Posted on: February 27, 2022

psirenne
Verified ownerGames: 995 Reviews: 2
Worst excesses of 90s adventure games
I've endured some punishing adventure games (the stairs mechanics in early King's Quest, for example), but this is in the running with Monkey Island 2 for most irritating. The first thing that really bothered me was the puzzle involving the surveyor's tool. There's a diagram showing how the lines are supposed to be aligned, which *does not match* the actual puzzle solution. After playing around with it for a while, I looked up the solution on UHS, and was glad that I didn't waste any more time on it. As with Monkey Island 2, the thing that is unacceptable is the endgame. You are treated to a maze with a lot of rooms which are just decoration, but *some* of the rooms are really important, and have puzzles and items which solve puzzles. The maze is very large, and you'll never be sure that you've gotten everything from each room, *and* it's patrolled by enemy soldiers who you have to avoid. *Except*, if you avoid them entirely, you'll miss that one of them is carrying something that you need to solve a puzzle. If you fight them, they regenerate, so you're always dodging around them while you're scavenger-hunting for everything that you might need. If you miss even one item, you have to wander around the whole maze looking for it, wondering if maybe you already *have* the solution in your inventory but haven't pieced together that a ribcage and a sausage can be combined to make a crab-trab, and that maybe a crab can be used as food for a hungry octopus, which eats crabs (there's no indication that octopuses like to eat crabs, or that crabs eat sausages, it's just dumb AG logic that you have to apply). If you get through all of this, you arrive at a statue that is powered by beads you've made in a machine at the beginning of the maze. You think you have an infinite supply, but you can run out, and if you do you have to go *all the way back* to the beginning of the maze, dodging enemies while you do. This game was what walkthroughs were *made* for.
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