Status SIGINT Oct 10, 2022
I am finding this game particularly annoying in comparison to the other early 90s LucasArts titles. It feels like the next level evolution of tedious puzzles. This part early on where you're looking for Plato's book, for example, felt sooo bad to me. Just some truly absurd leaps of logic and requirements to find little hidden things with no real …
I am finding this game particularly annoying in comparison to the other early 90s LucasArts titles. It feels like the next level evolution of tedious puzzles. This part early on where you're looking for Plato's book, for example, felt sooo bad to me. Just some truly absurd leaps of logic and requirements to find little hidden things with no real intuitive connection to what's going on. Another section a bit later where you're trading items back and forth between two merchants to narrow down which item one of them wants is certainly a puzzle, but not one with any entertainment value to be found whatsoever. Piloting a hot air balloon early-ish in the game also feels super awkward, cool idea but questionable execution. I am sure there are more minigames like that to come.
Those are just a few examples of the stuff early on that I found quite unappealing. I'm not a big Indiana Jones fan—maybe if I was, I wouldn't care as much about all that stuff—but I still think the story is at least fine so far. Similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that's not a very bad thing. I also like how many different locations they fit into the game, which gives it a generally great feeling of fast pace and adventure. And I like how packed it is with dialogue options. I can tell this is not a bad game when taken as a whole and in context of when it came out.
But sadly this is the first of the LucasArts games that after a couple sittings has me not wanting to go back for any more. Hearing that later on it devolves into a bunch of mazes and backtracking, no thanks. Part of me is doubting myself because this game is so acclaimed -- Am I just tired of this crap? Maybe to some degree, but I don't think that's it. Is this game's logic and puzzle execution really worse than the other games? I don't know. All I can say is that I never had this feeling when playing those games. They were fun even when the logic made little sense. At least I could get a laugh out of it or had something else interesting me. Not so much for me in this game. I think this is best left to the true fans of this franchise who will have the patience to deal with its difficulty.
