Shadowgate
I was able to get through the first half of Shadowgate because I remember most of the solutions from reading Nintendo Power in 1990. Does that seem odd? Their coverage of the game consisted of a series of screenshots and instructions that showed you exactly what to do in every room. It’s a point-and-click adventure game, so there’s no actual challenge to the game besides the puzzles.
If you don’t know the solutions, though, it’s a brutal game. Many of the puzzles straight-up kill you if you guess the wrong solution, and since the clues are often subtle or absent you’ll be guessing a lot. Everyone’s played this game, it seems, and they all shut it off in frustration after 20 minutes. Unless they read that issue of Nintendo Power.
And yet there’s something cool about it. The NES version has neat music, and the writing is sharp and often funny. You end up reading a few phrases over and over in adventure games, particularly when you’re grasping at straws and trying to USE PELICAN ON BATTERY or whatever, and most games will say “You can’t do that” or “I don’t see that here”, which is boring and frustrating when your solution makes perfect sense. Shadowgate has a few of those, but one of them is my favorite game text ever: “WHAT YOU EXPECTED HASN’T HAPPENED”. I love the sound of it, and how it subtly turns “the game is dumb” into “the player is dumb”. As a game designer you always want the latter.
Of course, I got stuck towards the end of the game because of a puzzle that’s solved by a pixel-hunt, basically. Nowadays that’s a whole genre — “hidden object games”, which I haven’t played but as I understand it consist mainly of clicking on the right thing in a picture of many things. So I guess that element I find annoying has been factored out and put somewhere it can be sought out or avoided.
