So I may just have a shorter temper than I used to, but I was totally prepared to quit Psychonauts again, in the final level. In the level after my bout with gaming OCD, I was furious with rage. I’m going to save my reasoning for a later post (which will be a lengthy one entitled ‘why the platformer is doomed’), but suffice it to say for now that the designers put together a level that, all combined, everything that is wrong with the genre.

Which was surprising, because up until that point, I was discussing how this Game Of The Year candidate could walk on water and heal lepers to anyone who would walk by my desk at work. Fortunately for Psychonauts GotY chances, God of War also managed to screw up their final levels with inane jumping puzzles. That’s when I started to realize how common the phenomenon of having a good thing and then screwing it up with a bizarre aberration of a game design decision near the end is. I started to make a list of the games that have screwed this up, in my experience.

  • Psychonauts: Jumping puzzle from hell.
  • God Of War: Inane ‘hell’ jumping puzzles inserted into a game that had previously been fairly light in them
  • Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines: The interminable sewers level, which were 1/10 as cool and 10 times as long as any other level in the game, with too much combat and not nearly enough cool, sexy vampire stuff.
  • Halflife (1): The ‘Zen’ levels
  • Alice: Some insanely stupidly hard boss monster. To be fair, I don’t know how close to the end it was because I quit in disgust

I’m sure I could think of more if I thought about it. I seem to remember quitting Baldur’s Gate after getting two false start ‘this is the end’ fights, and then finding out I had to go through another dungeon where every third step was a trap and my AIs were too stupid to keep off them without excessive handholding, but I didn’t finish that one and my memory is hazy.

It seems like the designers are in meetings with each other saying, ‘The game’s gotten to easy, just ramping up the difficulty isn’t enough, we need to throw the player a curve ball.’ But too often, that pitch seems to skip past the catcher and hit the backstop. At some point, the designers need to dance with the girl that brung ‘em. Giving your players a new wrinkle and forcing them to adapt with a new strategy is one thing. Making them miss the game they were playing two save games ago is quite another.

My favorite just-before-the-end-game experience was Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption – yes, the Diabloesque game from 2000 everyone is entirely too hard on. What I liked about it was simple – they just gave me really long tunnels of stuff to kill, leading up to the final boss. Previously, I had had to be cautious killing these monsters 2, 3, or 5 at a time and then resting, but at this point, I had had so much character advancement and was so powerful that I was mowing these guys down like a weedwhacker, killing everything in one or two hits while my henchmen just tried to keep up.

That may sound broken to a game designer trying to pace out everything carefully, but in truth, it was just friggin’ awesome. I went into the last room with the final boss, knowing that he was a minor god, but SO WAS I. My character was powerful, he was PO’ed and he was ready to tango. It sold the Hero’s Journey completely to me, and it made me feel a worthy adversary to a villain described as all-powerful up to then. And perhaps most of all, it took the fun gameplay, and just made it more fun.