Both traditional point and click and text based adventure games have been in a deep lull since the late 90’s due to declining sales, except for visual novel games in Japan. The genre has for better and worse has evolved into many different hybrid games like L.A. Noire and the Zelda series. These games which make up the majority of the modern market borrow adventure elements but still predominantly feature action so they don’t capture the feel of an authentic adventure game. To clarify, an adventure game is one that emphasizes puzzles, exploration, narrative, and atmosphere with usually no or very little action mechanics. They create a personal experience engaging the player on an emotional and psychological level like a film but with the added benefit of challenging one’s critical thinking.
What’s everyone’s top 5? and what modern (00-present) title do you think moves the genre forward?
Disclaimer: Lists are nice because it’s nice to see where everyone’s tastes but please have more to contribute than that.
Gemini Rue
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Grim Fandango
Blade Runner
King’s Quest 6
We need more developers like Quantic Dream who make it their goal to innovate and change push what the gaming medium is capable of. A quote from David Cage that I hope inspires other developers to try something new instead of playing it safe:
“I hope this will inspire people – it should! I want competition in this field. I don’t want to be alone on my flagship shouting, ‘Hey! Emotional storytelling!’ There should be more games trying this. But very few developers have the luxury of having a great publisher trusting them. We did an indie game with the financial support of a Triple A title. I don’t see Heavy Rain as an achievement, I see it as a first step. I know we can do much better, we can go further. I know there are many people out there to convince. I mean, look at how many people played Heavy Rain in comparison to Call of Duty – we want as many players as that. And even that is nothing – look at how many people watched Avatar. That is where we want to go.”
Edit: And yes I’m aware David Cage is a pretentious douchebag lol.
The genre is alive and well on the PC. Steam has a bunch of them it is just that they have no marketing budgets. Console adventure games are usually pretty weak. I enjoyed Heavy Rain but it and L.A. Noire are in the minority. Most of them have solid adventure game roots but have to have some have ass mechanic tacked on in order to sell on a console. Omicron had shitty shooting, L.A. Noire has shitty driving, Heavy Rain had shitty QTE’s, etc. “D” was a cool one that saw a console release on the Saturn and had it’s sequel turned into a shooter. The Broken Sword series is still going on and I honestly think that the handhelds are the only non-PC platform that are seeing true adventure games still being released.
The DS has it’s fair share of adventure games like Hotel Dusk, Again, Last Window, Trace Memory, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and a few others. Telltale games are been keeping them alive on PC.
You can find a lot of adventure games on the DS (and probably the 3DS later down the road). The last game I played was 999. I hear Ghost Trick is really good.
Quest For Glory (entire series)
Kings Quest 6
Space Quest
Shadowgate
Dejavu
I loved the hell out of Quest for Glory because it had combat with the point+click games. It was easy to game the system when you knew what you were doing, but it was pretty genre-breaking at the time. I think the P&C Adventure genre at large stalled heavily when Sierra changed their design focus. Notably, current games like Hotel Dusk carry on that old-school style the best, and you have LA Noire which is a good modern day spin, even if it was kinda bland.
I don’t know however, if we go back and play these games, are they that good?
I played Kings Quest 5. The game starts you in front of a house. If you go in the house and talk to the old man there (forgot his name), you chat for a bit and then he leaves. This is the very first action pretty much 100% of the people first playing the game will do. And if you do it you can’t beat the game, because at the end your owl companion flies off to go and find this man, and never returns with the item you need to win because he’s not there.
And for the life of me I could not figure out what the hell I did wrong. Years later I went back to the game and remembering that the little intro conversation with the man was pointless, I just skipped it to save time. Go figure, I finally got to beat it then.
Stuff like this was ALL OVER adventure games back in the day. I loved them so much growing up, but if someone pulled something like that again I’d swear off the genre in a heartbeat.
I wouldn’t call any of the aformentioned games in lists “adventure games”. You used nice reasoning to come up with a nifty definition there, but we usually equate adventure games with some sort of platforming. Ratchet and Clank is one series still holding kind of true to that. And I don’t know what comes out on Wii. Uncharted 2 would be appropriately titled “action-adventure”. And is the best at what it does. Those other games fall into the broad mesh of titles that “move genre forward” and try to do new things, while falling on the borderland between many genres. Ambitious games. And coincidentally, ones that I haven’t enjoyed.
I can’t really fill the list…But I must say, Ico was a personal fave of mine. Shadow of the Colossus aswell. So I am looking forward to the new game team Ico is putting together. Their adventure games really put you in a world that seems to stretch on and on. That’s my view of an adventure game.
Yea, SotC, Ico, Last Guardian, shit like that. Those are adventure games too.
I don’t feel Heavy Rain and LA Noire are adventure games. Though they’d prob be under that broad category on a site or something. But when defining them, it’d be sort of awkward to call them that. Just like whatever one may feel about Borderlands, at the end of the day, it’ll be considered FPS.
Do you mind naming some? Or do you just mean that steam has a big back catalog of the old school ones?
Are you saying that you think QTE’s are shitty as a mechanic or that the QTE’s in Heavy Rain were shitty? I don’t mind QTE’s but HR is the only game that I can think of that benefits from them. David Cage said something like “if you have a shooter engine then in every level all you do is shoot things but with QTE you can go from car chases to interrogations to puzzles to anything because the engine is flexible unlike other games that are trapped by their design.”
DS has helped in the mini revival of text based static background adventure games like Phoenix Wright but can you name some for ps2 n psp please?
I’m going to take a guess that you weren’t a pc gamer in the 90’s let alone 80’s. Adventure games may have platforming but but by definition aren’t required to. Not trying to be insulting but saying Heavy Rain isn’t an adventure game but Ratchet and Clank is shows you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Anyone ever play The 7th Guest? It scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.
I have yet to see anyone who can top Lucasarts; point and click adventure is just not terribly feasible anymore.
Day of the Tentacle, Fate of Atlantis, Secret of Monkey Island. All three of those are on equal footing. Fate of Atlantis is better than the Temple of Doom as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve played some of the games on DS and Steam, but they tend to be a little lacking. Maybe the puzzles make too much sense now, lol.
Maniac mansion for the nes was and will always be my favorite old school adventure game. It might be because it was my first one. I remember playing it when i was young like maybe 8 or something and being like what the hell is this and then coming back to it years later and really getting into. from there i went on to day of the tentacle. These were some great games. More modern tho i really enjoyed both hotel dusks for the ds, i was not expecting to actually like the 2nd one more than the first. Also i would love to see another phoenix wright, i know they are making an edgeworth 2 but i really liked phoenix wright and maya as a duo hahaha
Alive and well on many formats, PSP and DS for a start, not to mention a huge back catalogue on PC, but I’m sure you’re looking for new ones.
I don’t even consider it that, otherwise we might as well call MW2 Multiplayer an online RPG just because you gain loadouts and exp. I still consider it an FPS, there’s very few elements in it to make it like a standard RPG, sure you have quests and rewards, but it’s one of the most watered down RPGs if it’s to be considered one.
I grew up on the Lucasarts games, I played Fate of Atlantis in Virgin Megastore when they used to have Amigas and early PC games in there, fantastic game. I think a lot of the reason games just don’t seem as good is because of the emotional attachement, nostalgia and sense of achievement we had back when we finished those kinds of games. I think the new Back to the Future series of adventure games are excellent.
Anyway, games I liked:
Monkey Island series
Grim Fandango
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Day of The Tentacle
Sam and Max
Starship Titanic
Back to the Future
Blade Runner
Universe (this game was pretty poor, but it has a lot of good memory attached for me).
Did anyone ever play Ripley’s Believe It or Not: The Fate of Master Lu? or something like that. It was live capture animation. Fun, but some stuff was too hard for my adolescent brain. I remember one pixel hunt had you click on a spade of a wall full of spade wallpaper lol.
Fate of Atlantis was the shit too. There was an independent group trying to make another Indiana Jones game based on the fountain of youth, but I bet it fell off. Too bad cuz the demo was fun.
Not really feeling the new ‘adventure games’. Sam & Max and Back to the Future are fun, but a bit too easy. I was disappointed in LA Noire as an adventure game.
shout out to Phantasmagoria, a game I shouldn’t have been allowed to play at 11 years old lol
At one of the prior Screenwriting Expos, I attended a lecture on writing for games. Lecturer said all game makers want to be filmmakers. I don’t agree with that, but I definitely think makers of adventure games likely wanted to do films instead.
Though keep in mind I think of adventure games as stuff like Monkey Island or Full Throttle: a “bare minimum game mechanics” type game meant only to further a story that likely should have been a film instead, but couldn’t for whatever reason. Today, we call those “web originals.” There is no venom in my tone.