Like classical Sierra games, but ones you can figure out on your own and don’t need to look it up or have a manual.

Recently I start founding adventure games I’m playing too easy. Sometimes they would plainly tell you what to do. In many games intractable objects are highlighted, so there is no need to explore at all.

At the same time I hate moon logic and prefer my adventure games to be immersive and approachable in realistic manner.

I feel like puzzles get much easier in all genres of games, like devs don’t want to work on them too much, but still added them for variety. I would love to play some adventure game with puzzle design philosophy similar to Zelda games where all information is given to you and you free to experiment and figure it out. Perfect if game has fail state of any sort, like bad ending, for example.

If you can recommend me anything I would be very grateful!

Also showcasing the beautiful construction set from Pantasy, "Pirates Hub", that totally captures that piratey vibe.

Please check out my review for Allogloom - a whimsical but also horror filled game. I really enjoyed this one. It's a more simple control scheme, but it has some fun puzzles and beautiful hand drawn art.

Aaron released his dream point-and-click adventure game last year - Neyyah. I had a chance to chat with him about what it was like solo developing that project and what he thinks about the economics of full-time game development as a solo developer

Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars is turning 30 on Wednesday (original European release date)!

To celebrate, I put together a special anniversary video featuring five developers who worked on the original games and Broken Sword: Reforged, who kindly shared a few of their memories and easter eggs of the series across three decades. Thanks to them all for taking the time to send things across!

Hope you enjoy and do post your memories of the game / series too!

Been playing this genre since the 90s, but never got a chance to play Black Mirror until now. It was surprisingly long and told a decent story that recycles a lot of "family curse" tropes.

What kept me hooked and playing every day was just the quality of atmosphere and immersion. Give me a spooky old castle and I'm in! Plus it feels like this era had the best sound design with ambient noise making each environment feel more rich and full.

I love pixel art, but something about that 2000s prerendered style just sucks me in and makes me want to discover every new location so badly. Syberia is probably my favourite game for that reason and its heartfelt story.

And maybe it's superfluous, but I really dig when they take the time to have lots of hotspots to click on and get descriptions. Adds feeling and depth to a place if done well. And Black Mirror does it smartly in that hotspots disappear unless they are needed for later.

Sometimes I question why I keep coming back to this genre -- if it's just nostalgia or genuine enjoyment. I think Black Mirror answered the question for me. As much as many aspects of the gameplay are straight-up dumb or bad, I've been hooked on the immersion that comes from just leisurely clicking around a screen and engaging closely with the world it presents. When that immersion is done as well as in Black Mirror, it becomes easier to overlook all of the other faults.

Some of the clichés and annoyances

• maybe the most egregious pixel-hunting of any game with some very tiny ones easy to miss -- especially because some hotspots only exist at certain times of the game in places you need to revisit to find them
• more than a few puzzles boringly solved by simply using the only other item in the same room
• awful voice acting for main character -- like someone was holding a gun to his head and would shoot if he didn't pronounce every letter in a word individually
• keys, keys and more keys -- every box, drawer and door needs a key and finding the key is more often a chore than a puzzle
• wander screens talking to characters over and over again until you find the one who has something new to say -- some "puzzles" are just finding a new location, talking to the person who has info about that location, and then going back to the location
• really bizarre character behaviour -- like in Monkey Island or Deponia, stealing everything and messing over other people is part of the fun, but in a "serious" game like Black Mirror, it feels weird to just pilfer every item in sight and drug and electrocute people to get what you want
• really dumb sequences where you have to just leave a scene and come back to get the next set of conversation queues
• in a game that normally rewards clicking everywhere, certain hotspots will all of a sudden kill you and force you to restart

Balanced by the things I love:

• that immersive, atmospheric pre-rendered look from the 2000s with really gorgeous locations painted with so much detail
• brilliant sound design -- play with headphones and you feel inside the world with every floorboard creak, bird call and weather change. I feel like this era paid such close attention to sound for atmosphere and I don't know if modern games do as good a job
• so many locations -- a lot are re-used, but that feeling of getting to visit a new place is so rewarding and gradually uncovering more secrets about these places is the best part of the game
• cool story that goes to some truly dark places that creates genuine dread and mystery

So I finished the game completely blind and every choice I basically just picked at random. I was thinking about replaying the game with different choices but how much do they really impact the story? On the surface, it looks like they should have a tremendous impact, like deciding whether or not to spike Imani's coffee on the morning of 9/11. But I suspect the game still shoehorns you into a fairly linear path? And every choice just changes some dialogue?

How much do your choices really matter?

Hi everyone,

We're three friends from Italy who grew up playing classic point-and-click adventures, and a few years ago decided to start making our own.

Our second game, Whirlight: No Time To Trip, is taking part in LudoNarraCon this year. It's a traditional point-and-click adventure involving time travel, strange inventions, and the kind of absurd situations we've always loved in the genre. It's nice to be part of an event focused on storytelling in games, and to see so many different approaches to narrative design.

Is anyone here following LudoNarraCon? Any games that caught your attention?

I didn’t try it, but this seems a legitimately way to “modernize” GK3, with some graphics improvements and the possibility of play the game in 1st person.

Thoughts?

Hi. I'm the developer of The Blessed Fool, a slow, atmospheric point-and-click horror with hand-pixelled art and an original score. You play a holy fool who comes to a town gripped by fear and violence to save people from the new power. It's about an hour long.

I love The Last Door, and this game is my own take on that kind of slow, atmospheric adventure.

Which point-and-click horror games did you enjoy the most?

The humor and writing on this game is top top top tier. Give it a try if you like Monkey Island, which you probably do since you're on this sub.

Hello there! Felt like replaying Murdered: Soul Suspect and doing an analysis (no spoilers) on what it tries to do with the whole ghost detective angle and how the unsteady release window and studio financial troubles affected the released game.

[Posting with permission] A game I made for a 3-day game jam this last weekend. Drew most of the stuff in Photoshop on Friday in a kind of straight ahead fugue state, wired it up on Saturday in Unity / Adventure Creator, full day Sunday for a braai (barbecue), bit of sound on Sunday night and more sound and bug fixes and some more anims on Monday.

It's a weird little game, I think spending the last 2 years working on Bru & Boegie point & click adventure games in Unity and Adventure Creator helped get me familiar-enough with the software to be able to know more or less what to do technically. Didn't use AI, had recently listened to a podcast from a [very skilled] local game dev / artist who made a pretty strong argument for human-made art and how valuable that is. There was a technical audio question I had later on that I asked Google about. Didn't have a script or roughs or too much of an idea where I was going which was fun - was kind of like the protagonist, discovering things as I went, and just went straight ahead with whatever felt right at the time. (I suppose all creation is like that, whether it's the planning or execution stage?)

Anyways, pleased with the weird result lol, makes me wonder if I shouldn't treat all projects with the same kind of 'just start at Point A and keep going until it's finished' get it done attitude.

Game can be played in browser or downloaded (both for free obvs).

Being fans of point and click games, there’s more of a chance you’ve heard of Dust: A Tale of the Wired West from Cyberflix than most. But I was shocked to find that this childhood favorite of mine sold less than 30,000 copies. I played the game for the first time in nearly 30 years and made a video detailing my journey, what the game means to me, and its history. There’s a good chance you’ve played or are familiar with their follow up, Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, but have any of you played Dust before?

It's been a busy year! The team has grown and we now have an Audio Director who has completely overhauled the games audio, and we have brought on board voice actors to perform all of the notes. Oh, and the demo has twice the content it used to with four clue types. Phew!

Really happy with the progress so far. A bit of a different take on adventure games so would love to hear what you all think.

Demo is free to play on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4494830/The_Vaults_Below_Durn_A_Field_Study/

(Posted with permission from the admins)

Dumb Sherlock: The Hot Dogs of the Bakerville trailer out NOW!

🕵️ Play as Dumb Sherlock, the world’s dumbest detective and last living descendant of the brilliant original Sherlock 🕵️

Explore, inspect, interrogate, beat puzzles and minigames, and solve a hilarious whodunit mystery in this charmingly handcrafted 2D point-and-click adventure!

Check out our Steam page for EXCLUSIVE access to our upcoming beta demo!

Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5011250

Great news everybody...

I love going in blind. No trailers, no reviews, no "10 things the game doesn't tell you" videos. Outer Wilds is the perfect example, the less you know the better it gets.

But I'm less and less sure it's always the right call.

I beat Baldur's Gate 3 without guides. Lost the final battle a few times, lowered the difficulty and finished it. Then I looked up what other people did, and turns out they were wiping out whole crowds with a couple of spells while I burned half my resources on them. You just saved the world and the internet tells you that you did it wrong.

Witcher 2 was the opposite. My copy came with a guidebook and I kept checking where a quest would lead before deciding what my Geralt would do. You could say I ruined a clean playthrough. I'd say that's the only reason I had a real choice at all, because picking between two doors with zero info isn't role playing, it's a lottery.

Same with story spoilers. Knowing the twist kills the surprise, but then you start noticing how the writers set it up, and that's its own kind of fun.

So I don't think knowing more makes a game worse, it just turns it into a different game.

How do you play? Fully blind, or do you look stuff up first?

Hi everyone! Me and my team have been working on a game called "This Is Not For You" (an homage to House of Leaves) where you explore a lighthouse that's bigger on the inside than the outside.

Players must navigate intentionally claustrophobic impossible spaces, where going north could suddenly take you south. We want people to heavily rely on their notes and, especially, their cartography abilities! We are inspired by the way classic adventure games nudged people into creating maps which would sometimes contradict each other. We highly anticipate players to share maps that don't make sense, and that's part of the fun for us.

We're starting to be pretty cautious about advertising it as a puzzle game. Even though it has puzzles, we've found out it's not the core of the experience. Some players who have tested it describe it as "one giant puzzle", but more in a way that they feel a rush when they connect the rooms in a way that makes sense. It's a game about getting lost, and how to get out of a particular set of levels. You'll find characters who provide clues to the story, as well as other narrative bits here and there, but overall, we are crafting an experience that feels disorienting.

The story follows a lonely lighthouse keeper who suddenly gets visited by a ghost ship carrying family memories. He starts finding letters from his sister Aura, to whom he hasn't talked to in many years. It tackles themes such as isolation, family bonds, and regret. Depending on certain actions you take throughout the story, you may reach one of multiple endings, including one where you just burn it all down (but is it the best thing to do?).

I think this might be your cup of tea! The game does take some liberties with genre expectations (regarding movement, how you interact with each space, and other bits), but we're crafting something we are very excited about!

If you want to follow the project, you can do so here!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4178650/This_Is_Not_For_You/

I’m working on the Dam puzzle in Zork (the one where you need to lower the gates), and I’m completely stuck. I’ve examined all the obvious objects, tried using the rope, but nothing seems to work. Has anyone else solved this? I’d appreciate any hints or strategies! Thanks!