Adventure Games

Welcome to my shrine/catalog page for (mostly point-and-click) adventure games! I am dRiven by a Myst-erious urge to embark on a Long(est) Journey to play as many as I can. I would say that I'm just casually looking at ones that interest me, but this genre usually has so much visual style and whacky gameplay that even the 'bad' ones are still entertaining. I also figured they are a relatively manageable backlog, as playtime is usually under 10 hours, and most titles are quite dated so they often go on sale for like $1-3. My definition for these games is not super strict either; they can be 2D, isometric, pre-rendered or true 3D, puzzle or 'hidden object', as long as they have the vibe™.

Adventure games were a peak storytelling medium throughout the late 80s to early 00s. Large amounts of text-based exposition and dialogue allowed for grander worldbuilding in an era of less physical memory and computational power, while the point-and-click gameplay was more accessible to the average person (vs. complex RPGs with similar amounts of text/dialogue). This genre helped pioneer a lot of gaming technology like motion-capture and full motion video, while implementing them in creative ways. They were the first 'interactive movie' experiences, the closest that games got to mimicking the immersive feeling of a film (at the time). And they were the ideal space for this kind of experimentation due to the slower/static pace of their stories and gameplay (the 'cracks' show less). Eventually other genres with higher fun-per-minute rates inherited a lot of these features and adventure games declined from their peak by the 2010s.