The Great Game Guide

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

In this episode, we’re going to wind down our discussion of adventure games and talk about where things go from here! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Season 1, Episode 17: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 15 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 [http://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 [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/ [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! -------------------------------------------------- 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 [http://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 [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-11-14/the-turbulent-seven-year-saga-behind-hit-game-dispatch]. 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 [http://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 [https://greatestgames.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

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

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 [http://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 [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/ [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: Shardlight mini-adventures: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/1704/ [https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/1704/] https://indiegamebundle.fandom.com/wiki/Humble_Bundle#2021 [https://indiegamebundle.fandom.com/wiki/Humble_Bundle#2021] The Double Fine Adventure Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVwg-9WL3dE [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVwg-9WL3dE] Cressup interview with Jakub Dvorsky of Amanita Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7RAcmLn5N4 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7RAcmLn5N4] https://web.archive.org/web/20101208183108/http://machinarium.net/blog/2010/08/05/machinarium-pirate-amnesty/ [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://web.archive.org/web/20061210235634/http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id%2C699/] https://crystalshard.net/ [https://crystalshard.net/] https://steamcommunity.com/app/80310/discussions/0/3800527029416506681/ [https://steamcommunity.com/app/80310/discussions/0/3800527029416506681/] https://web.archive.org/web/20120606195617/http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17627 [https://web.archive.org/web/20120606195617/http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17627] http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/games.htm [http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/games.htm]   ------------------------------------------------- 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 [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1178762533]. 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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20101208183108/http:/machinarium.net/blog/2010/08/05/machinarium-pirate-amnesty/], 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 [https://galeriasavaria.hu/en/termekek/reszletek/gyujtemeny/4740600/Retro-tin-can-tin-can-polo-can-Czechoslovakia-1970s-game-called-Samorost-/]. 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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20210305165701/https:/adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17627]AdventureGamers.com [http://AdventureGamers.com] from Dave Gilbert himself recommending the first game [https://web.archive.org/web/20210305165701/https:/adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17627]. 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 [http://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.

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

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! ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 [http://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 [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/ [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.ign.com/articles/how-hidden-nazi-symbols-were-the-tip-of-a-toxic-iceberg-at-life-is-strange-developer-deck-nine [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 [https://www.eurogamer.net/tales-from-the-borderlands-sales-werent-great] ------------------------------------------------- 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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOnbnfVp918] 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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1C9Q5JheOE] 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 [https://www.eurogamer.net/tales-from-the-borderlands-sales-werent-great]. 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 [https://www.ign.com/articles/how-hidden-nazi-symbols-were-the-tip-of-a-toxic-iceberg-at-life-is-strange-developer-deck-nine]Life is Strange [https://www.ign.com/articles/how-hidden-nazi-symbols-were-the-tip-of-a-toxic-iceberg-at-life-is-strange-developer-deck-nine] games [https://www.ign.com/articles/how-hidden-nazi-symbols-were-the-tip-of-a-toxic-iceberg-at-life-is-strange-developer-deck-nine] 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 [http://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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac-Kl4Tsuqg] 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 sp

Season 1, Episode 14 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 12

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! ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 [http://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 [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/ [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! -------------------------------------------------- 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 [http://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 [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/ [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://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 [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] ------------------------------------------------- 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 [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] 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

Season 1, Episode 13 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 11

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! ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 [http://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 [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/ [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: “What is a Visual Novel?” academic paper - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3474712 [https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3474712] https://danganronpa.fandom.com/wiki/DISTRUST [https://danganronpa.fandom.com/wiki/DISTRUST] https://otomekitten.com/glossary/ [https://otomekitten.com/glossary/] https://princessmaker.fandom.com/wiki/Father_Marriage_Ending_(PM2) [https://princessmaker.fandom.com/wiki/Father_Marriage_Ending_(PM2)] https://www.eurogamer.net/unfinished-symphony-castlevanias-keeper-speaks [https://www.eurogamer.net/unfinished-symphony-castlevanias-keeper-speaks] https://www.famitsu.com/news/201506/29081240.html [https://www.famitsu.com/news/201506/29081240.html] https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/projectbook/koei/3 [https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/projectbook/koei/3] ------------------------------------------------- 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. [https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3474712] 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 [https://cing.fandom.com/wiki/Another_Code:_Recollection_changes]. 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 [https://greatestgames.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]