The Adventure Game and the Walkthrough

Anyone who played adventure games has nostalgia for them. They defined PC gaming to me and many of my generation. When I was younger, "computer game" and "adventure game" were nearly synonymous.

Playing through Lucasarts' Day of the Tentacle is one of my fondest game memories. Not that I actually played the game, but it was fun anyway.

Let me explain. The game, as purchased by my sister, came with a walkthrough. It was necessary — perhaps too much. Each time I would sit down to play, I made sure that the walkthrough was handy, because, dollars to donuts, I was going to use it. Sometimes it seemed like I had less of a game and more of a long film that I had to edit myself.

Adventure games were reaching a point were developers knew how to make them, but also knew how people played them. And those two processes never quite matched up. Each game had its own internal logic, which you had to learn quickly in order to solve the puzzles. There is one huge disconnect here. You needed the internal logic to solve the puzzle, but you needed to solve the puzzle to learn the logic. To compensate for this divide, they stuck the walkthrough in the box.

How many people remember adventure games as a collection of pixel-hunting and random item combining? OK, everyone put your hands down, I think that was all of us.

I can name a few reasons why the game was good. At the time, the graphics blew my mind and the writing made me laugh. And while I didn't solve every single puzzle, in an abstract sense at least, I could respect them and they were fun.

I'm glad adventure games aren't quite so dominant anymore — the overly arcane puzzle design was killing the genre. Thankfully, modern adventure games are much more intuitive and accessible — Zack and Wiki and the new Sam and Max series are great examples.

We should all remember, however, that there was a time when you needed walkthroughs if you wanted to beat your games.