Death in adventure games

Posted by Drummond Doroski.
First posted on 01 January 2009. Last updated on 23 May 2010.
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There is much debate as to what makes for the best sort of experience in adventure games. It is hard to pin down just what makes certain games fun and others frustrating. What makes a puzzle too simple or too complex? When does the story or dialog amount to be too much or too little? Sometimes, it is best to look at individual facets of the genre and examine what some games do well and others do…

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Previous Comments

Very Good

I was a Sierra-style defender for a long, long time. It's not easy. Everyone these days has fond memories of Lucasarts games, but most Sierra games are thought of as punch lines. Sierra's best are hardly even remembered, eclipsed by random deaths and cat mustaches.

That said, in a recent replay of QfG3 I found that my ability to defend them utterly failed. I love the QfG games. As a gamer for over 20 years, they're without a doubt my all-time favorite series. But it's possible to miss something in the first half hour of the game which will force a loss in the last five minutes.

That's some crappy design, folks. No matter what you think of death as a motivating factor.

United States By Adam • On 13 December 2011 • From Boston

Very Good

I think he happy medium is found in a game called Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist. In it death could happen randomly and unexpectedly but every time you had a rewind button that literally rewound the game so you could see the (usually humorous) death in reverse. The player was encouraged to try anything and everything, even if it might kill them, just so they saw all the animations that the game makers created.

United States By Insaniac99 • On 10 May 2009 • From Somewhere

Very Good

I definitely think you should be able to die in adventure games, if only because the lack of death tends to make things ridiculous during the more "tense" sequences. You end up with situations where the game designer has to think up more and more convoluted reasons why the bad guy won't actually kill you. The solution as i see it is to allow death, and allow it often, but have an undo feature to let you get right back to before you made the decision. No-one wants to do the same puzzle twice.

Australia By Jack McNameee • On 24 January 2009 • From Somewhere

Very Good

My own thoughts on death in adventure games can be summed up in a couple principles that even apply across genres: Firstly, you shouldn't have to die to be able to solve a puzzle, and you should have some fair warning before you're killed. Any time you die it should be your own fault, a perfect player ought to never die. And secondly, the only time you should need to save your game is when you quit at the end of the day, after dying you should be brought back to a convenient autosave or simply given the option to retry a sequence.

The first point was originally made by Ron Gilbert in his classic essay on why adventure games suck, and echoed by Scott Miller in his blog, game matters. Choose Your Own Adventure books and Adventure Games frequently violate this principle by having death occur almost at random as part of the gameplay, but I think the general principle is still a solid one. And at the very least, the second point still holds true (also brought up by both game designers), forcing the player to make save games all the time to prepare for the unexpected just isn't fun. A game should be a challenge in and of itself, not because you're forced to backtrack and repeat the same section over and over again.

You can kill the player if you want to, but it needs to feel fair, and it shouldn't force you to repeat hours of gameplay.

United States By Mark Newheiser • On 13 January 2009 • From United States

Excellent

I think he has a point. I've been playing these games for a while, and I admit that I do relish the idea when I start a game that I don't have to be tense the whole time thinking something is going to come up behind me and cut my head off because I choose to step to the left rather than to the right. However, I think it's reasonable not to throw out death all together.
I think the first comment's point though, is irrelevant to the gaming industry. True, it was easier and nicer back in the day to make various deaths such that a variety could form and the game would cease to be boring, however, we DON'T use floppy disks anymore, and we tend to pride ourselves today on how much memory is on our computers to run more complex tasks. By saying that providing various deaths is a way to be more interesting, you're also implying that writers should take the simple and easy way out by making small death sequences for the same puzzle, instead of trying to create more interesting puzzles with the new-found memory we seem to suddenly possess. We should never fall to the theory of whatever is less creative and quicker. The whole point of games is to be new, exciting and exceptionally creative; that's what makes a good adventure game.

United States By Victoria • On 13 January 2009 • From SLO, CA

Good

The best solution to the dying problem is actually the one that shows up in Full Throttle. Let the player die, then restart them just before they made the fatal mistake. You get all the humor and pathos of death without the eye-popping frustration of realizing just how long ago you saved.

United States By Gregory • On 09 January 2009 • From Charlotte, USA

Good

I feel probably the best use of death in an adventure game would be the original Broken Sword. It's always made very obvious when you're getting yourself into something dangerous, the game almost always gives you a sporting amount of warning, usually building up tension via dialogue and musical cues so you're kept alert and less likely to blunder into a trap, and (perhaps deliberately) the death puzzles are just a little easier than all the other puzzles in the game, so anyone who's got far enough to face them is probably well enough into the right deductive mindset, for the game's particular style of puzzle design, to stand a very good chance of surviving first time, so the old save-restore cycle is usually avoided by all but the least alert players. It's also always obvious and understandable what the danger was should one actually fail and need to do it again, rather than Sierra-style, utterly unpredictable "gotchas," and anyone who does get killed will usually quite forgive the game for having been sportsmanlike and beaten them fairly, rather than get annoyed at being sucker-punched. Also unlike Sierra games, Broken Sword is very sparing in its use of death scenes, using them only when appropriate to raise the tension of the plot and always treating them as significant, cinematically gripping, dramatic events, rather than a mere off-the-cuff dismissal back to the load screen.

It should be said, however, that games from the really old days (pre-CDROM, roughly, for reasons that will become obvious) that made extremely liberal use of deathtraps did have one compelling reason to do so: it was a good way of extending gameplay while adding minimal additional content, thus minimising the already obscene number of floppies the user would usually have to juggle to play the damn thing. I would venture to suggest that humorous (or even just surprising) deaths are better than, though perhaps not quite as efficient as the other traditional method of extending play without squandering additional memory: identical-room mazes, which have almost always been despised. At least the addition of many varied ways to get killed, which could easily increase the time spent playing any given area with any given objects by an order of magnitude, provided some action and variety, whereas mazes usually offered sheer boring repetition and monotony.

Great Britain (UK) By Tom • On 05 January 2009 • From Somewhere