8/19/2026 at 7:19:50 AM
The discussion here reminded me of the "Cruelty Scale" (https://www.ifwiki.org/Cruelty_scale) It was originally created specifically in relation to text adventure games, but seems appropriate to a broader range of game types.The rankings are based on criteria like how far the game lets you go after making a get-stuck choice before you realize you're stuck, and whether that realization comes with clear information about what the wrong choice was.
by bsammon
8/19/2026 at 9:20:46 AM
Aha, but there's an added dimension to this Sierra-branded cruelty:A young 8-year-old me, playing Police Quest for the first time. Sits through the briefing. Gets the gun, the ammo, the briefcase, from the locker room. Grabs the car key. Heads out to the parking lot, gets in the car, starts driving... and immediately dies: "you failed to perform the prescribed vehicle walkaround."
A bit of a "gotcha" for sharewareing the game, because said prescription was in a manual I definitely did not own (remember the games that would ask you for, say, the third word of the tenth page of the manual, as a form of DRM? brilliant.)
NO PROBLEM: ASSIGNMENT RECEIVED: I WILL SAVE THE GAME EARLY AND OFTEN!
Begin another playthrough. Lather, rinse, repeat. Play for several hours, carefully save scumming my way to glory: I have built a complex ladder of 10 save slots that I am slowly rotating through. Then the action gets heavier and heavier, and the saves come faster and faster, until the climax of the game, where you have the Death Angel cornered. "Radio for help."
And there it says: "With what radio?"
The one I had left back at the station, I don't know, 10 hours ago? But that's okay, because I can head back to the station and grab it from one of my convenient saves!
No, no I cannot. I have over-indexed and let fear win the day and save scummed myself into oblivion. The earliest save is in a walking-dead state as well. I am toast.
I died a bit that day. A painful lesson for an 8-year-old to learn. As Bennett Foddy says in his Getting Over It soliloquy, "When games were new, they wanted a lot from you; daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that."
by disillusioned
8/19/2026 at 11:44:20 AM
You could have also learned how to edit the saves to give yourself the radio :) . A tall ask of an 8-year-old of course, but not beyond the realm of possibility. Funny you mention Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It, because that's kind of how I "beat" it. After about 6 years of on and off attempts that always died around the church, I got fed up and edited the physics constants to make the game significantly easier. Since I used my own skill to hack the game and not an outside patch, I consider that "beating" the game in a sense.I am now thinking if you can pull off an adventure game where some puzzles require editing the save file. It would be pretty tricky to make it understandable to most people. Now that I think about it, I wouldn't put it past Deltarune to eventually have an easter egg that can only be reached from a save state, which is impossible to achieve through normal gameplay. I know it doesn't have one right now, because all the scripts have been examined in depth and nothing like that was found.
by Asooka
8/20/2026 at 10:55:47 AM
Some of them also had some cheat/debug commands you could get into. I know you could teleport to other screens, but I don't recall if you could use a command to get an item, particularly in PQ1. Or if there was a way to get back to the state you were in before that if you e.g. teleported to the station to pick up something and then tried to teleport back to the screen where you needed the item.I remember I could not get the obscure nonsensical spells right in KQ3 but I could sort of skip past them to see most of the plot.
by a96
8/19/2026 at 1:46:33 PM
I would suggest, without spoilers, that you go play the original Doki Doki literature club right now.by purpleflame1257
8/20/2026 at 11:08:02 AM
I did, but found it somewhat boring. Yes, I did get to the stuff you're thinking about, but personally it felt too forced. The game was trying to present itself as breaking the fourth wall in a way that is impossible with something built on Ren'Py. That is, I would say DDLC tries too hard and ends up stretching my suspension of disbelief past its breaking point.Also, past the weird bits, there isn't anything there. I have no reason to care for these characters. It feels like a vertical slice of a longer game, or a proof of concept.
DDLC has a really cool idea that should be tried again, in a way that remains consistent within its game world, with more character depth and a longer story.
by Asooka
8/19/2026 at 1:41:18 PM
For me, cracking open the data for some castle adventure ascii character game was one of the first steps to being a real programmer.by failrate
8/19/2026 at 2:58:29 PM
I think I spent more time figuring out how the character save files worked in the original Bard's Tale CRPG than actually playing the game; I certainly made more progress with doing so!by syntheticnature
8/19/2026 at 3:13:53 PM
Was this on DOS? "ASCII castle adventure game" brings back memories!by hungryhobbit
8/20/2026 at 12:25:27 PM
wave wandby mercer
8/19/2026 at 12:47:56 PM
i remember using a hex editor to edit save games to give me more in game money. felt like a hacker in a movie :)by dionian
8/19/2026 at 12:36:06 PM
While I have genuine sympathy for 8-year-old you, this has made for a thoroughly entertaining story which current you can tell, I and several of my friends I shared it with have laughed thoroughly, one of them remarked: That sounds like me….
Legit, the pre-car inspection and the radio killed me
Remember it like it was yesterday
by jonathanlydall
8/19/2026 at 10:54:44 PM
Ha! I love this! This is absolutely an "iykyk" situation. I brought this thread up with my brother and he remembered every bit of it as well.Here's a friendly reminder you can play Police Quest in your browser, right now:
by disillusioned
8/19/2026 at 1:47:13 PM
The final scene in PQ1, where you're incognito? I'm pretty sure you don't need a radio there, or are even allowed to have one. You get searched before they let you into the poker room. Instead you get a hidden pen transmitter from the cops in your hotel room.by boredhedgehog
8/19/2026 at 10:53:23 PM
Not the poker room... the... park? In the bushes? You're asking a lot of eight-year-old me's memory here, man.by disillusioned
8/20/2026 at 8:20:00 AM
Just trying to sort out the details. I think any story, even a funny one, improves when the facts are correct.The scene in the park indeed requires the radio. It's not very climactic though; you're just arresting some drug dealer, not confronting Death Angel.
by boredhedgehog
8/19/2026 at 11:38:00 AM
"use nightstick" - took me ages. I didn't know what a nightstick was, it's not a term known in my countryby 13hours
8/19/2026 at 3:40:07 PM
I legit started learning English from King's Quest 4. One of my first words was "Zounds!".by wkfauna
8/19/2026 at 2:24:15 PM
Pressing random buttons before you know the language of the game your playing is peak gaming childhood for me.by addandsubtract
8/19/2026 at 3:11:54 PM
Sierra games didn't use random buttons, you had to type phrases :(by hungryhobbit
8/20/2026 at 10:52:26 AM
My memory says there's some of them that didn't. Mixed Up Mother Goose, Black Cauldron, and both Manhunter games come to mind. I can be wrong, though. Sierra probably also has a ton of games I don't remember at all. They did a lot of games. A lot.by a96
8/19/2026 at 1:23:47 PM
> "When games were new, they wanted a lot from you; daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that."Most old games had a very short gameplay, single digit hours. They had to be challenging by any means so the player gets their money's worth.
by close04
8/19/2026 at 1:37:23 PM
It blows my mind to go back and look up how long some games such as Sonic 2 actually took, compared to the amount of time I spent failing to complete it in my youth.by xnorswap
8/19/2026 at 2:34:17 PM
I remember taking forever to finish the 1993 version of The Punisher on an arcade machine, and never managed at all for the 1991 NES version, only to finish them in probably 1h in an emulator with about a bazillion coins/retries :).by close04
8/20/2026 at 10:56:45 AM
Yeah I played Grim Fandango with a guide and clocked something like 8 hours.There was also the conspiracy that publishers made a lot of money with selling strategy guides back in the days.
by expedition32
8/19/2026 at 1:06:11 PM
Perhaps I was always a weirdo but while it did frustrate me when I ran into these I always found it to be an amusing part of the game. So much more so than games requiring specific twitch reflexes or hand eye coordination that I might not be able to pull together. But it probably says something that many of my favorite games back then are described as "punishing" today. Of course these days I wouldn't last 5 minutes if parachuted into one, but I've become soft!The one exception to the above was the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, which can fuck right off.
by jghn
8/19/2026 at 1:13:02 PM
Everytime I see a bad guy get cuffed in a movie in the front, I say "nope! the cop can get choked out now!". Thanks Police Quest, you taught us all a little safety that day.by smrtinsert
8/19/2026 at 3:42:37 PM
This is why you dont use linear save frequency. 5 min, 10 min, half an hour, one hour, two hours etcby im3w1l
8/20/2026 at 10:58:57 AM
I still do this. Save in a new slot when I start something new and cycle between a few slots as I go along. I'm sure I wouldn't need that with most newer games and I rarely if ever jump back to undo something, but somehow I feel like any of those saves could become corrupted at any time or I could be soft-locked somewhere.by a96
8/20/2026 at 10:54:22 AM
If anyone wonders why adventure games died...by expedition32
8/20/2026 at 6:09:52 PM
LucasArts kept them alive for a few more years :)But also, you die aplenty in a FPS game.
by frandroid
8/19/2026 at 3:35:21 PM
One of the worst cases of this I played back in the 80s was Ultima V. To avoid spoilers, there's an obscure item that you need to get before you attempt the (very long) final dungeon, but the game only hints at its existence. If you neglect to bring it, you are allowed to play to the very end at which point it tells you that you are marooned in the final screen and cannot win because you didn't bring the item. Ultima V is still my favorite Ultima, but that part of it was ultimate cruelty!by ryandrake
8/19/2026 at 8:47:53 AM
The delay is the real killer. You don't realize you're driving off a cliff until you’ve already hit the ground.by johnxianren