I don't get out much in any sense of the phrase. So when I realised that the most exciting thing to happen to me recently was a renewed interest in yoghurt (because there're only so many times I can watch Terry Crews proclaim that "Terry loves yoghurt" in Brooklyn Nine-Nine before I have to leap off my sofa and testify "Me too!") I proclaimed "fuck it" and decided to try something new.
Despite video games being the last little blinking ray of joy in an otherwise hollowed and beshitted life and also despite the fact I like to think I know everything about the games worth knowing about, there are definitely gaps in my interest and knowledge. And adventure games are a particularly gaping example.
They're not to be confused with 'action-adventure' of course, which is the generic label slapped clumsily on clumsy generic games - often movie adaptations - usually typified by bits of shooting or brawling, bits of climbing and bits of stealth all done shittily and bundled together; like that 2013 Star Trek game everyone hated, or the Uncharted franchise if you want to get inflammatory. And I do!
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| Yeah, that's right you floppy-haired cretin. |
No, a true-blue adventure game is one that will have almost zero gameplay, but thread a strong narrative through a series of logic puzzles and family-friendly conversations. Christ, that was dry. Why don't we say: 'Fuck-aroundy, puzzle-solvey, talky-talky funtime!'?
Anyway, I never got into them much. Mostly because I wasn't a PC gamer during the nineties or ever and also if you take the catharsis of extreme violence and 'interactive' part out of the interactive storytelling that makes games what they are (fucking tops), I'd just say: "So I might as well just be watching a eight hour long film then." And then something about how films are for yokels who can't focus on anything longer than 90 minutes and there was some grumbling about how I was sick of all the big-league, hoighty-toighty games getting pushed out before they're finished so they can block up a load of content behind transaction walls but I didn't write it down. I was probably sober.
But not the last week, ho-no. I've been all up inside adventure gaming and if you want to know how that all went please purchase the 'I'm So Sorry Season Pass*' by throwing your largest available wad of cash money down the nearest accessible drain.
*Gives you access to [unspecified number] of exciting new articles and strange, schizophrenic feature ideas like a diary where nothing happens at one [financially viable] price! Also, new player skins! Which I collected personally at the nearest bus station! With a flensing knife!
Day 1 -- Grim Fan Fun Go? Almost!
So it's Day 1, and I'm sitting staring at the Playstation Network Store heartily regretting this whole thing. Where the hell do I even start? This is a genre I've been purposely avoiding for actual decades. Why did I even pick adventure games? Good question, past-Will.
So now I'm staring at my shelf at a whole bunch of big-shot hoighty etc PS3 games. Dumb, racist military first-person shooters. Decent System Shock-rip off first-person shooters. Wait, where are the RPGs? I thought I was into those. There aren't many PS4 games since the burglary so what have I gotten since then? The dumbest racistest military shooter available and PS3 remasters, oh fantastic.
I knew there were gaps but this is ridiculous. Where are the stealth games? The horrors, the sports and the strategies? The butchers, the bakers and the candlestick makers? And then I realised: they're all crowbarred into the triple-A big dogs as featurettes, aren't they?
Ok, now, if anything I'm even more determined since I actively dislike horror, sports and strategy, so let's keep this simple: What's featured on the home screen? And that's the story of how I came to be downloading Grim Fandango Remastered, probably the most famous and successful OG adventure game of all time, and a screamingly obvious choice by all accounts, if I'd only thought for a single second.
Many, many hours later, I booted up my first new adventure in adventure gaming, set the graphics and controls to 'less shit' and 'slightly less shit' respectively (because this is a remastering, baby, slightly eradicated warts and all) and got going. And an hour later I put the controller down again and had a little cry.
So now I'm staring at my shelf at a whole bunch of big-shot hoighty etc PS3 games. Dumb, racist military first-person shooters. Decent System Shock-rip off first-person shooters. Wait, where are the RPGs? I thought I was into those. There aren't many PS4 games since the burglary so what have I gotten since then? The dumbest racistest military shooter available and PS3 remasters, oh fantastic.
I knew there were gaps but this is ridiculous. Where are the stealth games? The horrors, the sports and the strategies? The butchers, the bakers and the candlestick makers? And then I realised: they're all crowbarred into the triple-A big dogs as featurettes, aren't they?
Ok, now, if anything I'm even more determined since I actively dislike horror, sports and strategy, so let's keep this simple: What's featured on the home screen? And that's the story of how I came to be downloading Grim Fandango Remastered, probably the most famous and successful OG adventure game of all time, and a screamingly obvious choice by all accounts, if I'd only thought for a single second.
Many, many hours later, I booted up my first new adventure in adventure gaming, set the graphics and controls to 'less shit' and 'slightly less shit' respectively (because this is a remastering, baby, slightly eradicated warts and all) and got going. And an hour later I put the controller down again and had a little cry.
Day 2 -- Grim, Tortuous Frustration Forever
If you've never heard of Grim Fandango, a marketer would describe it as 'a landmark adventure game from LucasArts with logic puzzles and dark humour'. See this came out in 1998, in the heady golden years of adventure game dominance on PC.
And believe it or not, this was a time when, in PC circles at least, LucasArts meant 'magical, enthralling and wit-laden video games' instead of 'franchisicide hacked out with a fucking meat cleaver' like it does today. And Grim Fandango was only a year before Jar-Jar Binks and the subsequent sinking of the SS Lucas around Cape Christensen.
So it escaped relatively unmolested by all that and in fact, is one of the critics' easy and artsy choices for 'best games evarr' schtick. It's hard to point at a specific reason people loved this game so much but if you waved roughly in the direction of Tim Schafer, most people would probably agree if not rush up to kiss him on the mouth. Schafer was project lead during development and also worked on Day of the Tentacle, Psychonauts and The Monkey Islands. All stellar adventure games. If you say so.
Which is all well and good. But you want to know why it made me cry. You monster.
The answer is that after a paltry hour pottering around Grim Fandango's opening area, I went, head-lowered in shame, to a walkthrough. But as it turned out, that shame was misplaced because up there a few paragraphs ago, where it said 'logic' slightly before the word 'puzzles', it should have read 'incomprehensible trains of batshit lunacy'.
No sane person would assume that an objective like 'find a new sales lead' would involve asking a mardy carnival magician to give you two empty balloons, filling those balloons with packing foam, sending them down the mail pipe system like in Brazil in the hope that they break the mail sorting machine so you can get in and read your competitor's mail. That's about as far from the word 'logic' as I can think of. In fact, I'm inventing a new word to describe Grim Fandango's puzzles: Unlogic. There. Now that reads much better: 'A landmark adventure game from LucasArts with unlogic puzzles and dark humour'.
So we're barely into Day 2 of my adventure game experiment and I'm sat with a walkthrough on my lap in every way like a security blanket, arduously Simon Says-ing my way through. And so, with more patience than brain power, I reach the end of the game's second act, which appropriately, are called years. Because that's what it felt like, get it?
Day 3 -- Year 3, Man City 0
It's Day 3 and Year 3 of Grim Fandango and having slept on it, I realise just what is so truly upsetting about this game. Because I've played bad games and this isn't one of them. I mean, I own Battlefield 4. I don't really have any right to complain about such an artistically lauded game as Grim just because it made me feel stupid. Shit, owning that game makes me just about the worst person imaginable.
But Grim Fandango has done something that hasn't happened in a while: Disappointed me.
I knew full well what I was getting into when I traded legal tender for Watch Dogs. I've only got myself to blame for wasting those few, ineffectual hours of my rapidly shrivelling lifespan. And while we're on the subject, Grand Theft Auto V too. As much as thousands of asset models for civilians or lines of lazy dialogue or acres of useless space thrill me, Rockstar, I won't be back to your house until you've looked up what 'fun' means.
Actually, I think Grim Fandango is the most I've ever been disappointed in a game. For all my big talk of gaps in my knowledge, I downloaded it two days ago knowing full well that it was going to be lousy with unlogic puzzles because people joke about its spurious sense of 'good sense' all the time. I was also aware that this and Day of the Tentacle and The Monkey Islands and other solid LucasArts adventure games are meant to still be funny. I was expecting in a charming, maybe mischievous kind of way. But I was wrong. Because Grim Fandango as well as being the most disappointing game I've ever played, is also far and away the funniest.
Games don't tend to be the best vector for humour (see Sacred 3 for abundant reasons why) but occasionally surprise; like Portal, Deadpool or Saints Row. But I've never played anything as consistently hilarious as Grim Fandango. The writing is bullseye black humour from the word go. The characters have colour and life, ironically, since they're all dead. And the voicing is always convincing. It's an all round pleasure to chat with people in its Aztec-through-neo-noir-filter afterlife. Which is what makes the utter frustration of the gameplay so galling.
Now I'm sitting here looking at the non-sequitur puzzles not as cheeky little challenges to overcome, but towering walls of trial and error separating me from the solid gold storytelling bits I actually want. The conversations with the dismissive secretary you're trying to nail, the alpha sales douchebag, the misanthropic beatniks, the Marxist docker bees, your alcoholic troll driver, the bit where you try and ask an endlessly chatting security guard for her metal detector, the sexy did-no-wrong saint you're also trying to nail whose case starts the whole plot, these are the moments that make this game shine brighter than any polished-to-perfection, committee-designed demographic-bait today.
But the wall is too high. Which is why, five minutes into Year 3, I give up on Grim Fandango. Super great fun though it may be, anything 5% fun by volume won't satisfy. Grim Fandango is an exquisite espresso drowned in whipped cream, chocolate flakes and broken glass.
Day 4 -- Taking Valium like candy Hearts
So it escaped relatively unmolested by all that and in fact, is one of the critics' easy and artsy choices for 'best games evarr' schtick. It's hard to point at a specific reason people loved this game so much but if you waved roughly in the direction of Tim Schafer, most people would probably agree if not rush up to kiss him on the mouth. Schafer was project lead during development and also worked on Day of the Tentacle, Psychonauts and The Monkey Islands. All stellar adventure games. If you say so.
Which is all well and good. But you want to know why it made me cry. You monster.
The answer is that after a paltry hour pottering around Grim Fandango's opening area, I went, head-lowered in shame, to a walkthrough. But as it turned out, that shame was misplaced because up there a few paragraphs ago, where it said 'logic' slightly before the word 'puzzles', it should have read 'incomprehensible trains of batshit lunacy'.
No sane person would assume that an objective like 'find a new sales lead' would involve asking a mardy carnival magician to give you two empty balloons, filling those balloons with packing foam, sending them down the mail pipe system like in Brazil in the hope that they break the mail sorting machine so you can get in and read your competitor's mail. That's about as far from the word 'logic' as I can think of. In fact, I'm inventing a new word to describe Grim Fandango's puzzles: Unlogic. There. Now that reads much better: 'A landmark adventure game from LucasArts with unlogic puzzles and dark humour'.
So we're barely into Day 2 of my adventure game experiment and I'm sat with a walkthrough on my lap in every way like a security blanket, arduously Simon Says-ing my way through. And so, with more patience than brain power, I reach the end of the game's second act, which appropriately, are called years. Because that's what it felt like, get it?
Day 3 -- Year 3, Man City 0
It's Day 3 and Year 3 of Grim Fandango and having slept on it, I realise just what is so truly upsetting about this game. Because I've played bad games and this isn't one of them. I mean, I own Battlefield 4. I don't really have any right to complain about such an artistically lauded game as Grim just because it made me feel stupid. Shit, owning that game makes me just about the worst person imaginable.But Grim Fandango has done something that hasn't happened in a while: Disappointed me.
I knew full well what I was getting into when I traded legal tender for Watch Dogs. I've only got myself to blame for wasting those few, ineffectual hours of my rapidly shrivelling lifespan. And while we're on the subject, Grand Theft Auto V too. As much as thousands of asset models for civilians or lines of lazy dialogue or acres of useless space thrill me, Rockstar, I won't be back to your house until you've looked up what 'fun' means.
Actually, I think Grim Fandango is the most I've ever been disappointed in a game. For all my big talk of gaps in my knowledge, I downloaded it two days ago knowing full well that it was going to be lousy with unlogic puzzles because people joke about its spurious sense of 'good sense' all the time. I was also aware that this and Day of the Tentacle and The Monkey Islands and other solid LucasArts adventure games are meant to still be funny. I was expecting in a charming, maybe mischievous kind of way. But I was wrong. Because Grim Fandango as well as being the most disappointing game I've ever played, is also far and away the funniest.
Games don't tend to be the best vector for humour (see Sacred 3 for abundant reasons why) but occasionally surprise; like Portal, Deadpool or Saints Row. But I've never played anything as consistently hilarious as Grim Fandango. The writing is bullseye black humour from the word go. The characters have colour and life, ironically, since they're all dead. And the voicing is always convincing. It's an all round pleasure to chat with people in its Aztec-through-neo-noir-filter afterlife. Which is what makes the utter frustration of the gameplay so galling.
Now I'm sitting here looking at the non-sequitur puzzles not as cheeky little challenges to overcome, but towering walls of trial and error separating me from the solid gold storytelling bits I actually want. The conversations with the dismissive secretary you're trying to nail, the alpha sales douchebag, the misanthropic beatniks, the Marxist docker bees, your alcoholic troll driver, the bit where you try and ask an endlessly chatting security guard for her metal detector, the sexy did-no-wrong saint you're also trying to nail whose case starts the whole plot, these are the moments that make this game shine brighter than any polished-to-perfection, committee-designed demographic-bait today.
But the wall is too high. Which is why, five minutes into Year 3, I give up on Grim Fandango. Super great fun though it may be, anything 5% fun by volume won't satisfy. Grim Fandango is an exquisite espresso drowned in whipped cream, chocolate flakes and broken glass.
Day 4 -- Taking Valium like candy Hearts
Day 4 in the adventure game house and the mood is sour. So I couldn't scale the barrier of obtuse, old-school challenge. Why don't we try something new and exciting? Something like Valiant Hearts: The Great War, available now for free for Playstation Plus subscribers.
Some unspecified time later I was playing and enjoying this wee indie darling. And while I wasn't frustrated any more, I am now miserable.
Because Valiant Hearts uses real letters from that most depressing of modern conflicts, the First World War, to craft a personal story from the perspective of a small group, in order to maximise personal tragedy when a few of them inevitably die, I'm assuming.
For one thing, it is refreshing to be playing a military game and not have some dickbag shouting in my ear to go and commit more war crimes. You may be at war here, but you barely kill anyone. Aside from the admittedly frequent setpieces where you blow up a bridge, or house or bellfry or whatever, the worst you'll do as a player is give some Kraut a boff across the bonce with a soup ladle or spade.
This is an adventure game, which means violence isn't your goal, it's some incredibly roundabout solution to move from left to right because as well as budget, we've dropped a dimension since Grim Fandango. Yes, Valiant Hearts is 2D, massively simplifying puzzle structure right off the bat.
This is an adventure game, which means violence isn't your goal, it's some incredibly roundabout solution to move from left to right because as well as budget, we've dropped a dimension since Grim Fandango. Yes, Valiant Hearts is 2D, massively simplifying puzzle structure right off the bat.
Simple might be the watchword here actually. I just burned through the first chapter with nary a hiccough.
Day 5 -- All Buggy on the Western Front
The word of the day is 'incongruous'. Especially when you surround madcap racing and errant barrel-dodging to the sound of the can-can with weepy, Private Peaceful, war-is-hell melodrama.
The visuals are charming, with heavily hand-drawn sprites, watercolour backdrops and a dog called Walt, who I call 'Daddy's little cutey' when his AI is working and 'Korean bargain bucket' at all other times. Because, as I progress through a kind of lacklustre tour of WW1 combat and atrocity hotspots, I feel like the technical problems start to outweigh the artistic vision. And also that the art design was separated from the writing by a mile of barbed wire and sinkholes.
The visuals are charming, with heavily hand-drawn sprites, watercolour backdrops and a dog called Walt, who I call 'Daddy's little cutey' when his AI is working and 'Korean bargain bucket' at all other times. Because, as I progress through a kind of lacklustre tour of WW1 combat and atrocity hotspots, I feel like the technical problems start to outweigh the artistic vision. And also that the art design was separated from the writing by a mile of barbed wire and sinkholes.
Then I got to Reims forest. Where three puzzle sequences in a row brought the otherwise great pacing to a screeching halt. Not because of my obviously non-existent dumbness, but because objects got stuck in the geometry, dialogue failed to activate and good old sheer stupidity in puzzle design. I know it hasn't been long, but I already want to make up with Grim Fandango.
Day 6 -- A Big, Rad Wolf
But what the hell, I'll give it another go. I can get the whole load of five episodes together on the store. Here's a transcript of my day with it:
"Hahahaha, I burned you good, Mr Toad. Admit it."
"Hmnnnhnn-QTE-bor-fuck me I pulled his whole arm off!"
"Bllleeeeuuu-what? I don't care if you're at the door, mother. I'm busy. Fabletown isn't going to solve it's hooker-murders it's own self. I'm the Sheriff, dammit!"
Day 7 -- Dire Wolf, not arf!
Because this is also the kind of game designed in true Bioware fashion: With every dialogue choice giving you the option of being a simpering goody-goody or a toddler-burning, sacred icon destroying malevolopath, with something very vague in between.
I'm now balls-deep in it again trying to be as nice as I can but it is a credit to the game that I wanted to the first time as well and also that such an approach is difficult. The denizens of Fabletown are richly crafted and totally likeable, even the comically evil ones. And the undercurrent of consequence that influences every decision you make in the game pops up constantly during the five episodes and the last bring all the decisions you made together nicely.
Beyond that conversational adventure game stuff, there's also visceral, impactful violence. Sweet ass pacing. And a hardboiled narrative that would read like LA Confidential conflated with Brothers Grimm and read by Cliff Martinez. And if that's what I can expect of the genre in future then adventure games, you're all right with me.
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