There's Something About Adventure Games

There is something beautiful about Adventure games.  MYST-style, that is: first-person, puzzle-based, surrealistic, thought-provoking, mind-bending.  Of course, I call it "MYST-style", but I think that's kind of like calling an FPS a "DOOM clone".  That was true once, but they've come into their own, and though they appear to be oddly specific on the surface, the paradigm allows for infinite variety.

There is the MYST series, of course, and others of its time like The 7th Guest games (a slightly different take, but within the mold).  And after that, of course, Adventure games died--but this article is not a history lesson.

So let's zip to the present, where there is a light resurgence of Adventure games.  Often they're in the guise of another kind of game, such as Platformers, or mixed half-and-half (or worse proportions) with other genres, like Action.  Pure first-person puzzle-Adventure has become exclusive to casual games, and there are too many awful ones (if it labels itself as an "Escape the Room" game, odds are you want to skip it), so searching for a diamond in the rough is quite a task.

There are great Adventure game developers, like Mateusz Skutnik, as I've mentioned before, with his Daymare series, though his Submachine series is even better.  But unfortunately the list of quality Adventure devs is quite small.

What happened to Adventure games?  There seems to be this constant complaint that games these days are too violent (they've been violent since Spacewar! in 1962, so knock it off with the "these days" nonsense), and violence creeps into practically every genre.  Too often, my search for a puzzle platformer leads me to a puzzle platformer with guns.  Adventure games are rarely violent, partly because they don't lend themselves to violence well.  Violence tends to be a quick, think-on-your-feet kind of action, while Adventure games are designed around thoughtful, drawn-out decisions and contemplations.  I've played Adventure games with violence, but I have found the violent sequences to be almost universally quick, actiony challenges that quite break the flow of the game.

Games where you have to type are not meant for action... Note to self...

I don't quite know what the demand is for Adventure games.  The big industry doesn't seem to care, so Adventure games have become an indie thing.  But hey, if games these days are too violent, bring back the Adventure games, and have yourself a ball...

I think the death of Adventure games was also partly because it was thought that anybody could make them.  MYST's puzzles were extremely difficult, but they were also fair, and quite clever.  I think Adventure game makers jumped on the "extremely difficult" part, but forgot about the "fair" and the "quite clever" bits.  You can still see this, not just with older Adventure games that left no mark, but also in today's casual Escape-the-Rooms, where the puzzle might make no sense ("Of course you have to take the light bulb out of the fixture to unlock the door!  Why didn't I think of that before?").

The other trick of a great Adventure game is surrealism.  Even a game that takes place in a "normal" house (The 7th Guest, for instance) is very surreal.  In most games, the art of a game is a given, and beautiful vistas are not taken into consideration.  Although a player might have their jaw drop when they enter a new area (and I hope all developers strive for that), their mouth shuts when they need to shoot something.

But with Adventure games, that feeling of awe should happen with almost every click of the mouse.  Every time the player sees a new screen or solves a puzzle, something striking should happen.  I just finished playing an Escape-the-Room game that took place in an apartment.  There was nothing interesting to see.  There were probably a dozen puzzles to be solved in the room (or even more), but each one only achieved an unlocking of a drawer or a safe in the wall.  There was nothing impressive about it.

Yet even a beautiful, surreal world follows logic, and the combination of the two can trip up a designer.  It can follow its own logic, to some degree, but it must make sense in the context of the game.  MYST's world used books as a mode of teleportation, and this concept was introduced at the very beginning of the game.  Everything else that followed was a beautiful screen with a completely logical puzzle.  You never needed to drown a fish to unlock a door.

There was a game called Juggernaut for the Playstation (full disclosure:  it was panned, but I loved it) which took place inside the mind of the player character's girlfriend.  Since it took place basically in the imagination, anything could happen.  Yet the designers did not give into that temptation, and instead made each puzzle completely logical within the context of the incredibly surreal world.  You needed to do illogical things like paint a door to make it take you somewhere else, but before you tried to solve that puzzle, you understood that that was something that could happen in this world, so you went along with it.

The key to making a great Adventure game is to understand the opposing forces of the medium:  a logical surreality that, like all videogames should do, is challenging but solvable.  A player should never need to guess at the solution to a puzzle, but they should have to think about it for a bit.  It's the "Aha!" moment that drives the Adventure gamer.  Too often that moment is non-existent in a game, and that's why it fails.

The third, perhaps equally important piece of an Adventure game lies in the convergence of story and puzzle.  Each puzzle exists for a reason, and can't be there arbitrarily.  In MYST, Atrus created many of the puzzles to keep his sons from getting into the books behind them.  They are not just logical puzzles, but logically existent.  The Escape-the-Room game I played recently had no reason for the puzzles to exist in the first place.  Why am I locked in this apartment?  Who would go through all this trouble to hide all these keys around, create all these puzzles?  No one, really.

Adventure games, all told, are much more difficult to create than most casual gaming mills think.  This is probably why they died:  there were too many terrible ones, not because they were hastily slapped together like many of today's, but because making a passable Adventure game is much tougher than it seems.  When one genre grows in popularity, it suffers from too many copycats that don't know what they're doing.

After the boom and bust of Adventure games in the 1990's, they went on hiatus for a while, or got subsumed in other genres.  But now it seems there is more interest in the genre in the indie scene, and although there is a lot of rough, there are a few diamonds, if you know where to look.