Ok, so its partly sods law and partly plain stupidity that means I’ve signed up to deliver an interesting and witty blog in one of the busiest weeks I’ve had in a long while. There are old uni friends coming over this weekend, and nothing to feed them. I’ve got some long overdue transcribing I said I’d do four weeks ago, and still haven’t typed a single word. The flat has reverted to a somewhat animal like environment, and yet I sit here now, in my pj’s, watching the shipwrecked reunion (for the second time) gently sipping tea and avoiding it all. It’s at times like these you need quick, uncomplicated games, quick fixes, the sherbet equivalent of the gaming world.
This being said I have turned to my all time favourite type of game….the underrated, but incredibly rewarding point and click game genre.Now my love of point and click games was first triggered when a dearly beloved friend of mine ushered those fateful words ‘Here try this, you might like it.’ At which point she pasted a link to The Crimson Room and I didn’t see sunlight for the next 48 hours. Not that it took me that long to complete you understand (although it possibly wasn’t far off) but more that she opened up a world I never knew existed. The world of point and click or more specifically, the world of Escape the Room games. Now the formula for these games is simply and rarely changes. You wake up to find yourself locked in a room, by complete strangers, and you have no idea why. In fact you don’t seem to have much any of anything, which is good as you then don’t think that finding unrelated and incredibly cryptic escaping tools around the room is strange. In fact you think it incredibly normal and logical to place a cork on the end of a stretched out coat-hanger in order to reach a pot of yogurt down the back of the desk, and knock it out the way in order to reveal the previously undiscovered air vent.It’s this randomness that I love and my dearly beloved boyfriend, hates. He despairs as I sit there night after night, clicking every single square inch of screen until I find exactly the right pixel. ‘But you’re just clicking!!!’ he wails in despair as he tackles his own game in which you have to save the free thinking countries of the world, using only a rugged, unshaved but devastatingly handsome man and his spoon. And yes I suppose he has a point. His games involve a lot of whizzes and whistles and running and jumping and all the things that make first person shooters exciting.
But while I like all that stuff I also feel an enormous amount of pressure when I start one up. Like if I dont finish the game, I’d be letting a lot of people down. I still have an awful lot of guilt for not finishing Beyond Good and Evil, especially as I stopped at the point when all the children and Pey’j, your ham obsessed pig sidekick were still captured and moments from having their life force sucked out of them .Whereas with the point and click genre, there’s never any guilt, for not finishing. You can stop mid-way through a puzzle if you dont like it and pick another five minute time waster up instead and therein lies their true beauty! They’re all going to be along the same lines and they’re all guilt free!
However there is a worrying trend amonsgt the latest games. As rewarding as all the above mentioned randomness maybe, it is also perhaps harming the genre as more and more games are being developed resulting in a torrent of incredibly similar puzzles. Now this deluge of identical point and clicks predictably split into two factions. Firstly the ones that are so identical and match so exactly every other game that came before that they are ridiculously easy and pose no challenge at all. (for example, ALWAYS look in the waste paper basket and open and close the curtains at least three times) Or on the other end of the spectrum we have the games that want to give the gamer a challenge and because of the frankly rigid structure of this type of game, end up becoming so incredibly bizarre and cryptic that it becomes impossible to finish without a team of 20 people, all posting on forums until one guy finally discovers that you actually have to blow on the fish bowl from the right hand side of the screen in order to make the sea snail giggle and release the air bubbles which startle the cat into moving from the cat basket where the vital coke can is concealed.This has escalated so much that the hard core point and click fanatic actually expects this level of difficulty. This recently resulted in an entire forum of people working two days solid to try and crack a particularly difficult little point and clicker, before the red faced programmer appeared and ashamedly admitted there was a bug in the game which made it impossible to finish. Turns out as soon as it was corrected everyone got the solution pretty quick as they’d worked out pretty much every possibility it could be already.
So I guess in a way, its downfall is also its saviour, as the popularity of the style means that although more and more similar games keep appearing, there will also always be a strong base of people who happily click their way into the wee small hours, despite any pesky set backs, such as the game not actually working. As long as there are such people out there (of which I count myself as one) then I guess the point and click will live on. Much to the annoyance of whoever’s has to share a room with the noisy enthusast.
