Many gamers have a soft spot for point-and-click adventure games. This type of game’s focus tends to be on the story, the puzzles, and the characters. Because story is so central, the narratives of these games are often strong and very engaging. Two examples of this can be seen in the LucasArts games of the ’90s (and how they’ve persisted in public memory) and in the kind of renaissance we’re currently in where many creators are making what might be seen as massively single-player games with a point-and-click interface and unforgettable character design.
The first point-and-click adventure game I ever played was Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge when I was a kid. I was immediately drawn in. The funny dialogue, the eccentric and cool characters, and the persistent way they trouble strange, tropical islands filled me with an adventurous spirit. And Guybrush Threepwood, the series’ infinitely curious and bumbling wannabe pirate, left on his own to negotiate all the traps, snares, and puzzles he runs across, was impossible not to sympathize with and cheer on.
The golden age of point-and-click adventure games is considered by many to be the late 1980s to the early 1990s. During this time, companies like LucasArts and Sierra On-Line made the games that gave the genre its good reputation and made it seem fun. Adventure games of this era are still looked back upon fondly and continue to be discussed by people who love games especially people who love game design, because they’re considered “good” in just about every respect an interactive work of fiction can be good. Games that stand the test of time are good both while you’re clicking through them and afterward when you consider what you’ve done and the choices you’ve made.
This era was electrified by the appearance of LucasArts and their development of very popular iconic adventure games, which have become eternal favorites. The Secret of Monkey Island was the defining example of these games. In 1990, The Secret of Monkey Island was released to the masses. In The Secret of Monkey Island, the player becomes the main character; Guybrush Threepwood is the bumbling, often clueless, cohort; but he is no less, a truly lovable person. His intent is to become a mighty pirate; this is no Ordinary World. My path in college was filled with countless hours when I wouldn’t dare to do anything but keep my head facedown over a puzzle in the game, how was I to figure out what to do next?
LucasArts’ Day of the Tentacle is another game that makes one remember the company in a good light. It is a sort of adventure game where one mostly uses time to one’s advantage, naturally so, since the main characters are meant to be working inside a huge, time-altering machine that exists within a freaky mansion once occupied by a benignly nutty scientist. The aforementioned machine was accidentally activated, and talk about a “tomorrow schedule” had to be skipped when the events of yesterday happened again. The only trouble was that the happenings of tomorrow were (and still are) likely to lead to catastrophic consequences, rather in the way of things not being put right in the house that Jack built.
Another major player contributing to the golden age of point-and-click adventure games was Sierra On-Line. The brainchild of Roberta Williams was the King’s Quest series, hailed as a masterpiece of the genre, particularly its sixth installment, King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow.
This 1992 game was memorable for its rich narrative, challenging players to pay close attention to what was happening in the game world. In the Fifties-style red-and-white-checkered Cliffs of Id, or in the Isle of the Mists looking like something out of Pierre “Clayfighter” Butor’s surreal imagination, or in the beautifully drawn Realm of the Dead, adventure gamers were in for countless treats. And in solving the clearly signposted creative and diabolical puzzles leading up to the climactic decision point, “KQ” players needed the kind of smarts that the realm of interactive fiction asked of its audience.
Playing “Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers” is an experience that lingers in memory. This 1993 release from Sierra is yet another of its seminal works that brought the medium of interactive storytelling to a higher level. A story of maturity filled with a double embrace of murder mystery and the occult, its atmospheric narrative still holds us in its thrall. Knight is a sardonic southern gentleman, a writer with enough struggle that you can taste his chagrin. Throw in a history of family secrets that are going to get him killed; these first-rate, mentally engaging puzzles; and awesome “Syd Field” screenwriting … well, you have my attention.
Point-and-click adventure games enchant players with their well-constructed environments that brim with engrossing tales and demandingly clever brainteasers to solve. If you’s another sort of game player, you might speak lovingly of the rapidly paced, action-oriented thrills to be had in other sorts of games. But the pleasures and rewards of these games are different. They’re not thrilling like Top Gun; instead, they’re the musty, old pleasures of a whodunit, solved at a much slower and more thoughtful pace.
What really draws people to these games is the strong element of storytelling. Click-and-point adventure games are almost like interactive novels. They feature narratives with well-developed characters and intricate plots.
Apart from just being really entertaining and holding the player’s attention, these games do a couple of other things. One important aspect is the structure of the game, which remains almost the same regardless of which title you’re playing.
The Longest Journey, which came out in 1999 from Funcom, succeeds with a narrative unmatched by most in the pantheon of video-game storytelling. The plot follows art student April Ryan as she learns that she can move between parallel worlds. The narrative is multilayered and hugely satisfying, probing deep into imagined universes for both personal dilemmas and metaphysical questions, with a game much longer than the title suggests. The dialogue is well-written: characters talk like real people, not video-game avatars. Ryan’s journey is one of the most engaging in this medium, making this a title to remember.
The narrative prowess of the adventure game genre shines bright in this title. This authorial lucidity is an essential part of the appeal of adventure games. In much the same way that films and television episodes have precisely timed narrative beats to keep audiences hooked, adventure games structure their stories around puzzles and their solutions. Grim Fandango tells its story not through cutscenes (animated interludes that advance the story, often non-interactively, between levels or chunks of gameplay), as many games of its time did, but rather through the give-and-take between the game’s characters, and between the characters and the game’s highly atmospheric and beautifully realized settings.
Another major attraction of point-and-click adventure games is their puzzles. These games almost always have some sort of intricate, challenging puzzle that requires the player to really stretch their imagination and be observant of their environs. Solving these complex issues always feels extremely rewarding—after all, if there’s one thing nerds of any stripe like, it’s making our big brains feel useful. And, as a rule, the puzzles in these games are incredibly fair. If you can’t solve a puzzle, it’s almost never because the puzzle is poorly designed or because you as a player are supposed to have some sort of specific knowledge that you couldn’t possibly be expected to have.
An especially memorable conundrum I faced was in Myst, a game that came out in 1993. That one takes place on an island, and the player is basically a digital-age archaeologist, solving a sequence of puzzles left behind in a kind of holographic universe. They are not always very friendly puzzles. The challenge is that it is a world composed almost entirely of machinations, and figuring out how those work is not always easy; for instance, in a rather vexing moment involving a rocket hidden under a trapdoor, the player must decipher a coded sequence in order to figure out how to even reveal the first steps of the puzzle.
The Witness is a 2016 video game developed by Jonathan Blow, already known for his previous title, Braid, as well as his controversial comments and opinions about video games as an art form. The Witness is, unsurprisingly, a video game; its primary medium of expression is the puzzles. So, encountering puzzles reveals “plot twists” and discovers what is really happening on an entirely mysterious island—all the while, a player continues to be intellectually “captivated” and intuitively “engaged.”-from Dubious Quality.
The point-and-click adventure genre was in the proverbial dumpster following the late ’90s and early 2000s. The world was becoming engrossed with games that were revolutionary at the time. Change was in the wind, and it was all too clear that people were growing out of the world that point-and-click adventures had cultivated. But unlike most gaming stories, this one has a happy ending. The genre is back, big-time. Indeed, as the work steadily kept coming in throughout the decades and with many classic franchises relaunching, sometimes with the same people who used to play the original games, the genre is alive and enticing again in the modern age.
Point-and-click adventure games are seeing a comeback, and that serves my ’90s teenage self just right. But my current self also benefits. Now I can investigate the genre’s rebirth in a scholarly enough manner to nullify any guilt I might feel about wasting time on such digital diversions. During the last decade, these sorts of amusements, that is, interacting with a graphic narrative by way of pointing and clicking—have reemerged as a pastime worth both time and (I have to say it) money.
The adventure game genre is more alive than ever, and one of the most successful recent examples of this genre’s revival is Broken Age, developed by Double Fine Productions. Funded by a highly successful Kickstarter campaign, the game amassed well over $3 million from backers who wanted to see a fresh point-and-click adventure game fashioned by the creative talents often associated with this genre, in particular lead designer Tim Schafer—himself known for prior classics of the genre like Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle. This remastered, reimagined, and recreated version of the classic adventure game with the familiar and foreign narrative structure paired with absurdly beautiful and original art was bound for more than just simple nostalgia.
The point-and-click adventure genre has seen something of a renaissance in recent years, and in my view at least, The Walking Dead is the game that looms largest among the reanimators. It’s stunningly well-done and expertly crafted, but it also unabashedly goes for the emotional jugular. It aims to make you cry and succeeds. It’s so agonizingly sad, and the torment is compounded by the fact that the player is compelled to make awful decisions before all is said and done; delightfully cheerful stuff, obviously. Yet for all the game’s merits, and it has many, it’s possible to screw up the international release and get folks in certain regions nice and irked.
