In the past months I’ve rediscovered the joy of point & click adventures, and while getting myself reacquainted with the genre I’ve found that, even though the current commercial success of the genre is far away from it’s peak in the 90s, there are still a few companies and distributors putting out great games out there.

What I didn’t remember, and it’s something that anyone that has ever played an adventure game will recognize, is the frustration that sooner or later every game will lead you to. Most of this frustration comes from having a very limited pool of accepted solutions to problems (as in having the character refuse to open a door by smashing it with an axe, and instead having to look for God knows how long for a key), but there are also the mathy puzzles, many of which are derived from (or copies of) traditional CS problems: N-queens, sliding blocks, knight’s tour…

Solving this last class of problems usually requires some combination of intuition, luck and perseverance (in my particular case in what seems to be a 5%, 20%, 75% split). In fact, most of the times after solving one of those problems the main feeling I get is not one of achievement, but of relief about being able to go on with the game.

So, since they are well defined problems and I don’t seem to get any satisfaction by solving them by hand, what about creating a program to do it for me? This way I can just worry about having a clear understanding of the problem and let my computer sweat over finding the right solution. That’s exactly what I’ll be doing over this series of posts.

In the next post I’ll look at solving one of the most common and frustrating games out there, the sliding tile puzzle.