In this episode, we’re going to talk about adventure gaming in the 2000s as European game development studios and licensed games based on television shows and IPs aimed at girls largely took over the genre and kept the flames burning! Join us on this journey through games you’ve may have loved, some you may have heard of and some you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!
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Season 1, Episode 13: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 11
Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.
You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)
And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!
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Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.
Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)
Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!
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Season 1, Episode 14: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 12Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------
SOURCES:
https://lilura1.blogspot.com/2024/03/German-Computer-Games-Late-1980s-Early-1990s.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20160527110729/http://www.gamona.de/games/the-whispered-world,vieles-im-adventuregenre-laeuft-falsch-der-edna-entwickler:article,1499346.html
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EPISODE 14Coming up in this episode –
We’re going to talk about adventure gaming in the 2000s during those dark ages when the genre supposedly died and yet adventure games kept appearing on the shelves somehow thanks to a number of European developers and publishers and licensed games. We’re going to talk about Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, the Syberia games, Post Mortem, Still Life, Nancy Drew, Gray Matter, Ankh , the Black Mirror Trilogy, Runaway: A Twist of Fate, Index+’s Dracula: Resurrection series, Daedalic Entertainment and more!
I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed!
So, adventure gaming died in 2005, or so you might have thought if you were there at the time, because many gaming publications were not only decrying the end of one of PC gaming’s biggest showcase genres, but also PC gaming in general as MMORPGs looked like they were going to take over everything that console gaming hadn’t already.
Granted, there were still new adventure games coming out pretty consistently throughout the aughties, that period between 2000-2009, but you know how the games industry is – if it’s not a major title with a AAA marketing budget or some runaway sales success, no one really thinks that much about it. And that was very much the case for some of the games we’re going to talk about in this episode, many of which were far from obscure and some of which even received console ports!
But most of these games have one big thing in common – they came from developers and publishers in Europe rather than North America, and even when they did have a big name attached like Sierra’s Jane Jensen, they tended not to attract a lot of attention.
One of those games that flew under the radar in North America, but was quite popular in Europe, was Microids and Virtual Studio’s Amerzone: The Explorer's Legacy. And if you’re thinking, “Hey, didn’t that just come out last year?” the answer is yes, the from the ground-up remake of it did. But the original debuted in 1999 and the reason you probably wouldn’t have heard of it then if you were in North America is because it didn’t make it out until 2001 here through DreamCatcher Interactive, a Canadian publisher that served a very specific niche of adventure gamers in the late 1990s and early 2000s before it got acquired by the European publisher JoWooD Entertainment in 2007. DreamCatcher also founded an imprint called The Adventure Company in 2002, and it was through this it released the far more famous series that followed Amerzone, Syberia, which we’ll cover in a moment.
Both Amerzone and Syberia were written, directed and designed by the comic book artist Benoit Sokal, by the way, and Amerzone is specifically based on a story in a series he authored in the 1980s called Inspector Canardo. The fifth volume, L’Amerzone, debuted in 1986, and the English translation for the title is The Kingdom of White Birds.
I honestly didn’t know any of that before researching this game, and I certainly never would have known it from the game, because Inspector Canardo is a duck with a giant yellow bill who hangs around with non-human characters. But the game itself only involves human characters and portrays the world in a mixture of FMV and 360 degree pre-rendered Myst-style first person exploration sequences, some of which include some light animation. It’s a good-looking game for its time, but it’s a bit of a slow burn that didn’t appeal to those beyond the Myst lovers. I’m not sure if the remake fixes this problem, but based on what I’ve seen, it’s a pretty faithful recreation, and the bulk of the effort seems to be on bringing the graphics into a full 3D world.
The Syberia games are also by Benoit Sokal and are set in the same universe as Amerzone, but they’re point and click 3D adventure games that star Kate Walker, a lawyer from America who’s involved in overseeing a corporate acquisition that goes awry when the owner of the company, Anna Voralberg, dies and reveals just before she passes that her estranged brother Hans is still alive and will inherit the company. A good chunk of the first game involves Kate’s journeys across Europe with her animatronic ally Oscar, who drives a clockwork locomotive. After a bunch of things happen, Kate finds Hans Voralberg and decides to abandon her old life to help him on his quest to venture into the realm of Syberia – that’s spelled with a Y, by the way – on his quest to find the last living prehistoric mammoths and a lost civilization called the Youkols.
Honestly, I sort of hate this ending because it suggests that everything you’ve done up to this point is largely unimportant. Kate’s abandonment of her life in New York feels low-stakes and the game’s gone out of its way to suggest everyone she knows back at home is a jerk anyway. Clearly, this game’s about the feels through its gorgeous artwork and neat designs, but the sense of wonder the first game tries to inspire in the adventure ahead also falls sort of flat with me because I’m not as fascinated by mammoths as the game wants me to be, and this is coming from someone who’s taken his family to see actual mammoth and mastodon skeletons at several museums, including the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.
The second game, released in 2004, finishes Hans’s story and is worth playing if you enjoy the first game. But the third one, released fifteen years later in 2017, is the very definition of inessential and is generally considered a major misstep due to a plodding story, grating voice acting, lousy controls and a poor release state that made reviewers all too aware of the game’s many flaws. It also has a really aggravating cliffhanger ending.
The 2022 follow-up Syberia: The World Before tries to reconcile this by being both a prequel and provide a resolution to Kate Waller’s storyline, and while it’s a far better game than Syberia 3, it also is hopefully the last one since Benoit Sokal passed away during its development and, quite honestly, the story doesn’t have anywhere to go from here.
If I sound like I’m not a huge fan of the series… well, I’m really not. The Syberia games are very pretty and emotional, but they’re also really slow and kind of dull, benefitting more from the fact that they were some of the only adventure games available during the 2000s rather than the fact that they were particularly good at providing an adventure worth experiencing. I feel like their popularity had a lot to do with the fact that the first two were also eventually available on console systems, mobile devices and handhelds. Play them if you love beautiful graphics and steampunkish qualities, but I really don’t recommend them to people who don’t have a lot of patience and a desire to see the slow-moving story through.
And I’m at odds with some genre fans in saying this – a lot of people regard the original Syberia as being one of the all-time great adventure games! But to me, Kate Walker’s no April Ryan, and I really don’t get what all the fuss is about. Your mileage may vary, of course, and if you want to check Syberia out for yourself, try the 2025 remake, which is probably the best way to see for yourself if you’re interested in more.
Microids also created another trilogy around the same time as Syberia that was also published in North America by The Adventure Company, starting with Post Mortem in 2002 and continuing with Still Life in 2005 and Still Life 2 in 2009. Post Mortem is set in the 1920s in Paris with an obvious bent towards film noir inspiration, but also some prominent psychological horror, Broken Sword Templar-style conspiracies and slasher film overtones. In this game, you play as a clairvoyant retired police detective named Gus MacPherson who has visions of two people being murdered by a masked, knife-wielding killer. A woman named Sophia Blake, the sister of one of the victims, shows up at his door to hire him. You can play the game posing as a private detective, journalist or insurance agent, and this does impact the story somewhat.
Much of the game involves either first person navigation sequences in pre-rendered 360 scenes or participating in talking head dialogue sequences where 3D characters interact. Much like Amerzone, it feels a lot like Myst in many places, but the story is a little bit stronger because the character interactions are more interesting and there’s a stronger sense of danger since a killer’s on the loose. While Post Mortem is a fairly average mystery game on its own with several rather unsatisfying endings, it’s a little more interesting if you choose to play its sequels and see where things are going.
Still Life is a third-person 3D adventure game that takes place in both the 1920s in Prague and 2004 in Chicago, and you play as Gus and his granddaughter, FBI Special Agent Victoria McPherson, and for whatever reason, MacPherson is spelled Mc instead of Mac in this game. Vic also has a strong resemblance to Sophia Blake in Post Mortem, which is also never explained, as that character disappears from the storyline entirely in the sequels. You just sort of have to go with it.
Still Life is well-regarded but notorious for feeling like half of a game because it’s fairly short and has an ending that just sort of… stops. In a world where you couldn’t play Still Life 2 immediately after it, that was very aggravating. In 2026, it’s pretty easy to roll right on into it and continue Vic’s adventures as she heads up to Maine and tries to save a journalist named Paloma Hernandez whom the killer is toying with to lure Agent McPherson to his lair. Series fans weren’t wild about Still Life 2, but it does at least provide a somewhat satisfying conclusion to the story.
I personally think the series is worth playing if you enjoy adventure games that involve investigating crime scenes and interrogating suspects, but can also put up with annoyances like spotty voice acting, unskippable dialogue, uncanny valley character models and many signs that the games had more ambition than the developers had the ability to execute. Given that you can often find the entire trilogy on sale for just a few dollars, it’s not a bad value, and the presence of multiple killers throughout the games does add some tension that’s lacking in the Syberia games.
Another series from the same era is known as the Dracula Trilogy, developed by the French media company Index+ and starting in 1999 with Dracula: Resurrection, which is similar to Amerzone in featuring 360 degree pre-rendered environments with cutscenes where you interact with characters. Somehow, the game avoids that uncanny valley feeling by stylizing the characters a bit so they feel more like 3D animations than soulless dolls, and that’s very much to its credit, because as Jonathan Harker, you venture back to Transylvania seven years after Bram Stoker’s novel on St. George’s Eve and try to rescue your wife Mina from a seemingly resurrected Dracula. After dealing with unhelpful locals and Dracula’s henchmen, you find yourself embroiled in an investigation that delves deeper into the mythology of the evil Count and his father, Vlad Dracul.
The game ends on a cliffhanger with Jonathan and Mina escaping Transylvania, but discovering that Dracula has tricked them and headed off to London. Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary, which came out in 2000, continues the story with similar gameplay but adds in some combat mechanics this time around. It’s a longer game with an extremely involved plot involving Dracula’s secret sanctuary, a hiding place where he can withdraw and regenerate his power. Dracula is eager to retrieve an artifact called the Dragon Ring, which Johanthan found and used in the first game, but which is also missing a diamond that will restore it to full power and allow Jonathan to destroy Dracula once and for all.
Even though the second game ends fairly definitively with Jonathan doing just that, a Microids-owned developer called Kheops Studio was tasked with making a third game called Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon that was released in 2008 and which kicked off a brand new story more or less unrelated to the previous two chapters, moving the setting to 1920 and exploring the conflict between Eastern Orthodox Catholicism and Roman Catholicism as Transylvania is absorbed into Romania. The game traces the historical path of Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad Dracula or Vlad the Impaler, but it also acknowledges the existence of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula in-universe and accuses it of popularizing certain superstitions about vampires. This is, surprisingly, a very smart and self-aware game that rises above being an unnecessary cash-in sequel, and its biggest weakness is that it’s just a so-so adventure game due to some very uninspired puzzles and dated mechanics. It also paves the way for two more not-so-great Dracula games released in 2013 by Koalabs Studio and Anuman, Dracula 4: The Shadow of the Dragon and Dracula 5: The Blood Legacy. You can skip those.
Despite the existence of two other games that follow the story of the third game, the first three games are still often referred to as the “Dracula Trilogy” and are definitely the ones to play. Their surprisingly detailed plots are worth experiencing and you can finish the first two games in about the same amount of time it takes to complete the third one, meaning that you could easily enjoy the entire trilogy over a weekend.
But lest you think we’ve exhausted everything France had to offer when it came to early 21st century adventure gaming, we’ve still got more studios to cover. And one of the big ones is David Cage’s Quantic Dream, a game development studio that’s every bit impressive as it is controversial.
It was November of 1999 when an unknown French developer released a highly-hyped game through Eidos Interactive featuring the legendary singer-songwriter and actor David Bowie as both the composer of the game’s soundtrack and also as two characters within it. By the time it hit shelves, Omikron: The Nomad Soul had been in development for years and its premise was already difficult to describe. In some ways, it looked like late 1990s dystopian cyberpunk fare with oppressive robotic cops, a serial killer murder mystery, supernatural bad guys and even some nudity. In other ways, it looked like a science fiction dimensional-hopping adventure with laser gun fights and hand to hand combat. But as the game drew nearer, it was also promising a deep and engaging story with 41 controllable characters and a fully explorable city.
The finished game turned out to be so much weirder than any of that – a truly unique third-person 3D adventure that no one’s ever dared to imitate. And I’m going to say now that if you haven’t played Omikron: The Nomad Soul, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. It’s my favorite Quantic Dream game, and it’s also one of those late 1990s experiments like Tom Hall’s action RPG game Anachronox that tried really hard to make 3D gaming live up to its potential by scripting in dialogue, environmental events and player choices. Whether or not it’s even an adventure game is debatable – Quantic Dream pitched it as a “Soul Playing Game.”
Oh, and the soundtrack truly lives up to the pedigree of having David Bowie involved. It’s suitably weird, and David Cage’s past life as a musician definitely meant the development team paid attention to how music could help shape the game’s unique atmosphere.
The premise of the game is that a red-haired soldier named Kay’l 669 travels through a dimensional portal into your computer screen and asks you to take possession of his soul and re-enter his world, a place where there’s no saving, death is permanent and consequences matter. And that’s sort of true – when you die in this game, unless you have a resurrection item to provide a continue, you’re reincarnated as the closest NPC, and you can also often swap to control other characters on a whim. There are parts of the game where you need to be certain people with certain abilities to progress, but the appeal of Omikron has always been its open world style of non-linear gameplay across a huge city with five very different districts.
If the core adventure game has a weakness, it’s that once you discard Kay’l and begin body-swapping, the storyline becomes much less character-driven and starts to feel like you’re just ticking objectives off a checklist. Much of the midgame is just exploring and accomplishing tasks at your own pace. The latter third of the game is where the storyline really kicks in, and this is also where things get pretty bonkers as you transition from what has felt like science fiction into more of a sort of fantasy story with mummies and prophecies and sorcerers and ancient demons and magic swords. There are also some sequences that involve first-person shooting, which is honestly pretty bad in this game, and similarly unfun 3D fighting game-style combat like an ultra-simple Virtua Fighter.
Despite some great reviews, a famous musician and tons of ambition, Omikron: The Nomad Soul didn’t sell super well outside of Europe, and its Dreamcast port further exemplified its weaknesses as a game with a massive world, but a low level of interactivity. You also have to remember that Deus Ex came out about seven months later and really set a new standard for how 3D action games could fuse action, adventure and role-playing mechanics into a cohesive whole. It also didn’t help that Omikron was such a wild combination of many ideas that it was – and still is! – a very difficult game to describe to other people. Part of me sees it as a proto-Grand Theft Auto III for its open world, mature themes and exploration, but part of me also sees it as a very innovative attempt to push the adventure game genre into the 21st century by experimenting with new mechanics, much in the way Shenmue tried to on the Dreamcast.
Whatever the case may be, Quantic Dream didn’t stick with the formula, and even though they planned to make a sequel, they instead wound up working on a game released in 2005 called Fahrenheit, which was released in North America under the name Indigo Prophecy. And once again, Quantic Dream proved to be a company for whom reach far exceeded grasp, because Fahrenheit starts out like a moody, atmospheric supernatural 3D adventure mystery game and puts you in the shoes of a guy named Lucas Kane who is possessed by a supernatural force and commits a murder in the game’s opening scene and then tries to run from the police. He’s pursued by Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles, two police detectives who show up on the scene, and you get to control them too at different points.
The big conceit of the game is that your choices impact the storyline, and quick time events govern a lot of the gameplay and allow for a bunch of minigames. The game’s oozing with atmosphere and drenched in cinematic style, with shifting camera angles, crane shots, pans and zooms, scenes within scenes and steadycam-style chase cameras. And you can see the movie inspirations, too – there’s lots of cribbing from auteur directors like David Fincher, Alfred Hitchcock, Spike Lee and Ridley Scott as well as cop movies and film noir, and later in the game, there’s some full-on ripping off of The Matrix.
And it’s in that latter part of the game where Fahrenheit becomes rather infamous for losing its freaking mind and moving from a moderately-paced mystery into an absolutely crazy mishmash of ideas involved the ancient Mayans, the occult, angels, sentient AI, New Age prophecies, secret societies, conspiracy theories and Lucas becoming a literal zombie. There’s a romance story that comes out of nowhere and makes no sense at all, and that it results in a pregnancy in the epilogue is additionally problematic because of the story implications.
It’s such a confusing mess that you have to wonder what happened, and a lot of the blame falls on writer and game director David Cage. While a lot of his excesses could be forgiven in Omikron because it takes place in a fictional world, Fahrenheit takes place in New York City in the year 2009 and detaches itself from reality so firmly that it feels like the development team realized they weren’t going to finish the game as planned and just started tossing in every crazy idea they had.
As nuts as it is, Fahrenheit is absolutely worth experiencing, particularly if you enjoy shouting at your screen and wondering aloud who thought any of this was a good idea. It makes Hideo Kojima’s games seem restrained by comparison.
Quantic Dream’s next game came out in 2010 for the PlayStation 3 and it was immediately notable for its incredible graphics and its very moody and cinematic murder mystery story that once again took some heavy cues from David Fincher and managed to stay more grounded this time. The premise is that you alternate between four different characters and investigate a serial murderer called the Origami Killer. One character, Scott Shelby, is a private investigator patterned after Orson Welles’s character in the film Touch of Evil. Another, Madison Paige, is a journalist writing a piece on the Origami Killer. A third guy, Norman Jayden, is an FBI agent with a high tech pair of AR glasses that allow him to profile killers. The other main playable character, Ethan Mars, is a father who loses his son Jason to a car accident and then becomes very protective of his younger son, Shaun, who also winds up getting kidnapped years later by the Origami Killer, who seems to be targeting Ethan in particular for some reason.
I should add, my full name is Sean Jason Jordan, so this game always hits me a bit differently than most people!
The gameplay is similar to Fahrenheit’s quick-time events, but they’re even more granular, to the point that pretty much any action requires you to move an analog stick or press a button for some reason. The game also goes out of its way to make you, as the player, uncomfortable, ratcheting up the tension quite regularly and putting poor, desperate Ethan through situations where he’ll do anything to save his son – even crawl through broken glass or hack off a finger. The game has many different variations on its ending based on the choices you make for all the suffering you inflict on your characters.
I enjoyed Heavy Rain when it first came out, but I immediately saw the game as problematic for several reasons, not the least of which was the treatment of its playable female character, Madison, who largely seems to be in the game to have to avoid being raped or mutilated in horrifying ways and who also gets to be in a nude shower scene and get undressed by the player at different points. I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but there’s a scene where Madison gets captured by a mad scientist surgeon who literally tries to drill into her private parts as she’s restrained on an operating table. There’s another scene where she’s forced to strip off her clothes at gunpoint. And the game’s lone DLC prequel adventure, The Taxidermist, is yet another horrible sequence of events for Madison that adds nothing to the story except more mutilation of women.
This is where I started to question whether David Cage is not just a writer whose reach exceeds his grasp, but perhaps is actually one of those people who’s very good at imitating others’ ideas but whose own ideas are pretty rotten. And while Quantic Dreams’s next two 3D adventure games, 2013’s Beyond: Two Souls and 2018’s Detroit: Become Human, aren’t quite as misogynistic as Heavy Rain or as bonkers as Fahrenheit, both have the same problem when it comes to storytelling – they start out strong, feeling like a playable Hollywood movie, but then begin to fall apart as they go on, revealing a hollow core to their slick veneer and emotional moments.
They’re also reflective of a deeper problem, because Beyond: Two Souls still has its female main character almost get sexually assaulted and Detroit: Become Human is so tone-deaf about the social issues it attempts to evoke that it almost feels like a parody of 2010s global social movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and Free Palestine.
So it should come as no surprise that just a few months before Detroit: Become Human came out, French news outlets began reporting about the toxic workplace culture at Quantic Dream, and it was pretty shocking for the time, depicting the studio as a toxic place full of bros making tasteless, offensive jokes about topics like racism, sexism homophobia, pornography and Nazis, silencing whistleblowers complaining about harassment and forcing workers into contracts that violated French labor laws and made it difficult for them to fight back against a hostile workplace culture or reciprocity from management.
As a result, I really don’t feel much of a need to talk about these latter Quantic Dream games in this episode, as they’re neither as influential as the earlier ones on the modern adventure game genre nor games that I feel are worth our time and attention. I’ll give them some credit - they’re both pretty graphically and have some big-name Hollywood stars and some big ideas that result in interesting, very emotional storytelling. Many people like them, and they really do seem, at least on the surface, like they ought to be a big deal, though they’re just as superficial and flawed as Quantic Dreams’s other titles in the end.
Play them if you’re curious, by all means. But I’d far rather focus our attention on other games and studios.
OK, so before I begin talking about the next several games, I want to mention that there’s sort of this built-in bias online that games from Europe, particularly German and Eastern Europe, are lesser than any of the big American-made games in the 1990s by the likes of LucasArts and Sierra On-Line, and the result is you’ll often see these early 21st century adventure games get rated down and critiqued in ways that are just unfair. If we can celebrate really flawed American titles like Phantasmagoria and Return to Zork as adventure games, we can definitely celebrate some of the ones I’m about to mention. And in fact, I challenge you to try any of these for yourself before you decide they’re not your thing – most of them are very inexpensive, often on sale and definitely have a fanbase in the parts of Europe they hail from.
In 2005, a German company called Deck13 Interactive created a point and click adventure game called Ankh, a not-at-all faithful remake of an obscure 1998 game by Artex Software called Ankh: The Tales of Mystery, one of the last commercial games created for the Acorn Archimedes 32-bit computer. The 1998 version is pretty interesting in that it featured 3D-style cartoonish sprites on top of pre-rendered scenery, but it really didn’t find much of a fanbase outside of Germany, and I’ve honestly only seen the first few minutes of it. But I have tried Deck13’s remake, which allowed the game to reach a broader audience not just on Windows and the Mac, but also eventually on the Nintendo DS in Germany. Telltale Games apparently even played some role in advising Deck13 on development.
It’s very much in the realm of comedy and fantasy, similar to the way the Monkey Island games take some serious liberties with the golden age of piracy.
Ankh’s main appeal in 2005 was its use of the OGRE engine, a then-new open source 3D engine which allowed the development team to depict its cartoony graphics really well and still managed to work with a point and click interface without being too awkward or clunky. Many lower-budget and independent adventure games have used it since, especially in Europe.
The premise of Ankh is that you’re Assil, a young guy who got cursed by a mummy during a particularly wild party in a pyramid… but who also picked up a magical ankh in the process. He and his Arabian ally Thara have 24 hours to work together to remove his curse, which of course they do. It’s a pretty silly game overall with dance numbers and goofy characters, and not too bad if you enjoy the Egyptian theming.
Two more sequels followed. The first is 2006’s Ankh: Heart of Osiris, in which Assil loses his magical ankh necklace as well as Thara after she finds a love letter from another woman – the Pharaoh’s daughter - and has to get both the ankh and Thara back before Osiris curses Egypt, a quest which also draws in the Pharaoh this time around.
2007’s Ankh: Battle of the Gods moves the story forward a bit to a point where Assil and Thara are living together, but this time, you’re battling Seth, who is trying to underhandedly win the Battle of the Gods and thus undermine the power of all the other gods of Egypt … or anywhere else, because one of the game’s big twists is in getting to meet gods from other pantheons before they, too, lose their believers to Seth.
While the prospect of playing the entire Ankh trilogy might sound like a lot, the games are pretty short, they’re funny and they hold up well. You could probably blow through all three in a weekend with a walkthrough. There’s even a remastered version of the original.
In 2008, a French company called Wizarbox also used the OGRE engine to release a Europe-only 3D point and click adventure game called So Blonde, which was written by former Revolution Software artist and producer Steve Ince, who’d worked on Beneath a Steel Sky and several of the Broken Sword games. The premise of So Blonde is much less serious than the globe-trotting adventures of George and Nico, featuring a spoiled 17-year-old fashionista named Sunny Blonde who gets knocked overboard while she’s on a cruise and winds up on a mysterious pirate island and discovers that everyone who lives there is cursed. And I know, I know, I just railed against sexist games that traffic in tropes, but So Blonde actually takes this premise and does some clever things with it. It’s not a particularly great adventure game, but it did receive a 2010 Europe-only remake for the Wii and Nintendo DS called So Blonde: Back to the Island and 2012 sequel for just Europe and Australia called Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle.
The success of So Blonde also helped Wizarbox score a bigger coup – getting Jane Jensen to create a brand new 2011 point and click 3D adventure game for the PC and Xbox 360 called Gray Matter that actually did make it to North America, though only on Windows. And while Gabriel Knight fans who weren’t aware of Gray Matter may already be rushing to locate a copy so they can play it – and you can find it on Steam for 10 bucks - let me offer a couple of words of caution. First, it’s kind of short and easy for an adventure game, maybe 7-8 hours long with lots of talking and cutscenes to pad out the runtime. Second, it’s certainly not as well-built as any of the Gabriel Knight games, and it’s a bit weaker in concept and execution, though it does have some magic of its own where the graphics and music are concerned. It’s still quite an underrated game that deserves more attention, so let’s talk about it!
The basic idea of Gray Matter is that you play as Samantha Everett, a hot goth girl who’s a wannabe magician and natural con artist, and Dr. David Styles, a Phantom of the Opera-ish reclusive neurobiologist who’s a tortured genius and also disfigured enough to need to wear a partial mask. He’s also a professor at Oxford, and Sam tricks her way into being his assistant. One of the most famous aspects of the game is the need for Sam to perform magic tricks to distract people or to recruit volunteers for David’s research project, and the system for doing the tricks requires understanding the sequence of motions and items required. The game begins alternating between Sam and David around the third chapter, and this allows some needed tonal shifts between Sam’s almost annoying pluck and David’s off-putting world-weary crankiness. Neither character is helped by the voice acting, which is OK, but certainly not great.
Like any Jane Jensen game, the real appeal is the writing, and Gray Matter does have a neat storyline that juxtaposes the grounded worlds of science and performance magic with the paranormal mysteries of the occult, ghosts, real magic and psychic phenomena. A major part of the game involves Sam attempting to join the magical society known as the Daedalus Club, which leads to some of the most fun moments, and there’s also a neat magic shop called The Black Wand owned by a creepy but harmless magician named Mephistopeles.
Probably the worst thing about Gray Matter is that it’s a one and done. Jane Jensen attempted to follow it up with a crowdfunded game in 2014 called Moebius: Empire Rising, but it is, and I’m saying this as a backer of the project, a really lousy adventure game where pretty much the only redeemable aspect is the story, which still feels half-baked and more like an imitation of Jane Jensen’s style than a game she directed and wrote. It was also, unfortunately, her last adventure game to date.
Let’s move on to another series that’s known for its gothic style, and that’s The Black Mirror, which came out in 2003 from the Czech developer and publisher Future Games. This studio would also become known for the 2005 point and click adventure game NiBiRu: Age of Secrets, a remake of a 1998 Czech game called Posel Bohů, or Messenger of the Gods, which is sort of an Indiana Jones-style game set in the modern day where an archaeologist has to uncover clues leading to a secret planet in our solar system that both the Mayans and the Nazis were once aware of. It’s a decent game, though a little dull, and the chief complaints about it in the 2000s were its dark color palette and tedious puzzles.
The Black Mirror is quite similar to NiBiRu in that it’s very dark, has some lousy puzzles and was way more popular in Eastern Europe than it was in the United States. I won’t champion it as an essential adventure game, but I will say that it has enough of a fanbase that it received two sequels from the German studio Cranberry Production, a 2017 3D reboot by KING Art featuring a different storyline, and even has a prequel called Messenger of Death: Blood Bond on the way in 2027 led by the The Black Mirror’s creator Zdeněk Houb.
The original game takes place in 1981 and involves a man named Samuel Gorrdon who returns to his family’s manor, the Black Mirror in Suffolk, England, and begins investigating the death of his grandfather. It turns out Samuel’s ancestors brought a curse on the family by opening up a portal to an evil realm back in the 13th century, and Samuel discovers his grandfather’s dying wish was to locate the five secret keys needed to close the portal and end the curse.
This is all pretty standard stuff, but what makes The Black Mirror a little more distinctive is that wherever Samuel goes, killings tend to follow. This is definitely connected to the family curse, but the how and why is a nice surprise which serves as the definitive twist ending for the game as Samuel seemingly puts a stop to it for good.
That’s why it’s a little surprising that the sequels, 2009’s Black Mirror II: Reigning Evil and 2011’s Black Mirror III: Final Fear pick up the story 12 years later in Maine with all new characters. These two games split a broader story about a physics student named Darren Michael who gets tied up with an English girl named Angelina who’s eventually accused of murdering Darren’s awful boss. The game makes it seem like Angelina is being framed, but if you keep on playing, you’ll discover she is definitely not the innocent patsy she pretends to be.
What’s amazing about Black Mirror II and III is that they actually improve upon the original game without undermining its importance to the series. They’re good-looking point and click adventures with decent production values and some stronger puzzles. The first half of Black Mirror II kind of has a Silent Hill II vibe due to its foggy, dilapidated New England setting and Darren’s lack of awareness about what he’s being pulled into. The second half of the game introduces some interesting twists as Darren discovers how he’s connected to the Gordon family. And this story ends on a cliffhanger and continues right on into the third game with clearer eyes about where the broader plot’s leading and what the stakes really are as the evil Gordon family curse turns out to still have a foothold in our world.
As I mentioned, the German game developer KING Art produced a modern 3D Black Mirror reboot, but they are far better known for a 2009 point and click OGRE engine adventure game called The Book of Unwritten Tales, often regarded as one of the best European adventure games of the 21st century. It’s a fantasy-based 3D point and click adventure game with great production values for its time and a strong parodic style that lampoons a lot of different things – Indiana Jones, The Lord of the Rings, the Chronicles of Narnia, Discworld and many other pop culture and fantasy properties. The game’s plot is kicked off with a mishmash of ideas as the evil agents of a tentacled witch they call Mother kidnap a Yoda-like gremlin archaeologist named Mortimer MacGuffin who’s the key to stopping a war going on in the background as well as the dispenser of a magic ring, and that should tell you everything you need to know about how seriously this game takes itself.
The game is built around four characters – Wilbur Weathervane, the gnome with the heart of a hero, Ivo , the plucky Wood Elf princess with a bird companion, Captain Nate, the abrasive human sky pirate adventurer and Critter the what the heck is it creature that sort of looks like the Mahna-Mahna Muppet and speaks just about as intelligibly. Though the game is built in a 3D engine, the art design is gorgeous and it almost looks hand-painted if you just look at screenshots. The gameplay is also similar to many more modern adventures like the Telltale Games titles where the narrative and dialogue take precedence over some fairly light and easy puzzles. And this game delivers a surprisingly lengthy adventure – easily 12-15 hours your first time through and maybe even a little longer if you savor the experience.
The series also has two more games – the excellent but shorter 2011 prequel The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles, which tells the story of how Captain Nate Bonnet and Critter first met and even lets you see where Critter came from, and then the 2015 sequel The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, which is definitely a good time and even a little longer than the original, as well as significantly prettier.
If you’ve missed this series, you really should play it. It’s fun, it’s laugh out loud funny and it’s deserving of its reputation as one of the best adventure game series of the last couple of decades. Given that you can often find the entire series on sale for around $10-15, it’s worth buying and playing.
Another great trilogy I want to mention comes from the Spanish developer Pendulo Studios and it begins with the 2001 adventure game Runaway: A Road Adventure, a cartoony point and click adventure game that has a fusion of 2D backgrounds and objects and cel-shaded 3D graphics and which is often compared to the first Broken Sword game because of its smooth animated style and pairing of a blond-haired male and a dark-haired female who become embroiled in a conspiracy. Only this time, the girl’s named Gina and is being chased by the Mafia, you’re a grad student named Brian who’s got a road trip to make between New York and California, and there are also subplots involving alien abductions, some stranded drag queens, Hopi Indians, a severed finger, a weird crucifix and even the Mayans for some reason.
And seriously, what was going on in Europe in the early 2000s to make everyone so obsessed with the Mayans? The whole Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world thing wasn’t really big news until 2012 when it was supposed to happen, and people were still buzzing about Nostradamus’s predictions in the early 2000s, not the Mayans. But I digress.
Runaway is a hidden gem of an adventure game I definitely recommend. Brian and Gina are great characters, and Gina is sort of a damsel in distress, femme fatale and two-faced criminal all rolled into one. Suffice it to say that Brian’s one of those people who’s book-smart, but not particularly street smart, and Gina is such an attractive and charismatic girl that he falls for her every time and even falls for the old sunk cost fallacy when he realizes for the umpteenth time he can’t trust her, but has put his time in.
The sequels are also worth checking out. The 2006 follow-up Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle makes it look like Brian and his now-girlfriend Gina are going to spend some quality time together at a tropical island resort. No such luck – they get separated during a plane crash and Brian winds up on a globe-trotting adventure having a bunch of wacky encounters as he attempts to find Gina again. And in the third game, 2009’s Runaway: A Twist of Fate, you’re led to believe Brian is dead after the events of the second game landed him on trial and being held in a prison psych ward. The game even opens with his funeral and Gina standing over his grave! But, hardly a surprise here, it’s all an elaborate ruse Brian planned to get himself out of trouble.
And to be fair, I don’t think anyone would put it past the very duplicitous Gina to pull a fast one and let Brian pay for her crimes, but she’s grown a bit by the third game, and that’s good, because she’s the character you play as this time in a few chapters. And the third game has it all – Martian MacGuffins, a goofy mime, the Yakuza, hypnosis, a golden chicken, an eccentric screenwriter who’s working on screenplay of all your adventures, and so much more! The game also wraps up the entire trilogy storyline perfectly. There’s even a fun meta-joke end-credits sequence along with a stinger to explain that last hanging thread.
Don’t run away from this series; it’s really good stuff!
In the mid-2000s, the German game development scene was starting to flourish, and it’s worth remembering that up until the 1990s, Germany was separated into two countries – East Germany and West Germany – and both had a parallel growth in how they approached computing in the 1980s. West Germany had free-er access to a lot of the hardware standards and software coming out of France, Spain, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom while East Germany, which was facing the same electronic embargoes for Western technology that many of the Eastern Bloc countries were under, became a major producer of microchips for the Eastern Bloc during the last decade of the Cold War. This is important to understand because the reality was that German software developers on both sides of the Berlin Wall had to learn how to program for a variety of chipsets of varying degrees of quality.
As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and German Reunification began, a German software scene began to flourish, and like the software scenes in other developing nations like the Czech Republic, Poland, South Korea and China, much of the initial effort went into cloning or porting popular titles from the US, UK and especially Japan. One of the earlier developers to rise to prominence in the 1980s was Rainbow Arts, from which another developer called Factor 5 broke off following the success of the Turrican games – and many gamers would come to know them in the 1990s and early 2000s for the technically impressive Star Wars: Rogue Squadron games. Crytek, the original development studio behind Far Cry and Crysis, came out of Germany. So did Blue Byte, the makers of The Settlers games.
And so did Daedalic Entertainment, a studio founded in 2007 to both make and publish games, and they’re probably one of the best-known European adventure game studios today thanks to games like State of Mind, Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav, The Night of the Rabbit, A New Beginning, Anna’s Quest, The Whispered World and its sequel Silence, the Edna & Harvey games and, of course, the Deponia games.
I want to say right off the bat I am not going to cover all of Daedalic’s adventure games, though you certainly should give them a try. Currently on Steam, you can get a huge bundle of them for $5, and that’s a pretty normal price. Pick it up; you won’t be disappointed!
But let’s begin with Daedalic’s first adventure series which started with 2008’s Edna & Harvey: The Breakout, which is a crudely-drawn animated adventure that looks like it might have debuted on a website like Newgrounds originally due to its odd geometric angles that lack any semblance of perspective and Microsoft Paint aesthetic. It actually began life as a student project by creator Jan Müller-Michaelis and was built in a custom-made engine coded with Java. By today’s standards, we’d definitely call it an indie game, and it has the charm of a game made by someone who was clearly inspired by the adventure games of the 1990s but who also didn’t have the skill or resources to make something quite as slick and polished. Even the 2019 Anniversary Edition remake preserves the simple style by upgrading the art to look a little more polished, but really just smoothing over rushed edges, and that’s great, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with this adventure.
The premise of the game is that Edna is a young, dark-haired emo girl who’s trapped in an insane asylum along with her stuffed blue rabbit, Harvey, who occasionally becomes real and talks to her. From time to time, you see scenes outside the asylum and get a sense that Edna may be mentally ill, but she may have been framed and that Harvey’s her psyche’s connection to the real world. It’s also not unreasonable to wonder if she’s an unreliable narrator and exactly as dangerous as her circumstances suggest. It’s like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets Calvin & Hobbes, and it’s distinctive for its memorable cast of oddball characters, tenuous grasp on reality and the fact that Edna’s angelic hospital gown doesn’t fully close on the back and you wind up seeing her pinkish-purplish underwear a lot. There are also two endings, both of which don’t end too well for poor Harvey. I realize this all sounds like a disaster in the making, but somehow, the game pulls it off, and while it wasn’t well-received when it first debuted, it’s something of a cult classic today.
Oddly, the 2011 sequel, Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes, doesn’t star Edna, but instead features a blond-haired girl named Lilli. The narrator in the introduction is definitely messing with you, explaining that due to spyware installed on your computer, it can’t provide the experience it wants to because children clearly use your PC, and thus it’s going to censor the tale. Lilli is described by the game’s introduction as the most virtuous girl in the world, and you quickly realize she’s definitely shy, insecure and unable to speak for herself or make choices of her own. When Edna shows up and starts talking to Lilli, it’s hard to know what the game is doing, especially since Edna is trying to tempt Lilli to abandon her chores and go on a treasure hunt, which results in Edna digging up a bomb thinking it’s pirate treasure and persuading Lilli to keep the secret. Not long after, Edna enlists Lilli’s help in hiding her from a psychological examination being administered by Dr. Marcel, the first game’s villain and someone whom Edna was pretty sure she’d killed in one of the game’s endings. And when he gets his hooks into Lilli with psychotherapy, part of his treatment involves using Harvey to hypnotize her and send her diving into her own mind to literally face her demons.
The subtext of the game is that Lilli is suppressing a dark secret, and to make that point even more obvious, little gnomes will appear at times and start painting sections of the screen pink as students in the school start to go missing. It’s a deeply demented game that has many wonderful humorous moments, but which is also quite disturbing in places. Whether or not Edna is even real or a figment of Lilli’s imagination is an immediately obvious mystery – and I’ll let you play the game and find out! There are even three ways to end the game, and all of them really depend upon the way you see Lilli at the end. But I will say that one of the most remarkable things about this adventure is that even the narrator is found culpable in one of the endings – and maybe the player, too.
I really like the Edna & Harvey games and I wish more people knew about them, because they channel the same sort of strange energy as Tim Scafer’s adventure games, particularly Day of the Tentacle and Psychonauts. But chances are good if you’re going to start with a Daedalic game, you’re going to play one of their major titles, and if you do, I hope it’ll be The Whispered World, a visually splendid point and click adventure game where you play as a melancholy clown named Sadwick.
The first thing you’ll notice in this game is how much the animation looks like a feature film instead of the flat, cartoony quality the Edna & Harvey games utilized. Some serious effort went into creating multi-layered backgrounds that have rich colors and lighting effects. The characters are also amazingly well-animated, and Sadwick in particular moves so fluidly and has such a nice idle animation that he truly looks like he belongs in the game’s world. He’s also accompanied by his pet caterpillar, Spot, who can transform into a fiery slug or a green ball or a flat inchworm-like sheet to help solve puzzles.
The premise of the game is that the fantasy world of Silentia is falling apart, and Sadwick seems to be the only one who can actually see it in the horrible nightmares he’s been having. None of his family believe there’s anything to them. Sadwick travels into the Autumn forest and meets a messenger named Bobby who’s carrying the Whispering Stone, and Sadwick convinces Bobby to give it to him. This leads him to an oracle named Shana who reveals to Sadwick that his dreams are true – his destiny is to destroy the world.
Sadwick convinces himself that a race of demons called the Asgil are actually the ones destroying the world, and he goes on a Chicken Little-like journey to try to convince the other residents of Silentia to take all of this seriously. He believes that if he can revive Silentia’s king and bring balance back the world, he’ll be able to save everyone, but the way the game ends… well, let’s just say Sadwick’s hero’s journey is not at all what it appears to be and that the pessimistic narration with which the game opens will make you think very differently once you see the ending!
If I do have a critique of The Whispered World, it’s that the voice acting can be a bit grating. Many of the characters have cartoonish voices that aren’t well-suited to delivering a lot of dialogue, and Sadwick in particular wears thin on me after several hours. The writing is acerbic at times and a lot of the characters in the world of Silentia are sad and self-interested, laughing at Sadwick because they find him pathetic and not because he’s good at his job as a clown. It all makes sense when you see where everything’s going, but until you get to the end, you just have to proceed knowing the game’s tone has a purpose, from the golden decaying fall-like colors of the landscapes to the contemplative music to the obvious irritation of the game’s characters to Sadwick’s hopeless quest itself.
There is a 2016 sequel to this game called Silence with the on-the-cover subtitle of The Whispered World II, and it’s a very different game, though it’s by the same creator, Marco Hullen. It involves two siblings named Noah and Renie who are forced into a bunker as a war rages outside and bombs are falling. The bunker turns out to be the gateway to a fantasy world, and this time, the fantasy world is called Silence, though it’s clearly the same place we saw in The Whispered World and even has Spot the caterpillar, who becomes an ally. While it may not look like it’s connected to the original game at first and may even seem like a tone-deaf Chronicles of Narnia-esque way to return to Sadwick’s world even though that shouldn’t be possible given what happened at the end of the original, the story does eventually explain itself and totally pays off.
Once again, this is an absolutely gorgeous and melancholy adventure game, this time with characters rendered in 3D amidst incredible hand-drawn backgrounds, and I’d describe the overall aesthetic as being very similar to the look of the gorgeous 3D action game Kena: Bridge of Spirits. It honestly has the quality of a feature film when you see it in motion. The storyline introduces some new friends such as the wise adventurer Samuel and the rebel warrior Kyra, who is not only an important character but also a considerable reason for much of the danger Noah and Renie find themselves in. The voice acting’s also a lot better this time around and suits the characters and the surprisingly dark tone.
And I do mean dark, because if this game reminds me of anything, it’s the German author Micheal Ende’s novel The Neverending Story where the Nothing is consuming everything in sight. In this game, it’s shadowy obsidian-black masked creatures resembling a cross between dogs and beetles called the Seekers, and they can be terrifying when they show up unexpectedly and change the course of the story… or when they take down a character and turn him or her into one of them. Like The Neverending Story, the incredible sadness that pervades what’s happening in the background has a purpose in the tale the game is telling, but I’m going to warn you – while that book has a happy ending, both endings in Silence have a bitter bite to them.
Even so, I hope you’ll play Silence. It’s criminally underappreciated.
Let’s move on to happier games, and Daedalic definitely made a few of those with its series, Deponia, which started out in early 2012 with the point and click adventure game of the same name. This time, Daedalic went for something that’s sort of like tossing The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, Day of the Tentacle, The Book of Unwritten Tales and The Curse of Monkey Island into a blender and then adding in a theme song similar to the “Ballad of Freddy Pharkas” to top it off.
The result is a deeply sarcastic adventure starring a really reckless guy named Rufus who dreams of getting off the landfill of a planet called Deponia and living in the flying city of Elysium high above. Every time he tries to get up there, he fails badly, but as the adventure begins, his latest escape attempt results in a mistake where he accidentally knocks a red-haired Elysian girl named Goal into a garbage hatch aboard a cruise ship and the fall breaks her cybernetic brain. He’s offered a big reward to get her back to her fiancé, but there are three problems – she’s in an intermittent coma, she’s being hunted by cyborg soldiers from a group called the Organon who want some codes in her brain implant, and Rufus has become infatuated with her.
What follows is a largely silly adventure that uncovers a sinister plot to destroy the trash heap below and introduces Rufus to Cletus, Goal’s evil Elysian fiancé who happens to look just like him and who doesn’t know – and honestly, also doesn’t care – that Deponia is even inhabited. You have to love the subext there that the citizens living in a trash heap matter so little to the privileged people above that they don’t even think of them as living people. And Rufus saves Deponia in a pretty ingenious way by sending Goal back to Elysium with a backup brain implant that will cause her to use her station there to advocate for the people below.
In the second game, released the same year, the story continues and it turns out Cletus and Goal never made it back to Elysium and that Goal’s seemingly split personality in the first game is a result of her brain implant splitting into two personas. After another series of accidents, Goal’s brain breaks and splinters her into three pieces. Rufus has to restore her true personality and also once again save Deponia from the Organon, and, as it turns out, Elysium too this time. This game is not only twice as long as the original, but also way wilder, allowing for some really crazy situations to unfold and a lot of comedy to play out, including a whole sequence about platypus poetry. Whatever potential the original game failed to live up to, Chaos on Deponia fully realizes.
The third game, released in 2013, finishes off the story and includes a section where Rufus carelessly splits himself into three pieces under the assumption he’ll be three times as effective. There’s really no need for me to recommend it – if you play the first two, you’ll want to see how the story ends. What I will say is that it’s every bit as good as the others, has a fantastic scene where you have to deliver a ridiculous fascist-style speech to an enormous assembly of the Organon, and the intentionally ambiguous ending results in stopping the bad guys for good… though there is a cost, and that gets explored in depth in the fourth game, which is sort of a series epilogue released in 2016 called Deponia Doomsday. And we may get some further resolution in this year’s Surviving Deponia, which is not a point and click adventure, but a survival RPG.
One more Daedalic game I want to mention is Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, based on the 1989 novel and set in the 12th century in and around a fictional English town called Kingsbridge and a neighboring town called Shiring. It’s a really amazing adventure game with a distinctive animated style that aims for realism rather than the cartoonishness of the Deponia games and which has a dark, gothic feel that suits its dark themes and more serious story. That’s not to say that there aren’t fun moments or jokes, because there are, but this is a game about a troubled and dangerous period that includes a major civil war breaking out. The game was released in three chapters, or books, between 2017 and 2018, though any version you’d play today is going to be the entire story, which encompasses several decades.
One of the criticisms of this video game adaptation of The Pillars of the Earth is that it’s slow-paced and has a lot of dialogue, but I’d argue that’s actually what makes it special. The game’s fairly faithful to the novel and makes good use of its complex, nuanced characters to explore the historical period less through the actions that you take than the dialogue choices you select. The use of light and darkness creates some really powerful visual cues about where the story’s going, and it’s really neat to be able to travel around 12th century England and France and visit actual historical locations.
As such, it feels a lot more like the Telltale Games adventures than the traditional point and click titles Daedalic is better known for, but as a piece of interactive fiction, it’s really remarkable and probably one of the best video game adaptations of a novel I’ve ever come across.
As for Daedalic’s other adventures, which include State of Mind, The Night of the Rabbit, A New Beginning, Anna’s Quest and The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav and its sequel, Memoria, I encourage you to check them out for yourself!
Now that we’ve covered adventure gaming’s so-called stagnant years, I want to close by briefly talking about another group of adventure games that didn’t get much respect despite often being quite good – licensed games based on television shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigators, The X-Files, Law & Order, Murder, She Wrote and House, M.D. or on intellectual properties geared towards girls like Nancy Drew and yes, even Barbie.
The earliest of these worth mentioning is the 1998 first person FMV adventure The X-Files Game by Hypberole Studios and Fox Interactive. In the absence of FBI Special Agents Mulder and Scully, you play as Agent Craig Willmore and have to find them in a Myst-like fashion as you explore in and around Seattle. You do get to see them, of course, and Assistant Director Walter Skinner and The Lone Gunmen are also in the game, which helps to add to the authenticity of the storyline. It’s supposed to be set sometime within the third season’s arc and was actually developed by several of the show’s writers.
The Windows version of this game was an absolute beast, with 7 CD-ROM discs and multiple storyline paths including a horror-themed Paranoia track, a more empathetic Loss track and “The X-Track” where more of the show’s broader conspiracy themes tie into the game’s story. Despite some low review scores, the game found its fans and sold well and is today considered one of the better TV licensed FMV adventure games of the 1990s. The PlayStation port, which came out a year later, was only on 4 CDs, but failed to impress console gamers quite the same way.
Adapting television and movie properties was big business in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Radical Entertainment was one of the developers who was especially good at winning bids to do it. In the early 2000s, they opened up a subdivision called 369 Interactive to develop a line of adventure games that would be published by Ubisoft based around the CBS show C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation, and though the first game didn’t please critics any more than The X-Files Game did, fans of the show loved it, and it wound up selling quite well as a budgetware title. The game involves playing through 5 cases with members of the team rendered in 3D and voiced by their onscreen actors, and much of the game involves searching for clues, using crime lab forensic tools and connecting the dots well enough for the show’s characters to take over.
The success of this game led to a 2004 sequel based on the spin-off show CSI: Miami and also a return to Las Vegas’s original cast with CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Dark Motives. But in 2006, development shifted over to Telltale Games with the 3D engine-powered CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - 3 Dimensions of Murder. Telltale would also go on to create 2009’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Deadly Intent and 2010’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Fatal Conspiracy. None of these games is particularly great, but they’re all solid and enjoyable if you’re a fan of the show or just enjoy completing repetitive detective work with the game holding your hand.
Another developer who took a crack at CSI was Legacy Interactive, who developed 2008’s CSI: NY - The Game, definitely an uninspired and fairly unchallenging adaptation of the least popular CSI show. But Legacy Interactive was another one of those developers and publishers that was really good at landing licensed games and creating original casual titles and series like Emergency Room, Code Blue, Vet Emergency, 911 Paramedic and D.A: Pursuit of Justice. What they became better-known for were a series of games running from 2002-2005 based on the long-running TV show Law & Order and then, in 2009, a hidden object game based on Murder, She Wrote with a sequel coming out in 2013.
The Law & Order games are quite similar to Capcom’s Phoenix Wright games, breaking cases down into an investigation phase and a trial. The goal is to do the best job you can investigating cases so you have a better chance of winning the trial using the evidence you’ve procured. All of Legacy Interactive’s Law & Order games were released as budgetware, but they had decent production values and felt quite authentic to the show. I like them better than the CSI games because they add a bit more variety to the gameplay with the trials and offer far more interesting investigations. They look a bit dated by today’s standards, but they’re decent to play all the same.
Capcom also took a stab at adapting a TV show in a manner similar to Phoenix Wright’s structure, and that was with 2008’s Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, an adventure game developed by High Voltage Software. If you’re a fan of the Adult Swim cartoon show, this game is more or less a pitch perfect adaptation, using the same cheap-o style of animation, goofy characters and random referential style of humor. Capcom even let them throw in some Street Fighter II character cameos that show up when you make certain ill-advised choices or poke around in your evidence-gathering.
Moving over from television shows to more general licensed properties, I’d also like to mention Gorilla Systems Corporation and Runecraft, makers of the Mattel Interactive Detective Barbie adventure games, which were released from 1998-2000. I wasn’t even aware of these myself, but my friend and colleague Holly, who handles production on my day job’s marketing podcast, told me that these were some of her favorite games growing up, and as she described them, I realized that they, too, are point and click adventure games with investigation elements. They’re certainly easy and intended for children, but they’re well made, with the first two using pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds to approximate the look of the toys and the third even getting some 3D characters atop pre-rendered backgrounds in a game released solely for the PlayStation.
If you’re going to play any of these, Detective Barbie 2: The Vacation Mystery is probably the most fun since it has a more interesting story than the original game and also some engaging minigames. Even though Barbie had a reputation for being an airhead in the 1990s, these games definitely leaned into her being smart and capable, and I’m glad these games existed and offered young girls a chance to have adventure games that weren’t patronizing the way the toy aisle itself all too often could be.
Another developer called HeR Interactive took the idea of games for girls even further in the years that followed, releasing dozens of quality mystery adventure games based on Nancy Drew over the last two and a half decades, starting with Secrets Can Kill in 1998 and most recently releasing Mystery of the Seven Keys in 2024. The original game had Nancy Drew navigate realistic pre-rendered environments populated with cartoon characters, but the games that followed included 3D models with limited animations and a more plastic uncanny valley appearance. The first-person sensibilities and dialogue trees of the earlier games honestly feel more like Japanese visual novel-style detective stories than other Myst-style games, and when the series finally started incorporating actual 3D environments in its 2019 release Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem, the gameplay was also updated to be a little more like contemporary 3D adventure games with scripted sequences and more sophisticated events. That might be because it was by a different developer - the most recent game, 2024’s Nancy Drew: Mystery of the Seven Keys, actually took a step backwards into the older style.
One thing I will say for HeR Interactive is that they’ve always made these games for a female target audience and have focused on telling compelling stories and offering interesting but largely non-violent experiences that anyone can enjoy. And despite their focus on female gamers, HeR Interactive did try to get The Hardy Boys going, too, in 2009, but Frank and Joe Hardy only got one game from them, a Nintendo DS title called Treasure on the Tracks, and two other PC and Wii games released around the same time by other developers and published by JoWooD, none of which I’d recommend.
With all of that out of the way, there are two studios I haven’t brought up in detail yet despite the fact that both of them were based in North America and were making adventure games in the aughties. One of them is Double Fine Productions, which released the action adventure platformer Psychonauts in 2005. They’d go on to launch a Kickstarter in 2012 for the “Double Fine Adventure” and not only break records on that platform, but also bring back a significant amount of attention and enthusiasm for point and click adventure games in the process.
The other is Telltale Games, which launched Bone: Out from Boneville in 2005, and then Bone: The Great Cow Race and Sam & Max: Season One in 2006. By the end of the decade, Telltale had also released Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, Tales of Monkey Island, Wallace & Grommit’s Grand Adventures and a second season of Sam & Max, and they were still just getting started – The Walking Dead, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, Game of Thrones, Tales from the Borderlands, The Wolf Among Us, Minecraft: Story Mode, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, a third season of Sam & Max and two seasons of Batman: The Telltale Series were all still yet to come!
We’re going to cover both of those studios in our next two episodes along with some other indie studios like the Brothers Chaps and Videlectrix, Amanita Designs, Frictional Games, Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games, Yahtzee Croshaw’s Fully Ramblomatic Games, Crystal Shard, AGD Interactive, Clifftop Games and Grundislav Games, as well as a few more!
And when that’s all said and done, we’ll close things out with some perspective on why adventure games are still relevant today and why they’ve seen such a resurgence over the last decade.
But if you’re sick of adventure gaming, we’re not too far away now from starting our next series on another major genre in video game history – the platform game! And you can bet we’ll go every bit as deep into exploring the many interesting and underrated platformers you’ve probably never thought about between all the major ones you’ve played.
If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.
And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!
I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!
THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRY
Before I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.
This week, I’m recommending Death of the Reprobate, a 2024 point and click adventure by Joe Richardson which is actually the last part of a trilogy of games sometimes described as Rabelaisian and other times described as Pythonesque because of their resemblance to Terry Gilliam’s classic art cutout cartoons on Monty Python’s Flying Circus and in their various movies. So if Death of the Reprobate sounds good to you, you need to check out the other two games, 2017’s Four Last Things and 2020’s The Procession to Calvary, as well.
The premise of this game is that you’re the elderly son of a character named Immortal John, the hero of Four Last Things. Your character is constructed from various pieces of classical artwork, and every character you’ll meet either comes from a painting or is constructed from pieces of various paintings from different eras. As you walk around the game’s dozen or so screens, all of which are also assembled from classic paintings, you’ll also encounter musicians who are playing various pieces of classical music, a character who appears to be Jesus Christ literally telling you who you need to go talk to by holding signs over their heads, and many different birds you’ll eventually have to identify to solve one of the game’s puzzles.
The hardest puzzle in the game involves some math, but it’s not too difficult once you work out what’s being asked of you. It took me a few minutes of frustration to realize two characters in that scene are holding up fingers to contribute numbers to the equation, so that hopefully helps you somewhat! But most of the other puzzles are simple, and there’s even a built-in answer system a sagely character provides if you really get stuck.
This game’s not for kids; as God Himself decides to unleash some plagues on the world towards the end, most screens basically turn into a “last day on Earth” orgy with lots of nudes cavorting around, and there’s quite a bit of scatological humor and some occasional profanity. But since the game isn’t voiced and, hey, it’s all classy artwork from hundreds of years ago, you can still enjoy this game – and the two that came before it! – for its own artistic merits. At least, that’s what I told my wife when she saw my son watching me play it.
For the meager $13 asking price, Death of the Reprobate is a good way to kill a couple of hours, but you can probably get the entire series in a bundle for the same price if you check IsThereAnyDeal.com or wait for a sale.
As Our Series Continues…
We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!
We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com