With it being October and all, I decided I would play an adventure game that deals in the cartoonishly spooky. I discovered Champy The Useless Vampire. It turned out to be a much shorter game than I anticipated, so I can hardly use it as my October-long Halloween game, but it turned out to be a bite-sized little game clearly made by someone who loves the genre. The puzzles felt competent, but never actually challenging. My main complaint is that the title is wrong. Champy isn’t useless, he does the whole adventure. Saves the day and all that. He’s more competent than Roger Wilco, based on this game. The game was just a bit of welcome fun.

Anyway, a short game, so what could I possibly muse about from it?

Well, it did one thing I liked a lot. Point-and-click adventure games get a lot of flack for “pixel hunting” and that is sometimes justified, sometimes not, but there have been attempts to fix it. My favourite way games have tried to make it easier to find what’s on the screen is when you can highlight the hotspots. Any time I’m in a new point-and-click I find myself hitting tab or shift or spacebar just to see if that’ll do it, since I’ve had games do that in the past. In Champy though, it isn’t a separate button, but rather you hold down the left mouse button and it shows you everything! And it feels so right!

That button is already the primary means of interacting with the game world, so using it to look around, which is what highlighting the hotspots essentially represents, makes it feel I’m still interacting. Having a devoted button for it was always fine, but I realize now that it breaks the continuity of being in the game world in just the most minor way, but holding down the button doesn’t. It appeals to me greatly.

I don’t love HOW the game highlights its hotspots. It puts a little theme-appropriate bat icon on them, which isn’t terrible, but I’d prefer something that didn’t cover up the thing being shown. Since we’re supposed to be seeing the things, seeing less of them isn’t ideal. I’d probably prefer just outlining them in red or something, but still, the system is good.

It’s very likely this system has been used in games of higher profile that I have just not played yet, as much as I’d love to credit the innovation to a small game like this. But no matter what the case, I can credit the makers of Champy for picking the right way to do it.

If I ever get back to trying to make an adventure game on my own, this is the way I’d want to handle it.

When I mentioned the Drifter in my Newsletter last month, I realized I don’t talk about the games I play often enough on here. So now I will try to start doing that. I’m probably not going to be doing detailed reviews or trenchant analysis, but I think it would be good to just plop my thoughts down so I can look back at them later, especially in case I ever manage to live my lifelong dream of getting into designing adventure games. I’m gonna call these Adventure Game Musings

I finished the Mermaid Mask today. It’s the most recent in the Detective Grimoire series of point-and-click mysteries. I’d already played the previous two in the series and enjoyed them, so I am not surprised to enjoy this one too.

The thing I thought about most during my time playing this game was how it is just clicking everything on everything. This is something they complained about in the adventure games of yore, you’d get stuck and just have to click every item in your inventory on every other thing in the game. The Grimoire games are like that, clicking every topic on every suspect, and it can feel daunting as the amount of suspects and topics grows. I find myself walking up to someone and needing to get their reactions to the 40-some things I need to ask them about and it seems like a lot, it seems like it’s gonna take forever, and I wonder “Is that what I want?”

I remember playing games as a kid and I loved the exploration aspect. The hours I spent exploring Mordavia or the Galaxy Galleria didn’t feel like wasted time even when I was stuck. It was fun, it was the experience I was looking for in a game. So why does in feel imposing now? Well, it’s because of the time investment. I don’t long for less time playing the game, I long for the days of youth when I could spend hours exploring a game world and it didn’t make me feel like my time was slipping away. That’s not the fault of the games.

I think that what the games have to do, then, is find a way to make me feel less bad about it. What the Mermaid Mask does to mitigate the issue is that those 40-some questions posed to a suspect are answered in fun ways by characters who are brought to life by great voice acting and animation. It’s a reward for the time invested, so I enjoyed that.

Do I think there are better ways? Well, sure. The opposite of rewarding a lot of clicks is to punish over-clicking, and I liked the way The Seance of Blake Manor did it, with the amounts of clicks you can do being limited. Once you’re told you CAN’T click on everything, it frees you from the feeling that you have to click on everything. Having to think and pick and choose what things you click makes a lot of sense to me in a mystery game. As an example, in the Mermaid Mask I found a box that required a number combination to open and when I asked another character about it, he just opened it for me. It was all sign-posted, the idea that the number could be a birthday is not only obvious in a real-world sense but also was brought up in the game, and the guy mentioned that he had been gathering the birthdays of the people in the cast. I can see how I would connect the dots and use that guy’s knowledge to solve the puzzle, but I didn’t solve it that way, I just got it done because I was asking the guy about everything. I didn’t get a sense of satisfaction of realizing it myself.

Now, that’s one example, there are a bunch of puzzles in the Mermaid Mask that I got to feel clever for solving (especially when I do it before the game started feeding me hints) and I wouldn’t want the Grimoire games to not have a ton of fun characters. The way they do it is the right choice for these games, it’s what I would come to these games for, but if I had to choose which I prefer I think finding a way to limit the clicking appeals more to me.

Good game though!