Adventure Gamers - Forums

Urban Runner - a silly FMV point-and-click game published by Sierra. It involves a combination of classical adventure game elements & timed sequences. Main protagonist is being chased and tried to be killed by corrupt police detective and gang of thugs. The game has hilarious death scenes like in Gabriel Knight 2. Even though it’s very short has a lot of complex puzzles that lengthen the game.

I think many traditional point & click adventures have a few minor timed events that are often there to add the urgecy and/or the sense of danger. Your character is in danger/dying and you have a few seconds to use an item in your inventory or on screen. If the games aren’t filled with these scenes, I don’t think most adventurers find them annoying.

I personally play a lot of RPGs and some action games and platformers too, and I don’t really mind “hybrid” adventures. The problem in most cases has been the implementation. I’d rather have no combat than bad and clunky combat.

I wouldn’t want all my adventures to become hybrids though. Some games are just better old school. And I think it’s also about accessibility. Decades ago point & click adventures usually weren’t easy, and while they might not have had action scenes, there were sudden deaths and dead ends and all kinds of diabolical annoyances, that “hardcore gamers” just went through. These days the old school adventures aren’t truly old school in that matter. They’re good games for the people who have limitations to their reflexes, mobility, vision, etc. And I think it’s great that most of them are not made intentionally difficult.

edit. I’ll add a couple of examples where I have struggled with an action scene.

When I first played Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy) I had never before played a game with QTE. The control scheme in the beginning of the game was very intuitive, mouse movements mimicking the directions. Then, when the first QTE scene started, I fumbled it twice, trying to escape the attack by trying to run my character between the cubicles not realising I had lost direct control of my character and was supposed to press some buttons in a sequence. The scene (or the game altogether) really needed some kind of tutorial about this. The QTE in Fahrenheit was pretty bad overall, especially the left-right sequences. I’m glad they got rid of that in the later games and started to use better corresponding directions in the QTE also.

My other example is a bit similar. It’s from This War of Mine - not an adventure game really, I know - where the characters have a setting for scavenging or action, and it might actually work okay, but the problem was that there was never a possibility to try it out properly. The game autosaves and deaths are final, so there is no safe environment to try out how combat works. So, most of the time I spend sneaking and being cordial, and when a fight occurred, I didn’t even remember the other setting. So my character was trying to inspect piles of rubbish instead of fighting. It ended pretty badly .

So what I think is similar in these cases is that they are moments when the games pace changes, there’s a shift from non-combat to combat, which doesn’t happen smoothly. And there’s a lack of direction and/or possibility to practice your skills.

Though it’s possible there are some kind of tutorials or something available now.

russ869 - 14 March 2022 05:49 PM

The Tex Murphy games occasionally have some action sequences.  Although I usually found those parts pretty annoying.

And they are indeed. Just finished Pandora Directive recently and there was that one scene where you had to navigate a mouse-driven camera without falling into lava while avoiding fireballs. I don’t remember the last time I had to reload any game so many times.

point the gun and click the trigger?

is it me or hasn’t Full Throttle been named in this thread?

i mean it’s hardly a hidden gem, but maybe the closest resemblance to the original request.  Several parts of the game are quite action-oriented, but it never strays far from the LucasArts adventure game formula. I haven’t seen anyone describe it as an action adventure or something like that, but you’re (spoilers)punching bikers on the go, jumping ramps and slamming cars in a Destruction Derby - all sorts of crazy stunts with blatant disregard for danger.