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General discussion29 must-play adventure games as picked by Richard Cobbett(93 posts)(93 posts)
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Posted May 22, 2017
Did your favorites make the cut?

There was a time when everybody was looking at adventure games to introduce crazy technical innovations, explore unconventional stories, or just give us a strong argument against our dismissive parents who considered all games juvenile and insubstantial. Since the golden years of the graphic adventures, we've seen certain trends come and go, foreign genes spliced into the genre's DNA, and adventure games evolving into a variety of experiences that sometimes have little in common with their early predecessors.

Richard Cobbett, a longtime fan of adventure games and their close offspring, has recently compiled <span class="bold">a comprehensive list of 29+ titles</span> that all fans of the genre should check out. Newcomers and veterans are treated to an introduction to the history of adventure games, some advice on how to get started, and a list of the standouts, broken down into sub-categories for convenience: The Classics, Story-driven, Puzzles & Exploration.

Take your pick: there are all-around legends like The Secret of Monkey Island or Beneath a Steel Sky, masterpieces of storytelling like Grim Fandango or The Walking Dead, brain wreckers like Myst or Zork: Grand Inquisitor, and deliberately paced experiences like Gone Home.

Plenty of developers continue to be fascinated by the narrative possibilities of adventure games, even if they don't feel like adhering to their original formula. These 29 games (and the additional honorable mentions) are both celebrated classics and the product of experimentation with innovative ideas and are all more than worth your time.

So, how many of these have you already played and what others would you add to <span class="bold">IGN's list</span>, fellow adventurers?
Post edited May 22, 2017 by maladr0Id
Posted May 24, 2017
The best adventure in the last decade for myself is Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller. Great story with reasonably logical puzzles, in fact you can pick up this in a bundle with Moebius, Last Door, Quest For Infamy and more adventure games here:

https://www.bundlestars.com/en/bundle/odyssey-bundle

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jorlin: I'm very glad that Kentucky Road Zero made this list. I love that game for it's incredible poetic atmosphere. A true masterpiece.that works best imho. when playing it in the dead of night. Easily in my top-ten top-ten of best games of the last decade.
I bought this and realised it wasn't finished and wanted to wait until all episodes came out until I started.
Posted May 24, 2017
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jorlin: I really miss the Yathzee (Ben Croshaw) games also known as the Chzo mythos. Brilliant horror games made with AGS, beginning with the slow-starting (and crudely drawn) 5 Days a Stranger. ...
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Ashnak: I really loved the Chzo mythos!

Speaking of horror, some of my all-time fav adventures are Darkness Within 1+2 and Scratches. Really scary without the need to constantly fire jumpscares at you.
Really? DW was on sale just recently, but I passed on it because it looked a bit meh-ish. Might have to take a second look at it...

And yes, the Yathzee games are really good, my personal spooky favorite of the bunch probably being Trilby's notes (spookier than Downfall classic while still being a true adventure).
Posted May 24, 2017
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supplementscene: The best adventure in the last decade for myself is Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller. Great story with reasonably logical puzzles
Tell me about it. I loved this one, although some puzzles were quite tricky (and the plot, oh boy, pretty unique)
Posted May 25, 2017
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jorlin: I really miss the Yathzee (Ben Croshaw) games also known as the Chzo mythos. Brilliant horror games made with AGS, beginning with the slow-starting (and crudely drawn) 5 Days a Stranger.
Why miss them when you can play them right now?

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

They really are excellent adventures, well worthy of making this list, and his other games are a great deal of fun as well.
Too bad Richard didn't delve into the gems of the non-commercial game world, namely from the AGS, IF, and GameMaker scenes (like The Journey Down, Tale of Two Kingdoms, Anchorhead, Photopia, Counterfeit Monkey, etc.), as many of them easily put most of the games mentioned so far to shame.
Posted May 25, 2017
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garrus74: Gone Home in a list of "Essential, Must-play Adventures" ?! One of the most disappointing 3 hours of playtime you'll never get back.
Absolutely agree. Putting Gone Home in the same list as Monkey Island should be a crime.
Posted May 25, 2017
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meisjoe: Absolutely agree. Putting Gone Home in the same list as Monkey Island should be a crime.
Technically, it's not in the same list (there are three different lists in the article). ;)
Posted June 06, 2017
Gone Home recommended for 'puzzle fans'?

Also, no mention of Primordia anywhere - and that is one of the best adventure games ever made.

Still, good effort from Mr. Cobbett. This genre needs more love overall, so I will take an article with faults over nothing at all.
Posted June 06, 2017
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Mico Selva: Gone Home recommended for 'puzzle fans'?
The category they put it in was "puzzles & exploration" (as in: games that have lots of one or the other, if not both). Gone Home was definitely meant to count as "exploration", not "puzzle". ;)
Posted June 25, 2017
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AlienMind: +1 for removing Grim Fandango from the list
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WildHobgoblin: What's so bad about Grim Fandango? I thought that game is much beloved.
For me it's clunky interface, confusing location-traversal for the sake of being confusing, moon logic. It felt like somebody created the world by putting good elements into ammo and shot them on the wall using a shotgun. Apparently the customers back in the day also did not like it:
"Grim Fandango sales were poor despite the positive reception given to the game." "The game is commonly considered a commercial failure" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_Fandango).
Posted June 25, 2017
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WildHobgoblin: What's so bad about Grim Fandango? I thought that game is much beloved.
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AlienMind: For me it's clunky interface, confusing location-traversal for the sake of being confusing, moon logic. It felt like somebody created the world by putting good elements into ammo and shot them on the wall using a shotgun. Apparently the customers back in the day also did not like it:
"Grim Fandango sales were poor despite the positive reception given to the game." "The game is commonly considered a commercial failure" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_Fandango).
That was more due to the death of the popularity of adventure point & clicks since the advent of Doom Clones and other 3D Worlds. It's generally considered a classic by most fans of the genre, although yes there a few frustrations with it.
Posted June 26, 2017
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WildHobgoblin: What's so bad about Grim Fandango? I thought that game is much beloved.
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AlienMind: For me it's clunky interface, confusing location-traversal for the sake of being confusing, moon logic. It felt like somebody created the world by putting good elements into ammo and shot them on the wall using a shotgun. Apparently the customers back in the day also did not like it:
"Grim Fandango sales were poor despite the positive reception given to the game." "The game is commonly considered a commercial failure" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_Fandango).
I see. No accounting for taste, I suppose ;)
I think I'm fairly free of nostalgia where old adventures are concerned, having a few gripes with some of the games being held in very high regard by much of the adventure-gaming crowd. I actually thought GF was a pretty great game (only ever played the revamped version).
I guess it's a difficult thing today to make adventures that aren't piss easy but don't have the soup-can sort of puzzle either (walkthroughs make the latter kind of moot, anyway). From all "puzzles", I definitely love the environmental/"they don't know that they are puzzles" kind the most. Seems a pretty rare thing to find those done well, though.
Posted June 26, 2017
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robespeare: Blade Runner was terrific! And Discworld Noir too, please (I still read the blog of one of the designers).
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Dogmaus: Why not ALL Discoworld?
Sadly Blade Runner is unlikely ever gonna join the catalogue. And I don't own the disc anymore. One must find other ways to play it. The source code is missing for this Westwood gem. It could have been a rediscovered hit now that the new film is about to be released.
And Blade Runner has some major prolbems on modern systems because it happens in "real time".(Actaully they fudged the real time quite a bit for the sake of playabllity) and many sequences are timed. Sadly, modern CPU's speed the game up,so that some of the timed action sequences are almost impossible to win. In one example,you had in the original ten seconds to do something or die, but in most modern systems you only have four seconds. And you need access to the source code to fix this, apparently.

And I am surprised there is so little love for the Police Quest and Laura Bow Games. here.
Post edited June 26, 2017 by dudalb
Posted June 26, 2017
And I have to laugh at the statement "there is no such thing as a bad Adventure Game". IMHO NOTHING is worse them a badly designed,badly thought out adventure game.
Posted June 26, 2017
Although I doubt that GOG will get it, LA NOIR is really a classic adventure game that takes advanteage of modern technology. I love that game. It is like stepping into a Raymond Chandler novel.
THough some people don't like it because of the big twist at the end.
Posted June 26, 2017
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dudalb: And I am surprised there is so little love for the Police Quest and Laura Bow Games. here.
Police Quest is commonly misunderstood, I think. When people discuss it online, I often see complaints about how they died because they didn't do the car inspection or whatever. The game makes a lot more sense if you perceive it as a cop simulator in which reading the manual and attention to detail is rewarded, rather than a traditional puzzle-solving adventure game.

Laura Bow simply wasn't played enough, I think. I like them but the timed elements in Colonel's Bequest can be tough.
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General discussion29 must-play adventure games as picked by Richard Cobbett(93 posts)(93 posts)
(93 posts)