Latest Adventure Games News - PC page 55

Ever since Phoenix Wright and Professor Layton arrived on western shores, there's been an appetite for Japanese-styled visual novel adventures. Soon another crimefighting duo will join their iconic predecessors in Mediatonic's upcoming "Hollywood whodunnit" Murder By Numbers. 

Life and love are many things – thrilling, chaotic, inspiring, devastating – but they're never predictable or tidy. A true love story inspires emotions that range everywhere from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows in one big, jumbled mess. Attempting to make sense of it all for one young woman is When the Past Was Around, an upcoming point-and-click adventure from the creator of She the Light Bearer. 

Is there anything more guaranteed to lead to trouble than an unexpected inheritance from a deceased relative in an adventure game? It's a truism that will soon prove accurate once again in indie developer Fotros Games' upcoming point-and-click title, Lantern. 

No one disputes that "war is hell" but usually that axiom refers to the soldiers engaging in combat. But there are many more civilian victims of war as well, one of whom is the grandmother of indie developer Bob De Schutter of Lifelong Games, who recently released Brukel to share her harrowing tales of World War II.

Inspiration can come from the most unexpected places, as three former school friends from Slovenia found out in 2015 when a random Facebook photo struck a chord and provided the foundation for their debut design project. That game is the upcoming PlanetRealm, and over the course of the intervening years it has grown into a full-fledged 3D adventure packed with puzzles, hidden treasure, and little planets – lots of little planets.

There used to be a time when adventure games and RPGs played in their own separate corners, rarely crossing paths until the likes of Quest for Glory came along to blur the line between them. Indie developer Steven DiLeo of Adventurers Guild Entertainment is the latest to merge the two genres with his newly-released Phoenix Tales, a fantasy adventure with some light turn-based combat that attempts to emulate the genre hybrid classics of the 1990s.

Beauty may only be skin deep, but indie developer stigmamax's newly-rereleased Cutish has plenty of brains to go with its good looks.

There's nothing funnier than a good death... in adventure games, that is. Especially when that death is yours, and there are myriad ways to die, as in indie developer Giordano Pacifico's newly-released Witch Loraine's Death Game.

All children are sometimes forced to stifle expression of negative feelings, but what of those unable to do anything else no matter how grim their circumstances? This is the rather bleak premise of the upcoming My Beautiful Paper Smile, a four-part adventure set to debut early next year.

As with so many genre hybrids these days, it's getting harder to tell when a platformer ends and an adventure game begins, or vice versa. One such game that promises to blur the lines even further is the upcoming Onirike, by indie Spanish developer DevilishGames.

The phrase "perception is reality" isn't really meant to be taken literally, except in the case of SUPERLIMINAL, the upcoming first-person environmental puzzler by Pillow Castle Games. 

In their debut adventure, EQ Studios sent players into an entire abandoned town to solve the mystery of The Painscreek Killings. For an encore, there are more mysteries to solve without ever leaving home in the upcoming Scene Investigators.

You know you're in for a hard day when the best part about it is dying. Such will be the case for the back-from-the-dead protagonist of Powerhoof's upcoming retro-styled thriller, The Drifter.

Experienced gamers know all the unwritten rules of gaming to follow by now...or do they? Putting that notion to the test is Aetheric Games' recently-rereleased Interactivity: The Interactive Experience.

For many the end of the world is on its way, and for some it's already here. In other circumstances that would be a dire pronouncement, but not when it relates to Stela, a new cinematic puzzle-platformer available now for Xbox One, iOS and Apple TV, and still to come on PC.