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Lighthouse

Not only do the puzzles get very hard, but they get very repetitive. Pretty much all the puzzles involve figuring out how to use machines. Pull a lever, push a button, turn a wheel, and try and figure out what they're doing. Which is a lot of fun for awhile. But the machines keep getting more complicated, with more and more levers and switches, and by the end you're dealing with a whole bunch of related machines scattered around. Unlike Obsidian or Riven: The Sequel to Myst, Lighthouse calls less for ingenuity and intuitive leaps than it does for dogged determination and patience.

After a while I was pretty much cheating my way through everything. I reached the point of frustration where I hardly tried to solve things myself, and puzzles I might have got through had they come earlier in the game, when I was still having fun, I could barely think about by this time. (If I weren't so fond of cheats then I would have given up the game in frustration and given it a worse rating).

When people who are really, really good at adventure games describe how they play, it seems they have endless patience. They push buttons and switches, they leave, they come back, push more buttons, wander around, keep track of everything that's said and everything that happens, push the same buttons again, go to the same places over and over, and slowly but surely they figure out how everything in the game works. And if you are patient and methodical, it may be that you could get through this whole game, eventually, although it will take a long time and you'd better save your game frequently, because you're going to find yourself at places where you may not be able to solve things from where you are. And if you make it all the way through you have my greatest admiration, because even with the cheats, the last part of the game was just plain grim. And there were a couple of puzzles that, even though I solved them with the cheats, I can't see how they could possibly be solved without them.

To make it all more confusing, there are sometimes multiple solutions to a puzzle, and some may leave you in a worse position than others. It's as though this game were designed for people who thought you'd want to play it over and over, searching out all the nuances. It has optional activities that aren't necessary to solve the game, but that I read about in the cheat, and I was left with a few items that didn't seem to have any purpose at all (from the adventure games newsgroup I learned that one was for a particular circumstance and the other was optional!) Also, what you see will depend on what you do and where you are. I didn't fully realize this when I was playing the game, but when I loaned it to someone he saw an event I didn't see, and this allowed him to enter a location in an entirely different way and different time than I did. And I read recently that Sierra says the game has 16 different possible endings. In theory that's pretty cool, and it's a pity a game that takes such pains to have all these variations is the sort of thing you can barely stand to play once.

Still, if you want a really difficult game that will take you forever to finish (assuming you don't cheat), this is a pretty good bet. It's a very good-looking game, with nice computer animation (although it makes both the good and the evil characters look creepy -- that little baby is downright disturbing) and a very clean and light look. The puzzles generally do make sense (there's one in particular that I don't think makes any sense, and it's an alternative to an obvious alternate solution that leaves you in a worse position in the game), the machines are well designed and if you have the patience you should be able to figure it all out in time. And there are even a couple of genuine scares in the game, something you never saw in Riven: The Sequel to Myst.

The Myst-like interface is pretty good, although the directional arrows that allow you to move forward and around are sometimes difficult to get, and you have to wiggle around the mouse until you get just the right place. And it crashed on my computer more than most games (although in general adventure games are the most common reason I have for rebooting the system).

I loaned this game to my genius friend who always finishes games in a third of my time without cheating. He played for awhile, got frustrated, got a walkthrough, decided it was still too much work, asked me if there was any good reason to continue, I said no.

If I hadn't had a UHS file I wouldn't have finished this game. But with a cheat I found it more enjoyable than not.

-- Charles Herold -1999

Glitches:Crashed pretty often (popping up a message box titled "Panic" -- Sierra's way of reassuring you.

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