Using Walkthroughs: When It’s Not Cheating

How many times have you got­ten stuck in an adven­ture game because you missed one tiny lit­tle pixel you some­how neglected to click?  Or because you couldn’t make sense of the con­vo­luted story hinted at within the 300 pages of books and diaries the game expects you to read?  Or maybe you didn’t real­ize that you were sup­posed to com­bine the rope with the rub­ber chicken (how silly of you) which turns out to be mirac­u­lously crit­i­cal in mak­ing your great escape.  It’s hair-pulling moments like these when the temp­ta­tion to use a walk­through is at its strongest.  It’s the inevitable eth­i­cal dilemma all adven­ture gamers must face: do I con­tinue to waste hours get­ting nowhere, or do I take one lit­tle peek at the answers?  We’re torn between the desire to feel sat­is­fied in solv­ing puz­zles for our­selves, and on the other hand, the desire to merely get on with the rest of our lives.

If you’re like me, you’ll reach one of these mad­den­ing impasses and at least try to give it your best shot.  You’ll click and double-click every­thing, retrace your steps, talk to every­one, and exhaust a good hour or two of play­time before your brain trans­forms into Jello and your once opti­mistic pow­ers of rea­son­ing dete­ri­o­rate into thoughts of obscene and utter con­tempt for the mak­ers of such mind­fucks, that were obvi­ously designed specif­i­cally to destroy you.  I’ve been there.

Case in point:  Last night while play­ing The Black Mir­ror , I got stuck in William Gordon’s tower study room and for the life of me could not fig­ure out why.  I knew I was look­ing for a diary, and I knew it would be in this room.  I picked up every object there was to pick up, tried com­bin­ing items to no avail, and clicked and double-clicked on every square pixel of screen real estate that I could.  Yet the game would not let me leave the room, stat­ing that “I need to explore this area more thor­oughly.”  When I real­ized I had wasted over an hour in this sin­gle room, I decided to sac­ri­fice my pride and guiltily con­sult a walk­through, feel­ing stu­pid and defeated.  And you know what it turns out I was doing wrong?  I needed to right-click on the damn desk drawer to find the secret hid­den diary, not left-click it.  (WTF!)  So even though I had already fig­ured out exactly where to go and what to do, an unfor­tu­nate tech­ni­cal­ity pre­vented my progression.

When it comes to adven­ture games, I believe there’s a fine line between dif­fi­culty and poor game design.

Let’s be hon­est, game design­ers some­times do things that are just plain stu­pid and/or  make no sense.  And it’s cir­cum­stances like the one described above when I will hap­pily con­sult a walk­through and not feel guilty after­ward.  When we learn puz­zle solu­tions in a walk­through, we will usu­ally expe­ri­ence one of two reactions:

  1. Wow, how could I have missed that!??
  2. OMFG that is SOOOOO stupid!

The first reac­tion typ­i­cally leads to feel­ings of guilt and shame for hav­ing looked up the answer.  But if it’s the sec­ond reac­tion, should we feel jus­ti­fied?  I say yes.  Can it really be con­sid­ered cheat­ing if a game’s poor design or quirky con­trol sys­tem prac­ti­cally requires you to cheat?  (Of course, the only prob­lem is, you won’t know the dif­fer­ence until you’ve cheated…)

So in the inter­est of restor­ing everyone’s dig­nity dur­ing our moments of des­per­a­tion, I’d like to pro­pose the following:

Using a walk­through is not cheat­ing when…

  • You already know where to go and what to do, but can­not fig­ure out exactly how to do it.
  • You dis­cover some­thing impor­tant or con­nect the dots ear­lier than the game’s pro­tag­o­nist, and you must then do exces­sive amounts of back­track­ing to bring your less intel­li­gent alter-ego up to speed.
  • Ter­ri­ble con­trol or inter­face designs make oth­er­wise easy tasks exceed­ingly difficult.
  • The game has known bugs that inhibit progression.
  • Exces­sive use of red her­rings fea­tured in the game.
  • Puz­zle solu­tions turns out to be almost com­pletely illog­i­cal, with no prior clues given for how to go about solv­ing them.
  • Solu­tion requires com­bin­ing two com­pletely unre­lated objects in a non­sen­si­cal fash­ion to become key­stone of epic McGuyver-like proportions.

I remem­ber play­ing adven­ture games before the Inter­net.  Before walk­throughs, before Game­FAQs.  Before you could just Google a descrip­tion of the exact part of the game you were stuck on and be met with hun­dreds of detailed, pic­to­r­ial solu­tions.  Those were the days.  You felt a real sense of accom­plish­ment when you com­pleted games.  Nowa­days it’s far too easy to Google up the answers, or worse, unin­ten­tion­ally stum­ble upon cheats and spoil­ers posted online.  I guess one solu­tion could be to avoid the Inter­net com­pletely while you’re play­ing a game, but let’s be real­is­tic here.  These are the rea­sons why I’m thank­ful for sites like Uni­ver­sal Hint Sys­tem which is help­ful with­out giv­ing too much away.  After all, the very rea­son we play adven­ture games is because we enjoy games that reward us for our clev­er­ness and intu­ition, not pun­ish us with frus­tra­tion and feel­ings of inferiority.