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There are games with a Communist background. Recently there was a point and click called Irony Curtain: from Matryochka with Love. It was okay, a bit too much of a "Guybrush Threepwood in the Warsaw Pact" kinda vibe for my taste, a bit too derivative of old games. But it had interesting depictions of early Bolshevik rule with a humorous flavour, that can inspire you.

There's also the classic "KGB" game by Cryo, the ambiance was much darker but it was not devoid of humour as well.

These can inspire you a bit maybe?

It was really great, awesome concept, very original! You should make a longer version now, it would totally worth the effort!

Any ideas on where Mittens could take place?

Taiwan?

I think I may be able to fix a small game that would be a tribute to the band as well and built around one of their songs. I'll see what I can do.

So if I want to put a song by The Cure in the game does that count as pre-existing asset?

See, this is exactly what I expected: people in this forum debating the state of adventure games after years of being involved in it, gives much more interesting insights than these two guys in their one hour video

I find the topic fascinating.

I was actually wondering if there's a point of diminishing returns with some of this. For example, if I'd hand craft every response line in a full length game then that would take a lot more time and work than having a selection of generic blanket statements. And if most players won't even notice or care much about these small details, then is it really worth it? It's sometimes kind of hard to determine where's the line with a lot of this stuff, especially when working on a commercial game and all that time spent on polishing and adding features might not actually increase the sale numbers and interest in the game.

To a certain extent it is the same when you publish a book (or make a movie, maybe). You do not know if the audience will get it all. But there are also several levels of enjoyment. Some people read the book superficially and enjoyed the story, others read deeper into it and enjoy the extras. The same goes with the game: some will just enjoy the basic gameplay, others will go deep into it. When I published someone told me an interesting thing: once you have published something, it doesn't belong to you anymore, it belongs to any reader and they will make it something different. It has a life of its own. Somehow this is the same for your game: you put it out there and then  you have to let go and to accept it's not your game anymore.

maybe I've lost the faith in most developers that they can come up with a huge amount of consistent and enjoyable narrative puzzles and perhaps it would be better for some of them (myself included) to focus more on one specific aspect.

This may be partially due to... making too much games? This community surprises me in the huge amount of games they make. Even confirmed developpers who have nothing to prove. Maybe in this new decade and this new era the trend should be to do less games but spend more time in them, so the experience and wealth of knowledge acquired in the last two decades could be put to work doing better games?

Hmm, I'm curious what's your take on narrative without conflict or with minimal conflict and challenge? Don't actually know much about it, but I've seen kishōtenketsu brought out as an example sometimes. Would that be something that's feasible in games and how would that work with gameplay?

I think too much games seem to confuse conflict with scope. A lot of games at first I find very interesting because the story is set in a more domestic setting, but invariably spiral into supernatural, magical, maybe even end-of-the-world type of stories.
When you write a novel you are not afraid of writing something purely domestic. Love stories, family stories, intimate stories, and make them full of conflict and challenge from everyday life. There seem to be a taboo in narrative games about writing domestic stories. We are too fixated on the idea that a game has to be about evil forces at hand or life-or-death challenges.
In reality a lot of games outside of the purely point-and-click genre are about everyday conflicts. I wrote on my blog about "Life is Strange", and how the magical aspect takes a step back compared to the purely human and everyday life challenges. I also wrote about "Hana feels", a text adventure entirely based on a mental health issue. We do not need to be saving the world all the time.
This is also why I talk about "narrative" games rather than "adventure" games. I do not want it to be an adventure in the big sense all the time. Life is an adventure. Puzzles and gameplays are tools to tell a story, and that story do not have to be huge. Puzzles can be used to express real life tribulation and personal growth, not necessarily solving a mystery.

Definitely agree, about 70 percent of the games I play these days are AGS ones, mostly because I don't have much time for gaming in general and I also lack the hardware required for most modern games. But I do really want to broaden my horizon at some point and learn more about and from other types of modern games.

It is interesting for example to look at RPGs in general. They are an enduring genre, they are full of tropes, but they also are very well-polished and experienced in how to convey a story through a videogame.

I only watched part of the vid, but I think point and click are something like 2d platform games.  They are going to pretty much be around forever.  I play a pixel art platformer on my tablet and enjoy it.   Point and click adventures have a lot more room for diversity because they are story heavy.  They won't go away and they won't be the latest thing.  That's the nice thing about modern gaming.  We have so many options. 

This I totally agree with. And it is something I say a lot about our modern times: mainstream is irrelevant because you can look for whatever you want. There will always be such games if only because possibilities are endless.

The reason I came to AGS in the first place was the dearth of decent commercial adventures in the early 2000s. And so many more great games came out just between 2015 and 2020: Her Story, The Walking Dead, The Witness, Firewatch, Unavowed, The Outer Wilds, Night in the Woods etc. It saddens me that some people stopped playing adventure games in 1999. When I see people on social media asking for recommendations, so many of the suggestions are 30 years old - I get the impression that some hardcore adventure gamers still won't trust anything without wacky inventory items and a verb coin. And they're missing out!

1 hour video! Hahah...no.

But I get the idea that adventure games are stuck in the past- they do seem to be inordinately obsessed with nostalgia. Someone mentioned they were using Day of the Tentacle as an example, when it came out in the 90s, but the game was remade recently.

My take on the state of adventure games today?
I spent most of the 2000s catching up on classic 90s adventure games I had missed, and playing ones released here. I gave up on "commercial" adventure games at that point (last contemporary commercial adventure game I physically bought was possibly Syberia?).
It's undoubtedly true that adventure games are more in the mainstream now than they were then, but there's still this nostalgia attachment that needs to be shaken off. One of my most favourite (despite how buggy it was for me) adventure games I played last year (sorry AGS  ) was Wandersong. I still need to get around to Call of the Sea, too. "Commercial" stuff that still tries to ape games of the past end up really sucking for me- see Daedalic's entire catalogue (especially including the Deponia games).

True, once again, that we need to stop focusing on 90s games!
And true that we need to remember it has been two decades ever since, and that's two generations, thats a lot of time, that's already two other eras. And indeed, the early 2000s were a time when the internet was young, and the novelty of abandonware was maybe taking the first place, in front of new games. Just like you, I did a lot of playing these old games I could not afford to buy in the 90s!

Personally I hated Deponia, I did not went past the first chapter of the first game. The main character was just way too much of an awful and despicable individual, on top of being designed after Guybrush. I remember everyone saying "if you loved Monkey Island you will love Deponia!" That's pretty much because, like 90% of people, "I grew up playing and loving Monkey Island" that I disliked a game that rips it off without its charm.

Is it me or the latest games in the AGS database are not actually made with AGS? Should they be in there?

Sorry for upping an old thread but if you liked Lorenzo's game check out his interview here: https://formosafalanster.wordpress.com/2021/03/31/cartoons-stories-lots-of-fun-and-italian-flavour-an-interview-with-lorenzo/

And this is exactly what is wrong with the genre in 2021: the assumption that story and gameplay are mutually exclusive.

Yes, I agree, they're not mutually exclusive, but I assume it would take more talent, experience and resources to successfully merge narrative and gameplay. And this is not specific to the point & click genre, most games, even the critically acclaimed big budget ones, have serious difficulties with that.

I also don't think it's inherently right or wrong, it can simply be a different approach to making games. I mean, if these are the types of games people want to make and there are people like me, who enjoy playing those, then is that wrong? It's unfortunate to hear that there aren't enough games that suit your taste, but hopefully there'll be more in the future.

Oh don't get me wrong, sorry if it sounded like I was having a go at you, for sure everyone can enjoy what they want I still think even you would find enjoyment in a game that gives you the narrative you appreciate while taking you into a good gameplay.

I am not sure it would take that much resources to improve the balance in favour of gameplay, though. Experience yes maybe, but that's something we should put effort in because it would be very rewarding in the end.

This is ultimately the biggest problems: the tons and tons of games that are so easy they are forgettable.

I personally don't equate game difficulty with quality and enjoyment. Watching a movie is a very easy and passive way to consume entertainment, but that doesn't make them all forgettable. More interactivity doesn't automatically mean a better game. If it's poorly written and designed with underdeveloped characters and motivations, then yes, that might indeed be forgettable, but I'm not sure if the amount of puzzles and their increased difficulty would necessarily make it any better in this case.

To be honest, I don't recall many clever Aha! moments from the games that I've played. Usually, when I've been stuck on a puzzle and then finally figured it out or consulted a walkthrough, I've felt frustration, because the puzzle was (in my opinion) either poorly and unfairly designed or I missed a hotspot somewhere. And in most cases I probably would have had a better experience, if that puzzle had not been there in the first place. Puzzles in general are not something I tend to  remember from the games years or decades later, but interesting characters, great story elements and atmosphere will often leave a strong impression. Yes, sometimes the latter stuff is successfully tied and enhanced with the gameplay, but not always. [/quote]

That's what I think: movies are good even if they are passive, but then if we make a videogame instead of a movie there has to be a reason why, and that reason is that it's interactive. If the puzzle is badly made then the solution is to make better puzzles! I am sorry to see you have been confronted to so many bad puzzles that you have grown a distaste for them and I hope there will be better games to reconcile you with gameplay in general.
It's everything I write about in my blog: the quest for how to use gameplay as a narrative tool. The way I see it, you feel the story and the characters in a game through the gameplay itself. It is playing them and guiding them through the challenge that makes you care for them and experience their plight. I think this is an art that is too often lost and we should thrive to reconnect with it.

In my opinion, adventure games between 2000-2010 were mostly bad, retaining all the awful features of 90s adventure games and almost none of the good qualities.

But... but Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! came out in 2007... I think the second half of the 2000s was already quite decent actually. Wadjet Eye was slowly raising its head, I actually enjoyed Dreamfall back in the day, there was Machinarium, early Telltale stuff, a couple of Daedalic games, a fair amount of quality AGS freebies. I mean, even in the so-called golden ages of point & click games, there were only a handful of quality releases each year. How many true classics there actually are from that era, 10-20?
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That I totally agree with you on. There has always been plenty of good games albeit less mainstream. But because the best thing about our era is that mainstream is irrelevant, we can just relish in our niche.

I think it is also very important to get out of AGS and see other narrative games out there. As you can see on my blog I often look into games that are not point and click per se but still has narrative values. The accent should be on narrative through gameplay rather than on one type of gameplay, it greatly broadens your mind I think.

I value story, exploration and character interactions more than puzzles, so I'm perfectly fine with narrative-heavy games with light gameplay elements.

And this is exactly what is wrong with the genre in 2021: the assumption that story and gameplay are mutually exclusive.

If people would stop for a second being fixated in the past and the problems of the past, they would realize we are so far away from the time when games were too complicated and illogical that we are actually facing the opposite: an avalanche of adventure games whose gameplay has been stripped down to such an extent that it's not even a game anymore.

Why would you need to make the game ultra simple to value the story and characters?

This is the problem. I have played way too much of such games recently: they are so ridiculously simple that you finish them in 10mn and you barely got into the ambiance, the characters, the story. I am not interested in reading someone's unpublished short story plastered in a vague GUI with some art to illustrate it, with "turning pages" replaced with "clicking hotspots". If I had wanted to do that I would have stick to publish books and not try to do something interactive.

This is ultimately the biggest problems: the tons and tons of games that are so easy they are forgettable.

But in reality, it's just being lazy. It's claiming to be an author with interest in deep stories and characters, yet not even making the effort of writing an interesting line for the character to say when the player attempts an incorrect solution to the puzzle - when this is actually where the narrative is supposed to be in a game, because it's an interactive medium, not a passive one.

I'd like to see more games in which you get to understand the character's motivations and challenges as you attempt to solve the game, they would have carefully crafted it so that your trial and error is entertaining and even emotionally impacting.

That's because he gives his opinion without explaining where it comes from.

It's just "I don't like that". No, you have to tell us why it sucks.

And here is something I learnt when I published novels: a good critic never writes a negative critic unless the target is a big one.
Here is a personal story: I published my first novel and it ended up with a positive review by a TV host. So of course when I published the second one I sent it to him in hope he would do it again. He answered me that he did not like the book. So of course I started being afraid he would tear it apart on TV. He did not. I asked him why. He said because I'm a young author barely known by anyone, if he tears me apart he looks like a jerk who uses his influence to crush others for his own glory. I found that interesting so I pushed the conversation further. We looked at a review my first novel had in a newspaper, a review that was also positive, and he showed me the review just next to it: the critic had panned another book, but it was written by one of the very top authors in my country, someone famous and praised on every level. This guy was worth a bad review because he's a big shot, it's actually brave to challenge his position and say something negative about him because he would have fans who would attack you, and he probably needed a bit of humility. But me, I was too small to warrant a bad review, if he doesn't like my book he just needs to stay silent about it and no one will buy it anyway, there is no need to put me down.

I always remembered that story because it is the whole difference between making a bad review so you can look clever and making a bad review that actually makes sense. This is why I am vocal about disliking Thimbleweed Park, it's a big successful game made by a successful person who could use some humility. I played indie games I did not like but what is the point of letting everyone know, when the devs are already struggling?

The link with Yatzee is: he somewhat acheived some internet fame for what it's worth (mostly because he was there early), yet he uses his audience to beat a dead horse like other people did better than him 20 years ago.

Look, I just put another example here (I'm not the one who did the most games or even played the most games but I have one heck of a library on the topic) : https://www.pcgamer.com/dont-quit-how-to-save-adventures-225/ made ten years ago so mid-way between today and the previous article I posted. Already, once again, do we read all the same problems, but at least this article encourages developpers to renew the genre and offers solution. Which, if you play around some games and forget about fucking LucasArts for a second, you quickly realize has been done by a lot of people.

See Yatzee? This is how you research a topic.

I inflicted myself the video. There is nothing new in what they say. Do they think they are the first ones to criticize that "yeah some old adventure games were too complicated and illogical, brute force, too hard", blabla? That was literaly everything told in a seminal article published in 2000: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

Everyone has read this article already. More than 20 years ago.

Type "how adventure games died" in a search engine. Count how many people wrote long essays about the genre.

And there we have two guys who spent over an hour repeating what everyone has been debating for two decades. They are 20 years late to this.

He calls his video "the state of the genre in 2021" and he uses Day of the Tentacle to illustrate it, a game made in the 1990s. That would be interesting if he were pointing out what I personally think is the biggest problem of the genre in 2021 (the fact that too many people are fixated on old games) but he does not. He just has no idea what happens in 2021 so he talks about the genre as if we were still the day after Grim Fandango was first published.

Because you look at statistics and you do not know the people themselves. French and Italian would go see an American movie and then they'll forget about it. It doesn't impact them as much as their own domestic media. Of course people have American entertainment there, but they would never see it as a massive, important, impacting thing. It's seen and forgotten, it's not the big reference. They watch Disney but they don't see it as the core of their psyche.


I should probably not have said something. I am not comfortable with how you feel okay lecturing people on their own culture. I was eager to share my experience but if it is a fight, then I will let you win. I'd rather not post anymore here.

I think the prime reason why most people never see "western" creating offence is because it is rarely used in a context in with Southern Europeans would be part of the audience.

But I spend way too much time in English speaking spheres so I have become sensitive to it. And it seems Laura has the same history.

Some things that are similar between, say, a French person and a Taiwanese? Here you go:

- both cultures value food a lot, quality food, and eating time is important and not rushed
- both cultures value art and classical culture above pop culture which is seen as secondary to it
- both cultures would first be interested in pop culture from their own country before that of the Anglosphere
- both cultures are essentially atheist, owing to France long history of secularism and anticlericanism, and Taiwan being the least religious place in Asia
- both cultures prefer going around in public transport than with a car and if they have to drive would prefer a small vehicle
- both cultures are very picky about what they take from American culture and would not take it as a whole

All of the above is opposed to the anglo-american way of life. In both these countries, if you go around saying that Disney is a huge influence, people would laugh.

This comes obviously from a first hand experience.

edit: oh my god I almost forgot the most important! A culture of being extremely straightforward and direct! It is a misconception about Asian people being too polite to say the truth, any Asian person would tell you that to keep face you have to be extremely direct. The Mandarin language pretty much gives you no other choice! So the French tendency to be very frank goes very well with a Taiwanese abruptness, and in contrast with the convoluted manners of the English language.
Just think about how it is seen as very rude to curse in English and how women in particular never curse in English, whereas in French or Mandarin everyone including women curse very rudely all the time.

Again blondbraid you are talking about things you don't know about.

You are not a southern European yet you have people here pointing out to you that the conception of "western world" as you were taught is incorrect. Both Laura and myself have enough heritage and experience in Southern Europe to tell you that this is a misconception.

Yes, it is incorrect to say these countries have "more ties and more influence" from the USA. The Francosphere has a MASSIVE pop culture of its own, its own comic book culture, its own pop music, its own movies. Italy is the same, Italians primarily enjoy their own movies and music and entertainment. In these countries, US pop culture is seen as secondary.

Maybe it's not the same in Sweden. Well you learned something today: France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and others, they are not like Sweden.

So actually, the countries I mentioned are closer to some non-European countries. In Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and other East Asian countries, there is also a presence of Anglo-American pop culture but secondary to the local one.

Trust me, I am in a very good position to assess that Southern Europeans and East Asians often have more things in common than they would have with Anglo-Americans...

You are giving Disney way too much credit. And probably too much attention as well. Disney does not have the bravery to create trends, they follow them once they are deemed profitable enough. If you ever see Disney doing something progressive it is not because they genuinely support it, it is because it has become a better way to make money. Thus it means that trend is already established by other people who were more brave and less greedy than them. These should receive praise and attention, not Disney.

I don't know much about Disney's agenda (I just keep hearing they're evil, mostly from youtube critics), but you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. However power-hungry they may be, they still employ some genuinely talented, creative people. I loved The Lion King as a kid and I think they took some risks with that one, the death scene especially. I still have a soft spot for it, it's one of the things that got me into animation. Also Aladdin by the way, especially the platformer based on it - I would constantly pause it to see each animation frame .

true but sadly that was a long time ago  Walt Disney himself was a great person and he was actually very daring and willing to experiment. That's how he was successful in the first place. But he is long gone. Disney as we know it today, 25 years after the Lion King, is much different.

Look at the last time they experimented with something new: the design of Hercules or the whole Treasure Planet thing. They made less money, so they stopped. Now everything they do smells like analytics and marketing. They had a strong commercial streak for a long time but now that's all they are about.

Even if you think so, ignoring Disney will not make it go away, and it has had a huge cultural impact on western society whether you want it or not,

There is no such thing as "western world". Your use of this term is cultural appropriation and ethnocentrism. This "western world" you are talking about includes plenty of rich and independent cultures that have nothing to do whatsoever with Anglo/Nordic/Protestant people and it is not appropriate of you to speak in their name. If you actually knew about these cultures you would know that in most of them, my opinion of Disney being a tacky entertainment of secondary importance is often the norm, and they do not see Disney as so omnipotent.

and right now the best we can do as individuals is to call them out on problematic depictions to make them improve, even if Disney's just improving that stuff in order to avoid criticism.

So you believe individuals can change the world's views on society, gender, and minorities; but you don't believe individuals can change the world's view on a greedy corporation having too much control?

The best we can do as individuals is not enabling Disney further into their dominance by giving them the feedback they need to improve their marketing and comfort their position. The best we can do is spreading more awareness of how problematic it is that one massive company has such a weight and ensure it is not enduring.

Well, Disney also used to make a lot of money on films featuring racial caricatures, but stopped including those designs in their later films when enough people called them out on it.

No, they stopped doing racial caricatures because racial caricatures stopped bringing money and could actually cost money. 

Elsa and Anna are sisters so it kinda makes sense they would look similar. But I still agree with you that they have a lot of princesses looking alike. But again, it's not a statement on women, it's because they know that's how they'll make money.

You are giving Disney way too much credit. And probably too much attention as well. Disney does not have the bravery to create trends, they follow them once they are deemed profitable enough. If you ever see Disney doing something progressive it is not because they genuinely support it, it is because it has become a better way to make money. Thus it means that trend is already established by other people who were more brave and less greedy than them. These should receive praise and attention, not Disney.

They are filthy and should not be granted so much attention in the first place. The way we will stop looking at them as if they were some sort of important cultural landmark we will have done a great progress in humanity.

Disney characters look similar because they are only interested in making money. So if Elsa is successful in bringing money, they will make every character look like Elsa because that's how they will make more money. And if there are similarities between villains it is because they identified those are the villains that are making money.

Disney doesn't worth the conversations people have about them. They're just an awful and toxic organization that would do anything and its contrary for the sole purpose of making money. Don't talk about them like they are anything else than a big money machine. Everything they do has the same explanation: it was the best way to make money. Everything else about Disney is irrelevant.

Hear! Hear! Wham.  It is so nice to see that video gaming has really taken off over the last year. Far from being the bad influence, once thought, encouraging the
populus to get up to every unspeakable attrocity, it is now being recognised as a great stress reliever and a way to ward off altzeimers. An accolade rightly deserved   

*Picks up cane and starts waving it around like a madman.* Gaming died over a decade ago!

Ahem. Now I've gotten that out of my system. I honestly didn't realize gaming had taken off last year. I'm pretty sure games had become well-established mainstream nearly two decades ago (roughly around the time "AAA" became a common term). Did Covid really bring that many new people in?

It kinda reminds me of those who still treat the comic book and superhero fandoms as these obscure nerdy underdogs, even after a full decade of blockbuster Superhero flicks dominating cinemas.

That is not in every culture. There are many different cultures in Mainland Europe or East Asia that are not sensitive to superhero stuff. If only because they have their own brand of pop culture and do not need Marvel. It is seen there as an American oddity with very heavy marketing, and only a very niche audience is showing interest.

As per videogames it has been established for very long. What we observe though is a huge rise in independent developpers. In its infancy the videogame industry was made by small teams or solo developpers, then came the age when you could not do a game unless you were a Hollywood-size studio, then we reverted to an age when big studios and small independents are coexisting. Which is good for players and hobbyist developpers alike.

Movies have been the same though, there are lots of independent movies that appear here and there. Even in the US the independent cinema industry is rather flourishing and it is popular abroad.