Before I go on I’m going to need to explain a term, progress arrest. In well-designed games there’s this feeling of inertia, the sensation that the game is fundamentally pulling you towards its own natural end state. Games like Space Invaders do this easily with the descending bad guys, but games like Solitaire tend to not. Whenever that feeling of inertia stops, whenever the game can sit in an unchanging state waiting for one specific thing that is either obscured or inessential, it’s a progress arrest. Note that this isn’t the same thing as the point in Fallout 3 when the game stops telling you to go do things and then lets you fuck around – because progress in that case is more about doing the things you want to do or finding things to do.
A progress arrest is much more likely to happen in primitive forms of games – lots of card games have them, such as in Solitaire when you’re just shuffling up the deck and trying to find a single card that will let the game advance, or, most commonly, point-and-click adventure games, where your progress is stopped by Not Being Able To Work Out That One Damn Puzzle. Mostly, progress arrests flow from poor signposting, or interaction with random systems that can produce null results.
Simon The Sorcerer was a point-and-click adventure game from the golden age of same which is to say it hit a lot of genre boxes but mostly fuelled itself on trying to make progress arrests. In most any point-and-click game, the ones that were memorable either signposted their problems well (fewer than you think) or they made the stuff you wandered around looking at pretty interesting.
At one point in Simon The Sorcerer you’re standing over a hole in the ground, with a sleeping dragon underneath you, next to a monstrous pile of gold. I’d been stumped at that puzzle for ages, with a variety of methods to try and steal the gold. Buckets, nets, recruiting frogs – nothing. I had a magnet and some string, but that wouldn’t work, because gold isn’t magnetic.
The ‘solution’ to this ‘puzzle’ is of course to tie a magnet to a piece of string, and lower it down into the hole to pick up a single gold piece. Then you bring it up, and do it again, and the game cuts to multiple scenes of Simon bringing up coins while the pile of gold gets smaller and smaller. As Simon takes the last gold piece and puts it in his magical hat, he looks at the camera and says, “Of course, gold isn’t magnetic. But as long as it worked I wasn’t going to complain.”