Season 1, Episode 19 – Why We're Stuck on Platformers, Part 2

Season 1, Episode 19 – Why We're Stuck on Platformers, Part 2

In this episode, we’re going to look at early platform games and how they evolved the ideas from Space Panic and Donkey Kong! -------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 19: Why We’re Stuck on Platformers, Part 2 Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review. You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com) And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown! -------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode. Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/) Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you! -------------------------------------------------- Coming up in this episode – We’re going to talk about early arcade platformers from the early 1980s like Jungle Hunt, Pitfall!, Popeye, Mr. Do!’s Castle, Congo Bongo, Bagman, Beauty and the Beast, Frankenstein’s Monster, Roc ‘N Rope, The Glob, Ben Bero Beh, Chack’n Pop, Pig Newton, Mappy, H.E.R.O. and Spike! I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for our look at many of the great platform games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! I’m a qualitative researcher by training and profession and so my natural instinct is to try to categorize things when I start studying them. In our last episode, I offered three hallmarks of platform gaming – storytelling, physics and well-defined objectives – and I also mentioned that there are five core objectives that platformers tend to have in common – enemy elimination, collection, rescue, survival and speed. Now, of course, you could argue that there are other genres that share these traits, because these are also hallmarks of genres like the run and gun shooter, hack and slash action games, first and third person shooters and even action RPGs to some extent. I don’t disagree. Platformers are the mighty tree from which all of these genres ultimately either branched off or produced hybrid genres with other plants. One could argue that most action games are just Super Mario Bros. with variations to the formula. I don’t like to be that reductive, but I could see some logical basis for saying that, because Super Mario Bros., more than perhaps any game in existence, taught entire generations of game designers how to make a really, really solid action game. But in my upcoming book series, The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played, I went pretty deep in trying to categorize platformers in the 1980s because I realized pretty quickly that there’s a world of difference between a game like Donkey Kong, a game like Pitfall! and a game like Bubble Bobble. Superficially, they’re all running and jumping games with items to collect, enemies or hazards to avoid and a story driving you forward, but mechanically, they’re amazingly different. In Donkey Kong, you’re trying to figure out how to progress upwards on a single screen to rescue a damsel in distress while you navigate dangers and potentially complete tasks that change from screen to screen. The story repeats over time with more challenging stages. This is what I’d call a pure platformer, because the emphasis is on the platform jumping itself. A popular variant of these pure platformers would be the action platformer, which might involve a stronger action focus like running and gunning or hacking and slashing – two subgenres that are pretty well-established on their own with popular standards like Mega Man and Contra for run and guns and Castlevania and Strider for hack and slash. In Pitfall!, you have a series of 256 screens connected in a gigantic loop and you have two planes to explore – aboveground and underground. You have to optimize how you’ll explore this vast world and collect all 32 treasures within a 20 minute time limit. This is what I’d call an action adventure platformer, because the emphasis is on the theme. In Bubble Bobble, you have 100 screens to clear and your focus is on figuring out how to not only eliminate the enemies, but also trigger the game’s secret rooms and true ending. This is what I would call a puzzle platformer because the emphasis is on figuring out how to optimize your playthrough. But in Japan, a lot of these games are also sometimes known as comical action games due to their cartoony graphics and emphasis on all-ages appeal. There’s one other major branch that often involves running, but not necessarily jumping, and that’s the maze and chase platformer which evolved from the Space Panic template. One of the most obvious popular examples is Burger Time, a game in which you can’t jump but can make use of ladders. Namco’s cat and mouse game Mappy would be another, and of course Lode Runner provided a hugely popular computer game version of this concept. These games tend to focus on enemies that are constantly pursuing you and who you can only escape through utilizing traps, setting up barricades or changing to a different platform. As we discussed in our last episode, Space Panic is perhaps the first true platform game and it owes a lot of its inspiration to the top-down trap maze game Heiankyo Alien. You can also see where games like Pac-Man and Dig Dug and Rally-X all evolved from the trap maze concept, though they also owe some inspiration to an arcade game about driving in a maze and picking up tiles called Head-On. But the platformer version of a maze and chase game still has the three hallmarks we discussed – storytelling, physics and well-defined objectives – and thus has a different look and feel to a game like Pac-Man. To offer a different comparison, Mr. Do! is a maze and chase game very much like Dig Dug, but Mr. Do!’s Castle is a maze and chase platformer in the vein of Space Panic. So, now that we have these different types of platformers defined, it’s time to dig into them a bit. And we’ll start with the Donkey Kong-inspired pure platformers by looking at the console and arcade games that were more or less just outright copies of it. (We’ll talk about PC games in the next episode.) One of the most obvious clones is King Kong, a 1982 game from Tigervision for the Atari 2600. Your job is to climb the Empire State Building’s ladders and jump over gaps while a really ugly-looking gorilla tosses colorful striped bombs at you. A blond-haired lady in a blue dress runs around at the top of the screen with her arms flailing. Even the jumping sound effect sounds like a knock-off of Mario’s jumps. It’s a very dull game with little variety beyond speeding up the bombs. Beauty and the Beast came out the same year on the Intellivision, and while it looks like a Donkey Kong clone with a little bit of Crazy Climber’s building scaling added in, the graphics are far better and the gameplay moves surprisingly fast. That’s probably because it was made by Imagic, a developer who actually knew how to make a good game. As the hero Bashful Buford, you climb up a skyscraper four floors at a time and collect hearts being flung by your lady love Tiny Mabel while you chase the gorilla Horrible Hank up to the top floor of the building. Hank also tosses barrels to impede you, and the building is of course being bombarded by bats, birds and rodents, but the game’s controls allow you to move Buford around them much more capably than Mario can. My only real complaint is that the game doesn’t offer any real variety beyond its very repetitive gameplay loop. The higher-up floors aren’t as long as the lower ones, but this doesn’t do much to change the game itself. Frankenstein’s Monster for the Atari 2600 came out in 1983 and was developed by Data Age, and it’s a surprisingly creative take on the Donkey Kong formula, eliminating the rescue aspect entirely and instead focusing on stopping Dr. Frankenstein from bringing his monster to life. I’ll give the game credit for getting the title correct – this is about the monster, not the man – and also for breaking up its gameplay into three horizontal areas that each have some variety. Your character has to climb down from the castle at the top, leap through a pit-filled floor patrolled by tarantulas, head down into a subterranean cave and ride a log across a spider-infested acid lake to retrieve a stone. Yes, this game has two different types of spiders. Don’t overthink it. It totally makes sense. Then, you climb back up, reach the monster, dodge some ghosts and traverse a quick bat-filled room to place your stone in the wall you’re building to close the monster in. And all the while, lightning is striking above on the top third of the screen and the monster will come to life if you take too long. It’s a tense, exciting game that makes great use of its theme. Less impressive is the Atari 2600 game I Want My Mommy, which was also reskinned as Open Sesame with some undecipherable digitized speech added in for good measure. Both of these play like really slow Donkey Kong style games where your goal is to dodge brain dead foes who shuffle back and forth on each stage and reach the top using ladders you built by walking over flickering dots. In I Want My Mommy, you’ll either find an apple or your mother, and in Open Sesame, you reach a cave filled with treasure. Both games are incredibly lazy and barely engaging. The Magnavox Odyssey 2 got its own Donkey Kong clone with Pick Axe Pete! in 1982, and while it looks terrible – it’s literally just lines, geometric shapes and a stickman running around occasionally waving a pickaxe power-up that’s very much like the hammer in Donkey Kong – the lack of graphical fidelity makes the gameplay very fast and fluid. There’s no enemy at the top, but rather, three doors at different heights at the center of the screen that toss rocks at you. Your job is to break the rocks, locate keys to open up the doors and delve deeper into the mines. It’s super abstract and kind of chaotic, and yet surprisingly fun. Speaking of lesser-known consoles, the Vectrex was a miniconsole with a built-in vector graphics screen, and its lone platformer from 1983, Spike, is a true work of art because its simple tilted perspective vector graphics give it a very fluid, almost three-dimensional feel. This game follows the Donkey Kong script a lot more closely – your girlfriend, Molly, is being held in a cage at the top of the screen by the villainous Spud, and you have to find a key and break her out. The game’s simple and only has three levels at a time, but the platforms are moving, Spike can kick the enemies harassing him, the gameplay is fast and engaging and there’s even digitized speech you actually can understand as Molly asks for help and Spike rises to the occasion to offer it. Turning to the arcades, there are a few interesting platformers that managed to break free of the Donkey Kong style while still using a lot of its ideas. We’ll skip Nintendo’s very odd Sky Skipper, which does have a bunch of gorillas in it, but involves flying around. Instead, let’s talk about Roc ‘N Rope, a 1983 game from Konami where you’re a mountain climber on a quest to reach a mystical bird and have to use ropes to ascend to higher platforms. You can only fire these at a way too acute angle, though, and you’re constantly being harassed by cavemen and dinosaurs for some reason. I don’t want to make a thing out of this, by the way, but the bird you’re trying to reach resembles a Chinese Phoenix much more than a Roc, which was an Arabian bird that could carry a few elephants at a time. But anyhow, this game’s incredibly hard and I’ve never quite mastered it because the enemies are really numerous and aggressive and the ropes are really hard to aim correctly due to their low angle and the fact that the enemies can use them too. Congo Bongo also came out in 1983, and it’s a Sega-developed knock-off of Donkey Kong where the big idea is that everything’s tilted at an isometric, overhead diagonal angle to make the graphics look more three-dimensional. This time, you face a gorilla named Bongo who set your safari tent on fire, and so instead of trying to rescue a member of your expedition or anything like that, you’re bent on the far more exciting objective of revenge. Your suffering across four stages is rewarded as you light Bongo on fire! Bongo tosses coconuts at you that cascade down hills in the first stage, and as you progress, you also have to deal with other fauna like monkeys, snakes, hippos, rhinos and koi fish, which at least provides some nice variety for the various screens you run and jump across. Of all the Donkey Kong clones, this one’s probably the best-looking, though it lacks that addictive quality that Nintendo’s ape-battling game seems to retain. As Donkey Kong inspired a number of games – and we’re going to talk about even more next week! - Nintendo wasn’t content to release its own clone. Instead, Shigeru Miyamoto, Genyo Takeda the Nintendo R&D1 team released a 1982 platformer that set a new standard for game graphics and action and which, surprisingly, did not include a jump button. This new game, Popeye, wasn’t nearly as influential or popular as Donkey Kong, but it helped to kick off the action platformer, a subgenre that would become far more popular in the years to come! There would be no Donkey Kong without Popeye, because Popeye was the game that Shigeru Miyamoto really wanted to make first. You can definitely see the influence of Popeye in Donkey Kong – the love triangle, the power-ups, the everyman fighting a far more physically capable foe, the cartoonish artwork and so forth – but when Nintendo actually produced the Popeye game Miyamoto envisioned, it wound up being quite different from the game that came before it. One primary difference is the emphasis on fighting. Popeye has to run around the stage collecting hearts that are being dropped from the top of the screen by Olive Oyl, but he also has to dodge the aggressive Brutus, also known as Bluto, a muscular, barrel chested man who is spurned by Olive Oyl and seems to feel his only chance at true love is to stop the sailor-man from finding it too. In later stages, Olive Oyl drops music notes and the letters H E L P, which Popeye also has to collect. But ultimately, he’s going to have to face Brutus, and he has two ways of dealing with his foe – drop a trap on him or grab some spinach to power up and knock Brutus out for a few seconds. Popeye also has to deal with the Sea Hag, who’ll show up to throw bottles at him, and Brutus will sometimes toss a whole volley of bottles. Popeye can’t jump over these, so he has to punch them. Likewise, when vultures harass him on the ship level, he can punch those too. Because Popeye lacks a jump button, the gameplay is instead built around stairs and ladders. The second stage does have a see-saw where Wimpy can launch Popeye up to the top of a building, but a lot of the action involves falling through holes to get down and then climbing back up the stairs. The first and second stages also have wraparound edges, which give Popeye plenty of mobility. It’s a very interesting game. An arcade game that’s quite similar to it is Kangaroo, a 1982 Donkey Kong-like game by Sunsoft where Mama Roo has to ascend ladders and trees to save Baby Roo from some evil apple-throwing monkeys. Interestingly, Kangaroo came out about six months before Popeye, but it has a lot of similar ideas, including the ability to punch apples thrown at Mama Roo – though she can also dodge them with a jump or use a duck maneuver. One of the most fascinating aspects of this game is that the third level really changes things up by forcing you to knock out a tower of monkeys far enough to lower your joey’s cage, which is quite different from the platforming of the first, second and fourth stages. Another interesting idea is that a large gorilla armed with boxing gloves can appear, challenge Mama Roo to a duel and then snatch her boxing gloves. As much as I like the original arcade version of Kangaroo – and it is a pretty fun game! – I’m even more partial to the Atari 2600 adaptation, which strips out the third level and ditches the gorilla, but increases the speed and uses its simple graphics and limited controls as a means to improve the mechanics. It’s a surprisingly good distillation of the gameplay. Another more action-focused game featuring a cartoon character is 1983’s Pig Newton, an arcade game released from Sega that seems to be repurposed from a game maybe intended to be pitched to Warner Bros. or Disney before receiving a license for an obscure and short-lived comic strip by Malcolm “Mal” Hancock from the magazine National Review. The premise is still fairly interesting, however – you’re a pig stuck in a tree and wolves are standing at the trunk, whacking away with axes. Your job is to drop apples, banana peels, horseshoes, bombs and beehives on them to keep them from felling the tree while you collect a bunch of bird eggs. And of course Nintendo’s 1984 game Ice Climber, released for both the Famicom and NES as well as the arcade VS. system, is another platform game based on action, this time featuring the mallet-wielding, parka wearing couple Popo and Nana ascending an ice cavern, smashing their way through blocks, bopping yetis, picking up stray vegetables, riding moving clouds and grabbing ahold of a Pterodactyl. It’s a very weird game, and not a particular favorite of mine, but it anticipated some of the elements that would begin showing up in more action-oriented games in the mid-1980s, like scrolling screens, brick-breaking and more complex objectives. Speaking of platformers that got a little off the beaten path with multiplayer elements, I don’t know when else I’ll get a chance to mention Joust, the 1982 arcade classic from Williams where you fly around on ostriches or storks and fight blue, red or gray knights riding buzzards, all while stopping to land on platforms and destroy eggs that will hatch into new enemies. Joust was simple enough for gamers in 1982 that it was easy to pick up and play – you just needed a joystick to move left or right and a button to tap repeatedly to flap your bird’s wings. And yet even today, it’s a game that requires a lot of practice and skill to master. Even more amazing is that its simple concept allowed it to receive several flawless home versions, and even the Atari 2600’s port is surprisingly decent. When you consider that Joust came out just a year after Donkey Kong and yet is so different in concept and execution, it’s an absolutely amazing testament to how far platformer games were capable of taking the genre, but Joust is also a game that was pretty much in a league of its own, and even its 1986 sequel Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest, couldn’t surpass it. Nintendo R&D1’s Balloon Fight is another competitive game with platformer DNA baked in, but boy, is it a weird one. The game debuted in 1984 as the arcade game VS. Balloon Fight, but most players who know it today probably know it better for the NES port that came out alongside the console’s national North American launch in 1986. Similar to Joust, this is a game about flying around by flapping your arms and knocking flying goblin-like enemies down to platforms and them kicking them offscreen, and your health is represented by the number of balloons you have available – you start with two, but die if both are popped. You can also drown, get eaten by a giant fish or get struck by lightning. While the game is cooperative, in the 2-player mode, you can also pop each others’ balloons for extra points.   I’ll be honest in saying Balloon Fight is not my cup of tea, but it is interesting that it bears some resemblance to Nintendo’s far more famous game from 1985, Super Mario Bros.. And I know, I know, it’d be really fun to just segue into it right now. But we’ll get to that game in a couple of episodes, as well as the regular Mario Bros. game that preceded it. In the meantime, I want to talk about a different style of platform game that proved to be quite popular before Nintendo broke the mold. While some of these platformers had monsters to defeat, people to rescue or treasures to collect, their emphasis was on the theme of adventure itself. As I mentioned, Joust was a great example of how far platform game developers came in a year as they saw the potential using a side view, physics, storytelling and well-defined objectives similar to what Donkey Kong had already accomplished, but two games that came out within a month of one another helped to take the genre in a more conventional direction than flying around on large birds and poking each other with lances. Those games were Jungle King and Pitfall!, and while they’re both quite different in style, they also share a similar theme of putting you in the shoes of an adventurer out in the wild. Jungle King was first released in August of 1982 in the arcades by Taito, but it became more commonly known as Jungle Hunt after Taito had to remove the not-so-subtle nods to the Tarzan franchise, like the leopard print loincloth and the Tarzan yell at the beginning of the game. Taito also reskinned it as Pirate Pete with some different enemies and background graphics, but nobody really talks about that version. Jungle Hunt is the one most people remember. It splits its action into four vignettes, most of which involve jumping and side-scrolling but none of which features any actual platforms. The first, and probably the most memorable, is the starting screen, where you swing from vine to vine by waiting for your current vine to get close to the next one. This is not an easy task because you have to time your jump just right and there’s also a timer counting down. Fail and you fall to your death, and I’m sure many quarters were wasted back in the day trying to nail that section. The second vignette involves your explorer diving into the water with a knife and swimming upstream, avoiding chomping alligators and consuming oxygen bubbles before he runs out of air. And the third has you run uphill and dodge rolling boulders that seem to be coming out of a volcano during an earthquake, because they’ll bounce up in the air. And the final vignette has you carefully time jumps over two cannibals to rescue your lady love from being the main ingredient in a cauldron of boiling water. Finish that loop and then repeat to get a high score! One of the stranger aspects of the first two versions of the arcade game is that your character’s appearance changes noticeably between vignettes, often with different colors and proportions. The hero in Jungle Hunt also appears to be an old man with a monocle, which makes the portrait of him alongside the lady he rescues a bit cringey. But Jungle Hunt was a big deal, and its emphasis on breaking platforming down into different styles of gameplay to fit within the context of a theme was quite prescient. Today, we’d view this game as a collection of minigames, but in the 1980s, this was a very interesting solution to the problem of making a joystick and a single button work in a variety of contexts.  In fact, Coleco’s 1984 official adaptation of Tarzan plays a lot like a more sophisticated take on Jungle Hunt but adds in additional ideas like fighting and climbing as you move through its screens and resolve its vignettes. There’s even a final stage that’s reminiscent of Donkey Kong by way of a Mesoamerican pyramid, but with several gorillas taking the place of the barrels and an angry, fire-breathing idol at the top! The thirst for jungle adventures carried over into many other games, and one of the best-known series didn’t make it to the arcades until it was well-established as a console gaming classic! Pitfall! debuted in 1982 on the Atari 2600 and was created by David Crane for Activision, a publisher that he helped co-found in 1979 when a group of programmers broke away from Atari. Activision had a big hit in 1981 with a game called Kaboom! that involved catching bombs being tossed by the Mad Bomber, but Pitfall! was its crowning achievement, selling over 4 million copies and offering an experience no one had ever delivered on the Atari 2600 console – allowing players to explore a vast, intentionally-designed world full of hazards and enemies while also challenging them to collect as much treasure as possible within 20 minutes. Now, I don’t like to quibble about what game did what first, because you can almost always find examples of games that had some revolutionary feature prior to the game that actually popularized it. With that said, Pitfall! was definitely one the earliest side-view platform games to feature an explorable, self-contained world, because its 256 individual screens were connected together in a giant wraparound loop that included both overworld and underworld lanes. In fact, calling this game a platformer is even a bit of a stretch, because like Jungle Hunt,  there are no actual platforms to jump onto – you instead leap over pits, onto the heads of crocodiles or over enemies and hazards. When you consider the limitations of the Atari 2600 hardware and the very simple controls – run left, run right and jump – Pitfall! is a very impressive game for its time, featuring fluid character animations, several different types of hazards and puzzle-like design requiring you to understand the flow and timing of every screen you enter. Pitfall Harry is a particularly cool character because he actually resembles a human being despite being made out of a stack of pixels that are mostly two shades of green. One of the most important tricks to pick up on is that you’ll be much more successful if early in the game you head underground, turn around and run right to left after you nab the first treasure. If you don’t figure that out, you’ll never come close to reaching the maximum score. But… Pitfall! also doesn’t hold up tremendously well today because it’s so rooted in trial and error that it feels a bit capricious. Mastering the game requires a level of rote memorization that most players would never put up with today, and the repetitive screens, tricky timing and lack of guidance, checkpoints or continues past your three lives makes the game extremely difficult to recommend to anyone who doesn’t love the idea of old-school hard. What I would recommend instead is Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, the 1984 platformer sequel which features a more sophisticated world of connected screens set on a large grid allowing for both horizontal and vertical movement. And Pitfall II gets rid of the things that are most annoying in the first game – the vine-swinging, the timers and the pits that open and close on the overworld section of the map. There are also checkpoints this time, which was a pretty stunning innovation for the time. Pitfall Harry gains the ability to swim and ride balloons this time. It’s an easier, more accessible game that’s incredibly impressive on the Atari 2600 because it has persistent multichannel background music, and it even includes two NPCs, Rhonda and Quickclaw, who were part of the Saturday Morning cartoon show. Though the Atari 2600 version of Pitfall II is the most famous, and it was the only one coded by David Crane himself, the Atari 800 computer and Atari 5200 received ports by a programmer named Mike Lorenzen who decided to add in an extra map of his own design, and it resolves with an actual ending where Pitfall Harry has to charm a snake-like rope and ride it to the top along with Rhonda, Quickclaw and the Raj diamond he’s been trying to retrieve. But even this version of Pitfall II got some improvement on the Sega SG-1000 and in arcades when Sega ported it in 1985, creating a new version from scratch and combining elements of both Pitfall games. I actually think it’s the best classic Pitfall experience since it incorporates all of David Crane’s ideas while also adding in better jumping sequences and greatly upscaling the graphics to a more cartoony aesthetic. The game also adds in some later underground sequences, including a mine cart ride and a Mayan temple full of traps! Pitfall’s next sequel, Super Pitfall on the NES, is best avoided, but its later 1994 console sequel Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure takes a lot of cues from Sega’s remake. The Sega version of Pitfall! shows a lot of obvious inspiration from another action adventure platformer that debuted in 1983 called Spelunker for the Atari 8-bit computer. Originally developed by MicroGraphicImage and published through Broderbund, Spelunker developed a reputation for being an impressive and ambitious action platformer with exciting caverns to explore, treasures to locate and lots of enemies and traps to avoid – including a very annoying ghost who’d come in from the side of the screen! – but the game was so mercilessly tough that getting good at it required a lot of patience, particularly since falling even small distances could be fatal. The NES version is particularly infamous for its hatred of players, killing them for making the slightest mistakes. Spelunker was initially a hit but quickly faded away in the US as players moved on to other, more accessible games. It found a following in Japan, however, and the arcade edition there by Irem, released in 1985, is actually pretty good, fixing a lot of the issues with the computer game and making the game generally zippier and more forgiving. And this allows you to see the brilliance of the game’s interconnected levels, bombable rocks, large explorable caverns and, yes, even the stupid ghost, whose annoying presence forces you to keep moving rather than to sit and wait for it to get close enough that you can deal with it. In fact, modern gamers might recognize that Spelunker is one of the obvious inspirations for Spelunky, Derek Yu’s indie game masterpiece, and while the modern Spelunker HD is not a game I’d recommend since it’s based on the NES version of the game, the Irem arcade edition is a fun and interesting game even today! Japanese gamers even got an arcade sequel from Irem in 1986 offering more of the same and a very weird side-scrolling action sequel on the NES in 1987 called Spelunker II: Yūsha e no Chōsen that predominantly takes place in a fantasy-themed overworld with occasion spelunking for treasure. In 1984, a computer game called Montezuma’s Revenge continued the treasure hunting adventure theme, and while this probably belongs in our discussion next week regarding computer games, Montezuma’s Revenge was also quite popular on the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision in the waning days of both consoles as well as for the Sega Master System in a much-improved edition. This game, created by Utopia Software for Parker Brothers, involved taking control of Panama Joe and searching an ancient Aztec catacombs in search of a warrior’s treasure that’s guarded by monsters and a significant number of traps. It’s a challenging and surprisingly lengthy game that takes place in several large maps shaped like pyramids with long corridors and deep chambers shown one screen at a time. Though all of the versions are more or less the same and the Master System’s port is not particularly impressive by today’s standards, I’d still suggest this later version is the one to play since it retains a lot of the challenge and charm of the original action adventure game while also toning down some of the more arbitrary challenges created by stiff controls and overly aggressive enemies. Clearly, a lot of the games I’ve just described took some inspiration from Indiana Jones, but only one of the three games made about the character in the early 1980s was actually an action adventure platformer. We’ll talk about it next week when we discuss computer games, since it was exclusive to the Commodore 64. But one more cavern-exploring game worth mentioning is H.E.R.O. – that’s an acronym for Helicopter Emergency Rescue Operation – another game from Activision released in 1984 initially for the Commodore 64, but finding its way to consoles rather quickly on the Atari 2600, ColecoVision and Atari 5200 the same year and then the SG-1000 in 1985. The premise of H.E.R.O. is that you’re an inventive rescuer named Roderick Hero who’s decided to delve into some mines inside what’s become an active volcano to rescue miners trapped inside. Your helicopter backpack lets you fly or hover around, and you also have a laser beam you can use to blast critters while you try to find places where you can blast holes in the walls with dynamite to reach the miners. You only get six sticks of dynamite, but you also have limited energy which can be exhausted by spending too much time fighting creatures or exploring. Fortunately, the levels are fairly short and straightforward, and the helicopter backpack serves as an interesting alternative to jumping. Action adventure platform games would grow a lot more sophisticated after 1985 as more sophisticated arcade games and Super Mario Bros. began exploring what else could be done with run and jump mechanics. But there are a handful of other action adventure platform games from the early 80s worth discussing, each with its own unique take on the formula. One of the most interesting early platform games of the 1980s was Taito’s Elevator Action, an action platformer with an espionage theme. The game begins with your character, Agent 17, codename “Otto,” attaching a cable to the roof of a 30-story building and then descending through it to gather secrets while avoiding or killing enemy agents and then jumping into a spy car at ground level. The game’s designed around elevators that run along the five vertical shafts within the building, and Agent 17 can either ride inside an elevator with full control, ride on top of it with no control or leap over the elevator shaft when there’s no elevator car present. The catch is that the enemies can also use the elevator. The result is an absolutely brilliant action game filled with tense shootouts as you search for red doors containing the secrets you need to complete the level. Though Taito only released a few official arcade sequels – the insanely violent 1994 game Elevator Action Returns, the 2001 lightgun game Elevator Action: Death Parade and the 2021 UNIS-developed Elevator Action Invasion – the series did get a Game Boy Color remake called Elevator Action EX, a Game Boy Advance remake called Elevator Action: Old & New and a PlayStation 3 remake called Elevator Action Deluxe. Surprisingly, most of these sequels don’t even try to connect their continuity to the original game, and very few games ever copied the formula. Another game about stealing is the 1982 Valadon Automation side-scroller Bagman, which Taito also published, though just in Japan – Stern Electronics published it in North America. If you’ve never played this one, you should – it involves navigating the titular bagman through mines to gather actual sacks of cash scattered across multiple interconnected screens. You have to get the bags up to the surface while dodging mine carts, bayonet-wielding guards and long falls. Your only weapon is a pickaxe you can occasionally pick up and use to stun the guards. The gameplay is sort of like Donkey Kong meets Space Panic meets Pitfall II with a little bit of Elevator Action tossed in due to the presence of a mine elevator. The 1984 sequel, Super Bagman, is even more sophisticated and adds in a Dig Dug-like mechanic where you can drop bombs on enemies beneath you. You can also buy a gun from the gunsmith’s shop. The platforming in both games is light, but you can jump over pits, and the constant climbing and descending ladders definitely feels on brand for the early action platformer genre. The Glob is a 1983 game from Epos Corporation that also uses elevators to take you between the six floors visible onscreen, and you can even use the elevator as a weapon to crush the alligators, frogs, monkeys, pigs and rabbits who patrol the corridors. The Glob is also very interesting because you can leap onto the ceiling and then drop down on enemies to consume them, a mechanic that’s sort of like the predecessor to jumping on enemies to knock them offscreen. The Glob was definitely not influential – in fact, it’s also similarly unknown by the names Super Glob and Beastie Feastie – and it was mainly sold as a conversion kit for Pac-Man cabinets. Another obscure but interesting action platformer is the 1984 Taito arcade game Ben Bero Beh, in which you are a goofy looking superhero and have to descend to the bottom of the screen and try to rescue your girlfriend from a fiery blaze. You’re clearly not a very good hero because other women can also be seen falling from windows on certain stages, but you are armed with a fire extinguisher and the ability to jump over some enemies and hazards. This game was exclusive to Japan and only recently made it to the United States through Hamster Corporation’s Arcade Archives series, but it’s an interesting example of how far the rescue gameplay of Donkey Kong evolved in just a few years. The subgenre known as the puzzle platformer evolved a bit later in the mid-1980s with some influence from Japanese computer games like Door Door and Doki Doki Penguin Land, but two games released in 1984 helped to establish the arcade variety of this style of platform game. One was Tecmo’s Bomb Jack, published under their earlier name of Tehkan. Bomb Jack is a caped superhero who flies around a single screen collecting bombs before they go off, and the catch is that there are lots of enemies onscreen, making use of the platforms or themselves flying around. The game was popular enough to receive an NES adaptation called Mighty Bomb Jack and a home computer sort-of platformer called Bomb Jack II, but aside from NMK’s obscure 1993 revival Bomb Jack Twin, the series vanished after that. Chack’n Pop also came out in 1984, and while it’s not a familiar game outside of Japan, it’s often referred to as Taito’s predecessor to its later comical action game platformers The Fairyland Story and Bubble Bobble, though it plays quite differently from those games. The premise is that you’re a little yellow guy named Chack’n who has to navigate maze-like screens by either walking on the floors or ceilings and catch enemies or their eggs in the smoke of the bombs you can drop. The longer you take, the more enemies there are that hatch from the eggs, and your objective is either to eliminate all your foes or to dodge them and reach the hearts that collect at the top of the screen. Completing the stages with all the hearts collected lets you make an honest woman out of Miss Chack’n in a wedding ceremony at the end. Maze and chase games also found some opportunity in the platform genre. One of the most famous is Data East’s 1982 hit Burger Time, a game where you play as Chef Peter Pepper and create giant burgers by walking over the ingredients. Oddly, this attracts the attention of the eggs, sausages and pickles in your kitchen, and they follow you around to try to stop you. There’s no jump button in Burger Time – it’s all climbing and descending ladders – but you do have the ability to sprinkle pepper on those rogue ingredients or trap them in the falling hamburger layers. Burger Time has been remade several times, but it also got an official sequel in 1984 called Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory, where you assemble dessert by tossing around scoops of ice cream or rolling them into cones, where they mysterious get covered in hot fudge, sprinkles and a cherry on top like a sundae. Chasing you this time are jugs of milk, donuts, strawberries and a kitchen timer, but you do get a jump button this time around. The cat and mouse arcade game Mappy came out between these two games in 1983 and adapted Namco’s toy robots Mappy and Goro into video game adversaries. Mappy is a police officer mouse who has to retrieve stolen objects from the cat Goro and his kitty henchmen the Meowkies, and to do so, he enters their house and moves between six different horizontal lanes by hopping onto trampolines and vaulting to the desired floor. The trampolines replace the need for a jump button, but also leave Mappy vulnerable to being touched by enemies, so he can knock them over with doors or sonic waves or drop bells on their heads. There are also holes Mappy can open up in later stages to drop enemies down a lane. Mappy is also one of the few chase games I’ve seen where the enemies are significantly faster than the hero character when they’re running on a flat platform, and because Mappy’s invincible when he enters the trampoline shaft, a key strategy is to repeatedly bounce and try to lure the enemies onto floors that will slow them down while Mappy escapes. While the puzzle and maze and chase platformers tend to differ in objectives, most are centered around either collecting things or enemy elimination, but not both at the same time. You might see some collectible objects allow you to boost your points in an enemy elimination game or you might see some enemies be killable for points in a collectible game, but how you advance is typically focused on that single objective. Taito stuck to the single screen enemy elimination platforming formula for awhile with comical action games like The Fairyland Story, Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands, Parasol Stars and Don Doko Don, most of which include that puzzle platformer sensibility of finding secrets and unlocking additional stages or endings. Of course, once 1985 rolled around, many games started shifting to scrolling screen platforming, a style that is often credited to Super Mario Bros. but which actually owes its existence to Namco as they attempted to adapt the Pac-Man Hanna-Barbera animated series into a video game. The resulting game, 1984’s Pac-Land, not only brought Pac-Man into a platformer for the first time, but wound up being one of the most unintentionally influential games in history, despite rarely receiving credit for its contributions. So as we discuss Pac-Land, let’s get one thing out of the way right away – no, it was not the direct inspiration for Super Mario Bros., at least not according to Shigeru Miyamoto, who’s quoted in the 1998 Kenji Eno-authored Japanese-language book Super Hit Game Studies as saying that he only took some ideas from the game, like the scrolling levels and the blue skies. Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani also once said in an interview with Geek Culture that Miyamoto told him he’d been inspired by [https://web.archive.org/web/20170820031126/https:/geekculture.co/interview-with-toru-iwatani-creator-of-pac-man/]Pac-Land [https://web.archive.org/web/20170820031126/https:/geekculture.co/interview-with-toru-iwatani-creator-of-pac-man/], but gave no details on how. Comments like these have been way overblown by gamers over the years to establish the so-called trivia that Super Mario Bros. was directly inspired by Pac-Land, but if you play the two games one after another, you’re going to see that it just isn’t so. It’s like that piece of trivia you’ll see sometimes that George Lucas was inspired to create Star Wars by watching the Akira Kurosawa film The Hidden Fortress. There are some commonalities, sure, but just as George Lucas had a number of inspirations behind his creation, so too did Shigeru Miyamoto. Pac-Land also wasn’t the first scrolling platformer. Just among the games we’ve discussed, the 1983 game Mappy scrolls horizontally and Elevator Action scrolls vertically. And the 1982 game Jungle Hunt’s levels also scroll horizontally in one direction, though they go from right to left rather than left to right. Even so, Pac-Land is deserving of being recognized as the first horizontal-scrolling platformer that pushes the action from left to right in the running and jumping style we know today, and it has all the hallmarks of a true scrolling platform game. There are physics that allow Pac-Man to run and jump and collide with objects, there’s a story about returning lost fairies to Fairyland and there are all five of our objectives – rescuing fairies, eliminating ghosts, collecting points and power-ups, surviving to the end and getting to the “Break Time” sign in each stage before the timer at the bottom of the screen runs out. There are levels that take place on the ground, but also levels with honest-to-goodness platforms to jump on. There are also ramps that allow you to jump super far over large bodies of water and magic boots that allow you to take Pac-Man home after he rescues a fairy. And the game’s theme, drawn directly from the animated show, is not abstract like previous Pac-Man games, but cohesive, with towns and buildings and forests and canyons and deserts and magical doorways to Fairyland. Ghosts drive cars and buses and fly around in planes or flying saucers and jump on pogo sticks. Fire hydrants shoot blasts of water horizontally, tree trunks and cacti impede your progress, geysers blast water upwards, log bundles and clouds move up and down like moving platforms, and buildings you enter obscure your vision and create maze-like labyrinths to navigate. In short, Pac-Land is like nothing that came before it, but like nearly every scrolling platformer that came after it. The only thing it lacks is a true ending – the game just keeps repeating after you complete its initial 32 rounds. But that was also true of a number of 1980s games of all types, more a limitation of the rapidly evolving design philosophy than the game itself. Pac-Land is otherwise the platformer transformed, integrating all of the ideas we’ve been discussing into one impressive package. The only problem is that it wasn’t very popular – at least not compared to the Pac-Man games that came before it, nor compared to the likes of Donkey Kong or Pitfall!. Its influence was felt more strongly among game developers, particularly in Japan, than it was among actual gamers. If Pac-Land was the turning point for the platform game, Super Mario Bros. is where the genre found its stride and people started paying attention. And we’re going to get to Mario and his brother in a couple of weeks. But next week, we’re going to talk about early 1980s platformers on computer platforms such as the Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PC, ZX Spectrum and Atari 8-bit that helped to further evolve what these games could do. We’ll also touch on the Japanese platformers on the PC-88, MSX and FM-7.As always, I’ll dive deep into talking about games you might not know as well, and we’ll touch on quite a few you ought to check out! It’s going to be a fun series, and I hope you’re looking forward to seeing where this discussion will take us!   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 The Talos Principle 2, by Croteam. This one may not be off the beaten path for some – it was mildly popular when it debuted in 2023 and it’s the sequel to a fairly well-established 2014 puzzle game. But I took a pass on it when it first debuted because the initial puzzles felt like more of the same, just this time using Egyptian theming rather than Sumerian. I’m not sure why Croteam started the game off that way, because once you get past those first few puzzles, the game is very different from its predecessor, taking you to the city of New Jerusalem where you and nearly a thousand other “humans” – or, more precisely, synthetic beings with the minds of humans – are visited by what appears to be the spirit of Prometheus, or at least a projection of him by some sentient particles. You and four other people mount an expedition to a superstructure where more of these particles reside and you both explore the outskirts and complete more puzzles. But this time, there’s a deeper story linking everything together, and unlike the first game’s dump of information through terminals and cryptic statements from the godlike AI program known as Elohim, the story’s told properly through character interactions, partially-interactive cutscenes and player choice. The Talos Principle 2 definitely delivers in the puzzle department, just like the original, but it also really ups the ante on the graphics and music this time around. If you complete the game’s main story and optional puzzles, there are also three DLC sidequests to try out, two of which involve some of the other characters from the main game. And there’s a threequel on the way, planned for next year, which will wrap up the series. I’ll be sure not to sleep on that one – part 2 is so good I’m excited to see what comes next, even if it’s just more puzzles! Oh, and while there’s not official VR support yet like there is for the original Talos Principle, you can definitely get it running with the UEVR injector [https://www.reddit.com/r/VRGaming/comments/1cw4tiv/talos_principle_2_in_uevr/]. It’s a gorgeous enough game to be worth the trouble! 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 18 – Why We're Stuck on Platformers, Part 1

In this episode, we’re going to start our discussion about one of the most enduring genres of gaming: the platformer! -------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 18: Why We’re Stuck on Platformers, Part 1 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://rhombical.medium.com/to-a-or-not-to-a-the-ontology-of-the-platformer-cb4e1b314066 [https://rhombical.medium.com/to-a-or-not-to-a-the-ontology-of-the-platformer-cb4e1b314066] ------------------------------------------------- EPISODE 18Coming up in this episode – We’re going to begin our look at platform games and try to understand how they evolved into the concept we know and love today. I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for our look at many of the great platform games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! I’m going to start with a simple question: what is a platform game? Because when I was growing up as a young gamer in the 1980s, the term “platformer” wasn’t in common use, at least not right away. The terms appears to have originated in the UK and, according to a well-researched piece on Medium by Davy R. Howard, the earliest mention is probably from the debut issue of [https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/crash/1]Crash [https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/crash/1] Magazine in February, 1984 [https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/magazines/crash/1], where it’s used to describe the genre of “Kong games” in the mold of Donkey Kong or Manic Miner where players move between platforms suspended in empty space by either jumping or using ladders. Before we get too excited, that same issue concocted a bunch of other subgenres like “Ghost Gobbling” and “Creepie-Crawlies” that weren’t nearly as prescient. And it took awhile for the “platform games” moniker to catch on as well – you didn’t see it used very commonly in the UK magazines until later in the 1980s. I don’t think I came across the term “platform game” myself until probably the mid-1990s when the genre was in decline, and I at first assumed it was referring to another use of the word platform – the console systems themselves. Since platform games were at that point heavily associated with mascots and with being exclusive to various platforms – Nintendo had Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Country, Sega had Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Sonic the Hedgehog, the TurboGrafx-16 had Bonk’s Adventure, the PlayStation had Crash Bandicoot and the 3DO, at least initially, had Gex – it wasn’t too much of a stretch to presume that the idea of a “platformer” was to represent a console platform and that the other games that were in the same vein earned the title because of what they were imitating. In fact, when you look at the gaming magazines of the 1980s and 90s – and since I grew up in the US, those would have been magazines like Nintendo Power, GamePro, EGM and Diehard GameFan – what you often see these games referred to runs the gamut of terms like action games, jumping games, climbing games, hop and bop games or simply some reference to the game they most resemble – Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. or Sonic the Hedgehog being some of the most popular comparisons for pure platformers and Mega Man, Metroid, Castlevania, Zelda II: Link’s Adventure and Contra being common points of comparison for more action-focused games. Shigeru Miyamoto himself referred to the genre he pretty much created as being a “jump game,” and this makes sense given the fact that all of the Mario games, going back to Donkey Kong itself, are largely about using Mario’s jumping abilities to progress. Super Mario Bros. obviously tuned up Mario’s stiff and predictable jump from his earlier outings so that Mario had a stronger sense of vertical reach, momentum and control whenever he was in the air, but every mainline Mario game, all the way up to Odyssey and Wonder, is built around jumps, and even the Mario sports games and party games and RPGs and tactical strategy games and other offshoots tend to allow Mario to hop around at the very least if he’s a playable character. Of course, we shouldn’t assume things had to be this way. Mario evolved as a character and a concept because that’s what made sense at the time. It’s interesting to think that if Miyamoto had been given the go-ahead to make his planned Popeye game first that platform games might have involved a lot more of a combat focus from the get-go. The basic ideas behind platform games were probably inevitable to some degree, but their distinctive emphasis on running and jumping instead of shooting or stabbing was not a foregone conclusion. In the 1980s and 90s, the terms we use for games today weren’t in any way solidified and many of the more established formats we now recognize arose from either marketing terminology trying to describe games that were going to be available for sale or from the enthusiast gaming press trying to describe games they were previewing or reviewing. Describing something new to someone is much easier if you can evoke a sense of the comparable qualities it has to something else. If you describe Galaga as “Space Invaders, but in space and without shields”, that’s a pretty good explanation of the gameplay if you’re already familiar with Space Invaders. If you describe Dig Dug as “Pac-Man, but with underground digging,” the description misses a lot of the distinctive qualities of Dig Dug and also ignores the fact that you progress by killing enemies, not munching dots, but it’s still a decent enough way of describing a game where you move up, down, left or right in a grid-like world that has the qualities of a maze. And if you describe Super Pitfall as being “Super Mario Bros., but way less polished,” you don’t even need to explain the connection to previous Pitfall games or how the game takes place in a giant cavern instead of interconnected levels. You’ve captured the essential mechanics of the game as well as the quality, and that’s all most people would need to know in order to decide if they want to give it a try. This is one of the reasons why so many of the early descriptions for action games tended to center on the mechanics of what you’re doing. We have maze chase games, we have run and gun games and hack and slash games and beat ‘em up games and fighting games. Scrolling shooters would later receive the shoot ‘em up and cute ‘em up monikers to differentiate them from shooting gallery games and the far more popular Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake-style 3D shooting games, which would eventually become known as first person shooters once people got tired of comparing every new 3D shooter to one of id Software’s standards. Platform games are a little different from other action games in that they tend to be defined not by what you do, but by what you see, and in the 1980s and 90s, comparing single-screen platformers like Donkey Kong, Space Panic or Bubble Bobble to a scrolling screen platformer like Super Mario Bros. or Disney’s DuckTales would have seemed to be a bit of a stretch because these sorts of games felt so different not just mechanically, but also in terms of theme. The simpler games had a very basic story and were largely about clearing screens to progress, but the more complex scrolling titles had worlds to explore, hidden passages to locate, a wider range of actions available and a more compelling adventure to offer. And that word – adventure! – is a really important idea because at their heart, platformers almost always have a theme or a storyline that’s guiding you along. You can play a game like Pac-Man or Dig Dug or Rally-X and never really need to know why you’re doing any of the things you’re doing. Even scrolling shooters in the mold of Scramble or River Raid tended to have only the most basic of justifications for why you needed to destroy your enemies. But if it’s Donkey Kong, you’re Mario the carpenter trying to make your way through a construction site to save Pauline from an escaped gorilla. If it’s Super Mario Bros., you’re Mario the plumber traversing the Mushroom Kingdom to save the Princess from the evil King of the Koopas. And if it’s Donkey Kong Country, you’re Donkey Kong and his friend Diddy Kong trying to reclaim a banana stash from the villainous King K. Rool and his army of Kremlings. This is one of the three hallmarks of a platform game – storytelling! But unlike the adventure games we just spent weeks and weeks talking about, platformers traditionally didn’t use much in-game speech or text to explain what was happening. The story of these 1980s and early 90s games would unfold as you played through the game via visual cues, background occurrences and occasional quick cutscenes, and whether you were Sonic the Hedgehog running towards the increasingly mechanical region where Dr. Robotnik’s lair could be found, Sparkster the Rocket Knight blasting off towards the Devotindos Empire to rescue Princess Sherry and stop the rise of the Pig Star, Bubsy the sarcastic cat setting out to stop the Woolies from stealing all the Earth’s yarn balls, or Kirby the cream puff traversing Dream Land to retrieve the stars and food stolen by the evil mallet-wielding blue bird King Dedede, you always had some idea of what you were trying to accomplish. Even in simpler games like Bubble Bobble or The New Zealand Story, there was a setup, an unfolding storyline and an ending. And this carried over to many other platform-style action games as well, which is why games like Mega Man, Kid Icarus, Castlevania, Contra and Metroid all told their stories through visuals and big moments rather than through lengthy dialogue exchanges or cutscenes like you’d see in later action platformers as those genres grew more sophisticated. Beyond storytelling, a second hallmark of platform games is the insistence on obeying some notion of physics. Physics mainly manifest in four ways: gravity, timing, momentum and collision detection. Gravity was not a new concept introduced by platform games, but it was a chief idea of them. In many games prior to 1980, players controlled characters from an overhead, chase cam or first person perspective so that they could move freely along the X and Y axis on a single screen. This made a lot of sense because many early video games were based on the same principles as electromechanical games, and even the earliest console, the Magnavox Odyssey, had games based around X and Y axis manipulations. And games that utilized the diorama-like side-perspective tended to either have you utilizing gravity as a core mechanic – landing your lunar craft, dropping bombs, working your way through the ocean depths, or so forth – or ignored it entirely by giving you the ability to fly. But platform games changed this notion. If your character was restricted to moving along the X-axis freely and then could only manipulate the y-axis by ascending or descending ladders or with jumps or drops, the gameplay both became more limiting but also more interesting because the player couldn’t just push up to avoid enemies or hazards – they had to time jumps or make proper use of ladders to stay out of harm’s way. By setting the bottom of the screen as the floor and the top of the screen as the ceiling, the platforms themselves could serve as places where players could travel between the two extremes. Some platformers started to add variations to this formula. Some included platforms that could initially hold the character but crumble and drop to the bottom of the screen. Others offered one-way platforms that could be jumped onto from below but not traveled back through to head back down. And still others offered platforms that could become hazards by popping up spikes or dropping like trap doors to send the player downward. These variations all led to teaching players to time their movements and jumps carefully to successfully navigate stages. Collision detection, already in use in a number of games for causing the player to perish when connecting to enemies, bullets and hazards, added another wrinkle to platforming because it allowed the games to create barriers that could only be overcome with jumps and also higher floors or lower ceilings that could be used to create maze-like sections on the limited screen real estate available. Momentum was also tremendously important in platform games because most did not allow the player to jump forward or backward in a parabolic arc unless he or she was already moving. Jump from a standstill and most platformers would simply have you leap straight up with no change to your X-axis position. You had to be in motion to get the jump to move in that direction. Some later platform games also added in the idea of speed as a modifier for jump distances – if you were walking, running or rocketing your way through a stage, the arc of your jump would change accordingly, potentially widening or shortening your ability to travel across pits or hazards. Many platform games also used this element of momentum to add in special terrain that could make a player’s momentum decrease faster and limit their speed, often represented by sand or vegetation or water or goop, or which made surfaces less likely to slow players down, resulting in the dreaded ice levels. But beyond storytelling and physics, platform games have a third hallmark: one or more well-defined objectives that go beyond simply trying to score more points. And these can be broken down into five categories. The first objective is collection, which involves picking up all of something so that the screen or level can be cleared and you can move on to the next stage. In Mappy, for example, you have to retrieve all of the stolen items from Goro and the thieving Meowky cats. The second objective is enemy elimination, which involves getting rid of all of the enemies onscreen. In Bubble Bobble, you can’t move on to the second stage until you clear out all the enemies on the first. The third objective is rescue, which involves reaching characters who will not harm you and potentially bringing them back to a safe place. In H.E.R.O., your helicopter backpack-wearing character has to reach the trapped miners. And in Flicky, your mama bird must rescue her young and get them to the door to the next level. The fourth objective is survival, which involves getting through a level or screen without dying or losing all your lives. In Jungle King, also known as Jungle Hunt, you must face a number of challenges in different levels like swinging on vines, swimming with crocodiles, jumping over boulders and dodging hungry cannibals and get past each scenario through skillful play. The fifth objective is speed, which involves getting through a level or screen within a set time limit. This is rarely the main objective of platformers because, quite honestly, it’s not very much fun unless the game offers generous conditions or unlimited attempts. Where you see it most often prior to modern platformers is in bonus stages or as a hurry up mechanism used to keep players from lingering on one stage for too long. Prior to Super Mario Bros., you’d often find platform games with definitely one, probably two and maybe even three of these objectives, but rarely with all five of them. But once Shigeru Miyamoto and his team at Nintendo R&D4 broke the mold with this seminal game, all five objectives became so standard that it was rare to see a platformer without them. And that’s useful, because it means in our discussion of platformers, we have a few eras we can break things down into. The first era was the early days when Space Panic, Donkey Kong, Pitfall! and other games like them were laying the foundations for the genre. The second era began with Pac-Land, Kung-Fu Master and Super Mario Bros. and introduced players to scrolling stages, more complex mechanics and the eventual fusion of everything we just discussed. The third era began with attempts to move platformers into three dimensions, with a lot of missteps along the way before we got games like Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, Spyro the Dragon, Sonic Adventure and Crash Bandicoot. The fourth era began with the revival of the 2D platformer on handheld devices like the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and PSP. The fifth era began with the rise of indie and small studio gaming and digital distribution. And the sixth era began with the maturity of these small studio games into major releases in their own right like Hollow Knight: Silksong, Cuphead, Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, A Hat in Time and The Plucky Squire – the era we’re in today! And we’re going to cover all of that in this series of The Great Game Guide. But before we can get started, we need to understand why these games evolved in the first place. And that means going back to the 1970s, when video gaming was still such a new idea that no one had figured any of these things out yet. So what’s important to remember about the 1970s is that video gaming was new, it was limited and it was fairly rare, by which I mean that even the extremely popular Atari VCS, also known as the Atari 2600, had only sold 8 million consoles by 1980. Most of the best games required expensive dedicated hardware to run, which meant they were better-suited to arcades than to homes, and the personal computer market hadn’t really taken off yet either. I also want to emphasize that home electronics were still a pretty serious investment at that time and people weren’t nearly as eager to rush out and buy the latest, greatest thing in the 1970s, especially since there was a major recession in the western world from 1973-1975 that had aftershocks for many years.  Just to put things in perspective, I grew up in the 1980s and I remember going to older peoples’ houses and they’d have a black and white TV in their living room because it still worked and they didn’t see any need for upgrading to color – and color TVs had been around for over 20 years at that point! So the market for home video games was pretty limited to the sorts of people who had the disposable income required to be early adopters for new home electronics, and that meant that the consumer-grade hardware had to be pretty inexpensive for people to even consider it. This was a problem, because creating a new console required an expensive R&D process and also required finding an inexpensive enough chipset to run the software. And with electronics advancing rapidly and competitors feeling unafraid to put out shoddy copycats of dedicated machines, video game makers needed a good solution to break out of making endless Pong clones, the novelty of which had already worn off on many consumers. One of the big innovations after the Pong fad wore off was the Fairchild Channel F’s interchangeable cartridges, which were created by Jerry Lawson, an African American electrical engineer who was one of the great pioneers of video game hardware. Though the Channel F was not a popular console, Lawson was part of the broader Silicon Valley electronics scene that included Atari, and it’s unsurprising that Atari was also pursuing interchangeable ROM cartridges and used them for the VCS as well. After all, Atari hired several people who’d worked at Fairchild to consult on their own hardware. Atari’s VCS was successful because it was a good piece of hardware, but also because it was backed by Atari’s considerable reputation as a maker of arcade games. And for the first several years of the VCS’s existence, a lot of the games on the platform were either home versions of their arcade games or sports games. Even so, aside from maybe Breakout, Combat, Indy 500, Skydiver and maybe Superman, I really wouldn’t recommend any of the VCS games from the 1970s – they’re really pretty awful by today’s standards. But it was games like Skydiver and Superman and Basketball, Air-Sea Battle, Canyon Bomber and Human Cannonball that helped to at least explore the potential for action games that were depicted from a side-view perspective instead of a top-down one like Indy 500 or Combat or Atari’s arcade hit Asteroids. And of course Taito’s Space Invaders, which followed the Breakout style of scrolling a turret along the X-axis across the bottom of the screen while shooting upwards helped to further cement the idea of seeing the action from the side and treating the ground at the bottom as the origin of the action. Let’s pause for a moment and talk about something else you’d see in arcades at the time, and that was electromechanical games. Williams made one in 1970 called Flotilla where a belt with 3D buildings would scroll on a treadmill to give you the illusion of movement and you’d fire cannons and try to hit the structures. It’s really neat to see it in action. Sega had a pretty amazing one in 1977 called Heli-Shooter that allowed you to fly a helicopter over a projected 3D model of an island and blast buildings for points. It’s an amazingly clever way of delivering an analog game experience, and I wish we had more cool creations like that today. There were other cool electromechanical arcade games as well. A Japanese arcade company called Kasco also used 3D holographic technology to create the shooting gallery games Gun Smoke, Ninja Gun and Bank Robber, which are all basically like the great-grandfather to first person shooters, and Kasco made this truly amazing 3D space bombardment game called Star V that had a model of a planet inside the cabinet and projected a starship on top of it – you had to dive bomb red light sensors and hit them precisely to score points. A lot of electromechanical games had a depth of field that was best-suited to first person play, but there were also some fascinating ones in which you’d have a third person view. One of those was a 1971 Midway game called Stunt Plane where you had to fly in a circular pattern and get your plane through an arch. Sega made a neat one in 1973 called Moto Champ where you steered a toy motorcycle rider down a road, racing with four other toys on the track. And Sega’s 1969 shooting game Gun Fight was truly amazing – you and your opponent would each control a gunfighter toy on either side of an old West shooting arena and you moved your toy as you tried to hit the other one with your gunshot. The game even allowed you to shoot cactuses between the two fighters and knock their tops over! All of this context helps us to understand how arcade games were evolving during the 1970s. Electromechanical games could offer very sophisticated experiences that video games would struggle to catch up with for quite awhile, but they were very expensive to build and operate and broke down frequently due to all the moving parts. Coin-operated video games had many more limitations in terms of graphics and engaging gameplay, but they were also far more scalable – easier to build, easier to fix, more durable and potentially smaller in overall size. A lot of the philosophy of coin-operated video games arose from what worked for electromechanical games. If you restricted the degrees of freedom in a game and focused on providing a simple, accessible experience, you could impress people enough to get them to surrender the quarters in their pockets. And yet at the same time, video games needed to offer something truly novel beyond their ability to do things like display high score tables or integrate digital sound effects or they’d just be seen as an inferior copy of technology that already existed in a different form. So, for example, when Nintendo decided to ship a pretty lousy arcade game called Radar Scope, it didn’t impress anyone because it felt too much like a Space Invaders-style video game embedded in the deep playfield of an electromechanical game. It’s not hard to understand why Nintendo would have tried to pair these two styles – they’d been mildly successful with Sherriff, known in North America as Bandido, which was a video game take on the Wild West concept of their earlier electromechanical shooter Wild Gunman. Nintendo has long had a peculiar philosophy of trying to integrate the old along with the new. Radar Scope was just that. It’s actually interesting that people will look backwards at the game today and describe it as being unique without recognizing that it felt like a clunker to arcade audiences when it released in 1980. What can I say? Nintendo’s popularity today tends to cloud memories and prompt reinterpretation of some of the Big N’s blunders. And Radar Scope was a blunder. I’m sorry, Nintendo fans, but it’s a bad game. Play it today and see for yourself if you don’t believe me. It’s repetitive and boring and it plays like a simple shooting gallery game designed to suck down your quarters. Half the enemies sit outside your cannon’s range and you don’t have any cover or tactical countermeasures to avoid them when they start flying towards you. It did offer some digitized speech and tried to look 3D in its cabinet and cockpit formats by tilting its monitor and reflecting the image on the glass pane between the screen and the player, but it’s a lousy effect. Nintendo bet big on this cabinet and wound up with 2,000 of them on its hands, completely unsold. As you can read in the book Game Over by David Sheff, which is the authoritative source on all things early Nintendo, Nintendo had to figure out a pivot with a conversion kit and promoted their young artist Shigeru Miyamoto, who’d possibly done some of the artwork or cabinet art for Radar Scope – his contribution isn’t exactly known – to design a conversion kit for the game. The result was Donkey Kong, and unlike Radar Scope, it didn’t feel like a game that was looking backwards. In fact, aside from Universal’s Space Panic, released the year before, there wasn’t really anything else like it. I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about Donkey Kong because it’s extremely well-trod territory at this point. Play it if you haven’t already. I can’t imagine you haven’t, though. It’s one of the most ubiquitous, classic video games of all time. Working with Gunpei Yokoi, Miyamoto designed a game based on many ideas borrowed from Western stories such as King Kong, Popeye, Macbeth and Beauty and the Beast and re-used Sherriff’s damsel in distress focus to create something where an everyday hero could ascend a construction site and save a girl from an angry gorilla. The hero went through different names like Commander Video and Jumpman before eventually earning the moniker of Mario, possibly based on the name of the Italian-American landlord for Nintendo of America’s headquarters, Mario Segale. The girl, originally called “the Lady,” got named Pauline after the girlfriend of the warehouse manager. The ape got named Donkey Kong due to a peculiar understanding of what those words meant in English. The artwork and conversion kits were shipped to Seattle where Nintendo’s small team, including the son-in-law of Nintendo’s powerful CEO in Japan, got to work converting cabinets and soon found great success, saving the arcade division. But those details are really all superficial to our discussion. What Donkey Kong did was solidify the basic hallmarks I talked about earlier – storytelling, physics and well-defined objectives, with a focus on survival and rescue with a minor focus on accruing points to achieve a high score. It’s one of the earliest platformers to integrate the idea of a power-up in the hammer, and it’s also one of the earliest platformers to alternate what happens on each screen before repeating. It is, without question, the game that popularized all of these elements, and it was such a hot commodity for home consoles that Coleco snatched up the rights and used it to boost their ColecoVision, famously releasing an inferior version for the Atari 2600 while offering a very strong arcade port on their own system. It also inspired a huge wave of games that adapted or outright copied its formula, including Jumpman and Jumpman Junior, Miner 2049er, Manic Miner, Chuckie Egg, Hard Hat Mack, Beauty and the Beast, Kong, King Kong, Donkey King, Killer Kong and Crazy Kong, just to name a few. We’ll take a detailed look at those next week to see how they helped to further evolve the platformer genre. But there’s one other game we need to discuss, and it’s one you’ve possibly heard of – I’ve mentioned it several times in this episode already! - but probably never played. That game is Space Panic. In 1979, a team of students in the Theoretical Science Group at the University of Tokyo created a very unusual game called Heiankyo Alien, set in the Heian era in what’s now Kyoto and tasking a police officer with digging holes to trap invading alien monsters and then to cover them back up before they could  escape. The game was created in response to a general challenge for Japanese computer programmers to create the next Space Invaders, and while Heiankyo Alien would prove to be very influential over time, it would never reach that level of success. In fact, the only official commercial versions to ever make it out of Japan were an arcade localization from Sega-Gremlin called Digger in 1980 and a Game Boy port in 1990 under the original name. Heiankyo Alien is not a side-scrolling game; it’s actually an overhead game similar to Pac-Man set in the maze-like streets of the city. But its chief innovation – laying traps – inspired a company called Universal to adapt the concept into 1980’s Space Panic, a game with a with a sort of Chutes and Ladders side-view conceit where the player had to walk on platforms connected by ladders and then dig holes and trick pursuing aliens into falling into them. To add to this enemy elimination mechanic, players also had limited oxygen to ensure they’d try to maximize their speed and not just sit on a single space between two traps. To add to their mobility, players could also jump through holes to escape aliens, landing on the platform below and then having to climb back up to try to close the holes before the aliens escaped. Space Panic feels very basic and dull today, mainly because this set of mechanics was copied and re-used by a lot of games, from outright clones like Apple Panic, Alien Panic, Frenzy and Panic to semi-clones like Lode Runner to Universal’s own clone Mr. Do!’s Castle to somewhat different games like Mappy or Burger Time. But all of these games utilize the same hallmarks of a platformer – a somewhat thin rationale for why you need to panic, physics that connect you to the platform floors and make you or the enemies move downwards as they’re dropped, and clearly-defined objectives. Space Panic predates Donkey Kong by nearly a year, and it’s often listed in video game resources as the first true platform game. It’s possible there was something that came before it – you’d be surprised how many obscure hobby concepts there were during that era on mainframe computers and microcomputers! – but it’s definitely the first known commercial platform game, and certainly one of the most influential despite being relatively obscure thanks to being overshadowed by later games like Lode Runner. One thing I find particularly fascinating about Space Panic is that it lacks a jump button, which suggests that Donkey Kong’s biggest contribution to the genre may be the inclusion of that mechanic. Today, it’s hard to imagine a platform game without running and jumping. But Space Panic and the games that followed in its wake instead used ladders and stairs to allow for vertical movement, and this allowed for a couple of interesting ideas. First, enemies could also use those ladders, and you of course see enemies doing that in Donkey Kong as well. But second, the ladders tended to add a variable speed to the player’s choice of movement by being slower than simply walking around and definitely slower than falling through a hole. And yet, at the same time, ladders could allow players more control over their response to enemies. They created a risk-reward mechanic that running and jumping didn’t, and it’s interesting that ladders started disappearing from pure platformers once Super Mario Bros. caught on but remained in action platformers as a necessary way to travel between vertical levels. But we’ll get to that, and so much more, as we continue on with this series looking at platform games in depth! Next week, we’re going to talk about how the platformer genre started to solidify and evolve with some of the aforementioned copycat games and offshoots as well as with other seminal titles like Pitfall!, Jungle King, Montezuma’s Revenge and more. And in the coming weeks, we’ll work our way towards Super Mario Bros. and then onto the topics of mascot platformers, the awkward transition into 3D and the later eras of platform gaming.As always, I’ll dive deep into talking about games you might not know as well, and we’ll touch on quite a few you ought to check out! It’s going to be a fun series, and I hope you’re looking forward to seeing where this discussion will take us!   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 Sorry, We’re Closed, a really wild 2024 survival horror adventure game from À la Mode Games and Akupara Games that’s sort of like a combination between Silent Hill, Metaphor: ReFantazio and Andy Warhol’s pop art. I want to state up front that this isn’t normally my kind of game, and I do have a couple of gripes about it I’ll share in a moment. But it’s well-made, smartly written and full of interesting surprises – and amazingly stylish for a game set in what seems to be the most cursed corner of Britain. The premise of the game is that you’re a convenience store clerk named Michelle who has a weird dream one night about a demon sneaking into your room and bestowing you with a third eye to see the spiritual world. But this gift is also a curse, and if you can’t find a way to break free of it, you’ll become the demon’s newest plaything. Fortunately, there are angels and demons all around you, and with your newfound powers, you can see them. Unfortunately, you also have to fight some of them, and that’s where the game falls short a bit, because it’s about as clunky as Silent Hill – the original one! – when it comes to fighting things. The most frustrating points of the game are the boss battles, which often require a lot of trial and error and make a pretty strong argument for playing the game on its easiest mode so you can just enjoy the story. And the story is good, exploring the topics of love and holding on to people and broken hearts and how angels can fall and demons can be redeemed. It’s also pretty notable for its LGBTQ+ themes and nonbinary characters. It’s all depicted in a low-fi low-polygon style that sort of resembles late 1990s chunky 3D graphics, but it also has a strong sense of style and great art design, though it’s definitely not for children. Definitely give this one a try if you’re 18 or older! 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 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