In response to "Information Complexity and the Downfall of the Adventure Game from The Escapist Forum: I have to agree entirely with this article. I loath hotspots in games. RPGs suffer from this problem too. I was playing Astonishia Story yesterday for hours, with no idea how to advance in the game. Finally I got fed up and looked at FAQ. Hotspot. An area that didn't look any different from other areas was hot and clicking on it arbitrarily gave me an item I needed and things flowed like silk from there.
This isn't fun, nor is it good design. And just because you've gotten good at spotting them just means you've gotten used to a lousy gaming convention. However, that doesn't make it less lousy. These are adventure games, if you like hotspots there's an entire subgenre devoted to it. Or you could pick up a Where's Waldo book. Frankly, if you need to arbitrarily extend the life/difficulty of a game by making an object barely visible there probably isn't that much of a game there. It's the Adventure equivalent of grinding.
The problem with adventure games has nothing to do with slow-pacing or complex puzzles (issues I often hear cited by "adventure snobs" as to the reason the genre is on life support) but the fact that you can solve a puzzle within minutes of being presented with it and then spend hours trying to determine how to manipulate the interface in order to get the game to do what is you want it to do.
And as great as some adventure games are, none of them are worth that kind of frustration.
- Woflrider
The downfall of the adventure game? This conversation might have been apropos ten years ago ("now we have CD-ROM technology!"). In 2007 we have the Nancy Drew series, Sam and Max, a small army of DS games... Adventure games take up a third of the shelf space of the PC section at my local Best Buy. The genre is as big as it's ever been - it's just a smaller proportion of a much bigger and more diverse ecosystem.
- will.jennings
