Adventure Gamers Rejoice

With adventure games abandoned by the majors, and high-profile indie projects few and far between, fans of the genre find the pickings meager. But here's reason for celebration: a big, well-executed game that feels like a cross between Monkey Island and Leisure Suit Larry, with the sort of humor adventure gamers learned to love from Infocom and Lucasarts but is now almost entirely lacking on the gaming landscape.

Dave Gilbert Keeps Going Strong

Dave Gilbert, creator of The Shivah and The Blackwell Legacy returns with another graphic adventure every bit as charming as the first two.

Blackwell Unbound is a prequel to The Blackwell Legacy, following the career of Lauren Blackwell, the aunt of Rosangela, who was the protagonist of Legacy. We met Lauren only as an urn of ashes in that game, but learned that she'd been kept sedated in an insane asylum for decades before she died. We also learned that Joey, the family ghost, had haunted the Blackwell women for at least three generations.

Nefarious Plans, 1920’s Glam, and Teenage Flimflam

Dangerous High School Girls is a highly unusual game; set in a rather forbidding girl's high school in the 1920s, you lead a team of girls investigating a series of accidents, and surviving the often-nasty hazing you get from other girls. It is, thus, a story-driven game, but the actual gameplay is almost boardgame like; indeed, the graphics are purposefully designed to look like a vintage game board, and overcoming opponents doesn't rely on combat, but instead on a series of minigames that represent, in some sense, fibbing, taunting, exposing secrets, and making power plays.

Each girl has four attributes –- glamor, rebellion, savvy and popularity -- and each helps with certain techniques to expose the town's corruption "like layers of spoiled paint hidden under fresh."

The storyline guides your exploration, and most events trigger a confrontation –- your girl's skills against her opponent's. Your girl will snag up to three allies among her classmates, each with a different distribution of stats. When you're in a confrontation, you'll select the appropriate girl to deal with the situation, advancing the story if you win. If one of your girls is defeated, though, she's retired from your party for a fixed period of time. In a particularly nasty twist, the gals can pick up "boyfriends," which essentially take the hit for the young lady so that she can stay in the party if she's defeated.

Ghosts and Mysteries with Myst-like UI

The Delaware St. John series, of which this is the first chapter, has three great strengths: beautifully painted visuals, characters you come to care about--and stories that get creepier the deeper you get into the game. Fans of adventure games and gentle horror will find a lot to like here.

Del Returns

...In another mystery/horror graphic adventure featuring beautifully painted art, enjoyable badinage between the two main characters, and a story that's likely to evoke a shiver or three. While the game can be played without knowledge of the first, you may want to start with the first episode--though The Town with No Name is a little bigger and longer playing.

Adventure Games: Not Dead Yet!

Perhaps better known as the producer of massively multiplayer games like Anarchy Online and Conan, Funcom, which is based in Norway, began as a developer of beautiful adventure games like The Longest Journey, which fans of the genre will remember as one of the few good high-budget adventures of recent years. With Dreamfall, Funcom has, if anything, outdone themselves with a vast enthralling game set in the same universe as its predecessor, with gorgeous visuals and (thankfully and all too rarely) excellent voice acting.

The First True Interactive Drama

For decades, true interactive fiction--an application in which characters' responses to a player's input are determined algorithmically rather than via prescripted sequences, and in which valid stories emerge regardless of player action--has been a holy grail for AI researchers, digital artists, and game developers alike.

Most attempts to solve the problem have been "top down," that is, attempting to handle all sorts of stories, all sorts of personalities, and all sorts of potential actions. The results have generally been never more than mildly interesting.

Andy Stern and Michael Mateas, however, chose to try to solve a specific problem, rather than the general one. They chose a story with one setting (an apartment), two NPCs (a husband and wife), one basic conflict (their marriage is on the rocks), and a limited time frame (you are a friend of the family, visiting them over the course of an evening). By narrowing the focus this way, they were actually to solve the problem. Not, to be sure, in a way that solves the general problem--but in a way that makes of Façade the first really interesting work of true interative fiction.

Interactive Novel with Puzzles

Georgina Okerson, creator of Cute Knight returns with Fatal Hearts, a charmingly quirky adventure game, of a sort, featuring a teen girl protagonist and a chilling set of murders. Featuring anime-inspired art and teenage angst in a horror story, Fatal Hearts has several different endings -- different enough that you'll want to play more than once to explore the different outcomes -- along with puzzle mini-games and a well-written story.

It's not a point-and-click adventure game in the usual style; indeed, it's more of an interactive graphic novel with puzzle-game aspects. As such, it's very accessible even to adventure game novices.

Adventure Games Are for Kids

Well, at least this one is. Great Journey follows the adventure of two children seeking to help their friend Mr. Penguin prevent a polluter from dumping garbage in Antarctica. It's a simple point-and-click adventure in a classic mold with puzzles that tweens should have no problem solving, a bright kid-friendly palette, and engaging animations. Though the developer is Polish, the dialog has clearly been massaged by native English speakers, and the voice-over talent is clear and engaging.

Horror, Humor, and Well-Conceived Puzzles

Inherent Evil was the first graphic adventure developed by Bryan Wiegele and the crew at Big Time Games, and was originally developed in an unusual way: It was supposed to be released episodically, one chapter per week, with a $10,000 cash prize to the first person to 'solve' the game. This structure led to some interesting design decisions; originally, each chapter dropped you to the desk-top on conclusion, and there was no way to save games during a level.