How do you help players navigate through spaces and cases where they might otherwise be stuck? You’re designing a point and click adventure title for people who have been playing these games for twenty-five years just as much as you are designing for folks who are picking it up for a few laughs. In a blog on Gamasutra about the game’s design, artist Paul Conway writes: “We watched people play and tried to keep the difficulty level such that it was a challenge to solve something, but not so hard that you jumped to a walkthrough.” You’re not just designing a point and click adventure title devoid of context. And there’s a difficult line to thread to make a satisfying puzzle in the modern era. You need to think through the options at hand and come up with a clever solution to that problem, otherwise, you’ll never progress. Somehow, this is going to help you jumpstart a motorized elephant that’s blocking your path. You have a toy robot, a knife, and a hotdog bun.
It’s that challenge at the heart of point and click adventures. But in charting the path from Monkey Island to The Darkside Detective, what’s changed about the design of point-and-click adventure systems over the last 25 years? More importantly, how does the challenge of thinking outside the box to find cool solutions to complex puzzles grow up over all that time?
THE DARKSIDE DETECTIVE A FUMBLE IN THE DARK WALKTHROUGH SERIES
Just as the gunplay from Doom to Halo to Call of Duty has deepened and refined over the years, the point-and-click adventure gameplay of The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark, available now on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, has similarly been deepened and refined.