Adventure game recommendations for a newbie? (still oldfag PC nerd)

[Jason Liang]

The non-linear ones tend to be the ones that have some clock elements and expect you to fail several times before you learn how to beat it, i.e. Laura Bow, Last Express and Maniac Mansion.

Honestly I would just work my way down starting from the best, MUST PLAY games. Although I agree with MRY that Gabriel Knight has a few wtf puzzles (not the worst but still bad). Since you enjoyed Star Trek 25th (which was a very big release back in the day) I would recommend Indy as a similar game you would probably enjoy.

1) Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
2) Sam and Max: Hit the Road
3) Grim Fandango
4) Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father
5) The Last Express
6) Maniac Mansion
7) Day of the Tentacle
8) Laura Bow 1
9) Laura Bow 2
10) King's Quest VI
11) Neuromancer

---- I would probably play these 11 before anything else, in this order ---

If you still have the yankering for adventure games after that then -
Quest for Glories
Full Throttle
Monkey Island 1
Monkey Island 2
Police Quest 3, 4
King's Quest VII? The Princeless Bride
GK 2 (if you liked GK1)
GK 3
Leisure Suit Larry 3
Leisure Suit Larry 5
Leisure Suit Larry 6
Leisure Suit Larry 7
Beneath a Steel Sky
Loom
Space Quests
Dynamix Adventure Games (Rise of the Dragon, Heart of China, etc)

BloodNet has some rpg elements but it's not very good

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Strongly disagree with a lot of the above.

Sam and Max Hit the Road is the epitome of moon logic. This is not a failing of the game, it is a specific design choice to fit the tone, and it is frequently hilarious, but a good starting point? No.
As MRY said far more succinctly , Grim Fandango is too talky. There are stretches where it feels more like a Final Fantasy game than a Point and Click due to the density of dialogue. Also the puzzles are largely subpar, with a few admittedly inspired ones cropping up here and there.

Gabriel Knight 1 is a high point for the genre in terms of writing and story, but it’s also arguably the beginning of the end. Arbitrary “puzzles” (“Hey whatever you do, don’t sell this painting...”, that fucking drum puzzle, the whole endgame sequence) and the multitude of trap failstates make it, imo, one of the worst introductions to the genre around. To be clear: it’s still a great game, but it should not be used to sell the genre to a neophyte.
The Last Express (like Laura Bow 1) is a great game that succeeds in part by subverting the conventions of the genre. Playing it without having a firm understanding of those conventions is unlikely to leave an impression.

I thought about including Maniac Mansion on my initial list of recommendations, but left it off because... well, I just don’t think it’s all that great. Maybe it’s a matter of perspective (I played MM after DotT), but MM has always struck me more as a historically important game than an actually great game.

Laura Bow 2 is terrible. No one except genre enthusiasts should play it. It completely squanders the potential of the first game by scurrying away from everything that made it interesting. The high production values and excellent rendering of 1920s NYC can mask it for a little while, but by the time you reach the completely abysmal and non-sensical endgame there’s no avoiding the truth: the game is a fucking turd.

Oh, and re: KQVII:
I’ve spent some time defending this game on these boards, but make no mistake, it is deeply inferior to III, V, and VI (and I suspect IV as well, although it’s been a long time since I played IV). The game seems to have suffered from nearly dissociative levels of mismanagement (It’s a game that is a direct sequel to an entry praised for taking the franchise in a more mature direction, but that is itself aimed at 8 year olds and whose story is a direct sequel to a game published 6.5 years previously. What? Whose idea was that?!)
The Valanice chapters are actually largely excellent, but the Rosella chapters are Saturday Morning Cartoon level garbage, and the finished product just doesn’t gel as a whole.

And don’t even get me started on that fucking song.

 

[MRY]

I agree with everything <3sRichardSimmons said. I'll add two thoughts. In my opinion, while DOTT is one of the best adventure games ever because of its openness, puzzle density, and layering of puzzles (the way in which you keep go back through the same rooms and peeling more stuff back, using the same items in different ways, etc.), it is not a particularly great entry point because those qualities make it a fairly demanding game. Moreover, if you play it and love it for those traits, it's all downhill from there.

The Last Express has the added problem that I think it can be a very stressful (?) game to play for a completionist, because the whole mechanic is that stuff is happening everywhere and you have no idea where you are meant to be when, or what you're missing. I think it's a brilliant game for that very reason, but it also can be very off-putting because it is different from many games in that respect, so we are not well trained to enjoy it.

Maniac Mansion is an all around unappealing game that is very unlikely to make someone love the adventure game genre. It was important historically and is neat in lots of ways, but I'd no more recommend it than KQ2.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Sam and Max Hit the Road is the epitome of moon logic. This is not a failing of the game, it is a specific design choice to fit the tone, and it is frequently hilarious, but a good starting point? No.

Well, in the end, why not? A lot of us started with "moon logic" adventure games. Either you like them or you don't.
If you don't, I doubt you'd like them even if you play the easy ones first.

 

[polo]

S&M HTR is one of the funnier adventures i've ever played but its logic is as stupid and counter-intuitive as you can get, sometimes.
Full throttle is short, nice, and cool. I don't really remember the puzzles, could be a good entry to the genre.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Sam and Max Hit the Road is the epitome of moon logic. This is not a failing of the game, it is a specific design choice to fit the tone, and it is frequently hilarious, but a good starting point? No.

Well, in the end, why not?

Uhhh... because he specifically asked for recommendations that were not full of moon logic?
I like Sam and Max a lot. It’s a very funny and fun game, but the puzzles are pretty out there.

 

[Jason Liang]

Just to give some context it took me about 3-4 years to beat Gabriel Knight 1.

Only Myst and Riven are worse (in terms of "moon logic"). IMO Indy < Sam and Max < Grim Fandango < Gabriel Knight 1 in terms of ascending difficulty. And then Last Express for last.

Every serious gamer should play those five.

I actually get <3sRichardSimmons and MRY 's concerns. The only thing that baffles me is the hate towards Laura Bow 2.

 

[Binky]

Machinarium

 

[polo]

Machinarium

This one has georgeous art, i remember enjoying it quite a bit.

 

[WallaceChambers]

I don't think Sam & Max is the "epitome of moon logic" toon logic & moon logic aren't the same thing. A moon logic puzzle is something most people would never think of. Toon logic is something you'd get a sense to try if you've ever watched Looney Tunes. However there are still some puzzles in that game that would be overly harsh for a beginner, especially someone who is specifically asking for games without frustrating puzzles.

The amount of your time spent inside vs. outside dialogues. Classic adventures are not mostly about receiving story in dialogues, they’re about solving puzzles, exploring, experimenting. GF has a lot of puzzles but also a ton of dialogue, much of whic is passive—the player just clicks down the list. That’s now common in adventures, but not the right way to start IMO.

I agree that Grim Fandango isn't a good adventure to start with but I'm wondering how you define a "classic adventure." Is it a specific era? The way I conceive of the term it just means all the games from the 90s on back to the beginning. Basically before the "dead" period and the early '10s resurgence. And in that regard there's no real standard amount of puzzles vs dialogue that applies genre wide. There's games like Gabriel Knight and TLJ with dialogue out the ass. Then there's games like Myst or The Neverhood with basically none. Then there's games in the middle and everywhere inbetween like Fate of Atlantis or Simon The Sorcerer.

I would consider all those games "classic adventures" but Im assuming you're thinking of the term differently.

 

[MRY]

I think the last flourishing before adventure games died produced many games that are remarkably different from what came before, sufficiently so that I don't consider them "classic adventures." I don't think a strict temporal cut off works, but I would say that Grim Fandango, Mask of Eternity, Dragonfire, Monkey Island 4, Sanitarium, Phantasmagoria, Space Quest VI (maybe even V), etc., even though being made contemporaneously with other games that I would consider "classic adventures" in terms of mechanics, are not "classic adventure games." They were an effort to change core aspects of the genre to keep it alive. I might throw the Saturday morning cartoon games (like CMI, KQ7) into the mix.

To my mind, the "classic" adventure game genre is defined by the games released by Sierra and Lucas from approximately 1984 (King's Quest I) to approximately 1993(?) (Day of the Tentacle, QFGIV). You're much smarter and more careful than I am, so I'm sure you can prove how that time period is nuts, but anyway, that's the rough shape of it to me. To be sure, even within that era, there are huge differences -- parser to cursor; within cursor interfaces, the variety in quantity and quality of verbs; Sierra-style death and walking dead vs. post-MM Lucas-style "never lose," etc. But basically the games all shared a third-person perspective, inventory-based puzzles, and an emphasis on exploration, experimentation, and puzzle-solving. In that era, adventure games often had clever scenarios and interesting events, but I don't really think of any of them having much in the way of a story. The protagonist is typically very thin and very static, the events aren't heavily sequenced (i.e., there is significant non-linearity), etc.

Anyway, near the end of the classic period and thereafter, adventure games became story-delivery vehicles. Something similar happened with Western RPGs, incidentally -- the amount of narrative in the Western RPGs of my childhood, even things like Ultima V, is very minimal. But in the 90s, you start having games like Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and ultimately PS:T. By 2000, the expectation was that isoemtric RPGs and adventure games would consist largely of plot delivery punctuated by gameplay. So you end up with "walkthroughs" that say things like "walk right, talk to NPC 1, walk right again, talk to NPC 2, walk left to bring item A from NPC 2 to NPC 1, talk to NPC 1, walk right to bring item B from NPC 1 to NPC 2" etc. Adventure game and RPG dialogue trees become increasingly thick, dialogue-based cutscenes become more frequent, and so forth.

If you grew up with the adventure games, it's not actually something you notice because the process was fairly gradual. For instance, every King's Quest added more story than the last one, so it might seem more like a spectrum than an a sharp contrast. But the benefit (?) of replaying these games with my kids is that you wind up compressing the time between playing Secret of Monkey Island and Curse of Monkey Island, for instance -- rather than playing them seven years apart, I played them a year apart. So the contrast is sharp. SMI had very little dialogue, and the dialogue was largely confined to one-liner jokes. CMI is replete with lengthy dialogue trees, and the motivation for what you are doing is embedded in those dialogues. Thus, the puzzles make little to no sense if you start skipping dialogues in CMI, which is not true at all of SMI. But Grim Fandango takes it to a whole new degree. The first area of the game involves one bottomless dialogue pit after another, sufficient that my kids just quit.

 

[WallaceChambers]

I think the last flourishing before adventure games died produced many games that are remarkably different from what came before, sufficiently so that I don't consider them "classic adventures." I don't think a strict temporal cut off works, but I would say that Grim Fandango, Mask of Eternity, Dragonfire, Monkey Island 4, Sanitarium, Phantasmagoria, Space Quest VI (maybe even V), etc., even though being made contemporaneously with other games that I would consider "classic adventures" in terms of mechanics, are not "classic adventure games." They were an effort to change core aspects of the genre to keep it alive. I might throw the Saturday morning cartoon games (like CMI, KQ7) into the mix.

To my mind, the "classic" adventure game genre is defined by the games released by Sierra and Lucas from approximately 1984 (King's Quest I) to approximately 1993(?) (Day of the Tentacle, QFGIV). You're much smarter and more careful than I am, so I'm sure you can prove how that time period is nuts, but anyway, that's the rough shape of it to me. To be sure, even within that era, there are huge differences -- parser to cursor; within cursor interfaces, the variety in quantity and quality of verbs; Sierra-style death and walking dead vs. post-MM Lucas-style "never lose," etc. But basically the games all shared a third-person perspective, inventory-based puzzles, and an emphasis on exploration, experimentation, and puzzle-solving. In that era, adventure games often had clever scenarios and interesting events, but I don't really think of any of them having much in the way of a story. The protagonist is typically very thin and very static, the events aren't heavily sequenced (i.e., there is significant non-linearity), etc.

Anyway, near the end of the classic period and thereafter, adventure games became story-delivery vehicles. Something similar happened with Western RPGs, incidentally -- the amount of narrative in the Western RPGs of my childhood, even things like Ultima V, is very minimal. But in the 90s, you start having games like Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and ultimately PS:T. By 2000, the expectation was that isoemtric RPGs and adventure games would consist largely of plot delivery punctuated by gameplay. So you end up with "walkthroughs" that say things like "walk right, talk to NPC 1, walk right again, talk to NPC 2, walk left to bring item A from NPC 2 to NPC 1, talk to NPC 1, walk right to bring item B from NPC 1 to NPC 2" etc. Adventure game and RPG dialogue trees become increasingly thick, dialogue-based cutscenes become more frequent, and so forth.

If you grew up with the adventure games, it's not actually something you notice because the process was fairly gradual. For instance, every King's Quest added more story than the last one, so it might seem more like a spectrum than an a sharp contrast. But the benefit (?) of replaying these games with my kids is that you wind up compressing the time between playing Secret of Monkey Island and Curse of Monkey Island, for instance -- rather than playing them seven years apart, I played them a year apart. So the contrast is sharp. SMI had very little dialogue, and the dialogue was largely confined to one-liner jokes. CMI is replete with lengthy dialogue trees, and the motivation for what you are doing is embedded in those dialogues. Thus, the puzzles make little to no sense if you start skipping dialogues in CMI, which is not true at all of SMI. But Grim Fandango takes it to a whole new degree. The first area of the game involves one bottomless dialogue pit after another, sufficient that my kids just quit.

That makes sense. I think since I got into adventure games at a different era I tend to think of all the games I went back and played as retro games; "classic." The first adventure games I played were the DS games during the mid 00's mini resurgance of the genre on that platform. Stuff like Hotel Dusk, Trace Memory & Ace Attorney. All those games were very story heavy so it's something I've always associated with the genre. A few years later I played Monkey Island when the Special Edition came out and then played the rest of the LucasArts games afterward. I never had the experience of playing these games in the sequence as they were released so it's interesting to read your take on how things subtly changed over time.

Kinda funny that the Japanese adventure games basically started at the place that western games eventually transitioned too. Even their earliest games like Portopia, Princess Tomato or Famicom Detective Club were very story driven. Then some developers just abandoned game play altogether and splintered off into the VN genre. Which is not entirely the same but similar to where TellTale ended up at the end of their run.

 

[MRY]

Same can be said for RPGs, at least to an extent.

 

[AdamReith]

Two modern adventure games I've really enjoyed have been The Unwritten Tales series and the Deponia series.

I guess you need to be able to enjoy German humour and sometimes stupid puzzles but they both have buckets of charm otherwise.

 

[Dyspaire]

It's by no means the best adventure game, but I have a feeling OP might enjoy The Dig.

 

[Shaewaroz]

I just discovered Star Trek Generations PC game 1995. Looks really awesome - the Star Trek equivalent of Star Wars: Dark Forces. Worse fps elements, more adventure game elements and story. All Next Generation actors voice their respective characters. Level design looks great based on my initial impressions. Has anyone played this game?

There seems to be a lot of really good (though old) Star Trek games out there. Good news for a new Star Trek enthusiast like myself.

 

[Dexter]

I just discovered Star Trek Generations PC game 1995. Looks really awesome - the Star Trek equivalent of Star Wars: Dark Forces. Worse fps elements, more adventure game elements and story. All Next Generation actors voice their respective characters. Level design looks great based on my initial impressions. Has anyone played this game?

There seems to be a lot of really good (though old) Star Trek games out there. Good news for a new Star Trek enthusiast like myself.

I played Generations back in the day, it was okay, I remember a few levels like the one with the plants spitting thorns at you while you have to walk through some labyrinth to be very annoying, here's a Playthrough:


Since you opened this thread talking about Adventure Games and 25th Anniversary, you should obviously play Judgment Rites and A Final Unity first (which is like an above average episode of TNG), I even put those at the top of Adventure Games I would recommend playing or I thought were very good back in 2012: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/recommend-an-adventure-game.20927/page-3#post-2353529


Also check my "What Adventure Games Do You Like Most" Poll for examples of their respective eras: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...nture-games-do-you-like-the-most-poll.120032/

If you're looking more for good or playable Star Trek games and are done with the three above: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/star-trek-i-dont-even.82302/
I'd put stuff like Elite Force I+II, Bridge Commander, Away Team (a squad-based real-time tactics game with Pause) before Generations, there's also Hidden Evil I guess, which was a Meh-ish but playable Action Adventure: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/148078152
And there's also stuff like Mods for Stellaris I guess: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=688086068

 

[V_K]

Are there any decent adventure game hybrids? RPG adventure games or such?

QfG and successors have already been mentioned, but you can also try The Council, which is a fairly unique take on the RPG/Adventure formula. It's mostly a "narrative Adventure" (you'll spend a lot of time in dialogs and cutscenes), but there are real puzzles and some exploration and resource management thrown in the mix.
Then there are Daedalic's TDE games - Chains of Satinav and Memoria. They are classical Adventures but set in world of The Dark Eye, the German PnP RPG, which was also the basis for Realms of Arkania, Drakensang and Blackguards.
One reasonably non-linear (and really big) Adventure that haven't been mentioned yet is Discworld: Missing Presumed. I'm not sure how well it holds up against the classics, but I had a ton of fun with it as a kid.

 

[V_K]

Also, there's this thread about RPG/Adventures I made some years ago, maybe you can find something of interest there: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/rpg-adventure-hybrids.88046/

 

[Prehistorik]

Here are my favorites (which means I became completely immersed in them right till the end, and a little more).

Space Quest 1,2,3 (EGA only)
Even though it's half parody on Star Wars and Star Trek and they are filled with jokes, the backbone is a serious grand space adventure.
Most of the challenge comes from the text parser, but the level of interaction it brings felt mind-blowing (still is)!
Later in the series they made Roger Wilco a complete clown, and dumbed down the gameplay.

Tex Murphy series
Great games, playing as the PI with nice non-imbecile humor. FMV done right.
Also there is a new one in the making called "Poisoned Pawn", check it out!

Beneath a Steel Sky
I like dystopias in general, and this one gave me a kick. It has a really well done companion.

Gemini Rue
This is a modern retro-adventure, made in 2013 when cyberpunk wasn't as popular.
My favourtie Wadjet Eye game.
I also liked Primordia, but it's a bit rough.

As companies go, Legend is the best probably.
Great IF with pictures (like gateway 1,2) and adventures (like Mission Critical, Superhero League of Hoboken, Callahan Saloon etc). Good writing.
Probably the only games that made me stop and really appreciate the background art.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Neuromancer (1988) from Interplay is the best adventure game I ever played, bar none. Just loved cracking that Ice with software upgrades and those hardware chip upgrades in my head.

 

[AdamReith]

Neuromancer (1988) from Interplay is the best adventure game I ever played, bar none. Just loved cracking that Ice with software upgrades and those hardware chip upgrades in my head.

This sounds highly intriqueing. Any tips on where I might find it?

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Neuromancer (1988) from Interplay is the best adventure game I ever played, bar none. Just loved cracking that Ice with software upgrades and those hardware chip upgrades in my head.

This sounds highly intriqueing. Any tips on where I might find it?

I played it many years ago with original disks on my beloved Commodore 64. I have the downloaded disk images that I think I got from the Internet archive (I think it's 2 or 3 disks) and they play beautifully through RetroArch's C64 emulation core, but the disk swapping interface is cumbersome and a nightmare to set up. There's an MS-DOS version on abandonware sites, I'm sure, but it's too crude of a port for my tastes. The Amiga version (hint, hint: HOBRing) has the nicest graphics but lacks the nice digitized Devo title song and superior C64 SID music & sound. But go for the Amiga version, which I never actually played but heard is adequate. You can get the fully pre-configured, ready-to-play packages including the emulator from the aforementioned site.

 

[Jason Liang]

Neuromancer (1988) from Interplay is the best adventure game I ever played, bar none. Just loved cracking that Ice with software upgrades and those hardware chip upgrades in my head.

I have been trying to get Kalin to play this

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Neuromancer (1988) from Interplay is the best adventure game I ever played, bar none. Just loved cracking that Ice with software upgrades and those hardware chip upgrades in my head.

I have been trying to get Kalin to play this

The C64 is the original version the game was coded for, where everything in the chipset was utilized; the ports all seem lazy. But if people know how to do Retroarch C64 emulation and the disk swapping thing, I highly recommend it over the other versions if at all possible. Nothing like the sound of cyberspace in Neuromancer on the original hardware.