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A comment on Grim Fandango. Parent comment

Re:Grim Fandango by crooked-v on Saturday November 09, 2024 @07:43PM (#42097829)
Those point-and-click puzzles never felt like anything but time fillers to me. It's interesting to think about the "could have beens" of Western visual novels instead, or at least Telltale-style story games.
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Re:Grim Fandango by leshokunin on Saturday November 09, 2024 @08:25PM (#42097983)
That’s sad to read. I encourage you to explore games like Sanitarium, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

I think they have a lot to offer story wise. And very little in terms of being blocked by mechanics.

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Re:Grim Fandango by zerocrates on Saturday November 09, 2024 @08:28PM (#42097989)
It's interesting how much this is still the case.

I was just thinking about it myself when considering the new remake of Silent Hill 2. It's mostly beloved for its story and it spends a lot of time on that, and there's of course a lot of survival-horror combat in between. But beyond that there's another horror game (and just game) staple: lots of puzzles.

The SH2 remake aimed to be very faithful so was always going to have a bunch of puzzles (Silent Hill games typically have had a separate difficulty setting just for the "riddles"). But it's one of those things that you still almost have to have, particularly as a horror for some reason.

Silent Hill 2 is actually a case where even the "obligatory" elements operate pretty well in service of its themes, but plenty of the time games have these things just to have them.

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Re:Grim Fandango by I_AM_A_SMURF on Sunday November 10, 2024 @01:56AM (#42098866)
Heh. Resident Evil 1 feels like a (well designed) escape room.
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