Retrospective: Discworld

Discworld commits every point-and-click crime you'd care to mention - tiny (almost invisible) hot spots, events triggered through dialogue you might not ask and the most obtuse puzzles yet created. To catch a butterfly, I have to put a frog in past-Rincewind's mouth so that it isn't scared away by the snoring? That doesn't work. That doesn't work. THAT DOESN'T WORK. And said butterfly, when placed in the past next to a lamp-post will cause a miniature thunderstorm next to a mad monk in the future? Causing him to take off his robe so you can steal it? That doesn't work, Rincewind! THAT DOESN'T WORK.

I've heard that phrase "that doesn't work" so many times in the last few days that if I'd woken up this morning having drawn it over my body in toothpaste during convulsive night terrors, I genuinely wouldn't have been surprised. Those pre-GameFAQs years were dark indeed. How can a game so warm and inviting, filled with all of my favourite fictional people, want to hurt me so badly?

Why, at the start of act two, have new puzzle-centric objects appeared in places I've visited before without the game telling me? What hints are offered to suggest that I need to put a tied-up octopus in a toilet, then mix a prune in with a Fishmonger's caviar supply so I can steal his belt buckle from beneath a toilet door? Discworld runs on pure dream logic; it's like a pixellated hallucination. If there's anyone that completed it entirely under their own steam then they must have a connection to a higher astral plane than yours or mine. To complete the game without a walkthrough is to see the face of God. An insane and cruel God.

For me then, over the years, the rose-tinted spectacles have won out to some degree. But that's not to say that the game is an entirely bad one. The voice acting remains superb (has Eric Idle ever done anything that hasn't been 100 per cent super-great after all?), and small details like the way the Luggage (a treasure chest with hundreds of tiny legs) follows you around as a mobile inventory meld Discworld lore with the demands of point-and-click adventures beautifully.

The time-travel L-space twist, meanwhile - which has you going a week into the past and affecting the future with your obtuse puzzling - may be a Day of the Tentacle rip-off, but is still done with story-telling flair and panache. What's more, as an exciting and vibrant fantasy world, Discworld remains hard to beat, and the game's two sequels would go on to capitalise on that to, in my opinion, an even greater extent.

Above all this though, loom those three giant words, almost blotting out the sun. That. Doesn't. Work. I've been lying to myself for all these years, and to many of my closest friends and family. All this time I thought it was me that did not work, but in reality it was this badly-designed point-and-click adventure. Perhaps now I can attempt some form of closure. Perhaps now I can try to be happy again.