The Random Adventure Game News Thread

[Modron]

Dontnod is giving away the entirety of Tell Me Why for the month of june again this year
store.steampowered.com/app/1180660/Tell_Me_Why/

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

How are the Nancy Drew games not traditional? Does "tradition" not apply to a style of game that's been made since the early 90s?

Perhaps they are, but when I think traditional, I think games where you can click look on something and you read a text box of what it looks like. The Nancy Drew games tend to instead just show you whatever it is you want to look at, like Myst. Needlessly pedantic, but some people are offended by the very existence of Myst, which might put a damper on their enjoyment of the Nancy Drew titles.

 

[Darkozric]

I thought this was vapourware

 

[Modron]

There are a number of still ongoing adventure fan games with over a decade of development under their belt like the Indiana Jones fan game Raiders of the Seven Cities of Gold.
https://raidersofthesevencities.com/
https://twitter.com/CitiesGold

 

[jfrisby]

 

[Jvegi]

Sry for spamming, it's a joke, but god damn, have you ever seen anything more adventure game like than this fucker pulling large objects out of his jacket?

 

[LESS T_T]

The Secrets of Jesus got released today.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1142230/The_Secrets_of_Jesus/

can you make jesus punch pontius pilate in the throat?

Bought this

The developer is back with a new game... now he challenges the Mouse lawyers...

Well yeah it's freeware but I doubt this will go well.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

On one hand, a lot of Lucasarts fan games have made it by unscathed, on the other hand, releasing it on Steam is flying a bit too close to the sun.

 

[Dexter]

Time for Random upcoming Adventure Game Demos again, look for "Point & Click": https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nextfest?tab=2

Installed these so far:




There's also Old Skies and Near Mage among others, but I'm not a fan of the protagonists/art style.

 

[Modron]

Nightmare Frames is Out

Their twitter has a number of further teasers: https://twitter.com/postmodernadv

Available on Steam and Itch.io:
https://postmodernadventures.itch.io/nightmare-frames

About This Game​

Alan Goldberg is a frustrated slasher movie screenwriter in the Hollywood of 1985 who feels his career is at a standstill, but his luck is about to change: Helen Westmore, an eccentric millionaire, will grant him anything he could wish for if he is able to find genius horror director Edward Keller's last, unpublished work, which is said to be the scariest film of all time.

Alan will find his way amongst B-films production companies, VFX workshops, religious cults, and a small haunted town called Serena, the dark reputation of which began when Keller was last seen there.

• Point & click adventure game solely based on inventory puzzles.
• An investigative thriller that gets darker as you progress into the story. From ambient horror to the gory depths of Hell.
• More than 80 playable locations, and 50 characters to interact with.
• Original soundtrack by synthwave musician Stefano Rossi.
• In Joe's Diner you'll be able to listen to SYNTHWAVE FM, where DJ Karen Johnson broadcasts licensed tracks by Heclysma, Decade Defector, Vincenzo Salvia and Self Delusion.
• By the author of award-winning Urban Witch Story and Billy Masters Was Right.

 

[Modron]

Has anyone played this? It's free and looks pretty good, might play it tonight:

The Second Book may or may not come out tomorrow:

 

[Infinitron]

After a break from writing about games, the Digital Antiquarian does Toonstruck: https://www.filfre.net/2022/06/toonstruck-or-a-case-study-in-the-death-of-adventure-games/

Then, as I noted at the beginning of this article, 1996 brought with it an unprecedentedly large lineup of ambitious, earnest, and expensive games of the Siliwood stripe, with some of them at least much more thoughtfully designed than anything Trilobyte had ever come up with. Nonetheless, as the year went by an alarming fact was more and more in evidence: this year’s crop of multimedia extravaganzas was not producing any towering hits to rival the likes of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective in 1992, The 7th Guest in 1993, Myst in 1994, or Phantasmagoria in 1995. Arguably the best year in history to be a player of graphic adventures, 1996 was also the year that broke the genre. Almost all of the big-budget adventure releases still to come from American publishers would owe their existence to corporate inertia, being projects that executives found easier to complete and hope for a miracle than to cancel outright and then try to explain the massive write-off to their shareholders — even if outright cancellation would have been better for their companies’ bottom lines. In short, by the beginning of 1997 only dreamers doubted that the real future of the gaming mainstream lay with the lineages of DOOM and Warcraft.

Before we rush to condemn the philistines who preferred such games to their higher-toned counterparts, we must acknowledge that their preferences had to do with more than sheer bloody-mindedness. First-person shooters and real-time-strategy games could be a heck of a lot of fun, and lent themselves very well to playing with others, whether gathered together in one room or, increasingly, over the Internet. The generally solitary pursuit of adventure gaming had no answer for this sort of boisterous bonding experience. And there was also an economic factor: an adventure was a once-and-done endeavor that might last a week or two at best, after which you had no recourse but to go out and buy another one. You could, on the other hand, spend literally years playing the likes of DOOM and Warcraft with your mates.

Then there is one final harsh reality to be faced: the fact is that the Sierra vision never came close to living up to its billing for the player. These games were never remotely like waking up in the starring role of a Hollywood film. Boosters like Ken Williams were thrilled to talk about interactive movies in the abstract, but these same people were notably vague about how their interactivity was actually supposed to work. They invested massively in Hollywood acting talent, in orchestral soundtracks, and in the best computer artists money could buy, while leaving the interactivity — the very thing that ostensibly set their creations apart — to muddle through on its own, one way or another.

Inevitably, then, the interactivity ended up taking the form of static puzzles, the bedrock of adventure games since the days when they had been presented all in text. The puzzle paradigm persisted into this brave new era simply because no one could proffer any other ideas about what the player should be doing that were both more compelling and technologically achievable. I hasten to add that some players really, genuinely love puzzles, love few things more than to work through an intricate web of them in order to make something happen; I include myself among this group. When puzzles are done right, they’re as satisfying and creatively valid as any other type of gameplay.

But here’s the rub: most people — perhaps even most gamers — really don’t like solving puzzles all that much at all. (These people are of course no better or worse than those who do — just different.) For the average Joe or Jane, playing one of these new-fangled interactive movies was like watching a conventional movie filmed on an ultra-low-budget, usually with terrible acting. And then, for the pièce de résistance, you were expected to solve a bunch of boring puzzles for the privilege of witnessing the underwhelming next scene. Who on earth wanted to do this after a hard day at the office?

All of which is to say that the stellar sales of Consulting Detective, The 7th Guest, Myst, and Phantasmagora were not quite the public validations of the concept of interactive movies that the industry chose to read them as. The reasons for these titles’ success were orthogonal to their merits as games, whatever the latter might have been. People bought them as technology demonstrations, to show off the new computers they had just purchased and to test out the CD-ROM drives they had just installed. They gawked at them for a while and then, satiated, planted themselves back in front of their televisions to spend their evenings as they always had. This was not, needless to say, a sustainable model for a mainstream gaming genre. By 1996, the days when the mere presence of human actors walking and/or talking on a computer monitor could wow even the technologically unsophisticated were fast waning. That left as customers only the comparatively tiny hardcore of buyers who had always played adventure games. They were thrilled by the diverse and sumptuous smorgasbord that was suddenly set before them — but the industry’s executives, looking at the latest sales numbers, most assuredly were not. Just like that, the era of Siliwood passed into history. One can only hope that all of the hardcore adventure fans enjoyed it while it lasted.

There does eventually come a point in Toonstruck, more than a few hours in, when you’ve unraveled the web of puzzles and assembled all twelve matched pairs that are required for the Cutifier. By now you feel like you’ve played a pretty complete game, and are expecting the end credits to start rolling soon. Instead the game pulls it’s next big trick on you: everything goes to hell in a hand basket and you find yourself in Count Nefarious’s dungeon, about to begin a second act whose presence was heretofore hinted at only by the presence of a second, as-yet unused CD in the game’s (real or virtual) box.

Most players agree that this unexpected second act is, for all the generosity demonstrated by the mere fact of its existence, considerably less enjoyable than the first. Your buddy Flux Wildly is gone, the environment darker and more constrained, and your necessary path through the plot more linear. It feels austere and lonely in contrast to what has come before — and not in a good way. Although the puzzle design remains solid enough, I imagine that this is the point where many players begin to succumb to the temptations of hints and walkthroughs. And it’s hard to blame them; the second act is the very definition of an anticlimax — almost a dramatic non sequitur in the way it throws the game out of its natural rhythm.

But a real ending — or at least a form of ending — does finally arrive. Drew Blanc defeats Count Nefarious and is returned to his own world. All seems well — until Flux Wildly contacts him again in the denouement to tell him that Nefarious really isn’t done away with just yet. Incredibly, this was once intended to mark the beginning of a third act, of four in total, all in the service of a parable about the creative process that the game we have only hints at. Laboring under their managers’ ultimatum to ship or else, the developers had to fall back on the forlorn hope of a surprise, sequel-justifying hit in the face of the marketplace headwinds that were blowing against the game. Jennifer McWilliams:

Toonstruck was meant to be a funny story about defeating some really weird bad guys, as it was when released, but originally it was also about defeating one’s own creative demons. It was a tribute to creative folks of all types, and was meant to offer encouragement to any of them that had lost their way. So, the second part of the game had Drew venturing into his own psyche, facing his fears (like a psychotically overeager dentist), living out his fantasies (like meeting his hero, Vincent van Gogh), and eventually finding a way to restore his creative spark.

It does sound intriguing on one level, but it also sounds like much, much too much for a game that already feels rather overstuffed. If the full conception had been brought to fruition, Toonstruck would have been absolutely massive, in the running for the biggest graphic adventure ever made. But whether its characters and puzzle mechanics could have supported the weight of so much content is another question. It seems that all or most of the animation necessary for acts three and four was created — more fruits of that $8 million budget — and this has occasionally led fans to dream of a hugely belated sequel. Yet it is highly doubtful whether any of the animation still exists, or for that matter whether the economics of using it make any more sense now than they did in the mid-1990s. Once all but completely forgotten, Toonstruck has enjoyed a revival of interest since it was put up for sale on digital storefronts some years ago. But only a small one: it would be a stretch to label it even a cult classic.

What we’re left with instead, then, is a fascinating exemplar of a bygone age; the fact that this game could only have appeared in the mid-1990s is a big part of its charm. Then, too, there’s a refreshing can-do spirit about it. Tasked with making something amazing, its creators did their honest best to achieve just that, on multiple levels. If the end result is imperfect in some fairly obvious ways, it never fails to be playable, which is more than can be said for many of its peers. Indeed, it remains well worth playing today for anyone who shivers with anticipation at the prospect of a pile of convoluted, deviously interconnected puzzles. Ditto for anyone who just wants to know what kind of game $8 million would buy you back in 1996.

 

[jfrisby]

Nightmare Frames is Out

Really enjoyed Nightmare Frames. Same devs as Urban Witch Story. Current reigning champs of writing ridiculously long and good hotspot descriptions imo. Puzzles are probably the weak point in this one (mixed), but its pretty long, ~8hrs. Great artwork.

 

[LESS T_T]

Garage: Bad Dream Adventure, a lost/obscure/cult Japanese adventure game originally released in 1999, gets a remastered release on Steam soon. This remaster was released on mobile stores last year.

 

[MRY]

Nightmare Frames is Out

Really enjoyed Nightmare Frames. Same devs as Urban Witch Story. Current reigning champs of writing ridiculously long and good hotspot descriptions imo. Puzzles are probably the weak point in this one (mixed), but its pretty long, ~8hrs. Great artwork.

I've heard nothing but good things about it.

 

[Jenkem]

Dreams in the Witch House is pretty good..

 

[Modron]

I told you.

 

[wishbonetail]

Nightmare Frames is Out

Really enjoyed Nightmare Frames. Same devs as Urban Witch Story. Current reigning champs of writing ridiculously long and good hotspot descriptions imo. Puzzles are probably the weak point in this one (mixed), but its pretty long, ~8hrs. Great artwork.

Nighmare Frames is a blast. Coming from the shitty Sundew i didn't expect much but was pleasantly suprised. It doesn't offer much in terms of puzzles, most of the obstacles introduced in a form of pixelhunting. Pixel art is mostly good. Soundtrack is awesome, synthwave i assume. Other than that writers clearly know how to write interesting engaging story and characters (contrary to Sundew. It was an admirable effort as a single-person project though).

 

[Modron]

Virtuaverse is free on GoG for the next 3 days make sure to get it.

 

[Darkozric]

Virtuaverse is free on GoG for the next 3 days make sure to get it.

Already have it but this is a cool gift nonetheless.

 

[WallaceChambers]

Fans of weeb adventure games rejoice, the day is upon us.

 

[bertram_tung]

Fans of weeb adventure games rejoice, the day is upon us.

Visual novels are not adventure games.

 

[Darkozric]

Fans of weeb adventure games rejoice, the day is upon us.

You should make a thread about visual novels and post your visual stories there.

 

[WallaceChambers]

Visual Novels actually are a subgenre of adventure games but AI: The Somnium Files isn't a visual novel anyway. It's a detective adventure game with more interactivity and puzzle solving than many modern western titles.

 

[Darkozric]

Visual Novels actually are a subgenre of adventure games

Who said that? Zoomers or twitter retardos? There's no such thing as adventure "subgenre". VN are just VN and that's it.