MINI-REVIEW: The Lost Crown
Andrew Plotkin
(Review copyright 2008, Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com>)
I prepared for this review by -- well, by playing _The Lost Crown_, but then
by watching a whole bunch of Zero Punctuation reviews in a row. So please
imagine that I am typing at 180 words per minute.
I have a problem -- no, two problems -- with _The Lost Crown_. It is a
fantastic third-person adventure game which is scarred by a very few
interface design errors. And my problem is that, one, these errors turn what
should be a fantastic adventure experience into a dragging chore. And, two,
*every one* of these errors is an absolutely standard error made by *dozens*
of third-person adventure games over the years. I mean *seriously damn it*,
why I am writing these reviews? I could copy and paste chunks of my _Next
Life_ review in here and you'd be left with a pretty accurate impression of
what went wrong with _The Lost Crown_. Except that Jonathan Boakes doesn't
have the excuse of being Czech.
Jump back.
_The Lost Crown_ is a fantastic third-person adventure game. It is long and
broad and plot-rich and twisty. It has a bunch of characters to interact
with and plenty of locations to explore. Boakes's visual design sense is as
brilliant as ever; the world is rendered in black-and-white photography
touched with color, like hand-colored postcards, further embellished by
touches of animation and the 3D characters. The audio design is even better,
matching in turn the desolate, claustrophobic, or theatening landscapes of
the game with densely mixed soundscapes.
Boakes continues to explore the territory he staked out with _Dark Fall_:
scientific investigation into the supernatural. _TLC_ begins with your
flight from a shady electronics job into the tiny British town of Saxton.
Your ex-boss ambivalently threatens you and aids you, sending over a batch
of "ghost-hunting gadgets" which form the backbone of the game -- audio and
video recorders that can bring out supernatural detail in scenes. This is
not to say they're the *whole* game. You get symbol puzzles, dialogue
interactions, searching for physical evidence, fixing machinery, researching
in books -- the entire spectrum of adventure puzzle design, deftly
implemented. But the gadgets are what tie the gameplay together, as they're
used in their varying ways.
More subtly, _TLC_ has excellent pacing. The town starts out as a merely
eccentric place, with just a few inexplicable touches and quickly-explained
scares. Then, over the course of several days (and nights) of storyline...
Saxton gets stranger.
Your course of exploration is managed with equal facility. You begin
restricted to a few parts of the town. The rest opens up as you enter the
main storyline; and then you reach the more distant parts of the landscape,
one at a time, as they become relevant to the story. (Quite often, as you'd
expect, you have to revisit a locale at night... when things are different.
One way or another.) The game is pretty good at pointing you at these
locations, and blocking off the irrelevant ones, so that you're always
looking for plot in all the right places.
Usually.
Which brings me to the first of the serious design problems.
It's the slow walking issue. Or, really, the issue of slow animations in
general. _Next Life_ had it. Okay, _Next Life_ had it worse. In _TLC_, you
can double-click on an exit to jump to the next room -- hallelujiah. But it
still animates you walking *into* the next room. If you click to examine an
object, it animates you walking over to it and bending down. In a slow...
deliberate... series... of motions. Sometimes you turn your head. Turning
your head takes at least five seconds. Every time you turn your head, I want
to *scream*. Because I know the designers were thrilled at their clever,
distinctive, story-conveying character animations... and all I wanted was a
way to skip them.
Did I note that _TLC_ is a large game? It's pretty huge. Walking across it
takes *forever*. Several seconds per room. Double-click... new room...
carefully designed walk-in animation... maybe a dragonfly fluttering by...
and then you can double-click again.
And the thing is, _Next Life_ had this problem. _Syberia_ had it. I can
scarcely think of a third-person adventure game which *didn't* have tedious
navigation. The new _Sam and Max_ series doesn't, and that makes Telltale
some kind of damn geniuses, because they got it so right that I didn't even
notice the hole where the problem used to be.
(In retrospect, the _Sam and Max_ games survive by having cartoon characters
that run unrealistically fast -- and by being tiny. Off the top of my cuff,
no two locations in the latest S&M episode are more than seven rooms apart.
In _TLC_, seven rooms barely gets you from your home base to the center of
town -- and then you're much less than halfway to the outlying districts.)
To be fair, the designers of _TLC_ clearly saw the problem. Character motion
has been sped up by a factor of two, I think -- it's out of sync with the
walking *animation*, so that everybody looks like they're ice-skating. And
the double-click-to-exit scheme makes the game... mostly tolerable. Usually.
Except when you want to go check a location on the other side of the game,
to see if anything has changed there, or if your current puzzle can be
solved there. And then the tedium strikes. When you're trying to solve a
puzzle! _TLC_ is a game that punishes you for thinking outside the box. By
the end of the game, I was reading a walkthrough frequently, because trying
out my solution ideas was *too painful to think about* sometimes. Walking
three rooms away just wasn't worth the wait.
It gets worse. You can't click to skip lines of dialogue. (Nor hit space, or
escape, or return... believe me, I tried everything.)
Does that sound trivial? When you walk into the rented room that serves as
your home base, the voiceover says "Home sweet home... for the time being."
*Every single time.* You can't interrupt it. (Nor the
walk-in-and-hang-up-coat animation.) You have to sit through it. You are
trying to *go advance the plot* and the game is just *yammering* at you.
Same deal when you start a conversation with an NPC. You get the same little
hello speech for that character, or the same tired joke -- they're *all*
tired after the tenth time -- and you can't interrupt it. When you end the
conversation, the same little goodbye speech. And, as with most
dialogue-menu games, this is an unavoidable part of gameplay. When you're
stuck, you have to go talk to everybody to discover the next clue. Or ask
them about a bunch of topics you've already raised, in order to see if they
say something new. (They typically won't, but can you afford not to try?)
It's just like the puzzles; after a while, I could not face the prospect of
talking to people. I found myself arranging alternate plans: I'll click on
the professor and then *go get a drink of water*, so that he'll be done
greeting me before I get back from the kitchen. More and more, the plans
became "read walkthrough". No, not every time -- not even at the end of the
game, when I was *really* tired of slow dialogue -- but plenty often enough.
You think I'm kidding, but if this one issue were fixed, I would have
enjoyed _The Lost Crown_ instead of suffering through it for the good parts.
Did I mention that the voiceovers are *slow*? Your character talks like...
like he moves. One... phrase... at a... time. "I should accept... the
station master's invite... a possible lead." "Three... crowns... a link to
the mystery." "Can I ask you about... something else?"
I'm pretty sure that a lot of these lines are *literally* stitched together
out of separate sound files. "A link to the mystery" turned up a lot. So did
"Can I ask you about..." You can hear the periods between the chunks. Other
characters' dialogue had less repetition -- simply because the bulk of the
game information comes in the protagonist's voice -- but even for them, some
lines were reused in multiple situations.
I imagine it saved disk space... but it was a bad, bad decision. Nothing
slaughters the sense of story development like getting the same half-clever
banter repeated, by the same characters, two story-days after you first
heard it. With exactly the same phrasing and intonation. Do you *care*, Mr.
Protagonist? Have you learned anything about your new friend? Have you any
shared experiences to draw on or refer to? No, you are repeating lines like
a robot. Oy.
One may raise two objections to my objection to this use of the voice
talent.
First: _Sam and Max_ does it! (Yes, S&M has become my first counterexample
to all sorts of things. That's because S&M is the first third-person
adventure game which doesn't get anything wrong.) In fact every adventure
game with voice talent repeats lines. If you repeat a (useless) action, or
retry a dialogue topic, the game plays the same sound bite you heard before.
True! But, nearly always, this is an explicit signal of failure. The game is
communicating that your action did not change the game state. (*And* you can
click to interrupt, so it's not boring.)
_TLC_ uses this convention. But then it also repeats lines when the state
*has* changed. For example, the scene where you're working with a partner
with an energy sensor, locating ghost activity in four rooms. All four
times, your partner begins, "I'm picking something up, but it's very
mild..." I'm not saying that this is confusing; just that it wrecks the
sense of a narrative advancing.
Second objection: text adventures repeat lines! (In other words, *I* do it,
whaddaya think of that?) All of the failure cases I mentioned above, and
*also* room descriptions, default success messages ("Taken"), action
responses... Text adventures are full of re-used chunks of text.
To which I respond, true -- but voice has a lot more bandwidth. Play a sound
file twice, and it's excruciatingly obvious that the intonation is
identical. Read a printed sentence twice, and you are free to imagine that
the speaker is wearier, more excited, or simply aware of having said it
before. The intonation is in your head, and so context can creep in.
Plus, text adventures can easily tweak the flow of words. If the designer
thinks his text is getting repetitive, he can drop in a conditional word
("I'm *still* picking something up...") or have a phrase be randomly
substituted. Furthermore, he can do this at any point in development or
testing. With voice acting, changing one line is a big old nuisance.
I have to compare _The Lost Crown_ to _Barrow Hill_, a game which uses many
of the same voice actors. _Barrow Hill_ does not have dialogue menus; the
plot is carried by NPC voices, but they occur on the radio or the phone or
behind doors. You cannot respond. Nonetheless -- or because of this -- the
voice work in _Barrow Hill_ is delightful, perhaps my favorite aspect of the
game. It's natural and engaging; it conveys the characters with great
immediacy. _TLC_ manages to take the same voices and throttle all the life
out of them.
(I'm particularly dismayed that the protagonist of _TLC_ is voiced by
Jonathan Boakes himself. One day I'm going to meet him, and I'm going to
stammer something incoherent about how I'm a big fan and I enjoy his work so
much. And he'll start to respond "Thank you--" and then I will reflexively
punch him in the throat. Because, having finished _TLC_, I am *so sick* of
his voice.)
(Emma Harry, on the other hand, can talk at me all day long.)
So do I *recommend* this game? Well -- hang on, I have a couple more
nitpicks in the notes file. Like apostrophes. I noted about _Dark Fall_ that
Boakes's spelling and punctuation are lousy. He's using a spell-checker now,
but he still seems to think that apostrophes are magic pixie dust which make
words happy. Work on it.
Also, the game crashed on me twice, each time blowing an hour or so of
progress. Which took at least 45 minutes to replay, because you can't skip
any dialogue or animation. Save often, folks.
So, do I recommend _The Lost Crown_? Reluctantly, and with the warning that
it may drive you nuts -- yes, I recommend it. The environments, the
soundscapes, the deep and detailed storyline, the sense of history, the
skillful construction of puzzles and interactions out of the game elements:
these are worth the effort of barging through the game's shortcomings.
Anyhow, there's room for a sequel -- which I want to play, because Boakes
just has to fix a few things in his game engine. And that'll be great.
(I also see an upcoming _Dark Fall 3_. I want that too.)
(This review, and my reviews of other adventure games, are at
http://eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
Bush's biggest lie is his claim that it's okay to disagree with him. As soon as
you *actually* disagree with him, he sadly explains that you're undermining
America, that you're giving comfort to the enemy. That you need to be silent.
E-Cie
"Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> schreef in bericht
news:fvtqul$djo$2...@reader2.panix.com...
Thanks Andrew for another detailed review. I'll think this game over.
Ciao, E-Cie.
Ped Xing
news:fvtqul$djo$2...@reader2.panix.com:
> MINI-REVIEW: The Lost Crown
[snip]
Thank you for the review. What a pity about the interface issues; that was
something I hadn't read about in a different review I read which was
positive. I played Dark Fall 1 and 2 and enjoyed them a great deal, but
I'll hold off on this one for now. It probably takes me longer than
average to figure out certain puzzles and I like to go all around and make
sure I didn't miss anything, so the problem you described would hit me
particularly hard.
--
Ped Xing
mick
"Ped Xing" <ped...@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9A984D97...@140.99.99.130...
Not as much as you might think. The game actually `traps` you in certain
areas of the game until you have completed all you need to do there before
opening up again. There is no (at least that I can remember) going
backwards and forwards from one extreme of the game area to the other like
in the Agatha Christie games for example. If you liked DF 1+2 then I`m
pretty sure you`ll enjoy this as it`s certainly no worse.
mick
Andrew Plotkin
The plot does a lot of flow control, yes. But you're not *always*
trapped in a small area. Sometimes you're trapped in a large area, and
sometimes you're "in town" with access to most of the edge zones.
Also, you don't always *know* when an area opens up -- which means
going to check. You get clues about the railroad tracks quite early
on, which means I ran through the fens several times to see if I could
go there. Nope!
(Later, when the tracks *really* opened up, there was an unequivocal
hint about it... but I didn't know that was coming, did I?)
> If you liked DF 1+2 then I`m pretty sure you`ll enjoy this as it`s
> certainly no worse.
I'm afraid it's quite a bit worse. More rooms, slower navigation
through them.
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
Just because you vote for the Republicans, doesn't mean they let you be one.
Matt v3.2
> I'm afraid it's quite a bit worse. More rooms, slower navigation
> through them.
It occurs to me if this were practically any other genre, some fan
would make a mod or unofficial patch to correct these tedium issues. ;)
Imagine that, if adventure games could be "modded" (!) ... I'm playing
through Morrowind and there are zillions of mods that improve the game
in countless ways. Even simple tweaking of an .ini value. By the sound
of it, some of these adventure games could go from average to fantastic
with just a few tweaks. If only they were *built* for it. Which begs
the question, are they? And if not, why not? :) Surely it would only
improve the popularity of a given game.
<*keeps dreaming*>
I recently started playing Deus Ex. Looked it up online, and guess
what? - mods, fan patches, still being made. The game was released
nearly *eight years ago*! :)
--
};> Matt v3.2 <:{
Andrew Plotkin
> Andrew Plotkin:
> > I'm afraid it's quite a bit worse. More rooms, slower navigation
> > through them.
>
> It occurs to me if this were practically any other genre, some fan
> would make a mod or unofficial patch to correct these tedium issues. ;)
>
> Imagine that, if adventure games could be "modded" (!) ... I'm playing
> through Morrowind and there are zillions of mods that improve the game
> in countless ways. Even simple tweaking of an .ini value. By the sound
> of it, some of these adventure games could go from average to fantastic
> with just a few tweaks. If only they were *built* for it. Which begs
> the question, are they? And if not, why not? :)
Well, switching to my software engineer hat, moddability is *hard*.
Putting hooks into a game engine, and making sure that they behave
reasonably -- ie, that the first thing you change doesn't turn the
game into a pile of crashing bugs. This is a pile of work.
In general, adventure games are a lot lower budget than FPS titles.
It's a couple of programmers and designers. And _The Lost Crown_ was
done by *one* guy (voice talent aside).
It might be a small change to the game engine to allow click-to-
skip. Or, it might completely bugger up the state machine, and fixing
it would be a lot of work. Boakes could have allowed for that change
when he designed the thing -- but if he'd thought of it, he would have
*done* it, right? You can't design in moddability for kinds of changes
that you didn't think of in the first place.
(On the other hand, this thing is built in Macromedia Director. For
all I know it's a simple scripting change. If you think you have the
skillz, go for it.)
And now switching to the game designer hat:
Adventure titles -- at least, single-player titles -- don't really
have swappable content. It's not like a shooting game where you can
plug in new maps. (What are you going to do, add an extra ghost? A
scene in which Nigel and Lucy dance the mazurka? These are not
scenarios that the author is really motivated to allow for.)
If you're going to do new content for an adventure game, you're
designing a new game. Maybe a small game, or a chapter of a game, but
it's new work. You're really better off starting with a generic engine
or game design system, rather than modifying an existing game.
(Again, look at FPSs. They have a lot of physics code, shooting code,
and network code that a modder wants to take advantage of -- he's
keeping that base and building on it. What does an adventure game
modder want to build on? The ability to click on a hotspot? An
inventory list? Those are easy enough to write from scratch.)
I'm not saying it'll never happen, but these are the *general* reasons
why it doesn't happen much.
(I could get into the whole history on the Myst Online game. That
might have been the ideal case for "adventure mods", and maybe it
should have been, but Cyan never got to the point of inviting mod work
or making it easier for the fans. Some fans are struggling through it
anyway, but it's uphill.)
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
9/11 did change everything. Since 9/12, the biggest threat to American
society has been the American president. I'd call that a change.
GJ Woeginger
# Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in
# news:fvtqul$djo$2...@reader2.panix.com:
#
# > MINI-REVIEW: The Lost Crown
# [snip]
#
# Thank you for the review. What a pity about the interface issues; that was
# something I hadn't read about in a different review I read which was
# positive. I played Dark Fall 1 and 2 and enjoyed them a great deal, but
# I'll hold off on this one for now. It probably takes me longer than
# average to figure out certain puzzles and I like to go all around and make
# sure I didn't miss anything, so the problem you described would hit me
# particularly hard.
I think that you might enjoy "Barrow Hill: Curse of the Ancient Circle".
The atmosphere is similar to Dark Fall 1 and 2, all puzzles are perfectly
logical and integrated into the story. The storyline evolves slowly, and
the pacing is excellent. I found no problems with the interface.
--Gerhard
___________________________________________________________
Gerhard J. Woeginger http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/
Ped Xing
news:725ae$482403a9$839b44fd$22...@news1.tudelft.nl:
> I think that you might enjoy "Barrow Hill: Curse of the Ancient
> Circle". The atmosphere is similar to Dark Fall 1 and 2, all puzzles
> are perfectly logical and integrated into the story. The storyline
> evolves slowly, and the pacing is excellent. I found no problems with
> the interface.
Thanks, I'll look it up.
--
Ped Xing
Andrew Plotkin
>
> I think that you might enjoy "Barrow Hill: Curse of the Ancient Circle".
> The atmosphere is similar to Dark Fall 1 and 2, all puzzles are perfectly
> logical and integrated into the story. The storyline evolves slowly, and
> the pacing is excellent. I found no problems with the interface.
Me agree.
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
You don't become a tyranny by committing torture. If you plan for torture,
argue in favor of torture, set up legal justifications for torturing
someday, then the moral rot has *already* set in.
Mary
news:fvtqul$djo$2...@reader2.panix.com...
> MINI-REVIEW: The Lost Crown
>
> (Review copyright 2008, Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com>)
>
> I prepared for this review by -- well, by playing _The Lost Crown_, but
then
> by watching a whole bunch of Zero Punctuation reviews in a row. So please
> imagine that I am typing at 180 words per minute.
>
> I have a problem -- no, two problems -- with _The Lost Crown_. It is a
> fantastic third-person adventure game which is scarred by a very few
> interface design errors. And my problem is that, one, these errors turn
what
> should be a fantastic adventure experience into a dragging chore. And,
two,
Andrew, you sound pretty frustrated with this game. Since I didn't like Dark
Fall much, I don't think I should buy it.
Thanks for the review.
Mary
E-Cie
"GJ Woeginger" <gwo...@figipc70.tu-graz.ac.at> schreef in bericht
news:725ae$482403a9$839b44fd$22...@news1.tudelft.nl...
whatsoever, like crashes etc.
Ciao, E-Cie.
Jenny100
> http://eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html
I'm not sure why you called that a mini-review. But your thoughts, as
always, are very interesting. Thanks for posting.