This isn't new in and of itself there are plenty of games that tell you "you're not close enough yet". Machinarium solves this dilemma elegantly: Your character cannot interact with an object or the environment unless he is standing closely to it. It might be too much to ask of us to be able to figure out what an object does and how it should be wielded in order to help solve a puzzle, but sometimes this allows us to be a bit too lazy in actually figuring out how everything fits together. With mouse-over contextual icons, adventure games allow the cursor to almost be another character, a semi-sentient puzzle solving creature that automatically knows what a thing is for. But, Czech This Out: What I discovered while playing the demo for the new game Machinarium, made by the group who brought is the Samarost series, is that they had through clever design found a solution to this problem, while keeping the interactions simple enough not to be too frustrating. We can still go about figuring out the puzzle methodically, but the reduction in variables is so much that you can, if you want, do little more than wave your magic cursor over the screen to find the points that really matter. I'm of a mind that this is one step too far, or at least a half a step. You run about, knocking things over, until it all falls into place, scanning the cursor over everything to find out what's pushable and what's just in the background. The problem comes when the process of solving a puzzle now leads to a diminshed puzzle depth, reducing that rush of happy juice in the brain when you figure things out. You still get a thrill from solving the puzzle using your own ingenuity, but you can at least progress if you happen not catch what's necessary to do. This next step in simplification has been somewhat of a godsend for players who don't have the time and patience to solve puzzles through trial and error if the solution doesn't come naturally. There are still inventory systems with these, so the verbs and items are still in a sense present, but nowhere near the amount that there used to be in games like those using the SCUMM interface, or the old point-and-click Sierra games. The verbs, in a sense, are melded with mousing over a location, to where you no longer need to pick the right verb for solving a puzzle. You can see an example of this in the Axel and Pixel Quicklook on this site, where the cursor will sort of tell you what's background and foreground. When this process gained the pixel-hunt reputation for, if you're stumped, having to mouse over every little area to try to guess what, again, the designers were thinking, the mouse-over icon was born. They tried to make things more accessible through point-and-click interfaces, allowing you various verbs to interact with the environment. I think this comes from the old parser days, where people found it frustrating to have to guess what the designers were thinking. Adventure games have, for a long time, been in the process of streamlining. The Progress of Adventure Games Bleak AND beautiful at the same time.
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