This is what I wrote in my very longwinded article over at AdventureDevelopers.com,
The Cold Hotspot...
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Originally Posted by The Cold Hotspot: part 2
You've heard it countless times before. According to the media the adventure game is dead. Or dying. Or at least no longer important. The irony is that other genres, like role playing games (RPGs) and first person shooters (FPSs), have been borrowing key attributes and techniques of the adventure game for years, and even some of them are doing it better now than most modern adventures. You can discern this in titles like No One Lives Forever 2, Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, Deus Ex, Beyond Good & Evil, and Fable. When this happens, the game expands into new territory, it grows, deepens, and the player often discovers a new way to have fun. The game innovates and the genre diversifies. Silent Hill 3, despite its survival horror pedigree, features wickedly difficult puzzles on par with that of Myst or The Longest Journey. Fable, an RPG, rewards players for thorough exploration by allowing them to discover peripheral but enriching stories about the game's world and characters, very much like an inquisitive dialogue tree in any adventure game.
...The incest contained within the almost hermetically sealed genre of adventure has trapped both game designers and gamers themselves into instinctively thinking that a puzzle must be both elemental and obscurely difficult, as well as 'stereotypically puzzle-y'. That is, it must look and behave like puzzles they have encountered innumerable times in past games. While this mindset is understandable, it's painfully constricting as it leads both parties - gamers and designers - into a cul-de-sac of redundancy, and has produced laughably recyclable and artificially integrated obstacles. Quite a sin: let he who is without prior experience in the 'poke - pencil - through - keyhole - to - knock - key - out - onto - newspaper - below' puzzle cast the first stone.
Discussing the convention of the tired 'puzzle-cutscene-puzzle-cutscene' approach, Jake Rodkin, writer for the games site Idle Thumbs, says: "At their core adventure games are nothing but this weird linear puzzle skeleton -- that is what makes them work. But if that's all there is, any illusion of choice, of exploration, of interaction, of discovery -- especially by people who can't read and infer directly into the abstracted scripts of the game -- is completely obliterated...the genre has done it to itself - ideas have been rehashed time and again in the last 15 years without any new blood."
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Many things have, of course, transpired since I wrote this editorial series around two years ago, so that I should update my thoughts a bit. For example, the Nintendo DS has done much to introduce to a wider audience games that focus intensively on stories and cerebral challenges. Controversial titles like
Dreamfall,
Indigo Prophecy (known as
Fahrenheit in Europe),
Missing: Since January (known as
In Memoriam in Europe), and
EVIDENCE: The Last Ritual, may have helped proved that adventure games (or at least 'adventure-like' games) are fully capable of exploring new ideas and concepts, but for the most part the genre is still widely uncompetitive commercially, artistically, and conceptually, thus largely ignored (or as one poster here stated, forgotten) by the media and the many potential interested parties.
In fact, from what I've read in various news blog comments, non-adventure fan community forums, and news reports, many non-adventure gamers loved and raved about titles like
Dreamfall and
Indigo Prophecy specifically because they offered them a much needed break from the otherwise boring and redundant conventions that the typical adventure game offers. And I think that's the primary clue.
It looks to be that most media and interested consumers tend to overlook or be ignorant about the adventure game many times (with the exception of high production titles like
Syberia,
Still Life, and the
Myst series) because
collectively these games have done nothing new, dynamically bold, experimental, and even controversial in the past several years. Whatever titles that may categorically fall within the genre (like Indigo Prophecy) that are noticed by the press are the
exceptions, and yet even these titles may fail to arouse inspiration from other adventure game developers to explore beyond the genre's conventions.
This is NOT to say that I think that some traditional adventure games do not deserve attention. They do deserve it. However, I think it has much to do more with the perception that the adventure genre, collectively, has essentially nothing new to offer, either to the consumer or the media reporting on what's going on the game world.