Early adventure games were often plagued by poor design choices probably because most of them started as fun projects but the creators had a low capability to receive feedback from the audience, especially given that they were created before the Internet era.

One of the poor choices consisted in "making a game more difficult" by allowing game progression, for example, to the next level or scene, without allowing the player to return, while also allowing the player to miss and item that they must have had collected before progressing further. Depending at which point in time the "missing item" would be needed, it would have meant that the player would have had to reload an earlier save game, pick up the missing item and then play through the whole sequence again from where the item was missing.

The result thereof was that difficulty added was in terms of technicalities because the player would have had to have good backups but did not really add anything to the game itself that would have made the puzzles or the solving process "more difficult". Much later it was deemed that games that have a linear progression should not have any "point of no return", in particular with relation to missing inventory objects, such that game design, for adventure games in particular shifted to a stance where the game refused to let the player go any further if they missed some item that would be used later.

The problem of a "point of no return" obviously exceeds adventure games and the same concept can be applicable to, say, FPS games with RPG elements or just any game that progresses linearly, but this problem is mentioned in the context of adventure games because this is where the problem became very impactful given the times. You would have to imagine that if you were stuck at a certain scene, there were no "easily accessible" walkthroughs to debug what it wrong and there was no Internet to look up the problem. This ended up with many players just playing up to a point and then abandoning the game because they would have had no clue that, say, a bunch of scenes ago spanning multiple days or hours, there is some item that they did not pick up and was needed now. Compared to, say, FPS games, where the enjoyment is distributed between action and with some combined puzzles, an adventure game player felt a little queasy to have to go through the exact same content and in the exact same manner just because they did not pick up some item ages ago.

Perhaps one of the earliest examples that could be shared for this section is the case of early Sierra's King's Quest I, namely the scene where the player meets a gnome in the middle of a clearing and is then prompted without further explanation or ado to guess and spell out the gnome's name.

The prompting itself means actually having to type stuff on the keyboard to spell out the gnome's name, not to pick an answer out of several answers. If the player happens to be versed in The Brother's Grim stories and just given the context displayed in the image somehow manages to associate the random gnome with Rumpelstiltskin the answer would still be wrong. An additional clue as part of the context to this puzzle is a mention in the house of a witch that "Backwards is the key.", however even with that additional clue, if the player were to type "nikstlitslepmuR", that is "Rumpelstiltskin" spelled "backwards" as the clue would imply, then the answer is still wrong. There is a very technical clue to the clue in the witch house, namely that the statement says that backwards is the "the key" such that the alphabet itself is "the key". This would lead to the player having to spell out "Rumpelstiltskin" but with a reversed alphabet where the letter A becomes Z, Z the letter A, B the letter Y, the letter Y becomes B and so on.

The final result is "Ifnkovhgroghprm" which is the correct answer! We do not have a save file but it would be interesting to even check whether the "I" must be capitalized because more than likely it has to be and the game might not even accept a lowercase "i". Either way, cracking this puzzle is way, way too complex and very bad design, in particular, given the timeframe when King's Quest I was released during a period where the only media talking about games were niche game magazines given that there was no Internet. The expectation that a player would crack the code and solve the puzzle is way beyond reasonable and outright absurd.

Even back in the day when the first game was invented by displaying some paddles on an oscilloscope screen, a game that then was developed further by Atari to become the "modern" game of Pong, Nolan Bushnell, Atari's founder is famous amongst others to have stipulated the Bushnell's Law which states that a game should be "easy to learn and difficult to master". Bushnell also evolved the idea into a more palatable principle that games should not strive to be "too complex" in terms accuracy but should rather be "fun". The former constituted a response from Bushnell to someone in the audience when asked about the accuracy of games, say, in terms of physics or their connection to reality. In some ways, Bushnell's statements complement Masahiro Mori's theory on the "Uncanny Valley" where making something that resembles reality too much counter-intuitively might receive a negative emotional response rather than a positive one. Bushnell's statement is also important because it tackles the problem of some players requiring games to be "accurate", when, for what pertains to retail games, to borrow a phrase from a popular song, "It's Only a Paper Moon" and the game is really just entertainment and not a simulator meant to train people such that accuracy is irrelevant.

Note that even though the concept of overly accurate design of games would apply to a larger category than adventure games, the reality is that adventure games seem to be the ones that are most struck, perhaps even involuntarily by accuracy blight. That is, a developer wishes to make a catchy game that is difficult to solve, in order to make people talk about it but ends up designing a mess of a labyrinth where the solution cannot be determined. With Sierra aside, some of these involuntary mistakes happen even in cases where the developer wished to create, say, a "comical game" where items get used for purposes that they are not used for in reality.

One such example is to be found in the game Monkey Island 1, where the player has to associate a cotton swab with a giant monkey ear in order to secretly open a door. Henri Bergson's theory on humor not-withstanding, the "intellectual" requirements for this puzzle especially for someone that never approached an adventure game before might seem too steep to climb. With that said, and interestingly enough, designing adventure games is a matter of balancing the expected with the not-so-expected but if the story steps out of reality too much then players cannot be expected to solve them without having to use a walkthrough (which, is even considered cheating by standards). It is worthwhile to remember that making a game "too funny", or "too involved" as well as "too accurate" whilst foregoing intuition, might have the reverse effect and lead to a bad reception rather than a good one.

Note that there is some overlap between this section and the concept of "difficulty", however we would argue that this problem is more of a matter that would pertain to developers trying to "overachieve", perhaps not so much in graphics but rather in the design-complexity of the game, rather than something that would only be relevant in terms of "game difficulty".