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So other than Gabriel Knight, what little I can remember from Myst, Monkey Island and Grim Fandango I haven't played that many adventure games, or at least enough to say what is or isn't a good adventure game. I'm meaning to amend this so what good adventure games (available on something like GoG or Steam) would the Codex recommend?
More broadly what are the elements that make a good adventure game and what are some examples of this and what makes a bad adventure game?
My favourite adventure games aside from the ones you mentioned are
Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth (The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Scnibble)
The Shivah
Space Quest I, Space Quest IV, Space Quest V
Quest for Glory 1 and 4
Police Quest 2
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Torin's Passage
Full Throttle
Pepper's Adventures in Time
Gemini Rue
For me, the #1 most exciting thing about any adventure game is the atmosphere. I want to sink into the presentation of the world. It's all about the way it looks, the way it sounds, the way it feels. Some of my very favourite games are actually EGA text-parser games, so as long as there are graphics present, any game can compete in this area.
The setting. The setting will run itself over you in the first few minutes, but it will really sink in as you spend hours and hours in it. Does the setting grab you? How does it feel? Is it generic flavourless fantasy like King's Quest (which never appealed to me) or goofy-dangerous, endless-possibility exploration like Space Quest?
The next thing to hit me is interaction and characterization. Not necessarily the characterization of the characters, though -- the characterization of the world. How does the world interact with me? How do I interact with it? In Woodruff, there are tax collectors in the trash cans, if you happen to look inside them. In Pepper's Adventures in Time, you can actually use in-game cursor tools to compare goofy Ben Franklin bathing in his hot tub to real Ben Franklin. I remember learning about musket balls through clicking the "Real History" cursor on them. Sierra games like QfG and Space Quest hold death over your head throughout the entire game, creating a sense of trepidation and danger that isn't present in the safer and more carefree Lucas Arts games. All of these things hugely influence the emotional experience of the game, and they all stem from interactions with the world.
These are the most important things to me, anyway. "Writing" and "plot" are really secondary, but obviously good writing and plot are appreciated. They're just not the most important things. We're playing games, after all, not watching movies.
Adventure games available on gog.com that I would recommend:
Quest for Glory (all)
The Longest Journey
Syberia
King's Quest 5+6
Space Quest (all)
Broken Sword 1+2 (1 is better but 2 is ok)
Tex Murphy games (all)
Primordia
Simon the Sorcerer 1+2
Gobliiins 1+2
Chaos on Deponia
Beneath a Steel Sky
The rest I either haven't played, or are crappy for various reasons. GOG also doesn't have any Lucasarts games.
At this point, I think I'm more attuned to what makes a bad adventure game than a good one, since most adventure games released these days are pretty bad -- lack of (or bland) characters, lack of diversity in environments to explore, poor writing (as adventure games are pretty heavily dependent on it), an annoying main character, sliding tile puzzles, lack of creativity in puzzle design.
Goblins with one goblin is not goblins.
Naw, it's actually not bad, but I just prefer the puzzles in the first two. Woodruff is also a good game, but I don't think it's available on GOG, which is what I was talking about.
Having just finished my first playthrough of Resonance, I'm gonna go ahead and say that any adventure game fan should try it out, as well.
These Wadjet Eye games are way too serious for their own good, but it made me laugh several times, and it's easily as good as if not better than Gemini Rue.
Danke for directing me to that thread, I'm going to have to brush up on how to get my old abandonware working again...I need to get a hold of Grim Fandango, especially since there's probably no chance of seeing the old Lucas Arts game re-released digitally. Just have to scour the internet. And awesome GoG suggestions too, wishlist is filling up. I own Quest for Glory is seems...I must have bought it on impulse when it went on sale because I noticed how often the Codex mentioned it when I was lurking this place.
What I'm hearing is that because adventure games rely so much on narrative that if the writing is weak, you could argue this point about narrative for cRPGs too I guess, the entire thing falls apart and that when puzzles are not nuanced they just become an inane chore that bogs down the narrative , a narrative that might not be that good to begin with at that.
Now in asking this I'm not advocating the BioTard dating simulator mindset, not accusing anyone for it (stated before someone gets butthurt), but I have to ask: The way you experience adventure games, the 'good' and the way you get out of them, is not dissimilar than what someone 'gets out of Skyrim'?
There's plenty to be said about how Skyrim is a horrible example of a cRPG and its just fueling but is the difference that Skyrim, and Mass Effect etc., and an Adventure game is the player just 'viewing' the 'adventure' take place and not trying to 'simulate an experience' like Skyrim does? That atmosphere and good character and good writing are more vital to adventure games than any other type of game because its not trying to simulate anything but just present you with an 'adventure story', and if this is the case where does the player come in insofar as playing the game and 'getting' whatever it is you 'get from' an adventure game?
Extra Credits is mind bogglingly wrong, fucking hipsters, in their view that we need to 'get past mechanics defining a genre' but as to their general discuss of adventure games in regards to the walking dead how far or near the mark are they?
I'm afraid I'm tired of this discussion, so I'm going to assume I've seen those videos already.
Adventure games are not about "watching" anything -- at least not the good ones -- and it's a common canard that there is no agency for the player. Instead, you simply enjoy some failed writer's hamfisted take on high-school-level literary topics.
This is absurdly untrue, and it's the kind of argument that only a non-adventure fan could make. Adventure games are story- and character-explorers. The good ones are about moving your way through a world created by am auteur, yes, but exploring it at your own pace and on your own terms. Nobody likes an adventure game that gives you three dialogue choices that all result in your character saying the same thing. Nobody wants to play Dragon Quest or Space Ace, where you merely press the right button at the right time to watch the cartoon resume itself. There is much more than that to good adventure games. You look at what you want to see. You try what you want to try. They make you think. Sometimes, yes, they make you think about dumb shit or in illogical ways -- but that's just part of the fun. And if it's not part of the fun, then fuck it, it's a shit game.
Anyway, I once had this discussion with a grognard anti-adventure pro-"gameplay" theorist, and he told me nobody really enjoys adventure games because they simply try to do what books and movies do, only worse. This sort of person simply generalizes their own emotional response to the genre into an axiom, never considering that their presumptious axiom might only apply to, like, themselves.
I like adventure games more than RPGs. They are the supreme computer game genre to me, and RPGs are merely actiony imitations. Gaming theorists always claim the medium has progressed. I always feel like it's devolved into adrenaline-junky violence-fests and mere sandboxes. The adventure game has never died, and it never will.
Gaming theorists always claim the medium has progressed. I always feel like it's devolved into adrenaline-junky violence-fests and mere sandboxes. The adventure game has never died, and it never will.
I like adventure games more than RPGs. They are the supreme computer game genre to me, and RPGs are merely actiony imitations. Gaming theorists always claim the medium has progressed. I always feel like it's devolved into adrenaline-junky violence-fests and mere sandboxes. The adventure game has never died, and it never will.
I like adventure games more than RPGs. They are the supreme computer game genre to me, and RPGs are merely actiony imitations. Gaming theorists always claim the medium has progressed. I always feel like it's devolved into adrenaline-junky violence-fests and mere sandboxes. The adventure game has never died, and it never will.
If I'm going to play an adventure game it pretty much has to have good characters and a nice presentation. I don't mean amazing graphics, I mean nice music, cool locations to see, etc. It's a much more presentation-driven and story-driven genre, even if decent puzzles are essential to enjoying them.
I think the two key things to an adventure game are: an environment to explore, and puzzles to impede your progress. A good adventure game should have an environment that entices you to explore it, though not necessarily without risk; a bad adventure game will make interacting with the environment unrewarding. A good adventure game is going to integrate the puzzles (at least, when it makes sense to) into a natural extension of the environment, whereas a bad adventure game does not. A good adventure game should also reward you for making use of your brain by giving you a feeling of satisfaction when you manage to solve a difficult puzzle.
A good adventure game is kind of like a good cryptic crossword puzzle: you have a bunch of things which don't necessarily make sense when you first see them, and you don't know how they all fit in together, and you can't immediately see the answers, but once you've spent time puzzling them out, you get hints about other things and learn more about the whole, and at the end you've successfully (or not) explored everything, know everything and have that satisfying feeling of mental accomplishment from having gone head to head with the clever, tough but fair mind of someone else.
Now, story and character can be all or part of the environment. A story is a good way of directing a player of how to proceed by setting them a specific goal, and helping them to mentally or emotionally connect with a world. A story is also helpful for the designer, as it gives them a natural framework to work from when thinking of puzzles. Characters are good for the player, because they give players some kind of instinctive or emotional connection to the game world in a way that just things can't, and provide a way to motivate players to continue, and keep them from feeling lonely. Characters are also helpful for designers, because they let you give information to the player in a far more interactive way than just dumping a lot of text to the screen and saying "read", and let you change the environment in a natural way rather than just having random things happening.
But - and here's where I get annoyed with other people's definitions - are not the only way of expressing this environment. You can have an adventure game where no part of the game is story or character (or possibly even both), and by assuming the centrality of story and character to the genre you run the risk of turning adventure games into what Telltale and Quantic Dream and Valve and a bunch of other studios and game editorialists like Extra Credits seem to want to make them into: interactive TV series or movies where you press a button occasionally to do a thing to be rewarded with more story and character from the Skinner box so you can slap your fins together like a recently-fed seal.
One of the most satisfying experience I have ever had in any game was in Riven, a game with very little in the way of character or story. When you meet a character in that game, it feels like an important game event, especially as there are so few that you can properly understand. And, in a game genre where you're supposed to sit and think, reading journals doesn't necessarily take you out of the game the way it would an action game.
But none of those had anything to do with what I think about most fondly when it comes to Riven. Instead it was just me on a screen I'd passed several times before, just wandering around stuck, trying to figure out how all the clues I'd collected fit together, wondering if I missed something, when I suddenly noticed what turned out to be the key to the whole thing.
"The cave opening looks like a frog..."
If another character, or my character, had commented on it by making it a hotspot, it would have made the puzzle too easy. Similarly, if I had learned about having to do this earlier through the story, it wouldn't have been such an "Aha!" moment. This is the risk that you have with using a story or characters: it's too easy to use them as a crutch to give dumb, unobservant players the answer so they don't get stuck or frustrated for even a moment. A lot of developers do, then the puzzles become less of a centre-point of gameplay and more an obstruction to the story and puzzles. So you remove them, and I guess add QTE events so you can claim to be making a game.
I can probably rant about this more, but I'm still too mad at those Extra Credits idiots to think straight so I'm going to stop myself for now.
but is the difference that Skyrim, and Mass Effect etc., and an Adventure game is the player just 'viewing' the 'adventure' take place and not trying to 'simulate an experience' like Skyrim does? That atmosphere and good character and good writing are more vital to adventure games than any other type of game because its not trying to simulate anything but just present you with an 'adventure story', and if this is the case where does the player come in insofar as playing the game and 'getting' whatever it is you 'get from' an adventure game?
