"You can't say I didn't warn you about getting in over your head, Graham." OK, but you didn't warn me about these.
Obviously, death is not as serious an issue in this game as it is in some others due to that convenient "retry" button, which I do appreciate. However, there are still a couple of death traps in this episode that bothered me.
First trap:
This one would be easy enough to fix. Just
Second trap:
I have two problems with this trap (and any other no-warning trap like it), despite the existence of a "retry" button:
1) I did not feel like I actually made a mistake. It just felt like a "haha, i gotcha" message from the developers. Maybe you did, but you might as well periodically drop an anvil on Graham's head for no reason and be done with it. There is no warning in either case. Remember the infamous "invisible hole in the boat" puzzle in King's Quest V? This falls under that category.
2) It detracts from the realism. Why is Graham going through all that trouble? Why is he
Because he died on his previous attempt? How does he know? The only evidence that it's a trap is the death itself.
Fixing this one wouldn't be too hard either. Just give a warning of some sort without actually triggering the trap. Usually a warning comes in two forms:
1) It's implicit from the situation. Obviously, walking into the sea is not a good idea. It would also seem unwise to
In this case, you could for example
2) There is a direct warning from the narration or dialog. This is somewhat rare, but it does occasionally occur in KQ6. For example, trying to open the guard room door in the castle basement the first time gets the narration, "Alexander can hear the clear sound of guard dog voices coming from behind the door. He decides opening the door wouldn't be wise." Then only on the second click does he actually open the door and get caught. Another example would be throwing Rotten Tomato. The first time you click it on Stick, Bump gives you an explicit warning. Only when it's clicked on Stick a second time does Alex throw the tomato himself and ruin the game. (Yeah OK, neither of these actually cause death or even necessarily make the game impossible to complete, but they're the only examples I can think of at the moment.)
In this case, you could
It's perfectly fine to have both types of warnings (walking into the sea is obviously dangerous but it also gets an explicit warning) or just one or the other, but having neither, to me, is a problem.
I acknowledge that KQ6 has some deaths without warnings too, but that doesn't mean they annoy me any less. The second trip to the Isle of the Mists unprepared, walking too close to the clinging vines, and probably a few others I don't recall off hand. These bother me too.
Now, you guys are saying you're done with Episode 2, so you're probably not going back to change anything and I can live with that. But I still wanted to give my opinion on this matter, because if anyone agrees with me, then I hope this will be given consideration for similar situations in future episodes.