Recently a group launched an Adventure Game Aptitude Test as a one-day event where people logged on to play an adventure game while being on a webcam to make sure they don’t cheat. It turned out to be the game Maniac Mansion, which needed to be completed in four hours which…..ok. I think this was all meant to be a goof, which is perfectly fine and good and this post isn’t a dunk on that, it just got weird when a few games outlets and The Gamers started having takes on it past “haha, fun goof.” These takes seemed to be a combination of “wow, adventure games were so obtuse/difficult/unfair back in the 80s” and “wow, gamers can’t hack it anymore.” and neither of these is accurate.

These games were meant to be played over long stretches, with players thinking about puzzles when not playing them, and discussing solutions with friends and family. No one was beating Maniac Mansion in four hours back then. Maniac Mansion, at least in my opinion, is not even an unfair game. You still have to think about puzzle solutions and stuff for four hours straight. That’s exhausting. You’re still meant to step away for a bit to process it. These games were just not built for marathon sessions like that. As someone on Bluesky said, you can also complete a crossword puzzle in a couple minutes but you generally don’t.

I also think adventure games, even new ones, are generally more fun with played with friends over Discord, except when I want to be moody or depressed by myself when playing something like Norco or Kentucky Route Zero.

If I do have a criticism of the adventure game assessment, I do think it’s stripping the game from it’s context and putting it in one that it really isn’t meant to be played in and if you’re going to do something like that, you should probably give some setup unless you’re trying to make up a narrative for people to run with. Yeah, some of them have bad puzzles and I think softlocks are annoying, what else is new. My hot take about those is that I actually think a lot of the early Sierra/Infocom stuff holds up better than the late 80s/early 90s stuff because it’s so easy to whip through the game again and it’s much more straightforward about it being a treasure hunt for points or whatever (being extremely reductive here, I know it’s not that simple) where the later games are quite a bit longer and telling more elaborate (and better IMO) stories, but then you’re hit with these really frustrating interruptions where you may have to restart the game and it really hurts the storytelling. This is also why I’m a bit defensive of mid-90s Sierra, which I feel like adventure gamers generally dump on but I like. Oh well.

Anyway, all of this is to say, I will happily play weird French adventure games with friends over Discord.