Back Seat Designers

Is death necessary in an adventure game? What does it add to - or detract from - the experience? After an involuntary hiatus, the Back Seat Designers explore this subject in all its gory, with their trademark share of digression and clowning around included for good measure.

In a very special ~1 hour episode, the Back Seat Designers celebrate the release of LucasArts games on GOG.com by going down the line of the old LucasArts adventure game library and waxing at length about what they hope might be in store for us in the future.

What pisses you off? The Back Seat Designers know what pisses them off. It's not the games themselves, but rather the little mechanisms in some games that just doesn't gel. With Gabriel Knight: 20th Anniversary Edition fresh in their minds, but with no disrespect to Phoenix Online Studios intended, the Back Seat Designers tackle logic puzzles, missing running animations, clear goals and much more.

Have you ever read a book or watched a movie and wondered to yourself, "This would be perfect for an adventure game"? The Back Seat Designers have. And in this episode they pontificate on some well-known movies, books and other franchises that would make for perfect adventure games -- at least in their minds.

As an extra bonus, you can bear witness to our first truly genuine technical fuckup. Partway through the call, the phones inexplicably hung up on each other, and when Troels called Frederik back, he got his answering machine. In the interest of complete transparency and a dedication to their "no censorship" rule, the Back Seat Designers chose to leave this unwelcome intermission in.

We've all had one of those guilty pleasures: Playing a game that we know, deep in our hearts, is fucking awful, but we can't help but love it -- for one reason or another. The Back Seat Designers go through their closets and admit to their guilty pleasures: Adventure games that they either find criminally underrated, or, more likely, that are justifiably reviled but that they cannot help but enjoy.

Some people like to be scared, and it's an art to create something that truly scares the audience. What works and what doesn't? The Back Seat Designers talk truly scary moments in adventure games -- and some that tried but failed. And there's a special challenge to all game dev's at the end!

Ever been playing an adventure game where you have no idea what the fuck the game wants you to do, and when you find the solution, possibly by complete accident, you sit back and wonder just what the hell the designers were smoking? The Back Seat Designers have. And they talk about their "favourite" examples of this, as well as examples of games who did it right.

"Open world gaming" is one of those buzzwords that gets everyone excited. How is that conducive to traditional storytelling, or interactive storytelling, or whatever gets the Back Seat Designers' piss boiling? Can you follow a strict narrative with a beginning/middle/end and still have an open world to explore?