[blueskirt]

Exo's post did come off as insulting, in a "Nobody here agrees with you so shut up and go away already" kind of way. I would not call him a troll, but "Agree to disagree?" would have been a much better and polite way to voice what he wanted to say. Just saying.

Back on topic, I'm with Blackthorne and Katie on this one, both puzzles are retarded and their only purpose was to incite people to buy hint books or dial the Sierra's hint line. Telltale will hopefully not pull off something this retarded in their game.

Back on on topic, walking deads or dead ends are hardly a generational thing. The Secret Of Monkey Island was released a year after King's Quest V. It, and the many dead end free LucasArts games that followed it were damn hard none-the-less, it was regarded as a breath of fresh air when it was released and I cannot think of a single post-Loom LucasArts game that would be improved if dead ends were included.

I also disagree that it only takes thirty minutes to restart from the start when you encounter a dead end in an adventure game. When you know where you screwed up or where the item you need is, sure, it takes thirty minutes, but when you don't know the exact moment where you screwed up, and that was the case in many old school adventure games, you have to double and triple check every rooms looking for something you didn't pick up or didn't do correctly, hardly something you can do under thirty minutes.

But the more I think about it, the more I think that dead ends, like death, are not inherently frustrating, it's just that more often than not they have been badly implemented, and if it's possible to make dying in adventure games a logical, fair and non frustrating process that add to the immersion and realism, or in the case of some Sierra games, is part of the fun, maybe the same could be done with dead ends.

What if dead ends were fair, logical and not tied to moon logic puzzles, if the solutions were located in the same chapter as the dead ends and you only had to replay a small portion of the game, not the whole thing, if the game warned you that you are currently in an unwinnable state, hinted where exactly you screwed up, didn't not force you to replay maze or action sequences, warned you beforehand that you had to be prepared before entering an area you cannot come back from, provided automatic saves, that could not be overwritten, at specific moments in the game like the beginning of each chapters, or what if the game was still completable, if only with a sub-par ending... well, maybe dead ends could be tolerable.

I do not believe dead ends will get a revival in commercial projects, there is simply too much stigmata linked to them, doing so would simply drive away everyone but a minority of ultra hardcore players, it would be a financial suicidal move. But in freeware indie adventure games? Who knows. Maybe designing a game where dead ends are present, tolerable and a welcome feature could be a project Infamous Adventures could try to tackle.