
Great Adventure-Game Puzzles - nikbackm
https://www.filfre.net/2018/11/ten-great-adventure-game-puzzles/
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evmar
In one text adventure whose name I forget, you're stuck in a maze, and

[spoilers]

as you wander around helplessly at some point you start getting hot. If you
take off your shirt to cool off, the game responds something like: "ah, much
better. you stretch out your wings.". And with that info, the maze is solved
by simply "fly".

I liked how it made me aware of my preconceptions, that the protagonist I was
playing was just like me.

~~~
Scaevolus
9:05 is my favorite introduction to IF:
[http://adamcadre.ac/if/905.html](http://adamcadre.ac/if/905.html)

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acomjean
I like a text adventure game but sometimes the puzzles seem were so obtuse.
They seen to gave gotten better lately (being able to look up stuff on the
internet helps..)

I always think of old man murrays rant on a "gabriel knight" puzzle, and
wonder who has the patience to figure these things out: (the puzzle involves
spraying a cat with water and using tape to collect fur and maple syrup as an
adhesive..)

" Gabriel Knight must disguise himself as a man called Mosley in order to fool
a French moped rental clerk into renting him the shop's only motorcycle.

In order to construct the costume, Gabriel Knight must manufacture a fake
moustache. ... Knight must do this even though Moseley does not have a
moustache.

"

[http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/78.html](http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/78.html)

[http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/79.html](http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/79.html)

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Scaevolus
"Counterfeit Monkey" by Emily Short expands the T-remover puzzle into a full
game full of wordplay. For example, you turn a fossil into foil and then oil
to fix a car.

Retrospective: [https://emshort.blog/2013/01/24/making-of-counterfeit-
monkey...](https://emshort.blog/2013/01/24/making-of-counterfeit-monkey-
puzzles-and-toys/)

~~~
4thaccount
I'm a big fan of lots of her work. Beautifully written, fun, engrossing.

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codeulike
There was a text adventure for the BBC Model B called Philosopher's Quest
(Acornsoft 1983). The back of the box mentioned, among other things 'Nothing
in the game is a red herring so read all the text carefully for clues to other
puzzles.'

At one point in the game you see the word 'Blanche' written on a wall. If you
type the word, distant bells ring, but nothing else seems to happen.

Right at the end of the game, you need one more point to win. If you say
Blanche at the very end, then you get the final points; no red herrings.

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joshschreuder
I know it's mentioned briefly in the article, but I always loved the insult
sword fighting from Monkey Island. Very funny and young me really had to think
about the chosen response.

~~~
nathell
Ooh. In the language puzzles subgenre, I’d add the stranger encounter from
„The Edifice,” by Lucian Paul Smith (1997). One of the most memorable.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edifice](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edifice)

~~~
mjw1007
That's great. And all of "The Gostak".

I think I like these so much because they make me feel like I'm being clever.

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cpeterso
If you like text adventure games, check out Jason Scott's documentary _GET
LAMP_ about the history of text adventure games, including interviews with
some Infocom developers:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU)

[http://www.getlamp.com/](http://www.getlamp.com/)

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probably_wrong
Random fact about that puzzle in Monkey Island: it's the only way I know in
which you can _actually_ lose the game.

M.I. prided itself in having no dead ends, but if you throw the leaflet into a
fire then you cannot leave the island. I thought I was being smart throwing
items in the fire (the game stops you from throwing _other_ useful items, and
I wanted a smaller inventory), but in the end finishing the game took a couple
years and the internet.

~~~
AndrewOMartin
You can also drown when underwater, Guybrush can _only_ hold his breath for
ten minutes!

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brownbat
Radio4 published Hitchhiker's Guide online for an anniversary:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml](http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml)

The article boasts that the fish puzzle isn't even that hard for the game.
Curious which ones they found the hardest or most random...

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nitwit005
I wonder what percentage of users got past these in the days before looking up
answers online. Some of these I know I wouldn't have solved, or would have
taken an enormous amount of time like the Plundered Hearts example.

I recall people examining the raw data of some of these games to find text
strings that could explain how to solve them.

~~~
CamperBob2
_I recall people examining the raw data of some of these games to find text
strings that could explain how to solve them._

I tried that, but I wasn't sufficiently '1337 to crack the text compression
scheme used by Infocom, despite several attempts at disassembling their (Apple
II) parser back in the day.

Amusingly, though, because their game engine stored next to nothing in RAM and
relied heavily on demand-paging the compressed text from disk, I was able to
get some intriguing clues about locations, objects, and events I hadn't yet
encountered by swapping one game disk for another in the middle of a session
and typing LOOK. Most of the resulting output was garbage, and crashes were
pretty common, but when the (radix-40, IIRC) bitstream lined up just right,
the game would sometimes spew out a significant amount of decoded plaintext.

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32bitkid
One of the first games I played as a kid was the DOS port of infocoms Deadline
(1982) — a police/detective mystery. Easily one of my favorite adventure games
of all time. It had a branching story line, multiple endings, a real-time-ish
clock. Combine that with the “feelies” that infocom was known for in the early
80s and it was a unique experience that I’m not sure anyone will be able to
reproduce.

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nsxwolf
As much as I loved these games growing up, it pains me to admit that the
puzzle designs found in most make them objectively not good games.

Dark Seed, for example, has puzzles that must be solved at a certain time on a
certain day, and if you miss your chance the game becomes unwinnable without
any indication of that fact. Yay.

