awalterj: Labyrinth - The two doors riddle That riddle completely confused me the first time I saw the movie. The scene is too fast, didn't have any time to reflect on it. This movie should have been a point & click adventure instead, that would be awesome.
chadjenofsky: Should have been? Well it kinda was. Though not a point & click, and I think loosely based on the film:
LucasArts' first adventure game from 1986!
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth:_The_Computer_Game]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth:_The_Computer_Game[/url]
The irony here is that the LucasArts game didn't even bother to give the player an interesting riddle for the two doors. Instead, they parody the movie by outright labeling the doors "to certain death" and "to the castle". And when you pass through the door that says castle, one of the goblins asks the other "how did she figure that out?".
It's mildly funny but lazy design imho, the game should offer a more complicated riddle than the movie and not just use the scene for setting up a cheap joke. I still think Labyrinth would make a most wonderful point & click adventures, even the action scenes in the movie rely on wits rather than reflexes so it would be easy to transform them into genre-conforming puzzles. One example being when Ludo calls the rocks to unhorse the goblin knights.
Timed puzzles would be rare, only a few things like when Sir Didymus jousts the goblin knight would make more sense as a simple timed puzzle where you have to aim your lance at a specific part of the goblin's mount and if you fail then Sir Didymus gets unhorsed (more precisely, undogged) and you have to try again until you get it right. And during the city battle, it would be fun to play a little wack-a-mole minigame with Sarah against goblins trying to climb into the house through the windows. Running through the city without bumping into goblins could be handled like the car chase in Fate of Atlantis, it's still comfy point & click gameplay even if it's real-time. I don't mind timed puzzles and minigames when they're easy and fun, I only mind them when they're obtuse, unfair and badly designed in which case they have no right to exist in a point & click adventure.
As for the boss fight against Humongous, if translated 1:1 that one would work best as a traditional puzzle without a time limit. All your character would duck and cover indefinitely until you figure out that Hoggle can climb on the gate and jump down on Humongous to throw the pilot out of the mecha cockpit. That would be boring though as everyone who has seen the movie already knows what needs to be done so that puzzle would have to be changed as well as the final dialogue puzzle of Sarah vs the Goblin King to finally get the baby back.
The final stage in Labyrinth with the Escher staircase is similar to walking around the Monkey Head in Monkey Island where you could wander around forever and would never in a Million years get anywhere without the navigator's head. In the Lucas Arts game adaption of Labyrinth, you simply steer Sarah around until you eventually bump into Jareth, there is no think outside the box and make the jump revelation like in the movie. It would be difficult for anyone who hasn't seen the movie to get the player to think "oh I can jump off the ledge" so I understand why they didn't adopt that faithfully for the game. Another Fate of Atlantis car chase minigame seems appropriate :)
The final showdown with Jareth was pointless in the game, obviously you can't expect the player to know what they need to say unless they have seen the movie (outside knowledge requirement = bad) and since there was no parsing for that part, the player could simply piece together the sentence from two half-sentences in the interface "you have no" & "power over me". Lame, so lame! They could have turned this into a funny dialogue battle, something along the lines of what the player needs to do in the insult sword fights in Monkey Island or the verbal fights in The Shivah where it's actual fun gameplay not just saying one correct line fairy-tale style.
