From Monkey Island to Moon Logic - How Adventure Games Broke My Heart and Won It Back

You know what’s funny about being a Sega kid? Everyone assumes I only played fast-paced action games, but the truth is I spent just as much time clicking through adventure games on our family PC. Yeah, I had my Genesis hooked up to the TV in the living room, but upstairs in the computer room, that’s where the real magic happened. Christmas 1990 – I’m eight years old, already obsessed with my Master System, when my parents surprised me with The Secret of Monkey Island. Five floppy disks of pure adventure gaming gold.

I can still hear those drives clicking and whirring as the game installed. VGA graphics that looked incredible compared to anything I’d seen, writing that made me laugh out loud, puzzles that actually made sense most of the time. Guybrush Threepwood became as important to me as Sonic or Alex Kidd. Maybe more important, honestly, because while I could blast through Sonic in an hour, Monkey Island took me weeks to finish. Every screen was something to savor.

My friends thought I was weird for playing “slow games” when I could be racing around Green Hill Zone, but they didn’t get it. Adventure games weren’t slow – they were thoughtful. They made you work for every story beat, every joke, every revelation. When you finally solved a puzzle that had been stumping you for days, the satisfaction was better than any boss fight victory.

Sierra and LucasArts dominated my PC gaming life through middle school and high school. I loved both companies but man, they had completely different ideas about what players should endure. Sierra games were basically torture devices disguised as entertainment. King’s Quest V still gives me anxiety dreams – that abominable snowman, the desert maze, the cat puzzle that made no earthly sense. I learned to save every thirty seconds playing Sierra games because death lurked around every corner, usually in the most ridiculous ways possible.

LucasArts was the opposite. You couldn’t die in their games, which meant you could experiment freely. Try every item combination, click on everything, talk to everyone multiple times just to see all the dialogue. Day of the Tentacle became my obsession – I replayed it so many times I could recite most of the script from memory. My poor family had to listen to me doing Bernard’s voice constantly. Still do it sometimes when I’m grading papers and need a laugh.

Being an adventure game fan felt exclusive back then. These weren’t the games getting huge marketing pushes or magazine covers (except Myst, which was everywhere for a while). They were for people who cared more about clever writing than explosion effects, who’d rather solve a good puzzle than achieve a high score. I felt connected to these games in ways I never did with other genres. They were shaping how I thought about stories, about problem-solving, about humor.

Then the late ’90s happened and everything went to hell.

I watched my beloved genre die slowly, then all at once. 3D graphics were the new hotness, first-person shooters were printing money, and adventure games started feeling ancient. Publishers didn’t want to fund them anymore. The audience was shrinking. Even I was getting frustrated with some of the design choices – moon logic puzzles that required reading the developer’s mind rather than applying actual reasoning.

Gabriel Knight 3 basically killed the whole thing with that infamous cat hair mustache puzzle. If you’ve never experienced this monstrosity, consider yourself lucky. You had to make a fake mustache by combining cat hair, maple syrup, and masking tape, then use it as a disguise. Not just any cat hair – it had to be from one specific cat, and the solution made zero logical sense. This wasn’t clever puzzle design; it was sadism.

I remember walking through CompUSA around 2001, looking at their PC game section, and realizing adventure games had basically vanished. The shelves were full of shooters, strategy games, and RPGs, but the point-and-click adventures that had defined my gaming life? Gone. It felt personal, like losing a friend who’d been with me since childhood.

The next few years were rough. Occasionally some European developer would release a budget adventure game, usually with terrible voice acting and puzzles that made Gabriel Knight 3 look reasonable. I tried to stay interested but kept drifting toward other genres. Sometimes I’d revisit the classics through abandonware sites, but it wasn’t the same. The magic had died with the market.

But here’s the thing about adventure games – they’re naturally built around comebacks and resurrections. Just when everything seems hopeless, the hero finds a way to save the day.

Telltale Games started the revival in 2005 with their episodic Sam & Max series. Former LucasArts developers doing what LucasArts wouldn’t do anymore – making actual adventure games that honored the originals while updating them for modern audiences. I was skeptical as hell at first. Could they really capture what made Sam & Max Hit the Road special? Turns out, mostly yes. The writing was sharp, the characters felt right, and the episodic format actually worked better than I expected.

Their real breakthrough came with The Walking Dead in 2012. This wasn’t traditional inventory puzzles and pixel hunting – it was about character relationships and impossible moral choices. I played through the entire first season over one weekend and cried like a baby at the ending. My wife found me sobbing over a video game and didn’t even mock me, which shows how powerful that story was.

Meanwhile, indie developers were keeping the classic formula alive. Games like Machinarium and the Blackwell series proved you could make traditional adventure games that didn’t hate their players. Logical puzzles, engaging stories, beautiful art – everything the genre had always done well, without the moon logic that drove everyone away.

Steam changed everything too. Adventure games didn’t need shelf space at Best Buy anymore; they just needed to find their audience online. And we were there, waiting. I discovered so many great indie adventures through Steam recommendations and word-of-mouth from other fans who couldn’t believe the genre was coming back.

The crowdfunding explosion brought back the old masters. When Tim Schafer launched his Kickstarter for Broken Age, I backed it immediately. So did 87,000 other people, raising over three million dollars. The game had issues, but playing it felt like reconnecting with childhood friends. Ron Gilbert came back with Thimbleweed Park. Jane Jensen returned to Gabriel Knight. Even King’s Quest got a modern reboot that didn’t suck.

What amazes me about modern adventure games is how they’ve fixed the genre’s worst problems without losing what made it special. Moon logic is mostly gone – puzzles actually make sense now. Auto-save means no more losing hours of progress because you forgot to save before a death trap. Built-in hint systems help when you’re stuck without forcing you to alt-tab to GameFAQs and break the immersion.

I recently played Disco Elysium and had my mind completely blown. It’s like someone took the best parts of adventure games and RPGs, added incredible writing and a unique art style, then created something that felt both nostalgic and revolutionary. This is what evolution looks like when it’s done right.

Even VR has given adventure games new life. The Room VR took those mobile puzzle box games and made them feel magical in virtual reality. There’s something incredible about physically manipulating objects and solving puzzles in three-dimensional space that makes you feel like you’re actually inside these game worlds.

The best part about this resurrection is that adventure games have kept their greatest strength – storytelling that respects your intelligence and your time. In an era of live service games designed to keep you playing forever, there’s something refreshing about experiences with actual endings. Stories that want to tell you something specific rather than just extract maximum engagement metrics from your eyeballs.

Sometimes I wonder what my eight-year-old self would think of today’s adventure game scene. The kid who spent weeks exploring Mêlée Island and learning insult sword-fighting. I think he’d be confused by some of the interface changes and new mechanics, but absolutely thrilled that the heart of what made these games special is still there. That sense of discovery, of gradually unraveling mysteries, of laughing at genuinely funny writing – none of that has changed.

My own kids have played some modern adventure games with me. My daughter loves Oxenfree for its supernatural mystery and dialogue system. My son bounced off most of them because they require too much thinking and not enough button mashing, but he did finish Firewatch and admitted it was “pretty good.” Small victories.

I use adventure games as teaching tools now too. Nothing illustrates cause and effect like a good adventure game puzzle. Environmental storytelling, character development, narrative structure – these games are masterclasses in interactive fiction. Plus, they’re one of the few game genres I can discuss in class without worrying about violence or inappropriate content.

Adventure games never really died – they just went on their own hero’s journey. Faced trials, learned from failures, evolved into something stronger. Which is perfectly fitting for a genre that’s always been about the story rather than the score. They broke my heart when they disappeared, but winning it back has been one of the best gaming surprises of my adult life.

Joe

Joe’s a history teacher who treats the console wars like actual history. A lifelong Sega devotee from Phoenix, he writes with passion, humor, and lingering heartbreak over the Dreamcast. Expect strong opinions, bad puns, and plenty of “blast processing.”