Since its inception in 1977 with ADVENT, adventure games have been the most story-driven computer game genre. Many have found adventure games to have a true immersive quality that can be compared to reading a good book or watching a movie. If you are interested in playing games that can be thoughtful, funny and intelligent, and provide a little mental challenge, you might just have landed on the right website.

Adventure games are about stories, exploring worlds and solving puzzles. Play as Ray McCoy on assignment to track down replicants in Blade Runner the game. Or embark on a four-year journey through the mystical Land Of The Dead in the Mexican folk art and film noir inspired Grim Fandango. The game Bad Mojo even lets you play as a scientist trapped in the body of a cockroach. When you’re playing an adventure game, you never quite know what you’re going to get. Detectives, comedies, westerns, mysteries, horror, noir or sci-fi; there’s an adventure game for everyone.

There are in fact so many adventure games to play that it can be hard to find a place to start. Fortunately, this article should help you along your way.

Genre definition
Adventure games focus on puzzle solving within a narrative framework. There are generally few or no action elements. Other popular names for this genre of computer games are “graphic adventure” or “point-and-click adventure”.

Adventure games are not: role-playing games that involve action, team-building and points management; 3D action/adventure games such as Tomb Raider; side-scroller action games such as Mario or Rayman; puzzle games like Pandora’s Box or Tetris.

Characteristics
There are three characteristics that are always present in an adventure game to some degree. Some sub-genres focus more on one aspect than another.

Narrative
In adventure games, the story line is essential. The narrative is predetermined and unfolds one step at a time. The stories range in scope, tone and setting as much as movies and novels do. For instance, in Gabriel Knight you are attempting to solve a voodoo murder mystery in New Orleans, whereas The Secret Of Monkey Island tells the comedy tale of the oddly named pirate wannabe Guybrush Threepwood and his quest to defeat the Evil Ghost Pirate LeChuck. It’s hard to give any indication of what to expect, though adventure games are known for their original stories.

Puzzles
Inventory puzzles: accumulating an inventory of items that are then used to solve puzzles. In the first scene of the pirate adventure The Curse of Monkey Island, you have to attach a plastic hook to a ramrod in order to fetch a cutlass from the ocean. This is a typical inventory puzzle as found in most graphic adventures.
Dialogue-based puzzles: interacting with computer characters to accumulate clues, directions, or to persuade them to help your cause.
Environmental puzzles: puzzles requiring you to analyze and often alter your surroundings in the game.
Non-contextual puzzles: these can be anything, like a game of chess or a jigsaw puzzle. This type of puzzle usually has little or no relevance to the game’s narrative.

While a lot of adventure games contain basic inventory puzzles, some games provide more exotic types of challenges. For instance, in the game Spycraft you are a CIA agent and your tasks involve tapping into phone calls and analyzing photo evidence.

Exploration
Adventure games always require exploration to some degree, depending on the type of interface. In early text parser driven adventures the player had to navigate by typing in directions, such as “GO NORTH”. Modern point-and-click adventures provide more intuitive ways to get around, but still ask the player to hover the mouse over the screen to find ‘hot spots’ (objects that can be looked at or manipulated). Adventures with 3D graphics such as Tex Murphy: Under A Killing Moon and Gabriel Knight 3 usually demand the highest amount of exploration, as players will often have to walk around objects to find hotspots.

Next: different graphical styles