Hiya, I recently made a page dedicated to adventure games with the intent to play more of them and write about it. I don't always have a desire to make individual posts for every single game I play (some of them suck!), so these posts will be little compilations after I finish a few games, vaguely themed as 'journal' logs :)
Also, this one will be a bit longer than I expect these to generally be, because I want to briefly blab about some games I have played in the past and listed as 'completed'.
Oldies
Gone Home: you walk around a big PNW manor home while reading little emotional exposition notes and playing casettes from riotgrrl and queercore bands of the mid-late 90s. All my wildest dreams come true.
Blade Runner: One of the top 5 - 10 adventure games ever made. The story is a side-quel to the first film, you keep 'just missing' Deckard and film events, while interacting with many characters from the film. You play a different 'blade runner' (android hunting detective) investigating some rogue replicants, that ends up with similar "am I a replicant? am I a human?" themeage of the film, while you become a fugitive yourself. BUT every time you boot up the game it randomizes character responses and attitudes towards you, while also randomizing if your character is a replicant or not. There are like several different ending branches, with technically a couple dozen endings when factoring in which characters are present/alive, it's super replayable! Visually it renders motion captured FMV-like sprites over stunning isometric backgrounds, and it has an amazing soundtrack. Somehow we had a cracked copy on the family PC when I was a kid (it's originally a multi CD game), it's on GOG now I think, but before that it was unable to be legally purchased for like two decades.
Full Throttle: Really charming Lucasarts game where you play as a biker in a post apocalyptic world with a comic-animation art style. Kinda like mad max meets li'l elvis and the truckstoppers (IYKYK). Again, we had a cracked copy at home when I was a kid, but I haven't played through it in many years. It mixes a lot of puzzle solving with limited action gameplay and a fugitive on-the-run story. There was a recent remaster, it lets you switch between new and old graphical styles.
Police Quest: I played through this a bunch as a kid and probably finished it at some point. Another cracked game on the home PC (theres a trend here), this was more of a 'its there so ill play it' thing, like if you recorded a random TV show episode on VHS and rewatched it a bunch. I was always fascinated by how obtuse the police procedural elements are though (you lose the game if you don't perform a vehicle check before driving), and the old sprite visuals + text input system were novel to me (playing a 1987 game around 2000). Objectively as an adult, I see this as copaganda, that was written by a cop AND THEN HAD STORY ADDITIONS MADE BY THE GUY THAT WROTE LEISURE SUIT LARRY. PushingUpRoses has a good review video better explaining the literary whiplash of this game's tone. Don't bother playing it XD
Recent Ventures
Armikrog: 2015 kickstarter claymation game with a 3 HOUR PLAYTIME, frustrating puzzles with tonnes of backtracking, and large incomprehensible exposition dumps. After pushing through with a guide to finish it, I looked up the lead designer and oh there's a controversy section on his wikipedia... aaand he is a massive right wing bigot. Very "it's 'woke's fault that nobody likes my stuff now", hey man maybe your stuff just sucks, like this game.
Noctropolis: This game is amazing, it's like if Dark Horse made their own Batman in the mid 90s, but it was good and had world-ending light-dark balance lore, and was also kinda horny (that part isn't amazing, just funny). It's seeping with the (pseudo-)intellectual dialogue stuff of the era, things like a text box overexplaining the cold feel of the metal doorknob everytime you open your office, or if you click 'talk' to a wall you get a "there seems to be no response". I found it jarring playing in 2026 to see a down-and-out divorced slacker guy depicted as OWNING A BOOKSHOP. He's kind of tooooo into comics, and then he literally goes into the comics (it's a metaphor). There's genuinely cool parts where you get exposition in the form of an interactive comic book that you 'physically' read. It has great crunchy 1994 FMV acting, with motion captured sprites on isometric backgrounds that bounce between realistic and comic. I was blown away by the amount of lore and worldbuilding thrown into this 4-5 hour gameplay. It really fleshes out this story to a world-in-the-balance ending, which would probably take years of issues in a print comic. The controls/interface were a bit obtuse at first, but it's an old DOS game so this stuff wasn't really perfected yet. It's also one of those games that you NEED to be identifying every possible thing you could pick up and finding EVERY interactable area, because it will be required later and you'll be softlocked if you don't (or just make a lot of saves). Also, the titular (not gotham) city of Noctropolis is very cool, there's been some volanic disaster that shrouds it in permanent darkness, very noir-punk (if that's a thing?). Really worth checking out if you like any of this kinda stuff, it's often on sale for like $1-$3.
Next Up
I've had some trouble getting Atlantis: The Lost Tales working (the unofficial patcher won't unofficially patch), but I think that series will be next. It looks so cooked, I managed to play for an hour the other day and was dying laughing at some of the janky nonsense. Like I couldn't get past a section because a guard wouldn't let me through, and the solution was to talk to the other guard next to him, or there was a point where I got a game over screen because I poured a guy a drink XD.
Also, a friend of mine suggested a few games; Dark Seed and Spaceship Warlock, which led me to find the website 'Zomb's Lair' that hosts .exes of a buuunnnnccchhhhh of obscure old (mostly adventure) games! So I'll probably go through more stuff from there eventually.
Anyway, thanks for reading!