This won’t be as odd as the title makes it sound.
Tales of Bingwood (technically, it’s Chapter 1 of the Tales of Bingwood series, la di da, as all adventure games must be episodic now) is a cute little point ‘n clicker which pays homage to the Monkey Island series. It pays a lot of homage. It should really pay royalties. A pair of Finnish game developers, Markus Tupperainen and Carl Granberg, spent fifteen years, off and on, creating it, through many different iterations, and it finally ended up as what’s essentially an alternate-universe Monkey Island. Imagine if Ron Gilbert had been two indefatigable Finns. OK, now let’s imagine him as a sheep and three slices of pizza. Why the pizza? Well, the sheep needs to eat something.
Most of the mechanics in Bingwood are tried and true adventure game standards, which is fine and nostalgic, but even adventure games have learned some new tricks in the past fifteen years. One nice exception is the eye/hand cursor, which uses an approach I’ve never seen before. Other adventure gamers, have you heard of this one? The cursor defaults to an eye the first time you click on an object, and then becomes a hand if you’ve already looked at it once. A simple idea, but very useful.
One can, of course, cycle through the cursors to look at things twice, or manipulate/pick up things immediately. But I rarely do that because the default behavior coincides with my default adventure game behavior: look at everything in the room, then try to pick everything up, then fiddle with every switch, button, and lever. Works very well in traditional point and click adventures, less so in Myst clones, as I usually begin by immediately pulling the very worst lever. It also doesn’t work real well in life, where such behavior is considered a) shoplifting or b) “lever fondling.”
The Eye and the Hand symbols are a good shorthand for how people used to, and occasionally still do, play adventure games. The Hand is the obvious way to play – figure out the right action to perform, do it, repeat, and you win the game. The Eye represents what old-school adventure gamers tend to consider the real reward: a clever bit of description, dialogue, character insight, etc. I’d bet that almost all Sierra and LucasArts fans back in the day examined every object in hopes of a fun response before trying to use it. The Eye is the game showing you how well-realized its world is, and the Hand is you showing the game how cleverly you can outwit it. Bingwood and similar retro games can only succeed if the player is able to derive enjoyment from both acts, and I’m surprised that more adventure games didn’t come up with equally helpful ways to facilitate that constant switch between the two fundamental actions. I’m inspired that, fifteen years later, two fans of the genre found a new way to get the funny from the game to the gamer, and created a damn funny game to show off this new technique.
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