Toonstruck definitely felt like old hat at the time when it came out. Adventure games were a dying genre; meanwhile,
the same year we got games like Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, and Command & Conquer.
One of my favorite games from that year was also an adventure game: The Neverhood. It was weird, highly original, and innovative. It was, I felt at the time, a game that could herald a new direction for adventure games. It was puzzle-based but also felt strangely immersive.
Another game that felt groundbreaking was Tomb Raider, even though its puzzles weren't very interesting.
My family got its first Windows computer in 1997 second hand, and it came with Toonstruck, Titanic: Adventure out of Time, and Discworld 2. All were and still are amazing, so I'm glad to agree with the author's assertion that 1996 was the best year for adventure games.
In hindsight, the person we bought it from had great taste.
We are already there, I think. Look at the success of games like the Blackwell games (and other excellent games from Wadjet Eye, such as Gemini Rue and Technobabylon), the Deponia series, Machinarium, Thimbleweed Park, Life is Strange, Disco Elysium, or the newly released NORCO, which a lot of reviews are calling a masterpiece.
We are at a stage where adventure games are relatively cheap to make, and platforms like Steam and the App Store makes it easier to self-publish. It might not be hugely profitable, but that doesn't matter.
Catharsis is a thing. But I will admit, Ghost Giant isn't a comfortable game to play. It isn't supposed to be.
It's still a really good game, and it had me wearing my VR gear much further into the night than was either comfortable or sane, but if relaxation is what you're looking for then ... this is not it.
Sweeping generalizations are scarcely true or helpful. Young gamers play much more than just “fortnite&co” just like Millennials played more than Call of Duty and other FPS games and just like Gen X played more than Mario and other mascot platformers. Plenty of young gamers are perfectly capable of playing, understanding, and enjoying modern adventure games.
You are right and i deserve the critisism. What i meant to say is that for a new age of adventure games like in the mid 90ies there needs to be a new generation of vr affine gamers as i feel the current generation has given up on vr and adventure gaming in a classical sense.
Remember Robinson - the journey, a vr adventure made by crytek? It looked so promising i almost considered getting playstation vr although motion sickness is a real problem for me.
Kids are actually fairly big into indie horror, judging by my son and his friends, and these are somewhat like old school adventure games. My son has even brought up SCP, despite only being ten years old.
Stuff like Hello Neighbor, Poppy Playtime, Bendy and the Ink Machine, and of course the juggernaut that is Five Nights at Freddy's have gotten quite popular. Not as popular as Fortnite, obviously, but it's more than a tiny niche.
And the latest FNaF game, Security Breach, is pretty much a full fledged adventure/puzzle game that happens to have some jumpscares and a scary premise.
Adventure games are thriving. They may not be Twitch and YouTube headliners but there's still a huge audience.
A friend of mine is making a point & click adventure with Unity and has a playable demo on steam[1]. Unity and Steam (and their competitors) have truly made it possible for individuals and small teams to chase an idea to completion.
Certainly. They died off with the major publishers for economic reasons, but people still enjoy that type of game when done well. One of the main economic reasons was the resale market for games at places like gamestop, which didn't exist in the era of Myst/ Seventh Guest. If people could have just played through their CD-ROM game and sold it back to the store, sales would have been curtailed. In those days a CD-ROM (particularly multiple) was so much data that it would be difficult to download on a modem. So you could sell it in a store and sell one copy to everyone who wanted it.
Steam's DRM and the lower costs of developing an indie game in Unity is bringing this style of experience back.
This takes me back! In my final year of primary school I spent countless hours at a friend’s house playing this together (on his state of the art 100MHz 486 with a CD-ROM drive). We barely understood English and most of the puns and jokes went way over our head. I’ll never forget the vibe of that game and I have never played anything that comes close since. I wish I could play it again for the first time.
I bought this game in England in the late nineties in a bargain bin for probably £5. It had terrible box art, but I bought it solely because it had Christopher Lloyd, and the voice of Dan Castellaneta. It turned out to be possibly my favourite point and click game ever. Christopher Lloyd is amazing, as is Castellaneta. Such a shame it didn't do well.
A guy on the internet supposedly bought the rights to it. He keeps promising a remaster, or a sequel, but instead of, you know, doing kickstarter for it, is just asking everyone to like his page, and sign petitions, and nothing ever happens. What a waste of everyone's time. Oh well.
A few years ago I discovered I could play it on SCUMMVM on my Android tablet, so I played through the whole thing over a few weeks during my bus commute. It was glorious.
Replayed it some times ago. While watching the end scene, I was thinking « this game is so good, but I didn’t remember the end to be so abrupt... They should have thought about a part 2... »
Then I find videos of a cut part 2, really enjoying if you like the game:
I was expecting to see pixel hunting[0] in the article but did not. Pixel hunting in adventure games turned me off the whole genre. As the trope describes I find pixel hunting to be fake difficulty.
Adventure games at the time were also discarding it; for example, in Simon the Sorcerer you can press a key to cause an icon to flash over every interactable object on screen.
Two other times when I particularly felt that whole bunches of games suddenly became redundant were: Half Life and GTA3. I was working on a PC shooter game when Half Life came out and after playing the first few hours it felt clear that what we were doing was inadequate. Same experience working on a PlayStation 2 game while GTA 3 launched.
Funny, I just re-played the entire Myst series and re-read the books. I keep getting recommended Outer Wilds by everyone, so I think that's next. It seems like it did okay, got some awards.
Reports on the death of the adventure game genre have been greatly exaggerated. We're getting a new Monkey Island game this year. Telltale Games puts out consistently good titles. There's Kentucky Route Zero, Telling Lies, the Life is Strange series and spin offs, the Dark Pictures Anthology, and more.
And those are just "pure" adventure games. There are a lot of narrative driven games that I would call "adventure games with extra mechanics". I'm talking about Control, Quantum Break, Medium, A Plague Tale, etc.
Adventure games are still out there. And many of them are great.
I not fully able to surmise why they went bankrupt but I get the feeling it was more of a bankruptcy due to ambition / growth and bad planning rather than the genre going bust but I don't know. I'd be curious to know more.
One of my favorite games from that year was also an adventure game: The Neverhood. It was weird, highly original, and innovative. It was, I felt at the time, a game that could herald a new direction for adventure games. It was puzzle-based but also felt strangely immersive.
Another game that felt groundbreaking was Tomb Raider, even though its puzzles weren't very interesting.