The problem comes from the main input device, the mouse, working in only two dimension and the actions on screen taking place in three. However, controls quickly get messy because of something called the z-axis or the third dimension. The first person system is also what is used by Penumbra. This leaves games like Myst and Tex Murphy to use physics. A first person perspective is pretty much demanded in order to have a control system that lets the player perform enough actions to solve varied types of puzzles. Doing something similar to Broken Sword with physics would be very hard and I have yet to hear an ideas on how it would work. For a game using physics, it is much harder. It is just matter of moving the mouse and clicking to control games, and it is hard to make it more simple than that. While adventure games and physics seems like the promised land at first glance, it is far from it.Ĭlassic adventure games like Myst and Broken Sword got very inntuitive and simple controls and can still give the player a very detailed and varied experience. However, having implemented physics for four games now and working on a fifth a lot of problems have emerged. It might therefore seem obvious to start using physics in adventure games in order to bring the genre forward. For the last couple of years, especially after the launch of Half-Life 2, physics have gotten a lot of attention and is pretty much a standard component of any 3D game today. A nice way of solving this and still allowing a varied set of possible actions might seem to be physics. It was also mentioned that a major culprit in all of these where that many adventure games do not have a coherent system for doing interactions, like for example a Super Mario game. In the previous blog some problems with puzzles in adventure games where discussed.

Games like myst for nintendo wii