I greatly dislike dead man walking scenarios, I find them comparable to bugs in the game. Moon logic I can tolerate up to a point - it is a subjective scale of unbelievability after all, and "lateral thinking" is a big part of adventure games; I tend to be more accepting if the solution is at least consistent within the game world itself, less if it is self-contradictory.

Both, no doubt. I know that does not answer your question, but does not encourage the lesser evil alternative either :)

Dead man walking for sure. That's what really turned me off of certain adventure games back in the day, and what I look up to prevent happening when I play today. Moon logic sucked and sometimes I'd even abandon a game because of it, but at least I could walk around with a hope of figuring it out. Not so with something you missed entirely.

This is doubly true today where moon logic is an easy google search away from solving, but searching for a list of dead-ends is often difficult in my experience.

I personally found that the logic in most of Hitchhiker's puzzles actually made sense... but only after the fact. My problem/frustration in many cases was that you often couldn't fully understand the parameters of a puzzle until you had already passed the point of no return where a puzzle was then unsolvable and you had no choice but to RESTORE. Many of the puzzles were designed so that you essentially had to go in and fail the first few times (or quite a few times) so that you could learn what's going to happen and then go back to a saved game and take steps to prevent that failure condition from happening. The problem, though, is that there was often no way to know ahead of time that these failure conditions exist until you encounter them, no matter how much you LOOK, EXAMINE, SEARCH, etc.

I've played a few games that have used this technique as an intentional design decision, but those games (at least the ones I found fun) also had some elegant means to "rewind time" so that your failure wasn't actually presented as a failure, but rather: "Here's your challenge -- now figure out how to overcome it."


There's a few puzzles that tread into Moon Logic territory. It's a keyword-based system, so with enough intentional persistence you can eventually stumble through most of the puzzles. I was able to get through, I'd say, 95% of the game on my own.

But on that last 5% I found myself thinking "Hmm... with a few more shots of Jager, I can see how that might have been considered a logical option..."

Hot take: I believe games should have intrinsic fail states, so in a vacuum I consider "dead man walking" of the player failing if not having a certain item to be better than a "moon logic" puzzle that can ultimately be passed. Along the same lines, even if the "dead man walking" scenario doesn't result in a true gameover but only a softlock, I still consider that preferable to an "subjective" softlock where a puzzle is just obtuse to solve so the player is effectively stuck too.

That's *exactly* how I felt playing La-Mulans remake. In fact, it was sometimes fun figuring out the logic after knowing the solution.

That game did, however, have one late-game puzzle that I liked, and which I solved without having to look up the solution. I won't spoil it, but I'll just say that figuring out the solution involved getting hit on purpose.
I actually like the way Wizardry 4 handled its "dead man walking" situation:
* The game has 8 save slots, lets you save into any of them, and allows you to back them up. This is very different from other early Wizardry games, and is rather unusual for its era. (Remember, this game originally came on 5.25 inch floppies.)
* It's already obvious that the game is made for experts, so players should have good habits regarding saving. (The game even mocks the player for trying to get an event item with a full inventory.)
* There is a very clear warning before the point of no return, as well as the hint "Have you forgotten something?" (This should be a cue for the player to save in a separate slot.)
* In this game, when you encounter a party of doo-gooders, they have a battle cry. One of the groups that appears after the point of no return gives you the solution to the puzzle for the item you probably missed in that battle cry (in case you weren't able to solve it before).

I can agree. Most of those eighties adventures have very bad fame because all of these situations but they were text adventures, so once you were conscient of the trap and where your actions lead you to, restore and play a lot of the game again was annoying but not a great deal. Knowing what you need to know you could advanvce hours of gameplay in a minute typing. And that without a savegame.

In a graphic adventure it is different. I do no want to play again the second Leisure Suit Larry game in years.

Deadman Walking is the worst, with moon logic you can often solve it by accident or with a guide or walkthrough, but dead man walking it's game over, you have to start everything again and the time it happen to me I just quit the game. Barely have time to play now at days so if this things happen to me, it would be really bother.

The lesser evil here is Moon Logic; but I'd debate what is worse is: requiring knowledge outside the gameworld such as the trivia test in the final room of Hugo's House of Horror. How would I know that the onboard computer of the Satellite of Love has an obsession with Richard Basehart? (Example trivia, not actually featured in the game.)

Or you know, more infamously a puzzle impossible for the deaf and tone-deaf: That damnable Electric Organ from Myst and the age it leads to.

As others have said, "dead man walking" is worse because rather than just hard and annoying, it's also game breaking - at least for your current playthrough, but IMO that's more or less the same because adventure games usually have minimal replay value, and starting over probably means too much of a tedious waste of time for most players to even consider it. "Moon logic" makes me disappointed in a game and diminishes my enthusiasm for it, "dead man walking" causes me to abandon it and shy away from ever trying to play it again.

I'd also argue that the "dead man walking" scenario is most likely based on "moon logic" as well, so it's not just the greater evil of the two, but both of them combined.

... as Tokyo_Bunny_8990 already observed (although I'd add that it's not "instant" game over, but a frustratingly slow and confusing game over without any pointers that you're wasting your time, which is precisely what makes it so bad).

Following your definition of both, clearly "dead man walking" is worse.
"Moon logic" doesn't keep me from playing the game through to its end (though it may annoy the hell ou of me, on the way).
But "dead man walking" is basically destroying my whole gaming experience retroactively.

I'll post in the FOA forum and see if anyone there can help (so as not to derail this thread). I swear I spent several hours meticulously trying every item combination in every room and nothing worked.