By 1997, the point n' click genre was not quite dead - Escape from Monkey Island was released, but was well on its way to its grave. It was under this climate that There are several reasons for the death of the point n' click genre by the end of the '90s. For one, it didn't adapt properly to new technology. For another, publishers wanted more action-oriented games to capitalize on the popularity of first person shooters and other twitchy games. But perhaps the biggest nail was that the genre wasn't really evolving, sticking to the same warped puzzle logic that enthralled die hard fans but completely alienated everyone else. Under this climate, --- The Feeble Files is one of the most ridiculously difficult graphic adventures ever made. Not in the same way as old Sierra games, with its constant deaths and innumerable dead-ends - those were tedious, but their threat could be lessened with smart save game rationing. No, The Feeble Files, developed in 1997, rises above that, but instead drops the player into long, winding series of extremely difficult puzzles, the kind that you have to map out the steps on paper, look at them, and wonder how the hell anyone was supposed to solve that on their own. Let's take the first series of puzzles. Feeble is ordered to report to the head government, but the leader's secretary won't let you pass. She mentions some pills she takes - this is your clue that you're supposed to get some drugs from the store outside, which in turn will enhance your charisma, allowing you to pass. As luck would have it, the store is sold out, because the shipment is held up in the docks. You can complete the delivery with a dock pass, which is held by a trucker in one of the local bars. He won't give it to you, of course - instead, he tells you the name of cargo he's carrying, a shipment of CDs by a famous singing group. As luck has it, there's a protester nearby handing out petitions to ban this very same band, but he doesn't have enough signatures. S, you need to take his petition, use your GET MACHINE to physically enlarge it (don't ask) which somehow make it more important, then report it to the government so it's outlawed. The trucker will get arrested for carrying illegal goods, allowing you to get the dock pass, allowing you to buy the pills, allowing your way to charm yourself past secretary. But that's not all - you aren't allowed to see the president until you've changed into your work uniform. You can't just go back to your house or whatever to change, oh no - for some reason, the game concludes that Feeble can only do it Superman-style, inside of a phone booth. Wouldn't you know, the only two phone booths in the game world are occupied, and, as the game makes you assume, the occupants are talking to each other. One of them, when bothered, will ask Feeble for a drink. You need to get this drink and spike it with some expired medication (whose effects are never given), which causes him to become cross and curse out his girlfriend on the other end, causing them both to hang up. Then, you go to the other phone booth, find it available, change, and then get on with the game. There are a couple of leaps of logic in here - nothing too atypical of tougher adventure games, really - but it's the way this is all structured that's mind boggling. To complete one goal (whose solution is only inferred, never stated), you need to solve three other, mostly unrelated puzzles first. -The main reason I've started covering adventure games on HG101 is because I'm not happy with the way a lot of dedicated fan sites approach criticism. Discarding the fact that some reviewers are waaaay too forgiving when it comes to crappy writing (otherwise how could anyone excuse Runaway), there comes the puzzle design. Too many adventure game reviews don't talk about this, or talk about it in vague terms, because they don't want to spoil the reviewer. Nuts to that, what's the point of criticizing a game if you're not going to bother talking about it? It's tough to talk about puzzle design because it's very tough to gauge heir difficulty, at least compared to other genres. You can look at something classically difficult like Ninja Gaiden (any of them, mostly) and objectively say, yes, this game is extremely hard. With adventure games...you can say that, but it's tough to separate "difficult" to "badly designed". With an action game or an RPG, you can either practice, or fix up your strategy. With an adventure game, you really need to change your mode of thinking - that's not easy for a lot of people! So instead of criticizing puzzle design, a lot of reviewers just sort of give it a hand wave, probably because they don't want to piss off the kind of masochists that actually like this sort of stuff. But what makes a "bad" puzzle, exactly?