Written by the TAG Team
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| One of the most well-known adventures of the new century, but there's been others. |
In our blog posts, we've focused on the past. 30, 40 years ago, during the so-called Golden Age of adventures. But while the genre slowed down after that, it didn't stop completely.
What are your favorite adventures from the past 20 years? Perhaps even ones that the other commenters have never heard of. While everyone has likely heard of games like Thimbleweed Park, SpaceVenture, and Hero U, there have been others. Something not written by one of the household names of the 90s? A great Kickstarter you were happy to be a part of (unlike, say. the experience with SpaceVenture?)
Have no worries of spoiling our appetites for these games -- the blog won't be getting to them anytime soon. But it might give us something to play in-between posts.
Primordia, Technobabylon, The Hex, If on a Winter's Night Four Travelers, Elsinore, Detective Di: The Silk Road Murders...
ReplyDelete"Technobabylon" was pretty good.
DeleteIf On A Winter's Night was pretty great, if only for the most stunning pixel art I've ever seen if nothing else.
DeleteAnd Virtuaverse
DeleteSince you asked for some lesser known recent adventures:
ReplyDeleteThe last adventure games that I played were the ones in "The Journey Down" trilogy, which were pretty good.
Other random favourites: "The Will of Arthur Flabbington" is an old school adventure-inspired indie game with a certain je ne sais quoi, a crass humour and some decent puzzles.
"Unavowed" has a stellar plot and very good character development. Absolutely brilliant.
Even if a little bit older, the two Das Schwarze Auge adventures, "Chains of Satinav" and "Memoria" are quite good.
Adventures have absolutely thrived over the past decade+, after a really dark period. Of course, the genre has (finally) expanded and shifted to include interactive movies, walking sims, choice-based games, plus games that mix and blend styles. These all have their strengths and weaknesses but they are all adventure games to me.
ReplyDeleteMy favourites from this blend are:
- The Darkside Detective series
- Broken Age
- Kathy Rain
- Thimbleweed Park
- Call of the Sea
- Obduction
- Firewatch
- Soma
- Portal 2
- Dreamfall Chapters
- Life is Strange
- Tell Me Why
- The Wolf Among Us
- Immortality
- Outer Wilds
- It Takes Two
- Stray
And there are lots still on my to-play list like The Forgotten City, Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard and Unavowed. Wadjet Eye seem to have stepped up to fill the traditional pixel art point-&-click space, but if I'm being honest I haven't played anything from they yet that has wowed me.
Some of the games I listed may push the limits of what some people consider an adventure game to be, but I absolutely include them all and see them more as an evolution; something the genre failed to manage in the '90s.
I would disagree that most of the games on your list are "adventure games", otherwise I would add two of my favourite games in recent years as well, i.e. "The Return of the Obra Dinn" and "The Case of the Golden Idol".
DeleteIn any case, "Outer Wilds" is outstanding, a true masterpiece.
"Broken Age" and "Thimbleweed Park" are good (as expected from the likes of Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer) but maybe not as exceptional as their pedigree would indicate.
Ooooh, another "not quite an adventure" which is really fantastic: "The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante". A choose your own adventure gamebook taken up to 11.
DeleteYeah, I fully accept that there are others who won't share my idea of what an adventure game is and that's fine. They fit the criteria for me, so I happily include them.
DeleteFortunately, the traditional 2D point-&-click is still going strong. I still want to play lots FoxTail, Stasis: Bone Totem, Hob's Barrow, Unusual Findings and Nelly Cootalot.
see them more as an evolution; something the genre failed to manage in the '90s.
DeleteI'd argue that a little. The genre DID evolve a lot more than you think. The biggest ways included when death in games became somewhat taboo, and the change of interface which (arguably) made the games a lot easier or harder at times.
Games like Myst were definitely a major evolution, but there would be a lot of argument over whether it was good or bad.
I myself don't consider most of what you listed to be the greatest of evolutions, or all necessarily adventures. Part of it is the snob in me -- making some of these games more accessible to the masses has dumbed them down a lot. Broken Age is an example in that direction. For classic adventurers, it was way, way too easy, and felt like style over substance. But it's not awful. I backed that Kickstarter, and enjoyed the game, but didn't feel like I got my money's worth.
@LeftHanded Matt, since it seems we have a mostly similar taste in games, absolutely play through "The Forgotten City". It is probably the only adventure (or adventure-adjacent) game to which I could give a 10 in Dialogue and Acting (beside "Planescape:Torment").
Delete@Vetinari - Yes, I've been saving that one for a playthrough soon and am really looking forward to it. It looks right up my alley!
DeleteYou mentioned Return of the Obra Dinn earlier. I did have quite a good time with that, but by the end I was so frustrated that it left me feeling a bit negative on the whole experience. But it definitely is a special game.
I enjoyed Obra Dinn for its core gameplay loop, but I felt a little let down at the end. I wish there had been some way to "reward" the player for their work by putting the full story together in some organic way. Assembling my sense of what happened and in what order in my head was good while I was playing the game, but when I got to the end, most of the story was still in the form of a mental reconstruction that only existed in me, not in the game itself.
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DeleteRoss: Have you tried Great Ace Attorney? The dance of deduction was kind of a fun way to get the story straight while feeling like it was giving you agency to put the deductions into a chain.
And, also this is old, but Vanishing of Ethan Carter and Murdered Soul Suspect (once you use the demon encounters cheat https://steamcommunity.com/app/233290/discussions/0/619569608641434669/ it's basically an adventure game) has deduction chains which made me feel sMaRt.
Haven't tried any of the ace attorney games, but it turns out my family bought one of the bundles on sale recently so I'll check it out.
DeleteI liked the concept of the linking deduction mechanic in the young Hercule Poirot games, but the writing wasn't good enough to back it up (also, as a cosmetic issue the game faced you with far too many walls of too-small text)
Another couple of older but good-er adventure games exceedingly inspired by Sierra titles:
ReplyDelete- "A Tale of Two Kingdoms" (King's Quest)
- "Heroine's Quest" (take a wild guess)
Also, two of the best TEXT adventure games ever: "Hadean Lands" by Andrew Plotkin and "Counterfeit Monkey" by Emily Short.
ReplyDeleteBoth of those were great (Hadean Lands was _almost_ perfect).
DeleteI'd add Anchorhead - not as innovative as Counterfeit Monkey or Hadean Lands (which were innovative in different ways) but a very solid entry.
"Anchorhead" is pretty awesome, but having played it originally in the 90s, I really struggle to categorize it as "recent" :)
DeleteI haven't played the newer remake though, since I expected the plot to be still the same as the original.
True I guess, although it didn't come out until 1998, so it's only 26 years old, neither in the "30-40" range mentioned above nor in the "past 20 years".
DeleteLast one, I promise: I know that Laukku will probably disagree with me on this, but when I played through "Virtue's Last Reward" it was mindblowing, particularly when you realise (and I'm descending into spoiler territory here) gur ivfhny abiry tnzrcynl pbafgehpg bs univat zhygvcyr pubvprf/zhygvcyr oenapurf vf abg npghnyyl frtertngrq sebz gur fgbel, ohg vg'f npghnyyl gur pber bs gur fgbel vgfrys! N tnzr jvgu ab tnzrcynl/fgbel frtertngvba jungfbrire, vs V rire fnj bar.
ReplyDeleteI think we did a very decent job on Voodoo Detective.
ReplyDeleteThe Blackwell games were quite good.
ReplyDeleteHeroine's Quest has already been mentioned, but it's very very good, so I'll bring it up again (and it also has a brilliant trick that it uses in a certain place to subvert save-spamming :).
Quest for Infamy was also fun, though less of a QFG-style game.
And there's one that just came out, haven't played it yet: The Crimson Diamond. As I understand it, it's inspired by Colonel's Bequest
This is written under the assumption visual novels don't count.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite adventure game(s) from that period is SBCG4AP, but it's very difficult to play these days. That said, the Sam and Max games are very similar and almost as fun.
I've had a good time playing the Room games, though they are all quite short. I also heard good things about Detective Di, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
The majority of my adventuring experience this century (heck, my gaming experience overall!) has been courtesy of the Choice of Games company, who successfully forged a kind of third path informed by historical adventure games but in a hyperfiction choice-based format. Visually they're not going to wow an adherent of graphical adventures, but by removing the art and code overhead from the equation altogether, they have been rather successful in devoting their entire resources to solid writing and satisfying choice-and-consequences narratives in niche genres rarely catered to by the mainstream gaming industry.
ReplyDeleteHaven't played many games in quite a while, but for adventure games Edna & Harvey: The Breakout was good fun.
ReplyDeleteNo one mentioned The Book of Unwritten Tale, those games where excellent and gave me a nostalgic but still modern feel.
ReplyDeleteThe whole Deponia series where also really good adventures that balanced old school and new in a fresh mix.
I absolutely loved Frog Detective, a trilogy of very fun adventure games where you play a detective who is also a frog.
ReplyDeletealso: Snail Trek! which is a sci fi adventure about space faring snails (and it's free!)
Forgot to mention:
DeleteStories Untold (although I wasn't as fond of it as others)
Until Dawn (slasher movie inspired, not really enough puzzles)
Firewatch (which I loved but maybe not enough of an adventure game)
Tacoma (also loved, but see above)
also a bunch of stuff that is adventure game adjacent but not sure if it would count: The Stanley Parable, I was a Teenage Exocolonist, Minit, Lil Gator Game, Undertale
A detective in a world where crime doesn't exist, no less.
DeleteI haven't had time for very much gaming in the decade since my kids were born, but I have a tremendous amount of love for Gone Home, despite it being a bit thin.
The Telwynium (there's three "books"; that's the first)
ReplyDeleteFoolish Mortals, Heir of the Dog (from the people who made Lucy Dreaming), and Rosewater are all still in demo and not released yet, but look promising.
I haven't gotten around to playing The Adventures of the Black Hawk (El Halcon Negro) yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
Gibbous was fun, although they packed it jam-full of references to Monkey Island and other games and I got a bit tired of that after a while.
I keep meaning to get around to Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island (a Bill Tiller joint).
I think I'm most looking forward to one that's almost out: Prim, a 2D classic style P&C that should be out later this year.
ReplyDeleteOnes that are already out? The Telltale episodic ones were okay, like Sam & Max and even the Back to the Future ones. Nothing has really caught my eye recently until the Prim Kickstarter, but I'm still looking.
I'd say Deponia is probably the successor to Monkey Island in feel, puzzles, plot, wackiness, etc. It's just a superb series, going throught them for the 3rd time now.
ReplyDeleteReally enjoyed Primordia, and Gemini Rue. Same with Kathy Rain. Edna & Harvey, particularly the 2nd game.
Some very obscure AGS games, there's one called "The Oracle" which I enjoy a lot, and another one titled "Whose safe is it?", or "where is the safe?", cant remember the exact name.
The Sam and Max seasons are superb, the 2nd one being my favorite. I must be forgetting tons of other games
Telltale's "Sam & Max" seasons were indeed excellent (even if with some highs and lows); I didn't list them myself because I thought they fell under the everyone has likely heard about them heading.
DeleteSome highlights from the past 20 years:
ReplyDelete-Wadjet Eye Games games, notably the Blackwell series
-Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (best Frogwares game I've played, I've yet to play Chapter One)
-Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (from the creator of Ace Attorney; a PC port finally came out on Steam just last year)
-Telltale Games games, notably The Walking Dead
-999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors (the only good entry in the Zero Escape series IMO)
-Chzo Mythos (although technically the first two entries are more than 20 years old)
Honourable mention goes to Detroit: Become Human, the best (or least bad) out of David Cage's games (and which are arguably more interactive movies).
999 is in my top 10 games of all time. It's amazing, those twists are just outwordly. I liked the sequels, but they are just too over the top, they packed so much fantasy that's impossible to guess or just hard to follow.
DeleteI've been going through the Sherlock games from Frogwares and they're pretty fascinating. I've reached the Jack The Ripper game and I can see how each game has been trying to refine and improve the formula. They have been extremely flawed so far (massive issues with translation and in a couple of places actually broken design) but have a real charm.
DeleteI hear a lot about Crimes & Punishment being something special and I'm looking forward to it.
Interesting. I thought 999 was the weakest of the three games by far. The major relevation of the plot just seemed so nonsensical that I immediately experienced, as the late great Shamus Young put it, 'story collapse'.
DeleteFor my own nomination, I think any of the seven people who bought Zack and Wiki would agree that it's one of the top adventure games of the century.
>I thought 999 was the weakest of the three games by far
DeleteWhat, weaker than Zero Time Dilemma? The game where n punenpgre jnf pbafgnagyl bssfperra, xabja ol bguref ohg abg gur cynlre as a major twist? And VLR's twists I found less satisfying too, being either too predictable or too outlandish. (Me having played Ever17 before 999 possibly helped make its twist more palatable, though.) Plus, 999's pacing, characters and atmosphere make the journey to the ending much more entertaining than in the others.
>I hear a lot about Crimes & Punishment being something special
The mental clue connection mechanism was super fun. The next game, Devil's Daughter, also has it but was a downhill turn with the increased amount of QTEs, annoying characterisation of the two leads and IIRC weaker plots. I really felt the disappointment because the series had been steadily gotten better.
Yeah, just a significantly weaker plot imo :) 999's twist is just way too out there, it really is the worst excesses of the mystery writer showing through.
DeleteI agree with both of you ;) ZTD was the worst, but 999's twist is a bit of a weak point. VLR hit the right middle ground between the two.
DeleteLet me extend an olive branch: if it helps any, I think my distaste for 999 is proportionate to the degree I was enjoying it before the twist. Prior to that, I was *really* enjoying it.
DeleteVLR is just a straightforwardly good game. ZTD I will grant is uneven, but it didn't disappoint me in the same way 999 did, so I can give it a pass.
>I was enjoying it before the twist
DeleteWhich brings up an interesting question about journey vs. destination in storytelling.
If nothing else, 999 is the absolute best use of medium that the Nintendo DS ever managed. Having two screens was a very clever idea that Nintendo tried twice to use as a big innovation, and 999 may be the only game that actually did something with it was properly clever.
DeleteThat reminds me, I was going to add some more modern adventure games worth celebrating from the console side of things, since the traditional point and click adventures seem to have been pretty well covered by everyone else.
DeleteAside from Ghost Detective and the Zero Time trilogy, there's also...
- Zack and Wiki - I mentioned this already but I'll give a quick explanation of what it's actually like... which is kind of like nothing else. They are much more like a trad point and click than you'd expect from a console adventure, which tend to be heavier on text and lighter on explorable, interactable environment, even the ones that aren't outright Visual Novels.
This, though, is a fully-3D and beautifully realised game, almost like a playable kid's Saturday morning cartoon with its vibrant cel-shaded locales and colourful cast of characters. It's about this adventurous lad Zack and his magical flying-monkey-cat-sprite-statue-companion-*thing* Wiki, as they race from place to place trying to recover treasures from a nefarious but lovable Rose Pirate gang. Being a Wii launch title, it of course has the notorious Waggle Controls, but of all the games except Wii Sports I ever played this was the one that made best use of them.
- The Cinq games: Another Code / Hotel Dusk / Last Window / Another Code R. Here was a developer who knew how to make full use of hardware. Although some felt the touchscreen, dual displays and motion controls of the DS and Wii (respectively) were gimmicks, and often proved to be in less considerate developers' hands, Cinq were masters of realising their potential, with dozens of 'aha!' moments that required you to find creative ways of manipulating out-of-game controls with in-game objects that just felt *right*.
Just as importantly, they also just knew how to write really *good* stories. Their two flagship series had very different protagonists - Ashley Robbins, a young girl coming of age while unraveling the mysteries of her families' past, and Kyle Hyde, a jaded and ornery ex-detective of the classic hardboiled mould who might still yet prove to have a heart of gold. But the stories they tell show the same confident mastery of craft - establishing the world and its characters to give you a reason to care, and then slowly pulling you into their complex and evolving mysteries.
Both games also have highly different, but distinctive and well-chosen art styles. These are games I'd recommend to any adventure fan - Another Code + R have been remastered for Switch. Hopefully the Kyle Hyde duology will follow in time.
- The Ace Attorney series: which needs no introduction, really. A peerless set of masterfully plotted, story-heavy games, with a wonderful cast of characters and intriguing, logic-focused puzzles. For my money more playable than many prominent PC adventures of the classic mould, in that moon-logic is kept to a strict minimum and actual reasoning prevails over 'try everything on everything'.
Delete- The Professor Layton games: beautiful, charming, relaxing stories with warm colours and characters. There is a heavier deliniation between puzzles and story in these games than either the Ace Attorney series or tradition point and clicks, as puzzles don't exist 'in the environment' and (usually) don't tie into or advance the plot, instead having to be cleared between segments that develop the narrative.
While this isn't going to be to everyone's tastes, it does allow for a greater variety of puzzle kinds beyong inventory or dialogue puzzles - instead, think of the kinds of puzzles that you used to find in puzzle *books* (remember those?). As a spin on the genre these games are quite fresh, but you only need to play one (or the clearly inspired Puzzle Agent, available on PC) to know if this series is for you.
- The Danganronpa series: I can't actually talk about these because I've never played them. But as I understand it, they're a slightly more edgy take on the Ace Attorney formula? If you like anime things and settings about 'death games' and so on, and you don't mind a text-heavy experience, you'd probably get a kick out of these.
- World's End Club / Master Detective Archive: Rain Code : developed by TooKyo games, a sort of Japanese 'super group' comprised of key personnel behind the Zero Time and Danganronpa series, these are a pair of deceptively cutesy take on high-stakes drama and thorny, knotted mysteries.
They take place in a fully 3D environment, which offers a more immersive sense of exploration, but remain text heavy and linear in nature, which makes the physical world a sort of high fidelity (and slower to traverse) menu system -an innovation that I'm divided on whether I really like or not.
Well, that was a long list! Well done if anyone got to the bottom of it.
so happy to see another cinq hotel dusk fan! i know there must be dozens of us! i played it nigh on ten years ago but i still think about that game - it was so beautifully done.
DeleteJust remembered another new adventure game I enjoyed quite a lot: Beyond The Edge Of Owlsgard
ReplyDeleteSomeone mentioned Elsinore, which makes me very happy, because I thought that obscure game that never received any ads was unknown. It is extraordinary.
ReplyDeleteAmong the Wadjet Eye games, I recommend particularly Gemini Rue and Primordia. And the Shivah but it lasts maybe 20 Minutes. As for some other non Wadget Eye games but Wadget Eye-looking games I recommend: Kathy Rain, Whisper of a Machine
All the "modern" Sam & Max, better than the old ones.
Not mentioned here at all:
- Four Last Things, the Adventure Game where you must commit all 7 sins in a specific diocesis due to church redtape. High high recommend.
- tiny and Tall, a cartoonish adventure where Thor won't act against Gleipnir so two idiotic dwarves have to do it.
- The Dream Machine, in clay stop motion but even if it was not it would be an outstanding title.
- Aviary Attorney - Ace Attorney wih birds and also a better Ace Attorney than Ace Attorney.
Hmm, I still have yet to play the elusive 1996 classic Neverhood, so the thought of another claymation one seems intriguing.
DeleteI have Elsinore on my backlog, seems interesting and will probably play it soon.
DeleteThe Dream Machine is a flash game, that eventually was packaged as a full game. Highly recommended, the premise, setting and plot are very unique, and the Steam achievements very fun to find
This is a game jam game, so relatively short and not exactly polished (although the "special edition" is fully voiced), but I found it fun: Late Last Nite. For mature players only (or immature ones, as the case may be...).
ReplyDeleteBased on the free version of Loco Motive from a few years ago, I am very excited for the forthcoming full game.
ReplyDeleteI haven't played as many modern games as I would've liked, though I have a long list of them that I plan to get to eventually. From the Wadjet Eye ones, I liked the Blackwell series, Gemini Rue and Technobabylon the most. The Shivah, Resonance and Unavowed were great too.
ReplyDeleteOne I've played and haven't seen mentioned here yet is The Order of the Thorne: The King's Challenge, from 2016, a really nice and cosy fantasy AGS game. The sequel was in development a couple of years ago, hopefully someday it'll come out.
And, in a bit of shameless self-promotion, I've worked on some adventure games with friends as well. Two commercial ones are available on Steam, and some more free short ones are on Itch. Guess you could say they are some of my favourites too ;)
oh just remembered another great game, Cognition: Erica Reed .. super recommended
ReplyDeleteThe crimson diamond is a new laura bow/colonels bequest type game with a text parser
ReplyDeletehttps://www.thecrimsondiamond.com/
my backlog is too full but it looks pretty good...
https://www.polygon.com/impressions/446232/crimson-diamond-julia-minamata-text-parser-review-impressions-interview