Barbelith Underground > Games & Gameplay > What video games are you playing at the moment? You scum, you... degenerate... scum...

The characters, too - the writers are desperate to demonstrate how brave they are by having a gay character in there, that they have her make otherwise totally out-of-character references to her sexuality in every single sentence.

Oh that was noted right from the off, and was the first indicator to the problems with the writing (the other is April's diary, which is cringeworthy in excelsis). There's more than a whiff of overcompensation with Fiona, but I do get the impression they were trying, though not particularly well. Y'know. Uneducated boys making computer games.

It's the main problem with the game, really. In general, there's a tendency to overstate the case where a much shorter and terser tact would be preferable. That extends to plot exposition as much as it does characterisation. The explanation of the world's backstory when April makes her first journey to Arcadia is case in point. It's overlong and very, very clunky, but strong enough to carry another game.

Like your example of one of the puzzles above - there are far easier ways for April to obtain that item, a number of which are staring her right in the face within the flat background scenery, but you've got to go through this convoluted process of trying everything on everything else, effectively backwards-engineering the solution, rather than solving it by using your own intelligence.

Pretty much, but it's an idiosyncrasy of the genre you come to accept if you have any familiarity with it. April has a work glove. It would make far more sense to jump onto the tracks and knock the key out of the way with that than go through the process you have to, but you know for a fact when you start to play that it's never going to be that intuitive. That's all part of the fun.

That's why humour has been such a vital component of the genre. I think Ron Gilbert once said that it's kind of inescapable, which is why the old Lucasarts output was so heavily focused around laughs. If you can give the audience a wink, and make fun of the fact that the only pencil in the world is in a San Francisco kitchen, then the audience will accept it and play along. TLJ tries to be a bit more serious than most, but it comes from a time when those aforementioned idiosyncrasies were more readily accepted.

The puzzle logic is fucking nuts, no mistake. But you don't expect it to be anything but.

I've not met any pixel hunts yet. Certainly nothing to the order of Future Wars or the like. As long as you pay attention to everything, and note that any unresolved situation counts towards the whole, then there's nothing to get stuck at for any length of time. I haven't met a major sticking point yet, and I'm meeting the meat of the story now. It's just about going where you can go, ferreting out what there is to be done there, and cross-referencing it with everything else.

It has major faults. Faults which are common to the genre, and explain quite nicely why graphic adventures struggled to stay afloat in recent years. But it's stuff I grew up with and love, warts and all. So it's providing me with goodly amounts of fun.