Idiots should have known to use the honey on the skeleton, causing ants to carry away the bones but leave behind the clearly visible key that I was clicking on for 15 fuckingijfiejbfitkbeofniwkwhofh
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Hey! Spoilers!
Going into it cold without knowing the tropes of the genre and the visual design language would be a massive disadvantage. Gamers in the 80s would have a set of expectations and strategies that we wouldn't lean on today. Giving someone from 1985 Factorio might lead to some similar confusion until they got the hang of it.
Similar to giving an English reader some Chaucer.
Factorio spends a lot of time optimizing the first 30 minutes of game play for this exact reason. Check out these blogs on it:
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-241 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-327
True, maybe a bad example. Although there are a few conventionts it might not bother to explain, like WASD for directional input, or scroll wheels, or whatever.
I think Factorio perfectly proves your point.
The Devs spent a lot of time making sure you understand the game in the first 30 minutes. 80’s Devs didn’t do that and it shows in how hard the learning curve of the game is.
It goes even farther than that: games in the 80s didn't even necessarily have consistent designs that could be trained in the first 30 minutes. Especially the adventure games. They were also perfectly willing to let you lose the game in act 1 but not tell you about it until act 3, where the way they do "tell you" is you don't have any possible solution for a problem.
Like if you don't get that delicious pie plus another food source early on, you'll either die of starvation or the yeti will eat you later in the game.
But if you know what to do, the game becomes trivial.
These 80s games were made to sell actual walk-throughs. You had to buy a book or magazine for many of them.
They were not difficult, they were stupid.
Many had a premium rate phone line, and it was just a tape so if you were stuck near the end you'd have to listen to the end and potentially pay many times the game's cost.
Thanks for reminding me of those 1-900 phone lines ... I got in trouble for those.
"Moon logic"
Nah! We were just tougher back then!
Also, with no internet, nothing was around to distract you for 24 hours, or days, to try to solve one puzzle.
Kids these days don't understand the struggle!
😃
Grab ye flask
But ye can't get ye flaske!
The puzzle were often moon logic or 'oh shit! You mean THAT is what I must do?'
Sierra online had great games with great stories and characters but their puzzles were... Yeah...
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A very common thing even back then. Finishing a game was not a given. It was an achievement.
I read something years ago that those games were designed to have illogical puzzles so that you'd pay to call the help line (yes, there was a phone number you'd call for help) or sell paper game guides
Nintendo had a Hotline.. I called them once because I got stuck in donkey kong country. (The guy was like ‘at the first ledge just drop straight, there’s a hidden cannon that lets you skip the level’)
The Secret of Monkey Island 2 famously mocked this where you could simulate literally call the helpline in-game as the PC while lost in a jungle.
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In particular, ‘Maniac Mansion’ has pathways for the characters to die or the player to be stuck without a recourse — which later adventures avoided, allowing successful completion from any point in the game.
I recently tried playing through it for the first time (on an Android tablet with ScummVM), and pretty sure I hit such a dead end.
Because that was the beginning of the adventure game era where there was no concept of game design and ensuring that the games made logical sense, hence the birth of "moon logic", thanks Roberta. These games were also made to be obtuse because games were very expensive back then and making obscure logic was an incentive to make things more "worth" it, often intending to make the game last months of play time to solve their "logic" puzzles and you had to be in tune with the game designer to get them.
Not to mention that due to intention or lack of game design, these games were notorious for allowing you to put yourself into a unwinnable state with no way to correct it, things like Space Quest with the alien kiss of death that won't trigger until the very end of the game or that Kings Quest game where you had one shot to throw a boot at a cat or you'd be dead man walking.
Not being able to finish these games wasn't even unusual back then without the help of friends or BBS. Heck I had games adventure games I bought from that era that I never finished until the got re-released on Steam.
I remember playing Castlevania 2 back in the days. I never even came close to beating it. I only ever got as far as i did through sheer willpower and spending a shit ton of hours just brute forcing the game. A few years ago, i tried again. I read every conversation in the game and pretty much tried everything before reading a walkthrough. I was stuck at the same part that i was as a child. The solution: take a specific orb, go to a specific wall and crouch for a few seconds. Maybe you can find this out while playing the game, but holy shit these "puzzles" were random.
Ah, the classic AVGN problem with Castlevania 2
I had the same problem as a kid. My cousins had beaten it and given me some tips, but I could never figure it out. I also tried again a few years ago on an emulator but didn't have the patience to make it very far! Fun game though.
The Legend of Zelda was a game I absolutely loved as a kid. I could never get much past a certain point but never really knew why. I’d look everywhere, do everything I knew I could do, but always got stuck.
Years later I looked up a walkthrough out of curiosity. Turns out you can burn down bushes in the overworld with the candle. I don’t recall this ever being mentioned or even hinted at as a thing you could do. I was unable to progress because one of the dungeons was locked behind one of those bushes.
Roberta liked fairy tales and the first KQ game was just as many of them crammed into one place as possible. Did she not think that the Rumpelstiltskin puzzle was not crazy? There was one hint in the game of 'sometimes it is best to think backwards' but who the fuck would get it?
Also Rumpelstiltskin's name had to be spelled with the alphabet backwards! That made no damn sense!
excuse me his name was nikstlitslepmur and heaven help you if you mispeel it
4 hours is pretty cruel.
I mean I beat that game for the first time, in the first way, when I was ten. But it took me a lot more than 4 hours. Now I could probably do it in two. But only for the Bernard involved endings, and where you can make use of the glitches, like the switch character-pause-freeze Edna in her bedroom.
Was on my way to say this - 4 hours for a first time run of Maniac Manison without prior knowledge is brutal. And as you wrote, it's a badly standardized test to boot with the amount of possible characters to choose from.
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I’ve never beat Maniac Manson, but I did beat Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. Not in four hours, though. It took months playing (when it was new) after school and bouncing ideas off my father and his best friend. All three of us were playing the game separately and sharing tips.
I could probably beat it in around 2 hours if I tried today? I still remember the path but there are also the random mazes where you just try and hope for the best. Peru, the Sphinx, Mars, maybe another one. Oh yeah, Mexico City. Maybe there are guides online but I’ve never used them, and we didn’t have them when the game was new.
Well, yeah.
Game companies also sold strategy guides at the time. They're designed to be obtuse. I'm pretty sure the full walkthrough for Leisure Suit Larry 1 is only 2 paragraphs or something.
The actual steps to the end are short, there's just always a puzzle where you have to use a rubber chicken with a bar of soap to make a helicopter or some shit. I love adventure games though, I'm just a walkthrough baby.
There were even quite a few games from the 80s and 90s that required you to use the manual in order to play with translations, instructions, sometimes even hidden codes to move forward.
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In those people defense, that number of success was the same in the early 90's too.
Edit: Moon logic was a bitch back in the day. LucasArts and Sierra were the prime offenders.
Maniac Mansion was designed to be replayed, which is why the cast of characters you picked could be different each playthrough. It also meant a lot more red herrings.
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From the moon logic puzzle entry on the game's own page'
Practically every puzzle in the game requires the player to either use highly unconventional logic, or be a psychic:
Can't open the garage? You'd think you need to find the garage opener, right? Wrong. You need to use a workout machine, then open it with pure strength.
How does one open an envelope? With their hands? Or through a microwave? (Mind, you can open the envelope with your hands — you just shouldn't, because that tears it, making it unusable for re-mailing, which is crucial for several characters' paths through the game. It'll depend on your team composition whether you can get past that or not.)
Yeah fuck this game
Admittedly, I haven't played MM further than the first few minutes, I like old adventure games (esp. LucasArts ones), but just haven't bothered with this one.
I suspect the garage puzzle probably has some hint, like "it's too heavy/I'm not strong enough" when attempting to open it, so the player atleast can figure out that strength training is a thing. Still a bit of a stretch, as it's cartoon logic to actually become stronger after one workout - but.. it is a cartoony comedy game.
The envelope thing sounds like one of those "needs a crystal ball" -things that many of the games of the era unfortunately had. I don't think people even at the time appreciated the "dead man walking" -design. Must be fun for the softlock to become apparent hours or days later. It's just a dick move design-wise.
Crystal ball drsign was usually intentional, to make the game last longer
Most of game design then was finding creative ways to stretch their resources to make a game last longer
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The SAT, MCAT and most forklift operator certifications lie prostrate at our feet.
Idk what kind of forklift certifications they've been going through, those things are impossible to fail
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Use the staple remover on the gopher, duh
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