That’s really ironic. I liked the idea of the LucasArts adventures very much, but they generally turned out to be too “puzzly” for me, in that you got stuck if you didn’t “get” what the puzzle wanted from you, you missed some object you needed to pick up, or you didn’t mindlessly try out every object-verb-item combination or every dialog path. And very often, things I wanted to try that seemed sensible weren’t possible.
> they generally turned out to be too “puzzly” for me
Loom, I think, was like that sometimes, but Monkey Island wasn't too bad. Sierra's King's Quest series, however, was notorious in this respect, where the thing to do was something arbitrary you could not reason to in a million years.
That's the kind of thing that sucks in adventure games. In real life, I can be creative to a very large degree because reality has content, specifically, to the degree that I grasp that reality. A ball of clay is a ball of clay, and because I understand what clay is, I know what I can do with it. But in a game, a ball of clay is just a symbol. There is no ball of clay. It is a nominal entity, an image or word plus some code that simulates maybe some aspects of it in very constrained ways (in adventure games, this is truly very narrow, as in, if user clicks these two things with this action, then show picture and display text, the end). And this might be okay if the author has arranged things sensibly, but sometimes you end up with truly bizarre ideas. You wonder how these things passed QA.
The worst was King's Quest V, which you could play for 3-4 hours and soft lock yourself by deciding to go east into the mountains before you had done _everything_ possible in town and west in the desert. It didn't warn you you couldn't return, and if you didn't have an extra save it was back to the beginning.
Soft lock failure states are incredibly bad design... Instant deaths well, those can be acceptable with decent save system. But even Sierra in some cases managed to nearly entirely avoid soft lock failures... So leaving them in is well only bad work.
King's Quest felt particularly bizarre in some of the puzzles as well. I fondly recall the meager progress I managed in the 6th iteration, getting up that cliff, figuring out how to use the hero's ring as a bargaining chip, and I think I got to the minotaur part on the cover too. I got stuck too much to care, and put it aside.
Then I got the full color walk through book.
As I followed the guide, it was mind boggling not only how little progress I had made, but just how many different ways and paths to different endings I had missed! You didn't necessarily soft lock yourself as easily as others, but you could very easily screw yourself out of other options surprisingly quick.
Then I played The Dig. By comparison, The Dig felt like an accessible masterpiece. I didn't feel like I was straining for the right hidden pixel either across environments. The story wasn't unforgiving. There were only two real endings, and relatively easy to backtrack to.
