Monkey Island and the Complicated Art of Puzzles – Extra Punctuation

And badly designed adventure games don’t realise they need to have something on top of the framework to really engage the interest. In my review I cited an example of a puzzle from Return to Monkey Island in which we must win an eating contest by getting some hot pepper and then putting it on our opponent’s dish. The pepper is the key and the dish is the lock. Baseline shit. Yawn-o-rama. I contrasted that with a puzzle in Monkey Island 2 where you have to win a spitting contest. You need to puzzle your way around creating a green drink to enhance your phlegm, distracting the crowd to move the finish line back and only spitting when you see a scarf blowing in the wind. It’s a lot more than just a key in a lock. It’s several different keys for a lock that doesn’t have corporeal form half the time.

But I noticed one or two comments on the video referencing that whole spitting contest sequence and replying along the lines of “Shyeah, adventure game moon logic, am I right? No wonder no one likes them anymore.” No. Shut up. That’s GOOD adventure game design. That’s the kind of stuff I want, and that Return to Monkey Island – and most nouveau adventure games, thinking about it – can’t seem to replicate. I went off the point and click genre because that sort of clever, intricate puzzle design with integrated humour and storytelling was more the exception than the rule.

Yes, a lot of old adventure games had a moon logic problem. That was the other common issue besides pegs in holes puzzle design. Being too obscure rather than too simplistic. This is the point where a lot of internet games media veterans will bring up Old Man Murray’s classic article about what killed adventure games. In which writer Erik Wolpaw – who incidentally would go on to work on Psychonauts and the Portal games, trivia fans – describes a puzzle from the adventure game Gabriel Knight 3. In which the protagonist must go through a very roundabout process to acquire some cat hair to use as a false moustache in order to pass as someone in a photograph, but also the photograph doesn’t have a moustache, so he has to draw one on with a pen. The article concludes with the wonderful line “Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.”

Fair enough, it’s a terrible puzzle. But it’s not the intricacy of the process that makes it bad, it’s the fact that it’s fucking mental. No reasonable person would intuit that they needed a false moustache to pass as someone who doesn’t have a moustache. And even if they did, most sane people would then maybe cut off a bit of their own hair to use, not torment a passing blameless moggy.

The key word here is intuit. The end goal of any puzzle game is to make the player feel clever for figuring it out. It can’t be IMPOSSIBLE to figure out, neither can it be so obvious we don’t feel clever. You have to walk a fine line. So let’s go back to that Monkey 2 spitting contest puzzle and break it down. We’ve established it’s intricate, but could one reasonably intuit the solution?

Figuring out to spit when the wind is blowing is the simplest of the necessary deductions, there’s even a conversation you can overhear at a party elsewhere on the island that drops the hint that the wind is a factor. So that’s a tick.

What about the part where you have to drink a green drink to make your spit thicker? Earlier in the game, we witness another character order a green drink at the bar and then spit on the wall. And the camera weirdly focusses on the spitball as it travels across the room to signal that it’s important, weird though that seems at the time. So that seed is planted. But then it turns out there’s no green drink on the menu. Only a blue drink, a yellow drink and a red drink. The solution is to mix blue and yellow together to make green. I’d say the fact that the three available drinks are obviously the three primary colours would be enough of a hint that colour mixing is the solution. And then if you try the green drink Guybrush says “Oh my goodness my spit is now thick” just to hammer it home. Two ticks.

The last part is distracting the crowd with a horn so you can move the flags back a bit. This is probably the least intuitive part but bits of it are logical. You buy the horn in the store and immediately outside the store is a dude with a cannon whose job is to fire the cannon when the mail boat arrives. What’s the first thing you do when you buy a new toy? You try it out! So you blow the horn outside the store, the dude thinks it’s the mail boat and fires the cannon.

The next bit is the less intuitive part. You’re supposed to go one room to the right where the spitting contest is and blow the horn there. The dude hears it from the other room and fires the cannon, distracting the crowd and allowing you to move the finish line. This is the part that took me a long time to figure out as a kid, because I didn’t think it would work. ‘Cos you’re doing it right in front of the crowd. If I was in that crowd I’d be more interested in the weirdo blowing the horn right next to me than the distant cannon fire I’ve heard like three times today.

Still, it’s no cat hair moustache. Call it a partial tick. In summary, there’s enough common sense and clue drops in play to make it possible to intuit for the most part while still being obscure enough that one would feel clever for figuring it out. So it is a good puzzle, shut up. But the catharsis, the satisfaction of outwitting the game, is not the only purpose of intricacy in puzzle design.

What I didn’t mention is that before you can order the blue and yellow drinks you have to show the bartender ID. To get one, you have to go to a library on another island and give some information, and whatever information you pick from the dialog menu the bartender comments upon in a fun little comedy callback. The same library ties into several other puzzles in the game and has a weirdly huge selection of books you can take out, a lot of which have unique dialogue if you read them. The dude with the cannon is a unique character with dialogue and the fact that an elderly man who can barely see or hear is in charge of spotting the mail boat tells us something about the lax attitude of the island’s authorities. When Guybrush blows the horn he makes a funny face where his cheeks bulge and his eyes go crossed. And after he moves the finish line back he gives the camera a cheeky smile.

All of this is the true purpose of the intricacy in the puzzle design of the Monkey Island games. All the little bits and pieces of the process provide more little gaps into which jokes, funny touches and worldbuilding moments can be inserted. By the same principle that crinkle cut chips have more flavour because they have more surface area. But it’s more than flavour – the characters, the story, the jokes, these are what Monkey Island has where survival horror games have survival and horror. This is what the puzzle framework is supposed to be supporting.
And that’s why it’s disappointing that an equivalent situation in Return To Monkey Island is just a case of find the one thing to use in the one place. It was a missed opportunity not just for clever design, but for delivering story and mood and laughs. Sure, you can convey all of that in other places, like in dialog trees with characters, but I never have much patience for conversations in video games, for standing in one place reciting from a list of prepared statements when I’d rather feel like I’m achieving something. People always talk about storytelling and gameplay like they’re separate things, and argue over which is more important, but that’s missing the point: the most potent medium for storytelling IS the gameplay. Because that’s the bit we have to engage with and pay attention to.

Silent Hill 2, for all the lameness of its inventory puzzling, understood the principle of using it to express the narrative. At one point you need to fish something out of a hole in the ground with a hook on the end of a line. They could’ve just had you get a ball of string from a shelf and use that for the line, but they didn’t. You have to use a human hair that you find in a box locked with five different locking mechanisms, in a room that belonged to a grief-stricken man who’d lost his daughter. So a simple key hunt becomes a story in itself that reinforces the game’s emotional tone.

Well, anyway. I don’t even know who I’m talking to right now. Certainly not the developers of Return to Monkey Island, who made it perfectly clear in the ending to that game that they absolutely don’t give a shit. And the time to have a conversation about how to fix adventure games was about thirty years ago when I still gave a shit. So I guess I’m just talking for the usual reasons: because it makes me feel clever, and if it looks like I’m working my wife won’t tell me to do the washing up.