I remember the exact moment I fell in love with adventure games. It was Christmas 1990, and after weeks of dropping increasingly unsubtle hints, I unwrapped a copy of The Secret of Monkey Island for our family PC. I installed it that night, the 3.5-inch floppy disks clicking and whirring in the drive, and was immediately transported to a Caribbean island where a wannabe pirate named Guybrush Threepwood was about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. The colorful VGA graphics, the clever writing, the bizarre puzzles—I was hooked from the first insult sword-fighting lesson.
Adventure games defined my gaming adolescence. While my friends were mastering Mortal Kombat combos or speedrunning Sonic the Hedgehog, I was carefully drawing maps of the Underground Empire in Zork, deciphering the puzzles of Myst, and laughing out loud at Sam & Max Hit the Road. These games felt different from everything else on the market. They weren’t testing my reflexes or my ability to headshot enemies—they were challenging my brain, making me think laterally, and rewarding me with more story rather than just higher scores.
Sierra and LucasArts were my twin gods during this golden age. They had such different approaches, too. Sierra’s games—King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest—were often brutally unfair. One wrong step and you’d die in some comically tragic way, forcing you to reload (if you’d remembered to save, that is). I still have nightmares about that damn abominable snowman in King’s Quest V. Meanwhile, LucasArts took the more player-friendly approach where you couldn’t die, allowing you to experiment without fear. Both companies created iconic franchises that defined the point-and-click era, but they approached game design from completely different philosophies.
I was a LucasArts kid, personally. Something about their humor just clicked with me, and I appreciated not having to reload every five minutes because I’d forgotten to pick up some obscure item twenty screens back. Day of the Tentacle remains my favorite game of all time—a perfectly designed puzzle box where everything interconnects through time travel, wrapped in a Chuck Jones-inspired cartoon aesthetic. I replayed it so many times I could quote most of the dialogue from memory, much to the annoyance of anyone unfortunate enough to be in the room while I was playing.
The thing about being an adventure game fan in the 90s was that you felt like you were part of a special club. These weren’t the games featured in TV commercials or plastered across magazine covers (with some exceptions, like Myst). They were smart, weird, and distinct—games for people who valued story and puzzle-solving over spectacle and action. I felt a connection to these games that went beyond mere entertainment. They were shaping my sense of humor, my problem-solving skills, and even my understanding of narrative structure.
And then, suddenly, they were gone.
The decline happened gradually at first, then all at once. By the late 90s, the writing was on the wall. First-person shooters were the new hotness, with their bleeding-edge 3D graphics and adrenaline-pumping action. RPGs were evolving into more immersive experiences. And adventure games… well, they were starting to feel like relics from another era. The market was shrinking, budgets were getting cut, and publishers were increasingly unwilling to take risks on a genre they perceived as dying.
The death knell came in the form of Gabriel Knight 3, Sierra’s ambitious but flawed 1999 adventure that contained what is perhaps the most notorious puzzle in gaming history. If you’ve played adventure games, you probably know the one I’m talking about: the infamous “cat hair mustache” puzzle. For the uninitiated, this puzzle required you to create a fake mustache by taking hair from a cat, molding it with syrup onto a piece of tape, then using it as a disguise. Oh, and the kicker? You had to specifically use YOUR cat’s hair, not any other cat hair in the game.
This exemplified what players had started calling “moon logic”—puzzles that followed no earthly reason or logic. You couldn’t deduce the solution through careful observation or clever thinking. You just had to try random combinations of items until something worked, or more likely, cave and look up the solution in a walkthrough. This frustrating design had always been part of adventure games to some degree, but as other genres were becoming more accessible and respecting players’ time, adventure games seemed stuck in their ways.
I remember being in a Computer City store around 2001, browsing the rapidly shrinking PC game section, and realizing there were almost no new adventure titles on the shelves. The genres that had dominated my gaming life for nearly a decade had seemingly vanished overnight. It felt like losing a friend.
The next several years were bleak for adventure game fans. The occasional title would appear—usually European-developed, low-budget affairs that catered to the niche audience still hungry for point-and-click experiences—but the glory days seemed well and truly over. I drifted to other genres, occasionally revisiting classics through abandonware sites or the rare CD-ROM compilation, but it wasn’t the same. The magic had faded.
Then something unexpected happened: adventure games refused to die. Like any good protagonist facing insurmountable odds, the genre found a way to survive and eventually thrive again, though in forms that both honored and reinvented the traditional formula.
The resurrection began in unlikely places. In 2005, a small company called Telltale Games—founded by former LucasArts employees—acquired the rights to Sam & Max and announced an episodic series continuing the adventures of the hyperkinetic lagomorph and his canine companion. I was skeptical at first. Could this possibly recapture what made the original special? To my delight, it did—mostly. The writing was sharp, the characters were true to form, and the bite-sized episodic format actually made sense for modern players with less time to commit to marathon gaming sessions.
Telltale’s approach—shorter, more narrative-focused adventures released episodically—proved to be a viable model. They went on to create games based on everything from Back to the Future to Game of Thrones, but their crowning achievement came with The Walking Dead in 2012. This wasn’t your traditional inventory-puzzle adventure; it focused instead on character relationships and moral choices with meaningful consequences. It was a revelation, showing how adventure game DNA could evolve into something that felt modern and relevant while still prioritizing story over action.
Meanwhile, the indie scene was becoming a haven for adventure game revival. Developers who had grown up loving the classics were creating new experiences that paid homage to the genre while addressing its most notorious flaws. Games like Machinarium offered wordless puzzling with consistently logical solutions. The Blackwell series delivered compelling supernatural mysteries with well-developed characters. Gemini Rue merged adventure game mechanics with a dystopian sci-fi narrative that would make Philip K. Dick proud.
I discovered many of these titles through digital distribution platforms like Steam, which solved one of the genre’s biggest historical problems: limited shelf space and retail support. These games didn’t need to compete for physical store real estate; they just needed to find their audience online. And they did, often through passionate word-of-mouth from players like me who couldn’t believe our beloved genre was making a comeback.
The adventure game revival also spawned interesting hybrid forms. Walking simulators like Gone Home and Firewatch stripped away most traditional puzzles in favor of environmental storytelling and exploration, yet retained the narrative focus that made adventure games special. These “adventure-adjacent” experiences often provoked debate about genre definitions—are they really adventure games?—but to me, they clearly shared the same DNA and goals: immersing players in a compelling story without testing their twitch reflexes.
Perhaps the most surprising development was the return of the old masters through crowdfunding. When Tim Schafer—the mind behind Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, and Day of the Tentacle—launched a Kickstarter for a new point-and-click adventure in 2012, I backed it immediately. So did over 87,000 other people, to the tune of $3.3 million. The resulting game, Broken Age, had its flaws, but playing it felt like reconnecting with an old friend. Other veterans followed: Ron Gilbert with Thimbleweed Park, the King’s Quest series with a modern reboot, and even Gabriel Knight designer Jane Jensen returned with new projects.
What strikes me about modern adventure games is how they’ve preserved what was special about the classics while thoughtfully addressing their shortcomings. Moon logic is largely gone, replaced by puzzles that challenge but don’t frustrate. Auto-saving means no more lost progress because you forgot to save before an unexpected death. Hint systems help players who get stuck without forcing them to break immersion by alt-tabbing to a walkthrough. These quality-of-life improvements have made the genre more accessible without sacrificing its essence.
The visual evolution has been fascinating too. Some modern adventures embrace pixel art nostalgia, others push cutting-edge 3D presentation, and some adopt stylized 2D aesthetics that would have been impossible in the 90s. I recently played Disco Elysium—perhaps the most ambitious evolution of adventure game ideas in recent years—and was blown away by how it merged CRPG elements with adventure game structures, all wrapped in an oil painting-inspired visual style and some of the best writing in gaming history.
Even VR has provided fertile ground for adventure game mechanics. Solving puzzles in three-dimensional space, manipulating virtual objects with your hands, and feeling truly present in these fictional worlds adds a new dimension to the adventure game experience. The Room VR took the popular mobile puzzle series and transformed it into one of the most compelling virtual reality experiences I’ve had, proving that adventure game DNA can thrive in cutting-edge technology.
What’s most heartening about the adventure game resurrection is how it’s managed to preserve the genre’s greatest strength: storytelling. In an era of live service games designed to keep players engaged indefinitely, there’s something refreshing about experiences with a beginning, middle, and end—games that respect your time and aim to tell a complete story rather than extract maximum engagement. Adventure games have always excelled at this, and their modern incarnations continue that tradition.
I sometimes wonder what my 12-year-old self, utterly entranced by The Secret of Monkey Island, would think of today’s adventure game landscape. I think he’d be both confused and delighted—confused by the evolution of interfaces and mechanics, but delighted that the heart of what made these games special remains intact. The tactile pleasure of solving a clever puzzle, the satisfaction of unraveling a mystery piece by piece, the joy of exploring interesting environments—these elements transcend specific implementations or technological eras.
For me, the death and resurrection of adventure games mirrors my own gaming journey. There was a period where I drifted away from the hobby, overwhelmed by demanding work schedules and adult responsibilities. When I returned, games had changed, but the fundamental appeal remained. Perhaps that’s why I find such comfort in modern adventure games; they’ve grown up alongside me, finding new ways to deliver familiar pleasures in a changed world.
Adventure games never really died—they just went on their own adventure, facing trials and transformations before emerging stronger than before. And that seems perfectly fitting for a genre that’s always been about the journey rather than the destination.
