In this episode, we’re going to wind down our discussion of adventure games and talk about where things go from here!

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Season 1, Episode 17: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 15

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EPISODE 17

Coming up in this episode –

We’re going to wind down our talk about adventure gaming and discuss where it can go from here and why it’s so important for game developers to continue preserving the legacy of one of gaming’s greatest genres.

I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for our final survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed!

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about adventure games since The Great Game Guide launched at the beginning of this year, and I could definitely keep going for another dozen episodes about all the nooks and crannies of the genre that we’ve missed. But rather than try to be comprehensive, I want to talk about a few more hard-to-define games that are definitely worth your time to check out. Even so, I’m going to keep my descriptions short. And as with some of our previous episodes, I’m also making a list of all the games we won’t get to, which is available in the show notes and the script for this episode at greatestgames.substack.com. Check it out!

One that definitely is worthy of starting with is Innersloth’s Henry Stickmin, which began as a series of flash games on Newgrounds but which provided six different adventures with choose-your-own way branching storytelling, often going in wildly different directions. Instead of presenting puzzles, these games present items or options that allow players to determine how the story will proceed or if it will hilariously result in failure. A series in a similar vein is Sos Sosowski’s McPixel, which has more of an 8-bit aesthetic, but forces you to think quickly in a variety of crises to try to find the correct resolution to a problem.

Dropsy is another pixel art-style point and click adventure that was created by Jay Tholen under the studio name Tendershoot. Dropsy is an extremely interesting game where you play as a grotesque clown who is trying to cheer people up with hugs and assistance. He’d love nothing more than to just make people smile. The game’s notable for having no words, but a lot of heart. There’s a lot of darkness in the background, but the tone is surprisingly positive, and I cannot recommend this game strongly enough.

Similarly, Tendershoot’s later game Hypnospace Outlaw is a love letter to the old Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod home pages of the 1990s, and its adventure involves getting to know its cast of characters through their published online personas. I’ve recommended it before, and I hope you try it out as well!

Speaking of the pixel art aesthetic, Ron Gilbert’s Thimbleweed Park, published through his studio Terrible Toybox, is a really great point and click adventure in the style of Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, but with more of an X-Files sort of storyline and a Twin Peaks style of messing with the audience with a really meta undercurrent. There’s also a spin-off freeware game called Delores that offers a different take on the story, but it’s definitely best to save it as an epilogue.

Ron Gilbert also made a puzzle-platformer and adventure game called The Cave that is sort of like Trine or The Lost Vikings meets Maniac Mansion with a little bit of Legacy of the Wizard tossed in because you have to switch between characters to solve puzzles, but there are seven total characters in this game and multiple paths and endings to explore. It’s a unique game well worth your time.

Dave Lloyd and Powerhoof’s The Drifter is another pixel art-style game you should check out, this time using the story of a murder and a time loop to force you to work through a detailed and interesting conspiracy-filled mystery that really grabs your attention and includes some great characters, puzzles and music. The game also uses an interesting control scheme that allows you to cycle through the hotspots rather than click all over the place. I’m afraid to spoil any more for you; please be sure to try it!

Freebird Games’s To the Moon is another adventure that uses a pixel art aesthetic, but it’s rendered in the overhead style of a classic JRPG built in the RPG Maker game engine. There’s no fighting, you don’t have a party and you don’t pick up loot; you simply explore the life of a research subject through memories to understand why he desperately wants to travel to the moon but is feeling held back from his goal. To say more would be to spoil a great story, and the standalone sequel, Finding Paradise, is also excellent. I also recommend A Bird Story and Imposter Factory if you enjoy these, as they’re also connected in what’s more broadly known as the Sigmund Corp. series.

A similar game in the same style is Laura Shigihara’s Rakuen, which I’ve recommended before along with its spin-off, Mr. Saito, both of which involve a fantasy world that exists parallel to a real world tragedy. And the darker themes of illness and loss are definitely felt in Numinous Games’s autobiographical adventure game That Dragon, Cancer, one of the most emotionally difficult games I’ve ever come across due to its subject matter of losing a young child to cancer.

Those needing a happier game might want to try out Venba, an adventure by Visai Games set in the late 1980s about an Indian family that’s immig rated to Toronto. Venba is the wife in the family and she’s trying to recreate old recipes from her mother’s cookbook, often through trial and error. But the game’s more deeply about family and building connections with those closest to you. I absolutely love how upbeat and fun it is, and the soundtrack’s wonderful!

Consume Me is another game about eating, but this one, by developers Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson along with some other collaborators, is a semi-autobiographical story about being an Asian-American teenager and trying to consume a healthy diet in a world full of junk food, calorie counting and an oppressive weight loss goal. It’s actually about more than that, too – a romantic relationship eventually becomes consuming as well, and there are a lot of fun family dynamics. Don’t miss this one.

Another game about consuming things, but from a different point of view, is VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action from Sukeban Games, and I’m honestly not sure if we should call  it “Valhalla” or just roll with the stylized name. Whatever the case, you play as a bartender named Jill mixing drinks for a lot of different types of people, including some who won’t tell you exactly what they want, requiring you to figure it out for them. The bar’s a bright spot in the midst of a dark and cynical world, and it’s a really interesting experience to play through.

Kentucky Route Zero is a very interesting adventure game from Cardboard Computer that was released in five acts between 2013 and 2020. While playing it during that time was a bit of a tease since the content drip took so long between episodes, the current release has the entire story. The game involves a truck driver named Conway who is traveling along Route 65 in Kentucky, but he finds himself on a strange journey full of magical realism. Part of the game also takes place around Mammoth Cave National Park, which is of course the birthplace of adventure gaming. This game’s won tons of awards and deserves to be played, and there are several free interludes and a TV edition of the game that has everything in one place.

One other developer I really should have talked about in our last episode is Inkle Studios, which started out in the 2010s making mobile games like Sorcery! and 80 Days before moving into larger titles like Heaven’s Vault, which is a 3D adventure game about archaeology, and A Highland Song, which is an adventure platformer about a Scottish teenager running away from home to visit her uncle and which is of course set to music.

Inkle is also known for the games Overboard! and Expelled!, two visual novels done in the style of murder mysteries. In Overboard!, you’re trying to keep people from discovering that your character, the starlet Veronica Villensey, murdered her husband aboard a cruise ship. Before you judge her too harshly, he is a total jerk, but Veronica’s also really bad at covering her tracks, which means the game is more often than not about trial and error.

Expelled! is very much in the same vein, except this time, you’re a student in 1922 at a boarding school called Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Young Girls who’s being framed for murder… well, attempted murder, anyhow. How you respond to those charges is up to you!

Both of these games are hysterical and really great adventure games. Check them out!

One final studio I want to mention is Simogo, the creators of Sayonara Wild Hearts, which is not an adventure game. But some of their other mobile games, like Year Walk, Device 6 and The Sailor’s Dream definitely are, and their more recent game Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a surreal puzzle adventure that is definitely worth playing, both because the puzzles are really good and because the narrative around them is really interesting.

But I have been far from exhaustive here.

A few other recent games worth checking out include the murder mystery The Roottrees Are Dead, the surreal ethnographic game Chants of Sennaar, the cartoonish sci-fi adventure Elroy and the Aliens, the supervillain space tyrant themed Earth Must Die, the supernatural but lighthearted mystery Foolish Mortals, the ghostly possession split identity shenanigans  of Shadows of the Afterland, the EGA graphics-style The Crimson Diamond, the vampire themed Cabernet, the eerie detective story The Séance of Blake Manor, the Renaissance art silliness of the Immortal John Triptych trilogy or the exceptionally weird but wonderful Promise Mascot Agency.

I know I could probably name many more worth your time and worth looking into. And in fact, I have! Check the show notes for a link to the full list of games to try once you’ve played all these, and I’ll also include a few places on the web where you can find more if you’re interested.

After a boom, a bust, revivals on many fronts and a surge in interest in both playing and making adventure games over the last decade, adventure gaming has never been better than it is now! And as AAA gaming collapses under the weight of its own expectations, adventure games will be here for us for years to come, not as the showcase genre it once was, but as one of the time-tested and proven most engaging ways to tell a video game story.

So now that we’ve discussed adventure gaming’s most notable contributions, movements, ideas and executions over the last 50 years, it’s easy to throw our hands up in the air and say, “we’ve talked about this topic enough!”

But before we do that, let’s spend a few minutes reflecting on the journey we’ve taken, from the Colossal Cave Adventure and the halls of MIT all the way past Coarsegold and up into the Sierras and through the Redwood forests where LucasArts resides over to both sides of Europe, where the flames of adventure gaming kept burning brightly until we started to see signal flares go back up in New York City and the Bay Area in California to let us know the commercial side of the genre was alive and well again.

 We’ve seen adventure games based on books, on fairy tales, on serious stories and on cartoon hijinks. We’ve explored mansions, we’ve solved mysteries, we’ve escaped haunted houses and we’ve fixed dystopias. We’ve experienced twists and turns and visited parallel worlds and gone on dates and traveled through time and fought sword masters with our cutting remarks and even explored pocket universes, alternate realities, ruined civilizations and hellish dimensions.

And through it all, we’ve kept our wits about us, solving problems with our minds instead of our fists, interacting with characters we haven’t felt the need to bludgeon or shoot so we can loot their corpses for ammo and restoratives, and giving up those treasured items we’ve picked up off the ground hoping they’d come in handy one day.

There’s no other genre in gaming where we can place ourselves inside a story with no expectation that we’re going to see a lot of action. There’s also no other genre where we progress merely by solving puzzles or talking our way out of trouble rather than just by going in swinging or blasting so we can pick up keys or kill off the requisite number of enemies. Our actions aren’t limited to what a couple of buttons and a d-pad can do, and our ideas aren’t limited to seeing how quickly we can get through a stage or how many bodies we can make pile up while we do it or how much loot and experience we can acquire in to make our stats go up.

And that’s why the adventure gaming genre is so important and also why it will probably never really die – gamers love action, sure, but they also love to experience a good story and some interesting puzzles, and adventure games are always going to be the preferred way to make you think as a gamer because they’re capable of taking that sword or gun out of your hand and insisting you instead solve a problem with an ancient relic that might fit into a groove somewhere or Jesse James’s severed hand or a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle.

But this design philosophy also provides a problem for adventure game designers to have to overcome. In an action game, you can solve must of your problems by pressing a couple of buttons and eliminating any obstacles that get in your way. In an adventure game, your progression can be brought to a halt entirely simply by not knowing what you’re supposed to do next. If the game doesn’t signpost exactly what you need to do, you may get so stuck you’ll consult a walkthrough or just quit playing. In the 80s and 90s, games were scare enough that players would put up with the frustration. In an attention-starved economy where most of us have far more games to play than time to play them, the modern adventure game has a simple job: stay engaging or risk being shelved forever. Or, even worse, getting beaten up in your Steam reviews.

This is one reason why many modern adventure games don’t bother with complicated puzzles. The gamers who really want to be challenged are going to play pure puzzle games anyhow, and they’re a smaller audience than those who want to experience an engaging story.

One solution some designers have pivoted to is making games progress even if puzzles aren’t solved, perhaps simply depriving a gamer of an achievement. Another is including in-game walkthroughs or hint systems. I personally don’t have a problem with any of these approaches, but they do tend to make the puzzles feel less important than they were in 1980s and 90s adventure games because they simply become a roadblock rather than an actual obstacle to progression. It starts to beg the question of why the puzzles even need to be in the games.

This is where we should step back for a moment and think about why adventure games even have puzzles in the first place. The original text-based adventure game, Will Crowther and Don Woods’s Adventure, had puzzles because the game was trying to replicate having a dungeon master style narrator guide you through an exploration where you could maximize your score by picking up all the treasures. Just wandering around and exploring the Colossal Cave system wasn’t that engaging for anyone but an avid spelunker, but fighting monsters, solving puzzles and grabbing loot? That was something anyone could enjoy.

Zork dropped most of the combat but added in a lot more puzzles, and gamers enjoyed the cerebral and social aspects of trying to figure out how to get through the Great Underground Empire and talking to one another about ideas and strategies for progression. Puzzles added a way to make the game engaging without requiring endless combat sequences, and they also required players to explore to find needed items or clues and to experiment to try to figure out their application.

 Opening up a new area to explore, retrieving a treasure or triggering a new narrative sequence in the game was a reward for puzzle-solving, and the game’s method of feedback – a points system – helped you to understand whether or not you were succeeding in moving forward in your exploration and if there were things you’d missed along the way. And the game’s system of pushback was the parser itself telling you that you couldn’t do something you wanted to try.

Adventure games more or less followed this structure throughout the 1980s, and even many of the graphical games included points up until the mid-1990s. And many puzzles required one of four types of logical reasoning:

There’s Deductive, which is where you apply accepted facts or premises to a specific situation to draw an inference using logical reasoning. If we are told all Infocom adventure games involve puzzles and Zork is an Infocom adventure game, we can conclude Zork contains puzzles.

Next, there’s Inductive, which is where you gather clues to identify patterns that lead to a probable solution. If we know that Weird Ed Edison obsessively loves his hamster, that he dresses in military clothing and collects commando equipment and that hamsters will die if you put them in the microwave, we can reasonably infer that Weird Ed will harm us if we microwave his hamster. And boy, does he.

Then there’s Abductive, which is where you have incomplete information and have to fill in the gaps with a likely explanation. When Guybrush Threepwood fights Carla the Sword Master, he has to take all the responses to insults he’s learned and apply them to her insults based on his knowledge of what worked before and what he guesses will work now.

Finally, there’s Analogical, which is where you compare two similar situations and draw conclusions based on what they have in common. In Sam & Max Hit the Road, understanding that a regular flashlight could light up a dark patches in the Tunnel of Love and that Max’s black light bulb can also illuminate things, but differently, can lead to the conclusion to put Max’s bulb in the flashlight so you can see through the darkness.

By the way, a lot of people confuse deductive and inductive logic because of the world’s most famous user of deductive logic: Sherlock Holmes. But just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famed detective never actually said, “Elementary, my dear Watson!,” he also never used pure deductive logic in his problem-solving, even if he said otherwise. Holmes’s detective work is actually inductive, because he gathers clues and builds hypotheses, but then he uses deductive methods to rule out the hypotheses that aren’t consistent with known facts.

So anyhow, these four styles of logical reasoning – deductive, inductive, abductive and analogical – are at the heart of puzzle design because they’re the most common strategies players will utilize to solve a problem. And if a video game puzzle is really well-designed, it should be solvable by logic alone. It may involve some trial and error or understanding of cause and effect, but the game’s puzzle should have some sort of reasonable explanation that allows you to understand, for example, that if you need to get Captain Rottingham out of the barber’s chair, you need to put some lice on a comb so the barber will see them, insist on shaving Rottingham’s head and send the snooty captain on his way.

And an adventure game has a powerful way of providing you with feedback by telling you if a solution is or is not going to work and also by providing you with pushback by refusing to interpret your command.

Where adventure games get themselves in trouble is when they utilize a style of puzzle that relies on outside knowledge not communicated by the game. The common name is a lateral thinking puzzle, and its design requires the solver to make some sort of non-logical leap due to a lack of available information.

One classic example is the story about a man who’s lying dead in a cornfield, but none of the stalks around him have been disturbed. How did he die? The answer, of course, is he was a skydiver whose parachute failed to deploy, but that’s only solvable if the puzzler decided to include the detail that he’s wearing a backpack. Otherwise, the solver has to ask the right questions to elicit that piece of information and then use some wild abductive logic.

A more infamous one involves two men who sit down at a nice restaurant and are served their first course, a bowl of albatross soup. When one of the men tastes the soup, he gets very angry and strangles the other man to death. Why? Unless you know the answer, you’ll never guess the solution, and it takes a lot of question and answer back and forth to get anywhere close to it. You can always look the answer up, but I’ll give you a hint – it involves the two men being previously stranded at sea.

Person to person, these puzzles are solvable because the solver can ask the questioner yes or no questions to open up new information. But in an adventure game, this style of puzzle design only works if you can ask the game questions and receive responses.

And yet there’s a sort of siren’s call to add in these sorts of puzzles because gamers are often far more clever than designers give them credit for and an adventure game that can be solved too easily has a low level of value to most players. And so there are a number of adventure games that have included such terrible, illogical puzzles that they’ve become legendary today.

One of these is found in the original King’s Quest, and I referred to it before when we talked about that game, but just as a refresher, you meet a gnome who challenges you to tell him his name in three guesses. When you realize he has a hut made of straw, you can correctly infer he’s Rumplestiltskin, but if you type that in, the gnome tells you that you’re from a backwards part of the realm. The correct answer would seem to be to type in his name backwards, and the only other clue is a cryptic note found in the witch’s gingerbread house telling you, “Sometimes it is wise to think backwards.”

But then, in the earliest versions of the game, the gnome won’t accept that either. You have to encode his name forwards, but in a backwards alphabet into an unpronounceable string of characters – something like Ifnkovhgroghprm (IF-NIK-OV-HUH-GROG-HUH-PRAM). Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?

Oh, and did I mention that the game is looking for a particular spelling of Rumplestiltskin before you go to all that trouble, and that there were several popular variations at the time?

This puzzle is practically unsolvable without some heavy hints, and even when you do solve it, it’s not satisfying. Even when later versions fixed it so you just could type in his name backwards or use variations of it, the puzzle still wasn’t any fun. That’s the problem with lateral thinking puzzles – they often annoy the solver more than they impress them.

There are also just really badly-designed puzzles in adventure games where the game doesn’t provide you with appropriate feedback on how close you are to solving things. One of those sorts of puzzles I’ll never forget is Sam & Max: Hit the Road’s infamous Gator Golf puzzle. To make a long story short, Max gets trapped on the other side of a driving range in a Florida swamp, and Sam has to figure out how to rescue him. Hitting golf balls in the water will make the gators move, but not predictably, and so you have to use analogical and inductive logic to recognize that hitting fish into the water will cause the gators to move. You thus have to position all five so you can walk across their backs. Great! But the problem is you have to line them up just right down to specific pixels before Sam will cross, and the game doesn’t tell you that. I spent lots of time as a kid trying to figure out why the solution wasn’t working until finally, one day, my brothers and I got it right.

That’s just as bad as the Rumplestilskin puzzle – needlessly aggravating with what seems like a clear solution but no helpful feedback to let the player know that they’re on the right track. If the designers had designed that puzzle to offer more feedback, it would have been much easier. All it would have taken was some encouragement or heckling from Max. But instead, it was a dead end for some players.

Honestly, this is one of the reasons I’m not ashamed to save frequently and use walkthroughs when I play adventure games, and you shouldn’t be either. There are so many great adventure games with a really bad puzzle in them. Gabriel Knight 3 has a nonsensical passport puzzle where you impersonate a man with no moustache by wearing a moustache and then drawing one on his passport photo. Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars has a puzzle where you have to trick a goat into butting you, but then run away so it gets tangled up, a solution that makes no sense, which is out of line with every other puzzle and which the game doesn’t explain. The Longest Journey has an incredibly bizarre puzzle involving a rubber ducky. And Runaway has a puzzle where you need to make peanut butter by putting peanuts and butter together in an army helmet and then set it on a freezer lid that’s in direct sunlight so the peanuts and butter melt together.

Huh?

So, the reason for this digression into adventure game puzzles is because around the time Telltale started moving into movie and television IPs, they also realized that their broadly-targeted episodic games couldn’t be too challenging or people would never want to finish the season. And so they toned down the puzzles and greatly improved the storytelling. It’s rare that you’ll get stuck in any of the Telltale games from The Walking Dead on, and that’s very much to their credit. The puzzles are really just brief activities to break up the monotony of watching the story play out in games that are otherwise not very good at delivering action sequences.

Modern adventure games have largely followed that formula, and it’s rare you play one today that’s really, truly tough by intentional design. Games that want to have tough puzzles just pitch themselves as puzzle games. Those that want to be story-driven adventures tend to stay in that lane.

But here’s the problem with this design dichotomy. Adventure games with easy puzzles have to have incredibly strong narratives to remain interesting, and a lot of them do struggle with staying engaging because they have a lot of downtime where you’re either listening to people blather or walking around trying to figure out what action you need to take next. Modern designs tend to segment adventures into shorter sequences with just a few places to go at a time, but that winds up making the games more linear so they don’t feel like they’re able to offer a lot of options to the player. You get stuck with Telltale’s very annoying system of your character making an offhanded comment and the game offering feedback saying, “this character will remember that,” but then never making anything substantial happen because of it.

This is one reason adventure games have struggled since the mid-1990s to stay relevant. Once their day in the sun was over as a showcase genre for graphics, sound and multimedia, their appeal narrowed to people who enjoy puzzles or people who enjoy stories.

And as for the people who enjoy comedy? Adventure games today tend to be a lot more serious than the ones from the early to mid-1990s or the early Telltale era. Aside from a handful of adventure games that definitely go for comedy first, I can’t really think of a lot of recent adventures that prioritize being funny. And that was honestly one of the most interesting things about classic adventure games at their peak – their goofy puzzle logic and constant pushback was often played for laughs so that the games were focused on being fun rather than being vehicles through which to tell an interactive story.

This brings me to ask – are adventure games capable of growing and evolving into something modern?

Or is the point and click genre going to follow a cicada-like cycle of burrowing underground and then reappearing every decade and a half once people get tired of what these experiences have to offer?

So before I get started on the future of adventure gaming, let’s discuss one elephant in the room, and that’s Dispatch, one of last year’s best-reviewed games and, from all appearances, the modern evolution of the Telltale Games style. And Dispatch is a really good game – great story, fun characters, animation-like presentation that resembles modern comic book-style shows made for adults like Harley Quinn or Creature Commandos or Invincible, excellent voice acting and even an interesting little strategy game mixed in.

But for all the positive things I have to say about Dispatch, one aspect of the game absolutely sucks, and it’s the episodic format. Over four weeks, AdHoc Studio released the game two episodes at a time like a streaming show, with eight episodes total. The goal was to build buzz and get people talking, which may have worked for them – they sold over four million copies and have  merchandise, tabletop games and an animated series on the way – but it also revealed the game’s core weaknesses very early on.

Dispatch is a fun interactive story, but a pretty mediocre game. Its quick time events and hacking minigame are tedious and add the barest level of interactivity to the overall experience. Player choice is also mostly an illusion – the game’s not designed to allow much deviation from the story, and most of the choices just impact specific scenes or dialogue later on, not the overarching plot.

Those weaknesses were obvious in week 1 and continued on through week 4’s final release of episodes 7 and 8. And the story, while good for a video game, didn’t exactly spur water cooler discussions on social media. Most of the excitement was around the game’s presentation. And in fact, almost everything the game was praised for is related to its most superficial elements. It’s the very definition of a showcase title, but it’s also the sort of game people will tire of quickly if a lot more like it start appearing on digital storefronts.

Again, I’m not beating up on Dispatch. You should definitely play it! But a common criticism of the game is that you can also just watch a longplay on YouTube or Twitch and get more or less the same experience, because it’s just one step removed from being an animated series. And that’s not a direction I want to see adventure gaming moving into, because we’ve already seen how this plays out with Telltale Games. And in fact, we almost saw it with Dispatch, because AdHoc Studio nearly went under during its development and was apparently rescued by Critical Role Productions last summer.

And my suspicion is that the time, trouble and expense required to build a new IP is going to lead AdHoc Studio to have to supplement its original games with licensed stuff like its upcoming Critical Role-themed project. A decade from now, they may be the biggest adventure game company in the industry, or they may be following exactly the same path Telltale Games walked from good to great to pretty good to going bust. Only time will tell, and I sincerely wish them great success and hope they’ll be around for awhile.

So, aside from Dispatch, what is the path forward for adventure gaming, especially now that we’re in a time where hundreds of excellent point and click adventures are being released every year and they’re having to compete with 3D adventures, visual novels, dating sims, FMV games, action adventures, puzzle adventures and RPGs for attention?

Truthfully, I’m not sure what the market will support. Life is Strange: Reunion came out in March and it’s either a great game or a disappointment depending upon who you ask. Don’t Nod’s Lost Records: Bloom & Rage and Aphelion don’t seem like strong sellers, and even really well-received games like The Drifter, Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping and The Roottrees Are Dead don’t seem to be attracting a lot of attention outside the hardcore gaming community.

Idle clickers, hidden object games  and meme games are far more popular than most recent adventure games on Steam if you go by concurrent players or follower counts, and even those with built-in fanbases like Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer and Simon the Sorcerer: Origins seem to be regarded more as niche titles than must-plays, no matter how well they’re reviewed or how strong their production values are.

One thing I can say for certain is that the last time we went down a road of having too many adventure games and not enough interested players, many of the things adventure games did well shifted over to other genres. Computer RPGs and JRPGs adopted a lot of adventure game ideas in the late 1990s and 2000s, as did many 3D action games.

Dialogue trees. Item-based puzzles. Object manipulation puzzles. Limiting players to key areas until they progressed the story. Interactive environmental objects. Cel-shaded animation or full motion video scenes. Choice-driven gameplay with varied outcomes and endings. All of these things gradually became so standard in other genres we don’t even really think about them as being distinctive features today.

And honestly, I don’t see people clamoring for adventure games to be the main conduit of that sort of experience anymore. In fact, many gamers perceive adventure games as being too limited and slow-paced to deliver the same sort of active and engaging gameplay they otherwise receive from more conventional modern games.

But one area where traditional point and click adventure games still do differ is in the control you have over your character.

See, point and click adventure games are still one of the few genres where you, as a player, are not truly controlling the character on the screen, but rather directing them to do what you’d like. And it wasn’t always this way. The evolution started with late 80s adventure games like Maniac Mansion and gradually became the style for Sierra’s SCI1 games as well. In the original King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, you were the character onscreen, controlling them directly. But once the text parser went away and cursor-driven controls became the norm, you were simply telling your characters what you wanted them to do and then waiting to see if they’d do it.

One of the biggest changes came from the pushback the game would offer you if you tried to do something the game didn’t allow. In traditional text parser adventures, the narrator of the game would tell you that your actions weren’t possible like a dungeon master in a tabletop game. But by the early 1990s, it’d shifted to the characters themselves starting to do that, and that’s now the conventional way for adventure games to communicate with the player – for the character him or herself to have a dialogue with the player by either offering a response about why something won’t work or breaking the fourth wall freely.

There are very few genres that ever engage in this sort of dialogue, and aside from strategy games, where you may have an advisor who is there to guide you, I can’t think of many where the main character onscreen will detach themselves from the reality of the game world and speak directly to the player. In most genres, it would completely break the immersion of the gameplay and make the player realize they were not in complete control of their avatar onscreen. But in an adventure game, it has the opposite effect, creating a sort of partnership between the player and the character and allowing the character to exist outside of the player and to even refuse orders or interpret actions in a different way than the player intended.

And this is where I feel adventure games still have some opportunity to grow. We’ve already seen what happens when adventure games follow the old text parser dynamic of the narrator breaking the fourth wall and talking to the player – you get great stuff like The Stanley Parable, where the narrator’s attempts at pushback create a fun dynamic of trying to break the game. But the idea of working with the adventure game characters directly is something that warrants further exploration.

Think about the novel and movie The Neverending Story for a moment, where the big climactic moment of the film is when Bastian realizes that the characters are relying on him to come into their world and save everyone from the encroaching Nothing. Granted, if you read the book, it doesn’t work out so well for him in the second half as he realizes he has a godlike power over the fantasy world, and that’s where adventure game creators would have to reel you in as a player. But if you took a game like The Whispered World and gave the player more agency as not just an observer to the story, but part of the unfolding design of it, you might really have something interesting.

So here’s a pitch for adventure game creators out there to get your imaginations going. Imagine we take a classic story – let’s say Hamlet – and translate it to an adventure game, except instead of being Hamlet’s director telling him where to go and what to do, you’re cast as the ghost of his father, and it’s your job to ensure Hamlet fulfills your plan of exposing his uncle Claudius as a murderer. We can take some license here and suggest that when Hamlet’s giving monologues, he’s not muttering to himself, but arguing with you, the ghost only he can see. And your powers allow you to really mess with him and the other characters to get them where they’re supposed to be.

Can you save Ophelia, or is her death inevitable? Can you ensure that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wind up dead, or do you have to hatch just the right plot to ensure pirates attack their ship and turn the tables on them? Can you find a happier ending that doesn’t wind up with Horatio wishing Hamlet a flight of angels to see him rest while Fortinbras reluctantly inherits a kingdom? Allowing the story to be dynamic so that you have an ethereal presence guiding it along and trying to find a better path from the canon could make for an interesting adventure.

Here’s another pitch. Let’s say the adventure game is a cyberpunk detective story and instead of guiding your hard-boiled, trenchcoat-wearing cyborg hunter around, you’re playing as his remote assistant drone operator, watching over him and helping him while he’s working to solve the case. You guide him along and supply him with the information he needs to ask good questions, locate suspects or spot useful items, but the story unfolds based not on his skills as a detective, but how well you help him uncover the seedy underbelly of the complex world around him. If he decides to kill the wrong person or put himself in an unwinnable situation, you’ve got to get him out of the jam. And if he blows a case and goes rogue, it’s up to you to find him and retire him yourself.

There’s so much opportunity to be found in inserting the player into the adventure game as a character. We’ve seen it tried a little bit with games like Omikron: The Nomad Soul and Night Trap, but I think the concept could go a lot further, particularly if the game design is dynamic enough to allow for things to branch based on the decisions made instead of forcing the player down a linear path.

I personally think that’s how you get past getting stuck in a rut following the Telltale style that Dispatch evokes. Because what truly makes Dispatch work is that there’s nothing else quite like it right now. But give us too much of that particular flavor and everyone will get tired of it quickly.

What adventure games truly crave – and always have – is agency to be able to dig into the game world they’re exploring. And you only get that with real, meaningful choice and interaction.

So one more elephant in the room is generative AI and what it can do to enhance adventure gaming.

And the answer is… probably very little?

Look, I’ve been following the AI scene for awhile because I find it interesting. AI and gaming have a long history together, and a lot of the AI research in the 70s, 80s, 90s and early 2000s involved trying to design systems that could learn the rules of games and then defeat human opponents. Supercomputer systems were designed to master games like chess and Go, and some of the smartest computer engineers in the world devoted their entire lives to these really narrow use cases and turned these systems from being laughable into formidable. Today, modern AI algorithms built for mastering games can outperform human grand masters with ease.

But what we don’t talk about quite as often is the lower-level AI routines that were  built for many video games using clever methods to mask the lack of sophistication and computing power behind their algorithms. The key to video game AI has always been to make sure that the computerized opponents are challenging, but beatable.

Think about Pac-Man for a moment – you have four different ghosts who behave in four different ways to try to trap you. If they all four started in their own corner and just chased you, Pac-Man would never catch a break because they’d push him to the middle. But if they start in one place and one chases you while the other three have different routines that may introduce some randomness, then Pac-Man has a chance to break away, explore the maze and gobble some dots before it’s time to turn the tables on the encroaching enemies.

There are many games that have come out through the decades with really incredible and responsive AI. One game that impresses me even to this day is Unreal Tournament, which used Steve Polge’s AI routines to create some really smart bots who could not only perform like a human competitor but who could also favor certain weapons or exhibit riskier or more conservative behavior. They could also mock you when they took you down in a particularly humiliating way. Playing through the campaign often felt like playing with real people, and while the bots were a bit more predictable than humans because they would follow the rules of the game rather than doing the unpredictable, crazy, ill-advised things human players often would, they also were designed not to feel like they were cheating, even though, being subroutines running within the game’s code, they often were cheating not to win, but to tone down their behavior so they could feel fair.

Another game with incredible AI is Monolith Productions’ F.E.A.R., in which the tactical teams you face are able to respond to your current situation and coordinate attacks. The first time I played this game 20 years ago, I was blown away by how smart the enemy AI was and how many opportunities arose for situations the AI never could have planned for but was able to respond to. There are few games since that have been able to offer that sort of experience, and as action games went with more of an open world design, the enemies were instead focused on pathfinding and navigation meshes as opposed to smarter, more coordinated movements under narrower conditions. Limiting the intelligence of AI foes in an open world is also important, both for the purposes of computing resources as well as to keep players from being immediately hunted by everything in the world wherever they venture.

Consider Fortnite, for which Steve Polge himself was involved in the AI bot design. No one would ever describe those bots as smart, and that has as much to do with the open design as it does with the fact that the bots can’t be too smart in a game that’s often played by children or by mobile phone users. They have to put up a fight, but they can’t behave like humans because they have so many built-in advantages.

All of these types of AI are generally used for adversarial models. But of course there’s AI for non-playing characters as well that allows the characters to follow travel paths, to go through daily routines and even, in some games, to respond to the player’s state – being intimidated by seeing weapons drawn, being verbally or nonverbally hostile to players who are objectionable or running away when shots are fired, or so forth. This is more the style of AI a conventional adventure game might utilize, and it doesn’t require generative AI in the slightest – it can all be programmed in through algorithmic approaches.

So where generative AI appears to have a place in adventure games is in a few specific circumstances. One of the most obvious is in allowing players to have actual dialogue with the game’s characters that goes beyond pre-scripted conversations and dialogue trees. With generative AI, this could even be a verbal conversation where the player speaks directly to the screen and the AI character speaks back to the player.

The generative AI could also provide on-demand hints based on the context of a situation or guide the player using generated text or speech so they don’t get stuck for too long.

On its face, this seems like a very neat idea. But the problem is that the technology just isn’t up to the task of providing this experience without serious limitations, and generative AI in action tends to break free of its constraints in both predictable and unpredictable ways. It also tends to invent facts, suggest solutions that don’t work and agree with the player even when it’s told not to. A model built specifically for gaming might not have all of these issues, but that’s not where the technology is right now.

Another potential use is to have generative AI create extra details to, say, make a town square look more populated or to add more details and flourishes to a scene. For example, you could have generative AI create posters to go on walls or paintings to appear in houses or non-interactive NPCs to sit next to you on the subway.

The problem here is that adventure games are pretty controlled by design and don’t function well with a lot of randomization and added detail. What looks to a gamer like a clue to solve a puzzle or to know where to go next could just be a facet of the generative output, and it’s difficult for game designers to understand how players will respond to these details without a significant amount of public testing, which risks spoiling the game before it’s released.

Now, there could be small details you could model with generative AI that would add to the presentation without disturbing the gameplay, like insects buzzing by or raindrops falling or wind impacting the trees or flowers blooming in a field, but those don’t require generative AI to put into a game. There are perfectly conventional methods of doing this that don’t involve AI at all.

Another common idea is for the adventure game to respond to the player and to be able to not just accept input through natural language, but generate the adventure like a tabletop campaign, where the player can do anything and the game system can generate the story and assets on the fly like a Dungeon Master. This has been the sort of lofty dream of adventure games since Colossal Cave Adventure – let the computer do all the work and the player just enjoy the adventure! Imagine The Stanley Parable where every door you open leads to a new path that is generated on the fly. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

But it doesn’t work. For one thing, human Dungeon Masters have to work pretty hard to keep their adventurers on the rails or else all their hours of planning for a session go out the window, and this generally results in players having a lot less autonomy than they might prefer in a tabletop campaign. And if the players are being belligerent or uncooperative, the DM can always just get up and leave. There’s a social pressure to keep the game going in a productive direction.

Also, generative AI has shown us that there’s a big difference between the imagination of a neural network and the imagination of an actual human mind. Generative AI can come up with some fun and novel things with the right prompting, but it’s not intentional and it often reflects strange facets of the training data, not anything that’s actually imaginative or interesting. Used as a tool to assist a human game master in a tabletop setting, I can see some potential for it, but we already have tools that do that pretty well. They’re called sourcebooks, and they work pretty well for everyone except absolute beginners!

Video gamers don’t think of virtual DMs like friends. They verbally abuse them and try to exploit them and generally treat them like a machine and not a person – because that’s the actual truth of what virtual DMs are! And so a game designer has to account for the fact that the gamer is potentially going to try his or her best to break the game to find an advantage. An exploitable mechanic is bad enough, but an exploitable system that generates the entire game is quite another.

And one of the biggest ways to exploit generative AI is through sycophancy. I have tried to make several of the major chatbot platforms create a Zork-like text adventure I can play through prompts and every one of them has ultimately turned into a dreamlike experience where the AI tool forgets what I have in my inventory or what those objects’ significance is and allows me to break the rules of reality to solve puzzles. This has been true even if I am having the platform first create maps and update database files in-game.

It just doesn’t work, and the AI tools have an unpredictable logic where some actions will be unacceptable in one situation and totally acceptable in another situation. They also regularly break character or prevent you from doing things that make sense in the game context but which their guardrails tell you that a human user shouldn’t do, like kill an orc or say something inappropriate to an NPC or put poison on your sword blade.

Now, is there a potential for generative AI to function as middleware between a human’s natural speech and a traditional text parser so that we can provide a new interface for playing text adventure games using speech input? Maybe! That might work because then the unpredictable behavior of generative AI might be offset by the limitations of a traditional text adventure. But keeping the AI model narrowly focused on the text adventure and ensuring it could correctly translate human language to text input would be a lot of work, and I expect unpredictable things would still happen.

My feeling, at least as of this recording in 2026, is that generative AI will mainly be used for asset creation and text generation during development, and that’s something I don’t think most gamers have any patience for. Adventure games need to be hand-crafted to feel sincere, and computer-generated puzzles and text and graphics aren’t going to help adventure games to stand out. So let’s ditch that idea. There are so many wonderfully creative people out there making adventure games – support those who take the time to draw their own backgrounds and animate their own characters and write their own scripts!  

With all that said, I’m ready to wish adventure gaming a fond farewell as a topic. We’ve spent 15 episodes on the graphical adventure game genre alone and two more on text adventures! But there’s so much more we could talk about. I hope you’ve enjoyed this shallow dive into a very deep pool.

Next week, we’re moving on to platform games! We’ll look at how games like Space Panic, Pitfall!, Popeye, Jungle King, Burger Time, Elevator Action, Mr. Do!’s Castle, Pac-Land, Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong helped cement a style of gameplay that Super Mario Bros. took off with and which we’ve never looked back from. We’ll talk about computer games like Jumpman, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy and Hard Hat Mack and we’ll also talk about why the genre struggled in the translation to 3D. It’s going to be a fun series, and I can’t wait to get started!

 

 

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 (probably) 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 Thank Goodness You’re Here, a silly and surreal adventure platformer from Coal Supper and Panic that takes place in the fictional Northern English town of Barnsworth where people have entered into factions over whether meat pies should be tiny or humongous, where shop owners are uninterested in actually serving customers, and where your tiny yellow character must constantly help people who are in really stupid situations that require your intervention.

The game has two buttons – jump and slap – and almost everything you do involves either finding a way to the right part of town to resolve someone’s problem or by whacking things until they’re correct. The humor is incredibly wild and unbothered by any semblance of reality, and this includes your character, who’s a different size on every screen. A fishmonger wants you to make sure all his fish on display are visibly smoking cigarettes. Why not? A gardener hates snails and tells you to murder them all. OK! A woman is missing her dog and you need to make a new one for her out of sausage. Can do!

And, in one particularly British series of events, you can keep falling down a man’s chimney to bypass his burglar alarm, sooting up his living room to his extreme frustration and have him tell you it’s all right and offer you snacks and beverages as he sighs and cleans up the mess.

It’s a tremendously silly experience you can complete in a few hours but which is a fun ride all the way through. Give it a shot!

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

In this episode, we’re going to talk about attempts to grow and evolve the genre of adventure gaming in the 21st century through who brought the point and click adventure back to life thanks to an indie game boom, digital distribution platforms and a project originally known as the Double Fine Adventure!

-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 16: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 14

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!

-------------------------------------------------------------------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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SOURCES:

Shardlight mini-adventures: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/1704/

https://indiegamebundle.fandom.com/wiki/Humble_Bundle#2021

The Double Fine Adventure Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVwg-9WL3dE

Cressup interview with Jakub Dvorsky of Amanita Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7RAcmLn5N4

https://web.archive.org/web/20101208183108/http://machinarium.net/blog/2010/08/05/machinarium-pirate-amnesty/

Dave Gilbert reviews 5 Days a Stranger: https://web.archive.org/web/20061210235634/http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id%2C699/

https://crystalshard.net/

https://steamcommunity.com/app/80310/discussions/0/3800527029416506681/

https://web.archive.org/web/20120606195617/http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17627

http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/games.htm

 

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EPISODE 16

Coming up in this episode –

We’re going to talk about how point and click adventure games made a resurgence in the 2010s thanks in part to the interest in a Kickstarter campaign for Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Adventure. But Double Fine Productions wasn’t the only one making adventure games, and we have folks like AGD Interactive, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and others to thank for keeping the genre going! We’re going to talk about all of them, and many more, today!

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!

If you ask an adventure game fan who the greatest adventure game creators of all time are, you’re very likely to hear a handful of names including Roberta Williams, Jane Jensen, Al Lowe, Josh Mandel, the Two Guys from Andromeda Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, Lori and Corey Cole, Muriel Tramis, Steve Meretzky, Brian Moriarty, Dave Grossman and Ron Gilbert.

But if you ask the average gamer, you’re likely to hear another name adventure gamers will also be likely to mention – Tim Schafer.

And this is really interesting because Tim Schafer is one of the few adventure game creators who is not only associated with some of the greatest adventure games of the 1990s – namely, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle as well as the incredible Grim Fandango – but also a game developer who’s managed to stay current in his role as the founder and studio head at Double Fine Productions, a game developer and publisher he founded over 25 years ago that’s now owned by Xbox Game Studios.

Double Fine is not an adventure game company, and aside from a few notable titles like the action adventure series Psychonauts and Ron Gilbert’s 2013 action platformer puzzler The Cave, they’re mostly known for wildly experimental ideas that tend to be classified as “indie games” due to their scope, size and low prices. The two most recent games, 2025’s Keeper and 2026’s Kiln, are both tremendously original; Keeper has you playing as a lighthouse walking around a desolate 3D world, and Kiln is a 3D arena brawling game where you create your own pottery and smash other players.

Double Fine is also known for the heavy metal album cover-themed action brawler and strategy game Brutal Legend, the trick or treating RPG series known as Costume Quest, the fascinating alternate reality mobile trench warfare game Iron Brigade and the lovely and completely original matryoshka doll 3D action adventure Stacking.

And though Tim Schafer played more of a studio advisor role than a creator role for most of these titles, it’s clear that one of the reasons he’s so well known is because he’s transcended what a game developer is – he’s become something of a father figure in gaming, using his foundation as one of the great game creators of the 1990s to bring out the creativity in his younger teams and really champion making video games feel fresh and new.

All of this context might help explain why it was Double Fine Productions who helped to bring point and click adventure gaming back into the mainstream, and they accomplished it with a Kickstarter campaign in 2012 that was initially supposed to result in a small digital indie game known as “The Double Fine Adventure” but which was so popular and successful in concept that it was eventually released as a two-part adventure game in 2014 and 2015 called Broken Age starring Elijah Wood, Masasa Moyo, Pendelton Ward, Wil Wheaton, Jack Black, Richard Horvitz, Jennifer Hale, Nick Jameson and Nicki Rapp among many other talented voice actors.

We know more about the development of Broken Age than probably any other adventure game ever created because part of the Kickstarter pitch to backers was that a documentary film studio called 2 Player Productions would chronicle the entire development cycle. This makes a little more sense when you understand that the documentary Indie Game: The Movie debuted in 2012 and game developers Edmund McMillen, Tommy Refenes, Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow became minor celebrities because of it – though Phil Fish, sadly, was probably harmed more than helped by the exposure when a corner of the internet gaming community turned on him.

Tim Schafer clearly felt it was a good idea to give his own development team a shot at fame, and 2 Player Productions wound up releasing a 12 and half hour documentary series you can watch in its entirety on YouTube to see, warts and all, how the game was actually made.

And I should be clear in saying that Broken Age was not really deserving of this amount of scrutiny, because it’s a really average adventure game that was quite disappointing to many of the game’s backers, myself included. It’s not a game you’ll see referenced much today despite its extremely high profile a decade ago, and that’s primarily because its longer-lasting influence is more about what it did for adventure gaming and the Kickstarter ecosystem – bringing in over 60,000 new users and establishing a very engaged community willing to back other well-known adventure game creators who were bringing back classic genres or franchises – than what it accomplished as a game itself.

The premise of Broken Age is that you play as two teenagers who are living very different lives but who share a similar ambition to break free of the fates that have been assigned to them. One of them is Shay Volta, the sole human on an AI-powered starship that has two personalities – the sun-shaped MOM system, which is active during the ship’s daytime hours and which smothers Shay like a helicopter parent, and the moon-shaped DAD system, which is active during the ship’s nighttime hours and who’s distant and doesn’t provide much guidance. MOM has made the place so pitifully safe that everything’s made of yarn and Shay’s activities are always situations where he succeeds and is treated like a hero and given ice cream as a reward.

But he’s also really bored, and so Shay gets excited when he discovers a stowaway named Marek that looks like a wolf and who convinces him that his AI parents have been lying to him. Instead of the Superman-like journey he believes he’s on to find a new world after his old one was destroyed, he’s actually aboard a ship capable of saving cute, oppressed space aliens in need of his help if he acts outside the supervision of the computer. And yet it becomes clear to Shay that Marek is also not trustworthy when Shay’s repeated attempts to save a particular alien creature result in Marek growing increasing desperate for him to stop… and the ship is damaged in the process.  

The other is Vella Tartine, who lives in a place called the Badlands where she’s being prepared, along with other fourteen-year-old girls, to be a sacrifice for the vicious giant brain-like creature Mog Chothra, which will destroy the town’s dam if it’s not appeased with a steady supply of maidens. Vella survives her fate and resolves to kill Mog Chothra, and part of her quest involves meeting an adult man character named Alex who looks a lot like Shay and who’s living on a crashed starship that looks a lot like Shay’s. He pledges to help her by blasting the beast with his ship’s laser.

So, you’d expect that we’re going to discover that these two characters’ stories take place in different times and that Alex is Shay, but nope – the twist ending to Act I is when Shay emerges from the wreckage of Mog Chothra and meets Vella on the beach… and as she takes a swing at him, she falls into Shay’s computer-controlled life while he is stuck outside in the Badlands.

This is all, quite frankly, the setup for a pretty good story, and that’s why Act II is so disappointing, because it absolutely does not stick the landing. The story becomes a confusing mess of hastily-explained lore and complex conspiracies that honestly don’t make a ton of sense – and remember, this is coming from a guy who really loves The Longest Journey’s astoundingly complex storyline. The game’s also just not that funny, especially in the second act, and that’s a letdown given that Tim Schafer’s games tend to be known for having a number of laugh out loud moments.

There’s also the jarring difficulty spike - while Act I is very heavy on story with fairly light and infrequent puzzles, Act II is far heavier on problem-solving and feels like it dead ends a lot more often. Double Fine was clearly responding to user feedback while making the game and, well, let’s just say their original vision got compromised along the way as a result.

What is great about Broken Age is the flat painted artwork, animated in that very awkward 2D style so common in the 2000s and 2010s where the characters’ body parts just sort of rotate and stretch rather than looking hand-drawn, and at the time, it really was a bold choice given that a lot of people associated classic adventure games with low-resolution pixel art. The voice cast, as I mentioned, is spectacular, and the music by former LucasArts house composer Peter McConnell is quite good.

And honestly, with a decade of distance between playing the game and talking about it now, I do wonder if Broken Age is more deserving of a critical re-evaluation today. It’s not a bad game by any means, and absent the hype, it might even be a game that rises above expectations for new players rather than failing to meet them. Re-issued in a Director’s Cut edition that smooths out the puzzles and which introduces all the backstory a little more gradually, it might actually find new life as a beloved adventure game.

But absent that, let’s just acknowledge Broken Age for what it turned out to be – a game that re-established the market for point and click adventure games. And that turned out to be good news indeed for the indie game publishers who were already making point and click adventure games when the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter campaign took off, because it allowed developers like Amanita Design and Wadjet Eye Games to find the larger audience they deserved.

In 2010, an indie game developer named Jeff Rosen from a studio called Wolfire Games launched a two-week campaign for a pay what you want bundle that offered DRM-free copies across multiple platforms and which offered to donate some of its proceeds to charity. The Humble Indie Bundle included six games – World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra: Overture and, added midway through the campaign, Amanita Design’s  Samorost 2. The Humble Indie Bundle was so successful that it led to many more bundles and, eventually, a dedicated storefront and a game development studio and publishing arm called Humble Games. While Wolfire sold the company to Ziff-Davis in 2017 and it’s now a part of the IGN Entertainment brand, Humble Bundle is still very much around today, and there’s no question that it played a huge role in helping to popularize indie games on the PC by using its time-limited deals to raise the profile of a number of titles.

Amanita Design was one of the earlier benefactors, but Double Fine Productions also jumped onboard and released several of its own bundles through Humble Bundle over the early years, including prototype games their team had hacked together. And The Adventure Game Company, Daedalic Entertainment, Wadjet Eye Games, King Art Games and even Revolution Software were among the many adventure game developers who gradually included their games in various early Humble Bundles as well as well as competitors like IndieGala, Indie Royale and Groupees.

I mention this because while it’s fairly common knowledge today that Steam was the dominant marketplace for the growth of digital gaming on PC during the early 2010s, what often gets lost in the shuffle is the importance of these gaming bundles for adding large swaths of indie games to gamers’ digital libraries and giving them the ability to try off-the-beaten path games at their leisure. Mobile platforms certainly helped as well, and there are few genres better suited to touchscreens than point and click adventure games! But I contend that had it not been for deeply discounted digital gaming bundles allowing gamers to grab half a dozen games or more for just a few bucks, many of the games we’re about to talk about wouldn’t have gained as much attention as they received.

And this has nothing to do with their quality, because the Amanita Design point and click adventures are some of the best and most beautiful games in the genre, certainly worthy of playing today and definitely worth the small price you’ll pay for them. Some are even available for free! This Czech Republic studio was started in 2003 by indie game developer Jakub Dvorsky following the success of his browser-based point and click adventure game Samorost and specialized in short experiences like it for the next several years, releasing a combination of advertorial games, educational games and other browser-based titles including Samorost 2.

In 2009, Amanita Design released their first full-length game, Machinarium, a beautifully illustrated game with no dialogue that instead uses graphical thought bubbles above characters’ heads to communicate their needs. While the game’s more along the lines of a Neverhood or Professor Layton-style puzzler than a typical point and click adventure game, there is a storyline where you must pick your robot Josef up off the scrapheap and stop some evil robots from blowing up a tall building. The storyline is often told through little animated vignettes that appear in the thought bubbles and it’s really up to you, as the player, to pay attention to what’s going on if you want to grasp the entire plot. But that’s really optional – the strength of Machinarium is its presentation and its puzzle-solving, and it’s a beautifully-designed experience.

One of the most interesting aspects of the game is that it includes several minigames to play, including a walkthrough for each of the puzzles that you can access by playing a brief shoot ‘em up-style minigame where you steer your key into a lock, opening a book with graphical depictions of the actions you need to take. Some of the puzzles are tricky enough that they really require you to think through your actions, and the built-in walkthrough is helpful if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong or if you can’t figure out where to begin.

Amanita Design was still a small independent publisher when Machinarium first shipped, self-financed by its team of seven who’d worked on it for 3 years. Unfortunately, it was one of those games that was, at least according to Amanita, heavily pirated due to being released on PC DRM-free. In 2010, Amanita Design offered the game for $5 instead of its normal $20 in a “Pirates Amnesty” promotion that did grab some headlines and prompted gaming blogs and sites to remind the public that hey, Machinarium was actually a really great game well worth paying 5 bucks for.

This is what life was like before Steam sales! And both Steam and Amanita’s eventual acceptance into the PlayStation Network’s digital storefront helped to further boost the game’s availability and visibility.

Amanita’s next big game was Botanicula, released in 2012 and this time featuring a world of plants, fungi and insects with five playable characters working together to save their home tree’s final seed from being devoured by balls of long-legged blackness that are threatening not just the tree, but all of the creatures who live on its branches. It’s not only a gorgeous-looking game, but also an amazing-sounding one thanks to a soundtrack by the Czech alt-rock band DVA, which offers a strong sense of ambience to set the game’s chipper yet adventurous mood. Oh, and by the way, the band appears in the game as a couple of caterpillars playing a concert before they slip into cocoons.

Botanicula is so unique it’s hard to compare it to anything specific. At times it reminds me of LocoRoco and Pikmin and PixelJunk Eden and Knytt Underground and Sound Shapes, which were all fairly contemporary to it in one form or another, but there are also moments that are so unlike anything else I’ve ever played that I can only really recommend playing it for yourself. It’s a joyful experience that’s definitely surreal and just a tad scary for the little ones near the end, but which is so beautiful and wonderful it’s a game I’d recommend to almost anyone.

Amanita’s next game was Samorost 3, this time offering a full-length experience for the character known as the Gnome. In the first two games, Gnome explores a realm of space filled with tiny planets made up of natural objects like tree bark and rock formations and roots as well as discarded mechanical objects, most notably a rocketship called the Polokonzerva, which is made from a real-life can of what would have contained actual hot dogs in 1970s Czechoslovakia. I love stuff like that.

In the third game, the stakes are a little bit higher as the Gnome discovers a book revealing a sort of cosmic horror story about a space octopus who flew around the universe eating planets until a group of monks built a super-powered robot with a sword who chopped the octopus up into pieces and saved the galaxy. But these monks each used their magical flutes to control the robot and, wouldn’t you know it, one of the monks went rogue with his flute and stole the other three, one of which wound up landing outside the Gnome’s house and providing the inciting event for this game as the Gnome discovers he has to explore other worlds and eventually stop the evil monk and return the heroic robot to service.

Like all of the Amanita Design games, Samorost 3 has absolutely gorgeous graphics and tells its story through presentation rather than speech. While the imagery is focused on natural environments, more like Botanicula, the machinery from Machinarium definitely influences some of this game’s visual design as well. Even so, it’s definitely the most surreal game they’ve made to date, and it’s so gorgeous that it feels like a work of art in motion. Don’t miss it – you can play all three Samorost games in just a few hours, and they’re worth your time.

Amanita’s more recent games include 2018’s minigame compilation Chuchel, its card-based 2019 adventure game Pilgrims, its 2020 horror puzzle platformer Creaks, its nightmarish and fittingly named 2021 adventure game Happy Game and its upcoming storybook-style adventure game Phonopolis, which comes out later this month. I am not doing any of these games any justice by simply describing them this way – you should play all of them if you’re even remotely interested in what they have to offer because every single game Amanita Designs has ever made is filled with great ideas and creative presentation that you rarely see in other games, and since each of them is also fairly short, they never overstay their welcome and always leave you wanting more.

I think I can safely say the same for Wadjet Eye Games, a developer and publisher founded by Dave Gilbert in 2006. As I’ve mentioned before, Dave is not related to the famed adventure game creator Ron Gilbert, but he is a truly prolific and talented adventure game designer in his own right, creating the Blackwell Legacy series, Unavowed, Emerald City Confidential, Old Skies and the extremely interesting game that launched his career, The Shivah, an adventure game that he originally submitted to the 5th anniversary of the Monthly Adventure Game Studio contest and won with.

Prior to The Shivah, Dave Gilbert had created several small freeware adventure games between 2001 and 2004 including The Repossessor, Bestowers of Eternity – Part One, Two of a Kind, The Postman Only Dies Once, Purity of the Surf and A Better Mousetrap. But The Shivah was the first one he decided to release in a commercial format after seeing its reception, and Dave Gilbert went all out, adding in voice acting, outtakes, developer’s commentary, extra puzzles and improved graphics. If you play it today, you’ll more than likely be playing the 2013 re-release known as the Kosher Edition that improves the graphics further and adds some new music, but whatever version you play, The Shivah is unlike any adventure game you’ve ever experienced for a very simple reason:

You play as a Jewish rabbi investigating a murder.

If you’re not familiar with Judaism, a shivah is a mandated period of mourning after a death which lasts seven days after the person is buried. As Rabbi Stone, a man who is deeply questioning his faith and values, you are pulled into the investigation of a former synagogue member named Jack who died leaving you a large sum of money, but with whom you’ve also had a bad falling out with in the past due to Jack’s marriage to a woman from India named Rajshree. You have to clear your name and solve the crime, using the shivah to visit Rajshree and begin unspooling a thread that leads to a corrupt rabbi, a dead accountant and a mafia loanshark who’s running an investment scam.

One of the most notable things about the game is the dialogue system, which sometimes lets you choose the tone of your response and other times lets you complete sentences in a manner that may change another character’s reactions and indicate your morality. There are times when you have to disarm people with rabbinical lines of questioning, and there’s also a system for holding a rabbinical debate with your adversary Rabbi Zelig during the game’s climactic battle, in which you can throw a punch or ask questions about morality.

Given that The Shivah can be completed in a couple of hours, it’s an easy recommendation for adventure game fans – it’s quite engaging and has many of the hallmarks of other Wadjet Eye games like being set in New York City, offering an ethnically diverse cast of characters, asking deep questions about death, morality and spirituality, integrating puzzles into your investigation and offering highly intelligent and thought-provoking writing.

There are also multiple endings which allow you to decide just how deep Rabbi Stone’s crisis of faith goes – does he abandon his principles, give in to his temptations or find a way to fight back the cynicism and stick to his beliefs? All three endings are valid, though only one of them is remotely happy.

Dave Gilbert’s next game explored some similar themes, though through different lenses. The Blackwell Legacy came out in 2006 and was the first entirely commercial Wadjet Eye Games release, repurposed from Gilbert’s never-continued Bestowers of Eternity storyline but also developing into a much larger story. It also served as the foundation for a series that I highly recommend playing all the way through.

The Blackwell Legacy begins with a woman named Rosangela Blackwell, or “Rosa” if you prefer, who’s reeling from the death of her aunt Lauren, Rosa’s adoptive guardian after her parents died in a car accident. The game opens on the Queensboro Bridge in Manhattan where Rosa scatters her aunt’s ashes into the river, and we soon learn Lauren and Rosa’s grandmother both had mental breakdowns and exhibited some sort of psychosis about seeing and speaking to a person named Joey.

Lauren was a chain-smoker, by the way, so it’s a nice detail that you get to scatter her ashes. But more on her in a moment.

Rosa’s plagued by migraine headaches but she also has to file a story for the newspaper she works for, The Village Eye, to report on a suicide at New York University. This causes her to awaken her latent spirit medium powers, which were the source of her headaches, but which also introduce her to Joey Mallone, a wandering spirit who serves as a guide to her family and assists them in helping departed ghosts lingering in our world to move on to their next existence in the afterlife. Rosa and Joey must investigate a ghost hanging around Washington Square who’s connected to the student suicide, and this leads to a broader story about three girls who accidentally summoned a spirit called “The Deacon” with their Ouija board and who’ve each been driven mad by his haunting them. Rosa and Joey have to find a way to not only stop The Deacon, but save the only one of the girls who’s still alive from being driven to suicide herself.

Rosa decides to take on the mantle of being a spirit medium, and the next several games starring her involve multiple cases in which she and Joey have to help spirits move on while they also face some powerful antagonists working against them. But before those, Wadjet Eye Games released a 2007 prequel called Blackwell Unbound that told the story from Aunt Lauren’s point of view when she was herself a young medium in the 1970s. Besides getting to watch Lauren smoke several packs of cigarettes in this game, players are also introduced to the villainous medium known as the Countess and her connections to the Blackwell family. This helps to provide some added context and detail for the following games and, quite honestly, results in one of my favorite chapters in the series as Joey and Lauren explore New York in the 70s and even interact with a real person – New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, whose famous case of decades of writer’s block plays a major role in the game’s story.

But the three games that follow Blackwell Unbound – 2009’s The Blackwell Convergence, 2011’s The Blackwell Deception and 2014’s The Blackwell Epiphany – are all very interesting games in their own right as Rosa has to contend with her exhaustion from working as a spirit medium, the trauma she’s facing in seeing so many gruesome deaths and the very real danger posed by the ghost of The Countess, a malicious psychic predator named Gavin and a mysterious character named Madeline who has a deep connection to the Blackwell lineage.

The Blackwell games are all a little different in how they play and reflect Wadjet Eye Games’s growing sophistication with the AGS engine and its extensions. This is also a series that’s been very close to its fanbase. When The Blackwell Deception changed its art style dramatically to give its characters comic book style portraits instead of painted ones, the outcry among fans was loud enough that Dave Gilbert hired a different artist to redo them.

Each of the games also includes a developer’s commentary and outtakes, which add a lot of value to replaying them, but a really notable aspect of these games is also the puzzle design, which almost always arises organically from the events of the story and rarely forces you, as the player, to have to use lateral thinking or twisted logic to figure out how to progress. Characters will make statements that serve as hints about what to do next and each game’s case by case design prevents you from wandering too far outside the boundaries of knowing what you need to do next, though you’ll sometimes be juggling more than one case at a time.

But what I enjoy most about the Blackwell series is that each of the games feels like it has a purpose beyond just offering dialogue trees and puzzles. From the moment you meet Rosa, the series has a world-weariness to it that suggests that the job she’s about to take on is never-ending and soul-devouring, and all you can really do as the player is help Rosa and Joey through their quests and hope that this service you’re providing the spirits of New York City is going to have a happy ending. These are not happy, feelgood games; they’re dark and philosophical and unafraid to examine the line between life and death, legacy and obscurity, epiphany and deception. They’re all really good stuff, and I recommend playing every one of them in order so you get the whole experience.

Another Wadjet Eye Games release by Dave Gilbert that came out during the Blackwell series is Emerald City Confidential, a story set in the world of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels featuring a film noir-style story where you play as Petra, the only private eye in Emerald City. For whatever reason, this game is perhaps the most underrated of all of Dave Gilbert’s adventures, but it’s quite good, featuring an easy but moderately lengthy experience with a great storyline and a cartoonish aesthetic that’s sort of like a combination of Adult Swim and Scooby Doo.

Tonally, I’d compare it more to the Telltale Games adventures since it’s based on an existing property and isn’t afraid to go for a joke by introducing an occasionally goofy character, farcical situation or fun little piece of dialogue or description, but as with most of Dave Gilbert’s games, the strength is in the writing and characterization, and this one’s really good. I think the main reason it’s not as well-known is because it was published and marketed by PlayFirst, a casual game developer best known for Diner Dash that’s now owned by Electronic Arts.

More recently, Dave Gilbert has released 2018’s Unavowed and 2025’s Old Skies, both of which I highly recommend. Unavowed takes a cue from the Blackwell games and once again involves the supernatural, but this time, you play as a character who was possessed by a demon who made you do unspeakable things until a group of magical heroes called the Unavowed came to your rescue and exorcised the demon. Your job is to join their ranks and help them undo the damage the demon caused, recruiting new members along the way as you try to solve the mystery of what your possessed former self was up to.

To say too much is to spoil a really great story that you can customize RPG party-style by selecting which characters you want to experience it, and I’m really impressed at how well the game adjusts to your choices of which characters to bring along. It’s truly reminiscent of Maniac Mansion in that way and encourages replayability. But as I’ve mentioned before in previous episodes, this game goes all out in trying to portray epic action that really shows the limitations of what two-dimensional point and click adventure gaming can do, and for all its ambition, it’s probably the Wadjet Eye Games release most befitting of a full 3D action remake down the road.

Or maybe a live action online streaming miniseries – this game really does have a neat story that could be expanded upon.

Old Skies is a game I’ve recommended before on previous episodes, and it’s a time-traveling adventure that once again shows off Dave Gilbert’s strength as a game designer and writer by coming up with a fairly new concept for the effects of time travel and yet another compelling world-weary meditation on what it all means to not only be a part of it, but to break free from it. It’s right up there with Steins;Gate in terms of its emotional stakes and interesting ideas, and while it has many great moments, I don’t think there are any more memorable than walking around the World Trade Center in New York City on September 10th, 2001, knowing that in the morning, everything’s going to change.

But Wadjet Eye Games has also published quite a few adventure games not created by Dave Gilbert, and not only are many of them worth your time, but some will also introduce you to some of the best adventure game creators out there… as well as some of the best stories in modern gaming.

In 2011, a developer named Joshua Nuernberger released a game called Gemini Rue through Wadjet Eye Games, and though it’s kind of fallen off the radar in recent years, it’s a game I highly recommend tracking down and playing.

The game takes place in space in the 23rd century and has a really neat cyberpunk aesthetic that’s sort of reminiscent of Rise of the Dragon by way of Blade Runner and Total Recall with a retired assassin character who’s kind of like John Wick… at least for half of the game. The other half involves a different character and takes place in a futuristic prison where all the inmates wear white jumpsuits and get stuck behind laser walls – very reminiscent of the prison scenes in the Star Wars series Andor. One difference, however, is that you’re not stuck working on machinery in a grueling, gamified task, but instead memory-wiped of your criminal past and being given a chance to rehabilitate yourself through daily testing tasks preparing you for a final exam. But, of course, the game has a big curveball to throw at you as you discover how these two characters are related, and Gemini Rue absolutely rewards you with a gripping story as that twist unfolds.

But you know what’s most amazing about Gemini Rue? Dave Gilbert has said that the game was made when Joshua Nuernberger was just 19 and that it also was the publisher’s first breakthrough success story. Nuernberger went on to a career working in web development and even doing some work for NASA and has no desire to return to games, so if he only had one good game in him, this was apparently it.

Resonance came out in 2012 and was developed by Vince Twelve under his studio XII Games – that’s the Roman Numeral XII, by the way – and it’s both a murder mystery thriller and a science fiction story about a coming apocalypse brought on by an electron particle-splitting technology called Resonance. The game involves four different characters who are all caught up in the death of Professor Javier Morales, the particle physicist who created the technology and who was wrapped up in a deeper conspiracy with a powerful shadowy organization called the Eleven Foundation and a supercomputer called Antevorta.

One of the most interesting things about this game is how you use the different characters’ capabilities in tandem to solve puzzles, but there’s a big twist that shakes things up later on in the game and causes you to view the characters’ skills a bit differently. Resonance also has a neat aesthetic that’s somewhere between a traditional point and click pixel art game and a comic book thanks to cartoon bubbles being used to showcase speech and some imaginative cutscenes and backgrounds. It’s a neat adventure that makes me wish Vince Twelve had a few more games to his credit though he, like many of the creators who’ve published through Wadjet Eye Games, is often credited for his help advising other adventure game developers or testing their games.

The 2012 adventure Primordia was created by Mark Yohalem’s Wormwood Studios, who’d also go on to make the 2021 game Strangeland. Primordia definitely falls into the realm of science fiction and it’s not easy to explain its plot – think of it like a combination of Fallout, Full Throttle and Beneath a Steel Sky, because it’s a post-apocalyptic game where mankind is long dead. You play as the gravel-voiced android Horatio Nullbuilt version 5 and you have a sarcastic robot companion named Crispin Horatiobuilt version 1. You first task after having a power core stolen by a robot called SCRAPER is to rebuild an airship called the UNNIIC, but when that proves more difficult than you expected, you wind up searching the nearby wastelands for parts and have conversations with various robots, often talking about Humanism and the Gospel of Man, which is Horatio’s reinterpreted take on the human Bible.

As you and Crispin explore the area, you run into several different groups of robots, some of whom need or want your help and one of whom accuses you of being its ancient enemy, Horus. In the city of Metropol, Horatio is also restricted from sharing the Gospel of Man quite literally by having it stripped from his circuitry. The game’s storyline goes quite a bit deeper as you begin to discover that the robots in the area have had their memories manipulated, that various AI programs are locked into a political battle and that the city is in danger of being infected by a virus called Thanatos, to which Horatio has a mysterious connection.

Primordia is an extremely intelligent game that’s particularly notable for how much autonomy it gives you as a player. There are different ways to solve some of the puzzles and the game offers multiple endings that can be modified by whether or not two companions make it to the ending with you. Be sure to play this one with the sound turned up, too – the music and voice acting are just superb.

Strangeland is a very different affair, taking inspiration from games like Dark Seed, Planescape: Torment, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and Sanitarium to tell a bizarre metaphysical story about a character named The Stranger who is trapped in a carnival-like realm where he cannot die, nor can a blond-haired woman he sees who appears to be trapped there with him. I’m not even going to attempt to describe this game – it’s absolutely messed up and tells one of the darkest psychological stories I’ve ever seen in an adventure game, complete with tarot cards and Norse mythology and clowns and crows and cosmic horrors and giant crabs and disembodied talking heads and body horror and crazy cicadas that make inspirational speeches about life. And unlike Sanitarium, which constantly messes with you but ultimately gives you an actual villain to defeat, this game’s four endings take things in a very different direction as you battle a creature called The Dark Thing.

I don’t recommend Strangeland for those who aren’t into twisted horror-type stories, but it’s a very well-made adventure game that’s visually impressive and which has the familiar Wadjet Eye Games voice actor Abe Goldfarb playing the role of the Stranger as well as a number of other characters. You’ll have to play the game to see why.

A Golden Wake came out in 2014 as the first full-length commercial game from Francisco Gonzalez, the founder of Grundislav Games. Gonzalez made a name for himself in the AGS and freeware community for his 8-part Ben Jordan series, which ran between 2004 and 2012 and followed his growth as a game developer.

The premise of A Golden Wake is that you’re a real estate developer in the 1920s named Alfie Banks who heads to Miami, Florida to participate in the land grab in Coral Gables during a time when speculators believed the land might grow into a major city. It’s a modest-sized city of about 40,000 today, notable for its Mediterranean style and strict zoning laws as well as being home to the University of Miami. In the game, it’s still undeveloped coastal land that has all the potential Alfie and his fellow speculators can imagine, but this also involves doing some underhanded things, like conning people out of their homes with inspections or working with flim flam men, aviators, gangsters and the Miami Men’s club as Alfie goes through a rise and fall that tracks along the boom and bust of the Roaring 20s and heads into the prohibition era. There’s hot jazz music and people doing the Charleston, of course, but there’s also the question of what it means to build a legacy in a place where your success can be wrecked by hurricanes, a cratering economy and unpopular, oppressive laws. I’ll give you a hint: the game’s title is a foreshadowing of where things are going for Alfie in the end.

It’s a really interesting game that’s both well-written and historically-based. It’s also filled with beautiful backgrounds that evoke the art deco style and gilded age trappings. And it even has what TV censors used to refer to as “adult situations.” It’s definitely an intelligent and original adventure game, but for whatever reason, some players seem to find it dull. Their loss.

Grundislav Games went on to release two more adventures that are both set in the same universe but which were not published by Wadjet Eye Games this time. Both of them are really good and should definitely be on your radar – Francisco Gonzalez is an excellent and ambitious adventure game designer who will spend years meticulously working on these projects so they can integrate player choices made throughout the entire game.

The first is 2018’s Lamplight City, a 19th century steampunk detective story set in an alternate history where the United States is instead a colonial nation called Vespuccia that’s still part of the British Commonwealth. Much like A Golden Wake, this is a great-looking adventure with some pretty backgrounds, but it often breaks away into what I can only call “talking head” sequences where two character portraits enter into a dialogue over a black background.

This places a lot of the burden of the game on the story, and thankfully, it is a good one. The city setting of New Bretagne (Brit-An-Ya) is like a combination of New Orleans and Industrial Era London, and the intrigue develops over the cases as investigator Miles Fordham finds himself on the trail of a serial murderer named the “Justice Killer” who only kills men and who leaves an Easter lily at the site of each murder. Miles also seems to be suffering from schizophrenia and is off his meds, leading him to drink heavily and self-medicate to suppress the voice of his dead partner, Bill Leger (la-jehr), who taunts him throughout the game.

An intriguing aspect of the game is that over the course of the five cases you solve, you can follow false leads and actually come up with the wrong conclusions, accusing innocent people or finding yourself unable to resolve cases. The story will keep going even if you mess up, but it’s impacted by your lack of competence.

Early in the game, there’s a throwaway line from Bill where he mentions visiting his sister Harley out West. Surprisingly, this is the impetus for the sort-of-sequel to Lamplight City, a 2025 game called Rosewater that features the journalist Harley Leger arriving in the town the game’s named after and getting pulled into the orbit of a Wild West show performer named Gentleman Jake who’s about to embark on a treasure hunt. Harley joins him, his trickshooting partner Danny, a revolutionary from New Spain named Phil, a Native named Nadine and the steamwagon driver Lola on a trip that ultimately takes them from Rosewater to the West Coast city of El Presidio, where the companions finally find that the treasure they’ve been tracking is far more than they’d bargained for.

The fact that I’m offering that description might tell you that the destination isn’t really what makes Rosewater special – it’s very much the journey, and much like the excellent 2024 JRPG Metaphor: ReFantazio, the best moments in the game come from the road trip sections where you’re getting to know your companions better and dealing with various vignettes that pop up along your trek. Every one of these characters is well-crafted and has three dimensions of personality to explore as you get deeper into their backstories and motivations, and the many different paths and endings you can experience in each playthrough mean there’s plenty of reason to dive back in for another run if you want to see how things could have happened differently.

But before Lamplight City, Francisco Gonzalez teamed up with artist Ben Chandler to work on the Wadjet Eye Games release Shardlight, another interesting adventure game, this time set in a future post-apocalyptic world where shards of glowing green uranium are used to provide lighting in the game’s ruined environment. You play as Amy Wellard, an inhabitant of this world who’s suffering from a terminal disease called Green Lung and you have to make moral choices regarding your fellow sufferers and how you want to respond to the conspiracy going on in the game’s storyline, which involves a group called the Aristocracy who dress in British uniforms with powdered wigs and respirator masks resembling white face paint with prominent blush and beauty marks. Oh, and a plague doctor-styled Grim Reaper’s also running around, though he’s not a supernatural character and there’s a logical explanation for it.

As fascinating as the setup is, Shardlight is often criticized for feeling underdeveloped, and because of this, it’s definitely a deep cut as Wadjet Eye Games adventures go. On the plus side, Gonzalez and Chandler released two freeware mini-adventures set in the same storyline that you can play if you find the game intriguing. Check the show notes for a link to them.

The year before Shardlight debuted, Wadjet Eye Games published a different adventure game from developer James Dearden at Technocrat Games. This title, Technobabylon, is a fairly unique adventure game because it involves one of the main characters jumping in and out of a cyberspace-like network called The Trance and offers an interesting Blade Runner-style dystopian world that involves not just computer technology, but also biotechnology wetware that creates some interesting new wrinkles on the cyberpunk genre.

You alternate between two sets of characters – a net addict named Latha Sesame who lives as cheaply as she can in reality so she can spend most of her time in the Trance and Dr. Charles Regis, an agent of the police organization CEL who’s on the trail of a terrorist known as the Mindjacker. While you think the story’s going to set up a typical police procedural sort of mystery, what happens instead is Regis gets blackmailed into helping the Mindjacker commit more terrorist acts in order to protect the lives of some embryos Regis and his late wife Vishka had frozen in hopes of starting a family.

The story has a lot of twists and turns, and it’s notable for avoiding character tropes and really trying to do things differently. One character is unapologetically transgender. Another is a covered Muslim woman who’s actually trying to prevent more bombings from occurring. There are substantial discussions about the intersection of bioethics and artificial intelligence and flashbacks where scientists are involved in love triangles. There are puzzles where you have to alter robotic personalities by infusing one from a waifu-style chef machine and a detective sequence where you have to make sure a powerful, connected murderer is accused in front of the other suspects dead to rights with no wiggle room. There’s also a surprising sisterhood that impacts much of the story’s final act. It’s a really neat experience overall, and certainly one of the most impressive adventure games of the modern era.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow is a more recent title from Wadjet Eye Games, developed by a trio of developers named Shaun Aitcheson, John Inch and Laurie MH at Cloak and Dagger Games and released in 2022. You play as Thomasina Bateman, an antiquarian in Victorian London who’s invited out to the English countryside village of Bewlay to investigate a mysterious barrow. Her contact never shows up, and the villagers are suspicious of her, in part because she’s an eccentric outsider with a high level of education and also because she insists on wearing trousers.

Over time, some of the villagers do warm up to her, but it’s very much not to their credit, because Thomasina is ultimately being manipulated by two characters who want to unleash something from Hob’s Barrow. How she’s connected, what’s actually imprisoned there and whether or not she can stop them form the backbone of a very engaging and interesting horror story that grows more and more unsettling as you play it and which is very much in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft. And the old-school pixel art graphics, atmospheric effects, British voice acting and jarringly sentimental flashbacks showing Thomasina and her doting father add quite a bit to the experience overall.

Make sure you don’t miss this game. It’s absolutely fantastic!

You may know Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw today for his novels, his Zero Punctuation reviews or his more contemporary Fully Ramblomatic YouTube channel, but before he was an acerbic critic or a novelist, he was making adventure games under the Fully Ramblomatic Games banner, and from 2000 to 2007, he released a bunch of them, from the Rob Blanc trilogy to Lunchtime of the Damned to The Trials of Odysseus Kent to Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment to 1213 to his most famous quadrilogy, sometimes known as the John DeFoe Tetralogy or the Trilby Tetralogy, but more commonly known as the Chzo Mythos. And you might be expecting these games to be funny based on Yahtzee’s other works, but they’re actually quite serious horror stories that sprawled out into a deep and compelling mythology.

The first of these games, 5 Days a Stranger, stars a gentleman cat burglar named Trilby who is trying to rob the DeFoe manor out in the British countryside in the year 1993, but winds up trapped inside with several other people along with a terrifying demon. And of course the other people start dying, Mystery House-style, until you can find out how to stop it. The game ends with Trilby burning the mansion down.

The demon’s name is Chzo (chi-zo), and it has a strong connection to the mansion that transcends space and time. This is explained in the later games, 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby’s Notes and 6 Days a Sacrifice, in which Trilby and the DeFoe mansion continue to be connected, but 7 Days a Skeptic takes place in the year 2328 on a spaceship and 6 Days a Sacrifice takes place in the year 2189 in a far-future version of the UK.

Trilby’s Notes, by contrast, returns to the 1990s and has Trilby explore a hotel that shifts back and forth from the real world into a dark Silent Hill style alternative world as well as to witness some sequences that take place in different periods of time. It’s also a departure from the first two games because it involves using a text parser rather than point and click mechanics.

All four of these games are available as freeware on the Fully Ramblomatic site, and they’re absolutely worth your time. If you need a reason to check them out, I even found a 2003 review on AdventureGamers.com from Dave Gilbert himself recommending the first game.

Another indie adventure game studio that was active in the early 2000s was AGD Interactive, also known as Tierra, because they recreated several Sierra On-Line adventure games in the AGS engine to give them a similar look and feel to King’s Quest V’s VGA edition. Along with new versions of King’s Quest I-III, AGD also released a VGA edition of Quest For Glory II: Trial by Fire, even allowing players to import and export their save files to maintain continuity with the Sierra games. These games are all still available as freeware and were definitely part of the fabric of the fan-driven movement to keep adventure gaming alive once Sierra folded.

AGD, by the way, means “Anonymous Game Developer,” and the two developers behind it, Britney K. Brimhall and Christopher T. Warren, formed a commercial development studio called Himalaya Studios that has released two adventure games: the Wild West themed Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman’s Mine and the Quest for Glory style adventure RPG Mage’s Initiation: Reign of the Elements. While neither is a game I’d highly recommend, I’m very grateful to the creators for their Sierra remakes and I definitely recommend supporting them.

Pieter Simoons’s studio Crystal Shard is another developer that took some inspiration from Quest for Glory with the 2013 freeware game Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok, which takes place in the Norse mythological tradition during Fimbulwinter. Similarly to Quest for Glory, you create a character and select a class that gives you certain abilities mainly used for combat, but occasionally used for problem-solving. While you play as a female character this time around, that has little bearing on the plot; it’s more of a way to ensure the game is legally distinctive from its inspiration. But it’s truly a wonderful adventure game, and that it’s a full-length game of a commercial level of quality and completely free should be enough to make you want to play it.

Crystal Shard has released many other games in different genres as well, but its 2017 commercial adventure game A Tale of Two Kingdoms deserves a lot more attention than it’s received, and since it’s set in the realm of Celtic mythology and has a lot of fairy tale inspirations included, you can bet it has the feel of a King’s Quest adventure, but with far more opportunities for the player’s choices to shape the story and various endings.

Clifftop Games is a development studio from Sweden that’s most famous for its 2016 game Kathy Rain: A Detective is Born, which takes liberal inspiration from Twin Peaks and features a motorcycle-riding punk and journalism student who’s trying to learn more about her grandfather after his mysterious death. The story gets very weird and supernatural the longer it goes, and Kathy is haunted by her own traumatic childhood as well as the abortion she had as a teenager, giving this game a surprising amount of pathos. If you’re going to play this one, go ahead and just enjoy the superior 2021 Kathy Rain: Director’s Cut, which smooths out some of the puzzle logic and is just a general improvement in almost every way. The 2025 sequel, Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer, is also quite good, and Clifftop’s other standalone adventure, Whispers of a Machine, is a decent cyberpunk detective story that really deserves a larger audience.

I want to mention two more adventure game developers from the modern era that haven’t fit neatly into any of our other discussions. The first is Fireproof Games, makers of the series known as The Room, a well-regarded puzzle escape room series in the style of The 7th Guest but without the clunky narrative. There are four games in the main mobile series, which came out between 2012 and 2018 with a consistently high level of quality, and also 2020’s The Room VR: A Dark Matter, which is absolutely a great way to cap off the series.

Because the games were originally built for the iPad and iPhone, they involve a lot of 3D mechanical object spinning and manipulating, but the puzzles are exquisite and really require you to think and experiment. As the series goes on, there’s more of an exploration element to the gameplay, but the story is never the main attraction – it just provides a creepy background theme to justify the main puzzles you have to solve. All of these games are worth your time – don’t let the fact that they’re originally mobile games stop you from trying them!

The other developer I want to mention is Lucas Pope, creator of 2013’s Papers, Please and 2018’s Return of the Obra Dinn. While Papers, Please is as much a simulation as an adventure game, its structure is really about making choices, solving puzzles and interacting with other characters, albeit in an oppressive regime where you are constantly forced to make moral choices that may or may not involve leaving your family behind while you defect to another country.

Return of the Obra Dinn, on the other hand, is a detective game where you must piece together the narrative of what happened to a merchant vessel that disappeared for five years before finally showing back up as a ghost ship. You use a pocketwatch called the Memento Mortem to explore the moment of death for each crew member you discover and have to solve an enormous logic puzzle that not only fleshes out an absolutely crazy and very involved storyline, but which also involves uncovering the identity of 60 different souls who were aboard the ship. It’s a remarkable game and made even more distinctive by the fact that it approximates the monochrome look of early Macintosh games, though the gameplay itself is in 3D.

There are so many other adventure games I could discuss, and I will mention a few more in our wrap-up episode next week, but for now, let’s close out with one more surprising revival to the adventure gaming genre: full-motion video games.

In 2015, the British game developer Sam Barlow launched an indie game called Her Story that brought back something adventure and mystery games had largely left behind: full-motion video. But the clever idea of Her Story was to treat the video clips as found footage in a badly organized database and to force the player to watch videos to uncover new search terms to learn more about the story of Hannah Smith through 271 clips of police videos. The game’s story involves the murder of Hannah’s husband, for which Hannah at first seems to have an alibi, but as the player investigates the story, they learn that Hannah has a lookalike named Eve who was also involved in not just this situation, but her entire life. The game also ends with a twist I won’t mention, other than to say that it completely recontextualizes everything you’ve watched to that point. It’s a brilliant game, and rightfully considered a classic.

Barlow’s later games, 2019’s Telling Lies and 2022’s Immortality, are similar in structure and are also well-regarded. While I don’t feel either has quite a strong a bite as Her Story, there’s no denying that they are excellent games in their own right.

Another interesting FMV adventure is All Seeing Eye Games’s 2017 release Press X to Not Die, which is basically a campy B-movie style adventure with a goofy zombie storyline and lots of jokey moments that’s capped off with a clown fight in a parking garage. Your choices impact some of the game’s storyline branches, including what sort of clown you fight at the end – is it a birthday clown or a Juggalo? It’s quite reminiscent of old laserdisc-style animated games in terms of its limitations and its overall length, but it’s still a fun one worth the $3 it normally costs to play it.

But the most prolific maker of modern Full Motion Video adventure games  has got to be Wales Interactive, an indie game studio from the UK that started to get some attention in 2016 for its neon-colored, Tron Legacy-style first person adventure puzzler Soul Axiom before taking things in a very different direction with the FMV adventure The Bunker the same year.

The Bunker was actually developed by Splendy Games and tells the story of a thirtysomething man who grew up in a fallout shelter following a nuclear attack on England in 1986, and as he attempts to fix the air filtration system, he goofs up and has to flee the radiation he’s accidentally unleashed, bringing back repressed memories of what happened to the other survivors who used to reside in the bunker along with him and his mother. The story’s interesting and the acting is great, but the game is basically just the length of a feature film with cable TV production values, with fairly limited interactivity.

Even so, The Bunker was popular enough to get Wales Interactive to seek out other FMV games to publish, leading to the 2017 release of CtrlMovie’s Late Shift, the 2018 release of D'Avekki Studios’ The Shapeshifting Detective, and starting in 2020, the release of a huge number of FMV adventures including The Complex, Five Dates, Ten Dates, I Saw Black Clouds, Night Book, Bloodshore, Who Pressed Mute on Uncle Marcus?, Mia and the Dragon Princess, The Isle Tide Hotel and Dead Reset. None of these games is particularly well-regarded, but they are definitely there for those who can’t get enough of FMV gaming.

And with that said, I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but we’re still not quite done with our look at adventure gaming in the modern era!  In our next episode, we’re going to wrap things up and talk about where things are going from here for the adventure gaming genre. And don’t worry – I have a few more hard to categorize games to talk about that we’ve missed, and we’re going to get to them!

And get ready, because two weeks from now, we’re moving on to platform games! We’ll look at how games like Space Panic, Pitfall!, Popeye, Jungle King, Burger Time, Elevator Action, Mr. Do!’s Castle, Pac-Land, Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong helped cement a style of gameplay that Super Mario Bros. took off with and which we’ve never looked back from. We’ll talk about computer games like Jumpman, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy and Hard Hat Mack and we’ll also talk about why the genre struggled in the translation to 3D. It’s going to be a fun series, and I can’t wait to get started!

 

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 (probably) 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 Sword of the Sea, a 2025 release from Giant Squid that is absolutely one of the most gorgeous games I’ve ever played. The game’s similar to Abzu or Journey in that you’re a character in a surreal world that responds to your progression through it, but the idea this time is that you’re surfing around on a magical sword and restoring life to a world that’s grown devoid of it. In the opening area, you do this by surfing around desert dunes and searching for energy portals and shrines that restore water back to a ruined desert… as well as fish that start floating in the sky, adding a visual cue to where you need to go next and also just adding a lot more beauty into the world in general.

The game’s visuals are wonderful enough, but the Grammy-winning music by Austin Wintory elevates what’s already great into an experience that’s just magical. The chill vibes of surfing around on your sword, searching for ways to progress and never really worrying about nailing specific tricks or obtaining any sort of score makes Sword of the Sea a game you largely play for the relaxing design it has to offer, and while there is a story that’s told through wordless interactions with another character, where the game really excels best is when it’s just content to surprise you with new ideas and fun new twists on the mechanics you’ve already mastered.

The only complaint I have about Sword of the Sea is it’s too darn short. The 2-3 hours of gameplay it provides are magical, but I was surprised when it was over and really wish there was more. But I can always play it again, and I won’t be sorry to – like any great piece of art, there’s plenty there to enjoy the second or third time around.

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

In this episode, we’re going to talk about attempts to grow and evolve the genre of adventure gaming in the 21st century through publishers such as Telltale Games and genres like walking simulators!

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Season 1, Episode 15: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 13

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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SOURCES:

https://www.ign.com/articles/how-hidden-nazi-symbols-were-the-tip-of-a-toxic-iceberg-at-life-is-strange-developer-deck-nine

https://www.eurogamer.net/tales-from-the-borderlands-sales-werent-great

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Coming up in this episode –

We’re going to focus our attention on Telltale Games and also at the first-person genre of adventure games we now know as Walking Simulators as we look at how 21st century game developers attempted to use more modern game development philosophies to grow and evolve the adventure game genre!

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!

In our previous episode, we talked about many of the efforts in Europe to keep adventure gaming going by either moving into 3D or continuing on with point and click development.

But Telltale Games was one of the few standard-bearers in North America in the 2010s willing to try to not just bring the genre back, but make it relevant again, and it’s not surprising that they had a huge influence on adventure gaming despite ultimately having to close their doors a decade and a half after they started.

The studio was founded by Kevin Bruner, Dan Connors and Troy Molander, all of whom had worked at LucasArts and seen the hand writing on the wall after the cancellation of Full Throttle 2 and Sam & Max: Freelance Police, two sequels that had been in production following the release of Escape From Monkey Island but which certainly weren’t going to pull in the Star Wars-style sales figures LucasArts had grown accustomed to.

And that sort of fulfilled an old prophecy George Lucas supposedly had offered to the LucasFilm Games staff back in the 1980s when he’d held back the Star Wars license for precisely that reason – back then, he’d wanted his studio to create new things, not become the house of Star Wars games. Once LucasArts turned to the Dark Side and started making more money on their crummiest Star Wars games than they could have with their best adventure games, it was too late.

And so Telltale Games embarked on a mission to do something LucasArts wouldn’t – make a new Sam & Max game.

Creator Steve Purcell was onboard, but the license LucasArts owned to Purcell’s intellectual property had to expire first. While Telltale waited, they built a 3D adventure game engine called the Telltale Tool and start honing their craft on the casual game Telltale Texas Hold’em, several CSI games created for Ubisoft, and two episodic mini-adventures based on Jeff Smith’s Bone comics: Out From Boneville and The Great Cow Race. Both Bone games were point and click adventures rendered in 3D, and both also included voice acting and reasonably close adaptations of the source material, though I’m not the biggest fan of every choice they made for the character voices. Gran’ma Ben in particular just doesn’t sound right.

Telltale also established a formula with these games that would become synonymous with their style – offering small environments and fairly easy puzzles so the games could instead focus on storytelling and progression. Each Telltale adventure includes dialogue that gives the illusion of choice but doesn’t really change that much based on the actions you take or the decisions you make.

In later Telltale adventures, the game would sometimes tell you, “This character will remember that,” but often, the impact on the story would be very small. In the Bone games, choice is even less of a factor because the game sticks so closely to the comics; what you have instead are some selectable dialogue exchanges that put everything into a question and answer format and then minigames that pad the gameplay and interactivity out a bit. It’s fine, but it also makes them even less replayable than most adventure games because there’s really nothing new to see once you’re done. And that was a major criticism of both Bone games – they were short, expensive and not exactly a revolution in adventure gaming.

Now, I’d like to pause here and say if you’ve never read the Bone comics series, it’s one of the all-time great independent black & white comics and it’s absolutely worth your time and trouble to track down, especially in the colorized Scholastic editions. It’s sort of like the newspaper comics page by way of J.R.R. Tolkien, but it’s truly an original story with fantastic characters, a really gripping overarching plot and plenty of moments of comic relief. My biggest disappointment in Telltale’s adaptation of the Bone series is that they didn’t stick with it. The initial plan was to release five chapters over a season, but with middling reviews, poor sales, limited awareness of the license and the urge to get things going on Sam & Max, Telltale didn’t have much reason to continue.

So, here’s what happened instead. Telltale Games recruited several ex-LucasArts developers who’d been working on the Sam & Max sequel there and began adapting the IP to a six-episode format known as Sam & Max: Season One designed and written by Brendan Q. Ferguson, Dave Grossman, Jeff Lester, Chuck Jordan, Heather Logas and, of course, the series creator Steve Purcell himself. Everything had to be distinct from the cancelled LucasArts sequel, so entirely new characters and plots had to be created.

But Telltale needed funding for the game, and so they turned to the subscription service GameTap, which provided funding and promotion in exchange for launching each episode of the game on its service before general release. The first two episodes launched in late 2006 for Windows, with the other five coming during the first four months of 2007. Eventually, it also made it to the Wii and Xbox 360 and was retitled Sam & Max Save the World. Telltale also released fifteen machinima shorts built in the game engine featuring Sam and Max getting up to mischief between episodes. This was back before YouTube was a big thing, by the way, so online video shorts featuring game characters were still something of a novelty, especially when they were made by the publisher.

Steve Purcell additionally released a series of twelve comic strips called Sam & Max: The Big Sleep that were so well received he won an Eisner Award for them in 2007 for Best Digital Comic.

While Sam & Max was a hit among the fanbase, the game was more of a slow burn among the general public, in part because PC gaming was going through a weird transition during that time and in part because Telltale self-published the game digitally and was primarily relying on word of mouth and GameTap to promote the game. Though Sam & Max Season One was available on Steam in mid-2007, that platform still hadn’t taken off yet as a popular way to buy games, and while the game got a collector’s edition physical release through Telltale and a retail release through The Adventure Company, that didn’t mean much during a time when PC gaming was largely seen as dying and many retailers were shrinking their PC gaming sections down to bestsellers or dropping PC games altogether.

Another problem with Sam & Max Season One is that Telltale Games hadn’t quite figured out how to make their episodic format feel substantial. The first three chapters, “Culture Shock,” “Situation: Comedy” and “The Mole, the Mob and the Meatball” are wildly uneven, and the third one in particular is probably the worst chapter in the entire series.

On the other hand, “Abe Lincoln Must Die!” is tremendously funny and was even released as a solo standalone free download for those wanting to try the series out, and “Reality 2.0” evokes the original Sam & Max: Hit the Road’s VR sequence and also introduces the support group for outdated electronics known as the Computer Obsolescence Prevention Society, or C.O.P.S., who even have a great motivational song about how they aren’t useless despite the fact that yeah, they kind are.

Well, maybe not the arcade game Bluster Blaster, but he still comes on a bit strong.

The final chapter, “Bright Side of the Moon” not only references one of the great Sam & Max comics but also feels like a fitting end as the duo takes on the season’s big bad, the ultra-annoying Emetics founder Hugh Bliss.

Oh, and did I mention Max becomes president of the United States along the way and that the duo’s famous DeSoto becomes a presidential car for the final two episodes? Or that there’s a text adventure game to play through at one point? Or that there’s a mecha-Abraham Lincoln who goes on a rampage? Or that there’s a door guarding Secret Service agent whose codename is Superball?

Because he’s really, really good at being a bouncer, get it?

The second season of Sam & Max games from Telltale, which are now called Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space, debuted later in 2007 and then continued monthly into 2008, this time with five episodes instead of six. By this point, Telltale had hit its stride, and the quality of each episode was more or less at the same high level as the others – though I personally liked the third chapter, “Night of the Raving Dead,” the least.

Even with that one serving as the low point, you can’t deny this season has the right stuff – Sam and Max get to team up with their neighbor, the tough guy detective Flint Paper, they get to visit the Fountain of Youth and find out what happened to all the people who mysteriously vanished around the Bermuda Triangle and they also get to visit Hell and meet Satan himself. They get to attend a wedding between the robotic head of Abe Lincoln and their friend Sybil Pandemik. Oh, and they may also be responsible for the Big Bang thanks to a mix-up with a time traveling flying saucer piloted by a mariachi who simultaneously exists in the past, present and future. It’s wonderfully weird stuff.

Telltale went on to make a third Sam & Max series in 2010 called The Devil’s Playhouse that pitted the duo against the invading alien General Skun-ka’pe and gave Max psychic powers, including a big finale where Max turns into a giant monster and goes on a rampage across New York!

But before that happened, Telltale grabbed some other licenses and made some other interesting adventure games in the same style. The first was Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, a five-part series based on the Homestar Runner web cartoon series from the Brothers Chaps, Matt and Mike Chapman. Even today, it’s one of my favorite of all the Telltale adventures because it’s really well-crafted and funny.

Homestar Runner was already a natural fit for adventure gaming because the Chapmans had created several mini-adventures on their website from 2004 to 2006 under their fictional Videlectrix label such as Thy Dungeonman 1, II and 3, which are all text adventures in the style of old games like Vampire’s Castle and Zork, and the King’s Quest-style graphical adventure Peasant’s Quest, in which you have to vanquish the rampaging Trogdor the Burninator. Telltale’s approach to adventure gaming worked quite well for the property, and the point and click mechanics managed to feel approachable since the game would frequently cut away to different camera angles or perspectives when anything interesting was happening.

I love Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People because it does such an impressive job of bringing the world of Homestar Runner to life, and even the episodes that I didn’t think would be quite as good as the others wound up being incredibly amusing and added some nice variety to the gameplay. The humor’s exactly what you’d expect if you’re a fan of the webisodes, there are tons of Easter Eggs and fun little references to discover, and there are even minigames you can play in Strong Bad’s game room, including an interactive series of Teen Girl Squad cartoons you can design to try to make Strong Bad laugh at his own terrible creation.

Telltale followed this one up with Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures in 2009, featuring four episodes in the style of Aardman Animation’s stop motion animated series. While I wouldn’t call these games bad by any means, they never quite capture the spark of the Aardman originals and really aren’t that exciting to talk about. Even diehard fans will be disappointed because Wallace is voiced by his alternate voice actor Ben Whitehead rather than Peter Sallis and the humor feels very forced in places.

Telltale’s other big release in 2009 was Tales of Monkey Island, which I mentioned in a previous episode when we covered the latter Monkey Island games in more detail. It’s a great series that feels true to the originals – particularly Curse of Monkey Island, which it seems to be the most closely inspired by - and once again takes advantage of the heritage Telltale had in having so many former LucasArts developers on staff.

If you’re a fan of the Monkey Island games, it’s a great time, and the low level of difficulty is made up for by a well-crafted storyline.

But it and the third season of Sam & Max were also the end of Telltale’s experiment with making adventure games in the traditional mold, because starting in 2010, Telltale Games adopted a bold new strategy:

Making adventure games based on popular media like The Walking Dead, Batman, Game of Thrones, Borderlands, Fables, Jurassic Park…

…and in their first game of a new decade, a sequel to the Back to the Future trilogy.

When Telltale Games first announced it was working on a Back to the Future adventure game in 2010, many people were rightly skeptical. First of all, this game was planning to offer a new semi-canonical adventure for a story that was already resolved in its film trilogy – and remember, they destroyed the DeLorean in the end before Doc and Clara and their kids headed off for new adventures in their steam engine! - and the idea of a sequel series seemed a bit unnecessary.

But also, Telltale’s adventure game designs didn’t seem particularly well-suited to an epic theatrical license like Back to the Future, and indeed, the game wound up being very linear and had such easy puzzles that its inclusion of a hint system seemed like an insult to any seasoned adventure gamer. It looked like a step in the wrong direction even if Michael J. Fox was giving his blessing and Christopher Lloyd, no stranger to adventure games after starring in Toonstruck, was willing to come back and voice Doc Brown himself.

And actually, though Marty McFly was voiced pretty amazingly well by A.J. LoCascio, Michael J. Fox did sneak in later and record a few cameos as future Marty and also his ancestor, William McFly. The later 30th anniversary edition of the game even brought back Tom Wilson to re-record lines for Biff Tannen, who’d been voiced by soundalike Andrew Chaiken in the earlier game.

Finally, fans weren’t really sold on the cartoony look of the game, especially when the first episode came out and the game felt and sounded like the Saturday morning cartoon adventures of Marty and Doc rather than a true continuation of the story, and the constant use of the film’s orchestral music in the background made things feel even less congruent.

Personally, I found the visual style of the game quite jarring, and though it was preferable to an uncanny valley approach or some terrible FMV, the action and the set piece moments didn’t work quite as well in the Telltale Tool as they might have in a more sophisticated 3D game engine.

But let’s set all that aside. The game takes place six months after the movie and involves a new problem in 1986 – Doc Brown’s gone, his estate’s being foreclosed on and Marty’s had dreams of Doc Brown vanishing from the timeline and is worried someone nefarious, like Biff Tannen, might get their hands on Doc’s notebook with all his research notes about time travel. The DeLorean mysteriously appears outside, and Marty finds a tape recorder inside with Doc Brown’s voice summoning him to 1931. This kicks off a series of misadventures that take place in different eras of Hill Valley as well as an alternate version of 1986 and basically covers a lot of the same territory as the films, though this time, it’s Doc Brown who becomes the bad guy in the alternate timeline.

If that sounds like an adventure you’re eager to experience, Back to the Future: The Game’s got about 12-15 hours of story for you to go through, though word of warning – since it got delisted from digital storefronts, it’s started commanding collector’s prices for physical versions.

As Back to the Future: The Game took Telltale’s formula and made it more casual and approachable for mass audiences, gamers really had to decide if they were going to get onboard with Jurassic Park: The Game, which came out in 2011 shortly after Back to the Future was finished. I’ll just add, by the way, it was no accident both of these licenses even got picked up – Universal was floating them around at the time trying to get ancillary products made, and Telltale Games saw the potential to use them to build a broader audience. Keep in mind as well that this was four years before Jurassic World came out in theaters and revived the franchise. In 2011, Jurassic Park was still a dinosaur of a film property without much going for it.

This Telltale adventure was notable for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was their first game to include actual deaths, which went against the LucasArts-style philosophy they’d initially adopted, but which did allow the game to feature some actual stakes as players faced dangerous dinosaurs on Isla Nublar in a brand new storyline where no one’s safety was guaranteed. Second, the game integrated quick-time mechanics for various actions, ditching the traditional point and click style and instead giving players limited 3D movement control over the characters and cameras and playing up the opportunities for action and drama.

Jurassic Park: The Game also went for a more realistic style for its character designs and dinosaurs, making things feel more cinematic and in line with the film franchise rather than like a cartoon adaptation. The voice acting almost feels like it was sourced from filmed scenes where people were actually acting on a set, and the script often goes for linear storytelling with limited interaction rather than the typical Q&A dialogue tree format adventure games are known for.

And I’m going to say – these were the right choices, but once again, the Telltale Tool was not up to depicting a story like this in a believable, cinematic way. A lot of the scenes happen at night or indoors because that version of the game engine can’t render big, impressive scenes very well. The cast of characters are also even more forgettable than the guys in Jurassic Park III, and that’s really saying something.

Suffice it to say that critics were merciless to this game, calling out Telltale for making what was essentially an interactive movie with limited interactivity and also making a dinosaur game with very little wonder to it.

Here’s the thing, though. Jurassic Park: The Game was actually a decent seller, in part because it was made available for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 as well as the second generation iPad. Despite a troubled launch and really negative reviews, it found an audience, and Telltale adapted a lot of the same ideas towards their next big series – 2012’s The Walking Dead, a series that was incredibly well-received as a modern day classic despite being quite similar to the execution of Jurassic Park.

So, what happened to make The Walking Dead so much more popular? It’s not just the IP, because there have been plenty of lousy Walking Dead games. It’s actually the characters themselves. The first season of the game establishes very strong relationships between the convicted criminal in need of a second chance Lee Everett and his adoptive daughter in need of a protector and role model Clementine, and since everyone is depicted in a shaded, comic book style with heavy black lines and designs that neither look too realistic nor too cartoonish, the art design is able to pull off the game’s dark and serious story without looking like an inferior version of the television show or a knockoff of the original comics.

I would even hazard to say that Telltale’s Walking Dead series is better than the source material because it appropriately captures the horror of the setting while also using the limitations of the Telltale Tool to create tension and a feeling of being constantly boxed in by the zombie-like walkers, who limit your progress and constantly threaten your survival.

The first season of The Walking Dead is a parallel story to the comic book storyline and even includes some intersection with Hershel Greene and Glenn from the comics. But once the story is strong enough to stand on its own, it really does, and the sixth episode, also known as “400 Days”, even introduces five new characters who are integrated into the subsequent episodes.

The next three seasons really becomes Clementine’s story, and though Season One is the high point, the quality stays pretty high as the games go on, reflecting player choices over time and gradually making players feel like they’re playing their own personal version of the story shaped by their decisions. The final season, which launched in 2017, did a good job of giving the series an unsurprising but fitting conclusion.

Telltale also made a three-part standalone story in 2016 called The Walking Dead: Michonne that focuses on the popular comics and television show character during her sojourn away from Rick Grimes. It was generally well-received, and it also showcased a rebuilt version of the Telltale Tool that added in a few more opportunities for action and set piece moments.

Another Telltale adventure that really turned heads was also based on a comic book  – this time, Bill Willingham’s Fables, a long-running Vertigo Comics series about refugee fairy tale characters living in district in Manhattan called Fabletown where an enchantment called glamour helps to keep them disguised. This game, set a couple of decades before the comics, stars series favorite Bigby Wolf, Sheriff of Fabletown, investigating the decapitation of a prostitute Fable named Faith, which leads him down a rabbit hole that involves a corrupt Ichabod Crane, a trollop posing as a sexy version of Snow White, Georgie Porgie running a strip club called Pudding ‘N Pie, a pawn shop operated by the Jersey Devil and a shadowy figure called the Crooked Man, who has Bloody Mary and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum working as henchmen.

If you can’t tell from my description, this game is dark, even moreso than the comics it’s based on, and while I won’t say it’s a faithful adaptation of Bill Willingham’s long-running series because it has a much grittier, more serious feel to it, I will say it’s a fantastic game that really goes out of its way to realize Bigby Wolf as a character and to make him feel like a hard-boiled detective who’s trying to keep himself civilized and law-abiding while suppressing his violent animal impulses. It’s certainly one of Telltale’s finest adventures, but it’s also definitely not for kids.

A sequel has been in development at various points, but it’s unclear if it’ll ever come out.

Another really surprisingly good game from Telltale Games was the 2014-2015 series Tales From the Borderlands, an adventure game sidestory designed with oversight from Gearbox Software. I absolutely love this game, and it’s by far my favorite of all of the Telltale Games from the 2010s. Set a few years after the events of Borderlands 2, the game focuses on two sets of characters.

The game brings all these characters together eventually for a series of misadventures, but things start in medias res with the fast-talking main character getting ambushed by a masked mercenary and then dragged off into the wastelands. The main character has to explain everything that’s happened up to this point, and so he begins by introducing the characters.

The first is a group of Hyperion employees including Rhys Strongfork, his buddy Vaughn and their co-worker Yvette, who are all jockeying for position within the competitive bro-culture of the corporation and who are definitely being held back by Hugo Vasquez, Rhys’s rival who’s been promoted over him. Rhys has a cybernetic arm, an electronic eye and a desire to become the next Handsome Jack, and Vaughn is a squirrelly little accountant who goes through a major transformation as the game’s five chapters unwind.

The second is a duo of thieving sisters named Fiona and Sasha on Pandora who work with their adoptive father, Felix, who taught them everything they know about pulling cons. But when the girls try to scam Rhys and Vaughan during a secretive deal, a group of Psychos break in and steal the money, and Zero, one of the Vault Hunters from Borderlands 2, barges in and starts killing everyone. Sasha and Fiona flee along with Rhys and Vaughn, and they all have to escape Sasha’s psychotic boyfriend August, who believes she blew up the deal on purpose.

This all kicks off a pretty wild series of misadventures as everyone works towards getting the money back and getting Rhys and Vaughn out of trouble, but this leads to Handsome Jack’s AI-backup consciousness getting uploaded into Rhys’s eye and guiding Rhys to get into even more trouble. Meanwhile, Fiona and Sasha have to deal with the fallout of their own botched deal. And all of this converges on a much bigger storyline that includes several more characters from the first two Borderlands games and the pre-sequel as well as some amazing moments of action, drama and laugh out loud humor.

One of the most famous scenes in the game involves a shootout on the Hyperion space station, but it’s all part of an epic game of finger guns where the corporate employees pretend to unleash pistol fire, shotgun blasts, machine gun spray and grenades on one another and fall down dead while the custodial staff just ignores them and keeps on sweeping. It’s an insanely funny scene that sounds incredibly stupid but which truly fits the tone. The writing in this game is so sharp and funny that even its most over-the-top ridiculous moments are comedy gold.

Another thing Tales From the Borderlands does really well is utilize licensed music tracks and stellar voice acting. Besides the returning voice actors for Claptrap and Handsome Jack from the earlier games, Troy Baker, Laura Bailey, Nolan North, Patrick Warburton and Chris Hardwick headline a very talented voice cast. And the soundtrack includes some truly great tracks – Jungle’s “Busy Earnin’”, Shawn Lee & Nino Mochella’s “Kiss the Sky,” The Rapture’s “Pieces of the People We Love,” Twin Shadow’s “To the Top”, James Blake’s “Retrograde” and First Aid Kit’s “My Silver Lining.” All of these are used to match the emotion of each chapter and go along well with the game’s score by Telltale’s house musician and sound director Jared Emerson-Johnson.

After Tales From the Borderlands came out and really stuck the landing with its final two chapters, stories started coming out about how Telltale was in serious financial trouble during its development. The lower than average sales meant Telltale’s management saw the game as a failure, and they nearly cancelled the game midway through, but some passionate team members convinced management to leave a skeleton crew working on the game to see it through. Ironically, Tales From the Borderlands is probably the best-regarded of all of Telltale’s games, and the final chapters on which that skeleton crew worked are so much stronger than the first two that it feels like Telltale was throwing everything they had at this game.

It’s funny how sometimes passion comes across like that. And while Telltale’s later output was still very good, it never quite reached the peak Tales From the Borderlands was able to achieve.

I’m not going to linger too long on the next several Telltale Games titles because they’re all good, but none of them is quite as defining as the titles that came before them. If you enjoy the IPs these games are based on, you’ll have fun with them. And if you’re not interested, you can skip them without worry.

Game of Thrones was in development in 2014-2015 along with Tales From the Borderlands and basically released each of its chapters around the same time. The game is a sidestory to the HBO television series but focuses on House Forrester, a family from North Westeros that doesn’t have much intersection with the events of the show. That’s not to say that you don’t occasionally see a familiar moment or character – the first episode starts during the Red Wedding and kicks off a surprise succession in House Forrester that sets up much of the plot. If you want to see Jon Snow, Tyrion and Cersei Lannister, Margaery Tyrell, Ramsay Snow or the Mother of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen, they all make appearances, though they’re only occasionally important to the plot.

Personally, I never really dug this one, and part of it is because the characters have a sort of illustrated style that borders on cartoonish but which can’t quite sell the nuanced character emotions the plot demands. A lot of characters just seem to be constantly sneering and glum and there’s not a lot of joy in anything that happens. I realize that’s on brand for the IP, so if dark adventure games with lots of politics and psychopathic violence and gratuitous use of profanity are your thing, this one’s not too bad, and its six episodes do at least tell a complete story that fits within the broader continuity of the show. And hey, it’s better than the last few seasons of the show itself.

But if you have kids in the house, let me instead recommend Minecraft: Story Mode from 2015-2017, a two-season series that even got released as an interactive experience on Netflix between 2018 and 2022. Unfortunately, the game’s delisted from digital storefronts now, so finding a physical copy means paying some inflated prices. But if you enjoy Minecraft, the game is rendered in the same style and has lots and lots and lots of references and in-jokes that land a lot better than they did in the live-action movie.

The premise of the game is that a long time ago, a group called the Order of the Stone defeated the Ender Dragon. Flash forward to the present day, where a group of friends named Jesse, Axel, Olivia and Petra are headed to EnderCon along with their pig, Reuben. A bunch of stuff happens to contextualize all of the Minecraft trappings – the characters build things, there’s a survive in the wilderness scene where zombies and skeletons and creepers come out at night, and there’s an iron golem that gets loose and so forth – but eventually, the plot centers on the Order of the Stone getting attacked by a bad guy named Ivor who unleashes a Wither Storm. This causes Jesse and his friends to take up the mantle of heroes as they work to rebuild the Order and put a stop to the Wither Storm… even if it means that not all of them make it to the end of the story.

But that’s really just the first few episodes. The first season also included three continuing adventures for the friends and the second season introduced an entirely new villain called the Admin while retaining Jesse as the main character.

And one of the neat things about Jesse is you can play the character as a male voiced by Patton Oswalt or a female voiced by Catherine Taber. This game also has a stellar voice acting cast made up of many famous comedians or actors like John Hodgman, Brian Posehn, Corey Feldman and Yvette Nicole Brown and professional voice actors who’re well known for being in cartoon shows like Billy West, Dee Bradley Baker, Jim Cummungs, Kari Wahlgren and Phil LaMarr, among many others. Paul Reubens – Pee Wee Herman himself! – voices the villainous Ivor, and one of the adventure chapters in Season One even includes five famous Minecraft Youtubers.

Suffice it to say that if your family loves Minecraft, this game’s a good time. The first season’s a tad uneven, with episode two being a huge disappointment before you get back to the good stuff in episodes 3, 4 and 5, but season two is more consistent. The three DLC adventure chapters in season one, while inessential, are amusing enough.

Batman: The Telltale Series is also an easy recommendation, and it, too, has a stellar voice cast and brings back the visual style of The Wolf Among Us and Tales From the Borderlands to gave everything a dark-lined comic book veneer. The first season starts off fairly weakly and gradually gets better as it goes before fizzling out at the end, but the second season, titled Batman: The Enemy Within, is among the best things Telltale has ever created.

Surprisingly, the second season’s plot involves yet another origin story for the Joker. He’s not the only villain – it includes interactions with the Riddler, Catwoman, Mr. Freeze, Bane, Harley Quinn and Amanda Waller, but it’s so well-done and contextualizes the Joker in such an interesting new way as a friend of Batman’s who gradually turns to evil by cutting corners and reaching the conclusions Batman dares not to consider that it really ought to become canon, even if it does upend Harley Quinn’s origin story in the process.

Even so, with so many great Batman games to play, I’m not really sure an adventure game with action primarily derived from quick-time events was needed, and it was always sort of a head-scratcher why Telltale Games decided to pursue this license instead of something a bit less overexposed. I would have loved to see Telltale do something with the Green Arrow or John Constantine or the Green Lantern Corps rather than tell yet another story about Batman. My advice is to skip Season One entirely and just play The Enemy Within to enjoy its storyline.

Another game that isn’t a must-play but which is enjoyable is 2017’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series, which was the last new game, and not a continuation of an existing series, to be released by Telltale Games before they went kaput in 2018. It’s actually not quite as impressive or memorable as the later action game from 2021 developed by Eidos Montreal, but if you enjoy the James Gunn-directed films and also want to battle Thanos without worrying about the Infinity Gauntlet, this game does offer a fun combination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe take on the characters and the comic books.

Oh, and since Thanos dies in the first chapter, the game goes in a pretty wildly different direction than the movies, though it still features the same basic characters – Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Rocket, Groot and even Nebula, Yondu and Mantis, the Nova Corps and the Kree as well as the villain Hala the Accuser.

One of the more interesting things about Guardians of the Galaxy is that your choices actually do carry some serious weight compared to other single-season Telltale adventures, and the endgame even lets you resurrect someone DragonBall-style if you bothered to keep and power up a device called the Eternity Forge instead of destroying it. This also gives the game some replayability if you want to see some of the other avenues in which you can take things.

Telltale Games closed its doors in 2018, but there is a company operating as Telltale Games today, and they released the episodic adventure game The Expanse in 2023, co-developed with a developer called Deck Nine. I have not played it myself, and from what I’ve read in reviews, it’s a fairly typical Telltale-style game. If you enjoy that IP, give it a try.

Deck Nine is also responsible for the last few Life is Strange adventures, but I’ve steered away from them after True Colors, in part because the games Before the Storm, Double Exposure and Reunion all really look like fanservice to me without having anything new to say, but also because Deck Nine got busted back in 2024 inserting Nazi symbols into one of the Life is Strange games during development and also reportedly has had a toxic workplace culture full of harassment and racism. I’d rather support other developers, thanks.

But speaking of Life is Strange, let’s talk about it for a moment, because it’s one of many adventure games that came out in the wake of Telltale Games’s best years of output and definitely has some similarities. The first game was created by Dontnod Entertainment, a French development studio that created the interesting and very underrated 2013 action adventure game Remember Me before releasing Life is Strange through Square Enix in 2015. Though this created a series that Deck Nine would eventually continue, Dontnod managed to get a sequel out in 2018-2019 as well as a mini-adventure called The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, one of the most emotionally charged free games you’ll ever play!

The original Life is Strange was released in five episodes and follows Max Caulfield, a student at Blackwell Academy in Arcadia Bay, Oregon who discovers she has a strange precognitive power to see the future and also to rewind time to undo the actions of other people. After Max saves her childhood friend Chloe Price from being killed by an angry boy named Nathan Prescott, Max and Chloe become close friends again and start trying to use Max’s powers for good. Unfortunately, the further they get down their heroic path, the more dangerous things become, and it turns out Max’s powers not only attract the attention of a fearsome serial killer but also will cause a storm that will destroy Arcadia Bay as a consequence of her using her powers to save Chloe’s life. Max has to make a choice – sacrifice Chloe or let the town be destroyed.

Of course, much more happens than that, and part of the joy of the game is seeing the characters grow closer and face adversity together in the beautiful backdrop of the Pacific Northwest. Due to the close relationship between Max and Chloe, the game’s long been viewed as queer with Max as a bisexual character who has romantic feelings for Chloe if the player wishes for her to. Square Enix has always tried to downplay the sexuality of the series, but it’s not ambiguous, and LGBTQ+ fans have long championed the game as a step in the right direction for representation.

Life is Strange 2 is interesting in that it does not follow up on these themes at all, instead behaving more like an anthology story related more thematically than canonically to the first game, though a few loose connections do exist. It was released in parts across 2018-2019 and stars two brothers named Sean and Daniel Diaz who are running from the police after a tragedy and attempting to make it down the West coast to reach their father’s hometown in Mexico. Daniel is only 9 years old, but he has telekinetic powers, and Sean, who is 16, has to guide and protect him. Like the original Life is Strange, there are tough choices to make that impact the ending, and this time, they depend on Sean’s willingness to surrender and the level of morality he instilled in his brother Daniel during their trek. It’s honestly a really good game that might have been better off if it wasn’t called Life is Strange 2, because fans were initially disappointed that it didn’t continue the first game’s story. And yet I think it has just as much to say about American society and the treatment of unhoused people, Hispanic families with second-generation immigrants and the brutality and callousness of law enforcement.

The only one of the Deck Nine Life is Strange games I can recommend without reservation is their 2021 release Life Is Strange: True Colors, the first game in the series to not be released episodically and which stars an openly bisexual character named Alex Chen who can see colorful emotional auras and read and even manipulate peoples’ emotions. It’s a decent game with some good writing, a great cast of characters and a nice setting called Haven Springs, Colorado that’s just as gorgeous as the Pacific Northwest, but the game’s linearity undercuts what the previous games were known for – monumental choices.

Don’t Nod, which used to be one word and is now two words after a rebrand, created a new adventure game released in two parts in early 2025 with the frankly terrible title of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. I haven’t played it myself, so I can’t comment on its quality, but I do know the two-part release schedule was intended to build hype to get players talking. It didn’t have the intended effect at all and Don’t Nod clearly needs some tips on marketing if they’re going to continue to self-publish, but I have heard from people who’ve actually played the game that the first half is decent while the second half leaves some people satisfied and others really cold.  

Since we’re already talking about games that came out in the wake of Telltale’s output, let me mention a few more, all of which had some involvement from previous Telltale employees.

Oxenfree is a 2016 side-scrolling adventure game created by Night School Studio, which was founded by the former Telltale Games developers Sean Krankel and Adam Hines. And while the two studios maintained a close relationship until Telltale went under in 2018, it was actually Netflix who’d wind up picking the studio up and making it part of its games division, ultimately releasing Oxenfree II: Lost Signals in 2023. Both of these games are more action-oriented than your typical adventure game and also involve a lot more exploration, but they’re great-looking, well-made and fun to experience.

Night School Studio also released a similar graphic adventure called Afterparty in 2019 about two college students going on a total bender in Hell as they try to outdrink all the demons there. It’s definitely an odd one.

A more recognizable adventure game is Star Trek: Resurgence, a 2023 game by Dramatic Labs, yet another developer founded by former Telltale Games employees. The game takes place in the original The Next Generation continuity following Star Trek: Nemesis and even has Ambassador Spock included as a character aboard the USS Resolute and Commander Riker showing up later in the game as an ally, voiced by Jonathan Frakes himself!

The gameplay is very similar to a Telltale-style adventure, but the graphics are far more sophisticated and do a good job of depicting realistic-looking characters and environments. Unfortunately, the game’s a bit choppy in places and has some middling minigames, but I’m honestly surprised it didn’t make a bigger impression – it’s exactly the sort of Star Trek fans have been clamoring for, and it’s got a great story. Do yourself a favor and check this one out.

I also need to mention last year’s adventure game success story Dispatch, a serial adventure game released across eight episodes by AdHoc Studio, founded by Michael Choung, Nick Herman, Dennis Lenart, and Pierre Shorette, some of the team members who worked on those three truly great Telltale Games, The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us and Tales From the Borderlands. And Dispatch, more than any other game I’ve played, really channels the style of the mid-2010s Telltale Games with animation-quality cel-shaded graphics, some fantastic character moments and episodes that create emotional peaks and valleys to keep you invested. It also includes a strategy component where you literally dispatch superheroes to solve problems and an occasional hacking minigame.

You’ve definitely gotta play this one. Oh, and the game’s also known for being a little spicy, so be careful playing it around kids even if it does look like a cartoon.

One more offshoot I’d like to mention is the 2016 game Firewatch, which was created by a developer founded by Telltale Games’s Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin called Campo Santo that was eventually acquired by Valve.

Firewatch is a first-person adventure game where you follow a fairly linear plot that’s very heavy on dialogue and spectacle but which restricts player choice. It’s a great and fairly short story-heavy game that’s well worth playing, and it gives us a great opportunity as well to segue into other first-person adventure games known by the once-derisive name of Walking Simulators.

I’m going to be honest and say that I don’t know what the first true Walking Simulator actually was – or, if you prefer, environmental narrative adventure game or narrative exploration game, which are some of the many other terms I’ve come across trying to describe this subgenre of adventure.

I don’t even think everyone agrees on what the term actually means – is it the sort of game that forces you down a particular path with a linear story, or is it a game where your choices matter? Is it a game that rarely challenges you to do more than push a button or complete a quick-time event, or can it include some puzzle-solving and character interactions? Is it a first-person game where NPCs squawk at you via a radio, or can it be a third-person game or a game where you can speak to NPCs who exist in the game world?

Or is it literally just a game where you walk around towards a goal until the story’s over, hence the rather insulting name that was slapped on these games before it was embraced by gamers as an apt description of their gameplay?

Which games even are Walking Simulators? Most people wouldn’t classify thatgamecompany’s Journey or Playdead’s Limbo as a Walking Simulator despite the fact that both are basically an adventure games where you continue moving forward. The trio of indie games QWOP, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy and Baby Steps are also, likewise, literal walking simulators that most people wouldn’t associate with the adventure genre.

But most people would call Fullbright Company’s Tacoma a Walking Simulator despite the fact that you’re literally floating through a space station rather than walking for parts of the game.

Where does Galactic Café’s The Stanley Parable fit in with its choice-driven gameplay? What about Dear Esther with its non-linear story?

And aren’t some of these games just basically a more linear form of what Telltale Games was doing anyway?

So here’s what we’ll have to agree upon – like so many categories for subgenres of games, it’s all about vibes, and we have to fall back to the “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it” rule when it comes to Walking Simulators.

Rather than try to cover all of them, let me just mention a few that are really noteworthy and encourage you to check them out.

One obscure one that I’d absolutely check out is the 1998 Japanese PlayStation game LSD: Dream Emulator from Outside Directors Company and Asmik. It’s a truly unusual game about wandering around in dreams and shifting from dreamscape to dreamscape. Many dreams are randomized and there’s no real point beyond your own interest and amusement. As such, it’s probably the purest distillation of what a Walking Simulator is, because it’s all about your subjective experience as a player.

Another very obscure one is from 2009 by the Belgian developer Tale of Tales and it’s called The Path. The premise begins as a simple take on the story of Little Red Riding Hood – you guide a girl down a path using a third-person perspective and pay a visit to Grandmother’s house, which you explore in the first-person. There are six girls to choose from, and each more or less has the same experience. But then the game lets you know that you missed a number of things along the way, and on your replay, you need to take your girl off the path and see what there is to find. Every girl has a different surreal adventure, and what the story means is mostly up to you as the player, though the game does provide some clues.

But the games that most people would associate with Walking Simulators started coming out in 2012 and 2013 as digital indie games, and two of them, Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable, were based on Half-Life 2 mods while Gone Home, Proteus, Thirty Flights of Loving and The Unfinished Swan were all new games that were quite visually distinctive.

Dear Esther was first released in mod form in 2007 by a group called thechineseroom and thus is probably closest to the origin story for the Walking Simulator as a distinct genre of adventure gaming because it’s a short, story-driven game sort of like a full 3D version of Myst where you explore an island and trigger narrations that provide context, backstory and motivation for your adventure. The game doesn’t have any puzzles, combat or interactions with other players; you literally just wander around until you reach the ending, which allows you to take flight. The team that made the game went on to create the similar 2015 Walking Simulator Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, a game that puts me to sleep every time I try to play it, and the 2013 and 2024 horror games Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Still Wakes the Deep, which have a lot of the same design ideas.

The Stanley Parable first appeared as a mod in 2011 and was created by Davey Wreden and William Pugh with narration by Kevan Brighting. The game was subversive and fun, messing around with the player by trying to direct him or her to follow narrated instructions and then changing what could happen in the unfolding game based upon the player’s choices, leading to six different storylines. The game’s an absolute blast and so self-aware of what it’s doing that much of the fun comes from trying to antagonize the narrator and break free of the linear confines of the storytelling. Much like Portal, the game also eventually shows you the behind the scenes and helps you to understand that everything you’re experiencing is a lie of some sort or another.

A standalone release came out in 2013, and a 2022 remake called The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe not only added in a bunch of new content, but also a meta discussion about the game’s reviews on Steam, the need for collectibles, an item Stanely can carry around in the form of a bucket, the focus topics for sequels and so much more. Even if you’ve played the original, the remake’s worth your time!

Brendon Chung’s Blendo Games’s Thirty Flights of Loving is a brief experience that tells an action story out of order using cube-headed characters, and while it’s a sequel to a 2008 adventure platformer called Gravity Bone, it’s a pure Walking Simulator, right down to having you wander around a museum exhibit on the Bernoulli principle. Critics gave this game great reviews, but I remember being furious at it when I bought it during a Steam sale, played for 15 minutes and had no idea what I’d just experienced. It’s freeware now, and I’d recommend its 2016 follow-up Quadrilateral Cowboy instead, as it’s more of an actual game.

Proteus is a minimalist indie game that’s essentially like LSD: Dream Simulator, except instead of walking through dreams, you walk through seasons over the course of about half an hour. There’s no real story, and it’s really more of an experience than anything else.

But Giant Sparrow’s The Unfinished Swan is definitely an interesting take on the Walking Simulator genre because you begin in a completely white area and have to shoot paint splotches to reveal the contours of the world around you, giving everything a black and white painted appearance as you gradually uncover a castle leading to a huge labyrinth. The game eventually drops the need to paint everything to see it and gives you other puzzle-solving powers instead, and it becomes sort of half Walking Simulator, half Portal-style 3D puzzler later on.

And speaking of Portal, let’s go ahead and mention both it and its sequel now, because they are adjacent to, and had a strong influence on, the Walking Simulator genre due to their linear paths, heavy use of narration and tendency to force you, as the player, to break free of the psychotic computer GLaDOS’s attempts to murder you like she apparently has other test subjects who’ve come through her chambers. Portal came out in 2007 and was based on a 2005 student game called Narbacular Drop, and while it was a fairly short and easy experience on its own, Valve decided to include it with the 2007 Half-Life 2 compilation known as The Orange Box and also to eventually sell it as a budgetware digital and physical game. The game took on a life of its own due to its sleek design, fun first person puzzler gameplay, sense of humor and, of course, meme-worthy references to cake and a killer Jonathan Coulton song that played over the end credits, sung by GLaDOS herself and letting the player know that she was “Still Alive.”

Portal 2 debuted in 2011 and expanded the gameplay and the story, introducing a number of AI orbs within the Aperture Science test facilities and also delving deeper into the backstory of the experiments as well as what happened to all the other humans. This game felt like even more of a Walking Simulator in some places since so much of the game involved narration from offscreen characters.

Airtight Games decided to make their own Portal-style game with 2012’s Quantum Conundrum, another Walking Simulator-style puzzler with narration by John DeLancie, the actor who played Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation. And many similar games have followed in the same vein, such as Croteam’s 2014 first person puzzler The Talos Principle, Pillow Castle’s 2019 perspective-based puzzler Superliminal, Sad Owl Studios’s photography-based 2023 puzzler Viewfinder and Dogubomb’s 2025 hit randomized mansion exploration puzzler Blue Prince.

And speaking of house explorations, let’s go back to Walking Simulators for a moment, because we still need to discuss Gone Home, a game developed by a team called Fullbright Company who’d just worked on Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den and who wanted to apply many of the same design ideas to a smaller, more personal story that didn’t involve any action. The result was a game where you play as Katie Greenbriar, a 21-year-old who returns home after an overseas trip to find her family gone, things in boxes and a note from Katie’s 17-year-old sister Sam begging her not to go digging around to find out what happened.

The resulting investigation involves wandering around the house, picking up items, hearing snippets of Sam’s journal and searching for clues. The story is famous for revealing a teenage romance between two girls and the parents’ unwillingness to accept it, making Gone Home an interactive experience that resides alongside Life is Strange as one of those adventure games bringing visibility to the stories of folks in the LGBTQ+ community.

Fullbright Company released their next game, Tacoma, in 2017, and as I mentioned, it takes place aboard a space station and involves playing as an astronaut named Amy who has to piece together what happened to the crew by using the ship’s AI and an augmented reality system to uncover the entire story.

Another game that came out in 2017 is What Remains of Edith Finch, made by Giant Sparrow and starting out somewhat like Gone Home before revealing itself to be a game where the 17-year-old Edith Finch can see through the eyes of other people or creatures as she explores the tragic death of everyone in her family. It’s a clever and extremely surprising game that makes the most of its brief length to deliver a very interesting story.

A few other Walking Simulator-style games worth mentioning include the following:

·         The 2014 adventure puzzler The Vanishing of Ethan Carter from the developer The Astronauts, which involves exploring a decrepit coastal community and solving supernatural puzzles while using paranormal powers to investigate the deaths of people in the town

·         The 2015 horror-themed Walking Simulator SOMA from the developer Frictional Games, where you have to uncover why you were abducted from your apartment and have found yourself in an underwater station populated by aggressive mutant creatures.  Frictional’s earlier Penumbra games are more horror-themed, but also worth a look.

·         The 2016 Myst-style game Quern: Undying Thoughts, which is more of a first person puzzler than a pure Walking Simulator, though it still involves a story gradually told through narration or hearing from offscreen voices.

·         The 2021 hitchhiking game Road 96 from DigixArt Entertainment in which you play a runaway teenager who’s trying to make it to the border as you escape a fictional country that’s under totalitarian rule, but which really resembles the United States. The game is broken into randomized vignettes and plays sort of like a roguelike since you can’t pick exactly what happens, but much like a Walking Simulator as well since the scenes generally give you limited control and are heavy on exposition and telling a broader story.

·         The 2021 adventure game The Forgotten City by Modern Storyteller, which started life as a Skyrim mod but then became a full-fledged first person adventure game with characters who follow a daily clock and interact with each other. The game takes place what seems to be a Roman-themed afterlife setting and you find yourself trapped in a time loop, forcing you to have to change how each day goes to solve the mystery of the Forgotten City and free its inhabitants. There are multiple endings, and they’re all worth seeing.

While the Walking Simulator genre definitely sounds terribly dull, many of the games I just mentioned are extremely well-regarded and deserve to be played. Be sure to check ‘em out!

One game that really hasn’t fit neatly into any of our discussions is 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, a 2016 3D historical fiction adventure game set in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution that uses a Telltale Games style to tell its story. You play as photojournalist Rez Shirazi, who’s being interrogated in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. The game then flashes back to different time periods before and during the revolution where you take control of Reza and make decisions that impact the game. If you’re unfamiliar with the history of Iran or the context of this revolution on the modern-day state, this is a game you absolutely need to try. It’s not a deep dive into the era by any means and it’s way too short – it’s about the length of a feature film - but it’s enough to make you want to go crack open a history book or watch some documentaries to learn more about the era. The only bad thing about the game is that both of its endings conclude with a cliffhanger, anticipating a sequel that never happened.

By the way, the man interrogating you is played by Navid Negahban, the actor who brilliantly played Amahl Farouk the Shadow King in the FX series Legion, which is one of my favorite shows of all time. And Bobby Naderi, who plays Reza, is most famous for being in the 2024 movie The Beekeeper and he’s really good here too. And that’s on top of a very talented cast of, from what I can tell, mostly Persian actors.

Given how many games have depicted the Middle East as a warzone where everyone’s an enemy combatant, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday is remarkable in the kind of story it tells and the attention to detail it shows in trying to recreate the chaos of the overthrow of the Shah. And who knew that 10 years later, this game would become amazingly relevant? Be sure to check it out.

Our focus in this episode has been largely on 3D adventure games, but if you were to ask people today what adventure gaming is, they would still probably steer you towards the point and click genre. Why? Because the fires are burning brightly again for this style of gameplay, and we’re now spoiled with so many choices it’s hard to play them all!

So in our next episode, we’re going to look at a different philosophy Amanita Designs, 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 (probably) 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 Rakuen, a 2017 point and click adventure by Laura Shigihara. If you don’t know that name, you probably do know Plants vs. Zombies, in which Laura Shigihara was responsible for the sound, music and that fun song at the end, where she’s the voice of the sunflower. She’s also contributed music to a number of games and even recently released a 3D animated music video called “Colony VI” about cute animal astronauts who have a rather unfortunate odyssey where one of the crewmates has to sacrifice himself to save the others.

And if that sounds like a surprisingly dark plotline for a song about cute creatures, just know it’s very much in line with Shigihara’s self-published games, Rakuen and Mr. Saitou, which both have some joyful and wonderful moments atop a surprisingly bleak foundation. But since Mr. Saitou is really more of a side story to Rakuen, I of course recommend playing it as a chaser to the main course.

Rakuen is about a boy who’s in a hospital with a serious illness and who discovers that a book his mother has given him called “Rakuen” has gone missing. The boy retrieves it from an old vagrant named Uma who’s hiding in unused portions of the hospital, and when his mother comes to visit, she reads the story to him about a fantasy world that contains Morizora’s Forest that’s ruled by the great wish-granting spirit Morizora and which is populated by cute, large-eared creatures called Leebles and talking plants and animals.

The hospital is also populated with other patients who are sick or dying, and many of them have some sort of sadness that the boy resolves to correct by doing errands for them or trying to find ways to help them. The boy and his mother find a gateway to Morizora’s Forest, where they find Leebles who are similar to the people in the hospital with the same names and some of the same problems. But the forest is also haunted by wandering spirits called envoys that are trapped between the two worlds, and their presence is causing Morizora to sleep. And so the boy and his mother work to solve the problems on both sides and retrieve the parts of a song needed to awaken the great spirit so the boy can receive his wish.

The undercurrent running beneath all of this is terribly sad, and one of the inspirations for the game was the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Shigihara wrote a song called “Jump” for a digital album benefitting disaster relief, and she says that this was the start of the idea of the game. The game itself has several vocal tracks and some really gorgeous music – no surprises there! – and while it looks like a JRPG, it’s an adventure game through and through with light puzzles and absolutely no combat. If you enjoyed To the Moon, this game will be right up your alley.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/559210/Rakuen/

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

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

In this episode, we’re going to talk about visual novels, that particularly Japanese style of adventure game that also led to dating sims, murder mysteries and more! 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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SOURCES:

“What is a Visual Novel?” academic paper - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3474712

https://danganronpa.fandom.com/wiki/DISTRUST

https://otomekitten.com/glossary/

https://princessmaker.fandom.com/wiki/Father_Marriage_Ending_(PM2)

https://www.eurogamer.net/unfinished-symphony-castlevanias-keeper-speaks

https://www.famitsu.com/news/201506/29081240.html

https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/projectbook/koei/3

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Coming up in this episode –

We’re going to talk about console and handheld visual novel-style adventure games and the shaping influence they had on the adventure gaming genre as they also evolved into other types of games such as murder mysteries, dating sims 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!

In our last episode, I talked a little bit about the visual novel genre as we discussed Capcom’s Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, which debuted outside of Japan in 2005 on the Nintendo DS. I know it was the first game I ever really played in that style, and it honestly took me by surprise because I had no idea it was part of a much longer tradition of visual novels in Japan.

And I want to say right off the bat that the term visual novel is loaded because it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. The purest definition of a visual novel is a game in which the story is being told to the player with little deviation beyond perhaps some choice mechanics that have a bearing on where the story goes or how characters respond.

Some visual novels are pure stories. Some allow you to choose your own path through branching stories. Some involve romance which are also known as nakige or “crying games”, and some are adult eroge that have sex and nudity in them. Some are detective stories. Some include other styles of gameplay that might be part of a visual novel include role-playing, horror, strategy, puzzle-solving or minigames.

An academic article from 2021 titled “What is a Visual Novel?” by Janelynn Camingue, Elin Carstensdottir, & Edward F. Melcer examined 30 different definitions and 54 visual novels and attempted to craft a unified definition.

Here it is:

A Visual Novel (VN) is a digital narrative focused game that requires interactions where the player must be able to impact the story world or the story’s progression. The story and interactions are most commonly presented through a text box and often employ additional forms of interaction including menu choices—which often contain sets of actions that the player character can perform—or dialogue options representing the player character’s speech or thoughts. Crucially, VNs have On-Click Progression, where the player clicks, taps or presses a button to see the next part of the story. The aesthetics of VNs are most often conveyed through static images of characters, background art, sound effects (SFX) feedback, and soundtracks.

Whew! That’s a mouthful. So for our purposes, we’re going to look at visual novels in three particular styles: storyline adventures, detective adventures and dating simulators. And if a game or series hasn’t received a major release outside of Japan, I’m not going to provide much detail beyond a quick namecheck.

There’s another problem, too – I really can’t tell you what the first visual novel is. Some of the earliest proto-visual novels include Enix’s 1987 science fiction game Jesus, Hideo Kojima’s 1988 game Snatcher and System Sacom’s 1988 game DOME, which was part of its Novel Ware series. What most people seem to agree established the format more or less the way we see to it today is Chunsoft’s Sound Novel series, which began in 1992 with studio founder Koichi Nakamura’s Otogirisō.

Chunsoft, if you are not aware, has long been the co-developer the Dragon Quest games along with Enix, so this completely tracks. Chunsoft’s 1994 murder mystery game Banshee’s Last Cry and 1998 day in the life of eight characters game Machi followed in the same vein.

But remember how I mentioned before that many Japanese publishers tended to make adult-oriented eroge adventure games? Well, another studio named Leaf formed in 1995 and created a four-part “Leaf Visual Novel Series” starting in 1996 that included Shizuku, Kizuato, To Heart and the later Routes. Each of these was definitely geared towards a mature audience and Kizuato in particular is shockingly dark and violent. To Heart became the foundation for a popular series that spun off into anime, manga and audio dramas.

Also in 1996, a studio called ELF, best known for eroge adventure games like the Dragon Knight series and the Dōkyūsei dating sims, released a landmark science fiction visual novel called YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World that apparently featured such a compelling story that it was ported to the Saturn and Windows without the sex. I have not played it myself, but it was localized by Spike Chunsoft in 2019 for Windows and modern consoles, and it’s also been adapted as a manga and anime OVA.

Yet another eroge studio released a visual novel in 1997, and this one, a horror game this time, was called Moon – not to be confused with the game Moon: Remix RPG Adventure that we just discussed! While the name of the developer was Tactics, the team behind it jumped ship the next year to create the developer known as Key, which would go on to create 1999’s romantic games Kanon and 2000’s Air, both of which received sanitized releases after their initial adult versions shipped. Key went on to create the all-ages 2004 game Clannad, and it’s for this game we should pause and take a closer look, because Clannad is widely considered to be one of the best visual novels ever created.

The word Clannad is derived from the name of an Irish band that performed as a family known as the Clann of Dore, or Clannad for short, which caused the game’s writer to think the word meant “family.” And family is a major theme in the game’s story.

The game tells the story of a high school student named Tomoya Okazaki who begins the game in a toxic relationship with his abusive father following the passing of his mother. He meets a sickly girl named Nagisa Furukawa who is quite socially awkward and who is trying to restart the school’s drama club. Tomoya helps her and meets the four other girls who star in the game. This is the meat of the game, where you can pick different paths and explore the first half of the game, the School Arc, a fairly well-written social sim with some good character stories. If you enjoyed the social links in the Persona games, you’ll enjoy Clannad’s first half. One of the main objectives involves collecting items called “Orbs of Light,” and as you do so, you can unlock the second part of the game, the “After Story.”

And here’s the twist – the game shifts into the future where Tomoya and Nagisa are married, and what occurs in that future is one of the most emotionally affecting stories you’ll ever experience in a video game. Beyond the events that occur, you keep seeing glimpses of this place called the Illusory World, a realm Tomoya sees in visions that is inhabited by a lone girl and where he is a wandering spirit. This world has a spiritual and psychological connection to his story in the real one, and in order to see the game’s true ending, Tomoya has to come to understand its significance and collect the remaining Orbs of Light.

Clannad is a very long game – easily 40-50 hours long due to the need to complete every facet of the School Arc and then made longer by the need to replay the After Story to achieve the true ending. If you don’t want to bother with that sort of commitment, there’s an anime TV series from 2007-2009 that covers both arcs over 47 episodes and two OVAs. It’s well-regarded and worth watching even if you like the game, though some folks really seem to hate the particularly large and widely spaced eyes Nagisa and the other female characters have.

Key went on to create a long series of visual novels after Clannad, and their most recent one, the all-ages adventure Anemoi, actually comes out this month in Japan and centers around a man and his sister returning to their childhood home in rural Japan for the reopening of a time capsule buried ten years ago.

Another studio known for visual novels was KID, a video game developer that made a lot of action console games in the 1990s – including the cult classic Pepsiman! – before creating two very popular visual novel series that are known as the Memories Off series, which first launched in 1999 and is still going strong today with over a dozen sequels, prequels and spin-offs, and the Infinity series, which started in 2000 with Never 7: The End of Infinity and continued on into games including Ever 17: The Out of Infinity, Remember 11: The Age of Infinity, the spin-off 12Riven: The Psi-Criminal of Integral and the reboot Code_18.

Though these games are all science fiction titles, Ever 17, Remember 11, and Never 7 also have a thematic tie-in to the Zero Escape series by establishing the premise of trying to escape from enclosed places. This is not an accident; they share a writer, the incredible Kotaro Uchikoshi.

But let’s now turn to another visual novel series that can probably rival any of these games for popularity, and that’s the Science Adventure series, which begins with the 2008 game Chaos;Head and then was followed up by Steins;Gate in 2009. There are currently six main chapters in this series, and each of them is comprised of two words with a semicolon in between: Robotics;Notes, Chaos;Child, Occultic;Nine and Anonymous;Code. There’s also a new Steins;Gate sequel on the way with the name I guess will be Steins semicolon three question marks, which only a Japanese visual novel studio would think is a good name for a game.

The Science Adventure series is primarily developed by a studio called Mages and directed by Chiyomaru Shikura, who has also written the theme music and credits songs for the games. Suffice it to say he takes these games very seriously, and the mythology and lore that extend from them is pretty sprawling and way too complex to summarize here. In the first game, Chaos;Head, you play as a character in the Shibuya district in Tokyo who seems to be having a psychotic break seeing things that aren’t there. As you might expect, the story gets a lot crazier from that premise, and I don’t even want to try to explain what happens. Play it and find out!

Steins;Gate is the sequel, and while it takes place a year later in Akihabara, it’s a game about time travel and it’s by far the most popular entry in the series, with several spin-offs, a prequel and a sequel, and even a Famicom-style retelling. Steins;Gate is a great entry point into the series, and if you want to see if you’ll be up for the rest, it’s well worth your time. There’s also an anime adaptation if you prefer to watch it, and you won’t be disappointed if you do – over 24 episodes, it arguably tells the story better than the game and is widely considered one of the best anime series ever made, shifting gears about halfway through from really good to amazingly great.

There are a lot of other visual novels out there – more than I’d ever care to describe. But don’t worry – we’re not done yet! In fact, we’re just getting started as we now delve into a subgenre of the visual novel – detective adventure games!

Detective adventure games have long been a staple of the Japanese form of the adventure game genre, and whether you’re talking about Nintendo’s Famicom Detective Club, Riverhillsoft’s J.B. Harold Murder Club, Data East, WorkJam or Arc System Works’s lengthy Jake Hunter series, you’ll find that pretty much all of these games owe their style to one game in particular: Yuji Horii’s 1983 game The Portopia Serial Murder Case, which, as I’ve already mentioned, went on to not just establish the Japanese adventure game format, but also the basic mechanics for the JRPG.

Unfortunately, most of these games never made it outside of Japan, and while Riverhillsoft did port the first Murder Club to the DOS PC and the TurboGrafx CD in two very different versions in 1989 and 1990, that series has also largely remained in Japan aside from a couple of super obscure ports for the LaserActive format, both of which are essentially just FMV mysteries.

So, let’s jump forward to the 2000s, because this is the first time in which most American and European gamers got much of a chance to play the detective style of Japanese adventure games. We covered the Ace Attorney series in our last episode, and Phoenix Wright and his friends helped pave the way for even more mystery-style visual novels on the Nintendo DS as well as the PSP, 3DS and Vita down the road.

But there was another Nintendo DS game that came out in 2005 that offered a mystery to solve in visual novel style with some point and click adventure gaming puzzles thrown in: Cing’s Trace Memory, also known in Europe as Another Code: Two Memories. The premise of the game is that you’re a teenage orphan named Ashley Robbins who’s been raised by her aunt in suburban Seattle. But Ashley starts having nightmares about a traumatic murder and then receives a package from her father in advance of her fourteenth birthday. Inside is a device and a message telling her to come to Blood Edward Island. Ashley and her aunt travel there and Ashely meets a ghost boy named D who’s trying to understand why he’s dead.

The two begin exploring the Edward family mansion and learn the truth of Ashley’s memories as well as her family’s connection to the Edward family and more about D’s mysterious past. There’s a lot to uncover, including a device that creates fake memories, hence the name of the game. And there’s also a sequel on the Wii that was only released in Japan and Europe called Another Code: R – A Journey into Lost Memories which continues the story, and fortunately, both games received a 2024 remake on the Nintendo Switch released worldwide called Another Code: Recollection, though there are quite a number of changes from the original games.

Cing also released three Nintendo DS games that offered an interesting conceit – hold the system sideways, like a book! The first of these was 2007’s Hotel Dusk: Room 215, a detective story where former cop and current traveling salesman Kyle Hyde is stuck with several other people in a hotel out in the middle of nowhere and winds up investigating the staff and the other guests to solve the mystery of room 215. Once again, there are a few puzzles present, but the game’s mostly about following a fairly linear storyline where you mostly have to be careful not to antagonize the guests and earn a game over screen for making poor choices. In 2010, Cing released a sequel called Last Window: The Secret of Cape West in Japan and Europe with a more dynamic storyline, but otherwise following a similar structure.

And Cing also released a 2009 game in the same vein called Again in both Japan and North America, this time starring an FBI agent named Jonathan Weaver, or just “J,” who can use psychic powers to see scenes from the past. Unlike the other two games, which have a distinctive sketchy art style, Again uses digital scans of actors and looks more like a police procedural show. It’s not as awful as reviews of the era might lead you to believe, but it’s certainly not great.

Three other handheld games in a similar vein are BeeWork’s 2006 release Touch Detective, also known as Mystery Detective in Europe, Capcom’s 2010 game Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective and the indie game Corpse Party, which first appeared on the PC-88 in 1996 as an RPG Maker game and eventually was ported to the PSP, 3DS, mobile devices and modern consoles in the 2010s by Team GrisGris and the developer now known as Mages.

Touch Detective is the oddball of the bunch mechanically; it’s a point and click adventure game with really stylized cute character designs and a point and click stylus-driven interface. I really should have included it in the last episode, but because it’s a Nintendo DS game with some very chatty characters and inner monologues, it tended to get lumped in with the Phoenix Wright and Another Code games in reviews of the era.

The premise is that that you’re a young girl detective named Mackenzie who has an affinity for touching objects to aid her powers of deduction. The first Touch Detective offers four cases plus a bonus case. The second game, titled Touch Detective II ½, debuted in 2007 on the DS, but the third was initially only released in Japan on the 3DS until a compilation including all three games plus a few other bonuses was released on the Switch in 2022 with upgraded graphics. If you like point and click adventure games with a very heavy Japanese feel, these are worth your time!

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective looks like a point and click adventure game due to its pixel art characters and action sequences, but it’s similar to the Phoenix Wright games in some ways – no surprise since it’s by the same creator, Shu Takami. The premise of the game is that you’re a ghost named Sissel who doesn’t know why he was murdered, but who’s tasked with investigating and then preventing other murders by using his ghostly powers to go back in time 4 minutes and then apply his haunting “ghost tricks” to the environment to change the outcome of the event.

It’s a neat game that’s told over 18 chapters and which includes some adventure-style puzzle solving as well as a lot of dialogue amidst a ton of very memorable characters. If you’ve missed this one, play the 2023 remaster available on modern consoles, because it’s an improved experience overall that plays nicely on larger screens.

One more game in the same vein is Corpse Party, which, as I mentioned, started out as a 1996 RPG Maker title in Japan but which was eventually remade for Japanese audiences for Windows in 2008 as Corpse Party: BloodCovered and for the PSP in 2010 in a version called Corpse Party: Blood Covered… Repeated Fear. Later versions, such as the 3DS and mobile games and the modern console remake, are based on these remakes.

While the original game was an RPG, the newer games were adjusted into being adventure horror titles with lengthy dialogue sequences, multiple endings and lots of side story content to explore other characters. The 2011 sequel Corpse Party: Book of Shadows is actually mostly just a bunch of additional side stories taking place within the same storyline as the main game, but then setting up an epilogue for the 2014 sequel, Corpse Party: Blood Drive.

But as it happens, those games are all considered part of the same story; there’s a quasi-official 2013 fan game by Team GrisGris and Grindhouse called Corpse Party 2: Dead Patient. Mages and Team GrisGris are also planning to release an official sequel this year called Corpse Party II: Darkness Distortion scripted by original creator Makoto Kedōin that will offer a new entry point for those who haven’t played the original games.

There is some debate about which genre the Corpse Party games belong in since the games have their roots in the JRPG genre. But the gameplay of the most modern versions of the games definitely feels most like the visual novel genre. The original game and Blood Drive both have do have overhead sequences where you maneuver chibi-ized versions of the characters through the haunted school in more of an RPG style, but the games frequently break away into sequences with static backgrounds, character art and text.

I won’t even try to explain the story in these games – each installment is lengthy and there are lots of characters and plotlines to experience – but what I will say is that you play as Japanese high schoolers exploring a haunted school called Heavenly Host Elementary School that once stood where the high school Kisragi Academy now exists, and a magical incantation winds up transporting some students to the ruins of the old school in a spiritual world filled with the bodies of other students who had also found their way into Heavenly Host and who’ve been forgotten in the real world. The place is haunted by a girl in a red dress named Sachiko Shinozaki who serves as the original game’s antagonist, and once you get past the original content from the first game, things get very twisty-turny with all the character stories involved. The characters are all more or less anime and manga tropes and it’s very easy to get on the path for a bad ending instead of the true one. That’s one reason why some fans prefer to just watch the anime adaptations before playing the games.

But Corpse Party’s mixture of detective work, horror and character relationships doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and there are many other games in the same vein, many of which come from a run of titles created by Spike Chunsoft by Kotaro Uchikoshi and Kazutaka Kodaka.

OK, so a quick history lesson. Chunsoft is a long-time Japanese publisher that was responsible for the Sound Novel series we covered earlier, but in 2012, it became Spike Chunsoft when it was combined with another publisher known as Spike, which was founded in 1989 as Mizuki by a former Enix employee and which took on the name Spike in the mid-1990s as it absorbed an influx of people from Human Entertainment. Sadly, Spike didn’t pick up Kono Hifumi, the director of Clock Tower – he went to a company called Nude Maker to make, you guessed it, the Xbox mech simulator with a $200 controller, Steel Battalion. His colleague Goichi Suda – also known as Suda51 - went on to form Grasshopper Manufacture and some of the other team members went to Sandlot to start creating niche titles like Robot Alchemic Drive and Earth Defense Force.

But many of the Human Entertainment folks wound up at Spike, which was the developer of games like Lupin the 3rd on the Saturn, the King of Colosseum and DragonBall Z Budokai Tenkaichi games on the PlayStation 2 and the publisher of the Way of the Samurai and Kenka Bancho series. Spike also continued Human Entertainment’s Fire Pro Wrestling games.

In 2005, an entertainment and software corporation called Dwango bought both Spike and Chunsoft, and the two created several parallel visual novel-style series. Chunsoft’s creator Koichi Nakamura produced a complex live action FMV visual novel called 428: Shibuya Scramble, which was a spiritual successor to their previous Sound Novel game Machi, a 1998 non-linear visual novel on the Saturn in Japan that was notable for its large city to explore and eight different characters simultaneously experiencing five days of their lives, all depicted with live action photographs. 428: Shibuya Scramble takes place over a ten-hour period told over one-hour segments and features five main characters trying to solve a mystery, though each has a different approach and tone to their story. Even wilder, there are reportedly 87 different possible endings from over a hundred different story paths, which means that this game has loads of replay value. And since it features photography rather than anime characters, it feels more like an interactive TV show, though most of the scenes are stills, not video.

The game also included a bonus scenario about a character named Canaan that was unlocked by achieving the true ending, authored by Type-Moon’s Kinoko Nasu with character designs by Takashi Takeuchi. The Canaan story shifts to a more conventional anime look and even spawned an anime television sequel series. And the live action director Jiro Ishii went on to Level-5, the makers of the Professor Layton series, to produce a Japan-only 2012 game called Time Travelers for the 3DS, PSP and PlayStation Vita featuring 3D anime-style character FMV sequences that fit into a massive flowchart of choices dictating how the game unfolds.

In 2009, Chunsoft’s write4 Kotaro Uchikoshi launched another series that became a really big deal on handheld platforms: 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. The premise is that you are a college student named Junpei who’s been drawn into a deadly competition called the Nonary games along with eight other people and run by a character named Zero. The game’s broken up into escape room-style segments to provide puzzles and action and visual novel-style sequences to advance the story. The title pretty much tells you everything you need to know – there are nine hours in which to find a door with the number 9 on it, and since you’re all aboard a sinking cruise ship with sealed exits and windows and will blow up if you try to escape, you have no choice but to play along.

I will not attempt to explain the plot, as it’s not only quite serious and complex, but also far more fun to experience in the game itself. But I’ll mention that the game has two sequels: 2012’s Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward and 2016’s Zero Time Dilemma, which is actually more of an interactive movie than a visual novel and draws some clear inspirations from Time Travelers. All three received amazingly high reviews from many publications and are considered some of the best games of the 21st century. If you haven’t played them, you absolutely must.

Another popular visual novel series that debuted alongside the Zero Escape games began in 2010 with Spike’s Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, written by Kazutaka Kodaka, who’d previously worked on Clock Tower 3, the Jake Hunter games and a video game adaption for the Detective Conan manga series.

During a call for new pitches at Spike, Kodaka came up with a battle royale killing game concept called DISTRUST where 15 teenagers would kill each other over a 7-day period. The pitch started out as a visual novel but gradually added in the elements for which the series would become known – trials, deduction minigames, investigations, anime trope characters and a mysterious authority figure with black and white halves – originally a human-like robot named Phantom who looked like a boy on one side and a visible anatomy doll on the other. The concept gradually morphed into the first Danganronpa game and Phantom evolved into the series mascot, the evil black and white robot bear Monokuma.

I remember playing the original Danganronpa game on the PS Vita in 2014 and first wondering if it was a Persona 4 knockoff with some Phoenix Wright trial elements because, at least superficially, it felt like a weird fusion of those two games combined with some ideas from the Japanese film Battle Royale about high school students killing each other on a remote island. Even so, the game surprised me with its strong sense of comedy atop its bleak backstory and surprisingly strong main characters, and I was absolutely stunned by the ending, which contained some pretty amazing twists explaining how the “Ultimate” students who’d been selected to attend the prestigious Hope’s Peak Academy had been drawn into a killing game without any knowledge of the craziness going on in the world outside. I think it’s pretty safe to say that if you go into Danganronpa without knowing anything about the game or the anime and manga it ultimately spawned, you will be absolutely shocked when the game drops its last set of twists in the final chapter.

The same is true for the first sequel, and one of the first titles for Spike Chunsoft once they merged together in 2012, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. The sequel has an entirely new cast of characters – well, one of them looks familiar and certainly a lot fatter than before, but keep playing! – and absolutely jerks you around with a new killing game set on an island resort and a sort-of secondary antagonist named Nagito Komaeda who is both supremely lucky and also completely nuts, often throwing a wrench into the gears of any attempt to make progress in the game. Once again, there’s a big twist towards the end which is completely wild, and I honestly love the second game as much or maybe even a little more than the first. Again, go in knowing as little as possible and you’ll really enjoy it, and that includes skipping the sidestory action game Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls until you’ve finished the first two.

The third game, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, came out in 2017 and it’s a true love it or hate it sequel, featuring some of the best characters and moments in the entire series but also some of the worst contrivances and plot twists. It’s super self-aware and serves as a broader commentary on society’s obsession with competitive reality show-style games sacrificing young people for entertainment. Suffice it to say that this sequel is basically non-canonical where the other games are concerned and doesn’t need to be played if you don’t enjoy what it does early on to apply its first big twist.

Spike Chunsoft has made a few spin-offs to capitalize on the popularity of the anime and manga extensions of the series, and there’s also a new game coming up this year called Danganronpa 2×2 that’s essentially an alternate take on the second Danganronpa game. I personally don’t have high hopes for it, as I feel the series pretty much did everything it can do, but for those who can’t get enough, I guess it’s an option!

Two other Spike Chunsoft games I want to mention are 2019’s AI: The Somnium Files and 2023’s Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, both of which are new enough that I don’t feel a lot of need to describe them – you can easily play them right now on modern consoles or Steam!

AI: The Somnium Files is a visual novel by Kotaro Uchikoshi that alternates between reality and dream worlds called Somnia. As Kaname Date, a detective who delves into dreams to try to solve a murder of a young woman who’s had her left eye removed, you and your cybernetic AI-powered eye Aiba investigate a trail of clues leading you down five different paths that are broadly categorized in the left and right routes depending upon where you take your investigation.

It’s a really cool story with excellent 3D sequences, great voice acting and a lot of twists and turns to suit its nonlinear story. There are even two sequels, 2022’s AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, which partially takes place six years after the first game with a new main character, and 2025’s No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files, which takes place between the two games as a side story.

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is co-written by Kazutaka Kodaka and features a detective named Yuma Kokohead who’s followed around by a cute spirit named Shinigami solving mysteries together. Much like AI, the game moves between the real world and an imaginary one, in this case a place called the Mystery Labyrinth which is a visual representation of the mysteries that need to be solved. This game plays much more like Danganronpa, though, with Reasoning Death Match sequences, evidence-gathering and minigames to get through portions of the labyrinth. Though it has some of the same psycho-pop neon-infused look and chaotic energy of the Danganronpa series, Rain Code has 3D models and much more exciting animations. Yuma Kokohead has a piece of hair sticking up in the form of a question mark on his head, and Shinigami transforms Sailor Moon style into a scantily-clad goth girl in the Mystery Labyrinth. It’s an enormous game with dozens of hours of mysteries and a great blend of humor and drama.

By the way, Rain Code was developed by Too Kyo Games, which in Japanese means “Too Crazy Games” and it was formed by Kazutaka Kodaka, Kotaro Uchikoshi and the Danganronpa composer Masafumi Takada and character artist Rui Komatsuzaki. And they’ve since released another game in the same vein in 2025 called The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy that has 100 different endings, a school setting full of over-the-top characters and a squishy, sarcastic robot mascot character named Shirei. If that sounds like a wonderful fusion of 428: Shibuya Scramble and Danganronpa along with some tactical RPG combat to boot, then yep, you’re more or less on the money in thinking the game was co-developed by Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi with art by Rui Komatsuzaki and music by Masafumi Takada. So, it’s pretty much guaranteed that if you enjoy any of the Spike Chunsoft games we’ve just discussed, you’ll love this one too!

I want to cover one more topic, and I’m going to keep it brief because I really have little experience with this subgenre of the visual novel – dating sims! But they’re an important style of game to discuss and, quite honestly, one of the most influential in their impact on other genres from farming sims like Harvest Moon to tactical strategy games like Fire Emblem: Three Houses to JRPGs like Persona 3, 4 and 5 to pretty much anything else involving romantic interactions with anime-style girls.

Before we dive in, I’m only going to cover a few notable titles from the 1990s that helped to establish the genre – I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about eroge or hentai or NSFW games or anything else in that vein because it’s far outside my interests, and I’m also not going to get too much into the games from the 21st century. There are just too many!

I also want to take a moment to differentiate between dating sims and another subgenre of the visual novel known as otome, which means “maiden game.” Today, these two genres more or less look alike and it’s just a matter of selecting whether you want to play a game starring a boy or a girl who’s interacting with other characters, and both have strong roots in the bishojo tradition in Japan of products made for girls.

But dating sims have traditionally starred a male character in a harem anime sort of story where he had his pick of a variety of girls while otome games typically starred a female protagonist in a romance story that’s a bit more nuanced and which may or may not involve a large number of suitors. Dating sims are generally meant to project the feelings of the female player on the girls being seduced; otome games are meant to project the feelings of the female player on the protagonist as a self-insert and tend to go beyond mere seduction.

Of course, there are a lot of men in Japan who also enjoy dating sims and otome games, and they’ve also been quite popular outside of Japan with players of all genders, and particularly the LGBTQ+ community. And many of these fans are additionally interested in niche genres like Boy’s Love, Yuri, Amare, Joseimuke and Galge.

So, let’s start with dating sims, which are typically traced back to the 1991 game Princess Maker, which is actually not a dating sim at all, but a child raising simulation in which you are responsible for making parental decisions for an orphan girl during her adolescence and teenage years with the intention of preparing her to become the princess of a fantasy kingdom. In the first game, the daughter’s goal is to marry a prince, but the second game, released in 1993, includes the cringey element of being able to groom the daughter to become flawlessly perfect, avoid romance, and marry you, her adoptive father. Eww.

This game was developed by Gainax, the folks who brought us Neon Genesis Evangelion and FLCL among many other games and anime series, and it spawned a series that’s still producing games today - Princess Maker: Children of Revelation is currently in early access on Steam and planned for release later this year. But even though Princess Maker is not a dating sim per se, it established the framework under which many of the dating sims that followed would operate – your success with the various ladies in dating sims depends upon the actions you take, the gifts you give and the stats you raise.

As the player, your job is to maximize your chances for seduction by making the right moves to capture the heart of each girl you encounter, often amidst a time limit such as a schedule or set number of days. Some games allow you to go after multiple girls at once, and others prune your path more narrowly once you’re in a committed relationship.

The game that established many of these conventions is ELF Corporation’s 1992 eroge visual novel Dōkyūsei, which means “Classmates,” where you play as a male student on summer break wandering around different towns in Japan over a 22-day period, meeting fourteen different girls and trying to win their affections while also competing with suitors. While the game initially included explicit scenes and dialogue, ELF eventually released all-ages editions as well. And of course there was not only a sequel, released in 1995, but also an anime OVA series and a spin-off series called Kakyūsei, or “Underclassmates.”

Another notable dating sim is Tokimeki Memorial, or “Heartbeat Memorial,” a 1994 game by Konami that was released as an all-ages title from the start and thus became very popular in Japan. The premise is that you’re a first-year student at Kirameki High School looking for love and you not only have to keep the various girls you encounter happy, but watch out for someone souring on you and gossiping to their friends via a mechanic known as the “bomb” feature.

Interestingly, the scenario writer for the game was Koji Igarashi, who’d go on to work on the Castlevania series. While he got stuck working on a romance game, his girlfriend was working on Castlevania: Rondo of Blood. He would sneak into her office and play that game while asking her for tips on the romance game he was making. The success of Tokimeki Memorial allowed Igarashi to name his next project, which was of course Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. He didn’t work on the Tokimeki Memorial sequels, nor was he involved in the series’ shift to otome in 2002 when Konami released Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side, a sidestory series popular enough to have had its most recent sequel released in 2021.

But the entire otome genre owes its existence to the 1994 game Angelique, created by Keiko Erikawa, the wife of Yoichi Erikawa, with whom she’d co-founded the development studio Koei. That’s right, yet another adventure gaming power couple – and Keiko Erikawa is essentially the Japanese Roberta Williams! Angelique was intentionally created to serve the market of female gamers, and to create it, Keiko Erikawa had built a team called Ruby Party made entirely of female game developers. While Koei’s Shibusawa Kou had to step in to help guide the inexperienced team on the first Angelique, Ruby Party soon became one of the main otome game development teams, and their strategy was pretty simple: create fun games and then create mixed media to go along with them such as manga, drama CDs and anime OVAs. Many other visual novel, dating sim and otome developers followed that same playbook to broaden their appeal to women. And Ruby Party’s Neo Romance series of otome, dating sims and role-playing games established a strong market for games targeted at women in Japan.

Sega, seeing the potential for a mixed media dating sim, began developing a concept first proposed by Oji Hiroi for a theater-based cross-genre game called Sakura Taisen, also known as Sakura Wars, featuring tactical role-playing, visual novel adventure sequences and dating sim elements. Sega wanted the game to be a big hit for the Saturn and commissioned the famous manga artist Kōsuke Fujishima to design the characters and designed the story like an anime television series, complete with an animated intro set to the rousing song “Geki! Teikoku Kagekidan,” which cheers on the game’s Imperial Combat Revue, a troupe of actors who also double as demon-fighting mecha pilots. Their best fighters are the Flower Division, made up of actresses with spiritual powers. As Imperial Navy Ensign Ichiro Ogami, you double as an usher and eventual manager of the theater, and you can also choose which of the girls you’d like to romance as a cataclysmic war with Satan himself gradually escalates in the background.

Sega wanted Sakura Taisen to have a broader appeal than just the bishojo audience, and thus the game really plays up the action. The game was popular enough in Japan to spawn a long-running series and many tie-in media and also to inspire other games fusing visual novel and dating sim elements with role-playing and strategy mechanics. Even so, Sega never saw a market for it outside of Japan until 2010 when they finally released the fifth game, 2005’s Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love in North America for the PlayStation 2 and also in Europe on the Wii. The sixth game, 2019’s reboot simply titled Sakura Wars, got a global release, though it was reportedly not a huge seller.

I mentioned Leaf’s 1997 game To Heart earlier when we discussed their Visual Novel series, but let’s come back to this game again for a moment because it wound up being a big hit in Japan, spawning an anime series and several sequels and remakes. The original PC version was an eroge game, but the console version stripped out the adult content and was better off for it, broadening the audience and offering players a chance to romance ten different girls – including a robot! – and play some minigames amidst a busy school day schedule very similar to what you’d see in the later Persona 3, 4 and 5 games. A more recent version from Aquaplus was released in 2025 under the name ToHeart with no space between the words, but fans of the original seem to be lukewarm on the choices made in the new one.

Of course, To Heart wasn’t available outside of Japan until this recent remake, nor were a lot of the other games we’ve covered. But Red Company and Atlus’s 1998 PlayStation game Thousand Arms was released in North America, and though it’s a role-playing game, it’s best-known for including a dating sim system in which your main character, the womanizing blacksmith Meis Triumph, attracts a few female companions he has to take out on dates so he can increase his intimacy level with them. It’s a really goofy game that’s something of a deep cut for PlayStation-era RPG fans, but aside from Harvest Moon or the Private Actions in Star Ocean: The Second Story, I can’t think of too many other games from the era released outside Japan that included dating sim mechanics.

Let’s close out this section with one more game, the 1999 dating sim Kanon, Key’s first release and definitely an eroge with the same sort of unsettlingly cute anime girls you’ll see in Clannad. But as I mentioned, this game was liked well enough to justify all-ages versions when it hit consoles, and it, too, spawned a number of tie-in media, including anime, manga, light novels, a trading card game and drama CDs. Interestingly, Kanon is not quite as remarkable today as it was when it was released because it’s best-remembered as the game that established a lot of the modern anime visual style used in the genre and which popularized the calmer, slice of life storytelling often found in visual novels, dating sims and otome games. The story only has five paths and it’s not nearly as memorable as Key’s later games, but it and its dreamlike 2000 follow-up Air are still well-regarded as classics today.

We could talk about many other visual novels if we wanted to. One popular game is Doki Doki Literature Club, a freeware game that has since been released commercially and which is best played thinking that you’re just a male student trying to date girls in the book club. There’s the Nintendo DS launch title Sprung, which was reviled by reviewers at the time despite merely being a European ski resort take on the dating sim genre. There’s Hatoful Boyfriend, a game where you literally date birds, and there’s Christine Love’s visual novels Digital: A Love Story, Analogue: A Hate Story, Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story and…

My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress as Him and Now I Have to Deal with a Geeky Stalker and a Domme Beauty Who Want Me in a Bind!!, which is also known as Ladykiller in a Bind.

And those are just a small sampling of the many contemporary visual novels out there, many of which are now being authored by developers outside of Japan. There’s a particularly strong indie scene for LGBTQ+ visual novels and dating sims coming from all parts of the world with games like Butterfly Soup, and there are even parodic dating sims like Panzermadels: Tank Dating Simulator, the Trolley dating sequence in The Trolley Solution or the 2025 game Date Anything which, I’m told, completely misunderstands the genre and is mostly popular among people who don’t actually play dating sims.

One of the reasons for the proliferation of visual novels is that there are easy tools available to make them. In the old days, RPG Maker could be forced into it via plugins, but there are now commercial-grade tools like Visual Novel Maker, TyranoBuilder and Ren’Py with devoted communities and plenty of documentation to make it easy for anyone to make a visual novel and launch it on a modern marketplace. And while a lot of these games really aren’t that remarkable, there are a surprising number that are completely free and high in quality.

Now that we’ve non-exhaustively covered this frankly exhaustingly vast topic, I’m ready to move back to Western games and see how things evolved over the last 25 years as adventure gaming supposedly died and then came back to life. It turns out the rumors of the genre’s death were definitely exaggerated, but the last decade in particular has been an exciting time for the games to grow in commercial appeal!

So in our next episode, we’re finally going to talk about how games like Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, which is also known as The Indigo Prophecy, Microids’s adventure games including Amerizone: The Explorer’s Legacy, the Syberia games, Post Mortem and Still Life and Index+’s really wild Dracula: Resurrection series all moved us forward. And we’re also going to talk about the rest of the Quantic Dream library and Daedalic Entertainment as well as a few of the other European series of note.

And then we’ll bring things to a near-conclusion by talking about the influence of Telltale Games and indie studios like 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. And I’ll also set things up for us to begin a new series to talk about another genre that features progression-based storytelling, lots of variety and a long tradition of evolution in gaming – the platform game.

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 Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, a 2024 game from Panik Arcade and Those Awesome Guys which is, essentially, Super Mario 64 meets Choro Q. I know, I know, I threw you a curveball there by invoking the name of an obscure Japanese game that actually was released in North America for the PlayStation 2 about little cars driving around. And yet that’s what we’re doing in Yellow Taxi – driving a cute yellow cab that can dash or flip as it gets airborne and use its momentum to get to places a taxi probably shouldn’t go, like the roofs of houses or mountain peaks or underwater. It’s built around a hub world with many different non-linear levels you can visit, each of which has objectives and collectibles. Most importantly, the game doesn’t include a jump button, so there’s a lot of puzzle-solving involved in figuring out how to get to those places you can see, but can’t easily visit.

The game takes heavy inspiration from Mario’s 3D outings. There’s a Wario-like character named Morio – spelled with an O – who guides you, and the incredible soundtrack by Jacob Lincke really needs to be listened to on repeat, because it both evokes various 3D Mario game tunes but also puts its own spin on them and creates something wild and new. I think the fact that the game’s designers are Italian and repurposing Mario for their own creation is also sort of cool.

This game’s normally $17 but each to find cheap – it’s $5.26 on Steam today, and I got it in a bundle on Fanatical for about 10% of that along with some other games! – and you’ll have a great time with it. I found myself playing it far longer than I thought I would, and its variety and “what are they going to do next?” sensibility really makes it fun to pick up and play when you need something sort of challenging, but unimposing.

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

In this episode, we’re going to talk about console and handheld adventure games from the 1980s, 90s and 2000s that often offered players a different style of gameplay, but still had those puzzle-solving story-driven sensibilities. 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 12: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 10

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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SOURCES:

https://www.avclub.com/easter-eggs-the-hidden-secrets-of-videogames

https://www.pcgamer.com/80s-adventure-game-onry-senki-took-horror-gaming-in-a-slower-spookier-direction/

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/d/

 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/917844-d/80392231 (Archive of http://www.1up.com/features/kenji-eno-breaks-silence.html)

“What is a Visual Novel?” academic paper - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3474712

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EPISODE 12Coming up in this episode –

We’re going to talk about console and handheld adventure games from the 1980s, 90s and 2000s including a deeper look at a few great titles and an overview of how the genre was shaped by the Japanese adventure game scene!

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!

 

In 1980, Atari released a game for its Virtual Console System, later known as the Atari 2600, called Adventure. The game was originally intended to be a graphical adaptation of the mainframe Adventure that took place in the Colossal Cave by Will Crowther and Don Woods, but designer Warren Robinett ran into a few problems as he was designing the game.

First of all, the console system didn’t have anywhere near the memory that a mainframe computer had, which meant that the game needed to be designed using some very clever techniques designed to maximize the limited available space.

Second, the game’s graphical output was very limited in terms of how it displayed environments, items, characters and enemies.

And finally, the game had to be designed to work with a single-button joystick rather than a keyboard that could accept more sophisticated text input.

Robinett worked on the game for a year while a disbelieving management team tried to discourage him from continuing the project. It went on to be a million-seller for Atari, providing a surprisingly sophisticated fantasy gaming experience for the era and allowing players to explore a thirty-room kingdom, locate items within castles and battle dragons.

Oh, and get pestered by a very annoying bat.

It was a groundbreaking game in 1980, but today, Adventure is more famous for something else – being the first game to contain an “Easter Egg” due to a secret room Robinett hid in the game with a simple credit of himself as the game’s author. The reason he had to hide it at all was because Atari’s President, Ray Kassar, believed programmers were prima donnas and he didn’t want them to receive public credit for their work, both because they were not paid well and because it would make it easier for competitors to poach them. But the hidden room made it in to the final build, and Atari didn’t even know it existed until players started writing in inquiring about it.

According to Steve Wright, who was the manager of the Atari Home video game department at the time, Atari’s management wanted to remove the code for future printings of the game, but he persuaded them that not only would it cost too much to do so, but that gamers would love finding “Easter eggs” like this in their games. It was a metaphor that stuck, and Wright started insisting that every game include something like this, leading to several games at least including the developers’ initials. Adventure is now famous not just for being one of the great Atari 2600 games, but also for establishing the idea of a game developer receiving credit in a home console game.

But by the time the game had shipped, Warren Robinett had moved on to co-found The Learning Company, and the basic ideas and mechanics he’d developed for Adventure went on to shape some of their graphical edutainment computer games including Rocky’s Boots, Think Quick! and the surprisingly sophisticated programming adventure Robot Odyssey. His ideas also shaped a few Atari 2600 games like the Swordquest series and Haunted House, and also 1979’s Superman, which shipped before Adventure and which was built by John Dunn using some of Robinett’s ideas.

But in the wake of the 1983 market crash and the death of the second-generation consoles, adventure gaming on console games transitioned away from Robinett’s style and largely began either adapting the Japanese style popularized by Yuji Horii’s 1983 game The Portopia Serial Murder Case, the Filmation style popularized by Ultimate Play the Game’s 1983 isometric adventure Knight Lore or the point and click style of computer adventure games like Uninvited, Shadowgate and Déjà Vu as well as Maniac Mansion and King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!, all of which, by the way, got actual ports to the NES.

So did Princess Tomato and the Salad Kingdom, a Hudson Soft adventure originally released for home computers in Japan, and also a remake of a 1986 Nihon Falcom computer adventure role-playing game called Taiyo no Shinden: Asteka II that was localized for the NES in North America as 1988’s Tombs & Treasure.

But the NES also got a few original adventure games of its own. One of these is Beam Software’s Nightshade, a 1992 release that’s an honest to goodness point and click adventure with some light combat. Like a lot of adventure games, it’s lighthearted, and the premise is that Metro City’s superhero has been dispatched and a supervillain named Sutekh unites all the criminal gangs under his banner. A trenchcoat and trilby hat-wearing vigilante in sunglasses named Mark who prefers to go by the name Nightshade (but is sometimes called “Lampshade” or “Nightcart” by the denizens of Metro City) decides to take on Sutekh and the four criminal gangs under his control, but he has to solve a number of puzzles to do so. It’s a fascinating game that definitely has become a cult classic over time, but which was almost entirely ignored when it first debuted. Today, it’s far easier to play since you can use save states; the original game had to be completed in a single sitting.

The 1989 NES game Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is also an adventure game, though not a very good one. As Eddie Valiant and Roger Rabbit, you search around Hollywood, Toontown and the surrounding areas for pieces of Marvin Acme’s will. You also have to talk to characters you run into on the street or in buildings and search for items and joke punchlines, the latter of which Roger uses to get out of trouble when Judge Doom’s weasels catch up with him. The game looks great – it was made by Rare for publisher LJN Toys, and it honestly has a lot of good ideas in it, but as an adventure game, it’s boring and repetitive and doesn’t make enough use of the movie’s incredible ideas.

I also consider David Crane’s 1989 NES game A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia an adventure game because it involves exploring a Pitfall II-style world and making use of your blob pal Blobert, who can transform into different things when you feed him various flavors of jellybeans. There’s a puzzle solving aspect to this because you have to deduce the right transformations needed to overcome different challenges that you face and also do a little bit of lateral thinking to understand how the jellybean flavors correspond to Blobert’s powers. The punch jellybean, for example, turns Blobert into a hole because it plays into the phrase “hole punch.” The ketchup-flavored jellybean will make Blobert catch up with you. And the Licorice jellybean turns Blobert into a ladder because… um, they both start with L?

Codemasters also released a 1992 game for its Aladdin modular cartridge system on the NES called Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade, and while it’s a point and click adventure and platformer hybrid, I can’t recommend it as more than a curiosity.

Beyond all of these, a couple of action games infused the Japanese menu-driven style of adventure gaming in some interesting ways. One of those games is Dr. Chaos, which is part Castlevania-style platformer in a haunted house and which turns into a point and click first-person adventure game when you enter rooms. And on the Sega Master System, there’s Spellcaster, a localized port of a game based on the Peacock King manga that starts out as an action sidescroller set in Japanese mythology but turns into a first-person adventure game halfway through.

You might get the sense that adventure games just weren’t very popular on console systems, and you’d be right. What’s far more common are action adventure titles like The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, The Battle of Olympus, Faxanadu or Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest where players have to explore large worlds, collect items or powers and overcome obstacles to progress, with a lighter emphasis on puzzle-solving.

And yet on the Sega Genesis, players did get Scooby-Doo Mystery, an honest-to-goodness Day of the Tentacle-style adventure game starring the Scooby gang. This game debuted in 1995 and was developed by Illusions Gaming Company and it’s honestly really good if you enjoy adventure games. It even breaks up the gameplay into two episodes, and in both of them, Fred, Daphne and Velma get trapped and need help from Scooby and Shaggy. The first is called ‘Blake’s Hotel’ and features a guy in a monster suit who’s terrorizing everyone to scare them out of the hotel, who chases you through hallway doorways and who’s revealed to be exactly who you thought it was once he’s captured. The second is called ‘Ha Ha Carnival’ and it involves a phantom clown who’s scaring everyone on a boardwalk and sabotaging some of the rides. Once again, he’s stopped because of those meddling kids.

I’m not even a big Scooby Doo fan and I had a blast with this game. Give it a try!

Another interesting point and click adventure for both the SNES and the Sega Genesis is the 1994 release Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, though the twist is that you don’t control Pac-Man directly, but instead guide him as he wanders around Pac-Land and shoot at things that might affect him with a slingshot. It’s a very odd concept for a Pac-Man game and its unusual control scheme takes some getting used to. The game’s broken up into four missions with a couple of intermissions to play some classic Pac-Man, but the gameplay and art style more closely resembles the 1984 Pac-Land platform game that adopted a lot of the Hanna Barbera cartoon aesthetics.

Both Scooby Doo and Pac-Man 2 illustrate a trend for many console adventure games going forward – they were games largely made for kids based on popular characters or intellectual properties. There are games like the 1996 adaptation of the movie Casper on the PlayStation, Saturn, 3DO and Game Boy Color, which is an isometric adventure game with heavy puzzle elements. There’s the game Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster and the Beanstalk, originally released in 1996 for Windows but better known for its 1998 PlayStation version, which features a mixture of platforming and point and click adventuring. And there are the Game Boy Color and Advance Hamtaro games such as 2001’s Ham-Hams Unite! and 2002’s Ham-Ham Heartbreak featuring cute hamsters who have to learn “Ham-chat” words that also serve as an expanding dictionary of actions Hamtaro can take within the game. There’s the 2001 platformer adventure on the Game Boy Color, SpongeBob Squarepants: Legend of the Lost Spatula, and there’s also the 2006 direct to video movie tie-in The Barbie Diaries: High School Mystery.

But I also want to mention Blazing Dragons, a 1996 adventure game on the Saturn and PlayStation made by The Illusions Gaming Company, the same developer that made The Scooby Doo Mystery. While this is a licensed game as well – it’s based on a Canadian cartoon show by Nelvana created by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame along with Gavin Scott – the lack of familiarity most gamers will probably have with the property is an asset towards enjoying the game, because it’s very much in the vein of Discworld, but with dragons!

The premise of the show is a sort of twisted take on Arthurian legends where dragons in the castle of Camelhot sit around the Square Table under the guidance of King Allfire, who holds the legendary sword Exaliburn. The show and the game center on Squire Flicker, who serves under Sir Loungelot, a lazy but favored knight who constantly forces Squire Flicker to complete tasks for him that he can take credit for.

Obviously, the show has a lot of terrible puns, but the writing’s a lot more clever than you might assume, and the voice acting is top-notch, featuring the voices of Terry Jones, Cheech Marin and Harry Shearer, who’s not only famous for being a member of the fictional band Spinal Tap but also one of the main voice actors on The Simpsons.

The game itself could have been a lazy FMV adaptation, but nope – this is a true icon-driven point and click adventure game with pixel art characters, painted backgrounds, inventory puzzles, dialogue trees and even the odd arcade sequence. Even more surprising, this game is truly fun – it has a complete story to tell, doesn’t require any familiarity with the source material and it’s amazingly well-crafted all around. I think if it’d been released on Windows as well it might have made a slightly bigger impression, and it’s every bit as good as the Sierra and LucasArts adventures of the era.

But console adventure games that didn’t fit into the licensed adaptation mold tended to fit into some of the styles more popular in Japan – anime and manga-style games, visual novels and dating sims and mysteries.

And, of course, games designed to provide a spine-tingling sense of horror.

In 1981, Atari released James Andreasen’s Haunted House, an adventure game in the style of Adventure that replaced that game’s blocky avatar with a pair of eyes wandering around a dark four-story mansion filled with rooms populated by ghosts, spiders and bats. The game was well-known for the rather frightening sense of atmosphere provided by its spooky sound effects, flashing lightning and, in the harder game modes, persistent darkness. Suffice it to say that few 8-bit adventure games managed to be anywhere near as tense or scary as Haunted House was, and it’s still a bit nerve-wracking today. On home consoles, however, few games bothered to deliver the horror vibes that Haunted House was able to pull off.

But in Japan, horror adventure games became popular on home computers thanks to developers like System Sacom, which produced the Novel Ware line of games, the adult game developer Fairytale’s Dead of the Brain series and Soft Studio Wing, the creators of Mirrors and Onryō Senki, the latter of which even includes a protective ofuda design on the box to ward off evil spirits.

But as far as consoles go, one of the most notable horror adventure games of the 1990s was the Mega CD game Yumemi Yakata no Monogatari, which came out in 1993 in Japan from System Sacom and SEGA. Vik Tokai published a North American port in 1994 for the Sega CD under the name Mansion of Hidden Souls, offering players a spooky Myst or 7th Guest-style mansion exploration with pre-rendered full-motion video sequences transitioning between screens. The hidden souls the title refers to are butterflies representing other souls who’ve gotten trapped in the mansion and who sometimes help you along the way as you attempt to rescue your sister.

The 1994 sequel, which was this time published by Sega as a launch title for the Saturn console, is confusingly called The Mansion of Hidden Souls but has you take on the role of June, one of the butterflies in the mansion who’s tasked with trying to figure out why the moon has gone blood red, which is weakening the mansion’s power. Most of the game is spent talking to the other inhabitants of the mansion, and it’s honestly a very weird sequel because it sort of continues the story without preserving the horror vibes of the original. It’s also notorious for bad voice acting and uncanny valley-style floating heads.

If you’re going to play any of System Sacom’s games, the one to try is Lunacy, a 1996 Saturn game published by Atlus. It’s similar in style, but a bit better than either of its predecessors and the chief complaint about it is that the first half is something of a walking simulator – sure, you can wander around, but the game tends to guide you to where you need to go and there’s not much to interact with besides watching the story play out. This time, you play as an amnesiac named Fred who’s arrived in a place called Misty Town and who’s trying to find the City of Moons so he can escape a death sentence. The second half of the game is where all your choice and agency as a player finally arrive and allow you to complete actions that impact the game’s ending. Unfortunately, the game’s a bit clunky as adventures go and you’ll probably need a walkthrough to know how to obtain the ending you want. There’s also very little reason to play The Mansion of Hidden Souls before it – there’s no important storyline connection, just more of a thematic one.

One other adventure horror series I want to mention is the loosely-connected trilogy from Kenji Enjo’s studio, Warp. I’ll mention first that Kenji Eno was known for being one of those unhinged, boundary-pushing game creators in the mold of Suda51 or Swery65, and if you ever read The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers or any of the interviews with the man, you’ll see just how wild he was. He was also a provocateur of the highest order, perhaps because he also had a background as a musician and knew how to play the press for attention. One of his most famous stunts was in 1996 when he was showing off one of his games to the Japanese press and had it start out with a PlayStation logo that morphed into a Saturn logo so he could announce that he was going Saturn-exclusive. It was horribly offensive to Sony, especially since it was their press event.

The three games for which Warp and Kenji Eno are best known are the loosely-related D, D2 and Enemy Zero, all of which share some common ideas but are entirely different games with no continuity between them. One of the oddest conceits is that each game stars the same heroine, Laura, but she always has a different last name and is treated like an actress starring in standalone stories.

The original D was first released for the 3DO and, surprisingly, was the game that sold the best of the three, perhaps because it was also ported to the PlayStation, Saturn and PC afterwards. It’s an absolutely bizarre game where Laura Harris is sent into a hospital where her father, Richard, has barricaded himself and reportedly killed a bunch of people inside. She’s supposed to get him to surrender. But as she steps foot in the hospital and sees a bunch of corpses on the ground, she winds up in a medieval castle in an alternate dimension and has to explore it, 7th Guest-style, while she uncovers the mystery of what her father has been up to. The uncanny valley-style plastic human characters aren’t too engaging, but the game does have a few shocking moments worth seeing. And yes, a lot of the game’s weirdest moments have to do with cannibalism.

But rather than describe it, let me just encourage you to check it out for yourself, because the plot leads to a pretty bizarre connection to a famous monster whose name also begins with D. Or you can just watch a playthrough, because even though this game was released on multiple discs, all that FMV means it’s a relatively short experience you’ll finish in a couple of hours.

D-2 was supposed to be the killer app for Panasonic’s ill-fated M2 console, which was being designed to replace the 3DO.  The original version was supposed to be a sequel featuring Laura’s son and featuring a different D as a villain – this time the Devil himself! But that game never got finished, and what we instead received was a Dreamcast follow-up featuring Laura Parton, a plane crash survivor who winds up in the Canadian wilderness where she and her fellow survivors discover others have blossomed into hostile mutants with plant-like tendrils. There are also evil angels to contend with. The story at first sort of seems like it’s inspired by The Thing, but it’s way crazier and turns into a survival horror shooter as it goes, complete with a leveling system to give Laura more health as she kills more monsters. The ultimate story is sort of an Eldritch horror sort of conflict with evil aliens who want to annihilate mankind, but who are thwarted by Laura and her connection to the Earth Mother. It takes a lot of cues from the style of Metal Gear Solid, complete with lengthy cutscenes.

This game is sprawled across 4 CDs and is significantly longer than the original D. Also, the end credits sequence ends with a bunch of stock footage of Earth’s history and many alarming statistics about how overpopulated the world is about to get and how crummy things are for us and everyone else here, which, again, if you’ve finished Metal Gear Solid, seems like D-2 took some pretty direct inspiration from Hideo Kojima but went a different way with it.

Warp’s other famous game is Enemy Zero, in which Laura Lewis is trapped on a space station with invisible aliens that are killing everyone. The game is also divided between FMV sequences and 3D exploration sequences with some first person shooting, in which Laura has to locate the aliens with an audio device that tells her when they’re in range of her gun sights. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t produce stereo sound so it doesn’t quite work as an auditory 3D signal. That’s a shame, because it’s a neat idea.

The game’s definitely inspired by the film Alien, but it’s got its own wrinkles, and while I don’t want to ruin the story, I would definitely encourage you to go in with your eyes open that this game is hard. One hit and you’re dead, forcing you back to the main menu to reload. Fortunately, there are checkpoints where you can save, but unfortunately, they are limited due to the use of a mechanic where saved games are stored on an audio recorder where a save takes 3 charges and loads deplete one. You only have 64, which means you can run out. Enemy Zero’s reputation for being one of the Saturn’s obnoxiously difficult games is well-earned. I would recommend the 1998 Windows version, however – it looks and plays better.  

Much like the actor character of Laura, some of the cast of Enemy Zero show up in D-2 in different roles. Again, this is a really interesting idea, and it helps make some of the weirder stuff between the three games feel like it’s connected in a broader way, even though none of it is. These games are all very interesting, but I wouldn’t say any has aged particularly well, and the main reason you’d want to play any of them today is for the absolutely bonkers storytelling.

Another horror-themed adventure game was Human Entertainment’s 1995 Super Famicom game Clock Tower, which was inspired by the 1985 Italian film Phenomena, better known as Creepers in the US and UK, though this version is about 20 minutes shorter than the original. In the movie, which stars Jennifer Connelly as Jennifer Covino, an American girl attends a Swiss boarding school and has to track down a serial murderer who’s killing other girls at the school. Oh, and Jennifer has a telepathic link to insects for some reason, and makes friends with a chimpanzee named Inga. It’s a weird movie.

But Clock Tower takes some of its ideas and adapts them into a maddeningly tough survival horror game about an orphan named Jennifer Simpson who’s taken in, along with other orphaned girls, to live in castle-like mansion called the Clock Tower owned by the Barrows family. Jennifer soon finds one of her fellow orphans murdered and is chased by a terrifying and heavily deformed boy with a huge pair of shears – the Scissorman. Jennifer has to find a way to escape him, but winds up uncovering a deeper plot involving his mother, his brother and a devil-worshipping cult. It’s a 2D point and click adventure game with pixel art-style graphics, but also quite tense and timing-oriented and really difficult to solve without a lot of trial and error.

Clock Tower was recently remade by WayForward in 2024’s Clock Tower: Rewind, and it looks and feels like the original but now has animated cutscenes, voice acting and some amazing new songs by Dale North that feature vocals from the Silent Hill series’s Mary Elizabeth McGlynn and NieR series’s Emi Evans. It’s a great way to play the game.

Of course, outside of Japan, the game that most people would know as Clock Tower is actually the 1996 sequel, which was released on the PlayStation. This game involves the Scissorman hunting down Jennifer and her new adoptive mother Helen, and the two have to find an artifact called the Demon Idol, return to the Clock Tower and open a portal to Hell to destroy Scissorman for good. Though the game is in 3D, it retains the same basic point and click control scheme as the Super Famicom game and feels quite different from Resident Evil, which debuted the same year.

The Clock Tower series got two more games – one in 1998 called Clock Tower: Ghost Head but released in the West as Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within and a 2002 PlayStation 2 game called Clock Tower 3, which eschews the point and click style for direct control over your character. Neither game is connected in story or even has you visit the Clock Tower mansion – the premise becomes more of a theme about school girls running away from terrifying killers and monsters. And unfortunately, the series has stayed dormant ever since.

One other horror adventure from the PlayStation is FromSoftware’s 1998 title Echo Night, a first person game aboard a haunted ship that has you solve puzzles and help spirits solve their personal problems and atone for their regrets. It’s a fairly short and rough-around-the-edges adventure I can’t really recommend to anyone but the curious. There are two sequels – one only released in Japan and a PlayStation 2 sequel from 2004 called Echo Night: Beyond – as well as a spiritual successor from 2018 for VR called Déraciné.

Speaking of which, there are also many other 1990s horror adventure games from Japan that have never made it into North America, and I can’t even pretend to be an expert in them because I don’t speak or read Japanese. I come across them occasionally, like the 1999 SNK game Athena: Awakening from the Ordinary Life that stars Psycho Soldier’s Athena Asamiya. If you want to dive into those sorts of games, you’ll need to learn Japanese, but you’ll find plenty to play.

Recently, a rather intriguingly named digital game called Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening shipped on Windows and modern consoles. It’s developed by Magic Pockets and published by Microids and based on a 1970s and 80s manga and anime series by Buichi Terasawa featuring the psychogun-armed, blonde-haired adventurer Cobra, who battles space pirates led by Lord Salamander and duels with Crystal Boy or Bowie – it depends on the translation – who’s a man made out of incredibly strong glass. Cobra has an assistant named Lady Armaroid and a complicated relationship with triplets with the last name of Royal who each have parts of a treasure map tattooed on their backs.

It’s a fun story; total 80s cheese with a Total Recall or Bourne Identity framing device thrown in for good measure. And it’s also pretty mature in its themes and attitudes towards sex and nudity, which might explain why it was very popular in France despite being only a minor hit in Japan. So it’s surprising to see a modern retro-style action game based on it given that it’s not really trying to make a comeback as a property and it’s not exactly a nostalgic anime series for anyone else in the world.

But it’s even more surprising that this isn’t the first time a Cobra game has been released with some connection to France. Loricels made two of them for home computers in the 1980s, simply titled Cobra and Cobra 2. And there was also a Mega CD game called The Space Adventure released in 1995 by Virgin interactive Entertainment’s European division.

But The Space Adventure was actually created by Hudson Soft as a 1991 PC Engine sequel to the 1989 PC Engine CD game Cobra: Kokuryū Ō no Densetsu, and while both North America and Europe got the sequel on Sega’s CD-ROM console, the original game, which tells the first part of Cobra’s story, was never released.

That’s a shame, because The Space Adventure is a decent game in its own right. It’s also the first game to ever receive an ESRB rating of M due to the extreme violence, skimpy outfits and outright nudity present in the game. But more than anything, it’s a typical example of the Japanese style of adventure game we’ve already discussed when I mentioned Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher a few episodes back – a menu driven experience depicted by selecting actions accompanied by still or slightly animated images with occasional moments of controlling your character. In Cobra’s case, that’s on his spaceship, or in certain corridors, where you get to walk up and down paths and move between rooms in third person perspective.

The game’s story more or less follows the manga and the anime adaptation, leading to a climactic battle with Crystal Boy. There are many twists and turns that get you there, including quite a few moments of ultra-violence and one midgame encounter with an ancient giant robot. Cobra’s almost always up for a fight with a grin on his face and a cigar hanging out of his mouth, and when he is in trouble, he can count on Lady to come and rescues him as the plot requires it. Everything looks cool and there are even sections with some voice acting. I’m not sure why critics panned this game so much in the 1990s – it’s a decent experience today, and surprisingly lengthy for a console adventure, clocking in around 10-15 hours the first time around.

Another outer space adventure game from Japan that many English-speaking gamers would like to see get an official release is Hideo Kojima’s Policenauts, which came out in 1994 on the NEC PC-98 before getting ported to the 3DO, PlayStation and Saturn in the following years. Unlike Snatcher, which draws so heavily from Blade Runner that it might as well be called a manga-style adaptation, Policenauts feels more like its own thing – sort of a buddy cop in space story, sort of a hard science fiction meditation on the problems with space colonization and organ trafficking, sort of a procedural murder mystery. Sure, it draws from many influences – especially Lethal Weapon – but it feels more original.

As a game, it’s primarily a visual novel style of adventure in the style of J.B. Harold Murder Club where you exhaust every available menu option to proceed and, like Snatcher, there are shooting sequences. The story has a few twists and turns and even two different prologues, but it’s an entertaining and surprisingly straightforward ride that takes about 10 hours to get through.

The biggest problem with Policenauts is that it’s never officially been translated into English, which meant that some of the slyer references made to the game in Metal Gear Solid went right over players’ heads. For example, Meryl Silverburgh is a main character in Policenauts, FOXHOUD tattoo and all, and the protagonist from Policenauts, Jonathan Ingraham, smokes the same brand of secondary smoke-less cigarettes as Solid Snake. And Snake’s real name – David – is an allusion to Meryl’s partner, Dave Forrest, in Policenauts, though it’s a bit tongue in cheek, since Dave’s a pacifist who shoots to wound and Snake is constantly telling Meryl to shoot to kill.

Thankfully, a massive fan translation effort resulted in the PlayStation version of the game receiving a high-quality English translation in 2009, and if you want to play it, the good news is that it’s not hard to do so provided you can get your hands on the original discs or an image of them. I’d say the mystique of Policenauts is probably a bit stronger than the game itself, but it’s still well worth playing.

Another PlayStation-era adventure game long stuck in Japan has been Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, a 1997 release by Love-de-Lic that only recently got a full worldwide release in English and other languages. Now, I’m going to be honest and say I that I have not played this game all the way through myself, and with good reason – it’s only been available in English the last few years and my focus has been on games from the 80s and early 90s during my research project, The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played. I’ll get to Moon one of these days. But I’ve played the first few hours, I’ve watched some playthroughs to get what it’s about, and let me tell you - it’s a brilliant game I’ll be excited to spend more time playing when it’s time.

The premise of the game is that you begin as a hero in the style of Dragon Quest and make your way to the final boss, a dragon. But before you finish the battle, the game pulls back to reveal a boy playing a video game on his TV, and his mom orders him to stop playing and go to bed. Before he can, he’s mysteriously absorbed into the TV and falls into the world of the game, landing next to the towspeople of the castle in the Moon world where the Hero resides in a land called Love-de-Gard. The boy is a spirit who can’t be seen but who can be understood, so he puts on a few spare clothes an old lady gives him – she mistakes him for her grandchild – and walks around town in a green stocking cap, a pair of gloves, a pair of boots and a vest, which is all anyone can see of him. He’s also contacted by a benevolent Queen who tells him to get to know the townspeople and help them with their problems.

This sets up the first part of the game, which is basically built around the conceit of, “what does the rest of the game world do when a JRPG hero isn’t around?” And honestly, it’s kind of a miserable place because the hero is so obsessed with leveling up that he’s abusing the world around him, particularly the monsters, who are really just animals and whose corpses are strewn about the woods and whose spirits need to be reunited with their bodies so they can be taken to the moon and resurrected. He’s also stealing from people, bothering them with inane questions and murdering their pets in a misguided effort to save the villagers from animals that look dangerous. Every opportunity to help a person or a creature is essentially a puzzle to be solved, and as you do, you earn love, which in turn helps you to level up your love level and gain more actions so you can travel further in the world.

It’s a wonderfully subversive adventure game that looks and plays like an RPG but which has no combat and forces you to do good by helping people instead of battling your way to glory. The characters and game world are absolutely captivating, the game’s look is distinctive and the soundtrack is amazing. I particularly adore the game’s fusion of traditional art, pre-rendered art and Claymation, and nothing in this game, even the design of the hero, looks like any other RPG or adventure game you’ve played before. The story’s also really funny and interesting and has a lot of heart, as you might expect.

Fans of Toby Fox’s Undertale and Deltarune will definitely see a lot of thematic similarities between those games and Moon, and the game’s artwork reminds me a lot of the TV World in Chapter 3 of Deltarune since Tenna very closely resembles the look of characters from Moon. While it wasn’t a direct inspiration, Fox has said in interviews that just hearing about Moon while he was working on Undertale helped shape his own concept. But I’d suggest the pacifist route in Undertale and the complex character interactions of Deltarune are very much in the vein of what Moon pulled off back in the late 1990s. If you enjoy those games, you’ll love this one too!

Love-de-Lic made some other unusual games like the 1999 adventure puzzler UFO: A Day in the Life and the 2000 evolutionary strategy game LOL: Lack of Love, both of which were only released in Japan. When Love-de-Lic folded, some of the staff went on to form Punchline, which created the very odd 2002 PlayStation 2 kissing game Chulip and the interesting 2006 psychological horror game Rule of Rose. Some of the staff later formed a new developer called Onion Games to release 2016’s Dandy Dungeon: Legend of Brave Yamada, the global port of Moon and a 2024 Moon sequel called Stray Children.

Well, I’ve done it to myself again – I had a whole other section on Japanese visual novels to talk about and I realized that this episode was getting far too long. And so I’m going to file those away for next week so we can go into a lot more detail and instead talk about a few other console and handheld adventure games worth mentioning.

Let’s begin with the 1997 PlayStation and Saturn game Swagman, which was created by Core Design and which honestly defies easy description. It’s an action-adventure game sort of in the style of The Legend of Zelda depicted from a top-down view, and it superficially looks a bit like Zombies Ate My Neighbors, but with pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds.

But this is an adventure game through and through about a brother and sister who are on vacation in a place called Paradise Falls where a sinister being called Swagman is unleashing monsters and trapping the adults in perpetual nightmares as he rounds up the Dreamfly fairies.  You begin the game as Zack and have to rescue your sister, Hannah, who’s captured in the opening cinematic by Swagman’s goblin-like Skallywag minions. Eventually, both of you have to venture into the nightmare realm known as the Terrortries to rescue the fairies who make up a group called the Dreamflight so they can spread enough Dreamdrew to counteract Swagman’s nightmare-inducing Dream-Ash. Oh, and Zack and Hannah’s hit points are measures in Zees, and if they lose them all, the dream is over and they, too, are consumed by nightmares.

I realize this all sounds like the fever dream of a person who’s spent too much time imbibing in some odd substances of their own, but Swagman is actually a really neat game. Though it is an action title with boss battles and a Zelda-style emphasis on exploration, rescuing fairies, collecting keys, blowing holes in walls and progressing into new areas, you also pick up items that extend your abilities and often have to think a bit to solve the game’s surprisingly involved puzzles. Zack and Hannah also can transform into monsters when they enter a mirror and step into the Dream World.

While Swagman didn’t earn super great review scores when it was released, it’s actually well worth your time to play today, particularly on the Sega Saturn.

As for more traditional adventure games, Capcom produced a pretty neat one in 2001 for the Game Boy Advance called Gyakuten Saiban, which means “Turnabout Trial.” In this game, a rookie lawyer named Ryuuichi Naruhodou has to successfully argue cases in court, including two against an aggressive opponent named Reiji Mitsurugi, who’s never lost and who gets angrier and more cunning in defeat until he himself winds up a murder suspect. The game was popular enough to warrant two Game Boy Advance sequels, but Capcom’s American division started pushing for a localization as well. The resulting game was christened Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and it debuted on the Nintendo DS in 2005 to low expectations.

Obviously, it caught on, because the series, which is now simply called Ace Attorney, is still going strong. But for many American gamers, myself included, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was the game to expose players to the modern style of Japanese visual novels and detective games. In each chapter of the first release, players are charged with investigating a crime, gathering clues, preparing a defense and then getting into the thick of things in the courtroom, where the prosecutors will introduce arguments that need to be interrupted and refuted with hard evidence. The tennis-like rhythm of things going your way and then suddenly going the wrong way as a new argument is introduced makes these games tense and fun, and the wacky characters, strange contrivances, ridiculously permissive judge and the fact that at one point you have to put a parrot on the stand make this game incredibly memorable.

The Nintendo DS version also allowed players to shout “Objection!,” “Hold it!” or “Take that!” into the microphone and also to play a brand new fifth chapter prosecuted by Phoenix Wright’s rival Miles Edgeworth with some added touchscreen elements. While both of the other Game Boy Advance games were also localized for North America and Europe and ported for the Nintendo DS, they didn’t receive any other features. Fortunately, every sequel since has been released worldwide in some form.

And this includes the 2012 crossover game Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, co-developed by Capcom and Level-5, the studio behind the Professor Layton games.

We might as well talk about Professor Layton as well, because each of the games in his series is an adventure game with traditional puzzles to solve like brain teasers and logic puzzles and even manipulation puzzles like sliders or a jigsaw puzzle. The first game, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, was released in 2007 in Japan for the Nintendo DS and a year later in North America. Unlike a lot of DS games of the era, the Professor Layton games feature animated cutscenes and occasional voice acting,

The setup of the games tends to be the same from entry to entry – Professor Hershel Layton is dressed like Arense Lupin and is part Indiana Jones, part Sherlock Holmes and, in the third game, part Doc Brown from Back to the Future, and he’s accompanied by his young assistant Luke Triton, the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’s Dr. Watson. The series was originally intended as a trilogy, but Level-5 had such success that it started creating prequels and side stories for subsequent entries, and a new sequel, Professor Layton and the New World of Steam, is due out sometime this year to finally continue the story.

As adventure games, the Professor Layton games are primarily little drips of story between arbitrary puzzles, with lots of talking head dialogue and accordion music in between. The beginning and the end of the game tend to be where most of the interesting storytelling takes place, and thus these games are less about the adventure than the destination. Even so, they’re fun and interesting and extremely well-made.

Another interesting adventure game from around the same time is the 2007 Capcom-developed game Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, a truly remarkable title for the Wii that uses the game’s unique controller to facilitate a point and click adventure while also including some minigames that often involve shaking the Wiimote. Zack is a young pirate boy and Wiki is a monkey friend who can fly by spinning his tail. Along with their crew, The Sea Rabbits, Zack and Wiki are following the directions of the skull of Captain Barbaros to find an island of treasure… but of course they have an adversary, the Rose Rock gang led by the beautiful but annoying Captain Rose.

But the really treacherous character is of course Captain Barbaros, who betrays Zack and has a personal grudge against Wiki. The game’s story is primarily told through non-voiced dialogue, but since it’s in full 3D and has you point and click to move Zack around, it really does feel like a substantial adventure game. It feels more like One Piece than The Secret of Monkey Island, but it’s still quite fun.

I’m not sure why this game got overlooked as badly as it did – it’s really good and well-made, with great graphics, a fun story and wonderful characters. It also makes amazing use of the Wiimote by having you do things like build Rube Goldberg-type machines, play rhythm games, complete laser puzzles, go fishing and so much more.

One final game I wanted to mention this episode is Sega’s 2012 Nintendo 3DS title Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure, a truly one of a kind fusion of adventure gaming, rhythm gaming and platforming that really deserves more attention. The story is absolutely bonkers and involves the resurrection of Napoleon in France in some vague era in the 20th century, and you play as a boy named Raphael who’s leading a double life as the thief Phantom R. The adventure portion of the game involves running around Paris both during daylight and nighttime hours in visual novel style and occasionally dipping into minigames. The production values are amazing, and the music and character art add a lot of charm to the Parisian setting. Don’t miss this one – it’s truly an underrated gem.

If you’re paying close attention, you may notice I just mentioned the visual novel style of gameplay, which is a major subgenre of adventure gaming in Japan. So in our next episode, I’m going to give you a crash course in Japanese visual novels, murder mysteries, eroge and dating sims. Many of these games have never made it outside of Japan, but some of the ones that have, like Clannad and Steins;Gate, are considered some of the best narrative games ever made. Don’t miss it!

And now that we’ve brought console gaming and PC adventure gaming to a point where things are starting to converge in the 21st century, our next episode after that will talk about how games like Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, which is also known as The Indigo Prophecy, Microids’s adventure games including Amerizone: The Explorer’s Legacy, the Syberia games, Post Mortem and Still Life and Index+’s really wild Dracula: Resurrection series all moved us forward. And we’re also going to talk about the rest of the Quantic Dream library and Daedalic Entertainment as well as a few of the other European series of note.

And then we’ll bring things to a near-conclusion by talking about the influence of Telltale Games and indie studios like 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. And I’ll also set things up for us to begin a new series to talk about another genre that features progression-based storytelling, lots of variety and a long tradition of evolution in gaming – the platform game.

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 Decline’s Drops, a 2024 action platformer from, and I’m going to butcher this I’m sure, the French game developer Le Moulin aux Bulles (la moo-lan-oh-byool). It’s not a complicated game or even a particularly fresh take on the genre. You play as a puppet girl named Globule armed with boxing gloves, a dash mechanic, a double jump and a dodge roll, and you make your way through levels gathering dew drops and defeating the six heads of a hydra who wrecked your garden.

Gameplay-wise, it’s a lot like Donkey Kong Country Returns by way of Super Smash Bros., and that’s not a bad thing. The controls are tight, the animations are smooth and you have enough variety to your attacks to keep things interesting. There are puzzles to solve and collectibles to pick up, as well as some great boss encounters.

No, what makes this game stand out is the absolutely gorgeous hand-drawn artwork and a wonderful soundtrack. Decline’s Drops is a tremendously beautiful game that’s fun to play simply because it’s so much fun to watch and hear. Globule is an adorable animated character with hose-like arms and legs to give her a lot of motion, and her enemies are things like chickens and frogs and slugs rather than the same old sorts of bad guys. It’s not a super long platformer, either, requiring at most about 10 hours to finish.

It’s well worth the $15 it normally costs, but you can easily find it on sale if you look, and I myself found it in a bundle. Give it a shot! It’s a really enjoyable time.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1500180/Declines_Drops/

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

In this episode, we’re going to talk about 1990s adventure games using pre-rendered scenes and 3D, including The Longest Journey, Grim Fandango, Escape from Monkey Island, Chronomaster, Sanitarium, BioForge and more! Join us on this expedition 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 11: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 9

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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SOURCES:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050308133426/http://www.justadventure.com/Interviews/TLJ2/TLJ2.shtm

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-last-express-revisiting-an-unsung-classic

https://insidethemagic.net/2012/02/interview-imagineer-jonathan-ackley-details-the-creation-of-sorcerers-of-the-magic-kingdom-at-walt-disney-world/

https://mixnmojo.com/news/Jonathan-Ackley-ensures-my-future-children-get-lost-at-Disney-World-UPDATE-Ahern-shares-culpabilit

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/venture-moon/duke-grabowski-mighty-swashbuckler-point-and-click/posts/1562717

https://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/features/376/

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EPISODE 11

Coming up in this episode –

We’re going to talk about adventure games from the 1990s that attempted to move the genre into three dimensions including The Longest Journey, Grim Fandango, Escape From Monkey Island, BioForge, Chronomaster and more! And we’ll also look at some of the odd offshoots of the genre like The Neverhood, The Last Express, Sanitarium and Twinsen’s Odyssey!

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!

 

If you’ve been hanging in there with us week after week, you might have wondered why I haven’t delved into talking about LucasArts’s last few adventure games, which are generally considered some of their best. But don’t worry – I haven’t lost the thread. I was just waiting for the right time to bring them back up, because LucasArts found itself on a very interesting trajectory between 1995 and 2000 as it released four adventure games that gradually evolved away from the style the developer had become famous for and into the 3D style we’re going to talk about in detail in this episode.

So let’s start off with Full Throttle, a point and click adventure game by Tim Schafer that came out in 1995 as a CD-ROM exclusive title. And this was actually a pretty big deal at the time because many adventure games to this point were still shipping on floppy disk editions with optional enhanced CD-ROM versions. Full Throttle certainly looked like a Day of the Tentacle or Sam & Max-style adventure at first blush, with hand-drawn sprites, painted backgrounds and an icon-driven point and click system.

But seeing this game in action made it clear why the multimedia features were needed, from the awesome theme song by the hard rock band The Gone Jackals to the cool cinematic sequences featuring the game’s protagonist, Ben, riding his fat, noisy Corley Motors motorcycle down the road and getting into scraps with rival gangs. In fact, a significant part of the game involves arcade action fighting sequences that are sort of like a cartoon version of the game Road Rash where Ben has to knock other bikers off their rides. Full Throttle turned out to be one of the best point and click adventures ever made, and it also gave Tim Schafer enormous license to try something wildly different with his next game, 1998’s Grim Fandango.

And wow, did Grim Fandango deliver, though it was a rather polarizing game among adventure game fans at the time because of the changes it made to the familiar formula of the genre. The game’s set in an afterlife based on Meso-American folklore and stars Manny Calavera as a grim reaper agent of death who helps guide departed souls to the appropriate place in the great hereafter. But when he meets a woman named Meredith who ought to be bound for eternal paradise aboard the number 9 train, but who’s somehow stuck in the lower levels with people who lived far less saintly lives, Manny realizes something’s up and that there are nasty souls who’ve decided to make themselves comfortable in the slums instead of trying to ascend to the heavenly realm. The game’s scope and imagination is, quite frankly, absolutely amazing, and it has a dio de los muertos vibe fused with a film noir art style that makes for an unforgettable story and experience.

But there was a practical reason for this style of art as well. Tim Schafer was trying to figure out how to bring adventure gaming properly into 3D, and more abstract character designs and pre-rendered backgrounds were better-suited to the relatively low-polygon capabilities of computer systems of the day. Grim Fandango also was designed to ditch the mouse cursor and GUI common to most adventure games and instead allow players to move Manny around with arrow keys and recognize areas of the world he could interact with by tilting his head – an elegant solution to having to wave a mouse pointer all over the screen in search of objects or characters who were interactive.

I really don’t want to go into much more detail about Grim Fandango because it’s such a brilliantly-made game that it’s held up over time and become regarded as a classic. But in the 1990s, it definitely wasn’t for everyone. Hardcore adventure game fans thought the gameplay was too linear and the puzzles were too easy, and navigating Manny around the backgrounds could be an awkward affair because of the odd shape of his body and the sometimes less-than-obvious pathways. The fixed camera angles were also awkward in the same way other 3D games like Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII struggled to fuse 3D characters and backgrounds.

Gamers who weren’t adventure fans, on the other hand, just thought the game looked weird, and since it was only available on CD-ROM and really needed a beefy computer with a 3D graphics card to run optimally, it’s no surprise that it was a commercial failure despite receiving fairly strong critical reviews. Remember, Grim Fandango came out during a major year for games – Half-Life, StarCraft, Thief: The Dark Project, Baldur’s Gate, Unreal, Starsiege: Tribes and Fallout 2 all came out that year as well on PC – and given the pedigree of those games, you can see what stiff competition it was up against.

Not that gamers were suffering from a lack of great games, because 1997 also happened to be an amazing year for computer gaming. And one of the titles that debuted was The Curse of Monkey Island, the last of the SCUMM engine games, but also by far the most sophisticated in terms of art design and multimedia features. With all of the original designers off doing their own thing, LucasArts turned to Larry Ahren and Jonathan Ackley to helm this sequel. Both had worked on other LucasArts adventures, and both eventually wound up working in theme park design, notably teaming up again in the early 2010s to work on the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom experience for Disney theme parks.

This is an interesting note because one of their jobs in reviving the Monkey Island games was to deal with the twist ending of Monkey Island 2, which heavily hinted that LeChuck and Guybrush were actually children playing in an amusement park called Big Whoop and the entire adventure had been make-believe, but that Chuckie was actually infused with some sort of demonic magic. How do you make a sequel to that?

Ron Gilbert would claim over the decades he knew exactly what was going to happen next, but to the LucasArts team responsible for continuing the story, the best choice was to pretend most of that never happened and to return Guybrush to the Caribbean, floating his way into a siege on Plunder Island where LeChuck and his undead pirate minions were busy trying to forcibly capture Governor Elaine Marley the same way Bowser is constantly trying to snatch and grab Princess Peach.

Honestly, this was a good choice. No offense to Ron Gilbert, who is a brilliant adventure game designer, but the Monkey Island 2 ending never sat right with me and risked undermining all the fun of a series that was part Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride and part On Stranger Tides pirate shenanigans inspired by Tim Power’s crazy 1987 novel.

And The Curse of Monkey Island added in a few nice new things that have stuck with the series since. The first is an all-star voice acting cast led by Dominic Armato, who nails the role of Guybrush so well he basically was the character we all heard in our heads all along, and he’s since voiced every Monkey Island game released, including the remasters of the originals.

And the same is true for the other voice actors, at least mostly – Earl Boen is LeChuck, except in the final game, because he was retired from voice acting. Alexandra Boyd is Elaine Marley, except in the fourth game for some reason where she loses her English accent and sounds completely different. Leliani Jones is the Voodoo Lady, except in Tales of Monkey Island. Neil Ross is Wally B. Feed, a.k.a. Bloodnose the Pirate.

And Denny Delk is Murray, the aggressively evil demonic talking skull, a brand new character introduced in this game who’s the second great addition. Every game since has included Murray, and he always steals the show.

The third addition is the ability to play the game in an easy, story-driven mode or a more challenging puzzle mode, and what I particularly like about this feature is that the puzzle isn’t just more difficult, but holds back some of the game’s best jokes and moments to reward players to pick the tougher path. Since the interface adopts Full Throttle’s icon-driven commands, The Curse of Monkey Island is more focused on pointing and clicking on the environment than the previous games, and it also runs in full-screen since the action menu pops up as a doubloon with regions to click for different interactions. This allows players to not only enjoy the scenery, but to search it for areas allowing them to do something. It feels less like a pixel hunt and more like a multimedia cartoon.

The game’s story, too, makes some smart choices as Elaine gets turned into a golden statue after Guybrush proposes to her with a cursed ring in the opening animated sequences and then sends him on a chase around Plunder Island, Blood Island and Monkey Island. The end of the game even attempts (rather confusingly) to retcon the whole Big Whoop issue by having LeChuck and Guybrush have a showdown on a roller coaster. The game puts all that stuff to rest, lets Guybrush triumph and rescue Elaine, and ends with them both getting married and, presumably, ready for a sequel.

But Escape From Monkey Island didn’t make it out until 2000, this time led by LucasArts vets Sean Clark and Mike Stemmle, who’d worked together before as the designers behind Sam & Max Hit the Road. This time, the series utilized the Grim Fandango game engine and eschewed the cel-animated style of the previous game for 3D characters. I don’t think I’m out of step with most series fans in saying Escape From Monkey Island is the weakest game in the entire series, and while it’s good by adventure game standards, it feels like a downgrade after the great leap forward The Curse of Monkey Island offered.

The plot feels like a “where do we go from here?” sort of contrivance and focuses on LeChuck pretending to be a gubernatorial candidate named Charles L. Charles trying to unseat Elaine Marley and acquire her family’s voodoo talisman that will unleash the Ultimate Insult. There’s a bad guy named Ozzie Mandrill who is constantly criticized for being an “Australian developer buying up everything,” which is a very dated reference to Rupert Murdoch. There’s also a parodic restaurant called “Planet Threepwood”, filled with references to the previous games in a manner that’s clearly making fun of the ill-fated Planet Hollywood restaurants and their penchant for displaying minor film props as major treasures.

And the second half of the game is bogged down by an enormously unfun sequence called “Monkey Kombat” where Guybrush battles the island’s simians with insulting monkey noises and eventually pilots a monkey mecha suit to defeat a giant statue of LeChuck.

It sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is. And despite some amusing moments and some great character interactions, there’s also a lot of silly stuff. Did we really need to know the origin story of Herman Toothrot or the lineage of the three-headed monkey?

After LucasArts stopped producing adventure games and a Sam & Max and Full Throttle sequel were both canceled, Mike Stemmle wound up moving over to Telltale Games and was involved in several of their adventures, including Tales of Monkey Island, for which he was a co-director, designer and writer.

This five-part series is actually pretty good in terms of its story and humor, preserving the art style of Escape From Monkey Island but also offering different gameplay experience, returning to a point and click interface that has Guybrush move around 3D environments and investigate interactive objects. I’d argue that the Telltale series is best for long-time fans, but it’s fairly standalone in terms of its continuity and I really enjoy some of the new characters, particularly Morgan LeFlay, a Guybrush fangirl and bounty hunter who becomes sorry to meet her hero, and who plays a significant role in this story.

As I mentioned, Ron Gilbert started teasing on social media that he’d always wished he could finish the Monkey Island trilogy with his planned third game because he had an amazing idea of where to take things from the ending he’d concocted for Monkey Island 2. Once Disney acquired LucasFilm, that seemed like it would never happen since Disney was even less interested than LucasArts in producing new games and LucasArts itself had been turned into a licensing arm. But then Ron Gilbert made the surprise announcement in 2022 that he was finishing up Return to Monkey Island for release later in the year along with several LucasArts veterans like Dave Grossman and David Fox at his current development studio, Terrible Toybox. While the game introduced yet another art style – this time sort of like paper dolls atop more stylized backgrounds – it initially underwhelmed some fans when it was shown off. And when it debuted that September, it finally brought a close to not only Ron Gilbert’s big idea, but also, surprisingly, the series itself.

Whether or not Return to Monkey Island effectively pulls off the idea Ron Gilbert was so excited about is a matter of taste. But is the game funny? Absolutely. Are the puzzles worthwhile? Mostly. Does the ultimate storyline pay off by finally revealing the Secret of Monkey Island? Pretty effectively, in my opinion, while still incorporating all of the continuity of the games Gilbert wasn’t involved in and showing respect for the contributions of the other creators. Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman even include a letter to series fans dated June 18, 2020 to talk about their perspective on the series at the very end.  That’s about as nice of an ending as you could hope for, and I’d glad we finally got it.

But I want to point out that the Monkey Island series is a microcosm of many of the changes that the adventure gaming genre went through. It started off solving the problems inherent to the adventure game genre by removing pointless deaths and focusing players on actions they could do instead of the ones they couldn’t, then it evolved into one of the great multimedia adventure games, and then tried to move into a more console-friendly 3D style. As the genre returned to the flatter point and click 2D style, so did the final entry, and it de-emphasizes tough puzzles while adding in clues, comfort systems and lots and lots of self-awareness.

But before we move on to talking about other games that, like Grim Fandango and Escape From Monkey Island, took the adventure game genre into 3D, let’s briefly mention two games that took direct inspiration from Monkey Island to deliver pirate adventures worth playing. The first is called Voodoo Kid, and it’s a 1997 point and click adventure from Infogrames that uses digitized character renders and pre-rendered environments to depict a haunted pirate ship with a literal skeleton crew. The premise is that you fall asleep reading the story of Baron Saturday, who turned his crew into zombies and is heading for the Island of Lost Souls. In your dream, you awaken on the ship and have to find a way to divert the ship from its course. It’s a fairly short and easy adventure, definitely targeted at kids, but it at least allows you to pick if you’d rather play as a boy or girl and it’s fully voice-acted and well animated, with lots of fun little moments. The only downside is the puzzles, which tend to be along the lines of The 7th Guest’s arbitrary brainteasers.

Another interesting game is Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, a 2009 game from Autumn Moon Entertainment first released in Germany that made it to the English-speaking world in 2010. Its biggest claim to fame is the involvement of studio co-founder Bill Tiller, a former LucasArts designer and artist who worked on The Dig and The Curse of Monkey Island.

Autumn Moon’s 2008 point and click adventure game A Vampyre Story was a reasonably good time, and I do recommend it, particularly if you’d like to play as a busty French vampiress and pull items out of a coffin to try to cast a spell to allow you to escape from the cursed castle in which you’re imprisoned. It’s a gorgeous game bursting with personality and which has an incredible soundtrack.

Autumn Moon’s follow-up game The Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island is a really interesting adventure because you play as a trio of ghosts named Papa Doc, Jane Starling and Blue Belly, all of whom are trying to get back into their bodies and who have to work together to solve their problem and then defeat the evil Queen Zimbi. While the characters are rendered in 3D, the backgrounds themselves are painted and multilayered, offering a strong sense of the artistry from The Curse of Monkey Island while also utilizing the fluid animation that 3D characters can provide.

If you enjoy the Monkey Island games, you should definitely give Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island a try. It definitely has its own vibe and is often seen as being lesser-than the Monkey Island series, but I think it stands on its own pretty well. The puzzles are decent, the voice acting’s good and the artwork and animation are spectacular! The Day of the Tentacle-style teamwork adds some variety to the game, and the characters are varied enough that they don’t overstay their welcome if they start to annoy you.

Unfortunately, Autumn Moon never got to make a true sequel to either of its adventure games, and the most we’ve gotten is episode one of Duke Grabowski: Mighty Swashbuckler! in 2016 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. It’s a great looking game very much in the piratey spirit of Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, but after 10 years and some promises about four more episodes that have never manifested, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that we’ll ever see Duke’s adventures continue.

I mentioned Alone in the Dark in our last segment, and now seems like a good time to explain why I did. In 1992, Infogrames released this interesting horror-themed adventure featuring two 3D characters – Edward Carnby and Emily Hartwood – exploring a haunted mansion in Louisiana called Decreto. While Alone in the Dark certainly looked odd for its time due to its use of low-polygon, slow-moving 3D character models atop pre-rendered environments and static cameras depicting each room, hallway or scene, the game was able to create a mood unlike anything that had come before it, and while games like Elvira, WaxWorks and Harvester were going for gore, the Alone in the Dark games were able to build a much more unsettling experience that became the template for the survival horror genre that Resident Evil would later popularize.

It’s funny, though, because I don’t think many people consider Alone in the Dark an adventure game despite the fact that it’s not that different from The 7th Guest or Dark Seed in terms of structure and design. One reason why it is a bit different is because it involves limited combat with enemies who can definitely kill you, but you’re still exploring a mansion and trying to find ways to solve puzzles with items. I think the best way to categorize Alone in the Dark is as an action adventure game that had an enormous influence not just on horror games, but also the burgeoning field of 3D adventures.

BioForge is definitely a game with a similar design philosophy. It’s a 1995 3D action adventure game from Origin Systems that still focuses on combat and horror, but which has a science fiction premise. After a cryptic introduction, you awaken as a cyborg in a derelict station aboard a moon somewhere in space. You not only have to fight your way through the robots and cyborgs left on the station – early in the game, you can literally beat one foe with his severed arm when he won’t stop attacking you! – but also get your bearings as you strive to understand what happened to everyone there.

I actually feel like BioForge is a little bit closer to an adventure game than Alone in the Dark because so much of it is focused on puzzle-solving. Many of the solutions to the puzzles are found by reading logbooks or computer monitors – an idea that’s pretty common today, but which was a fairly novel and immersive way of sharing information with the player in the mid-1990s. The game also has an unfolding cinematic story brought to life by voice acting and in-game events rather than cutscenes or narration, which was again pretty exciting for the era. While the gameplay itself is a bit clunky due to tank controls and lousy combat, there are several places in the game where you need to outsmart your enemies rather than beat them down, and that helps BioForge overcome its weaknesses somewhat. I definitely recommend it if you can put up with its limitations as an awkward 90s action adventure game.

Speaking of games set in futuristic settings, let’s take a look at Chronomaster, which came out the same year as BioForge, and which had the bona fides of being created by a famous Hugo and Nebula award-winning author.

Roger Zelazny was a science fiction writer who was very popular in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, particularly for his novel Nine Princes in Amber, which was the basis of an illustrated text-based adventure game adaptation by Tellarium in the 1980s. Those novels are about a true world called Amber that casts shadows across the multiverse to create every other reality. Some shadows have different laws of nature and even allow for magic. Zelazny loved the idea of alternate worlds and used them to play around with what was possible without violating the accepted rules of hard science fiction. The canon in the Chronicles of Amber thus tends to focus on the characters themselves, not the inconsequential worlds they inhabit.

Zelazny was also well-known for infusing mythology into his writing as well as a strong sense of action due to his prowess in fencing and various martial arts. If you’ve never had a chance to read some of Zelazny’s novels, you absolutely should; they’re often energetic and interesting, with fast-moving plots and cool characters and that overwrought, thoughtful, philosophical style of dialogue that’s so strongly associated with the wooden characters in science fiction magazines.

Chronomaster is not a novel, but a multimedia adventure game from 1995 that Zelazny was working on with his partner and collaborator Jane Lindskold when he passed away of cancer. The game was developed by DreamForge Interntainment, a US-based studio mostly known for making Dungeons & Dragons games and other role-playing games like DarkSpyre and Veil of Darkness, which I’ll absolutely talk about another time when our discussion is centered on underrated 90s CRPGs. But Chronomaster is not like anything else DreamForge ever made, both before and after. It’s a 3D-style icon-driven point and click adventure game where you explore a pre-rendered game world as Rene Korda, a sort of godlike scientist who creates customized pocket universes for wealthy people with exacting tastes. He’s brought out of retirement to repair some universes that have entered a state of “temporal stasis” where everyone and everything is stuck in time.

And when I say pocket universes, I mean that literally, because within some of these, Korda can visit multiple worlds. This sense of scale is both the game’s greatest asset and its biggest weakness. As an adventure game, Chronomaster is absolutely massive. But on the other hand, the game definitely weakens as it goes on because the more focused science fiction story of the initial sections gives way to a  wild, anything goes approach later on where the game nearly turns into a parody of itself as Korba begins exploring universes that are built to some very strange specifications.

One of the most notable aspects of Chronomaster is the voice acting, which is provided by Ron Perlman as Korba, Brent Spiner of Star Trek: The Next Generation as his eventual ally Milo and Lolita Davidovich as his chripy computer assistant Jester. They all do a good job, though Ron Perlman sounds half-awake in a lot of his narration. But there are dozens of other characters who’re voiced in this game as well by a fairly large cast of actors ranging from suitable for the roles to absolutely amateurish.

The game also has a rather strange sense of art design. Korba is a goofy-looking character with spiky blond hair, opaque goggles and Halloween costume-level body armor, Milo sort of looks like an outer space Steven Seagal and Jester has the appearance of a Western comic book artist’s take on an anime girl. There’s also a later ally named Selene who’s wearing revealing spandex but who has a cybernetic eye and a crew cut so you’ll know she’s supposed to be tough. The ultimate bad guy looks like a reject from the Borg. All of this is rendered in that awkward mid-90s plastic uncanny valley style that looked dated the moment the game shipped.

Even so, you’ve got to overlook this game’s rough edges because the story is unique and interesting and the gameplay is rewarding if you can stick with it. The puzzles are quite challenging, but there is some openness to the design, with multiple solutions to many of the problems you face, making every playthrough feel a bit different if you don’t stick to a walkthrough. There are also a few different endings, so the game responds somewhat to your playstyle. There’s even one way to finish the game midway through, though I’ll note this is not the good ending.

Speaking of endings, DreamForge Intertainment inserts itself into the game’s ending newsreel, suggesting a pocket universe in which the company is still making wildly creative games today. Unfortunately, they’d wind up closing their doors while working on Myst IV a few years later, but before that happened, they created one of my favorite 3D-style adventure games of the 1990s – the very trippy and weird 1998 isometric adventure Sanitarium. At first blush, this game looks a lot like Fallout or Baldur’s Gate because you wander around pre-rendered environments viewing everything from a diagonal top-down angle. But the gameplay follows the mechanics of adventure games, putting you in the shoes of the fully bandaged coma patient Max, who awakens in a horrifying sanitarium and soon finds himself wandering around a village of mutant children who have been adopted by an evil alien they call “Mother.”

And just when you think you have a handle on where this game is taking you, the game throws you an incredible curveball I won’t spoil. As I was playing it, I assumed that it was going to turn out to be one of those games where Max turns out to be the villain facing his worst crimes in the form of a coma-induced nightmare so he can seek redemption, but nope, that is not at all where this game’s story ultimately goes. It’s definitely a game I’d describe as “messed-up,” but it’s not quite the horror experience it appears to be, so if you’re more a fan of psychological horror and tension as opposed to jump scares, this one is definitely worth a playthrough.

In the 1990s, video gaming got its first cover girl in the form of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Core Design and Eidos’s self-assured polygonal gun-toting adventurer came at the right time to represent console gamers who were starting to outgrow Mario and Sonic, who were getting bored with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and who were ready for a little bit of sex appeal. That Lara Croft was one of the first 3D characters who managed to pull off being attractive rather than hideous didn’t hurt, and Core Design was more than happy to generate pictures of her in swimsuits and provocative poses to ensure every magazine had ample reasons to cover her.

PC gamers tended to be a little bit older in the 1990s than their console gaming counterparts, and so it’s not surprising that when April Ryan came around in the game The Longest Journey in late 2000 in the English-speaking world, most gaming magazines barely noticed it despite the fact that April spends the beginning of the game in skimpy pajamas and much of the rest of the game dressed in skin-tight clothes with a visible midriff like she’s headed to the club. But that also might be because April’s a stylish artist who’s not just tossed in the game for sex appeal, but part of a story where she can go and have lengthy conversations with her friends and neighbors and where she fits into the worlds she inhabits instead of plundering them.

 The Longest Journey was originally released in Scandanavia and Europe everywhere but the UK by a developer called Funcom, largely known at the time for making licensed console games. While the game was a big hit in its home country of Norway and sold well in its neighboring countries, the decision to wait on an English-language release was primarily due to the desire to get the game into the North American market, not an easy feat since a lot of publishers wanted nothing to do with adventure gaming. And you can tell that the excitement for this game was not high despite the glowing reviews it received once it shipped; Computer Gaming World and PC Gamer gave far more pre-release coverage to Escape From Monkey Island than The Longest Journey, often in the context of discussions about whether or not the adventure game genre was truly dead.

The premise of the game is that there are two parallel worlds that have split off from the original Earth. One is called Stark, and we see it in the year 2209, with a similar history and culture to our own world, though it has a sort of steampunkish, science fictiony Blade Runner vibe and takes place within a fictional city on the US West Coast called Newport. It’s governed by science. The other world is called Arcadia, and it’s a lower-tech, fantasy-style place governed by magic.

April has a dream in which she meets a white dragon who tells her she’s going to play a part in a future that may bring about a different world. But before April can get any clarity on what this means, a force of dark chaos rises up beside her and shatters her dream, sending her back to her regular life on Stark, where she’s worried about finishing off a piece for an upcoming art show.

And yet April’s life keeps being interrupted by moments where strange things are happening, and there’s some subtext to suggest that maybe her dreams are being influenced by the things around her and she’s going crazy. But an odd man she encounters named Manny Cortez explains that she is special in some way. He eventually opens a portal to Arcadia and explains that once she steps inside, she will take the first step on the longest journey of her life.

And as April emerges in the other world, she finds she cannot understand anyone there, though her ears gradually acclimate to allow her to understand the magical Alltongue. This opens her up to learning from a priest named Tobias Grensret, who walks her through the backstory and explains that April is a Shifter, a rare person who can travel between both worlds. Both worlds exist in a balance that’s maintained by a dragon-like alien race called the Draic Kin, twelve humans called the Sentinel and a quasi-divine individual known as the Guardian, but he’s gone missing and his replacement has not been found. April eventually discovers that a group called the Vanguard is trying to merge both worlds back together, which will plunge both worlds into chaos, and her quest is to restore a disc that will help allow the Guardian to return.

I’m really oversimplifying things, because The Longest Journey has a very detailed storyline that is frequently dropped on April through lengthy conversations and info dumps. If you’re not into complex lore and detailed characters with complex motivations for doing things, this is definitely not the game for you. And if you assume that April is going to become the Guardian in the end, well, no, this game’s not that straightforward either. The entire experience is incredibly lengthy and this has often led gamers to joke that this game is aptly named – your first playthrough can easily last 15-20 hours if you sit through the conversations and work to solve the puzzles.

But oh, what a fantastic journey The Longest Journey has to offer! The game’s built on vibes, and so many of its ideas feel like they were inserted because the development team took some inspiration from something and decided to jam it into their game. Normally, this is the mark of a bad game, but the dreamlike feel of the adventure actually handles this structure really well. April’s young and naïve, but she’s no dummy, and her cleverness and ability to persevere carry her through this game and make you feel really attached to her by the end. The game even seems to hint that she survives to be an old woman in Arcadia, telling stories about her young exploits.

That’s why it was such a surprise that the sequel, 2006’s DreamFall: The Longest Journey, didn’t really continue April Ryan’s story so much as sideline her to introduce a new character named Zoe Castillio who’s living in the city of Casablanca in Stark in 2219, ten years after the first game. And from the start, you know that Zoe’s in a coma, telling you the story of how she got there. Zoe’s quest before the coma is to find and save April Ryan, who’s now living in Arcadia as a part of a resistance movement there, and Zoe begins receiving cryptic directions from a little girl named Faith whose consciousness exists in Stark’s global computer network, DreamNet. Zoe’s ultimate quest is to thwart a plot to infiltrate the dreams of people in both worlds and brainwash them, which sounds kind of stupid as I say it out loud, but I promise, it makes sense in the game.

DreamFall is an action adventure game, eschewing most of the traditional adventure game conventions and focusing more on combat. Like The Longest Journey, it’s filled with dialogue and complex lore. There’s a whole backstory about an event called the Collapse that isn’t even really explained in the game and the rise of an Arcadian faction called the Azadi and a conspiracy in Stark involving a mysterious Japanese toy company. Oh, and the world is being plagued with static that keeps knocking technology out. Again, as I say this out loud… just trust me, it’s not as dumb as it sounds, and the dreamlike quality of the game glosses over the silliness of the story.

Like The Longest Journey, DreamFall also draws obvious inspirations from all sorts of different things that were popular during its development – the films The Ring, AI: Artificial Intelligence and Lost in Translation are three of the most obvious influences just in the first few minutes of Zoe’s adventure, and many of the things that happen in Arcadia seem to be visually influenced by Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films this time around.

My only real gripe about DreamFall is that it ends April’s story rather unceremoniously and, in my estimation, to the detriment of the continuation of the series. When Funcom continued the story in their five-part episodic adventure game DreamFall Chapters in 2014-2017, they had to retcon this with a rather silly contrivance designed to bring April back into the fold. I really only recommend DreamFall Chapters in its 2017 Final Cut edition, and even then, only if you’re really interested in seeing how the story ends.

Let’s close out our look at 1990s adventure games with a few that don’t really fit neatly into any category. All of these games are absolutely excellent, and I hope you’ll check them all out. But the first is still not available commercially, and that’s a shame, because this 1996 adventure, The Neverhood is a really great game that was released by Dreamworks Interactive.

But before we begin, let me go ahead and rip off the band-aid and talk about Doug TenNapel, the artist and co-designer of this game who’s largely responsible for its distinctive look. Doug TenNapel is a brilliant animator who’s responsible for some great stuff, including some wonderful graphic novels and kids’ books, some cool album art for the band Five Iron Frenzy, many television shows from the 1990s and early 2000s and, most famously, for creating the character of Earthworm Jim and even voicing him in the first two games.

Dan Castellenata, the guy who voices Homer Simpson, played Jim in the cartoon show. But Doug TenNapel was responsible for that show, too, which is probably why it does such a good job of sticking to the game’s goofy premise.

But here’s the thing. Doug TenNapel is a very problematic personality who’s allowed his very conservative Republican politics and support for figures like Andrew Breitbart and Donald Trump to tarnish his artistic career. He’d be the first to tell you this because he has talk show called Doug in Exile where he complains about being cancelled by the progressive left, SJWs and an LGBTQ culture he says is waging a culture war against him. I don’t believe I’m misrepresenting him in any way here, but I want to be clear: I don’t support or endorse anything he stands for. We’re all entitled to our opinions, but when we use those opinions to be hurtful to other people, we take it too far.

It really stinks when someone who’s so creative and who’s made some really cool stuff also turns out to be a heel, and if you don’t want to support Doug TenNapel, I understand. In that case, you should definitely skip the 2015 game Armikrog, which was intended to be a sort of spiritual successor to The Neverhood and which turned out to be a half-finished game in the end. Full disclosure: I was a Kickstarter backer, but I didn’t realize at the time that Doug TenNapel was such a polarizing figure.

Anyhow, The Neverhood is not a problematic game in any way, and since it was made by a team of people who have not followed Doug into exile as far as I can tell, let’s presume the game’s still worth checking out, because let me tell you – The Neverhood is truly something special. The game’s built from digital scans of claymation figures and offers some of the most imaginative point and click adventure gaming you’ll ever see. It also has one of the most tedious mechanics ever seen in an adventure game in the form of its seemingly never-ending “Hall of Records,” but we can forgive that because the rest of the game is so good.

The premise is that you are Klaymen, a misleadingly named clay man who wanders around the mysterious Neverhood searching for discs that fill in the game’s backstory and provide clues on where to go next. You wander around the world in both first-person FMV sequences and third-person screens representing puzzle rooms, and the game looks absolutely incredible because all of it is built on Claymation sets with professional-grade animation. Even more amazingly, the game’s soundtrack is an all-timer, filled with whimsical music sung mostly in a nonsense language and evoking a sort of jazzy, folksy, cinematic sense of whimsy that fits the graphical style perfectly.

The Neverhood is the type of game where you’ll fool a monster that wants to eat you with a dummy made of dynamite. It’s the sort of game where if you need to make a door to walk though, you just direct Klaymen to expand one out of a hole in the clay, shrinking another one elsewhere in the room. It’s the sort of game where it feels like anything and everything can happen and you simply need to figure out the right insane logic to open the game world up to your wild ideas. It’s also the only game I’ve ever seen where you defeat the bad guy by pantsing him when he thinks he’s won.

Aside from my gripes with the creator, my biggest complaint about The Neverhood is that it was only available for a short time and has never gotten a reprint or a digital release, making it extremely expensive to buy secondhand due to its rarity. And while it does have two follow-up games – Skullmonkeys on the PlayStation and the aforementioned Armikrog – neither is nearly as good as the original. If you get a chance to play it, you should.

Another game that bombed badly when it was released, but which is at least available digitally today, is Jordan Mechner’s 1997 rotoscoped mystery game aboard a train, The Last Express. Jordan Mechner was already a pretty big name for his publisher, Brøderbund – he’d created Karateka and Prince of Persia for them and essentially had carte blanche to do what he wanted, and that gave him an almost unheard-of four-year development period to see his idea through.

And wow, is The Last Express an impressive game even today. It begins sort of like an Agatha Christie meets Myst-style adventure aboard the Orient Express, but it has a few important deviations from that formula. First of all, the game takes place in real time at a pace of about six game minutes per actual minute. Secondly, the game will frequently break into rotoscoped Art Nouveau-style cutscenes in the third person where you see your character, the American doctor Robert Cath, interacting with other passengers. Finally, you have the ability to rewind time to undo the effects of any bad decisions you make, and you can also fast forward to later points in the story, provided you’ve already reached them once.

And yes, by the way, this mechanic was the inspiration for a key mechanic in Jordan Mechner’s next game, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, though it’s executed very differently there.

But what’s really wild about The Last Express is how detailed the game’s character interactions are. Every character in the game – there are about thirty of them – has an agenda and behaves differently depending upon the choices you make. Where they are and what they’re doing at a given time can vary a lot, and your conversations and inquiries can  put some of them on edge. The script for the game is very well-written and has a lot of conversational dialogue that’s voiced extremely well and which feels authentic to the setting and the context of traveling on a train, including multiple languages where the characters speak natural dialogue. Your character also has to be careful not to blow his cover, as he’s assumed the identity of his murdered friend.

I don’t want to say too much about the story because part of the pleasure of the game comes from seeing how things unfold and finding the right path to reach the game’s true ending. Over the three days of your journey between Paris and Constantinople in 1914, you explore the Orient Express and discover a botched arms deal, a spy, another planned murder, a stolen Serbian treasure and so much more. The train gets hijacked at one point, and there’s even a bomber who threatens to blow the up the Orient Express and everyone on it. And all of this is happening while Europe is fast approaching the start of World War I, which breaks out if you survive to see the game’s ending.

The Last Express should have been a major success – it was a critical darling, attracted a lot of broader media attention and really looked like a game that everyone would want to play. But the problem was that Brøderbund was going through a tough time and its entire marketing department quit, resulting in the game being poorly supported and reportedly only being on the shelves for a couple of months. It wound up being one of their last games, and certainly their most expensive; their other adventure game that year, the comedy adventure Koala Lumpur: Journey to the Edge, was hardly a hit, and Brøderbund got acquired by The Learning Company the next year and was gutted by extensive layoffs.

One other unusual adventure I’d like to comment on is actually made up of two games. The first is known as Little Big Adventure in Europe and Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure in North America. And the sequel, called Little Big Adventure 2 in Europe, is also known as Twinsen’s Odyssey.

Both games were created by the French developer Adeline Software International, which also created the more conventional 3D action adventure game Time Commando in 1996. But the Little Big Adventure games, or Twinsen games if you prefer, are very different because they’re overhead isometric adventures where your main character, the blue-robed, top-knot ponytailed, dragon-riding Twinsen, has to solve problems in the normal adventure game manners – dialogue, puzzle-solving and with items – but also sometimes with his fists, his reflexes or with stealth. To enable these actions, Twinsen has four stances – Normal, Aggressive, Discreet and Athletic.

What makes these games a bit different from others in the genre is that like The Last Express, the action takes place in real time and parts of the map open up as you complete actions that unlock certain conditions or knock enemies off their routes and task schedules. It’s a very unique series that was quite a big deal in Europe, but which barely made a dent in North America because it was published by Electronic Arts and they simply didn’t understand its appeal, changing its title and making it look more like an action game than any sort of adventure game. That the game also shipped in a disk version and multimedia edition didn’t help, because the CD-ROM voice acting adds a lot of charm to the game.

The original Twinsen game features pre-rendered graphics with 3D character models on top of it, very similar to Alone in the Dark’s look, but with a far more family-friendly feel. Both take place on the world of Twinsun – named for the two stars the world sits between – and yes, it’s a little confusing that the hero is named Twinsen. But he’s such a likable and fun character who has a chipper personality and often over-exaggerates his movements, reeling back before he runs and throwing his magic orb weapon like a baseball pitcher. The second game keeps a lot of this style but also adds in portions that are actually 3D instead of pre-rendered, which means the camera is free to show things from different angles. It’s a little weird, but it absolutely works.

Unfortunately, Electronic Arts published the game in Europe and then handed the North American publishing rights off to Activision, which was similarly clueless about how to market a French adventure game that deviated so much from the Sierra and LucasArts formula.

But the good news is that both games are pretty easy to find and play today – GOG has them both and even has the original versions available as free add-ons, and they’re also on Steam. Be sure to give them a try – they’re wonderful family-friendly games with neat characters, strong art design and incredible soundtracks.

As usual, my desire to cover everything notable has gotten me into trouble, and I’m going to have to wait until we start talking more about the 21st century to cover the next step in adventure gaming evolution with games including Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, which is also known as The Indigo Prophecy, Microids’s adventure games including Amerizone: The Explorer’s Legacy, the Syberia games, Post Mortem and Still Life and Index+’s really wild Dracula: Resurrection series. All of these games are worth more than a name check and we’ll get to them in a future episode.

I don’t want to suggest that adventure gaming completely died after 2005, but it did change. Many of the characteristics of the 3D fork of adventure gaming were adopted into other genres such as action-adventure games, first person shooters, survival horror, role-playing games and even platformers, and aside from a handful of developers like Quantic Dream and Telltale Games, you really didn’t see a lot of adventure games coming out in 3D between 2005 and the indie gaming boom of the mid-2010s. Myst-style games, too, largely tapered off in favor of full 3D first person games like Portal, The Stanley Parable, The Talos Principle and Superliminal.

But adventure games remained a popular genre in Eastern Europe, and Daedalic Entertainment was one of the most prolific producers of the traditional style of 2D adventures, releasing series such as Edna & Harvey, Deponia and The Dark Eye as well as standalone titles like The Whispered World, Anna’s Quest, The Night of the Rabbit and A New Beginning.

And of course there were other adventure game makers as well. The Spanish studio Pendulo Games made the excellent Runaway: A Twist of Fate trilogy, the Czech studio Future Games made NiBiRu: Age of Secrets and the Black Mirror trilogy – no relation to the Netflix show of the same name - and various studios around Europe produced other halfway decent adventure games like Secret Files: Tunguska, Ceville, The Inner World and So Blonde.

Another popular breeding ground for adventure games was the Adventure Game Studio, and this led to hundreds of adventure games being developed and published, mostly as freeware, but in some cases as commercial titles. One of the most prolific publishers of AGS adventures is the indie studio Wadjet Eye Games, started by Dave Gilbert – no relation to Ron – and we’ll talk about them in much more detail in an upcoming episode. But there’s also of course Yahtzee Croshaw’s Fully Ramblomatic Games, Crystal Shard, AGD Interactive, Clifftop Games and Grundislav Games, just to name a few! And we’ll be covering them all as well in our last couple of episodes for this series.

But you know what we still haven’t covered in detail? Consoles and handhelds! So in our next episode, we’re going to talk about games like Adventure, Haunted House, Nightshade, The Space Adventure, Night Trap, Mansion of Hidden Souls, D, Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, Blazing Dragons, Scooby-Doo Mystery, Policenauts, Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, Swagman, Steins;Gate, Clannad and Moon. And, if we have time, we may even delve into the incredible Sakura Taisen series, find a Zero Escape sort of dilemma or spend some time righting wrongs in the Turnabout Courtroom with an Ace Attorney on the rise!

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 Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, a game that came out last year from Pocket Trap and PM Studios and which promised the first “yoyovania.” OK, so that’s a clever little bit of marketing fluff, but what this game actually involves is a top-down puzzle-focused perspective like classic Zelda with a really capable yo-yo, far more useful than the one in the NES Startropics series. One of the most interesting ideas in the game is the ability to use angled surfaces to change the direction of your yo-yo so you can hit enemies at different angles and solve some surprisingly clever puzzles. The further into the game you get, the more abilities you earn for your yo-yo to allow you to resolve puzzles that weren’t previously possible to solve.

The game also has a goofy story about restoring your family’s power plant, which has been raided by gangsters who’ve made off with four powerful batteries. As the bat creature Pippit, you have to use your super-charged, spectrally-infused yo-yo that’s carrying the spirit of your auntie to catch up to the gangsters and set things right. Most of this is just a rationale to offer four different themed areas representing the elemental powers of the batteries, and the story’s probably the least interesting part of the game. It’s all about puzzle-solving, room-clearing action. There’s also a city hub world you can wander around and complete missions so you can upgrade your moves.

Oh, and did I mention one prominent song in the game’s score is by the great Yoko Shimomura, composer for Street Fighter II, Super Mario RPG, Parasite Eve, The Legend of Mana and Kingdom Hearts, among many other games?

If you’re the sort of person who really enjoys the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance Zelda games with all their timing and technique-based puzzles, this is the game for you. It even can be set to look like it’s playing on an approximation of the Game Boy Advance, which is pretty neat! Give Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo a shot – it’s one of last year’s best retro-style indie games, and you won’t regret playing it!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2870350/Pipistrello_and_the_Cursed_Yoyo/

 

 

OTHERS TO RECOMMEND – 3D

Eternam (1992) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1368/eternam/)

Dragon Lore: The Legend Begins (1994) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/3776/dragon-lore-the-legend-begins/)

Normality (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1999/normality/)

Time Commando (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/342/time-commando/)

The City of Lost Children (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/3842/the-city-of-lost-children/)

Dark Earth (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2874/dark-earth/)

Koala Lumpur: Journey to the Edge (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/4462/koala-lumpur-journey-to-the-edge/) 

Mission Sunlight (1998) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/100362/mission-sunlight/)

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

In this episode, we’re going to talk about 1990s point and click adventure games made yet another group of like Westwood Studios, Cryo, Access Software, Cyberdreams, Infogrames, Revolution Software, Viacom and more! Join us on this expedition through games you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!

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Season 1, Episode 9: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 7

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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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SOURCES:

Shelley Day’s court case: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/waw/press/2005/dec/day.html

The KGB File: http://thekgbfile.50webs.com/index.html

Rick Gush on Kyrandia: https://web.archive.org/web/20021122190852/http://www.adventuregamers.com:80/display.php?id=110

https://muds.fandom.com/wiki/Kyrandia

https://www.well-played.com.au/broken-sword-parzivals-stone-has-been-delayed/

Harvester on GameGrumps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_lcJD7-gOo

https://kotaku.com/how-harlan-ellison-s-most-famous-short-story-became-an-1827327887

https://www.pcgamer.com/saturday-crapshoot-i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream/

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EPISODE 9

Coming up in this episode –

We’re going to talk about all sorts of point and click adventure games from the 1990s that weren’t published by Sierra, including The Legend of Kyrandia, Beneath a Steel Sky, Dark Seed, Call of Cthulhu, Dune, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, Beavis and Butthead and of course, Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream!

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!

 

One name you haven’t heard much about since we left LucasArts a few episodes ago is Ron Gilbert, and you might wonder what he was up to after leaving LucasArts following Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. And the answer is, “making dozens of games with his colleague Shelley Day,” another established game developer who’d worked at LucasArts. Together, they’d found Humongous Entertainment and make games about characters like Putt-Putt, Fatty Bear, Freddi Fish and Pajama Sam, with many of these point and click adventures utilizing the SCUMM engine.

But because these games are for little kids, I don’t feel a lot of need to go into detail about them. Suffice it to say Ron Gilbert did eventually return to modern adventure games and we’ll cover him in later episodes.

And as for Shelley Day… well, that’s a sad story, and you look her up in the show notes if you want to see why she and Gilbert parted ways.

But I bring up Ron Gilbert because he’s one of the few adventure game creators who really stayed active in the 1990s working on point and click adventure games and not trying to evolve things into 3D or to chase after trends like pre-rendered artwork or controller-friendly mechanics. He’s also one of the people who most influenced the style of point and click adventure games by not only articulating a philosophy he largely followed, but also by showing people how it could be done with the first two Monkey Island games.

And as we’ve already discussed with games like Simon the Sorcerer and Discworld, that Monkey Island style was pretty prevalent throughout the 1990s, especially with Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle and some of the less aggressive Sierra games. But not everyone was copying that style, and one developer that certainly tried to do its own thing was Cryo Interactive, a French developer founded by several folks from ERE Informatique. While ERE was bombastic and included the intergalactic logo for Exxos in its branding, Cryo adopted the face of a female android in a sleep pod, first seen in the French-only puzzle game Extase, based on a minigame called “Brain Bowler” in ERE’s truly odd 1989 outer space Olympiad, Purple Saturn Day.

Cryo’s next project was an adventure game based on Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel, Dune, in 1992, but which also drew heavy visual inspiration from the 1984 David Lynch feature film adaptation, even using the film’s logo and a production still of Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides in a stillsuit on the cover of several editions of the North American release. According to the credit, MacLachlan’s appearance was licensed for the game, probably to help enhance its marketability.

Within the game, some characters resemble the film’s actors. Feyd-Rautha Harkonen still closely resembles Sting, for example, and Lady Jessica looks a lot like Francesca Annis. Virgina Maden’s Princess Irulan also shows up in footage from the film to narrate the story in the Sega CD version. Other characters, however, like Thufir Hawat, Baron Harkonen and Duncan Idaho, look so different they’re not remotely recognizable.

Dune is a fascinating point and click adventure because it takes place from the first person perspective as you control Paul Atreides visiting various sites on the planet of Arrakis, but it also transforms into a strategy game about midway through once the Harkonens kill Duke Leto and you have to work to evict them from strongholds.

Throughout the game, the Fremen recognize you as Muad’Dib and pledge their loyalty to you as you visit their sietches, and a lot of the political and social dynamics of the book and film are relaxed to make the adventure simpler and more focused. But you still get to fly around in ornithopters, ride sandworms and raise armies… as well as fall in love with Chani, whose fate is a little happier in this telling than the source material where she’s only permitted to be Paul’s concubine when he seizes the Imperial throne.

Cryo’s work on the game, however, was famously troubled due to a number of issues going on behind the scenes, and as they were working on their Dune game, an American developer called Westwood Studios was building one of its own, a real-time strategy base-building and resource-gathering game that would come out the same year as Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty. It’s one of my favorite games of all time, by the way, and the direct inspiration for Blizzard’s Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Westwood’s own Command & Conquer series. But we’ll talk about those games another time.

As for Westwood, we’ll come back to them in a few minutes, because they, too, were building adventure games in the 1990s.

But I want to touch on a few other games Cryo released in the 1990s that were also adventure games, including their 1992 adventure KGB, which has a reputation for being one of the most difficult graphical adventure games ever made, and yet which is still well-regarded as being a legitimately good game. And by the way, there is a 1993 CD-ROM re-release called Conspiracy that adds in some clips where Donald Sutherland plays the main character’s deceased father, but these scenes really just provide some vague advice and don’t add much to the game.

The premise of KGB is that the Soviet Union is days away from collapsing in 1991 and you are an officer named Captain Maksim Mikhailovich Rukov, or either Maks or Rukov for short, who’s joined the KGB’s Department P and who has to investigate some problems within the KGB that eventually lead to an assassination plot to murder Mikhal Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the USSR.

I’m not sure exactly how historically accurate the game actually is, but in real life, there was a failed coup attempt in August of 1991 that involved the KGB and the State Committee on the State of Emergency, more popularly known as the “Gang of Eight,” who opposed Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost, which meant restructuring and transparency.

KGB is all about spycraft and catching some of the slipperiest people you’ll ever see in an adventure game through a variety of methods, such as recording conversations and making use of a snuff film as leverage.

The KGB conspirators are very hard to pin down, and wouldn’t you know it, they also have a corrupt CIA ally in the mix as well as a man who’s been surgically altered to look like Gorbachev and who’s been brainwashed so he can go on TV and resign the presidency in place of the actual Gorbachev, who gets kidnapped. Your main ally is your Uncle Vanya, an older man in a wheelchair who’s been working undercover at the KGB and who pulled strings to get you on the job. He also has a friend named Major Vovlov who serves as your bad-tempered boss and the game’s ultimate antagonist.

Because the game is so challenging, I recommend consulting a website I’ve linked in the show notes called The KGB File to help you through it. KGB is definitely a game made for adults who want an engaging and sophisticated plot; it doesn’t hold your hand and it has some seriously mature themes it explores along with a lot of Russian names to keep track of from a surprisingly large cast of characters. There are drugs and prostitutes and murders and multiple layers of bureaucracy to keep track of. If you enjoy the intrigue aspects of Metal Gear Solid games, you might find KGB to be a really engaging experience.

Another Cryo’s adventure game is from 1995: Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure, which is also for mature audiences and might seem more accessible, but it’s a polarizing game for multiple reasons. It’s based on the Dark Horse comic book series from the 1990s, primarily the graphic novel Aliens: Labyrinth, to which this game is actually an adaptation but also a sort of sequel.

In the graphic novel Aliens: Labyrinth, the plot revolves around a scientist and former Colonial Marine named Tony Crespi who’s sent to a research space station to secretly monitor Colonel Doctor Paul Church, who’s experimenting on Alien Xenomorphs by putting them in a dark, labyrinth-like maze and learning about how they hunt and make decisions. But it all sort of goes Jurassic Park and, predictably, tragedy occurs.

The game takes place  at a time that would simply be defined as “later” and isn’t officially part of the Dark Horse canon despite drawing liberally from it. You play as Lt. Col. Hericksen, not-so-subtly named for the actor Lance Henriksen who played Bishop in the Aliens film. The gameplay is interesting because it’s sort of a point and click adventure due to Hericksen’s appearance in many scenes, but it also looks and plays like a 3D Myst-style game at times.

Even so, this one is mostly a point and click adventure with dialogue trees, inventory puzzles and illustrated characters who pop up in visual novel-style conversations. But there are also some RPG elements and turn-based strategy sequences where you pilot an exosuit and battle Xenomorphs and facehuggers and, towards the end, Colonial Marines.

It’s a surprisingly pretty and interesting game, though the illustrated characters and the pre-rendered scenes do clash a little bit. The voice acting is also pretty bad and clashes with the otherwise dark atmosphere of the game. But probably the biggest complaint about Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure is that it’s so easy to make mistakes and undo all your hard work, and it doesn’t help that the game is also quite buggy. My advice is to play with a walkthrough, because the game isn’t so much challenging as it is limited by a bad interface, time constraints and poor directions.

But if you like your games dark and gritty and set in the future, you might want to check out what Westwood Studios had on tap in 1990 with a different adventure also based on a book.

Infocom’s final years as an Activision adventure game imprint gave rise to a few graphical adventure games and RPGs, many of which were created by Brett W. Sperry and Louis Castle’s Las Vegas-based game studio, Westwood Associates, soon after renamed Westwood Studios. One of Westwood’s earliest games was a 1990 DOS point and click adventure and RPG hybrid called Circuit’s Edge, based on the novel When Gravity Falls by George Alec Effinger. While the game has a cyberpunk feel to it, you’ve never played a setting quite like this because the premise of the story is that the Islamic Arabic culture has become the principal world power and you play as an investigator named Marid Audran who lives in the city of the Budayeen and gets caught in a web of intrigue involving a client he’s framed for murdering and a crime lord benefactor who hires him to get to the bottom of what really happened.

Now, I want to specify that Circuit’s Edge is more a role-playing game with an involved story than a true adventure game. The interface shows stats on the side, a small graphical window with character portraits beside it and a big text box underneath, and moving through the Budayeen is similar to the first person navigation around the town of Skara Brae in The Bard’s Tale. But the game also follows a lot of the classic adventure game conventions of having you collect inventory, solve puzzles and talk to NPCs fairly liberally. There are also a lot of very adult themes in the game, including quite a bit of prostitution and even nudity. It’s interesting and worth checking out, if for no other reason than it tells a story that is quite different from most other games of the era.

Westwood’s next adventure series is one of the ones it’s best-known for, and the proper name of the series is Fables & Fiends, though this was retooled later to reflect the first game’s subtitle, The Legend of Kyrandia. This initial chapter debuted in 1992 and features a character named Brandon, an orphaned young man who has to battle the murderous jester Malcolm, who’s escaped his magical confinement and is using the magical Kyragem to sow mischief around the land, including turning Brandon’s grandfather, the powerful wizard Kallak, into stone. In many ways, the game feels like a King’s Quest-style adventure, though apparently, at least according to the game’s writer and the designer of the sequels, Rick “Coco” Gush, Westwood licensed it from an earlier MUD game called Kyrandia by Richard Skurnick and Scott Brinker, though the inspiration appears to be superficial at best.

The Legend of Kyrandia is a true point and click adventure game in the style of a Sierra or LucasArts adventure with all the elements you’d expect – gorgeous artwork, an inventory scroll at the bottom of the screen and a context-sensitive cursor that allows you to interact with the game world depicted in the top two thirds of the screen. The music by Westwood’s house musician Frank Klepacki is wonderful, and there was even a CD-ROM talkie version released alongside the disk-based version with voice acting, though it’s kind of cringey and nowhere near as good as what Westwood would start to be known for once they started shipping games like Command & Conquer.

The story is basically what you’d expect – as Brandon, you are the chosen one who has to prove his mettle as a hero, discover your claim to the throne and overcome the mischievous machinations of Malcolm, who shows up occasionally to bother you, but who never comes across as particularly menacing. You also befriend a young alchemist named Zanthia who teaches you how to make potions. That might seem like an unimportant detail, but as you’ll see in a moment, she’s not a trivial character.

The Legend of Kyrandia is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s really more in the realm of “lighthearted” than comedic. The jokes are mostly just slapstick or Brandon grumbling about things, and Malcolm has to be one of the least funny jesters in the history of gaming, and also one of the least capable. Suffice it to say he’s the sort of villain who tells you not to go into the room you need to go into to defeat him, and then also is the sort who’s easily defeated by a trick a child would see through. He’s also kind of annoying, a point that’s not lost on Zanthia when she returns in the second game as its protagonist.

And the second game is a little confusing to identify at first because it was originally published in 1993 as Fables & Fiends: The Hand of Fate with a box that didn’t match the first game’s storybook aesthetic and instead depicts a purple hand inset inside an even larger hand and which doesn’t really say “The Legend of Kyrandia - Book 2” anywhere. The back cover’s text is hard to read due to a confusing layout and since Malcolm and Brandon are nowhere to be seen, it’s hard to connect this game to its predecessor. Even worse, the title screen for the game itself also just says “The Hand of Fate.”

But if you play the game, especially if you’re playing the CD-ROM talkie edition, it’s pretty clear you’re playing a sequel as Brandon’s voice kicks off a narration and shows some familiar scenes and characters as Brandon explains that the world is disappearing, piece by piece, and that Zanthia has been selected to retrieve a stone from the center of the world.  In fact, later versions of the game even received new box art more in line with the first game and more clearly calling this game “Fables & Fiends – The Legend of Kyrandia Book Two” with no mention of the Hand of Fate, but instead a painted picture of Zanthia traveling through the skies on her quest.

And make no mistake – marketing issues aside, The Hand of Fate is a superior game to the original in every way. It’s more imaginative, it’s funnier, it has better puzzles and Zanthia is just a far more charismatic character than Brandon, with a dry wit and a recast voice actress who adds so much more to the character in the talkie version. And actually, the voice acting in this game is better all the way around, much more in line with the best of Sierra and LucasArts. Frank Klepacki’s score even ups the ante this time with a little more variety and some funk as well as some island-style music. It’s pretty clear the Westwood team took some inspiration from The Secret of Monkey Island instead of King’s Quest this time around, right down to featuring a segment with pirates, but it results in such a better game it was honestly a good move.

Zanthia’s travels are of course not straightforward, and she not only attempts to visit the center of the world, but also wanders around swamps, castles, coves, lava pits, the high reaches of the world and even across a rainbow bridge into the surreal realm of the Wheels of Fate. One of the most-lauded aspects of the game is that she approaches her challenges with a certain confidence and world-weariness that’s unusual for adventure games of the era. She even changes her outfits to suit the places that she goes.

But if you ask me, the best aspect of the game is that there’s no Brandon and no Malcolm. And unfortunately, the game’s standalone story ends with a cliffhanger where Malcolm is freed, setting up a sequel for him to make his return.

The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three: Malcolm’s Revenge came out in 1994 and while it is very clearly part of the series from the box art and the introductory cinematic, it also looks and plays a bit differently from the other two games. The hand-drawn aesthetic is replaced by largely pre-rendered backgrounds, the inventory bar that lines the bottom of the screen in the previous two games is gone, popping up only when needed, and the gameplay is occasionally interrupted by pre-rendered cutscenes. The credits sequence also has full-motion video sequence featuring the development team at Westwood, with Malcolm causing havoc around the office. You can even see Joe Kucan, who famously played Kane in the Command & Conquer games, make an appearance as the game’s vocal recording director.

And speaking of the acting, Malcolm, thankfully, has been recast with a nastier, more villainous voice for this sequel, and since you play as him this time around, it’s good to see the character be less of a cartoon clown and more of an actual bad guy. That is, of course, assuming you keep him in that persona – this game actually allows you to choose if you want to lie to other characters or be nasty, measuring Malcolm’s behavior with a meter that appears next to the inventory bar.

As adventure games go, Malcom’s Revenge isn’t much of a revenge tale; rather, it’s one of the most surreal, bonkers ones you’ll ever play, with much of the game devoted to realms with talking animals and obnoxious humans who tend to get under Malcolm’s skin. As you might expect, he becomes an unlikely hero and has to kick a group of pirates out of Kyrandia to restore things to the way they used to be. In the end, all he really wants to do is take a nap, but he’s unfortunately blamed for pretty much everything that goes wrong in Kyrandia, which means he also has to clear his name before the game is over.

While Malcom’s Revenge is often thought of as a step down from The Hand of Fate in terms of its adventure game credentials, it’s still a decent adventure game with an absolutely killer soundtrack that’s very much in line with the sort of funky hip-hop industrial tunes you’d hear in Command & Conquer. The strong production values help make the game fun, and thankfully, the humor is a lot sharper than Malcolm’s first outing.

Westwood worked on one more point and click adventure game in the 1990s, and while it was a bit of a slow burner in terms of sales, it did make a positive impression and has since become a true classic. The name of that game? Blade Runner, based on the 1982 feature film of the same name and released in 1997 with an eye for recreating many of the movie’s strongest visuals while telling a parallel story to Rick Deckard’s adventures with the escaped Nexus-6 replicant units led by Roy Batty.

The game focuses on a rookie Blade Runner named Ray McCoy who winds up on the trail of a warrior poet replicant named Clovis who is leading a group of rogue replicants who are all suspects in a crime involving murdering animals – a heinous crime in a future were real animals are exceedingly rare. McCoy has to hunt down all of Clovis’s replicants, but the way the game is structured, who those replicants actually are is randomized, and there are multiple endings available, some of which include McCoy himself being a replicant.

One of the most notable things about Blade Runner is how well it nails the aesthetic of the film. The team at Westwood not only recreated some of the locations, camera transitions and lighting effects, but also extended the world out with new places that look as if they came from scenes we just didn’t get to see in the film. Many of the film’s characters make an appearance and are voiced by the original actors, and the new characters are all voiced by established screen actors, some of whom, like Jeff Garlin and Lisa Edelstein, went on to became quite famous.

The graphics were also quite interesting for the time, fusing pre-rendered footage and a sort of voxel-based rendering of the characters that was able to be done in software without a 3D accelerator card. In the 1990s, this was crucial since it meant delivering graphics that looked 3D without actually having to be 3D. While the game looks movie-accurate in many places, everything was created specifically for the game and nothing was used from the film footage. Since the target resolution was lower than we’d use today, the game does have a sort of grainy look and feel to it that modern ports have not been able to fix since the original source code was lost, but it’s still a darned impressive-looking game that’s still one of the best and most authentic cyberpunk stories out there.

I would love to talk more about Blade Runner, because I’m a huge fan of the original novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Ridley Scott film and the game itself. It was one of the first games I reviewed as a pro game reviewer back in the 1990s and definitely one of my favorites I ever got to write about. But what I’ll ask you to do instead is just go out and get yourself a copy and play it, because it’s one of the best adventure games of the late 1990s and short and straightforward enough that you can play it multiple times and see its many variations.

And while I don’t think you’ll need a walkthrough, I will say that there are some pretty good guides that explain how the innerworkings of the game function, and if you want to see the thirteen different endings the game has, you’d be wise to use them!

In the 1990s, Ray McCoy was far from the only detective in a trenchcoat running around a post-apocalyptic 21st century California, and some of his stiffest competition came from a character introduced by Access Software in 1989 in an adventure game called Mean Streets. I covered this game way back in Episode 4 of the podcast when we talked about 80s adventure games, and listeners may recall that this is the first game featuring Tex Murphy, a character who’d come to be played by Chris Jones, who posed for the digitized pictures of Tex in this game. The game was originally supposed to be a follow-up to Access Software’s 3D flight game Echelon, which is why it included a 3D engine for flying Tex’s car.

The 1991 sequel, Martian Memorandum, ditched the 3D in favor of a more conventional adventure game design with some digitized movies and sounds, and it is an interesting adventure in its own right, largely focusing the gameplay built around dialogue and interrogations, with a handful of inventory puzzles to help grease the conservational wheels.

Unfortunately for Martian Memorandum, it’s also sort of the black sheep of the series today because the next few games not only brought  back the 3D gameplay by allowing Tex to walk around and explore the game world first person style, but also added in significantly more digital footage to make the games feel more like interactive movies. We’re going to talk about all of these games – Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Detective, the Mean Streets remake Tex Murphy: Overseer and even the more recent 2014 revival Tesla Effect – in our next episode as we cover 3D and FMV games.

But Access Software made some other adventure games in the 1990s, and both of them are quite a bit more obscure than the Tex Murphy games. The first of these is 1990’s Countdown, a point and click adventure that uses digitized characters, portraits and backgrounds to tell a story about an amnesiac CIA agent who wakes up in a mental hospital in Turkey and has to escape so he can foil a terrorist plot. While I know that this sounds like pretty well-trod territory, Countdown is one of the better games using the old Bourne Identity setup, and one of the most interesting things about it is that the game includes a dialogue system where you can try different approaches as you talk with other characters and sometimes get really interesting outcomes, though one of the game’s biggest faults is how you can wind up in unwinnable situations and find yourself having to replay earlier sections. It’s definitely a game where you need to save often.

The first half of Countdown is definitely the stronger portion as you find a way to escape your room in the mental hospital and gear your bearings. One of the nicer aspects of the game is that you only enter rooms where you can actually do something and otherwise navigate using a top-down map. This limits the number of red herrings you have to deal with in screens or locations that are really just there to string important areas together, and once you finally are able to travel around the Mediterranean in the second half of the game, it feels like the game world really opens up, though you have to be careful you don’t waste precious time going places too far out of the way. The game could also give you some more hints about what you have to do, however – a lot of essential items are hidden and you need to get used to using the move command on just about everything you see.

Beyond the frustrations around Countdown’s difficulty, which are easily solved today with walkthroughs and longplay videos, there are some goofy things that make it endearing. For example, you run into a fellow patient who’s sitting nude in an interrogation room and making goofy faces while you talk to him. Many of the other characters don’t look so much like actors as corporate drones Access Software grabbed from a nearby office and asked to make some funny faces. Your main character, who’s named the oh-so-creative name of Mason Powers ugh looks like an Eddie Bauer model in a button-up shirt and khakis.

There’s also a bad guy named Scorpio and another character named McBain, which is quite funny if you enjoy The Simpsons but which we can’t really fault the developers for since the show hadn’t introduced those characters yet. Call that a happy coincidence.

I really recommend Countdown and hope more people will check it out – it’s way better than Sierra’s 1990 thriller adventure Codename: ICEMAN and while it’s a bit dated and has a pretty anticlimactic ending, there’s a lot of fun to be had if you bother to play through it.

The 1992 point and click adventure game Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a little harder to recommend because it has aged so badly. It’s very easy to confuse this game with Sierra Discovery’s Lost in the Rainforest, but it’s actually quite a different game, much more in the style of Indiana Jones or the 1984 film Romancing the Stone and featuring some absolutely dated tropes from old movie serials and the 1958 film Wild Women of Wongo, a movie that designer Chris Jones enjoyed so much that he adapted ideas from it. I’m assuming he did so because the movie’s in the “so bad it’s good” camp, but the problem is that the game itself doesn’t feel like it’s in on the joke.

Amazon is broken up into fourteen short chapters that play sort of like a movie serial. You’re Jason Roberts, a researcher in search of your brother Allen, who disappears in the Amazon during an expedition due to what seems to be foul play. On his journey, Jason meets an attractive blond white woman named Maya who seems to hate men but of course turns out to be a scout for a tribe of literal Amazons who live in the Amazon, complete with low-cut outfits and grass skirts or swimsuit bottoms. Oh, and did I mention the actual natives are cannibals who are wowed by little tricks you do with your inventory items and apparently believe white-skinned people are gods?

Sensitivity to other cultures is pretty lacking here, as is a sense of direction – background NPCs will have elaborate backstories, narration will take over when the game doesn’t want to depict the next logical action, and the game rarely tells you what you actually need to do in order to advance the plot. There are also moments where the story will end one chapter of the serial and then recap what just happened. It sort of feels like this is all by design in some sort of parody of other adventure games, but again, it’s not executed well enough that the designers tip their hand to show you it was on purpose.

One of the weirder things about the game is the audio narration, which sounds like it’s being delivered by an infomercial announcer reading a script rather than an actor attempting to set the mood. Many of the other lines in the game that get an audio reading also tend to be of the overly flat or scenery-chewing variety, as if the actors were just the folks Access Software could round up from their social circles. The audio is also noticeably highly compressed, but you can’t be too picky about that because the game was only released on floppy disk.

Another odd aspect of the game is the graphics are about half digitized and half hand-drawn. The main character, Jason, has a digital portrait, but his walk-around avatar is noticeably illustrated. Many of the other characters he encounters are digitized from real actors, but some, especially the native Amazon tribe later in the game, look like they came from a storybook. It’s really jarring visually, and it feels like Access Software’s ambition may have exceeded their grasp, especially since this game uses a Super VGA display mode.

But by far the weirdest thing is that the game features a number of death scenes preceded by glowing red letters that say “SHOCK WARNING” before showing your often not-so-gruesome demise. There’s also a weird note in the credits that no insects were harmed in the making of the game, which is weird because a giant ant that murders Jason in one of the death scenes. Again, you have to imagine this was all part of an attempt to spoof the source material and amuse the audience, not to play any of this seriously.

I’m not saying Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a bad game by any means – it’s reasonably engaging and has some good moments. But it’s definitely not Access Software’s best, and when we talk about Tex Murphy in our next episode, we’ll see how far they were able to evolve adventure gaming with a far better setting and design.

Another adventure game I can only recommend as a curiosity comes from Revolution Software, and that’s not because it’s a bad game so much as their first attempt at a genre they’d go on to master later on. This game came out in 1992 originally for the Amiga and it’s called Lure of the Temptress. I don’t even really want to spend a lot of time describing it because it’s honestly a pretty dull game where even the promise of a sexy villainess is barely realized since she has so little presence in the game. You mostly see humans who are under the oppression of pig-faced monsters called Skorl, and even an encounter with a dragon mid-game is anticlimactic. If you want to try Lure of the Temptress, it’s freeware now and easy to try out. But you’d be better off playing Revolution’s next game, which is also freeware, but much more interesting: the 1994 cyberpunkish point and click adventure Beneath a Steel Sky, a game that was mostly popular in Europe in the 1990s but which has since become an international cult classic that even got a sequel in 2019.

The premise of Beneath a Steel Sky is that you are a survivor of a helicopter crash in the Australian Outback who was raised by Aboriginees who live there. You’re given the name “Robert Foster” because the tribe spots a can of Foster’s Lager in the wreckage. As you grow up, you build a companion robot named Joey who can be upgraded into other robots during the game. And this is really useful, because you’re kidnapped and taken to a place called Union City, where you have to escape the minions of LINC, a powerful computer mainframe that runs the city.

By the way, most of this backstory is relayed through comic book artwork drawn by Dave Gibbons, the co-creator and artist of Watchmen. It’s really neat.

As the game proceeds, you have to work your way through the city and learn more about who you really are and how you’re connected to LINC. I won’t spoil the story, because it’s actually interesting, but it has heavy overtones of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with Foster playing the role of the Savage, but also inverting things so he’s the savior of a dystopian society instead of the self-flagellating misfit of a misguided utopia.

Beneath a Steel Sky is also notable for having a fairly interesting tone with lots of humor interspersed within the game’s more serious science fiction premise. The writing is good and the voice acting helps to bring the characters to life, though I find Robert a Joey a bit grating since Robert sounds like a generic hero and Joey’s voice sound like’s it’s filtered through a cheap electric fan.

Revolution’s defining moment, however, is their next game, 1996’s Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, which was released in North America under the rather stupid name Circle of Blood. The game opens with an amazing and lavishly animated introduction in Paris where the main character, the American tourist George Stobbart, is sitting outside his favorite café when a sinister-looking clown drops off an accordion loaded with explosives and blows the place to smithereens, killing a mysterious old man in the process. And as soon as the animation ends, the game puts you right into the scene, maintaining roughly the same level of animation and launching George into a lengthy adventure investigating why this strange bombing even happened, though he finds no help from the local French authorities, who seem more interested in covering up the case than solving the mystery.

George soon meets a photojournalist named Nicole “Nico” Collard who becomes his ally in uncovering what’s really happening, and the two find themselves mixed up in an intriguing story that involves  the Knights Templar and a group of Neo-Templars who are trying to acquire the power of an ancient deity. Unlike most adventure games, which can be beaten in a few hours, Broken Sword is a really long game that can last a dozen or more hours in your first playthrough thanks to a lot of lengthy conversations that make the characters feel as if they exist to do more than just hand out puzzle clues and inventory items as well as some fun puzzles that never get in the way of the game but do require some thought here and there.

The original version of Broken Sword is great, but if you play it today, chances are good you’ll be playing the Director’s Cut edition from 2009 that adds in additional Nico scenes where she’s actually playable and kicks off the game with her own introduction, which adds in a sinister mime who appears to be involved in the murder plot. This version also adds in portraits for the characters whenever they’re speaking and comic book panel-style action windows, especially in the new scenes. I’m personally not sure that Broken Sword needed all this extra content, as it was fine on its own, but it did help the game to reach a broader audience on the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS and mobile devices.

The 1997 sequel, Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror, sends George on a quest to rescue Nico from a group of cultists who are trying to once again obtain the power of a God, this time from the Mayan mythology. Once again, this is a lavishly animated game with absolutely stunning graphics and lots and lots of fully voiced dialogue, but it’s also noticeably shorter than the original. I definitely recommend this one, but it feels like a made for TV sequel rather than a true continuation of the original game.

From the third game onward, the Broken Sword series has changed things up with each entry, but each also has a much longer and more satisfying story than the second game. 2003’s Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is an action adventure game with some climbing and platforming mechanics and also gives you direct control over the characters rather than a point and click interface, which is good, because it was also released on the Xbox and, in Europe, on the PlayStation 2.

The fourth game, Broken Sword: The Angel of Death, released in 2006, only made it out on Windows computers. It’s once again a 3D game, but this time, it uses a point and click interface in some parts and direct control in others. It’s somewhat polarizing because it initially sidelines Nico and instead introduces a blonde American woman named Anna Maria, but it’s a fine adventure on its own and worth playing if you’re invested in the series.

The most recent game, Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse, debuted in 2013 as part one of a two-part series that concluded in 2014. This chapter returned to the more traditional point and click animated style of the original game and it’s easily the best-looking game in the series. The story and puzzles are a little less inspired, but if you’ve bothered to play the first four games, you’re of course going to want to see what happens to George and Nico in the fifth, particularly since this story’s mystery comes the closest to many of the themes explored in the first game, though this time it’s a Gnostic cult trying to destroy God with the help of Lucifer himself. The game also hints at the end that George and Nico might finally get together, which will hopefully be what will happen in the upcoming Broken Sword: Parzival’s Stone, which keeps getting delayed, but which series creator Charles Cecil continues to say is coming.

Here’s to hoping we’ll see it soon.

I know you’re probably worried that we’re getting close to the dregs now that we’ve talked about so many fantastic 1990s point and click adventure games already, but I promise that we still have a few left worth mentioning.

And since Broken Sword is so lavishly animated, this seems like as great a time as any to bring up another game that evokes that feeling of watching a cartoon: the 1997 adventure game from Burst and Virgin Games called Toonstruck, starring the great character actor Christopher Lloyd as Drew Blanc, a human who gets pulled into the animated world he’s created. It felt like Christopher Lloyd was in everything around this time after Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Back to the Future movies really raised his stature, and this game has plenty of other famous 90s staples from comedies and animation, including Ben Stein, Tim Curry, Dan Castellaneta, Jeff Bennett, Corey Burton, Rob Paulsen, April Winchell, Tress MacNeille, Jim Cummings, Frank Welker, David Ogden Stiers and Dom DeLuise.

Yes, this is the rare adventure game where the voice cast isn’t just imitating famous actors, but actually has a cast full of them!

The premise of the game is that Drew Blanc is the creator the Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun Show, a show that pays his bills but which he hates. He really wants to build a show around his snarky purple cartoon character Flux Wildly, but his studio head isn’t interested in that and demands more cute bunny designs instead. Drew falls asleep and enters the world of his creations, where he finds out that an evil character named Count Nefarious is changing the world of Cutopia into a dark and twisted place, and Drew and Flux have to stop Nefarious and save the world from disaster.

If I have a complaint about the story, it’s that Drew and Flux only briefly see the effects of Nefarious’s evil plan before they’re already taking on a quest to undo it. It makes the story feel poorly-paced and completely erases the stakes established in the first part of the introduction, and I don’t feel like Toonstruck ever fully recovers from that choice. If you’re here for story or puzzles, you’ll find Toonstruck to be quite a letdown. It’s better to just play it as a game that’s full of cartoon antics and enjoy the ride, because this game’s way more of a looker than anything else.

Of course, if you want something starring cartoon characters who are way stupider, there’s another animated adventure game from Viacom Games that’ll be right up your alley: the 1995 game MTV’s Beavis & Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity, a pitch-perfect adventure game that feels like the cartoon show has come to life on your computer, complete with the same disclaimer and introduction at the beginning and plenty of included animation. When you finally get to play the adventure game itself, you get to take Beavis and Butt-Head around Highland High School, annoying Daria and interacting with Principal Vicker and Mr. Buzzcut and hocking loogies off the roof in the first of several minigames.

As far as a plot, there’s about as much of one as you’d expect from a game starring Beavis & Butt-head. They’ll sit on the couch and watch music videos, they’ll try to follow around their aggressive idol Todd and they’ll annoy Mr. Anderson or their boss at BurgerWorld or even get tossed in prison for awhile. The interface for the game is somewhat like the one LucasArts used in Full Throttle, allowing you to pull up a sort of radial menu with icons for actions. You can also choose whether or not you want Beavis or Butt-head to respond in conversations with various characters.

The result is a really funny game that makes amazing use of its license and which honestly is one of the stronger mid-1990s point and click adventure games, right up there with anything LucasArts or Sierra published and extremely well-crafted all around. The various arcade action minigames keep the adventure game elements from becoming too tedious, but they also don’t wear out their welcome. The game’s plot, while meandering, fits the characters perfectly, and unlike every other Beavis & Butt-Head game made in the 1990s, you’re not doing anything the duo wouldn’t do. The end of the game even has them get locked in the trunk of Todd’s car so that Daria can overhear them making stupid jokes and rescue them, only for Beavis and Butt-head to return home, having learned nothing. It’s a perfect ending to a surprisingly great adventure game, and probably the best adaptation of a cartoon show until 2014’s South Park: The Stick of Truth pulled off a similarly great game.

And just to illustrate how bad things could have been, GT Interactive published its own adventure game in 1999 called Beavis and Butt-Head Do U. and it’s pretty boring and completely unchallenging despite trying to replicate the same gameplay.

But let’s now turn to a few of the other great adventures of the 1990s that dip a little more into the realm of horror instead of animated antics.

We’ll start with a title published by Electronic Arts and developed by Flashpoint Productions called Noctropolis, and it is a fascinating fusion of digitized characters, gorgeous artwork often warped by a fishbowl perspective and full-motion video. The game begins in our world, where a comic book shop owner named Peter Grey is reading through his favorite comic, which features a trio of villains named Luscious, Tophat and Desperado facing off with a shadowy caped hero named Darksheer and his beautiful sidekick Stiletto. Darksheer’s powers come from an ancient Egyptian substance called Liquidark. It’s peak 1990s Image Comics-style cheese; the heroes don’t have a code against killing and there’s plenty of T&A, but everyone also avoids swearing and the heroes agonize about their crimes to a priest. The intro is surprisingly lengthy and nearly the size of a full comic book.

Then Peter has a dream about a vampire succubus seducing him and wakes up to receive a package from a courier with another comic inside, this time detailing the formation of a new supervillain team under the leadership of a mysterious villain named Flux. An obelisk appears and Peter steps inside, and steps out into perpetually dark world of the “City of Night,” Noctropolis. With Darksheer missing, Peter assumes his identity and teams up with Stiletto to take on this new threat.

As you can probably already tell, this game was made for a certain target audience and was marketed as being sexy and violent, though there’s actually very little sex or violence in the actual game. It’s actually a lot sillier than it looks. One of my favorite puzzles involves getting a dog who’s guarding a platform to jump into a huge pit by dangling a sausage on a string in front of him, with a pitiful howl playing as he falls for it. It makes me laugh every time.

But much of this game involves wandering around and reading lots of text. And I mean lots of it – think of a comic where there’s more captions than dialogue and where the action is told to you as often as it’s shown. All of the dialogue itself is fully voiced and acted out by one of the hammiest green screen casts you’ll ever see, but the production values are high, and once again, we have a game that pulls off a lot of what Phantasmagoria was trying to do, but more effectively.

Noctropolis is definitely a game I’d recommend, both for its endearingly cheesy story and its beautiful graphics. Even your pop-up action menu looks interesting as you see the verbs you can use divided up into sections atop a pyramid-like triangle. It’s more style than substance and quite a tease, like the 90s comics it’s imitating, but it’s a definitely an adventure unlike any other you’ve ever played.

Another sort of wacky horror game from the same era is called Harvester, and it was made by DigiFX Interactive and published in Europe by Virgin Interactive and in North America by a schlockhouse publisher called Merit Studios in 1996. And Harvester is schlock of the highest order, a horror game where you play as an amnesiac named Steve Mason who awakens in 1953 in a town called Harvest where everyone seems to be more than a little off. Every character you meet feels like they’re playing a role in a 1950s sitcom that’s simmering with anger and resentment underneath, sort of like Twin Peaks meets Silent Hill. Things quickly get weird in ways I don’t want to describe because so much of the fun of this game is its shock value.

And Harvester is shocking. At different points in the game, full motion video sequences will play where Steve watches absolutely bewildering things play out, and they’re rendered more interesting by the fact that the acting in this game is so endearingly bad that you’ll find yourself wanting to rewatch certain scenes and imitate the tortured dialogue. If Mystery Science Theatre 3000 had ever found an adventure game to feature, it’d be Harvester, and I mean that in the best possible way, because it’s absolutely entertaining to play through, provided you’re old enough to handle its gore and clumsy handling of sex.

Speaking of which, the Game Grumps, who are the closest thing to video gaming’s MST3k, have a great video featuring Harvester, and it’s in the show notes!

But if you’d like your horror games a little less silly, you might want to turn to Infogrames’s two Call of Cthulhu adventures from 1993 and 1995. The first is called Shadow of the Comet, and it’s generally regarded as an excellent take on the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos, placing you in the New England coastal village of Illsmouth and having you investigate a case where a scientist went mad during the previous passing of Halley’s Comet. As you arrive in town in 1910 three days before the comet can be observed, some of the people in the town are standoffish and suspicious, and some have strange characteristics that suggest they may be connected to the horrific Old Ones, ancient evil eldritch beings who are worshipped as gods by the local cultists but who will bring about the end of the world if they’re successfully summoned.

For those familiar with the Mythos, you encounter Yog-Sothoth, Dagon and of course Cthulhu in the course of the game, and you’ll also hear a namecheck for at least one other elder god as well. The story is a combination of elements from several Lovecraft stories including “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and of course “The Call of Cthulhu,” but it does depart in a couple of ways. First of all, most of the residents of Illsmouth are not evil and actually are glad that you rid them of the evil cultists in a surprisingly upbeat ending, which is atypical for a Lovecraft-based story. Second, you face the elder gods directly but never succumb to insanity, another common trope of Lovecraft’s tragic heroes.

While Shadow of the Comet isn’t perfect by any means, it plays like an icon-driven Sierra adventure and has a lengthy, interesting plot to uncover and some memorable character interactions and great horror scenes.

The sequel, Prisoner of Ice, hews much more closely to the story “At the Mountains of Madness” and while the original game had a nice illustrated style, this one uses digitized characters walking around painted backgrounds. It also shifts the plot forward to 1937 and adds in some Nazis, which is honestly where the game gets pretty silly. While it’s tangentially connected to the original game in a very unsatisfying manner, it’s also half as interesting and about a quarter of the length of it. I honestly don’t recommend it unless you are really curious.

Another horror series you should check out, however, is Dark Seed, which was released in two parts in 1992 and 1995 by Cyberdreams and which prominently features the artwork of H.R. Giger, best-known for the design of the Alien Xenomorph in the feature film Alien. You play as Mike Dawson, a mustachioed self-insert of the game’s creator and owner of a newly purchased old mansion that turns out to be a gateway to a parallel world that’s sort of like the Upside-Down in Stranger Things. He dreams that an alien embryo gets shot into his brain, and sure enough, this creature, the Dark Seed, is intended to hatch from his head and destroy his world, paving the way for the ancients from the Dark World to take over.

Dark Seed is a very average adventure game with an oppressive timing mechanic and tricky puzzles, and thus it’s best-played with a walkthrough. But the reason you’d even want to is because the story is interesting, the horror atmosphere is tense and the graphics are incredible, utilizing large swaths of Giger’s artwork to create the Dark World and give the game a true sense of otherworldliness. The higher resolution used in the game necessitated a more restricted color palette for the graphics hardware of the day, and that actually adds a distinctive quality to the game, with our world being rendered in browns, greens and blues and the Dark World having a cold, sterile white, blue and gray quality to it. The frame around the gameplay window also changes from ornate curtains to alien gargoyles framing a monitor.

The second Dark Seed was made without Mike Dawson’s involvement, but the character in the game is still based on him. H.R. Giger’s artwork still features prominently, but the game’s far more digitized this time around, using a blend of photography and pre-rendered objects. Chris Gilbert plays Mike this time, and he sounds ten years younger despite the fact that this game’s a sequel. Tone is also a problem. Crowley, Texas is not nearly as good a setting as the mansion from the first game, and the motivation of catching a Dark World shapeshifter is a lot less pressing than getting an evil alien embryo out of your head.

The game’s music is absolutely awful and the normal world just feels… off. I’ve seen people compare it to David Lynch works like Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks and I think that comparison is appropriate since the intent of the scenes seems to be to skewer small town culture. Once you get into the Dark World, though, the game goes a bit bonkers, and by the end of the game, the body count’s surprisingly high and the ending has a twist that you’ll either love or hate, but which made it impossible to make a third game with Mike Dawson as the lead.

That’s just as well, because Cyberdreams published another game the same year based on the Harlan Ellison short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” and the game is notable for having Ellison’s involvement. It was a commercial flop that has since become a cult classic, though I’ll warn you it’s very much a love it or hate it kind of game.

I’m going to presume listeners probably don’t know much about Harlan Ellison, but he was a well-respected and award-winning science fiction writer primarily known for television and magazine stories. He was always a polarizing figure in his lifetime, outspoken about his conviction that writers deserve to be paid and credited for their work, obsessive about creative control and also quite happy to torch collaborators, producers and Hollywood studios when he felt his work was being tampered with.

He had a long feud with Gene Roddenberry over the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which he originally wrote. He hated Roddenberry’s rewrite and made such a stink that he published several of the teleplays in a 1995 book that included a lot of self-important essays.

He also sued a lot of people, quite famously including James Cameron, alleging that The Teminator’s core concept was stolen from one of Ellison’s old Outer Limits episodes called “Soldier.” The connection was tenuous at best and it’s debatable Ellison’s idea about a time-traveling soldier was even that original, but he got his settlement from Orion Pictures all the same.

Ellison was also an outspoken critic of the video games, which he said were “time wasters.”

So you can imagine what a mess Cyberdreams had on its hand trying to market their ambitious adventure game, which has a gripping and memorable title, but which is based on an absolutely bonkers story about a supercomputer named AM that kills off the global population except for five people – a woman and four men – and then extends their lives and changes their bodies so it can torture them indefinitely.

In the short story, the humans eventually escape to go and find some canned food and wind up killing each other. But one survives, and AM turns him into a gelatinous blob who no longer has a mouth or any ability to end his own life – hence the title.

In the game, this is one of the endings, but the story is changed to AM coming up with a new way to torture everyone by playing a game in which they each enter a sort of psychodrama and have to find a way to defeat AM. The game sort of follows the same template of the later Persona RPGs where each character has to overcome a flaw and find a way to live with their past, but two of AM’s three supercomputers that make up its electronic brain have sympathy on the humans and attempt to help them.

The game is incredibly messed up and features a number of endings, including an actually happy one as well as a lot of unhappy ones where your chosen character in the final chapter becomes a blob. Curiously, Ellison didn’t seem to understand that the game was winnable and bragged both before and after release that the only way to win was not to play – perhaps a promise Cyberdreams had made during production but chickened out on in the final build. But Ellison still looms large over the game – he voices AM and he clearly really loved having the chance to play his most psychopathic character, because he relishes reading those lines in the game.

I do want to mention that there are some very controversial aspects of the game, not the least of which is the trauma and rape of the lone female character, Ellen. But there’s also a Nazi scientist named Nimdok who AM relates to the most, but who resulted in the game being censored in France and Germany, making the game almost impossible to win since you need Nimdok – or at least the knowledge he has - to be able to get the actual good ending without consulting a walkthrough or guessing at a puzzle. That might account for why Ellison was confused about the game actually having one.

As a point and click adventure, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is a fascinating game well worth playing today. It’s unique in how it plays, it has a strong story that will keep you captivated and it’s fairly short and not too difficult. Just be aware that it’s not for everyone, and if you’re easily triggered by trauma, this game’s going to be an intense suffering simulator you’d best avoid.

There’s one more series I want to cover before we close out this week, and it’s The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, a surprisingly well-crafted adventure game series from Mythos Software and Electronic Arts that uses a point and click style to set Holmes and Watson out and about exploring London and investigating cases. The first game 1992’s The Case of the Serrated Scalpel, puts you on the trail of either Jack the Ripper or, as Holmes suspects, a clever copycat who has left behind the clue of a scalpel with a serrated blade.

The game is portrayed in an illustrated style with a verb and dialogue panel on the bottom third of the screen and the action shown in the top two thirds. Much of the interaction involves examining things and letting Holmes and Watson talk to one another, and there are of course some inventory puzzles and other basic deductions to be made.

This is largely a traditional point and click adventure game with a lot of text to read and dialogue trees to exhaust as you search for clues and try to trap people with deductive logic so they’ll provide needed information. The story isn’t based on one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales and thus feels a bit twisty turny and contrived at times, but it’s still a decent take on the source material.

There’s also a 1996 sequel called The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Rose Tattoo which ditches the illustrated look and feel of the original game for digitized characters and tries to recreate Victorian London with period costumes and scenes. I actually prefer the look and feel of the 1992 game to this one, but I can’t deny that it’s an impressive sequel that succeeds in using filmed digitized characters on sets far better than Sierra’s experiments with Phantasmagoria did the year before. The game world feels substantial and, when you’re out on the streets, even alive. The detailed map of Victorian-era London is also a lot of fun, particularly if you know the city and can spot locations that correspond to today.

Both games are also right up there with ICOM Simulations’ full motion video series Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, which we’ll discuss next week.

We’ve covered so much ground in our adventure gaming series that I know you’re thinking, “Sean, there is no way there could possibly be more 1990s point and click adventure games we need to discuss. You’ve covered them all!”

If only that were true! I have here in front of me a list of a whole bunch of games I didn’t even get a chance to cover, and if you take a look at the written version of my script on greatestgames.substack.com, you can find all of these games along with links to their entry on MobyGames.

And by the way, let me clarify: have I played all these games through? Heck no! At most I’ve played enough to get an impression of what they have to offer, and in a few cases, I’ve just watched video playthroughs or read about them. But here’s the thing. Many of these games came from smaller publishers or from outside the US and UK, and as a result, they didn’t get as strong of coverage and don’t have the same sorts of fanbases as more popular games. That doesn’t mean they’re bad! It just means that they’re obscure and that one of them might become your new favorite game if you play it and like it.

So, once you exhaust all of the other games we’ve discussed, give some of these a shot!

And with that, we’ve reached the end of our exploration of point and click adventure games from the 1990s! In our next episode, we’re going to finally cover the multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Under a Killing Moon, Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, The Last Express, Black Dahlia and The Neverhood. And of course we have an obligation to accept Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.

And guess what? We haven’t really covered console and handheld adventure games, so we’re going to talk about those too. Count on an episode devoted to those!

Then we’ll finally close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream.

We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!

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 Mini Motorways, a game by Dinosaur Polo Club that came out in 2019 on iOS devices as part of Apple Arcade before getting a port to Windows in 2021 and the Switch in 2022. It’s the follow-up to their earlier minimalist train game Mini Metro, and while it’s not quite as simple as drawing lines on a route map, it’s a little more strategic because you have a few tricks up your sleeve to route traffic that weren’t there in the earlier title.

The game is presented in a minimalist SimCity sort of format where you need to connect homes of a certain color to destinations of the same color using roads, of which you have a limited number of tiles you can use. As the weeks advance, you earn tools like stoplights, roundabouts, tunnels, bridges and highways that can help you deal with traffic jams and route traffic more effectively. The game goes until you have a destination that’s not receiving enough traffic, and then it ends, allowing you to start over and try again.

I enjoy this game because it’s simple and fun and doesn’t take much of my time, and yet has enough layers of complexity to make loading up a new map a challenging and interesting experience for a coffee break or a few moments of Zen. For $10, it’s a good deal, and even better, it’s often on sale and offered in a bundle with the equally great Mini Metro. Give it a try – it’s really wonderful!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127500/Mini_Motorways/

In 1990, we’ve got

Earthrise (1990)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2151/earthrise/

The Hugo Trilogy (1990-1992)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/71030/the-hugo-trilogy/

Murders in Space (1990)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/4803/murders-in-space/

 

In 1991,

The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian (1991)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/5024/the-adventures-of-maddog-williams-in-the-dungeons-of-duridian/

Spaceship Warlock (1991)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/22016/spaceship-warlock/

Suspicious Cargo (1991)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/54818/suspicious-cargo/

 

In 1992, we’ve got

Coktel Vision’s Bargon Attack (1992)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/13178/bargon-attack/

Eternam (1992)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1368/eternam/

Hook (1992)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/20230/hook/

Rome: Pathway to Power (1992)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2232/rome-pathway-to-power/

 

1993,

Black Sect (1993)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2571/black-sect/

Blue Force (1993)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1478/blue-force/

 

 

1994,

Igor: Objective Uikokahonia (1994)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2170/igor-objective-uikokahonia/

Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb (1994)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/4008/inherit-the-earth-quest-for-the-orb/

 

 

1995,

Bureau 13 (1995)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/6601/bureau-13/

Chewy: Esc from F5 (1995)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2339/chewy-esc-from-f5/

Dračí Historie (English: Dragon History) (1995)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/44689/draci-historie/

Flight of the Amazon Queen (1995)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/352/flight-of-the-amazon-queen/

Teen Agent (1995)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/6423/teen-agent/

 

1996,

Housemarque - Alien Incident (1996)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1924/alien-incident/

Down in the Dumps (1996)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/652/down-in-the-dumps/

Fable (1996)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1893/fable/

Imperium Romanum (1996)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/6300/imperium-romanum/

 

1997,

Ark of Time (1997)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2156/ark-of-time/

Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths (1997)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/7659/tony-tough-and-the-night-of-roasted-moths/

U.F.O.s (1997)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/4556/ufos/

VooDoo Kid (1997)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/16006/voodoo-kid/

 

And in 1998,

Galador - The Prince and the Coward (1998)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/30716/galador-the-prince-and-the-coward/

Team17 - Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy (1998)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2564/nightlong-union-city-conspiracy/

Hopkins FBI (1998)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/3994/hopkins-fbi/

 

As for 1999? There really weren’t any notable point and click adventures from that year we haven’t already covered except for Cookie’s Bustle, a peculiar Japanese point and click adventure that’s most famous for being targeted by a copyright troll from 2022 to 2023 to try to erase all evidence of its existence. It’s only playable in Japanese without a fan patch and it’s quite dark and challenging despite its cutesy exterior, so while it’s a fun curiosity, it’s not an easy game to pick up and play.

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

In this episode, we’re going to talk about 1990s point and click adventure games made yet another group of like Westwood Studios, Cryo, Access Software, Cyberdreams, Infogrames, Revolution Software, Viacom and more! Join us on this expedition through games you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!

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Season 1, Episode 9: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 7

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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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SOURCES:

Shelley Day’s court case: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/waw/press/2005/dec/day.html

The KGB File: http://thekgbfile.50webs.com/index.html

Rick Gush on Kyrandia: https://web.archive.org/web/20021122190852/http://www.adventuregamers.com:80/display.php?id=110

https://muds.fandom.com/wiki/Kyrandia

https://www.well-played.com.au/broken-sword-parzivals-stone-has-been-delayed/

Harvester on GameGrumps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_lcJD7-gOo

https://kotaku.com/how-harlan-ellison-s-most-famous-short-story-became-an-1827327887

https://www.pcgamer.com/saturday-crapshoot-i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream/

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EPISODE 9

Coming up in this episode –

We’re going to talk about all sorts of point and click adventure games from the 1990s that weren’t published by Sierra, including The Legend of Kyrandia, Beneath a Steel Sky, Dark Seed, Call of Cthulhu, Dune, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, Beavis and Butthead and of course, Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream!

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!

 

One name you haven’t heard much about since we left LucasArts a few episodes ago is Ron Gilbert, and you might wonder what he was up to after leaving LucasArts following Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. And the answer is, “making dozens of games with his colleague Shelley Day,” another established game developer who’d worked at LucasArts. Together, they’d found Humongous Entertainment and make games about characters like Putt-Putt, Fatty Bear, Freddi Fish and Pajama Sam, with many of these point and click adventures utilizing the SCUMM engine.

But because these games are for little kids, I don’t feel a lot of need to go into detail about them. Suffice it to say Ron Gilbert did eventually return to modern adventure games and we’ll cover him in later episodes.

And as for Shelley Day… well, that’s a sad story, and you look her up in the show notes if you want to see why she and Gilbert parted ways.

But I bring up Ron Gilbert because he’s one of the few adventure game creators who really stayed active in the 1990s working on point and click adventure games and not trying to evolve things into 3D or to chase after trends like pre-rendered artwork or controller-friendly mechanics. He’s also one of the people who most influenced the style of point and click adventure games by not only articulating a philosophy he largely followed, but also by showing people how it could be done with the first two Monkey Island games.

And as we’ve already discussed with games like Simon the Sorcerer and Discworld, that Monkey Island style was pretty prevalent throughout the 1990s, especially with Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle and some of the less aggressive Sierra games. But not everyone was copying that style, and one developer that certainly tried to do its own thing was Cryo Interactive, a French developer founded by several folks from ERE Informatique. While ERE was bombastic and included the intergalactic logo for Exxos in its branding, Cryo adopted the face of a female android in a sleep pod, first seen in the French-only puzzle game Extase, based on a minigame called “Brain Bowler” in ERE’s truly odd 1989 outer space Olympiad, Purple Saturn Day.

Cryo’s next project was an adventure game based on Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel, Dune, in 1992, but which also drew heavy visual inspiration from the 1984 David Lynch feature film adaptation, even using the film’s logo and a production still of Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides in a stillsuit on the cover of several editions of the North American release. According to the credit, MacLachlan’s appearance was licensed for the game, probably to help enhance its marketability.

Within the game, some characters resemble the film’s actors. Feyd-Rautha Harkonen still closely resembles Sting, for example, and Lady Jessica looks a lot like Francesca Annis. Virgina Maden’s Princess Irulan also shows up in footage from the film to narrate the story in the Sega CD version. Other characters, however, like Thufir Hawat, Baron Harkonen and Duncan Idaho, look so different they’re not remotely recognizable.

Dune is a fascinating point and click adventure because it takes place from the first person perspective as you control Paul Atreides visiting various sites on the planet of Arrakis, but it also transforms into a strategy game about midway through once the Harkonens kill Duke Leto and you have to work to evict them from strongholds.

Throughout the game, the Fremen recognize you as Muad’Dib and pledge their loyalty to you as you visit their sietches, and a lot of the political and social dynamics of the book and film are relaxed to make the adventure simpler and more focused. But you still get to fly around in ornithopters, ride sandworms and raise armies… as well as fall in love with Chani, whose fate is a little happier in this telling than the source material where she’s only permitted to be Paul’s concubine when he seizes the Imperial throne.

Cryo’s work on the game, however, was famously troubled due to a number of issues going on behind the scenes, and as they were working on their Dune game, an American developer called Westwood Studios was building one of its own, a real-time strategy base-building and resource-gathering game that would come out the same year as Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty. It’s one of my favorite games of all time, by the way, and the direct inspiration for Blizzard’s Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Westwood’s own Command & Conquer series. But we’ll talk about those games another time.

As for Westwood, we’ll come back to them in a few minutes, because they, too, were building adventure games in the 1990s.

But I want to touch on a few other games Cryo released in the 1990s that were also adventure games, including their 1992 adventure KGB, which has a reputation for being one of the most difficult graphical adventure games ever made, and yet which is still well-regarded as being a legitimately good game. And by the way, there is a 1993 CD-ROM re-release called Conspiracy that adds in some clips where Donald Sutherland plays the main character’s deceased father, but these scenes really just provide some vague advice and don’t add much to the game.

The premise of KGB is that the Soviet Union is days away from collapsing in 1991 and you are an officer named Captain Maksim Mikhailovich Rukov, or either Maks or Rukov for short, who’s joined the KGB’s Department P and who has to investigate some problems within the KGB that eventually lead to an assassination plot to murder Mikhal Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the USSR.

I’m not sure exactly how historically accurate the game actually is, but in real life, there was a failed coup attempt in August of 1991 that involved the KGB and the State Committee on the State of Emergency, more popularly known as the “Gang of Eight,” who opposed Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost, which meant restructuring and transparency.

KGB is all about spycraft and catching some of the slipperiest people you’ll ever see in an adventure game through a variety of methods, such as recording conversations and making use of a snuff film as leverage.

The KGB conspirators are very hard to pin down, and wouldn’t you know it, they also have a corrupt CIA ally in the mix as well as a man who’s been surgically altered to look like Gorbachev and who’s been brainwashed so he can go on TV and resign the presidency in place of the actual Gorbachev, who gets kidnapped. Your main ally is your Uncle Vanya, an older man in a wheelchair who’s been working undercover at the KGB and who pulled strings to get you on the job. He also has a friend named Major Vovlov who serves as your bad-tempered boss and the game’s ultimate antagonist.

Because the game is so challenging, I recommend consulting a website I’ve linked in the show notes called The KGB File to help you through it. KGB is definitely a game made for adults who want an engaging and sophisticated plot; it doesn’t hold your hand and it has some seriously mature themes it explores along with a lot of Russian names to keep track of from a surprisingly large cast of characters. There are drugs and prostitutes and murders and multiple layers of bureaucracy to keep track of. If you enjoy the intrigue aspects of Metal Gear Solid games, you might find KGB to be a really engaging experience.

Another Cryo’s adventure game is from 1995: Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure, which is also for mature audiences and might seem more accessible, but it’s a polarizing game for multiple reasons. It’s based on the Dark Horse comic book series from the 1990s, primarily the graphic novel Aliens: Labyrinth, to which this game is actually an adaptation but also a sort of sequel.

In the graphic novel Aliens: Labyrinth, the plot revolves around a scientist and former Colonial Marine named Tony Crespi who’s sent to a research space station to secretly monitor Colonel Doctor Paul Church, who’s experimenting on Alien Xenomorphs by putting them in a dark, labyrinth-like maze and learning about how they hunt and make decisions. But it all sort of goes Jurassic Park and, predictably, tragedy occurs.

The game takes place  at a time that would simply be defined as “later” and isn’t officially part of the Dark Horse canon despite drawing liberally from it. You play as Lt. Col. Hericksen, not-so-subtly named for the actor Lance Henriksen who played Bishop in the Aliens film. The gameplay is interesting because it’s sort of a point and click adventure due to Hericksen’s appearance in many scenes, but it also looks and plays like a 3D Myst-style game at times.

Even so, this one is mostly a point and click adventure with dialogue trees, inventory puzzles and illustrated characters who pop up in visual novel-style conversations. But there are also some RPG elements and turn-based strategy sequences where you pilot an exosuit and battle Xenomorphs and facehuggers and, towards the end, Colonial Marines.

It’s a surprisingly pretty and interesting game, though the illustrated characters and the pre-rendered scenes do clash a little bit. The voice acting is also pretty bad and clashes with the otherwise dark atmosphere of the game. But probably the biggest complaint about Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure is that it’s so easy to make mistakes and undo all your hard work, and it doesn’t help that the game is also quite buggy. My advice is to play with a walkthrough, because the game isn’t so much challenging as it is limited by a bad interface, time constraints and poor directions.

But if you like your games dark and gritty and set in the future, you might want to check out what Westwood Studios had on tap in 1990 with a different adventure also based on a book.

Infocom’s final years as an Activision adventure game imprint gave rise to a few graphical adventure games and RPGs, many of which were created by Brett W. Sperry and Louis Castle’s Las Vegas-based game studio, Westwood Associates, soon after renamed Westwood Studios. One of Westwood’s earliest games was a 1990 DOS point and click adventure and RPG hybrid called Circuit’s Edge, based on the novel When Gravity Falls by George Alec Effinger. While the game has a cyberpunk feel to it, you’ve never played a setting quite like this because the premise of the story is that the Islamic Arabic culture has become the principal world power and you play as an investigator named Marid Audran who lives in the city of the Budayeen and gets caught in a web of intrigue involving a client he’s framed for murdering and a crime lord benefactor who hires him to get to the bottom of what really happened.

Now, I want to specify that Circuit’s Edge is more a role-playing game with an involved story than a true adventure game. The interface shows stats on the side, a small graphical window with character portraits beside it and a big text box underneath, and moving through the Budayeen is similar to the first person navigation around the town of Skara Brae in The Bard’s Tale. But the game also follows a lot of the classic adventure game conventions of having you collect inventory, solve puzzles and talk to NPCs fairly liberally. There are also a lot of very adult themes in the game, including quite a bit of prostitution and even nudity. It’s interesting and worth checking out, if for no other reason than it tells a story that is quite different from most other games of the era.

Westwood’s next adventure series is one of the ones it’s best-known for, and the proper name of the series is Fables & Fiends, though this was retooled later to reflect the first game’s subtitle, The Legend of Kyrandia. This initial chapter debuted in 1992 and features a character named Brandon, an orphaned young man who has to battle the murderous jester Malcolm, who’s escaped his magical confinement and is using the magical Kyragem to sow mischief around the land, including turning Brandon’s grandfather, the powerful wizard Kallak, into stone. In many ways, the game feels like a King’s Quest-style adventure, though apparently, at least according to the game’s writer and the designer of the sequels, Rick “Coco” Gush, Westwood licensed it from an earlier MUD game called Kyrandia by Richard Skurnick and Scott Brinker, though the inspiration appears to be superficial at best.

The Legend of Kyrandia is a true point and click adventure game in the style of a Sierra or LucasArts adventure with all the elements you’d expect – gorgeous artwork, an inventory scroll at the bottom of the screen and a context-sensitive cursor that allows you to interact with the game world depicted in the top two thirds of the screen. The music by Westwood’s house musician Frank Klepacki is wonderful, and there was even a CD-ROM talkie version released alongside the disk-based version with voice acting, though it’s kind of cringey and nowhere near as good as what Westwood would start to be known for once they started shipping games like Command & Conquer.

The story is basically what you’d expect – as Brandon, you are the chosen one who has to prove his mettle as a hero, discover your claim to the throne and overcome the mischievous machinations of Malcolm, who shows up occasionally to bother you, but who never comes across as particularly menacing. You also befriend a young alchemist named Zanthia who teaches you how to make potions. That might seem like an unimportant detail, but as you’ll see in a moment, she’s not a trivial character.

The Legend of Kyrandia is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s really more in the realm of “lighthearted” than comedic. The jokes are mostly just slapstick or Brandon grumbling about things, and Malcolm has to be one of the least funny jesters in the history of gaming, and also one of the least capable. Suffice it to say he’s the sort of villain who tells you not to go into the room you need to go into to defeat him, and then also is the sort who’s easily defeated by a trick a child would see through. He’s also kind of annoying, a point that’s not lost on Zanthia when she returns in the second game as its protagonist.

And the second game is a little confusing to identify at first because it was originally published in 1993 as Fables & Fiends: The Hand of Fate with a box that didn’t match the first game’s storybook aesthetic and instead depicts a purple hand inset inside an even larger hand and which doesn’t really say “The Legend of Kyrandia - Book 2” anywhere. The back cover’s text is hard to read due to a confusing layout and since Malcolm and Brandon are nowhere to be seen, it’s hard to connect this game to its predecessor. Even worse, the title screen for the game itself also just says “The Hand of Fate.”

But if you play the game, especially if you’re playing the CD-ROM talkie edition, it’s pretty clear you’re playing a sequel as Brandon’s voice kicks off a narration and shows some familiar scenes and characters as Brandon explains that the world is disappearing, piece by piece, and that Zanthia has been selected to retrieve a stone from the center of the world.  In fact, later versions of the game even received new box art more in line with the first game and more clearly calling this game “Fables & Fiends – The Legend of Kyrandia Book Two” with no mention of the Hand of Fate, but instead a painted picture of Zanthia traveling through the skies on her quest.

And make no mistake – marketing issues aside, The Hand of Fate is a superior game to the original in every way. It’s more imaginative, it’s funnier, it has better puzzles and Zanthia is just a far more charismatic character than Brandon, with a dry wit and a recast voice actress who adds so much more to the character in the talkie version. And actually, the voice acting in this game is better all the way around, much more in line with the best of Sierra and LucasArts. Frank Klepacki’s score even ups the ante this time with a little more variety and some funk as well as some island-style music. It’s pretty clear the Westwood team took some inspiration from The Secret of Monkey Island instead of King’s Quest this time around, right down to featuring a segment with pirates, but it results in such a better game it was honestly a good move.

Zanthia’s travels are of course not straightforward, and she not only attempts to visit the center of the world, but also wanders around swamps, castles, coves, lava pits, the high reaches of the world and even across a rainbow bridge into the surreal realm of the Wheels of Fate. One of the most-lauded aspects of the game is that she approaches her challenges with a certain confidence and world-weariness that’s unusual for adventure games of the era. She even changes her outfits to suit the places that she goes.

But if you ask me, the best aspect of the game is that there’s no Brandon and no Malcolm. And unfortunately, the game’s standalone story ends with a cliffhanger where Malcolm is freed, setting up a sequel for him to make his return.

The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three: Malcolm’s Revenge came out in 1994 and while it is very clearly part of the series from the box art and the introductory cinematic, it also looks and plays a bit differently from the other two games. The hand-drawn aesthetic is replaced by largely pre-rendered backgrounds, the inventory bar that lines the bottom of the screen in the previous two games is gone, popping up only when needed, and the gameplay is occasionally interrupted by pre-rendered cutscenes. The credits sequence also has full-motion video sequence featuring the development team at Westwood, with Malcolm causing havoc around the office. You can even see Joe Kucan, who famously played Kane in the Command & Conquer games, make an appearance as the game’s vocal recording director.

And speaking of the acting, Malcolm, thankfully, has been recast with a nastier, more villainous voice for this sequel, and since you play as him this time around, it’s good to see the character be less of a cartoon clown and more of an actual bad guy. That is, of course, assuming you keep him in that persona – this game actually allows you to choose if you want to lie to other characters or be nasty, measuring Malcolm’s behavior with a meter that appears next to the inventory bar.

As adventure games go, Malcom’s Revenge isn’t much of a revenge tale; rather, it’s one of the most surreal, bonkers ones you’ll ever play, with much of the game devoted to realms with talking animals and obnoxious humans who tend to get under Malcolm’s skin. As you might expect, he becomes an unlikely hero and has to kick a group of pirates out of Kyrandia to restore things to the way they used to be. In the end, all he really wants to do is take a nap, but he’s unfortunately blamed for pretty much everything that goes wrong in Kyrandia, which means he also has to clear his name before the game is over.

While Malcom’s Revenge is often thought of as a step down from The Hand of Fate in terms of its adventure game credentials, it’s still a decent adventure game with an absolutely killer soundtrack that’s very much in line with the sort of funky hip-hop industrial tunes you’d hear in Command & Conquer. The strong production values help make the game fun, and thankfully, the humor is a lot sharper than Malcolm’s first outing.

Westwood worked on one more point and click adventure game in the 1990s, and while it was a bit of a slow burner in terms of sales, it did make a positive impression and has since become a true classic. The name of that game? Blade Runner, based on the 1982 feature film of the same name and released in 1997 with an eye for recreating many of the movie’s strongest visuals while telling a parallel story to Rick Deckard’s adventures with the escaped Nexus-6 replicant units led by Roy Batty.

The game focuses on a rookie Blade Runner named Ray McCoy who winds up on the trail of a warrior poet replicant named Clovis who is leading a group of rogue replicants who are all suspects in a crime involving murdering animals – a heinous crime in a future were real animals are exceedingly rare. McCoy has to hunt down all of Clovis’s replicants, but the way the game is structured, who those replicants actually are is randomized, and there are multiple endings available, some of which include McCoy himself being a replicant.

One of the most notable things about Blade Runner is how well it nails the aesthetic of the film. The team at Westwood not only recreated some of the locations, camera transitions and lighting effects, but also extended the world out with new places that look as if they came from scenes we just didn’t get to see in the film. Many of the film’s characters make an appearance and are voiced by the original actors, and the new characters are all voiced by established screen actors, some of whom, like Jeff Garlin and Lisa Edelstein, went on to became quite famous.

The graphics were also quite interesting for the time, fusing pre-rendered footage and a sort of voxel-based rendering of the characters that was able to be done in software without a 3D accelerator card. In the 1990s, this was crucial since it meant delivering graphics that looked 3D without actually having to be 3D. While the game looks movie-accurate in many places, everything was created specifically for the game and nothing was used from the film footage. Since the target resolution was lower than we’d use today, the game does have a sort of grainy look and feel to it that modern ports have not been able to fix since the original source code was lost, but it’s still a darned impressive-looking game that’s still one of the best and most authentic cyberpunk stories out there.

I would love to talk more about Blade Runner, because I’m a huge fan of the original novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Ridley Scott film and the game itself. It was one of the first games I reviewed as a pro game reviewer back in the 1990s and definitely one of my favorites I ever got to write about. But what I’ll ask you to do instead is just go out and get yourself a copy and play it, because it’s one of the best adventure games of the late 1990s and short and straightforward enough that you can play it multiple times and see its many variations.

And while I don’t think you’ll need a walkthrough, I will say that there are some pretty good guides that explain how the innerworkings of the game function, and if you want to see the thirteen different endings the game has, you’d be wise to use them!

In the 1990s, Ray McCoy was far from the only detective in a trenchcoat running around a post-apocalyptic 21st century California, and some of his stiffest competition came from a character introduced by Access Software in 1989 in an adventure game called Mean Streets. I covered this game way back in Episode 4 of the podcast when we talked about 80s adventure games, and listeners may recall that this is the first game featuring Tex Murphy, a character who’d come to be played by Chris Jones, who posed for the digitized pictures of Tex in this game. The game was originally supposed to be a follow-up to Access Software’s 3D flight game Echelon, which is why it included a 3D engine for flying Tex’s car.

The 1991 sequel, Martian Memorandum, ditched the 3D in favor of a more conventional adventure game design with some digitized movies and sounds, and it is an interesting adventure in its own right, largely focusing the gameplay built around dialogue and interrogations, with a handful of inventory puzzles to help grease the conservational wheels.

Unfortunately for Martian Memorandum, it’s also sort of the black sheep of the series today because the next few games not only brought  back the 3D gameplay by allowing Tex to walk around and explore the game world first person style, but also added in significantly more digital footage to make the games feel more like interactive movies. We’re going to talk about all of these games – Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Detective, the Mean Streets remake Tex Murphy: Overseer and even the more recent 2014 revival Tesla Effect – in our next episode as we cover 3D and FMV games.

But Access Software made some other adventure games in the 1990s, and both of them are quite a bit more obscure than the Tex Murphy games. The first of these is 1990’s Countdown, a point and click adventure that uses digitized characters, portraits and backgrounds to tell a story about an amnesiac CIA agent who wakes up in a mental hospital in Turkey and has to escape so he can foil a terrorist plot. While I know that this sounds like pretty well-trod territory, Countdown is one of the better games using the old Bourne Identity setup, and one of the most interesting things about it is that the game includes a dialogue system where you can try different approaches as you talk with other characters and sometimes get really interesting outcomes, though one of the game’s biggest faults is how you can wind up in unwinnable situations and find yourself having to replay earlier sections. It’s definitely a game where you need to save often.

The first half of Countdown is definitely the stronger portion as you find a way to escape your room in the mental hospital and gear your bearings. One of the nicer aspects of the game is that you only enter rooms where you can actually do something and otherwise navigate using a top-down map. This limits the number of red herrings you have to deal with in screens or locations that are really just there to string important areas together, and once you finally are able to travel around the Mediterranean in the second half of the game, it feels like the game world really opens up, though you have to be careful you don’t waste precious time going places too far out of the way. The game could also give you some more hints about what you have to do, however – a lot of essential items are hidden and you need to get used to using the move command on just about everything you see.

Beyond the frustrations around Countdown’s difficulty, which are easily solved today with walkthroughs and longplay videos, there are some goofy things that make it endearing. For example, you run into a fellow patient who’s sitting nude in an interrogation room and making goofy faces while you talk to him. Many of the other characters don’t look so much like actors as corporate drones Access Software grabbed from a nearby office and asked to make some funny faces. Your main character, who’s named the oh-so-creative name of Mason Powers ugh looks like an Eddie Bauer model in a button-up shirt and khakis.

There’s also a bad guy named Scorpio and another character named McBain, which is quite funny if you enjoy The Simpsons but which we can’t really fault the developers for since the show hadn’t introduced those characters yet. Call that a happy coincidence.

I really recommend Countdown and hope more people will check it out – it’s way better than Sierra’s 1990 thriller adventure Codename: ICEMAN and while it’s a bit dated and has a pretty anticlimactic ending, there’s a lot of fun to be had if you bother to play through it.

The 1992 point and click adventure game Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a little harder to recommend because it has aged so badly. It’s very easy to confuse this game with Sierra Discovery’s Lost in the Rainforest, but it’s actually quite a different game, much more in the style of Indiana Jones or the 1984 film Romancing the Stone and featuring some absolutely dated tropes from old movie serials and the 1958 film Wild Women of Wongo, a movie that designer Chris Jones enjoyed so much that he adapted ideas from it. I’m assuming he did so because the movie’s in the “so bad it’s good” camp, but the problem is that the game itself doesn’t feel like it’s in on the joke.

Amazon is broken up into fourteen short chapters that play sort of like a movie serial. You’re Jason Roberts, a researcher in search of your brother Allen, who disappears in the Amazon during an expedition due to what seems to be foul play. On his journey, Jason meets an attractive blond white woman named Maya who seems to hate men but of course turns out to be a scout for a tribe of literal Amazons who live in the Amazon, complete with low-cut outfits and grass skirts or swimsuit bottoms. Oh, and did I mention the actual natives are cannibals who are wowed by little tricks you do with your inventory items and apparently believe white-skinned people are gods?

Sensitivity to other cultures is pretty lacking here, as is a sense of direction – background NPCs will have elaborate backstories, narration will take over when the game doesn’t want to depict the next logical action, and the game rarely tells you what you actually need to do in order to advance the plot. There are also moments where the story will end one chapter of the serial and then recap what just happened. It sort of feels like this is all by design in some sort of parody of other adventure games, but again, it’s not executed well enough that the designers tip their hand to show you it was on purpose.

One of the weirder things about the game is the audio narration, which sounds like it’s being delivered by an infomercial announcer reading a script rather than an actor attempting to set the mood. Many of the other lines in the game that get an audio reading also tend to be of the overly flat or scenery-chewing variety, as if the actors were just the folks Access Software could round up from their social circles. The audio is also noticeably highly compressed, but you can’t be too picky about that because the game was only released on floppy disk.

Another odd aspect of the game is the graphics are about half digitized and half hand-drawn. The main character, Jason, has a digital portrait, but his walk-around avatar is noticeably illustrated. Many of the other characters he encounters are digitized from real actors, but some, especially the native Amazon tribe later in the game, look like they came from a storybook. It’s really jarring visually, and it feels like Access Software’s ambition may have exceeded their grasp, especially since this game uses a Super VGA display mode.

But by far the weirdest thing is that the game features a number of death scenes preceded by glowing red letters that say “SHOCK WARNING” before showing your often not-so-gruesome demise. There’s also a weird note in the credits that no insects were harmed in the making of the game, which is weird because a giant ant that murders Jason in one of the death scenes. Again, you have to imagine this was all part of an attempt to spoof the source material and amuse the audience, not to play any of this seriously.

I’m not saying Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a bad game by any means – it’s reasonably engaging and has some good moments. But it’s definitely not Access Software’s best, and when we talk about Tex Murphy in our next episode, we’ll see how far they were able to evolve adventure gaming with a far better setting and design.

Another adventure game I can only recommend as a curiosity comes from Revolution Software, and that’s not because it’s a bad game so much as their first attempt at a genre they’d go on to master later on. This game came out in 1992 originally for the Amiga and it’s called Lure of the Temptress. I don’t even really want to spend a lot of time describing it because it’s honestly a pretty dull game where even the promise of a sexy villainess is barely realized since she has so little presence in the game. You mostly see humans who are under the oppression of pig-faced monsters called Skorl, and even an encounter with a dragon mid-game is anticlimactic. If you want to try Lure of the Temptress, it’s freeware now and easy to try out. But you’d be better off playing Revolution’s next game, which is also freeware, but much more interesting: the 1994 cyberpunkish point and click adventure Beneath a Steel Sky, a game that was mostly popular in Europe in the 1990s but which has since become an international cult classic that even got a sequel in 2019.

The premise of Beneath a Steel Sky is that you are a survivor of a helicopter crash in the Australian Outback who was raised by Aboriginees who live there. You’re given the name “Robert Foster” because the tribe spots a can of Foster’s Lager in the wreckage. As you grow up, you build a companion robot named Joey who can be upgraded into other robots during the game. And this is really useful, because you’re kidnapped and taken to a place called Union City, where you have to escape the minions of LINC, a powerful computer mainframe that runs the city.

By the way, most of this backstory is relayed through comic book artwork drawn by Dave Gibbons, the co-creator and artist of Watchmen. It’s really neat.

As the game proceeds, you have to work your way through the city and learn more about who you really are and how you’re connected to LINC. I won’t spoil the story, because it’s actually interesting, but it has heavy overtones of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with Foster playing the role of the Savage, but also inverting things so he’s the savior of a dystopian society instead of the self-flagellating misfit of a misguided utopia.

Beneath a Steel Sky is also notable for having a fairly interesting tone with lots of humor interspersed within the game’s more serious science fiction premise. The writing is good and the voice acting helps to bring the characters to life, though I find Robert a Joey a bit grating since Robert sounds like a generic hero and Joey’s voice sound like’s it’s filtered through a cheap electric fan.

Revolution’s defining moment, however, is their next game, 1996’s Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, which was released in North America under the rather stupid name Circle of Blood. The game opens with an amazing and lavishly animated introduction in Paris where the main character, the American tourist George Stobbart, is sitting outside his favorite café when a sinister-looking clown drops off an accordion loaded with explosives and blows the place to smithereens, killing a mysterious old man in the process. And as soon as the animation ends, the game puts you right into the scene, maintaining roughly the same level of animation and launching George into a lengthy adventure investigating why this strange bombing even happened, though he finds no help from the local French authorities, who seem more interested in covering up the case than solving the mystery.

George soon meets a photojournalist named Nicole “Nico” Collard who becomes his ally in uncovering what’s really happening, and the two find themselves mixed up in an intriguing story that involves  the Knights Templar and a group of Neo-Templars who are trying to acquire the power of an ancient deity. Unlike most adventure games, which can be beaten in a few hours, Broken Sword is a really long game that can last a dozen or more hours in your first playthrough thanks to a lot of lengthy conversations that make the characters feel as if they exist to do more than just hand out puzzle clues and inventory items as well as some fun puzzles that never get in the way of the game but do require some thought here and there.

The original version of Broken Sword is great, but if you play it today, chances are good you’ll be playing the Director’s Cut edition from 2009 that adds in additional Nico scenes where she’s actually playable and kicks off the game with her own introduction, which adds in a sinister mime who appears to be involved in the murder plot. This version also adds in portraits for the characters whenever they’re speaking and comic book panel-style action windows, especially in the new scenes. I’m personally not sure that Broken Sword needed all this extra content, as it was fine on its own, but it did help the game to reach a broader audience on the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS and mobile devices.

The 1997 sequel, Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror, sends George on a quest to rescue Nico from a group of cultists who are trying to once again obtain the power of a God, this time from the Mayan mythology. Once again, this is a lavishly animated game with absolutely stunning graphics and lots and lots of fully voiced dialogue, but it’s also noticeably shorter than the original. I definitely recommend this one, but it feels like a made for TV sequel rather than a true continuation of the original game.

From the third game onward, the Broken Sword series has changed things up with each entry, but each also has a much longer and more satisfying story than the second game. 2003’s Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is an action adventure game with some climbing and platforming mechanics and also gives you direct control over the characters rather than a point and click interface, which is good, because it was also released on the Xbox and, in Europe, on the PlayStation 2.

The fourth game, Broken Sword: The Angel of Death, released in 2006, only made it out on Windows computers. It’s once again a 3D game, but this time, it uses a point and click interface in some parts and direct control in others. It’s somewhat polarizing because it initially sidelines Nico and instead introduces a blonde American woman named Anna Maria, but it’s a fine adventure on its own and worth playing if you’re invested in the series.

The most recent game, Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse, debuted in 2013 as part one of a two-part series that concluded in 2014. This chapter returned to the more traditional point and click animated style of the original game and it’s easily the best-looking game in the series. The story and puzzles are a little less inspired, but if you’ve bothered to play the first four games, you’re of course going to want to see what happens to George and Nico in the fifth, particularly since this story’s mystery comes the closest to many of the themes explored in the first game, though this time it’s a Gnostic cult trying to destroy God with the help of Lucifer himself. The game also hints at the end that George and Nico might finally get together, which will hopefully be what will happen in the upcoming Broken Sword: Parzival’s Stone, which keeps getting delayed, but which series creator Charles Cecil continues to say is coming.

Here’s to hoping we’ll see it soon.

I know you’re probably worried that we’re getting close to the dregs now that we’ve talked about so many fantastic 1990s point and click adventure games already, but I promise that we still have a few left worth mentioning.

And since Broken Sword is so lavishly animated, this seems like as great a time as any to bring up another game that evokes that feeling of watching a cartoon: the 1997 adventure game from Burst and Virgin Games called Toonstruck, starring the great character actor Christopher Lloyd as Drew Blanc, a human who gets pulled into the animated world he’s created. It felt like Christopher Lloyd was in everything around this time after Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Back to the Future movies really raised his stature, and this game has plenty of other famous 90s staples from comedies and animation, including Ben Stein, Tim Curry, Dan Castellaneta, Jeff Bennett, Corey Burton, Rob Paulsen, April Winchell, Tress MacNeille, Jim Cummings, Frank Welker, David Ogden Stiers and Dom DeLuise.

Yes, this is the rare adventure game where the voice cast isn’t just imitating famous actors, but actually has a cast full of them!

The premise of the game is that Drew Blanc is the creator the Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun Show, a show that pays his bills but which he hates. He really wants to build a show around his snarky purple cartoon character Flux Wildly, but his studio head isn’t interested in that and demands more cute bunny designs instead. Drew falls asleep and enters the world of his creations, where he finds out that an evil character named Count Nefarious is changing the world of Cutopia into a dark and twisted place, and Drew and Flux have to stop Nefarious and save the world from disaster.

If I have a complaint about the story, it’s that Drew and Flux only briefly see the effects of Nefarious’s evil plan before they’re already taking on a quest to undo it. It makes the story feel poorly-paced and completely erases the stakes established in the first part of the introduction, and I don’t feel like Toonstruck ever fully recovers from that choice. If you’re here for story or puzzles, you’ll find Toonstruck to be quite a letdown. It’s better to just play it as a game that’s full of cartoon antics and enjoy the ride, because this game’s way more of a looker than anything else.

Of course, if you want something starring cartoon characters who are way stupider, there’s another animated adventure game from Viacom Games that’ll be right up your alley: the 1995 game MTV’s Beavis & Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity, a pitch-perfect adventure game that feels like the cartoon show has come to life on your computer, complete with the same disclaimer and introduction at the beginning and plenty of included animation. When you finally get to play the adventure game itself, you get to take Beavis and Butt-Head around Highland High School, annoying Daria and interacting with Principal Vicker and Mr. Buzzcut and hocking loogies off the roof in the first of several minigames.

As far as a plot, there’s about as much of one as you’d expect from a game starring Beavis & Butt-head. They’ll sit on the couch and watch music videos, they’ll try to follow around their aggressive idol Todd and they’ll annoy Mr. Anderson or their boss at BurgerWorld or even get tossed in prison for awhile. The interface for the game is somewhat like the one LucasArts used in Full Throttle, allowing you to pull up a sort of radial menu with icons for actions. You can also choose whether or not you want Beavis or Butt-head to respond in conversations with various characters.

The result is a really funny game that makes amazing use of its license and which honestly is one of the stronger mid-1990s point and click adventure games, right up there with anything LucasArts or Sierra published and extremely well-crafted all around. The various arcade action minigames keep the adventure game elements from becoming too tedious, but they also don’t wear out their welcome. The game’s plot, while meandering, fits the characters perfectly, and unlike every other Beavis & Butt-Head game made in the 1990s, you’re not doing anything the duo wouldn’t do. The end of the game even has them get locked in the trunk of Todd’s car so that Daria can overhear them making stupid jokes and rescue them, only for Beavis and Butt-head to return home, having learned nothing. It’s a perfect ending to a surprisingly great adventure game, and probably the best adaptation of a cartoon show until 2014’s South Park: The Stick of Truth pulled off a similarly great game.

And just to illustrate how bad things could have been, GT Interactive published its own adventure game in 1999 called Beavis and Butt-Head Do U. and it’s pretty boring and completely unchallenging despite trying to replicate the same gameplay.

But let’s now turn to a few of the other great adventures of the 1990s that dip a little more into the realm of horror instead of animated antics.

We’ll start with a title published by Electronic Arts and developed by Flashpoint Productions called Noctropolis, and it is a fascinating fusion of digitized characters, gorgeous artwork often warped by a fishbowl perspective and full-motion video. The game begins in our world, where a comic book shop owner named Peter Grey is reading through his favorite comic, which features a trio of villains named Luscious, Tophat and Desperado facing off with a shadowy caped hero named Darksheer and his beautiful sidekick Stiletto. Darksheer’s powers come from an ancient Egyptian substance called Liquidark. It’s peak 1990s Image Comics-style cheese; the heroes don’t have a code against killing and there’s plenty of T&A, but everyone also avoids swearing and the heroes agonize about their crimes to a priest. The intro is surprisingly lengthy and nearly the size of a full comic book.

Then Peter has a dream about a vampire succubus seducing him and wakes up to receive a package from a courier with another comic inside, this time detailing the formation of a new supervillain team under the leadership of a mysterious villain named Flux. An obelisk appears and Peter steps inside, and steps out into perpetually dark world of the “City of Night,” Noctropolis. With Darksheer missing, Peter assumes his identity and teams up with Stiletto to take on this new threat.

As you can probably already tell, this game was made for a certain target audience and was marketed as being sexy and violent, though there’s actually very little sex or violence in the actual game. It’s actually a lot sillier than it looks. One of my favorite puzzles involves getting a dog who’s guarding a platform to jump into a huge pit by dangling a sausage on a string in front of him, with a pitiful howl playing as he falls for it. It makes me laugh every time.

But much of this game involves wandering around and reading lots of text. And I mean lots of it – think of a comic where there’s more captions than dialogue and where the action is told to you as often as it’s shown. All of the dialogue itself is fully voiced and acted out by one of the hammiest green screen casts you’ll ever see, but the production values are high, and once again, we have a game that pulls off a lot of what Phantasmagoria was trying to do, but more effectively.

Noctropolis is definitely a game I’d recommend, both for its endearingly cheesy story and its beautiful graphics. Even your pop-up action menu looks interesting as you see the verbs you can use divided up into sections atop a pyramid-like triangle. It’s more style than substance and quite a tease, like the 90s comics it’s imitating, but it’s a definitely an adventure unlike any other you’ve ever played.

Another sort of wacky horror game from the same era is called Harvester, and it was made by DigiFX Interactive and published in Europe by Virgin Interactive and in North America by a schlockhouse publisher called Merit Studios in 1996. And Harvester is schlock of the highest order, a horror game where you play as an amnesiac named Steve Mason who awakens in 1953 in a town called Harvest where everyone seems to be more than a little off. Every character you meet feels like they’re playing a role in a 1950s sitcom that’s simmering with anger and resentment underneath, sort of like Twin Peaks meets Silent Hill. Things quickly get weird in ways I don’t want to describe because so much of the fun of this game is its shock value.

And Harvester is shocking. At different points in the game, full motion video sequences will play where Steve watches absolutely bewildering things play out, and they’re rendered more interesting by the fact that the acting in this game is so endearingly bad that you’ll find yourself wanting to rewatch certain scenes and imitate the tortured dialogue. If Mystery Science Theatre 3000 had ever found an adventure game to feature, it’d be Harvester, and I mean that in the best possible way, because it’s absolutely entertaining to play through, provided you’re old enough to handle its gore and clumsy handling of sex.

Speaking of which, the Game Grumps, who are the closest thing to video gaming’s MST3k, have a great video featuring Harvester, and it’s in the show notes!

But if you’d like your horror games a little less silly, you might want to turn to Infogrames’s two Call of Cthulhu adventures from 1993 and 1995. The first is called Shadow of the Comet, and it’s generally regarded as an excellent take on the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos, placing you in the New England coastal village of Illsmouth and having you investigate a case where a scientist went mad during the previous passing of Halley’s Comet. As you arrive in town in 1910 three days before the comet can be observed, some of the people in the town are standoffish and suspicious, and some have strange characteristics that suggest they may be connected to the horrific Old Ones, ancient evil eldritch beings who are worshipped as gods by the local cultists but who will bring about the end of the world if they’re successfully summoned.

For those familiar with the Mythos, you encounter Yog-Sothoth, Dagon and of course Cthulhu in the course of the game, and you’ll also hear a namecheck for at least one other elder god as well. The story is a combination of elements from several Lovecraft stories including “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and of course “The Call of Cthulhu,” but it does depart in a couple of ways. First of all, most of the residents of Illsmouth are not evil and actually are glad that you rid them of the evil cultists in a surprisingly upbeat ending, which is atypical for a Lovecraft-based story. Second, you face the elder gods directly but never succumb to insanity, another common trope of Lovecraft’s tragic heroes.

While Shadow of the Comet isn’t perfect by any means, it plays like an icon-driven Sierra adventure and has a lengthy, interesting plot to uncover and some memorable character interactions and great horror scenes.

The sequel, Prisoner of Ice, hews much more closely to the story “At the Mountains of Madness” and while the original game had a nice illustrated style, this one uses digitized characters walking around painted backgrounds. It also shifts the plot forward to 1937 and adds in some Nazis, which is honestly where the game gets pretty silly. While it’s tangentially connected to the original game in a very unsatisfying manner, it’s also half as interesting and about a quarter of the length of it. I honestly don’t recommend it unless you are really curious.

Another horror series you should check out, however, is Dark Seed, which was released in two parts in 1992 and 1995 by Cyberdreams and which prominently features the artwork of H.R. Giger, best-known for the design of the Alien Xenomorph in the feature film Alien. You play as Mike Dawson, a mustachioed self-insert of the game’s creator and owner of a newly purchased old mansion that turns out to be a gateway to a parallel world that’s sort of like the Upside-Down in Stranger Things. He dreams that an alien embryo gets shot into his brain, and sure enough, this creature, the Dark Seed, is intended to hatch from his head and destroy his world, paving the way for the ancients from the Dark World to take over.

Dark Seed is a very average adventure game with an oppressive timing mechanic and tricky puzzles, and thus it’s best-played with a walkthrough. But the reason you’d even want to is because the story is interesting, the horror atmosphere is tense and the graphics are incredible, utilizing large swaths of Giger’s artwork to create the Dark World and give the game a true sense of otherworldliness. The higher resolution used in the game necessitated a more restricted color palette for the graphics hardware of the day, and that actually adds a distinctive quality to the game, with our world being rendered in browns, greens and blues and the Dark World having a cold, sterile white, blue and gray quality to it. The frame around the gameplay window also changes from ornate curtains to alien gargoyles framing a monitor.

The second Dark Seed was made without Mike Dawson’s involvement, but the character in the game is still based on him. H.R. Giger’s artwork still features prominently, but the game’s far more digitized this time around, using a blend of photography and pre-rendered objects. Chris Gilbert plays Mike this time, and he sounds ten years younger despite the fact that this game’s a sequel. Tone is also a problem. Crowley, Texas is not nearly as good a setting as the mansion from the first game, and the motivation of catching a Dark World shapeshifter is a lot less pressing than getting an evil alien embryo out of your head.

The game’s music is absolutely awful and the normal world just feels… off. I’ve seen people compare it to David Lynch works like Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks and I think that comparison is appropriate since the intent of the scenes seems to be to skewer small town culture. Once you get into the Dark World, though, the game goes a bit bonkers, and by the end of the game, the body count’s surprisingly high and the ending has a twist that you’ll either love or hate, but which made it impossible to make a third game with Mike Dawson as the lead.

That’s just as well, because Cyberdreams published another game the same year based on the Harlan Ellison short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” and the game is notable for having Ellison’s involvement. It was a commercial flop that has since become a cult classic, though I’ll warn you it’s very much a love it or hate it kind of game.

I’m going to presume listeners probably don’t know much about Harlan Ellison, but he was a well-respected and award-winning science fiction writer primarily known for television and magazine stories. He was always a polarizing figure in his lifetime, outspoken about his conviction that writers deserve to be paid and credited for their work, obsessive about creative control and also quite happy to torch collaborators, producers and Hollywood studios when he felt his work was being tampered with.

He had a long feud with Gene Roddenberry over the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which he originally wrote. He hated Roddenberry’s rewrite and made such a stink that he published several of the teleplays in a 1995 book that included a lot of self-important essays.

He also sued a lot of people, quite famously including James Cameron, alleging that The Teminator’s core concept was stolen from one of Ellison’s old Outer Limits episodes called “Soldier.” The connection was tenuous at best and it’s debatable Ellison’s idea about a time-traveling soldier was even that original, but he got his settlement from Orion Pictures all the same.

Ellison was also an outspoken critic of the video games, which he said were “time wasters.”

So you can imagine what a mess Cyberdreams had on its hand trying to market their ambitious adventure game, which has a gripping and memorable title, but which is based on an absolutely bonkers story about a supercomputer named AM that kills off the global population except for five people – a woman and four men – and then extends their lives and changes their bodies so it can torture them indefinitely.

In the short story, the humans eventually escape to go and find some canned food and wind up killing each other. But one survives, and AM turns him into a gelatinous blob who no longer has a mouth or any ability to end his own life – hence the title.

In the game, this is one of the endings, but the story is changed to AM coming up with a new way to torture everyone by playing a game in which they each enter a sort of psychodrama and have to find a way to defeat AM. The game sort of follows the same template of the later Persona RPGs where each character has to overcome a flaw and find a way to live with their past, but two of AM’s three supercomputers that make up its electronic brain have sympathy on the humans and attempt to help them.

The game is incredibly messed up and features a number of endings, including an actually happy one as well as a lot of unhappy ones where your chosen character in the final chapter becomes a blob. Curiously, Ellison didn’t seem to understand that the game was winnable and bragged both before and after release that the only way to win was not to play – perhaps a promise Cyberdreams had made during production but chickened out on in the final build. But Ellison still looms large over the game – he voices AM and he clearly really loved having the chance to play his most psychopathic character, because he relishes reading those lines in the game.

I do want to mention that there are some very controversial aspects of the game, not the least of which is the trauma and rape of the lone female character, Ellen. But there’s also a Nazi scientist named Nimdok who AM relates to the most, but who resulted in the game being censored in France and Germany, making the game almost impossible to win since you need Nimdok – or at least the knowledge he has - to be able to get the actual good ending without consulting a walkthrough or guessing at a puzzle. That might account for why Ellison was confused about the game actually having one.

As a point and click adventure, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is a fascinating game well worth playing today. It’s unique in how it plays, it has a strong story that will keep you captivated and it’s fairly short and not too difficult. Just be aware that it’s not for everyone, and if you’re easily triggered by trauma, this game’s going to be an intense suffering simulator you’d best avoid.

There’s one more series I want to cover before we close out this week, and it’s The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, a surprisingly well-crafted adventure game series from Mythos Software and Electronic Arts that uses a point and click style to set Holmes and Watson out and about exploring London and investigating cases. The first game 1992’s The Case of the Serrated Scalpel, puts you on the trail of either Jack the Ripper or, as Holmes suspects, a clever copycat who has left behind the clue of a scalpel with a serrated blade.

The game is portrayed in an illustrated style with a verb and dialogue panel on the bottom third of the screen and the action shown in the top two thirds. Much of the interaction involves examining things and letting Holmes and Watson talk to one another, and there are of course some inventory puzzles and other basic deductions to be made.

This is largely a traditional point and click adventure game with a lot of text to read and dialogue trees to exhaust as you search for clues and try to trap people with deductive logic so they’ll provide needed information. The story isn’t based on one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales and thus feels a bit twisty turny and contrived at times, but it’s still a decent take on the source material.

There’s also a 1996 sequel called The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Rose Tattoo which ditches the illustrated look and feel of the original game for digitized characters and tries to recreate Victorian London with period costumes and scenes. I actually prefer the look and feel of the 1992 game to this one, but I can’t deny that it’s an impressive sequel that succeeds in using filmed digitized characters on sets far better than Sierra’s experiments with Phantasmagoria did the year before. The game world feels substantial and, when you’re out on the streets, even alive. The detailed map of Victorian-era London is also a lot of fun, particularly if you know the city and can spot locations that correspond to today.

Both games are also right up there with ICOM Simulations’ full motion video series Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, which we’ll discuss next week.

We’ve covered so much ground in our adventure gaming series that I know you’re thinking, “Sean, there is no way there could possibly be more 1990s point and click adventure games we need to discuss. You’ve covered them all!”

If only that were true! I have here in front of me a list of a whole bunch of games I didn’t even get a chance to cover, and if you take a look at the written version of my script on greatestgames.substack.com, you can find all of these games along with links to their entry on MobyGames.

And by the way, let me clarify: have I played all these games through? Heck no! At most I’ve played enough to get an impression of what they have to offer, and in a few cases, I’ve just watched video playthroughs or read about them. But here’s the thing. Many of these games came from smaller publishers or from outside the US and UK, and as a result, they didn’t get as strong of coverage and don’t have the same sorts of fanbases as more popular games. That doesn’t mean they’re bad! It just means that they’re obscure and that one of them might become your new favorite game if you play it and like it.

So, once you exhaust all of the other games we’ve discussed, give some of these a shot!

And with that, we’ve reached the end of our exploration of point and click adventure games from the 1990s! In our next episode, we’re going to finally cover the multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Under a Killing Moon, Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, The Last Express, Black Dahlia and The Neverhood. And of course we have an obligation to accept Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.

And guess what? We haven’t really covered console and handheld adventure games, so we’re going to talk about those too. Count on an episode devoted to those!

Then we’ll finally close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream.

We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!

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 Mini Motorways, a game by Dinosaur Polo Club that came out in 2019 on iOS devices as part of Apple Arcade before getting a port to Windows in 2021 and the Switch in 2022. It’s the follow-up to their earlier minimalist train game Mini Metro, and while it’s not quite as simple as drawing lines on a route map, it’s a little more strategic because you have a few tricks up your sleeve to route traffic that weren’t there in the earlier title.

The game is presented in a minimalist SimCity sort of format where you need to connect homes of a certain color to destinations of the same color using roads, of which you have a limited number of tiles you can use. As the weeks advance, you earn tools like stoplights, roundabouts, tunnels, bridges and highways that can help you deal with traffic jams and route traffic more effectively. The game goes until you have a destination that’s not receiving enough traffic, and then it ends, allowing you to start over and try again.

I enjoy this game because it’s simple and fun and doesn’t take much of my time, and yet has enough layers of complexity to make loading up a new map a challenging and interesting experience for a coffee break or a few moments of Zen. For $10, it’s a good deal, and even better, it’s often on sale and offered in a bundle with the equally great Mini Metro. Give it a try – it’s really wonderful!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127500/Mini_Motorways/

In 1990, we’ve got

Earthrise (1990)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2151/earthrise/

The Hugo Trilogy (1990-1992)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/71030/the-hugo-trilogy/

Murders in Space (1990)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/4803/murders-in-space/

 

In 1991,

The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian (1991)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/5024/the-adventures-of-maddog-williams-in-the-dungeons-of-duridian/

Spaceship Warlock (1991)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/22016/spaceship-warlock/

Suspicious Cargo (1991)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/54818/suspicious-cargo/

 

In 1992, we’ve got

Coktel Vision’s Bargon Attack (1992)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/13178/bargon-attack/

Eternam (1992)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1368/eternam/

Hook (1992)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/20230/hook/

Rome: Pathway to Power (1992)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2232/rome-pathway-to-power/

 

1993,

Black Sect (1993)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2571/black-sect/

Blue Force (1993)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1478/blue-force/

 

 

1994,

Igor: Objective Uikokahonia (1994)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2170/igor-objective-uikokahonia/

Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb (1994)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/4008/inherit-the-earth-quest-for-the-orb/

 

 

1995,

Bureau 13 (1995)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/6601/bureau-13/

Chewy: Esc from F5 (1995)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2339/chewy-esc-from-f5/

Dračí Historie (English: Dragon History) (1995)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/44689/draci-historie/

Flight of the Amazon Queen (1995)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/352/flight-of-the-amazon-queen/

Teen Agent (1995)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/6423/teen-agent/

 

1996,

Housemarque - Alien Incident (1996)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1924/alien-incident/

Down in the Dumps (1996)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/652/down-in-the-dumps/

Fable (1996)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1893/fable/

Imperium Romanum (1996)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/6300/imperium-romanum/

 

1997,

Ark of Time (1997)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2156/ark-of-time/

Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths (1997)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/7659/tony-tough-and-the-night-of-roasted-moths/

U.F.O.s (1997)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/4556/ufos/

VooDoo Kid (1997)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/16006/voodoo-kid/

 

And in 1998,

Galador - The Prince and the Coward (1998)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/30716/galador-the-prince-and-the-coward/

Team17 - Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy (1998)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2564/nightlong-union-city-conspiracy/

Hopkins FBI (1998)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/3994/hopkins-fbi/

 

As for 1999? There really weren’t any notable point and click adventures from that year we haven’t already covered except for Cookie’s Bustle, a peculiar Japanese point and click adventure that’s most famous for being targeted by a copyright troll from 2022 to 2023 to try to erase all evidence of its existence. It’s only playable in Japanese without a fan patch and it’s quite dark and challenging despite its cutesy exterior, so while it’s a fun curiosity, it’s not an easy game to pick up and play.

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

In this episode, we’re going to talk about 1990s point and click adventure games made by publishers other than Sierra On-Line, including MicroProse, Activision, Adventure Soft, Interplay, Revolution Software, Legend Entertainment, and more! Join us on this expedition through games you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 8: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 6Enjoy 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://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/168

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564784-timequest/faqs/81243

What happened to Shelley Day: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/waw/press/2005/dec/day.html

The Space Bar Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxOgmTThiyw&list=PL9tH-kQslZN0J0HlGMe6lYTSjixaolCJn

--------------------------------------------------

Coming up in this episode –

We’re going to talk about all sorts of point and click adventure games from the 1990s that weren’t published by Sierra, including Spellcasting, Death Gate, Simon the Sorcerer, The Space Bar, Elvira, Return of the Phantom, Dragonsphere and Star Trek!

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!

 

One of the things you might have realized about me by now is that I don’t like to leave stones uncovered when we’re talking about a topic like adventure gaming – there are just too many great games to mention and so many of them have gone unnoticed over time. I really don’t want you to miss out on experiences that might become your next favorite game from the retro era!

But we’ve also reached a point in our discussion where if I try to be comprehensive with all of the point and click adventure games released in the 1990s, we’ll never get to talking about other genres. Even so, there’s a lot of ground to cover.

And so in this episode and the next one, I’m going to intentionally keep our discussion limited to the point and click adventure games I think are most notable or which hold up the best today, and I’m also going to save most of the Myst-style adventures, 3D games and full motion video games for their own episode.

So, please forgive me if I don’t bring up one of your favorites or if I just mention in passing, because there’s really so much ground to cover!

But to kick us off I need to devote some time in this episode to talk about Steve Meretzky, the legendary text-based adventure game developer behind the classic 1980s Infocom games Planetfall, Stationfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Sorcerer and, along with Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

But by 1990, Steve Meretzky had made the transition to a company called Legend Entertainment, a publisher founded by Infocom veterans Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989. Neither of these guys had actually worked for Infocom; both were contractors with their own companies, and they’d worked together on the Infocom-published titles Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels and Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur in the 1980s.

They were supposed to work on a third game about Robin Hood, but Infocom was shut down by its new parent, Activision, before that could happen.

Bob Bates had a chance to work on a video game tie-in for James Cameron’s feature film The Abyss around this time, though it fell through, and Mike Verdu’s company was providing software for the US Department of Defense in addition to renting out programmers as contract workers for software development.

In their time working with Infocom, they got to know many of the implementors there, including Steve Meretzky. When Infocom collapsed, they saw an opportunity to carry on the text-based adventuring tradition, albeit with some newer technology.

And these games also occupied an interesting middle ground between traditional text-based adventuring and the more popular graphical adventures Sierra and LucasArts were publishing. Like Maniac Mansion’s SCUMM engine, Legend’s games allowed players to click on commands with a mouse and assemble actions together, and like a graphical adventure game, the image pane had pictures with interactive elements players could click on. By today’s standards, they look rather intimidating due to all the text onscreen, and even then, they were clunky. But the text allowed Legend’s games to go beyond the more distilled storytelling of Sierra and LucasArts’s output of the early 1990s.

But because of all that text, the games needed to have a great hook. Steve Meretzky was brought aboard as a contractor to make a fantasy series similar to Leather Goddesses of Phobos that would have a strong appeal to the older adults who still like text-based adventures, and he started work on what would become a trilogy called Spellcasting.

The first game, 1990’s Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls, featured a cover that basically played on the same tropes the movie Revenge of the Nerds had established in 1984 – a dorky-looking wizard with a pocket protector, big glasses and a pointy hat stands between a buxom cheerleader and a bikini model, both with long blond hair like Farah Fawcett. It’s honestly a little cringey today, but in the 1990s, it was great marketing for a game that was actually quite tame compared to the raunchy humor of Leisure Suit Larry.

But not too tame, because the Spellcasting games do allow you to turn on a naughty mode and get some more explicit language and opportunities for hooking up than you’d see in normal mode. And unlike Leisure Suit Larry, the girls in the game aren’t just there to mostly tease you – they are quite willing to head into the bedroom, though the games generally just note that they did and the action scores you some points without much description of what happens.

The Spellcasting series has the sensibilities of an 80s college frat boy movie combined with the fantasy of being an up and coming wizard named Ernie Eaglebeak at Sorcerer University who also has to face challenges and foes and occasional fantasy creatures. It’s essentially Harry Potter Goes to College and Gets Laid Repeatedly, but released years before those books even existed. You even have a rival sorcerer, the evil Joey Rottenwood, who happens to be your stepfather.

Rather than try to explain the plot of the games, I’ll just summarize them. Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls came out in 1990 and covers the setup: you’re a horny young man lusting after your voluptuous neighbor, Lola Tigerbunny, and you enroll in Sorcerer University to impress her, but spend much of the game going to parties and then, when tragedy strikes, getting involved with a plot about saving the school and stopping a bad guy.

In Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer’s Appliance, released in 1991, you decide to join a frat in your sophomore year and spend the first part of the game getting hazed and the second part of the game navigating another tragedy as the school’s president dies of shock due to the lascivious behavior of his wife and you have to uncover the secrets of the Sorcerer’s Appliance, the first game’s MacGuffin, in order to defeat this game’s pair of villains. This game is significantly longer than the first, but also a lot more focused on the plot this time around.

In Spellcasting 301: Spring Break, released in 1992, you and your frat brothers ride your magic carpet to the beach at Point Blather and party, only to find your rival frat from another college, the St. Weinersburg Academy of Magic, already there, and your frat has to defeat them in several contests, including bullfighting. This is important because the final chapter in the game involves tracking down a mythical Prokturingham Bull that terrorizes Point Blather every 89 years. You have to bring back its head but discover the game’s hidden villain has other plans for the bull. A fourth chapter is promised at the end of this game, but it never happened.

Each of the Spellcasting games is basically written in the form of a novel where the game takes place over days or chapters of the story, depending upon which you’re playing. And the writing is good – Steve Mertezky had a lot of freedom with the Spellcasting series and really seemed to enjoy extending out the ideas of his Infocom game Sorcerer and making it into a bunch of smutty college adventures. But by the standards of the day, these games felt pretty outdated with their text parsers and heavily verbose descriptions, and as time has gone on, their misogynistic attitudes towards women you have to score with to score in the game have also not aged well, so I’m hesitant to recommend them.

Steve Meretzky also made a Leather Goddesses of Phobos sequel for Activision in 1992 called Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!. Unlike the original text-based game or the Spellcasting games, this one’s a true graphical point and click adventure that takes place in a retro-50s setting and you play as a guy named Zeke, a girl named Lydia and an alien named Barth. It’s also a really lousy game that’s focused on showing off a lot of cheesecake but which doesn’t deliver in the story or puzzle department. Worst of all, it’s boring. Don’t waste your time with it.

Steve Meretzky’s odd 1994 adventure game and RPG hybrid Superhero League of Hoboken is probably his crowning achievement at Legend Entertainment, and it has a strong flavor of the same sorts of low-rent, last on the list superheroes you’d see in Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot and Mystery Men comic books. You play as Crimson Tape, leader of the titular team, and your superpower is creating organizational charts, a skill you don’t even get to use in the game. The game is filled with similarly useless heroes like Princess Glovebox, who excels at folding paper maps, Tropical Oil Man, who raises the cholesterol of his enemies, and Captain Excitement, who puts his foes to sleep. The writing is really what makes this game palatable, because the RPG mechanics are pretty weak and the game is very heavy on text with illustrations in a central pane. While it uses a point and click interface for the adventure game elements, you still select verbs from a list or cardinal directions to interact with the game world.

I personally think the game is one of Steve Meretzky’s least funny adventures, far better in premise than execution, and definitely lacking on the RPG side of things. But many players seem to have a strong sense of nostalgia for it, so it’s worth a try to see if it’s your cup of tea!

I’m much more interested in getting people to try The Space Bar, a 1997 comedy adventure game Steve Meretzky created after he stopped contracting for Legend Entertainment and co-founded Boffo Games with Mike Dornbrook and Leo DaCosta. After their first game, the minigame collection Hodj ’n’ Podj, didn’t sell very well, Meretzky turned back to adventure games one last time. Though he served as the game’s director, he worked with a team this time around that included Ron Cobb, a concept artist who worked on many science fiction films, including designing some of the aliens seen in the Mos Eisley cantina scene in the original Star Wars. And thus the premise of The Space Bar is that you’re hanging out with some weird-looking aliens, trying to solve a mystery and locate a shapeshifting killer hiding in the bar The Thirsty Tentacle on the planet of Armpit VI.

As the human detective Alias Node, you have to interrogate the aliens using dialogue trees and a power called Empathy-Telepathy, or emp-tel, that allows you to access the memories of some of the aliens you meet and enter into their worlds. This is definitely one of the neatest ideas of the game, because every alien has different ways of interacting with their memory world and some also see things differently due to their sensory organs. The aliens are really interesting and varied and are rendered in a style that makes them look like something between puppets and claymation creations. These segments are also the most fun part of the game because they’re not constrained by the same draconian timer that makes the main portion of the game so tense.

And that timer really is the main reason The Space Bar is such a polarizing game, because this is the sort of adventure that begs to be explored at a leisurely pace, but it instead requires a lot of trial and error and save scumming because it gives you very little opportunity to deviate from the correct series of actions. In fact, it’s hard to find a walkthrough or even helpful hints for the latter parts of the game because it’s so ridiculously hard to complete – and I myself have never finished it. I had to watch a Let’s Play series by the Youtuber Rocket Baby Dolls LP to see the ending, which shows off the game’s concept art. A link to that playlist is in the show notes.

The best advice I’ve come across is to save often and keep notes about which actions help you move forward so you can make the most of the time. And while I love so many things about this game, I’d welcome a fan patch to make it more accessible.

Sadly, Steve Meretzky took the commercial failure of The Space Bar as a sign he needed to move into making more casual games, and that’s pretty much what he’s done since then. But he wasn’t the only creator at Legend Entertainment.

Timequest is a 1991 game created by Bob Bates, and it’s both a serious adventure game and a far more sophisticated one than any of the Spellcasting games. The premise of the game is that you’re a low-ranking member of the Temporal Corps from the year 2090 AD who is sent back in time to different periods and places to undo ten changes that a rogue officer has made to the timeline, and there are also two more overarching problems you need to correct.

This officer’s name, by the way, is Zeke S. Vettenmyer, which is an anagram for Steven E. Meretzky. I love that little detail.

Your adventures involve many major historical events, like the assassination of Julius Casear, the signing of the Magna Carta or the crowing of Charlemagne, and you can visit six major locations around the world in many different time periods ranging back from 1361 BC all the way to 1940AD, for a total of 55 spacetime locations counting your starting point.

Even better, you can play the game in a fairly nonlinear fashion, but in doing so, you have to follow a rule that once you visit a location, you can only travel forward in time and you can’t revisit an area you’ve already been to… at least until the end of the game, when any pretense of causality gets tossed out the window. So, if you plan to play without a walkthrough, it’s a good idea to visit every location, take lots of notes and what you find, and then restart your game and try to figure out the sequence that allows you to make it through the game.

Fortunately, you don’t need a map; the game creates one for you, and most locations are pretty simple. Unfortunately, the game gives you a lot of inventory items to juggle with no constraints on how much you can carry, and this adds to the complexity of the puzzle-solving.

Timequest is very interesting and it’s fairly well-written, but it’s so ridiculously hard without a hint book or walkthrough that it’s a tough game to recommend to anyone but the most serious adventure gamers out there, particularly since it uses the same text parser and limited graphic user interface seen in Spellcasting. The game’s plot is also full of plot holes and contradictions, like most time travel stories, and I highly recommend the very entertaining GameFAQs walkthrough by an author who simply goes by AMC – it not only tells you how to complete the game but offers a thoughtful and amusing analysis of how stupid the villain’s plan really is.

So, Timequest isn’t for everyone.

But Bob Bates’s next game, 1993’s Eric the Unready, is a far more palatable affair because it’s intended to be a parody of Zork and King’s Quest-style adventures as well as the broader geekdom of fantasy and sci-fi. While the game still uses a text parser with a small pane for graphics, it will occasionally shift into full-screen graphical cutscenes with text popups or dialogue, and there are also minigames like a card game or a trivia contest and an occasional newspaper to read that often contains darkly humorous stories about happenings in the crazy world around you.

If the title didn’t already tip you off, this is a deeply unserious adventure game, and definitely up there with Space Quest and Quest for Glory in its willingness to abandon the story for a humorous tangent that’s really just there to make you laugh.

There are all sorts of characters you’d never expect to appear in the game, like Khan Noonien Singh from Star Trek and the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz and a clan of Killer Attack Turtles.

There’s a sequence where the game basically turns into Zork, and another sequence where you have to pull a sacred banana from a stone to impress some knights. There’s a whole plotline about visiting the Greek gods and finding out they’ve decided to upgrade their temples to be more like tacky Hollywood offices, with Clio running reception and a toga-wearing agent named Morty booking gigs for deities who need something to do. There’s a Fantasy Island parody with an actual Monkey Island where you’ll find a four-headed monkey – that’s one more head that the one Guybrush Threepwood is constantly using as a deflection.

As an adventure Eric the Unready is fairly even-keel. It’s not too challenging, but it does have a few puzzles that push you, especially in the latter sections of the game. The game’s sharp sense of humor and anything-goes sensibilities certainly make it fun. And it even ends with the tease of a sequel by saying, “And so endeth the saga of Sir Eric the Unready – Part I.”

Sadly, Eric never got that sequel, but Bob Bates’s partner and co-founder, Michael Verdu, designed another great adventure for Legend Entertainment released in 1995 called Misson Critical that utilized a far more sophisticated interface with full-motion video and pre-rendered backgrounds as well as a graphical user interface to replace the text parser. It’s a great game, but it’s very much in the style of Myst and really doesn’t fit as well into our discussion here, so we’ll talk more about it when we get to those Myst-style games.

Legend Entertainment also created several games adapted from the works of fantasy and science fiction authors. I’m not going to go into detail on any of these because they are all pretty dependent upon your love for the fiction they’re adapting. For example, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway and Gateway II: Homeworld, which came out in 1992 and 1993, are based on the Heechee saga that was set up in the 1977 novel Gateway, which tells the story about a hollowed-out asteroid that serves as a space station for humans and a source of technology from a long dormant alien race called the Heechee. The saga spans five novels, and I truly recommend these books – they’re quite good!

But the games deviate pretty significantly from the novels, beginning with the basic setup but then establishing their own stories. As illustrated text-based adventures that springboard off a classic hard sci-fi novel series, the Gateway games are decent enough, but your enjoyment of them will go way up if you read the original Frederik Pohl novel first.

Likewise, the 1993 graphical adventure Companions of Xanth, which is based on the Piers Anthony book Demons Don’t Dream, part 16 in his sprawling Xanth fantasy novel series, is mainly going to appeal to fans of the source material who get the jokes and enjoy seeing the characters from the series depicted onscreen. One of the game’s worst ideas is pretending to give you a choice of companions to guide you and then forcing you to use Nada Naga, who’s featured on the box in her half woman, half snake form, but who actually looks like a human female in the game. While this is in line with the plot of the novel, it makes the game feel small and linear by comparison. The voice acting is also really spotty, as is the use of digitized graphics in sections to portray the characters from the non-magical realm of Mundania.

I read every one of the Xanth books available as a teenager – he’s almost reached 50 of at this point! - but I never really enjoyed this game. As it happens, Piers Anthony had a 1993 book about video games called Kilobyte that would have made a far better adventure game, and I also think some of his other more popular books, such as the Incarnations of Immortality novels or the Apprentice Adept series, would have been better-suited to a video game adaptation than Xanth.

Speaking of other fantasy novels, Death Gate is a 1994 adaptation of the seven-part fantasy series The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, who are also quite famously the authors of the original Dragonlance novels upon which many games have been based.

Of all the Legend Entertainment adventures, it’s also by far my favorite, and probably the one where it’s least necessary to be familiar with the novel it’s based upon. The premise is that you’re Haplo, a member of a race called the Patryns who were banished to a land called the Labyrinth when the world was broken thousands of years ago by the evil Sartans, and you have to find the pieces of the world seal to break the power of the Death Gate and make the world whole again.

The adventure is lengthy and text-heavy, but it’s controlled similarly to the adventure segments of Superhero League of Hoboken with a compass for movement and a list of verbs and an inventory panel, quite similar to a Sierra SCI1 or SCUMM engine games if they were in the first person perspective. Since the story has so many fantasy terms and strange names, voice acting helps to make the story more understandable, and fortunately, the voice acting is also quite improved in Death Gate, and used during the game’s extensive dialogue trees to bring characters to life.

Though Death Gate might look like an RPG, it’s a pure adventure game from start to finish. The puzzles aren’t super challenging and often rely on object utilization, but they are well-designed and put up an occasional challenge without making the game feel impossible.

I’m less impressed by Shannara, a 1995 fantasy adventure based on the novels by Terry Brooks and created by Corey and Lori Ann Cole, the creators of Quest for Glory. Josh Mandel, who also worked at Sierra and had just departed while working on Space Quest 6, was a writer on this game as well. This story actually takes place between the novels The Sword of Shannara and The Elfstones of Shannara, and you play as Jak, the son of Shea Ohmsford from the original novel and father of Wil from the second one.

The problem with Shannara is that the game is trying to follow a similar design template to the Coles’ Sierra games, but it doesn’t work quite so well in Legend’s engine because the gameplay takes place in the first person and the combat and overworld travel sequences are just terrible. The adventure game portion of Shannara is fine, but it’s also sort of generic, lacking the spark of Terry Brooks’s novels and the humor of the Coles’ earlier games. I’d like to say this one’s a hidden gem, but it’s really not; it’s definitely just a mediocre game that occasionally rises above its station before sinking right back down to it. Keep in mind that in 1995, role-playing games had already significantly surpassed many of the technological hurdles Shannara was facing and had far more compelling stories and mechanics.

A far better game is Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, a 1997 adventure game from Josh Mandel, this time as a designer. It’s also based on a novel, this time a 1977 book of the same name by Spider Robinson that spawned a longer series, and Josh Mandel managed to persuade Robinson to get more and more involved in consulting on this game to make it something fans of the novels would enjoy, and Robinson even wrote and performed some songs for the game.

It wasn’t a commercial success, but it’s one heck of an adventure game, still following the Legend Entertainment model of a central graphic pane above an inventory bar and text scroll, but movement is handled by panning around environments on the top half of the screen and clicking on doorways rather than using a compass, and the cursor is context-sensitive. The game’s also quite dialogue-heavy, featuring wonderful characters – even a talking dog! - and great voice acting to accompany Jake Stonebender’s journeys through six wild adventures spanning cities, ruins, rainforests, a satellite in space and even a bizarre aurora borealis-tinged simulated universe.

And of course every adventure includes plenty of time spent in Callahan’s Place, the bar run by Mike Callahan that attracts all sorts of misfits from other worlds, dimensions, fictional universes and timelines.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon was mismarketed as being a Western game in the style of Josh Mandel’s earlier co-creation, Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, but it’s a much different sort of game more in the style of the modern Disco Elysium. You definitely need to play this one – it’s absolutely fantastic! While you’re at it, read the broader series of Callahan’s Place books as well.

The 1998 adventure John Saul’s Blackstone Chronicles: An Adventure in Terror is based on a horror novel series spanning six books, and the game is actually its seventh chapter, starring series protagonist Oliver Metcalf in the town of Blackstone, which is home to a haunted asylum. This game is much more in the vein of Myst or The 7th Guest, with full screen pre-rendered video graphics making it feel like you’re playing a 3D game with many spirits to talk to. There are no inventory wheels, verbs or compass icons to help you interact with the game world; you instead have a context-sensitive cursor.

While this all sounds like the makings of a pretty big disaster for a company that tended to be behind the curve technologically in the adventure game experiences it offered, Blackstone Chronicles is actually a pretty decent and overlooked game. It’s spooky and has a story worth experiencing, and it’s also well-designed as an adventure, with puzzles that are fun but not overly frustrating and narration that helps you along. Surprisingly, John Saul seems to have had little to do with this game; Bob Bates wrote the story and designed the game, and Mike Verdu served as executive producer.

That unfortunately brings us to the end of Legend Entertainment’s adventure games, as the studio largely moved on to first person action games powered by the Unreal Engine like The Wheel of Time and Unreal II: The Awakening before shutting down in 2004. While they’ll never be quite as well-regarded as Infocom, Sierra or LucasArts, they were among the last bastions of traditional adventure gaming in the 1990s, and victim to the same commercial pressures to get out of that business as everyone else.

But Legend Entertainment wasn’t the only game in town when it came to adventure gaming, and one studio that managed to produce a big hit was Interplay, who managed to find a way to allow adventure gamers to boldly go where several games had not so impressively gone before!

 

Star Trek has a long history with gaming going back to the early 1970s when it inspired many mainframe computer games, but as official Star Trek games go, the 1980s was kind of a bust where the official license was concerned. Sure, you have the 1982 Sega arcade game and the Vectrex’s surprisingly good Star Trek: The Motion Picture space combat sim, most of the best Star Trek games were actually retooled into original IPs, generally for strategy and role-playing games.

Computer gamers did get a few releases, though – the lousy text adventures Star Trek: The Kobayahsi Alternative and The Promethean Prophecy, the pretty good Mike Singleton strategy adventure Star Trek: The Rebel Universe and the halfway decent illustrated text adventure Star Trek: First Contact, which centers on making covert First Contact with a planet called Gothica and has nothing to do with the later Next Generation movie about the Borg.

There’s also the sort-of-space sim Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which is held back by being based on one of the worst movies in the franchise, and Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Transinium Challenge, an obscure 1989 tie-in to the show’s first and second seasons that uses a graphical interface and digitized character portraits, but has you play as Commander Riker because Captain Picard decides he needs more training.

Some of these games are interesting, but none of them is really great.

And then Interplay got its shot in 1992, resulting in a true point and click adventure game that’s structured to provide players with new episodes of the classic show. It’s known as Star Trek 25th Anniversary, a name it shares with far less impressive and unrelated NES and Game Boy games released the same year. But it has one thing almost no other Star Trek game has – a 1993 CD-ROM talkie edition where most of the original cast returned to voice the characters.

I cannot emphasize enough how much the voice acting adds to the game, because unlike the movies, which often felt quite different from the original show, this game and its 1993 sequel, Star Trek: Judgement Rites, already felt like a true continuation of the original series, with the same sorts of self-contained plots, puzzles to solve and conflicts to resolve along with occasional ship to ship combat sequences aboard the Enterprise. Adding in the original cast to read those lines made an already excellent adventure gaming series feel truly authentic, even if the cast tended to read the lines flat and don’t always quite sound like the television versions of the characters since the actors were so much older.

The gameplay in each game generally involves either being on the bridge of the Enterprise, where Captain Kirk can give orders to the crew, or beaming to each chapter’s locale with an away team, often represented by a small area with a few screens and some puzzles to solve to advance the plot. The character interactions are by far the best thing about these games, and if you enjoy hearing Dr. McCoy and Spock bickering or Captain Kirk taking charge in unwinnable situations, you’ll have a great time playing through these games.   

As point and click adventure games go, Interplay’s Star Trek games felt a little behind the more stylized games Sierra and LucasArts were producing at the time, and they’re known for being a little too easy as far as puzzle solving goes. Their audience was never hardcore adventure game fans, however, and aside from the fact that the ship combat sequences are mandatory, both games were quite popular with casual players, and the CD-ROM editions with voice-acted lines justified being a multimedia early adopter during a time when many DOS-driven desktop computers still didn’t have sound cards or CD-ROM drives.

But an equally impressive Star Trek game came out in 1995, this time from Spectrum Holobyte. Star Trek: The Next Generation – “A Final Unity” is a point and click adventure game that includes rendered videos, painted sprites and voices sourced from the actual actors from the TV show. While it’s not perfect, it truly looks and feels like an extension of the show so well that it’s portrayed as an episode within the seventh season of the series, and it’s definitely as well-written and engaging to play through.

Much like Star Trek 25th Anniversary, the game shifts between Bridge interactions and Away Team missions, and there are occasional strategy and combat sequences that are far weaker than the actual adventuring and puzzle solving. You can also visit engineering or the holodeck, though you sadly can’t do anything fun in the latter like catch Lieutenant Barclay making out with a simulation of Deanna Troi or accidentally set Professor Moriarty loose on the ship.

Even so, this game’s great if you’re a Star Trek fan, and also a bit more challenging than Interplay’s adventures. Most of the Star Trek games that followed this one were either full motion video games, action games or space combat simulators, so it’s really the last true point and click adventure game for the franchise.

Another intellectual property that received some adventure games in the early 1990s came from Horror Soft, who’d originally created the well-regarded 1989 horror adventure game Personal Nightmare and then got the rights to create two horror-themed adventures featuring Cassandra Petersen’s sexy TV hostess Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. All of these games were designed under the direction of Horror Soft’s owner, Mike Woodroffe, a name we’ll be hearing again a little later in this episode.

By the way, if you remember our discussion several episodes ago about Adventure International’s UK branch that employed Brian Howarth to port Scott Adams’s text-based adventures to other platforms, Mike Woodroffe was the owner of the UK side of the business and eventually changed its named to Adventuresoft UK when Adventure International went bankrupt and then again to Horror Soft to reflect a change in focus towards more mature themes.

The Elvira games play like first-person point and click adventure games with some RPG elements and combat, but what’s most impressive about them is that both were released for the Commodore 64 as well as DOS, Amiga and Atari ST formats, which made them far more accessible to gamers of the early 1990s. Given that the other versions all feature digitized graphics, the 8-bit conversions are actually quite good with a more limited palette and constrained resolution.

Both the 1990 Elvira, which involves wandering around a castle searching for a way to free the mistress of the dark from the evil Lady Emelda, and the 1991 Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus, which takes place in a demon-infested movie studio, are appropriately spooky and filled with monsters to battle and horrors to uncover. The second game is far longer than the first and also involves enormous mazes that are difficult to navigate, requiring you to take the time to map them out in classic CRPG style.

Horror Soft also released another 1992 RPG-style adventure through Accolade that didn’t use the Elvira license, but which does involve time travel as you wander around a wax museum. This game, WaxWorks, is today considered a classic horror computer game, though at the time, it wasn’t regarded quite so well. Part of that might be because it’s extremely gory, far more so than the already disturbing Elvira games, but also because the gameplay is quite challenging. It also was only available on DOS and Amiga systems, which limited its audience, particularly in the UK.

While Horror Soft and its North American publisher Accolade were courting mature audiences with blood, guts and gore, MicroProse was going for sleaze with Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender, a science fiction point and click adventure game where you visit a planet of technologically advanced women called Keepers who can alter their gender to become men and impregnate women they call Stock who live aboveground in primitive dwellings. As the only actual man on the planet, you’re of course going to evoke some passionate feelings, one way or the other.

The game was marketed to sound like a Leisure Suit Larry meets Space Quest IV, but in reality… it’s not nearly as funny or interesting as either of those series, and the voice acting is atrocious. It’s actually more like Leather Goddesses of Phobos in that it’s a big tease that doesn’t really take its premise far enough. But I don’t want to suggest it’s a bad game, because it’s not. The puzzles are fine, the dialogue is at least amusing and the game is long enough to feel substantial without overstaying its welcome.

MicroProse released two other games using the same engine, 1993’s Return of the Phantom and 1994’S Dragonsphere. I actually like both of these games much better than Rex Nebular, though Return of the Phantom wins a lot of points because I love the 1910 Gaston Leroux novel The Phantom of the Opera and the 1980s Andrew Lloyd Weber musical adaptation of it.

The game does too, and its take on the story is to start out in the then-present day of the 1990s where a situation quite similar to the events of the novel is taking place at the Paris Opera House, which is staging an opera called Don Juan Triumphant. Unfortunately, a chandelier falls on the audience and the Opera House’s Ghost is blamed for it. An investigator named Raoul Montand gets too close to the case and discovers the Phantom, who shoves him off a catwalk.

For reasons never really explained, Raoul goes back to 1881 and experiences the actual events of the novel, where the Phantom of the Opera, an escaped sociopathic sideshow feature named Erik, kidnaps a girl named Christine Daae and Raoul, now mistaken for the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, has to locate Erik’s lair and free her.

I won’t defend this game as being great – Raoul is very slow whenever he’s moving, the characters are very chatty but poorly voiced, and the story doesn’t really make a lot of sense due to the time travel nonsense, something which was maybe intended to distinguish this story from other adaptations of the novel, or maybe which made sense from a design point of view to give the player more information about the Phantom.

Even so, if you’re a fan of the story like I am, there’s something wonderful about getting to play a Phantom of the Opera adventure game, and it does have some nice visuals and interesting moments, including the Phantom’s diabolical labyrinth and the duel on the famous chandelier.

Dragonsphere, on the other hand, is an adventure game I’d recommend to anyone. It’s become something of a cult classic today, but when it debuted in 1994, it was amazingly overlooked despite playing very much like a King’s Quest-style fantasy adventure game with a SCUMM-style interface with clickable verbs and an inventory pane. The premise of the game is that you’re a newly-crowned young king named Callash who is trying to find a way to stop the return of the sorcerer Sanwe, who’s imprisoned in his tower by a magical trap called the Dragonsphere. Sanwe and Callash are destined to duel as Sanwe’s powers return, and Callash ventures out and attempts to gain the support of the rulers of nearby realms, with all of them knowing his showdown with Sanwe is near.

And then the game throws you an incredible, unguessable curveball I won’t spoil, but will instead say makes the final act of the game change dramatically as the whole purpose behind your quest changes. And this is part of what makes Dragonsphere such a cult classic – its seeming King’s Quest-style story is a little sharper than it first appears.

As an adventure game, it’s also a lot of fun. Though the voice acting isn’t great, the characters are interesting and some attempt was made to use effects to at least convey a sense of otherness when you encounter the different races of the kingdom. The graphics look very much like King’s Quest V’s painted backgrounds and animated sprites, and the introductory cinematic at the beginning does a great job of setting the story in motion.

Dragonsphere also has a lot in common with another game from around the same time period, Adventure Soft’s Simon the Sorcerer, which was released in 1993 through Activision and which features a similar fusion of King’s Quest-style fairy tale fantasy and a SCUMM-style interface along with a wicked sense of humor that will appeal to anyone who loves the LucasArts games of the era. There’s also a 1995 sequel that takes the premise in even wilder directions.

Oh, and just a fun aside here – Adventure Soft was formerly known as Horror Soft. So yes, this is the same developer that created the Elvira games and WaxWorks, though the game is very different in sensibilities.

The first game is about a 12-year-old boy named Simon who receives a magical spellbook for his birthday, and then one night reads a spell from it and opens a portal to another world. He finds himself in a fantasy land where he’s asked to help rescue a wizard named Calypso, but much like Guybrush Threepwood in the Monkey Island games trying to be a mighty pirate, Simon is a wannabe wizard who has to convince the other wizards in the village to take him seriously by completing arbitrary quests.

Aside from LucasArts, the game’s other clear inspiration is Terry Pratchett, and Simon the Sorcerer feels a lot like the later Discworld games by Teeny Weeny Games and Perfect 10 Productions, right down the distinct British sensibilities. In the talkie edition, Simon’s voiced by Red Dwarf’s Chris Barrie and the cast is mostly made up of British actors who do a great job of bringing the characters to life. This is a very high-quality adventure with great graphics, laugh out loud humor and a number of truly memorable moments.

Unfortunately, Simon the Sorcerer II: The Lion, the Wizard and the Wardrobe, isn’t quite as inspired. While the original game was designed by Mike Woodroffe and written by his son, who actually is named Simon, Mike Woodroffe took more of a managerial role in the second game and Simon Woodroffe took over on game design. The sequel’s Simon’s supposed to be older, and so Brian Bowles provided his voice for this one, but he doesn’t quite have the same mildly annoyed charm that Chris Barrie brought to the role and honestly sounds too old for a teenager. Simon also comes across as being a bit of a jerk at times, which again is a little jarring.

The sequel’s still very funny, but the puzzles aren’t quite as good and the story’s kind of all over the place. Fans of the first game will enjoy the second, but definitely play the first one first.

The series was successful enough to spawn a 2002 sequel called sigh Simon the Sorcerer 3D made by the Woodroffe’s side project development studio, Headfirst Productions, and it’s pretty widely loathed. There’s also a fourth and fifth chapter from 2007 and 2009 that was produced by the German developer Silver Style Entertainment, and most Simon fans consider them both the equivalent of fan games. A sixth chapter was planned by an Irish developer called StoryBeasts with Chris Barrie back onboard, but it never happened.

Interestingly, Smallthing Studios S.r.l. just released a new game in 2025 called Simon the Sorcerer: Origins that retcons the original story and has Chris Barrie return to voice the character. Though it’s not perfect, it’s pretty and well-animated, and it’s far closer in spirit to the first two games.

But going back to the 1990s, one more game I want to talk about from Adventure Soft is The Feeble Files, a 1997 science fiction point and click adventure by Mike and Simon Woodroffe and starring Robert Llewellyn – Kryten in Red Dwarf – in the starring role as Feeble, an alien whose job is to burn crop circles in Earth’s farm fields before an encounter with the Voyager space probe makes him aware of the Freedom Fighters who are struggling against the Big Brother-like OmniBrain – and yes, The Feeble Files has some heavy dystopian overtones and inspiration from George Orwell’s novel 1984.

The game’s something of a hidden gem today and was marketed terribly at the time – the box art isn’t very appealing, the back of the box did a terrible job of explaining what the game was about and the in-game graphics, which feature lots of polygonal 3D aliens, are a little off-putting since the characters aren’t particularly cute or charismatic. The voice acting is also spotty in many places due to some odd choices made by the mostly British cast.

But what The Feeble Files delivers is a great adventure with some challenging puzzles that actually worth scratching your head to solve. It’s not a game I’d recommend to everyone, but it is an interesting one that’s enjoyable enough if you need a challenge or don’t mind using a walkthrough.

We’ve talked about a couple of series of games about young wizards in training already, but one point and click series we have not yet mentioned is Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, a 1995 point and click adventure by Perfect 10 Productions and Teeny Weeny Games and published by Psygnosis.

And this was not Psygnosis’s first foray into adventure gaming – they’d already published the very British 1993 Space Quest IV-style adventure game Innocent Until Caught by the developer Divide By Zero and its 1995 sequel Guilty and they’d later publish a 3D adventure called The City of Lost Children in 1997 that we’ll discuss when we get to that style of game.

Both Innocent Until Caught and Guilty are fairly average point and click adventures that try to spice up their adventuring with some humor that doesn’t really land too well and some sleaze in the first game that involves a scene set in a brother. They’re worth checking out if you enjoy the genre, but the second game is the only one that has any voice acting, and it’s pretty spotty in quality.

Divide by Zero also created two other adventures that are similarly obscure, though they do have some interesting moments. One is a 1995 science fiction game called The Orion Conspiracy, and it’s sort of an Alien or Aliens style adventure with shapeshifting aliens that have to be hunted down Among Us style. It’s rather infamous for its bad writing, long cutscenes and heavy use of profanity and homophobic slurs, so I’d recommend playing it with caution.

Divide By Zero’s other adventure, a 1996 cel-animated style point and click game called The Gene Machine, is actually a far better game and quite underrated. It’s what we’d today called a steampunk-style game, clearly inspired by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and set in the Victorian era. There’s a talking cat, which might make you think it’s for children, but like Innocent Until Caught, there is a scene in a brothel. Generally speaking, however, the writing’s more family-friendly. The voice acting is also far more consistent and helps deliver the dry, British wit that fuels the humor. There are even some laugh out loud moments amidst some standard icon-driven graphical adventuring.

If you get a chance to try The Gene Machine, you really should. It really surprised me when I checked it out, particularly since it was published by Vik Tokai, a publisher that was known for some really lousy computer games including the absolutely awful Western-themed graphical adventure Silverload.

But we were talking about Psygnosis and the Discworld adventure games, and let me first say that if you’re not familiar with the source material by Sir Terry Pratchett, you really should read the novels The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, which are not only the initial novels in the long-running series, but also your introduction to Rincewind, the game’s main character, who is here voiced by Eric Idle. The Discworld is a planet sized disc being help up by four elephants riding a giant turtle that’s flying through space, and it’s filled with all sorts of fantasy creatures and evokes many familiar tropes. Most of the stories take place in a city on that Disc called Ankh-Morpok which is filled with a vast cast of characters who appear in multiple stories and who sometimes parody celebrities in the real world or in literature.

The original Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, stars the wizard Rincewind and was adapted into a text-based adventure game in 1986 by Delta 4 and Pirahna Software. It’s notable for being a badly-made game that cleaves too closely to the book but still manages to be incredibly hard.

The 1995 game, by contrast, is depicted in an animated cartoon style that really helps to sell the humor. The plot itself is not based on one of Rincewind’s normal adventures, but instead mostly upon the eighth Discworld novel, Guards! Guards!, about a group of characters called the City Watch who have to foil an evil plot to install a puppet king by summoning a dragon that provides a pretense for getting rid of the lawful ruler, the Patrician of the city of Ankh-Morpork. The dragon causes a lot of problems, though, and someone has to figure out how to stop it when it proves to be uncontrollable even by those who summoned it.

Rincewind’s insert into this story works pretty well because the game adds in other familiar characters like the walking Luggage that follows Rincewind like a puppy as well as The Librarian and Death, who show up in a lot of Discworld books. The writing is very sharp and voiced extremely well, and the animation style is quite fluid with lavishly illustrated artwork despite the game’s limited resolution and 256-color palette. My only real complaint is that the game can be incredibly obtuse in places, and even being familiar with the source material doesn’t always make it clear what you’re supposed to do next. It’s best-played with a walkthrough, and since it’s also available on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn, it’s pretty accessible, though I would definitely recommend the DOS or Amiga version since they both use a mouse.

The 1996 sequel Discworld II  is known in Europe by the subtitle Missing Presumed… !? and in North America as Mortality Bytes!, and it is a far more impressive-looking game with a cel-shaded animation style and Super VGA graphics. Imagine the difference between Monkey Island 2 and The Curse of Monkey Island and you’ll get the difference here – the dour look on Rincewind’s face is far easier to see since there aren’t as many pixels obscuring things and the game’s screens and scenes are more capable of showcasing different angles and perspectives to make things more visually interesting.

The game’s also significantly longer, but also easier, this time drawing on the novels Moving Pictures and Reaper Man and having Rincewind investigate why Death’s gone on holiday and using a movie to draw the Grim Reaper out of hiding. The game’s quite aware of how irreverent it is and even includes a song written and sung by Eric Idle called “That’s Death” and later includes “gratuitous 3D scene” near the end to poke fun at how every game was doing those back then. Thankfully, it reverts back to the animated style, which holds up way better today anyhow.

The first two Discworld games are truly excellent and are well worth playing today. But there is a third one as well called Discworld Noir that came out in 1999 that abandons Rincewind as a protagonist and plays more like a detective story with a main character named Lewton who was once part of the City Watch in Ankh-Morpok.

While the game is very good – and probably longer than the first two games combined! – it’s such a shift in graphics and style that it really feels like something else entirely. Instead of the lavish animated style of the second game, this one features pre-rendered scenes and characters and abandons objects and inventory puzzles in favor of clues Lewton collects in his notebook. The tone is also quite different, with a darker look and feel, and the story eventually turns into a sort of cultish cosmic horror tale, which is quite distinct from the sillier style of the early games. Even though Terry Pratchett came up with the story and contributed some of the dialogue, I wouldn’t describe the game as feeling like it has his fingerprints on it so much as the inspiration of his humor and characters.

Lewton’s turn as the protagonist also seems like an odd choice since Rob Brydon, who voices the character, feels far less comfortable with the role than Eric Idle did as Rincewind despite being a well-established comic actor in his own right. Rounding out the voice cast are Kate Robbins, who voices female characters in all three games, Robert Llewelyn of Red Dwarf fame and The Young One’s Nigel Planer, who’s also known for reading Discworld audiobooks and was even in the television adaptations of some of the Discworld novels.

But for all those critiques, Discworld Noir can stand on its own as a legitimately decent adventure game with a lot of gameplay to offer. It can be long-winded and isn’t as visually engaging during all that talking, but it’s well-written and the clues system makes the game far more accessible than many adventure games of the era, anticipating some of the changes that were coming to the genre in the next decade as adventure gaming largely shifted to 3D.

And now that we’ve covered the Discworld games, we’ve also reached a great stopping point. In our next episode, we’ll talk about some other point and click adventure games like The Legend of Kyrandia, Beneath a Steel Sky, Dark Seed, Call of Cthulhu, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Dune, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, Beavis and Butthead and so much more… as well as Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream!

And then after that, we’ve still got to cover multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Under a Killing Moon, Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, The Last Express, Black Dahlia and The Neverhood. And of course we have an obligation to accept Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.

Then we’ll finally close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream. We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!

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 Old Skies, a 2025 adventure by Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games that features one of the most interesting and world-weary time travel concepts I’ve ever encountered. The premise of the game is that you are Fia Quinn, a time traveling agent for ChronoZen, a future company that allows people to go back in time and make changes to the timestream… for a price. The result is often that history changes in the process without anyone being aware but the agents, but ChronoZen and its employees ensure that the things that are important to their own existence can’t be changed.

But their present lives can, and Fia might find herself with a spouse and children in one timeline only to have it washed away by someone else’s choices a moment later.

The entire game is excellent and makes great use of its time travel conceit to create fun puzzles and interesting interactions. Fia’s adventures take her to many different times and places, but  the standout moment is when Fia has to travel to New York City on September 10th, 2001 knowing that tomorrow, the city is going to be thrown into chaos and some of the people she meets will die and yet seeing the unsuspecting people of New York just going about their lives as if nothing big is going to happen.

Being a time-traveler, she knows how things are destined to turn out as well. As she winds up uncovering connections between various people and timelines, she’s forced to have to make a drastic choice of her own to preserve the existence of  someone she comes to care about.

I highly recommend Old Skies, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys adventure games. The voice acting is fantastic and the writing offers both a serious story and some humorous moments as you spend time growing to care about the game’s characters. It’s not difficult, but it is fun and it even has some neat connections to other Wadjet Eye Games titles and a developer’s commentary mode for those who want to learn how it was made.

It’s normally $20 on Steam, but also available for a discount in many bundles with other great adventure games.

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