It's currently on sale on steam, if you're interested.

THIS! THANK YOU!

I do enjoy adventure games. I am not the most patient guy when I face a difficult puzzle but I will try to solve it and I'll give it time and thought before I end up looking up hints and/or guides. A problem I encountered many times, comes down to what you said. There are many situations that I think a possible solution for a puzzle, given the items I possess at the moment and whatever clues I have, and while this solution makes perfect sense, the game requires a pre-ordained solution, as you stated. And that's where I get stuck. I am frustrated that my sensible way of solving a puzzle is not valid and I find it difficult to put myself in the shoes of the game designers. It would be great if an adventure game gave more freedom to the player and more options to solve a puzzle.

That happens, of course, when a puzzle does have some kind of sense. Illogical puzzles are a whole different category and I despise them wholeheartedly.

for STASIS, they were a bit limited in resources, experience, and most importantly "street cred" to do much to "break out" the genre in a revolutionary direction

for STASIS, they were merely going "hey everyone, we're here on the map now, this game will show you how much we love P&C adventure games like many of you do, show that we know what we're doing and that we are aware of what a GREAT MANY OF US are missing from the genre. We're going to do this one right, classic tyle, nothing too innovative, but it will help us gain your trust so that moving forward, when we go even bigger, you know you can trust us to do it right."

HOWEVER - while it may not "bring something new to the table" - it is ABSOLUTELY REFRESHING given the state of the genre over the past 15 years

and now they're making BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION - this is the game that is potentially going revolutionize the P&C adventure game genre. Now, they are smart, they know not to promise things they can't be sure they're going to deliver, but they have ASPIRATIONS, and THOSE they share. They WANT to make "puzzles" with multiple solutions. They want REACTIVITY and CHOICES to impact the narrative because 1.) it makes sense to do with the capacities of programming today, and because 2.) replayability of a P&C adventure to discover different paths is THE NATURAL PROGRESSION OF P&C VIDEO GAMES AND WTF HASN'T IT BEEN HAPPENING MORE ALREADY?!

play STASIS, gain confidence in their abilities as writers, puzzle-makers, world-builders, etc., and then SUPPORT BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION's kickstarter to ensure it gets made!

leroux - you were looking for good horror some time ago: STASIS~!!!!

another great way to ingest it is to put it in some actual apple cider/apple juice and drink it
daily regimen and it WILL HELP YOU IN SO MANY WAYS, brain, digestion, immunity
games are making you stupider, that is a problem with a lot of mainstream games, I played SWTOR for like a month and it was the worst game I've ever played and absolutely dumbs down players. WoW does the same thing, it's a breeding ground for people who don't know how to play video games and don't know to LEARN to play video games.

RUN AWAY!!!

I grew up with adventure games, mostly from the late EGA to the early VGA era. Aside from a couple small exceptions (Prince of Persia 1), they're what I mostly played as a child. Hell, I even have an appreciation for KQ5, although I'd be willing to admit that is more nostalgia than anything else. Throughout my teens, when people were shifting to FPSes, I stuck around with adventure games (aside from occasional forays into Doom and Doom clones :D), and explored those games I had missed out when I was younger. Then in the supposed "dead years of adventure games", I was enjoying a huge amount of free, indie (wasn't called that then, though) adventure games made by hobbyists and enthusiasts.

Couple of games I was actually stuck at for years and years (the leaflets to get out of the cannibal imprisonment in MI1, and the picking up the ladder and using it in Fate of Atlantis, for example) until I gained access to the internet.

I'm kinda glad I played so many of those games then, because I'm not sure I'd have the patience to play them now. I used to judge adventure games (or more accurately, judge myself :D) by how long it took me to to look up a walkthrough online, but I've given up that criteria now, because I've kinda realised, I don't play adventure games for the puzzles. This seems to come in sharp contrast to a very existent (and honestly to me, quite weird) group of gamers who actually do play adventure games for the puzzles, and the story is secondary, and their complaining about how modern games are coddling gamers by getting rid of bad puzzle design choices (like randomisation and walking deads and such).

Puzzles inherently are really kind of stupid. I mean, take a fairly serious game like Fate of Atlantis: I am exploring, and I find a statue head. I use the statue head to place in a socket, which turns on machinery that happens to produce lava. I get a stone cup from somewhere, which I use to collect lava. I carry this cup full of lava around until I find a machine. I use this cup full of lava in a machine to get beads to power a robot to trample a guard.
I mean...wut? Half of it is randomly clicking on stuff to see what happens (which I admit is a fun part of adventure games, but nobody seriously started out on that puzzle with the intention to get beads to power a robot), and the other half is either doing stuff on a scale that goes from reasonably obvious, to blatantly obvious stuff (oh, I have a bunch of beads in my inventory, and I'm in a world where ancient artifacts like robots are powered by beads!).

Other kinds of puzzles really aren't better. I don't mind slider puzzles or riddles or cryptograms in a puzzle game, but they almost never fit meaningfully in an adventure game. Oh no, this clever wizard locked his house with the use of a slider puzzle! Now only anyone who spends a small amount of time would be able to open the door! Such a clever wizard!

It also seriously infuriates me when I see a note hidden behind a picture saying something like "The first is the last, but the last is in the middle, wind up the beginning to the cycle of time", which then I'm supposed to use with a note on a calendar that marks a birthday to figure out the password to someone's computer. That's just stupid.

To clarify, I still love those adventure games, and even many new ones (Book of Unwritten Tales was really enjoyable, a lot of Wadjet Eye stuff, etc.), and I absolutely don't want these games to turn into a "click to continue the game" type affair, but I gave up on most "commercial" non-indie adventure games at some point after I played Syberia- not a game that I consider bad at all, just that it was going a certain trend that I didn't really care for, with focus on flashy graphics with nothing to do, obtuse puzzles to "challenge the player" (pad out run time) and so on, despite perhaps having a nice story. Every time I try them, even today, (eg. Daedalic's stuff, Microid's stuff, etc) I get frustrated at how they don't scratch my itch at all.

So yeah, I don't think you're getting worse. Just your tolerance for that stuff is lower.

While not strictly an adventure game (and I'm not much of a fan of most visual novels), I am enjoying Danganronpa on the Vita, and one puzzle there really struck me as being "perfect". In fact, I believe that Danganronpa does this a lot.

It's actually quite simple: you're in a discussion with an NPC (Sayaka for those who know the game), and your responses in this discussion dictate how your relationship with that NPC evolves. This is nothing new for the Visual Novel genre. What makes these particular choices special (a sadly all-too-rare feature of Visual Novels that would elevate the genre somewhat if writing was much better) is that the game subtly drops clues as to the best answer to each question, but doesn't dead-end you if you get the answer "wrong".

This is really how puzzles in P&C games should be done. Puzzles should always be logical, but the information you need should be readily available without being excessively obscure or excessively obvious. Puzzles might even be based on real-life skillsets, but games need to be careful with these - if the requisite knowledge is too general, the solution may be too obvious (a key and lock puzzle comes to mind here), but if it is too specialist (chemistry, physics, languages), certain individuals may struggle to understand the logic behind a given puzzle.

I was? I only remember looking for somewhat creepy movies that are a little more subtle, with eerie atmosphere instead of jump scares and gore and all that. Are you referring to that thread?

Anyway, I'll give Stasis a try!

yep I was refering to your desire for good "horror" movies that weren't based on gore and jump scares

while STASIS has some gore, it's more about the atmosFEAR and other psychological horror elements that make it as good as it is/why I mentioned it might be something you'd want to look in to
I'd never heard of this but I play forum mafia on mafiascum.net and there is a theme game based on this in signups currently~

Intrestingly enough The Secret World MMO I mentioned earlier has such kind of puzzles. However in this game a player is expected to look information on the internet. In fact TSW has a built in browser. So if I, for example, stumble upon a doctor, who wants me to work as an orderly and I'm given a patient file and about 20 kinds of medicines, I'm free to search wikipedia about these medicines to learn what deseases they cure and compare those to the symptomes in the patient file. And this totally is within the flow of the story and the game world.

You're probably just getting tired of moon logic, soup cans, and pixel hunts.

In the past, when you get stuck, the only solution was to go ahead and to persevere, or just buy a magazine with a walkthrough. Besides, to have a backlog was rare, so you had time for each game.
Nowadays, you can find a walkthrough in 30s on internet with video and commentary, so what's the interest to get stuck if you feel frustrating ? You can also give up and play an other game among the hundreds from your backlog, no time to lose.

Evolution ? Nah, regression !
Don't blame yourself, blame the way we live now.

Haha a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y!

In fairness, a single data point doesn't define a trend. If however you have similar problems with a completely different adventure game, then you may be onto something.