Sumez wrote: ↑Fri Jan 31, 2025 7:02 am
Man, I'm gonna have to inquire about this, because it's something I hear about so often that I can't help wonder where it comes from.
I've played tons and tons of games in the genre, and I guess there might be a couple of examples of this happening? - me missing an important item because you can barely spot it in the artwork, and you'd have to stumble upon it with the cursor like you described. But if you put me on the spot, I wouldn't be able to name any single specific instance.
Well, I think if any of us are "put on the spot," it might be tough to recall an hard-to-spot item in an adventure game we played years ago. There's nothing surprising to me about that.
Yet, people often tend to act like it's a common issue of the genre, if not straight up *genre defining*. What are some games, or some specific examples, that make you point out this issue? I'm genuinely curious.
I think the main reason is that the early Sierra games were especially rife with hidden items, to the point where the task was a feature and not a bug. In those AGI games, you not only had to contend with impossible to see items, but you had to fight with the text parser to string together the phrase which would allow you to discover them. The four leaf clover in King's Quest, which you must not only assume is findable, but must be search for in just the right way. The golden egg in the tree in Hero's Quest that you can get by climbing and searching for, or by throwing rocks (why would I throw rocks at a tree?). I would say that most items in the 80s Sierra games were made to blend into the background as that was a way of creating a challenge for the player. It was cheap, but it was early days and they were working with what they had. As time went by, the games became more clever and the puzzles tended to rely more and more on testing actual reasoning and not on "pixel hunting" or trial and error (can I climb the tree, what will happen if I do?), but those things never fully left the genre, and they stuck around as a cheap and easy way to make a puzzle difficult when the developer didn't want to or couldn't think of a better way to make a more interesting challenge. There were plenty of moments in The Fate of Atlantis that had pixel hunts like the random piece of red cloth in the Bedouin's collapsed house, or the wax cat in the beginning. The first Gabriel Knight game has a fairly notorious pixel hunt involving a snake scale you must find that is on the ground in the grass and bares absolutely no difference from the surroundings. In fact, the whole game is like that and there's a "hi res mode" in the CD version that renders the selectable items double resolution so they visually stand apart from the background when you mouse over them, a feature they implemented because they knew how impossible it was to make out items from the background.
Can I give you a list of the toughest, most unfair pixel hunts in adventure game history? No, my specific memory of playing all those games isn't good enough for that. However, I can tell you unequivocally that most early adventure games (especially the Sierra stuff) were filled with pixel guesswork, in which you had to study a 2D background and, in many cases, try to imagine what it actually was you were staring at, and then spend what feels like eons popping phrases into a parser hoping that you were not only correct in your assumptions, but that you were using the super specific word(s) that the designers chose to identify them. In many cases, those words would be crossword puzzle level archaic word usage, and impossible for a child (me) to know.
As time went by, we all got better at doing the pixel hunting dance because we got wise that we needed to scan backgrounds exhaustively, and the games made that process much easier with the established norms of the mouse cursor over the text parser, and with higher resolution graphics, allowing a small item to be (slightly) more accurately represented. However, that didn't stop games from occasionally expecting you to find a black item in a sea of darkness with a hit box the size of a dust partical.