I’m cheeking my chooken right now!
Interesting. That was my ‘solution’ to the key problem of the genre (imo), being stuck in a puzzle because you didn’t think on the specific solution the game designer decided it should be used, even when you thought of other perfectly valid in real life solutions to the problem (that the game designer didn’t implement). In other words, borrow from RPG games where you can have different solutions to quests. At least you decrease the chances of players getting stuck if every problem have three solutions, instead of just one.
I thought of that like… 15 years ago, I’m glad someone finally did it.
Actually, I should clarify. The key selling point of Unavowed is that it is a series of chapters, each being a mostly self-contained story. When you start a chapter (by taking the NYC subway to a new location), you choose which of the team members you want to bring with you. Each of the characters has a different set of skills–there’s a fire mage, a half-djinn with a sword and the ability to detect lies, a guy who talks to ghosts, and a former cop with law enforcement connections. Once you pick a team and start that chapter, you are stuck with those characters. The trick is that every challenge you encounter in the story can be resolved with any combination of characters. So, there’s usually a ghost in a story, but if you don’t have the right character, you can’t talk to them. So whatever information you get from the ghost, you can get some other way.
So, it doesn’t solve the problem of getting stuck on a prescribed puzzle, exactly. It’s more of a mechanic that creates variety and replayability. Although you do feel like you know what avenues will be the best to pursue based off the characters you brought with you…
What most modern adventure games do about the getting-stuck problem, including Unavowed, is simply not make the puzzles too hard. Old school point-and-click authors thought they needed to provide a really intense challenge. With games now, especially ones where the main draw is the interactive story, puzzles are just hurdles that create the satisfying feeling that you accomplished something before you get another chunk of narrative. I think it’s a big improvement on the games that had you banging your head against a puzzle for a week, listening to the same error messages over and over again. “I don’t think that will work.” “No, I don’t want to do that.” “That’s pointless.”
I feel like there must be an adventure game that created multiple solutions to all or many of the puzzles… but I can’t think of it right now. I mean, some of the Infocom games did that here and there, but not often.
What your suggestion makes me think of are the Ultima Worlds games–Savage Empire and Martian Dreams. Those are basically adventure games built in an RPG engine, so it’s an open-world with objects that operate systematically. So if you need to dig something up, you can go looking around the world for a shovel or a pick axe or whatever. And there might be multiples of each of those, in fairly commonsensical locations. And the trick is you can’t carry an infinite amount of stuff, so you have to remember where things are and decide what’s going to be most worth taking with you.
So what they did was go way back to the roots and recreate the Maniac Mansion system, only on a per-chapter basis… interesting!
There are a few examples of this that I know of:
- The first King’s Quest was surprisingly open in its approach, allowing you to interact with many characters in multiple ways (slay the dragon or put it to sleep). It was probably the best early Sierra game.
- Zak Mckracken allowed you to use many objects for similar tasks e.g. if you needed to throw a bottle at something, it could be any other heavy object too. In most adventure games, a specific object must be used for a specific purpose.
- In the Quest For Glory games, different classes had different solutions to the same puzzles.
Ultimately I think either devs need to give an easier path for difficult puzzles, with the harder path being more satisfying/giving more points, or they need to give good in-game hints that get more generous the longer you spin your wheels.
I skipped over those since I started at Ultima 7 and disliked the earlier interfaces, but it sounds like they’re worth a try.
I was an enormous fan of New Star Soccer back in the day, as it scratched all the right itches for someone who really likes playing sports RPGs - it had a solid representation of the actual sport you were meant to be playing, it had teammate drama, love affairs, long term grudges and it allowed you to shower your girlfriend in hanggliders.
So I was surprised that I somehow missed the release of New Star Manager!
It’s great!
You’ve moved now from being a player to a manager, obvs, and you get to control both on and off field aspects of the team, like team lineups, formations, player transfers, sponsorship deals, stadium infrastructure and press conferences.
So far, so similar, but then the game starts giving you cards to play.
Your staff generate these cards on a cooldown that gets shorter as you upgrade your facilities and you can also earn others through interactions with your board or the fans from events that pop up, or from successful press conferences. The press will ask you questions like “what’s the name of your scout” or “how many more games will [player] miss through injury” and you have a few seconds to answer correctly, so you better be paying attention.
These generated cards can be just energy drinks to replenish tired players, but they can also be stat improvements, cards that change a player’s position, or things like guaranteed successful contract negotiations, allowing you to definitely get another twenty games out of that star forward before he asks for more money.
You get to chose which players get these cards, so you can develop young talent, or try to pump the stats of your established stars.
On the field the game is a lot of fun too, with some clever touches. In defence you don’t get to do anything as the game will use text to tell you about the other team’s attacks, the result and who, if anyone, was the hero or was to blame. When you’re on the attack though, you get full control over your team - you can “paint” lines on the field to show individual players where to run, chose where to pass and how hard, dribble the ball and then pick your spot to unleash a thunderbastard shot on goal. At this point a ball bounces across the screen and you have to click on it where you want to make contact - too low and the ball can fly over the bar… hit the wrong side and you can spoon the shot into the crowd.
Overall, great fun so far.
King’s Bird is an excellent and beautiful platformer, if you’re up for a challenge and you’re into speed-run strategies. If you’re not, it might be worth it for the art and the novelty of the control scheme alone… but you will likely (like me) hit a wall eventually.
You do have to learn to handle an older interface–the weirdest part being that it’s from that era where they had a keyboard interface and then layered mouse controls on top of it, so it’s actually pretty flexible, but sort of works best once you figure out how to combine the two the right way–but otherwise they’re definitely worth it, especially Martian Dreams which I think is a downright classic. Hey, Warren Spector himself said it was the best Ultima game ever made! It’s a tremendously conceived world and a fascinating place to explore (although some folks gripe about how RED it all is…).
Not sure if it’s been mentioned here, but Mutant Football League: Dinasty Edition is a LOT of fun.
https://www.gog.com/game/mutant_football_league_dynasty_edition
I’ve also seen it compared to Mass Effect? But I haven’t played those, so I don’t know how accurate the comparison is.
I need to get into this on the ipad after learning about it not too long ago. Need a game that combines all the best parts of this with the gameplay/interface of Score! Hero. I see that there’s something called Score! Match that might be what I’m looking for but will have to dig up more info on it.
How is it in single player?
I’m only playing single player. It has single games, playoffs, full seasons, and a full-fledged dinasty mode to build your team from the ground to glory. I have yet to play the latter mode - I’m still playing season mode to “warm up”, and it’s really fun.
BTW, there’s a demo on Steam, apparently. I have no idea how representative of the current state of the game it is, but it should be enough for you to have a slight idea if you’ll enjoy it or not.
Do you play Mutant Football League on a controller or mouse+keyboard?
New Star Manager is wonderful. I play it on Android - the mobile touch controls are great, and it runs like a dream.
Yeah great game, I love it too. Headers aside it really hits that twitch vs thinking sweet spot. IE: 90% thinking 10% twitch.
This looks fun, also great price!
Impressionistic brawler with mild Soulslike elements.
I heard about it from Dominic Tarason’s top 5 games of the year at RPS. (He’s been a pleasant addition to RPS this year since we seem to enjoy similar genres.)
There’s a good demo at the itch.io page: https://melessthanthree.itch.io/lucah
This looks good, still in EA tho.