No, some games were hard (don't remember Beneath that well as I only ever played the first 20 minutes and wasn't hooked in) and some classic point'n'click had really illogical and weird solutions. It's not so much that they were hard but some puzzles really had no rules and you could only progress by sheer luck or means of clicking everywhere or combining anything. It was unfair.

I loved the monkey island serie's art and lore but some of its puzzles are just a waste of time. But there is a very vocal minority screaming on the internet at the top of their lungs that those puzzles are the best thing ever. shrug

edit: Just googled that car hair mustache thing from a sibling comment (couldn't remember which game it was, AAMOF I didn't play it) and look the first comment of that article:

https://kotaku.com/how-we-survived-adventure-gamings-most-ha...

I think part of the death of adventure gaming is due to the internet and FAQs. The majority of people will burn through a typical adventure game in an hour or two by looking up what to do any time they get even mildly perplexed. Yeah, there will be those of us who refuse to look, but there will be a large share that spoil their own experience and then complain about it.

See ? You have to suffer to enjoy it and those who didn't or took a shortcut are just whiners who ruined their experience of the game.

Some games just had a really bad UI, too.

I remember spending a lot of time very frustrated with a game called Teenagent because IIRC to open the inventory you had to move the mouse to the top left corner and keep it there for a while. As far as I remember there were no indications that this was the case, and it just seemed to me that the inventory would randomly pop up somehow.

Of course it's possible the game might have told me that in text somewhere, but back then I did not really understand English, so I'll call it bad UI design.

Some era adventure games were famous from simply being illogical. It's always nice having to pick up cat hair to make a fake mustache to impersonate someone that does not have a mustache.

A nice 3 page rant from 2000: http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

GK3 is one of my favourite games ever.

I even took a trip to the city in France where the game takes place purely because of the game.

Not to mention it's also the game where Scott Bilas started experimenting with data-driven workflow that informed his work in Dungeon Siege and influenced Entity-Component-System architecture.

Also, there's not one, but multiple people trying to recreate the engine of the (very unsuccessful) game, more than twenty years after it was released. [1] [2] [3]

...but the cat-hair-mustache puzzle is indeed the lowest point of the genre.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/gk3tools/

[2] https://github.com/kromenak/gengine

[3] https://github.com/shff/GK3-extractor

I love GK3, the only game that gave me a similar feeling was The Raven Legacy of a Master Thief

> the only game that gave me a similar feeling was The Raven Legacy of a Master Thief

Just bought it because of your comment. Thank you.

Have fun! It's just great!!

I grew up with it, and replayed it a few years ago. It was definitely 10 yo me being stupid. Still a hard game, but not nearly as impossible.