Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island: Worst Puzzle (SPOILERS)

[ATMachine]

So I just finished Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island. It was a solid game, although it has a few issues (mostly the cutscenes needed to be longer and include more exposition, plus a few technical niggles). But what I really want to talk about is the puzzles.

 

No, scratch that. What I really want to talk about is ONE puzzle.

 

This is a stupendously bad puzzle. In fact, hands down, it's the worst puzzle in the entire game. All the other puzzles are pretty fair, really, but this one is godawful.

 

For those who haven't figured it out already, there will be SPOILERS ahead!

 

So at one point in Act 2 of the game, you're controlling Blue Belly the cook, and you need to ask a smuggler some questions. The problem is, you're a ghost, so you can't just TALK to him. Instead, you have to possess the dead body of his accomplice and mime the questions to him.

 

You perform this miming by clicking a series of buttons in succession. The buttons are illustrated with pictures, which correspond to gestures. However, they don't have text TELLING you what they mean, so you have to go solely by the icons. This makes the choice of buttons largely a matter of interpreting the art--and it's not easy!

 

You have to ask three questions. The second is by far the worst, so I'll focus on it. For this second round, in which you're asking where the smuggler's hideout is, there are four components. In each section of the second question, you choose one of four buttons, thus stringing a four-part mimicry together.

 

In the first round, you select buttons choosing one of four beginning words (which seem--but can't be proven--to correspond to "Show", "Tell", "Lead", and "Where"). Next, you advance to choosing a pronoun. In this the choices are: a pirate pointing at himself, and the face of the body you're possessing (both of which could mean "Me"), plus the face of the smuggler, and a pirate pointing at another pirate (both of which could mean "You").

 

In the third part, you have four buttons representing a means of displaying or revealing the location of the hideout (an X on a map, coordinates on a map, a spyglass, and a pirate asking "Where is it?") And in the final part, you have four icons representing possible types of hideouts, whether in houses, in caves, or behind secret passages.

 

(Did I mention we don't KNOW where the hideout is yet?)

 

So you're left stringing together a series of buttons whose meaning you can't be sure of, and multiples of which frequently appear to mean the same thing, in an effort to create a question which you don't know the proper way to phrase. Brute forcing it is looking pretty optimal at this point, right?

 

It gets better. In the first and third questions you ask, if you string together a NEARLY correct sentence, you get a unique response from the smuggler, telling you you're on the right track. Plus, both of those questions have a far more limited set of buttons from which to choose.

 

But in the second question, there are NO hints when you get it NEARLY right. This means you have to be lucky enough to GUESS the right ONE combination. Out of a possible 256 button combinations.

 

Also, whenever you enter an incorrect combination, you see your character acting out the charades in an ultra-slow animation, after which the smuggler says some variant of "I don't know what you're talking about." Then the dead body you're possessing shrugs its shoulders--oh so slowly--to express its frustration, after which you start again. It takes about a minute per attempt, all told.

 

Put simply, given the number of possible options, and the time it takes you to input each one, this puzzle is a combination lock which it could take you HOURS to brute force.

 

And I forgot to tell you that once you've started this puzzle, you can't leave it. You can't walk away from the charades game and solve other puzzles, or bring up the menu bar to save and quit. All you can do is keep searching for the right combination. Or hit ALT+TAB and check GameFAQs.

 

Which makes it all the more remarkable that, according to the recent Mojo interview, this was Bill Tiller's favorite puzzle:

I like the coconut plantation puzzle with Papa Doc, the charades mini game with Blue Belly, and the ballroom puzzle with Jane Starling and Grimjaw.

How on earth could he enjoy this abomination of a puzzle? It's an incarnation of everything that's wrong with the adventure genre.

 

Perhaps, though, since he *knew* the right answer all along, it was obvious to him? Regardless, this is horrible design.

 

But aside from this Worst Puzzle Ever , I quite liked the game. Really. I swear.

[Honbrifcl]

So I just finished Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island. It was a solid game, although it has a few issues (mostly the cutscenes needed to be longer and include more exposition, plus a few technical niggles). But what I really want to talk about is the puzzles.

 

No, scratch that. What I really want to talk about is ONE puzzle.

 

This is a stupendously bad puzzle. In fact, hands down, it's the worst puzzle in the entire game. All the other puzzles are pretty fair, really, but this one is godawful.

 

For those who haven't figured it out already, there will be SPOILERS ahead!

 

So at one point in Act 2 of the game, you're controlling Blue Belly the cook, and you need to ask a smuggler some questions. The problem is, you're a ghost, so you can't just TALK to him. Instead, you have to possess the dead body of his accomplice and mime the questions to him.

 

You perform this miming by clicking a series of buttons in succession. The buttons are illustrated with pictures, which correspond to gestures. However, they don't have text TELLING you what they mean, so you have to go solely by the icons. This makes the choice of buttons largely a matter of interpreting the art--and it's not easy!

 

You have to ask three questions. The second is by far the worst, so I'll focus on it. For this second round, in which you're asking where the smuggler's hideout is, there are four components. In each section of the second question, you choose one of four buttons, thus stringing a four-part mimicry together.

 

In the first round, you select buttons choosing one of four beginning words (which seem--but can't be proven--to correspond to "Show", "Tell", "Lead", and "Where"). Next, you advance to choosing a pronoun. In this the choices are: a pirate pointing at himself, and the face of the body you're possessing (both of which could mean "Me"), plus the face of the smuggler, and a pirate pointing at another pirate (both of which could mean "You").

 

In the third part, you have four buttons representing a means of displaying or revealing the location of the hideout (an X on a map, coordinates on a map, a spyglass, and a pirate asking "Where is it?") And in the final part, you have four icons representing possible types of hideouts, whether in houses, in caves, or behind secret passages.

 

(Did I mention we don't KNOW where the hideout is yet?)

 

So you're left stringing together a series of buttons whose meaning you can't be sure of, and multiples of which frequently appear to mean the same thing, in an effort to create a question which you don't know the proper way to phrase. Brute forcing it is looking pretty optimal at this point, right?

 

It gets better. In the first and third questions you ask, if you string together a NEARLY correct sentence, you get a unique response from the smuggler, telling you you're on the right track. Plus, both of those questions have a far more limited set of buttons from which to choose.

 

But in the second question, there are NO hints when you get it NEARLY right. This means you have to be lucky enough to GUESS the right ONE combination. Out of a possible 256 button combinations.

 

Also, whenever you enter an incorrect combination, you see your character acting out the charades in an ultra-slow animation, after which the smuggler says some variant of "I don't know what you're talking about." Then the dead body you're possessing shrugs its shoulders--oh so slowly--to express its frustration, after which you start again. It takes about a minute per attempt, all told.

 

Put simply, given the number of possible options, and the time it takes you to input each one, this puzzle is a combination lock which it could take you HOURS to brute force.

 

And I forgot to tell you that once you've started this puzzle, you can't leave it. You can't walk away from the charades game and solve other puzzles, or bring up the menu bar to save and quit. All you can do is keep searching for the right combination. Or hit ALT+TAB and check GameFAQs.

 

Which makes it all the more remarkable that, according to the recent Mojo interview, this was Bill Tiller's favorite puzzle:

 

How on earth could he enjoy this abomination of a puzzle? It's an incarnation of everything that's wrong with the adventure genre.

 

Perhaps, though, since he *knew* the right answer all along, it was obvious to him? Regardless, this is horrible design.

 

But aside from this Worst Puzzle Ever , I quite liked the game. Really. I swear.

 

OK, some people need some more experience with adventure games. If you look very carefully, you will see a reaction of the guy after each button you press. He will either understand or nod "no" to your choice! So for five questions, you start with buttons 1-1-1-1-1. If on the fourth question, he confirms, and the others he nods "no" then you know that the first button is the correct one only for the fourth question. And then you try again with 2-2-2-1-2 if somewhere the second button is needed. So it is definitely not as difficult as you state, but often in adventures, you have to watch carefully...

[ATMachine]

For your information, soon after I wrote the above post I was informed of the "expedient" you describe via another forum. However, I think it in no way diminishes the objective badness of the puzzle in question.

 

A puzzle which must be solved by correctly stringing together an apparently random series of menu options, with no explanation given as to their meaning--whether there be hints provided or not--is objectively poor. But such a puzzle which does not allow you to save, load, quit, or abandon the puzzle is not merely poor. It is fundamentally a kick in the teeth from the developers.

 

In replying to me, you question my level of experience with adventure games. This is condescending, uncivil, and entirely uncalled for. I have played plenty of adventures in my time, and I think I have some idea of what and what does not constitute a "difficult" puzzle. Besides, as I noted above, the reputed difficulty of the puzzle is only one of the factors making it so despicable.

 

On every forum which has threads about this game you will find people complaining about this particular puzzle. Even official reviewers have cited it as one of the game's major failings. Obviously, these people are not unschooled novices who have difficulty with the concept of an adventure game. Nor, for that matter, am I. Please remember in the future that not everyone thinks alike about every puzzle of every game.

[Kroms]

Or that bad puzzles should get ignored simply because the great games of the past had some. Those games were great despite the occasionally too-difficult puzzles, not because of them.

[SyntheticGerbil]

I haven't played this yet, but it's weird Tiller was proud of a puzzle which seems impossibly hard.

 

Also I really don't like people coming to Lucasforums to make their first post a rude and argumentative one, especially about a somewhat obscure adventure game. Honbrifcl, I know you probably just haven't lurked enough, but rest assured that almost everyone here has played more than enough adventure games, maybe even more than the current average JustAdventure or AdventureGamers users combined.