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Are classic adventure games genre dead?
Try Bertram Fiddle too and no, it`s not dead 
Far from it.
Playing: 1) Broken Sword 5 2) Road 96
horrible “pixel art” wannabes
How many of them have you played, may I ask?
It’s interesting that so many people view retro games this way. Like that kind of art is just a lazy choice and inferior to hi-res art.
If you read the interview with the Darkside Detective developers on the main page, they experimented with high resolution art but said it didn’t feel right. The art style was a deliberate choice they put a lot of thought into. I don’t think that comes across until you’ve played the game. The screenshots aren’t eye candy, they only work in unison with the experience of playing the game.
I don’t mean to denigrate any player’s choice - if you don’t like retro art, you don’t like it. I just think it’s sometimes misunderstood why this art style is used. After all, there are equally as many “horrible” casual games which simply look beautiful for the sake of looking beautiful without any thought as to how the art style fits in with the game itself.
I wouldnt use the word dead. We continue to get very nice gems here and there. But the market share that the genre symbolized is not what it was and probably never will be. In part because the video game market is much much larger now.
So youve got a game like the KQ revival.. everyone talked about it. People on my social media who arent gamers talked about it. It got celebrity mentions and headlines. The first episode rolls out and its *beautiful* with top notch visuals, voices and design. It was reminiscent of 90s productions. And it commercially was not successful. Debatably episodes after that took some hits in quality. It made the case easily that this is a different era.
But the genre is not dead.. only different. And finds itself into many commercial borderline-action releases, and tell-tale-likes, with smaller budget classic-like releases popping up here and there. For example i am confident mage’s initiation will release this year. That is sure to be another treat like thimbleweed.
I agree. The video game market has changed and evolved since the 80s-90s but the adventure genre is not dead. And I think we see a lot of new innovations in adventure games today, even if it’s a pixel art game (which is a style I love).
Another adventure game, released in 2017, you could take a look at is The Wardrobe.
Story rich DRM-free games for Windows, Mac and linux for direct download - https://fireflowergames.com/. Half the profit goes to projects that benefit the environment and game related projects.
horrible “pixel art” wannabes
How many of them have you played, may I ask?
I like pixel art but when it’s done well like in Simon the Sorcerer 1/2, Monkey Island or even the latest Thimbleweed Park. I think than 320x240 resolution is minimum for the pixel art to look good. Those really low res games look horrible to me.
When a comedy from Wadjet Eye Games?
Yes I think that those guys could use some more lighthearted adventure. Those grim, dark and “mature” games are getting old pretty fast. I want to play a game for fun. Most of current AGs are depressing to be honest.
I’m sure you haven’t played all of these games:
Ace Ventura
Ankh
Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity
Ceville
Day of the Tentacle
Discworld 1
Discworld 2: Missing Presumed…!?
Duckman: The Legend of the Fall
Fable
The Feeble Files
Flight of the Amazon Queen
Freddy Pharkas
Gilbert Goodmate and the Mushroom of Phungoria
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Jack Keane
Legend of Kyrandia, Book 1: Fables and Fiends
Legend of Kyrandia, Book 2: The Hand of Fate
Legend of Kyrandia, Book 3: Malcolm’s Revenge
Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love for Sail
Runaway 1: A Road Adventure
Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle
Runaway 3: A Twist of Fate
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Simon the Sorcerer 1
Simon the Sorcerer 2: The Lion, the Wizard and the Wardrobe
Toonstruck
Torin’s Passage
Touche: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer
A Vampyre Story
The Whispered World
Just pick something and imagine it’s a brand new game.
I did play most of them but thanks for the list.
No way I would call it dead. I believe that the 2017 Aggies will have plenty of games nominated for awards.
Anyway, the new Leasure Suit Larry Games have excellent graphics and are very funny. I can’t recommend Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry highly enough.
I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.
I think we see a lot of new innovations in adventure games today, even if it’s a pixel art..
You’re a cagey one aren’t you.
“Going on means going far - Going far means returning”
horrible “pixel art” wannabes
How many of them have you played, may I ask?
It’s interesting that so many people view retro games this way. Like that kind of art is just a lazy choice and inferior to hi-res art.
If you read the interview with the Darkside Detective developers on the main page, they experimented with high resolution art but said it didn’t feel right. The art style was a deliberate choice they put a lot of thought into. I don’t think that comes across until you’ve played the game. The screenshots aren’t eye candy, they only work in unison with the experience of playing the game.
I don’t mean to denigrate any player’s choice - if you don’t like retro art, you don’t like it. I just think it’s sometimes misunderstood why this art style is used. After all, there are equally as many “horrible” casual games which simply look beautiful for the sake of looking beautiful without any thought as to how the art style fits in with the game itself.
I’m not sure I buy it being an ‘artistic choice’. I don’t mind ‘pixel art’ if the story is good but I think it’s there for budgetry reasons rather than any other reason.
They are not even close to being dead compared to 2004 or so (when the industry said adventure games were dead) but I really question the efforts of classic adventure game devs to attract new fans. Are Thimbleweed Park and The Darkside Detective pulling in new people or pooling from the same cluster of fans who are getting oooooooooooooold?
The games are fine but maybe I’m asking for a bit more showmanship. I see there’s always talk around more watered down adventures like Life is Strange and Tacoma and I’m sure there’s a way to show these younger gamers that they don’t know what they’re missing.
horrible “pixel art” wannabes
How many of them have you played, may I ask?
It’s interesting that so many people view retro games this way. Like that kind of art is just a lazy choice and inferior to hi-res art.
If you read the interview with the Darkside Detective developers on the main page, they experimented with high resolution art but said it didn’t feel right. The art style was a deliberate choice they put a lot of thought into. I don’t think that comes across until you’ve played the game. The screenshots aren’t eye candy, they only work in unison with the experience of playing the game.
I don’t mean to denigrate any player’s choice - if you don’t like retro art, you don’t like it. I just think it’s sometimes misunderstood why this art style is used. After all, there are equally as many “horrible” casual games which simply look beautiful for the sake of looking beautiful without any thought as to how the art style fits in with the game itself.
I’m not sure I buy it being an ‘artistic choice’. I don’t mind ‘pixel art’ if the story is good but I think it’s there for budgetry reasons rather than any other reason.
I think that is partly true. It’s going to be impossible for some smaller developers to play around with higher resolutions initially. With DD and Thimbleweed Park it’s clear they had the ability and budget to go above pixel art, and chose not to. TP especially wouldn’t have made sense as a game with any other graphic style.
I found this part of the DD interview interesting.
Paul: The original style was what we really nailed early on in the process. It’s a really low-res style mixed with HD lighting on top of that. It was mostly because it was a game jam game, so we had eight hours to do the initial game. More detail just couldn’t be done; my base resolution was very small, original characters being like 30 pixels by 10. It was kind of a quick style to get a very flat background, and as soon as I started adding a few more bits and pieces of light and colour to the background, I felt I had this ‘aha’ moment where the atmosphere was there. I really liked the art style. Then when we posted it online, we got a lot of positive reactions to the style. It was interesting that people kept saying it looked like the old LucasArts games; if you put them side-by-side they wouldn’t stack up at all. The old LucasArts stuff has much more character and scene detail, but I’ll take the compliment.
We debated it for a while, changing the art style with a higher resolution. Did a few tests with higher resolution and character faces and all that. But it felt wrong to change it. We kept getting positive reactions to the style; people loved the art. The game evolved into essentially being an icon of what adventure games looked like, rather than the exact style of those adventure games. The characters having no faces put a few people off, but they are only three dots so there is really no space anyway.
Another adventure game, released in 2017, you could take a look at is The Wardrobe.
I don’t recommend it. One of the dumbest games I played recently.
I think it became a “not enough profitable kind of game” I love adventure games, like all of you and I really miss the genre, so I decided to make one myself. At the beginning of the year, I got a team of 6 people and started working in this point and click 2D graphic adventure called “3 Minutes to Midnight” and today we posted our first screenshot in twitter. The game will be released in Feb 2019.
Since you are all huge fans of the genere, I would love to know your opinion about it. If the genre is dead, LET’S BRING IT BACK!
I love the screenshot - please tell us more about your game! (That would be far more interesting than adding to the old worn-out discussion about whether adventure games are dead or not) 
That screenshot does look interesting.
I don’t think it’s dead at all. If anything, we’re seeing more and more of them now than since those days. The problem is, they’re not very profitable and as a result, I think we’ve seen devs that are the fans try a new direction with the genre. Telltale’s The Walking Dead, life is Strange, OxenFree, The Cave, Dreamfall Chapters, horror games, King’s Quest etc all tried mashing other genres in there and some worked, some didn’t.
What does sort of bother me about the new pickings in the bread and butter adventure games, is the lack of good writers now. This genre is just sitting there for a writer to really have fun with the story and not resort to “they fight” like in many other game genre’s, but a lot of them seem to be very bland now.
Also, I don’t understand the desire to bring back bad puzzle design in these “classic” Adventure games. It’s what pushed the genre into the shadows in the first place I feel.
classic games are more like a cult this now, do you know hard rock? same thing!
I don`t know why but every time I see a sentence that has “adventure games” and “dead” in it my eyes start rolling back so hard my head hurts.
Women come and go… a highscore lasts forever
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