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The Random Adventure Game News Thread

jfrisby

Cipher
Patron
Joined
Mar 21, 2013
Messages
491
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Steam leak reveals popularity of adventure games
https://mixnmojo.com/news/Steam-leak-reveals-popularity-of-adventure-games
A recent leak in Valve's Steam API has allowed clever people to extract the number of players of particular games, for the first time ever. In an article published on technology site Ars Technica, precise player estimates for 13,000 titles have been shared. Of note are titles published by DoubleFine, TellTale and, of course, LucasArts.

Note: The list shows the number of people who have played a particular game since achievements were added to it (so older games that had achievements added later will have higher scores than shown). And crucially, the list does not show the number of owners (which will be higher than the players).

The Walking Dead - 2,846,244 players
Firewatch - 959,053
Game of Thrones - A Telltale Games Series - 598,965 players
Grim Fandango Remastered - 516,584
Broken Age - 419,666
Minecraft: Story Mode - A Telltale Games Series - 346,763
Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck's Revenge - 288,297
Batman - The Telltale Series - 272,720
The Cave - 271,663
Day of the Tentacle Remastered - 265,169
Stacking - 248,039
The Walking Dead: Michonne - A Telltale Miniseries - 197,450
Gemini Rue - 130,615
Batman: The Enemy Within - The Telltale Series - 80,154
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series - 69,783
The Blackwell Legacy - 79,474
Full Throttle Remastered - 61,757 players
Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards: Reloaded - 56,138
Blackwell Unbound (Blackwell 2) - 52,347
Blackwell Convergence (Blackwell 3) - 49,385
Blackwell Deception (Blackwell 4) - 46,844
The Shivah - 38,128
Blackwell Epiphany (Blackwell 5) - 20,146

Adding a couple more from the data file:

Primordia 83,704 (see also: http://www.wormwoodstudios.com/2018/04/primordia-sales-data.html)
Quest for Infamy 28,702
Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok 129,604
Deponia 743,347
Memoria 186,812
Silence 69,338
A New Beginning - Final Cut 108,523
A Golden Wake 10,117
Shardlight 11,451
Technobabylon 41,216
The Cat Lady 116,526
King's Quest 166,533
Thimbleweed Park 98,491
Machinarium 609,675
Kathy Rain 49,640
The Samaritan Paradox 22,104

edit:
Paradigm 13,467
Dropsy 59,822
The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 55,530
Void And Meddler 12,001
Snail Trek - Chapter 1: Intershellar 541
A Long Road Home 25,595 (?? see also: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...ed-food-go-buy-it.106074/page-11#post-5535100)
 
Last edited:

Rahdulan

Omnibus
Patron
Joined
Oct 26, 2012
Messages
5,105
There's way too much Telltale in top 10 and some remasters of old games. Kinda weird to see Broken Age and The Cave are only new releases up there.
 

Modron

Arcane
Joined
May 5, 2012
Messages
9,934
I am still surprised more people don't play heroine's quest, it's the best new adventure game outside of primordia and it's free.
 
Joined
May 8, 2018
Messages
3,535
I can't find anything on the Codex about this game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/542050/Forgotton_Anne/



Forgotton-Anne_20180506171642-960x472.jpg
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,232
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamer.com/snail-trek-is-a-charming-sierra-style-adventure-with-built-in-autocorrect/

Snail Trek is a Sierra-style adventure with modern twists, like autocorrect and autosave
How a thoughtfully crafted text parser can polish the ‘bad’ out of your nostalgic experience.

PC gamers, especially us old-timers, often raise the question, ‘Why don’t game developers make X anymore?’ The common answer is, ‘You only think you want X because you don’t remember how bad X was.’ While I’m all for modern games appealing to more people, I do remember how bad X was, when it comes to the quirks of old adventure games, and I still want it, anyway. Have you seen Stair Quest? It’s literally only treacherous staircases, Sierra-style sudden death, and a text parser for interacting with stairs. It’s great.

Sierra released King's Quest in 1983, and in 2018, game developers are still innovating on the text parser. Like Stair Quest, Snail Trek boldly takes a step further back in time than most games would dare, but it's not one big joke about the terrible instant deaths in old adventure games. Snail Trek is an authentic, Sierra-inspired adventure with thoughtfully crafted puzzles and a hilarious story. While he was revisiting an old project, designer/artist Phil Fortier realized there "might be an underserved niche market" for games with text parsers.

He was right: I am that audience, and Snail Trek is a delightfully clever throwback full of smart touches like autosuggest and autocorrect.

I initially observed ‘snial’ being autocorrected in the first of Snail Trek’s four chapters. I was typing fast. The opening is tense: On reaching the lettuce planet, the crew finds that their captain has disappeared, under highly suspicious circumstances, and there’s no way to send the ‘all green’ signal to their dying homeworld.

“I noticed, during playtesting, that a good third of ‘I don’t understand’ responses were caused by simple typos,” Fortier says. With the fate of all snailkind in my trembling hands, autocorrect is actually pretty great.

The parser also suggests words as you’re typing. Fortier says, “It works like a typical search engine or, more accurately, like a terminal command prompt.” Typing ‘look at let...’ might generate suggestions like ‘lettuce, letter, latch and leak.

“I was worried this could spoil puzzles, but the games' vocabulary is large enough that that’s not the case,” Fortier says. Certainly, I found suggestions included elusive synonyms for objects I already knew existed, but knowing extra words didn’t spoil anything for me.

When I typed ‘look’, expecting a description of the wider location, I realized the parser was reacting to my proximity to objects. Fortier explains, “The game understands where the player character is standing, which informs autosuggest results, or lets you omit a noun completely, so you can type ‘look’, ‘get’ or ‘open’ and the game knows you’re talking about the object in front of you.” As well as streamlining input significantly, I found this especially useful for when objects weren’t immediately recognisable against their backdrop, like a ladle or loose panel.

Many adventure games, past and present, expect the player to hunt for what they need in incidental clutter. I recall standing next to objects in Sierra games and typing, “What is that?” to no useful response. Without a point-and-click interface, and no way to reveal hotspots, this parser’s proximal responsiveness alleviates that old frustration well. This also allows for Fortier to make his art and interface feel authentic to 80s games while still making them more playable.

“Early Sierra games used the basic 16 colour EGA palette, then dithered any two together to give the appearance of more colours. Snail Trek’s palette is those 16 colours, plus all the combinations, but in pure form rather than being dithered," he says. "As with the text parser, it’s an attempt to stand out within a crowded market. It may turn people off, but the bright, limited palette catches the eye of anyone who played early adventure games.”

All the deaths, none of the dead ends

Like many early adventurers, I ate the pie in King’s Quest 5, rendering the game unfinishable. That was punishing. I loved it. Many didn’t. In Snail Trek, curiosity can result in sudden death, but there are no unforgiving dead ends like in Sierra's old games. I laughed when I died in Snail Trek, before remembering that I hadn’t saved. Luckily, the game had autosaved, just before I died.

Fortier says, “I'm a fan of death in adventure games, though I know some designers aren't. I've seen recent adventures go to ridiculous lengths to avoid killing the player. Having said this, I didn’t enjoy walking a fine path along a cliff/stairs in old games, although Stair Quest nicely parodies this. It temporarily changes the game from requiring thought to requiring dexterity. It’s also unrealistic, because a person wouldn’t generally fall off stairs. You can still die in my games, but it’s not quite so accidental.”

Fortier is thoughtful about many aspects of the adventure genre. Snail Trek's puzzles are better than the ones I remember from the 80s. He referenced Ron Gilbert’s puzzle dependency charts as a way to visualise choke points and player agency, and always wanted to have multiple, clear goals to occupy the player at any one time. “I put clues into the environment, descriptions of items, or in the game's responses to doing the ‘wrong’ things,” he says.

I particularly liked how the scope for location and story evolved over Snail Trek's four episodes. Although you’re initially limited to the ship, the game grows incrementally, with all areas remaining involved. Towards the end of Chapter 3, I realized I knew the solution to a puzzle because it was a variation on something I’d solved in Chapter 2. I also recalled a sudden death I’d experienced in one chapter, knowing how to use it to my advantage later.

After talking about the design of Snail Trek, I had to ask: Why snails?

“Some people think anthropomorphized snails are cute," Fortier says. "Also, a walk cycle (glide cycle) is very easy to animate.” Although Fortier speaks modestly about his storytelling, I found the narrative well-structured, funny, evocative, and occasionally dark, despite being all about snails.

“Originally, the game was going to take place in a garden, with the snails trying to eat yummy plants. The gardener is trying to grow food and wants to keep the snails out. Who is the real bad guy? Then I thought, everything is better in space!”

It’s hard to explain why, without spoilers, but this proves to be true: Snail Trek, like most things, is better in space. Fortier is now working on a larger adventure with the working title Cascade Quest.

Although currently planning for a similar text parser, Fortier says, “I'm experimenting with offering a point-and-click interface for Cascade Quest, too. It mostly takes place in the wilderness and you’re a non-hero who gets caught up in something bigger than yourself. I'm trying to figure out how much point-and-click would expand my audience and make it easier to localize to other languages, as well as if it takes anything away from the text parser experience.”

Either way, Snail Trek proves that at least some of us do want more genuinely nostalgic games, especially with a smart-parser, autosave and a distinct lack of stairs, to smooth over those bits of design that haven't aged well after 30 years. The Snail Trek Collection is a steal at $3. I loved Princess Rosella, of King’s Quest, when I was a kid. I think I love the hopeful child snail in Snail Trek and her hysterical parents even more. Don’t delay: her survival depends on your ability to type words (at least semi-accurately).
 

bertram_tung

Arcane
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Joined
Jul 6, 2012
Messages
1,254
Location
Sunco Gasoline Facility
Insert Title Here
https://catmic.itch.io/return-of-the-tentacle

"Return of the Tentacle - Prologue" is a fan project and the unofficial sequel to the iconic adventure game "Day of the Tentacle". Purple Tentacle is back and tries to conquer the world and enslave humanity once more. The three friends Bernard, Laverne and Hoagie make their way back to the mansion of the mad scientist Dr. Fred – time travel should help saving the world.

Hunt down megalomaniacal Tentacles, have bizarre conversations and solve crazy puzzles. Bernard, Hoagie and Laverne roam hand-drawn locations filled with elaborately animated characters and atmospheric music and sounds. We have done everything possible in order to capture the atmosphere and the humor of the old classic and carry it into the 21st Century.

Control the characters just like in the good old 2D adventure game era with your mouse. A modern interface awaits! Apart from familiar faces of the original game, you will also encounter guest appearances from characters that belong in other games.

get it before its shut down

Cool, reminds me of this, which I have lost hope of ever seeing completed, since there hasn't been an update in over a year now:

https://www.night-of-the-meteor.de/en/news.html
 

bertram_tung

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jul 6, 2012
Messages
1,254
Location
Sunco Gasoline Facility
Insert Title Here
https://catmic.itch.io/return-of-the-tentacle

"Return of the Tentacle - Prologue" is a fan project and the unofficial sequel to the iconic adventure game "Day of the Tentacle". Purple Tentacle is back and tries to conquer the world and enslave humanity once more. The three friends Bernard, Laverne and Hoagie make their way back to the mansion of the mad scientist Dr. Fred – time travel should help saving the world.

Hunt down megalomaniacal Tentacles, have bizarre conversations and solve crazy puzzles. Bernard, Hoagie and Laverne roam hand-drawn locations filled with elaborately animated characters and atmospheric music and sounds. We have done everything possible in order to capture the atmosphere and the humor of the old classic and carry it into the 21st Century.

Control the characters just like in the good old 2D adventure game era with your mouse. A modern interface awaits! Apart from familiar faces of the original game, you will also encounter guest appearances from characters that belong in other games.

get it before its shut down

Cool, reminds me of this, which I have lost hope of ever seeing completed, since there hasn't been an update in over a year now:

https://www.night-of-the-meteor.de/en/news.html


funny enough, the game oasis789 posted has a reference to the game in the link i posted


by the way i finally got around to playing return of the tentacle and it is actually pretty impressive for a free little amateur demo
 
Joined
May 8, 2018
Messages
3,535


Close to the Sun casts players back to the height of Nikola Tesla’s career in the late 1890s, charging them with boarding a mysterious ship complex created by the man himself to bring the greatest minds of the world together in an alternative version of history.

Though his various scientific breakthroughs have, even at this early stage, had a major impact on the rest of the world, it quickly becomes apparent that something, somewhere on this ship has gone disastrously wrong, and history is not playing out as it should. Players take on the role of Rose, a young journalist searching for her sister in this first-person horror adventure, with Close to the Sun’s water-laden world offering no way of escape and no easy answers to the riddles aplenty therein.

Key Features
  • First-person horror adventure where survival is the order of the day.
  • Problem solving in order to progress the story: Just what happened on board Tesla’s ship?
  • Danger aplenty as Rose pieces together just what killed most on board despite having no real means to defend herself.
  • Teamwork with a yet-to-be-revealed ally who helps Rose navigate her way through the ship’s Art Deco halls.
  • Nerve inducing exploration – defenseless and weaponless, the keys to Rose’s survival are running, hiding, and quick thinking.

https://gematsu.com/2018/07/close-to-the-sun-to-be-released-for-ps4-xbox-one-and-pc-in-q1-2019

corridor_concept_06.jpg
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka with Love, " satirical point-and-click adventure about a Western journalist visiting the communist regime of Matryoshka for the first time", from Artifex Mundi:



ss_49ac7d6e6cc8d337b3a87197155e1eb3a4625a85.600x338.jpg


ss_b9c27973840cbcdbd0488ee5a9e11ba32c3d336e.600x338.jpg




“Our glorious country of Matryoshka has invited a representative of the Western media to witness the glory of communism firsthand. The lucky journalist will be the first ever person to bask in the light of merciless merciful Leader, who is the embodiment of all that is good as well as having the best-looking stash in history. The journalist will explore our worthless wealthy country and political realm by solving puzzles and minigames to understand the depth of the megalomania the depths of magnanimity of our fearless Leader. The sponsored visit also includes an interrogation a meeting with our Minister of Propaganda Information, Vlad, whose job is very cruel crucial to our country. So, without further ado, stay away from welcome to Matryoshka!”

Signed: the Department Of Propaganda Information
--

Irony Curtain is a satirical point-and-click adventure about a Western journalist visiting the communist regime of Matryoshka for the first time. Immerse yourself in slapstick humor that ridicules dictatorship accompanied by hand-drawn, stylized art and all the grandeur and sharpness that 4K allows! Dive into a brilliant story full of unforeseen twists and turns, take a look behind the Iron Curtain, and discover the bizarre secrets of Matryoshka!

Prepare For
  • 22 hand-painted locations that look surprisingly better than their original counterparts.
  • 9 postulates introduced during the first Matryoshkan Revolution that nobody remembers or cares about.
  • 170 black market items – you really won't know what to do with some of them!
  • A 5-year plan that no one ever hoped to achieve, and neither should you.
  • 1,951 jokes punishable by political imprisonment.
 
Joined
May 8, 2018
Messages
3,535
https://store.steampowered.com/app/757300/Trberbrook__A_Nerd_Saves_the_World/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/591630/Candleman_The_Complete_Journey/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/868580/Arkhangel_The_House_of_the_Seven_Stars/



Welcome to Mayonez!

Mayonez is a dark comedy adventure RPG, set in the fictional industrial town of Mayonez.

tumblr_inline_pcfnzuZH1R1rjpl3s_1280.jpg



Story and Gameplay

You find yourself in the dilapidated industrial town of Mayonez, where you ended up unexpectedly after being used to a comfortable life in the West. Being unhappy with the current situation, you seek your way to the glorious leader’s office. The waiting list is long, but some citizens are willing to hand you their ticket in exchange for help.

tumblr_inline_pcfnvcFGcg1rjpl3s_500.gif

These residents all have unique personalities that enrich Mayonez and make it slightly more alive. You may befriend them or betray them and sway public opinion of both yourself and the regime.

Characters are almost always eager to talk about the latest village scandals and ask for free help - sending you on quests! Quests can have different outcomes depending on your choices. You can learn new skills through our small RPG system that affects your dialogue choices, making every playthrough a little bit different.

tumblr_inline_pcfnyhqSlL1rjpl3s_500.gif

The quests will send you through a non-linear story, with multiple locations such as the city, forest and farms that are always open to explore freely.


Slav life

tumblr_inline_pcfo1loHtC1rjpl3s_500.gif

As the focus is noticeably on Slavic culture, we’ve done a lot of research not just on modern life in Slavic countries, but also traditional customs and folklore. We find that it’s a highly underrepresented group of people that’s barely made itself known globally, so we hope to bring it a bit more attention.

In this world, reality and mythology are closely intertwined. Among regular folk lurk various well-known figures, such as Baba Yaga and Slavic gods.

Thanks for having a look!

We’ll be updating this blog as much as we can, as well as other stuff:

Facebook: @tinymold

Twitter: @TinyMold

Steam
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...and_interactive_fiction_author_Stu_Galley.php

stu.jpg


Obituary: Game programmer, designer, and interactive fiction author Stu Galley

Celebrated game programmer, designer, and interactive fiction author Stu Galley has passed away.

News of Galley's passing has been circulating on social media, where fans and colleagues have been paying tribute to his life and work.

Galley was perhaps best known for creating some notable interactive fiction titles during his time as a senior game designer at Infocom.

He was the driving force behind popular games like Moonmist, Seastalker, and The Witness, the latter of which won multiple awards including the 'best computer game of the year' accolade from Electronic Games magazine.

After Infocom was acquired and eventually shut down by Activision, Galley left the company for pastures new, and began working as a sales system analyst for Thinking Machines Corporation before eventually joining MIT as a systems engineer.

When asked whether or not he enjoyed his job in a 1986 interview with Zzap! magazine, Galley responded with a memorable quote that highlights the pioneering work he was doing at the time.

"Yes, yes I do," he replied. "It's funny, it's almost like a dream fulfilled but up until a few years ago, I had no idea that this was what my dream was because I had no examples to go by."
 

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