Still, I'm not sure what the definition of "Adventure Game" is. To me, it's usually a game with graphics at the top (not required but most common), and 4 or so lines of text at the bottom. Some times you walk a character around. Other times you just type "exit door", "open drawer", "take key" (or pick from a menu)
Those games might have been dead in some form (King Quest, Monkey Island, etc...) but the basic form has been alive and kicking (a) in the form of Japanese story games and (b) as indie games on places like itch.io. It's covered with "story adventure games"
Of course most of those games would benefit from this list of rules.
It's boom and bust. When adventure games became graphical, they became massively popular, one of the top-selling genres of games. But since 2000 they were in decline, almost to the point of death. Gamers wanted 3D shoot-em-ups or simulators or other genres, more than they wanted the old point'n'click adventures they'd been playing for the past decade.
They haven't really come back, in that form, except as appeals to afficionados. Deponia (2012-2016), Syberia (2002-), Dreamfall (1999-2017) did quite well, but I don't know how many people who hadn't played an adventure game before would willingly pick them up. Then there are nostalgia-bait games which Ron Gilbert is especially guilty of, e.g. Thimble Park, The Cave, Return to Monkey Island. You could also add the remake of Riven to that list.
If by Japanese story games you mean visual novels... they're not really the same genre, even if technically they have you moving around the place collecting things to solve puzzles. I'd also argue that anything David Cage has done (Farhenheit, Heavy Rain, etc.) are not adventure games, he chases after "interactive movies" as mentioned in the article.
I have a firm belief that the original point-and-click adventure boom was an accident. A lot of previously popular but now niche genres follow a pattern: They applied some constraint to their interaction that lead to (relatively) high-fidelity graphics and/or storytelling on weak hardware and with small budgets. Once technology advanced to the point where said graphical fidelity could be achieved without those constraints, all but a few hardcore players left for other genres. Fighting games (where the machine could spend its entire resource budget on two characters and a largely static stage), rail shooters (where the fixed camera and scripted encounters allowed the designers to very easily know how many entities would be onscreen in any given frame, even to the point of being almost entirely pre-rendered), racing games (cars are easy to model, fixed tracks give the designers full control of entity visibility, sprite scaling allowed for 3D-ish effects before 3D acceleration existed), flight simulators and space games (the sky/space is easy to render, planes and spaceships are also easy to model compared to humans). None of these genres are as popular as they once were, probably due to the fact that even a go-anywhere open world game with hundreds of living entities on screen can run on modest hardware these days, so there’s no benefit from a graphical perspective of applying those restrictions.
The adventure game and the visual novel once occupied this position. By being a series of (potentially entirely pre-rendered) stills that could only be interacted with in a few predefined ways, you could make impressive-looking scenes even on 16-bit hardware. It would be a very long time before anything as impressive as Myst could be made to run in real time on consumer-grade hardware. I suspect a lot of people only bought these games because they looked pretty, and once that edge was gone, they realised that maybe they didn’t really like the genre in the first place.
I think that there's another factor to consider. The market for computer game was both much smaller in the 80s and early 90s but also tended to be much more educated. So, games that are essentially puzzles with stories would have much more appeal to that group of people.
I think also culture was much more ready to put "mindful" and engaged deep thought time on content. As lot of games due still end up burning lot of time, but I feel they often are more mindless or more in the moment gaming. Kinda tetris like deepflow. Our attention spans have shortened a lot and there is lot more distractions available.
That sounds plausible. Or at least it was part of it, because at least Myst would never have sold anywhere near as many units if it didn't look so impressive (in 1993).
Though there is also the simple fact that pure puzzle games can't compete with puzzle+action games (e.g. Zelda), even if the puzzles are somewhat reduced.
You can see a similar thing in movies: Highly successful Pixar movies are typically comedy+action, because mixing in action beats pure comedy in terms of entertainment.
The trend towards action is also present in other genres: Turn
-based strategy games got mostly replaced with real-time strategy games, and turn-based RPGs got replaced with action RPGs where fighting is done in real time.
Telltale Games was big for a decade with their adventure games, in which Gilbert was somewhat involved as well. The Walking Dead from 2012 was one of the best selling video games of all times.
I grant you, Telltale did make a good number of adventure games in the classic style, e.g. Sam & Max, and then also applied them to licenses like Wallace & Gromit and Back to the Future... but I feel The Walking Dead was a different type of game. More a narrative and character led game, like a visual novel, rather than a puzzle game of any kind... and as that was so successful, they stopped making the point'n'click puzzle-type adventure games.
Would you consider them to be the same genre, an evolution, or a different genre (that perhaps Telltale spawned?)
The original Monkey Island was a smash hit for its time and sold significantly less than 1 million copies.
So, while adventure games didn’t take off like 3D shoot-em-ups that doesn’t mean they actually declined even if they aren’t posting 200+ million GTA 5 numbers. Monkey Island 2 special edition sold 459k units on steam that’s far better than the original Money Island 2’s 25k on launch.
In all fairness, it was easier to get the cracked warez version back then then to find a shop that had these games. At least in my country. So maybe sales numbers don't tell everything in this case.
A few years ago, adventure games had a revival on smartphones, especially with The Room series and the Cube Escape / Rusty Lake games. They were greatly helped by the fact that A) adventure games have no action and B) most action games do not work well with touchscreens.
While not specifically designed for smartphones, StoryHarp (which I wrote in 1998 in Delphi and then ported to the web in 2018 using TypeScript, Mithril, and Tachyons) can run in a browser on a phone. StoryHarp makes it easier to write simple rule-based text adventures where players click on available options from a list rather than by typing in text (more like Choose Your Own Adventure books). You can try it out here:
https://storyharp.com/v3.0/
The Ace Attorney series are visual novel games; I'd call them a crossover of genres.
They have the presentation of a visual novel (first person perspective, characters look straight out at you, most of game is paging through dialogue), but they also have gameplay elements of traditional adventure games (looking around multiple locations for clues, try every item in the inventory to see what response you get, etc.) - I think in Japan they'd call that an adventure game for being overly interactive, but in the West we'd still call it a visual novel.
I haven't tried the Zero Escape series, but after a quick look at one on Youtube, it does look like that same mix of visual novel with adventure game / puzzle elements?
Adventure games that have elements of visual novels have existed for a long time in Japan even though they were often not translated and sold outside of Japan. Examples of this are the The Portopia Serial Murder Case (from Yuji Horii who wrote the scenario for Chrono Trigger), the Jake Hunter games, etc...
The Telltale version? Telltale actually went out of business a few years ago.
Even so, those aren't akin to the classic adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island, etc. They are more like "Choose your own adventure" novels - but a major criticism is you always end up in the same place at the end so your choices are largely irrelevant.
Telltale went out of business, but the genre is doing fine. Others continue to make games.
> They are more like "Choose your own adventure" novels - but a major criticism is you always end up in the same place at the end so your choices are largely irrelevant.
They are like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, but I think it's unfair to say you end up with the same ending. I know games where, based on your decisions, people may die in the middle of the game. Whether they're alive or not does lead to a different story.
Even in The Walking Dead series, there's a game with a very different ending depending on who you choose to get killed.
The games are much easier than the old adventure games of the 90's. For me, though, that's a blessing. I simply cannot devote as much time to solving those types of games, and I appreciate they've made adventure games for someone like myself.
The point is that if you liked adventure games, you'll likely enjoy these games as well.
I think "adventure game" has broadened a bit in meaning maybe. To me it means a game where the outcomes don't depend on response speed or dexterity in a game task and where those game tasks are diagetic content within a narrative. So basically puzzles only, where the puzzles are a natural intrinsic part of a story.
Everything else is UI. You can have traditional adventure games, first-person adventure games, third-person adventure games that are not really traditional, and so forth.
Just my opinion though. Traditionally "adventure game" meant a sort of text-driven story game without combat or dexterity-based tasks, and it often still does. But I see the term get applied more broadly than that.
I really recommend playing games from Wadjet Eye, like Gemini Rue, Blackwell, Unavowed, they are all point and clicky adventure games. I think that adventure games aren't dead, they are just a niche.
Resonance has some unique mechanics that are actually effective at restoring some of the reactivity and world-building flavor that was lost when adventure games moved from parser to point-and-click interfaces (while still using a solely point-and-click interface). It's also a really good game on top of that.
I remember pkayung the adventure game “Milkmaid of the Milky Way” and loving the style. It’s indie, and the text just rhymes all the time. http://machineboy.com/milkmaid/
I think "story-driven game with no combat or dexterity" covers it decently well (story-driven in the sense that, the story is the primary, usually sole, focus - making "progress" in the game is equivalent to finding out what happens next).
Though some people tend to consider visual novels as being distinct from adventure games, with a stipulation that a visual novel has no "overworld" (i.e. you don't walk around on a map - neither graphically nor textually - you just move from one "scene" to the next. You move forward in time rather than N/S/E/W in space.)
I think there are still "classic" adventure games around like Deponia, but they run into those problems.
I think the way around this is to make things less trickier, but at some point you get a story-based game/visual novel or maybe a "walking simulators" like firewatch.
Still, I'm not sure what the definition of "Adventure Game" is. To me, it's usually a game with graphics at the top (not required but most common), and 4 or so lines of text at the bottom. Some times you walk a character around. Other times you just type "exit door", "open drawer", "take key" (or pick from a menu)
Those games might have been dead in some form (King Quest, Monkey Island, etc...) but the basic form has been alive and kicking (a) in the form of Japanese story games and (b) as indie games on places like itch.io. It's covered with "story adventure games"
Of course most of those games would benefit from this list of rules.