Helgen’s banjo solo…until you interrupt him.
Time to jam Guybrush!
The Curse of Monkey island is not my favourite Monkey Island game, but I will always remember it because it was a game that led me to a really good friend. We’d been discussing games and we discovered our mutual love for Monkey Island, so he lent me his copy of Curse, and we spoke about it at length for the next few days. And we both laughed while talking about the crew.
I’d love to know if any of you have fun memories with a Monkey Island title, or any other game for that matter!
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 two weeks I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
It’s been two weeks and no one even tried to solve my numeric puzzle. For the record, the answer is 22.
Sadly, I don’t have a new puzzle this week. I’ve been without internet for some time and it’s made it difficult for me to do the proper research on certain topics for a puzzle I have in mind, but I will try to have a new one for next week. Also, inventory puzzles are a bit difficult to describe in text without making them too obvious, so those I’m working on slowly and carefully to make them appealing and challenging for readers.
This week I’m actually going to talk about two puzzles, from the same game and both really clever. These are two from Tomb Raider: Anniversary and are simple yet clever.
The first one is at the start of the Greece segment of the game. You come across a panel depicting the Perseus constellation and the different stars are targetable. There is a switch in front to reset them if you shoot the wrong one. The puzzle consists on shooting the right set of stars to open doors and make things happen. The clues are very close and don’t take much exploration to find.
It’s an extremely simple puzzle, but I like it for the sole reason that it involves gunplay in its execution. Many action-adventure games separate the action from the adventure, the guns from the puzzling, but TR Anniversary embraced both and this was just one of the many times where you use Lara’s weaponry as part of a puzzle solution. And because of that it deserves a spot on The Weekly Puzzle.
The second puzzle I’ll mention is in the Temple of Khamoon. You find yourself in a room with four rotating pillars, each with four symbols. If you rotate one, its adjacent pillars do so as well. The point of the puzzle is to align the symbols together, and you have murals depicting the images you should align.
What makes this an interesting puzzle for me is that the clue can also trick you into believing you needed to have the pictures facing the murals, and that is incorrect and made the puzzle twice as long as it should’ve been. Perhaps it was just my lack of attention or maybe the designers intent was for it to serve as both clue and misdirection, but either way, I found it very clever and figuring out the pattern and rotation order to properly align the pillars was a joy.
(Image Credit: Stella’s Walkthroughs) Four pillars, four images, can you match them?
The Tomb Raider series is filled with hundreds of puzzles, and if you have a favourite one, share it!
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 two weeks 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’s puzzle isn’t from an old game, but a rather recent one, about a year or two old, Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller. It’s one of the earliest puzzles in the game, and involves using Erica’s postcognition to figure out the correct way to disable a bomb. You do this by using the power and figuring out the order in which the killer wired the bomb so you can then use the reverse process to defuse it.
It’s very clever!
It’s not an overly complicated puzzle but I always felt it was very clever. It wasn’t an inventory puzzle but a logic one. Each wire gave you a different vision and you had to deduce the correct order from these jumbled images. The Cognition season has plenty of similar puzzles, but this one in particular has always been my favourite, though the Cordelia/Erica power puzzle in a later episode comes really close. But that’s a subject for another week.
Have you made progress with my little puzzle from last week? Next week is the solution to it and a new one, so make sure you come back!
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 two weeks I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
It’s been two weeks and no one even tried to solve my little riddle. For the record, the answers are Grave or Coffin. Joel from Geekout South-West nailed it weeks ago and that’s why I didn’t let him participate this time. But don’t worry Joel, this is a fresh one!
For this week’s puzzle I’m going for my personal Kryptonite: Numerical Sequence/Pattern Puzzles. You can see them in many games, predominantly in Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes series. The thing you need to do is figure out the value of X.
7 10 6 12 15 11 X 25
It’s fairly simple but it might stump some of you out there!
Now for this week’s puzzle I have another classic, but this time from Sierra instead of the LucasArts.
In Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers you’ll spend most of your time talking to people, the puzzles mostly being about finding the right items you need to get them to spill. During the third day you need to meet a gentle old lady, but she won’t give the time of day to your lecherous investigator. So you need to fool her…by stealing clothes from a priest. As always, I won’t go into full details on how you go about this because I don’t want to ruin it for you.
Gotta hand it to him, he knows how to disguise!
The reason I love this puzzle is because not only does it move the story forward but it also supports the characterisation by showing you just what the protagonist is capable of to get what he wants. There are many other moments in the game were you commit questionable acts in your quest—and in fact, it’s a common element in the series…including the infamous cat hair puzzle, but we don’t talk about that one—but nothing beats tricking the old lady. Gabriel proves just how much of a sleazebag he can be. But his performer is Tim Curry so you can’t really hate him for that. Gabriel Knight is still at the top of my list because the puzzles not only move the story forwards but they support the characterisations. You learn more about the characters with every puzzle solved, as they are actions they committed, decisions they made.
Have you ever played a Gabriel Knight title? If so what’s your favourite moment? If it’s the unmentionable cat hair, we need to talk about your tastes my friend. If it’s the strangely homoerotic conversations with Von Glower in Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within that clearly made Gabriel’s actor uncomfortable, then you’ve got a fantastic sense of humour and I like you!
Make sure you solve this week’s puzzle and don’t forget to come back next week for another 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. In this series, I’ll bring you a new puzzle every week, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every two weeks I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
Today’s puzzle also comes from the vaults of LucasArts, from its most popular adventure game series: Monkey Island, specifically the 2nd in the series, LeChuck’s Revenge.
After dealing with Largo LaGrande on Scabb Island, Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate, sets out to find the four pieces of the map to the legendary treasure of BIG WHOOP. One of these pieces is in Rum Rogers’s shack but to get to it you need to shut-off a particularly impressive looking waterfall. How do you do it? Well, there’s a fire hydrant at the top of it, so of course you need a monkey wrench. Good thing you have a catatonic monkey in your pocket, right? How do you get the monkey? We’ll leave that alone because I don’t want to ruin the puzzle if you haven’t played Monkey Island 2.
Yes, this puzzle is moon logic, and I usually hate these. But this is moon logic at its best, based off wordplay. You need a monkey wrench and you have a stiff monkey, quite easy to make the leap. It shows the strength and weakness of this style of puzzle design. If you’re familiar with the English language, then you’ll figure it out instantly, but if you’re not or you’re playing it in another language, then the puzzle makes little sense.
This puzzle also shows how creative the LucasArts team was when it came to designing silly puzzles. The entire sequence, from finding the monkey, shutting off the waterfall to getting your hands on the map is one ridiculous moment after another.
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge has wonderful and challenging puzzles, but for me the best will always be this monkey business. When I played the game, I finally had enough of a handle with the language that I picked the word-play clue instantly. It didn’t just make me laugh but also made me feel proud of my linguistic ability.
Do you have a favourite Monkey Island puzzle you’d like to mention? Don’t forget to come back next week for two new puzzles, one from a game and one of mine!
I love puzzles, not the 1000 piece landscape ones everyone’s tried to assemble at least once in their lives. No, those drive me insane. The ones I mean are the gaming puzzles, riddles and brain-teasing challenges. Some need items and for others you just need to use whatever brain cells you have left after binging on Dragon Age Inquisition for eight hours a day.
Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they offer 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.
Over the past few months, I’ve been hard at work on designing my own puzzles for an in-development adventure game demo. I’ve gone through the classics: inventory, moon-logic, number sequence & math, cryptography and text-based and even old school riddles. For example, here’s one I posted on twitter a few weeks ago, just popped in my head and it was better than I expected:
Ominous when empty. Sad when full.
What is it? Only one person has solved it and in fact offered a different response that works well!
In this series, I’ll talk about some of my favourite puzzles in games, from the silly to the brain melting. But that’s not all, every other week, I’ll also give you one of my puzzles for you to solve, some of them are simple and others not so much. If you solve one first and you’d like to submit one of your own then I’ll feature them in a future issue. I’ve already given you one to get started, and now I’ll focus on this week’s puzzle. It’s from a really old, classic LucasArts adventure: Full Throttle.
At one point in the game, you need to get into The Vulture’s hideout, but it’s protected by a minefield. Getting through it is hilarious and it involves a remote-controlled car and a boxful of Powerblast-battery-powered bunnies to clear the way!
When I first played this game, I wondered what to do with the minefield, and I tried a single bunny, got an item in return but ten I was stumped, because as is the usual case for me, I hadn’t seen something in the environment, but once I did, it all clicked into place and I solved the puzzle and finished that sequence, laughing like a maniac while doing so. It’s funny, on hindsight maybe not that funny, but it just caught me by surprise, especially because the music shifts to Flight of the Valkyries!
It’s another example of how creative the people at LucasArts were/are at creating puzzles. Sure, it’s on the edge of being moon-logic, but there’s enough sense in it that it doesn’t seem far-fetched.
Below you’ll see the end of the puzzle. I want you to have a giggle but not ruin the entire thing for you!
Do you have any favourite puzzle or memory from Full Throttle or any other adventure game? Let me know in the comments!
