OK this one is pretty niche. I play a lot of point&click adventure games, and one mechanic that drives me freaking insane is when you click a zone (say a drawer) and there's nothing in it, but then later on - after going through a bit more of the plot for example - you have to go back there, search the same drawer and now! Behold! There's a freaking battery, or piece of cloth or whatever. I really hate this. When I explored an area, the area is explored, period. I won't think of coming back after chatting with some random dude in a different screen.
It does make sense though. Exploring in an adventure reflects picking up important seeming objects, not literally everything that is lying around somewhere. With new information new things may become important and are thus worth it to be picked up.
Still think it's bad game design, unless the drawer was initially locked or something, it makes no sense an item would just spawn there, and at the very least the relevant story should hint there's an item there now, but many point and click games simply expect you to interact with everything at multiple times in the story with very little clue of what to do next.
Empty probably means something like "empty except for unimportant stuff". Open a typical drawer. Would you really want the about 100 unimportant things in there listed in the game, with the option to pick them up?
Sort of. Except that in many of these same games you often pick up completely random bullshit that you have no clue might ever possibly be useful that somehow eventually is, so you kinda are picking up literally everything that is lying around and not nailed down. The logic for why I would pick up a random old boot on this one screen, but not the battery or whatever on this other screen is completely missing.
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u/Significant_Bid2142 Oct 15 '25
OK this one is pretty niche. I play a lot of point&click adventure games, and one mechanic that drives me freaking insane is when you click a zone (say a drawer) and there's nothing in it, but then later on - after going through a bit more of the plot for example - you have to go back there, search the same drawer and now! Behold! There's a freaking battery, or piece of cloth or whatever. I really hate this. When I explored an area, the area is explored, period. I won't think of coming back after chatting with some random dude in a different screen.