The Great Game Guide

In this episode, we’re going to talk about attempts to grow and evolve the genre of adventure gaming in the 21st century through publishers such as Telltale Games and genres like walking simulators!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 15: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 13Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:https://www.ign.com/articles/how-hidden-nazi-symbols-were-the-tip-of-a-toxic-iceberg-at-life-is-strange-developer-deck-ninehttps://www.eurogamer.net/tales-from-the-borderlands-sales-werent-great-------------------------------------------------Coming up in this episode –We’re going to focus our attention on Telltale Games and also at the first-person genre of adventure games we now know as Walking Simulators as we look at how 21st century game developers attempted to use more modern game development philosophies to grow and evolve the adventure game genre!I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed!In our previous episode, we talked about many of the efforts in Europe to keep adventure gaming going by either moving into 3D or continuing on with point and click development.But Telltale Games was one of the few standard-bearers in North America in the 2010s willing to try to not just bring the genre back, but make it relevant again, and it’s not surprising that they had a huge influence on adventure gaming despite ultimately having to close their doors a decade and a half after they started.The studio was founded by Kevin Bruner, Dan Connors and Troy Molander, all of whom had worked at LucasArts and seen the hand writing on the wall after the cancellation of Full Throttle 2 and Sam & Max: Freelance Police, two sequels that had been in production following the release of Escape From Monkey Island but which certainly weren’t going to pull in the Star Wars-style sales figures LucasArts had grown accustomed to.And that sort of fulfilled an old prophecy George Lucas supposedly had offered to the LucasFilm Games staff back in the 1980s when he’d held back the Star Wars license for precisely that reason – back then, he’d wanted his studio to create new things, not become the house of Star Wars games. Once LucasArts turned to the Dark Side and started making more money on their crummiest Star Wars games than they could have with their best adventure games, it was too late.And so Telltale Games embarked on a mission to do something LucasArts wouldn’t – make a new Sam & Max game.Creator Steve Purcell was onboard, but the license LucasArts owned to Purcell’s intellectual property had to expire first. While Telltale waited, they built a 3D adventure game engine called the Telltale Tool and start honing their craft on the casual game Telltale Texas Hold’em, several CSI games created for Ubisoft, and two episodic mini-adventures based on Jeff Smith’s Bone comics: Out From Boneville and The Great Cow Race. Both Bone games were point and click adventures rendered in 3D, and both also included voice acting and reasonably close adaptations of the source material, though I’m not the biggest fan of every choice they made for the character voices. Gran’ma Ben in particular just doesn’t sound right.Telltale also established a formula with these games that would become synonymous with their style – offering small environments and fairly easy puzzles so the games could instead focus on storytelling and progression. Each Telltale adventure includes dialogue that gives the illusion of choice but doesn’t really change that much based on the actions you take or the decisions you make.In later Telltale adventures, the game would sometimes tell you, “This character will remember that,” but often, the impact on the story would be very small. In the Bone games, choice is even less of a factor because the game sticks so closely to the comics; what you have instead are some selectable dialogue exchanges that put everything into a question and answer format and then minigames that pad the gameplay and interactivity out a bit. It’s fine, but it also makes them even less replayable than most adventure games because there’s really nothing new to see once you’re done. And that was a major criticism of both Bone games – they were short, expensive and not exactly a revolution in adventure gaming.Now, I’d like to pause here and say if you’ve never read the Bone comics series, it’s one of the all-time great independent black & white comics and it’s absolutely worth your time and trouble to track down, especially in the colorized Scholastic editions. It’s sort of like the newspaper comics page by way of J.R.R. Tolkien, but it’s truly an original story with fantastic characters, a really gripping overarching plot and plenty of moments of comic relief. My biggest disappointment in Telltale’s adaptation of the Bone series is that they didn’t stick with it. The initial plan was to release five chapters over a season, but with middling reviews, poor sales, limited awareness of the license and the urge to get things going on Sam & Max, Telltale didn’t have much reason to continue.So, here’s what happened instead. Telltale Games recruited several ex-LucasArts developers who’d been working on the Sam & Max sequel there and began adapting the IP to a six-episode format known as Sam & Max: Season One designed and written by Brendan Q. Ferguson, Dave Grossman, Jeff Lester, Chuck Jordan, Heather Logas and, of course, the series creator Steve Purcell himself. Everything had to be distinct from the cancelled LucasArts sequel, so entirely new characters and plots had to be created.But Telltale needed funding for the game, and so they turned to the subscription service GameTap, which provided funding and promotion in exchange for launching each episode of the game on its service before general release. The first two episodes launched in late 2006 for Windows, with the other five coming during the first four months of 2007. Eventually, it also made it to the Wii and Xbox 360 and was retitled Sam & Max Save the World. Telltale also released fifteen machinima shorts built in the game engine featuring Sam and Max getting up to mischief between episodes. This was back before YouTube was a big thing, by the way, so online video shorts featuring game characters were still something of a novelty, especially when they were made by the publisher.Steve Purcell additionally released a series of twelve comic strips called Sam & Max: The Big Sleep that were so well received he won an Eisner Award for them in 2007 for Best Digital Comic.While Sam & Max was a hit among the fanbase, the game was more of a slow burn among the general public, in part because PC gaming was going through a weird transition during that time and in part because Telltale self-published the game digitally and was primarily relying on word of mouth and GameTap to promote the game. Though Sam & Max Season One was available on Steam in mid-2007, that platform still hadn’t taken off yet as a popular way to buy games, and while the game got a collector’s edition physical release through Telltale and a retail release through The Adventure Company, that didn’t mean much during a time when PC gaming was largely seen as dying and many retailers were shrinking their PC gaming sections down to bestsellers or dropping PC games altogether.Another problem with Sam & Max Season One is that Telltale Games hadn’t quite figured out how to make their episodic format feel substantial. The first three chapters, “Culture Shock,” “Situation: Comedy” and “The Mole, the Mob and the Meatball” are wildly uneven, and the third one in particular is probably the worst chapter in the entire series.On the other hand, “Abe Lincoln Must Die!” is tremendously funny and was even released as a solo standalone free download for those wanting to try the series out, and “Reality 2.0” evokes the original Sam & Max: Hit the Road’s VR sequence and also introduces the support group for outdated electronics known as the Computer Obsolescence Prevention Society, or C.O.P.S., who even have a great motivational song about how they aren’t useless despite the fact that yeah, they kind are.Well, maybe not the arcade game Bluster Blaster, but he still comes on a bit strong.The final chapter, “Bright Side of the Moon” not only references one of the great Sam & Max comics but also feels like a fitting end as the duo takes on the season’s big bad, the ultra-annoying Emetics founder Hugh Bliss.Oh, and did I mention Max becomes president of the United States along the way and that the duo’s famous DeSoto becomes a presidential car for the final two episodes? Or that there’s a text adventure game to play through at one point? Or that there’s a mecha-Abraham Lincoln who goes on a rampage? Or that there’s a door guarding Secret Service agent whose codename is Superball?Because he’s really, really good at being a bouncer, get it?The second season of Sam & Max games from Telltale, which are now called Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space, debuted later in 2007 and then continued monthly into 2008, this time with five episodes instead of six. By this point, Telltale had hit its stride, and the quality of each episode was more or less at the same high level as the others – though I personally liked the third chapter, “Night of the Raving Dead,” the least.Even with that one serving as the low point, you can’t deny this season has the right stuff – Sam and Max get to team up with their neighbor, the tough guy detective Flint Paper, they get to visit the Fountain of Youth and find out what happened to all the people who mysteriously vanished around the Bermuda Triangle and they also get to visit Hell and meet Satan himself. They get to attend a wedding between the robotic head of Abe Lincoln and their friend Sybil Pandemik. Oh, and they may also be responsible for the Big Bang thanks to a mix-up with a time traveling flying saucer piloted by a mariachi who simultaneously exists in the past, present and future. It’s wonderfully weird stuff.Telltale went on to make a third Sam & Max series in 2010 called The Devil’s Playhouse that pitted the duo against the invading alien General Skun-ka’pe and gave Max psychic powers, including a big finale where Max turns into a giant monster and goes on a rampage across New York!But before that happened, Telltale grabbed some other licenses and made some other interesting adventure games in the same style. The first was Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, a five-part series based on the Homestar Runner web cartoon series from the Brothers Chaps, Matt and Mike Chapman. Even today, it’s one of my favorite of all the Telltale adventures because it’s really well-crafted and funny.Homestar Runner was already a natural fit for adventure gaming because the Chapmans had created several mini-adventures on their website from 2004 to 2006 under their fictional Videlectrix label such as Thy Dungeonman 1, II and 3, which are all text adventures in the style of old games like Vampire’s Castle and Zork, and the King’s Quest-style graphical adventure Peasant’s Quest, in which you have to vanquish the rampaging Trogdor the Burninator. Telltale’s approach to adventure gaming worked quite well for the property, and the point and click mechanics managed to feel approachable since the game would frequently cut away to different camera angles or perspectives when anything interesting was happening.I love Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People because it does such an impressive job of bringing the world of Homestar Runner to life, and even the episodes that I didn’t think would be quite as good as the others wound up being incredibly amusing and added some nice variety to the gameplay. The humor’s exactly what you’d expect if you’re a fan of the webisodes, there are tons of Easter Eggs and fun little references to discover, and there are even minigames you can play in Strong Bad’s game room, including an interactive series of Teen Girl Squad cartoons you can design to try to make Strong Bad laugh at his own terrible creation.Telltale followed this one up with Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures in 2009, featuring four episodes in the style of Aardman Animation’s stop motion animated series. While I wouldn’t call these games bad by any means, they never quite capture the spark of the Aardman originals and really aren’t that exciting to talk about. Even diehard fans will be disappointed because Wallace is voiced by his alternate voice actor Ben Whitehead rather than Peter Sallis and the humor feels very forced in places.Telltale’s other big release in 2009 was Tales of Monkey Island, which I mentioned in a previous episode when we covered the latter Monkey Island games in more detail. It’s a great series that feels true to the originals – particularly Curse of Monkey Island, which it seems to be the most closely inspired by - and once again takes advantage of the heritage Telltale had in having so many former LucasArts developers on staff.If you’re a fan of the Monkey Island games, it’s a great time, and the low level of difficulty is made up for by a well-crafted storyline.But it and the third season of Sam & Max were also the end of Telltale’s experiment with making adventure games in the traditional mold, because starting in 2010, Telltale Games adopted a bold new strategy:Making adventure games based on popular media like The Walking Dead, Batman, Game of Thrones, Borderlands, Fables, Jurassic Park……and in their first game of a new decade, a sequel to the Back to the Future trilogy.When Telltale Games first announced it was working on a Back to the Future adventure game in 2010, many people were rightly skeptical. First of all, this game was planning to offer a new semi-canonical adventure for a story that was already resolved in its film trilogy – and remember, they destroyed the DeLorean in the end before Doc and Clara and their kids headed off for new adventures in their steam engine! - and the idea of a sequel series seemed a bit unnecessary.But also, Telltale’s adventure game designs didn’t seem particularly well-suited to an epic theatrical license like Back to the Future, and indeed, the game wound up being very linear and had such easy puzzles that its inclusion of a hint system seemed like an insult to any seasoned adventure gamer. It looked like a step in the wrong direction even if Michael J. Fox was giving his blessing and Christopher Lloyd, no stranger to adventure games after starring in Toonstruck, was willing to come back and voice Doc Brown himself.And actually, though Marty McFly was voiced pretty amazingly well by A.J. LoCascio, Michael J. Fox did sneak in later and record a few cameos as future Marty and also his ancestor, William McFly. The later 30th anniversary edition of the game even brought back Tom Wilson to re-record lines for Biff Tannen, who’d been voiced by soundalike Andrew Chaiken in the earlier game.Finally, fans weren’t really sold on the cartoony look of the game, especially when the first episode came out and the game felt and sounded like the Saturday morning cartoon adventures of Marty and Doc rather than a true continuation of the story, and the constant use of the film’s orchestral music in the background made things feel even less congruent.Personally, I found the visual style of the game quite jarring, and though it was preferable to an uncanny valley approach or some terrible FMV, the action and the set piece moments didn’t work quite as well in the Telltale Tool as they might have in a more sophisticated 3D game engine.But let’s set all that aside. The game takes place six months after the movie and involves a new problem in 1986 – Doc Brown’s gone, his estate’s being foreclosed on and Marty’s had dreams of Doc Brown vanishing from the timeline and is worried someone nefarious, like Biff Tannen, might get their hands on Doc’s notebook with all his research notes about time travel. The DeLorean mysteriously appears outside, and Marty finds a tape recorder inside with Doc Brown’s voice summoning him to 1931. This kicks off a series of misadventures that take place in different eras of Hill Valley as well as an alternate version of 1986 and basically covers a lot of the same territory as the films, though this time, it’s Doc Brown who becomes the bad guy in the alternate timeline.If that sounds like an adventure you’re eager to experience, Back to the Future: The Game’s got about 12-15 hours of story for you to go through, though word of warning – since it got delisted from digital storefronts, it’s started commanding collector’s prices for physical versions.As Back to the Future: The Game took Telltale’s formula and made it more casual and approachable for mass audiences, gamers really had to decide if they were going to get onboard with Jurassic Park: The Game, which came out in 2011 shortly after Back to the Future was finished. I’ll just add, by the way, it was no accident both of these licenses even got picked up – Universal was floating them around at the time trying to get ancillary products made, and Telltale Games saw the potential to use them to build a broader audience. Keep in mind as well that this was four years before Jurassic World came out in theaters and revived the franchise. In 2011, Jurassic Park was still a dinosaur of a film property without much going for it.This Telltale adventure was notable for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was their first game to include actual deaths, which went against the LucasArts-style philosophy they’d initially adopted, but which did allow the game to feature some actual stakes as players faced dangerous dinosaurs on Isla Nublar in a brand new storyline where no one’s safety was guaranteed. Second, the game integrated quick-time mechanics for various actions, ditching the traditional point and click style and instead giving players limited 3D movement control over the characters and cameras and playing up the opportunities for action and drama.Jurassic Park: The Game also went for a more realistic style for its character designs and dinosaurs, making things feel more cinematic and in line with the film franchise rather than like a cartoon adaptation. The voice acting almost feels like it was sourced from filmed scenes where people were actually acting on a set, and the script often goes for linear storytelling with limited interaction rather than the typical Q&A dialogue tree format adventure games are known for.And I’m going to say – these were the right choices, but once again, the Telltale Tool was not up to depicting a story like this in a believable, cinematic way. A lot of the scenes happen at night or indoors because that version of the game engine can’t render big, impressive scenes very well. The cast of characters are also even more forgettable than the guys in Jurassic Park III, and that’s really saying something.Suffice it to say that critics were merciless to this game, calling out Telltale for making what was essentially an interactive movie with limited interactivity and also making a dinosaur game with very little wonder to it.Here’s the thing, though. Jurassic Park: The Game was actually a decent seller, in part because it was made available for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 as well as the second generation iPad. Despite a troubled launch and really negative reviews, it found an audience, and Telltale adapted a lot of the same ideas towards their next big series – 2012’s The Walking Dead, a series that was incredibly well-received as a modern day classic despite being quite similar to the execution of Jurassic Park.So, what happened to make The Walking Dead so much more popular? It’s not just the IP, because there have been plenty of lousy Walking Dead games. It’s actually the characters themselves. The first season of the game establishes very strong relationships between the convicted criminal in need of a second chance Lee Everett and his adoptive daughter in need of a protector and role model Clementine, and since everyone is depicted in a shaded, comic book style with heavy black lines and designs that neither look too realistic nor too cartoonish, the art design is able to pull off the game’s dark and serious story without looking like an inferior version of the television show or a knockoff of the original comics.I would even hazard to say that Telltale’s Walking Dead series is better than the source material because it appropriately captures the horror of the setting while also using the limitations of the Telltale Tool to create tension and a feeling of being constantly boxed in by the zombie-like walkers, who limit your progress and constantly threaten your survival.The first season of The Walking Dead is a parallel story to the comic book storyline and even includes some intersection with Hershel Greene and Glenn from the comics. But once the story is strong enough to stand on its own, it really does, and the sixth episode, also known as “400 Days”, even introduces five new characters who are integrated into the subsequent episodes.The next three seasons really becomes Clementine’s story, and though Season One is the high point, the quality stays pretty high as the games go on, reflecting player choices over time and gradually making players feel like they’re playing their own personal version of the story shaped by their decisions. The final season, which launched in 2017, did a good job of giving the series an unsurprising but fitting conclusion.Telltale also made a three-part standalone story in 2016 called The Walking Dead: Michonne that focuses on the popular comics and television show character during her sojourn away from Rick Grimes. It was generally well-received, and it also showcased a rebuilt version of the Telltale Tool that added in a few more opportunities for action and set piece moments.Another Telltale adventure that really turned heads was also based on a comic book  – this time, Bill Willingham’s Fables, a long-running Vertigo Comics series about refugee fairy tale characters living in district in Manhattan called Fabletown where an enchantment called glamour helps to keep them disguised. This game, set a couple of decades before the comics, stars series favorite Bigby Wolf, Sheriff of Fabletown, investigating the decapitation of a prostitute Fable named Faith, which leads him down a rabbit hole that involves a corrupt Ichabod Crane, a trollop posing as a sexy version of Snow White, Georgie Porgie running a strip club called Pudding ‘N Pie, a pawn shop operated by the Jersey Devil and a shadowy figure called the Crooked Man, who has Bloody Mary and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum working as henchmen.If you can’t tell from my description, this game is dark, even moreso than the comics it’s based on, and while I won’t say it’s a faithful adaptation of Bill Willingham’s long-running series because it has a much grittier, more serious feel to it, I will say it’s a fantastic game that really goes out of its way to realize Bigby Wolf as a character and to make him feel like a hard-boiled detective who’s trying to keep himself civilized and law-abiding while suppressing his violent animal impulses. It’s certainly one of Telltale’s finest adventures, but it’s also definitely not for kids.A sequel has been in development at various points, but it’s unclear if it’ll ever come out.Another really surprisingly good game from Telltale Games was the 2014-2015 series Tales From the Borderlands, an adventure game sidestory designed with oversight from Gearbox Software. I absolutely love this game, and it’s by far my favorite of all of the Telltale Games from the 2010s. Set a few years after the events of Borderlands 2, the game focuses on two sets of characters.The game brings all these characters together eventually for a series of misadventures, but things start in medias res with the fast-talking main character getting ambushed by a masked mercenary and then dragged off into the wastelands. The main character has to explain everything that’s happened up to this point, and so he begins by introducing the characters.The first is a group of Hyperion employees including Rhys Strongfork, his buddy Vaughn and their co-worker Yvette, who are all jockeying for position within the competitive bro-culture of the corporation and who are definitely being held back by Hugo Vasquez, Rhys’s rival who’s been promoted over him. Rhys has a cybernetic arm, an electronic eye and a desire to become the next Handsome Jack, and Vaughn is a squirrelly little accountant who goes through a major transformation as the game’s five chapters unwind.The second is a duo of thieving sisters named Fiona and Sasha on Pandora who work with their adoptive father, Felix, who taught them everything they know about pulling cons. But when the girls try to scam Rhys and Vaughan during a secretive deal, a group of Psychos break in and steal the money, and Zero, one of the Vault Hunters from Borderlands 2, barges in and starts killing everyone. Sasha and Fiona flee along with Rhys and Vaughn, and they all have to escape Sasha’s psychotic boyfriend August, who believes she blew up the deal on purpose.This all kicks off a pretty wild series of misadventures as everyone works towards getting the money back and getting Rhys and Vaughn out of trouble, but this leads to Handsome Jack’s AI-backup consciousness getting uploaded into Rhys’s eye and guiding Rhys to get into even more trouble. Meanwhile, Fiona and Sasha have to deal with the fallout of their own botched deal. And all of this converges on a much bigger storyline that includes several more characters from the first two Borderlands games and the pre-sequel as well as some amazing moments of action, drama and laugh out loud humor.One of the most famous scenes in the game involves a shootout on the Hyperion space station, but it’s all part of an epic game of finger guns where the corporate employees pretend to unleash pistol fire, shotgun blasts, machine gun spray and grenades on one another and fall down dead while the custodial staff just ignores them and keeps on sweeping. It’s an insanely funny scene that sounds incredibly stupid but which truly fits the tone. The writing in this game is so sharp and funny that even its most over-the-top ridiculous moments are comedy gold.Another thing Tales From the Borderlands does really well is utilize licensed music tracks and stellar voice acting. Besides the returning voice actors for Claptrap and Handsome Jack from the earlier games, Troy Baker, Laura Bailey, Nolan North, Patrick Warburton and Chris Hardwick headline a very talented voice cast. And the soundtrack includes some truly great tracks – Jungle’s “Busy Earnin’”, Shawn Lee & Nino Mochella’s “Kiss the Sky,” The Rapture’s “Pieces of the People We Love,” Twin Shadow’s “To the Top”, James Blake’s “Retrograde” and First Aid Kit’s “My Silver Lining.” All of these are used to match the emotion of each chapter and go along well with the game’s score by Telltale’s house musician and sound director Jared Emerson-Johnson.After Tales From the Borderlands came out and really stuck the landing with its final two chapters, stories started coming out about how Telltale was in serious financial trouble during its development. The lower than average sales meant Telltale’s management saw the game as a failure, and they nearly cancelled the game midway through, but some passionate team members convinced management to leave a skeleton crew working on the game to see it through. Ironically, Tales From the Borderlands is probably the best-regarded of all of Telltale’s games, and the final chapters on which that skeleton crew worked are so much stronger than the first two that it feels like Telltale was throwing everything they had at this game.It’s funny how sometimes passion comes across like that. And while Telltale’s later output was still very good, it never quite reached the peak Tales From the Borderlands was able to achieve.I’m not going to linger too long on the next several Telltale Games titles because they’re all good, but none of them is quite as defining as the titles that came before them. If you enjoy the IPs these games are based on, you’ll have fun with them. And if you’re not interested, you can skip them without worry.Game of Thrones was in development in 2014-2015 along with Tales From the Borderlands and basically released each of its chapters around the same time. The game is a sidestory to the HBO television series but focuses on House Forrester, a family from North Westeros that doesn’t have much intersection with the events of the show. That’s not to say that you don’t occasionally see a familiar moment or character – the first episode starts during the Red Wedding and kicks off a surprise succession in House Forrester that sets up much of the plot. If you want to see Jon Snow, Tyrion and Cersei Lannister, Margaery Tyrell, Ramsay Snow or the Mother of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen, they all make appearances, though they’re only occasionally important to the plot.Personally, I never really dug this one, and part of it is because the characters have a sort of illustrated style that borders on cartoonish but which can’t quite sell the nuanced character emotions the plot demands. A lot of characters just seem to be constantly sneering and glum and there’s not a lot of joy in anything that happens. I realize that’s on brand for the IP, so if dark adventure games with lots of politics and psychopathic violence and gratuitous use of profanity are your thing, this one’s not too bad, and its six episodes do at least tell a complete story that fits within the broader continuity of the show. And hey, it’s better than the last few seasons of the show itself.But if you have kids in the house, let me instead recommend Minecraft: Story Mode from 2015-2017, a two-season series that even got released as an interactive experience on Netflix between 2018 and 2022. Unfortunately, the game’s delisted from digital storefronts now, so finding a physical copy means paying some inflated prices. But if you enjoy Minecraft, the game is rendered in the same style and has lots and lots and lots of references and in-jokes that land a lot better than they did in the live-action movie.The premise of the game is that a long time ago, a group called the Order of the Stone defeated the Ender Dragon. Flash forward to the present day, where a group of friends named Jesse, Axel, Olivia and Petra are headed to EnderCon along with their pig, Reuben. A bunch of stuff happens to contextualize all of the Minecraft trappings – the characters build things, there’s a survive in the wilderness scene where zombies and skeletons and creepers come out at night, and there’s an iron golem that gets loose and so forth – but eventually, the plot centers on the Order of the Stone getting attacked by a bad guy named Ivor who unleashes a Wither Storm. This causes Jesse and his friends to take up the mantle of heroes as they work to rebuild the Order and put a stop to the Wither Storm… even if it means that not all of them make it to the end of the story.But that’s really just the first few episodes. The first season also included three continuing adventures for the friends and the second season introduced an entirely new villain called the Admin while retaining Jesse as the main character.And one of the neat things about Jesse is you can play the character as a male voiced by Patton Oswalt or a female voiced by Catherine Taber. This game also has a stellar voice acting cast made up of many famous comedians or actors like John Hodgman, Brian Posehn, Corey Feldman and Yvette Nicole Brown and professional voice actors who’re well known for being in cartoon shows like Billy West, Dee Bradley Baker, Jim Cummungs, Kari Wahlgren and Phil LaMarr, among many others. Paul Reubens – Pee Wee Herman himself! – voices the villainous Ivor, and one of the adventure chapters in Season One even includes five famous Minecraft Youtubers.Suffice it to say that if your family loves Minecraft, this game’s a good time. The first season’s a tad uneven, with episode two being a huge disappointment before you get back to the good stuff in episodes 3, 4 and 5, but season two is more consistent. The three DLC adventure chapters in season one, while inessential, are amusing enough.Batman: The Telltale Series is also an easy recommendation, and it, too, has a stellar voice cast and brings back the visual style of The Wolf Among Us and Tales From the Borderlands to gave everything a dark-lined comic book veneer. The first season starts off fairly weakly and gradually gets better as it goes before fizzling out at the end, but the second season, titled Batman: The Enemy Within, is among the best things Telltale has ever created.Surprisingly, the second season’s plot involves yet another origin story for the Joker. He’s not the only villain – it includes interactions with the Riddler, Catwoman, Mr. Freeze, Bane, Harley Quinn and Amanda Waller, but it’s so well-done and contextualizes the Joker in such an interesting new way as a friend of Batman’s who gradually turns to evil by cutting corners and reaching the conclusions Batman dares not to consider that it really ought to become canon, even if it does upend Harley Quinn’s origin story in the process.Even so, with so many great Batman games to play, I’m not really sure an adventure game with action primarily derived from quick-time events was needed, and it was always sort of a head-scratcher why Telltale Games decided to pursue this license instead of something a bit less overexposed. I would have loved to see Telltale do something with the Green Arrow or John Constantine or the Green Lantern Corps rather than tell yet another story about Batman. My advice is to skip Season One entirely and just play The Enemy Within to enjoy its storyline.Another game that isn’t a must-play but which is enjoyable is 2017’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series, which was the last new game, and not a continuation of an existing series, to be released by Telltale Games before they went kaput in 2018. It’s actually not quite as impressive or memorable as the later action game from 2021 developed by Eidos Montreal, but if you enjoy the James Gunn-directed films and also want to battle Thanos without worrying about the Infinity Gauntlet, this game does offer a fun combination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe take on the characters and the comic books.Oh, and since Thanos dies in the first chapter, the game goes in a pretty wildly different direction than the movies, though it still features the same basic characters – Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Rocket, Groot and even Nebula, Yondu and Mantis, the Nova Corps and the Kree as well as the villain Hala the Accuser.One of the more interesting things about Guardians of the Galaxy is that your choices actually do carry some serious weight compared to other single-season Telltale adventures, and the endgame even lets you resurrect someone DragonBall-style if you bothered to keep and power up a device called the Eternity Forge instead of destroying it. This also gives the game some replayability if you want to see some of the other avenues in which you can take things.Telltale Games closed its doors in 2018, but there is a company operating as Telltale Games today, and they released the episodic adventure game The Expanse in 2023, co-developed with a developer called Deck Nine. I have not played it myself, and from what I’ve read in reviews, it’s a fairly typical Telltale-style game. If you enjoy that IP, give it a try.Deck Nine is also responsible for the last few Life is Strange adventures, but I’ve steered away from them after True Colors, in part because the games Before the Storm, Double Exposure and Reunion all really look like fanservice to me without having anything new to say, but also because Deck Nine got busted back in 2024 inserting Nazi symbols into one of the Life is Strange games during development and also reportedly has had a toxic workplace culture full of harassment and racism. I’d rather support other developers, thanks.But speaking of Life is Strange, let’s talk about it for a moment, because it’s one of many adventure games that came out in the wake of Telltale Games’s best years of output and definitely has some similarities. The first game was created by Dontnod Entertainment, a French development studio that created the interesting and very underrated 2013 action adventure game Remember Me before releasing Life is Strange through Square Enix in 2015. Though this created a series that Deck Nine would eventually continue, Dontnod managed to get a sequel out in 2018-2019 as well as a mini-adventure called The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, one of the most emotionally charged free games you’ll ever play!The original Life is Strange was released in five episodes and follows Max Caulfield, a student at Blackwell Academy in Arcadia Bay, Oregon who discovers she has a strange precognitive power to see the future and also to rewind time to undo the actions of other people. After Max saves her childhood friend Chloe Price from being killed by an angry boy named Nathan Prescott, Max and Chloe become close friends again and start trying to use Max’s powers for good. Unfortunately, the further they get down their heroic path, the more dangerous things become, and it turns out Max’s powers not only attract the attention of a fearsome serial killer but also will cause a storm that will destroy Arcadia Bay as a consequence of her using her powers to save Chloe’s life. Max has to make a choice – sacrifice Chloe or let the town be destroyed.Of course, much more happens than that, and part of the joy of the game is seeing the characters grow closer and face adversity together in the beautiful backdrop of the Pacific Northwest. Due to the close relationship between Max and Chloe, the game’s long been viewed as queer with Max as a bisexual character who has romantic feelings for Chloe if the player wishes for her to. Square Enix has always tried to downplay the sexuality of the series, but it’s not ambiguous, and LGBTQ+ fans have long championed the game as a step in the right direction for representation.Life is Strange 2 is interesting in that it does not follow up on these themes at all, instead behaving more like an anthology story related more thematically than canonically to the first game, though a few loose connections do exist. It was released in parts across 2018-2019 and stars two brothers named Sean and Daniel Diaz who are running from the police after a tragedy and attempting to make it down the West coast to reach their father’s hometown in Mexico. Daniel is only 9 years old, but he has telekinetic powers, and Sean, who is 16, has to guide and protect him. Like the original Life is Strange, there are tough choices to make that impact the ending, and this time, they depend on Sean’s willingness to surrender and the level of morality he instilled in his brother Daniel during their trek. It’s honestly a really good game that might have been better off if it wasn’t called Life is Strange 2, because fans were initially disappointed that it didn’t continue the first game’s story. And yet I think it has just as much to say about American society and the treatment of unhoused people, Hispanic families with second-generation immigrants and the brutality and callousness of law enforcement.The only one of the Deck Nine Life is Strange games I can recommend without reservation is their 2021 release Life Is Strange: True Colors, the first game in the series to not be released episodically and which stars an openly bisexual character named Alex Chen who can see colorful emotional auras and read and even manipulate peoples’ emotions. It’s a decent game with some good writing, a great cast of characters and a nice setting called Haven Springs, Colorado that’s just as gorgeous as the Pacific Northwest, but the game’s linearity undercuts what the previous games were known for – monumental choices.Don’t Nod, which used to be one word and is now two words after a rebrand, created a new adventure game released in two parts in early 2025 with the frankly terrible title of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. I haven’t played it myself, so I can’t comment on its quality, but I do know the two-part release schedule was intended to build hype to get players talking. It didn’t have the intended effect at all and Don’t Nod clearly needs some tips on marketing if they’re going to continue to self-publish, but I have heard from people who’ve actually played the game that the first half is decent while the second half leaves some people satisfied and others really cold.  Since we’re already talking about games that came out in the wake of Telltale’s output, let me mention a few more, all of which had some involvement from previous Telltale employees.Oxenfree is a 2016 side-scrolling adventure game created by Night School Studio, which was founded by the former Telltale Games developers Sean Krankel and Adam Hines. And while the two studios maintained a close relationship until Telltale went under in 2018, it was actually Netflix who’d wind up picking the studio up and making it part of its games division, ultimately releasing Oxenfree II: Lost Signals in 2023. Both of these games are more action-oriented than your typical adventure game and also involve a lot more exploration, but they’re great-looking, well-made and fun to experience.Night School Studio also released a similar graphic adventure called Afterparty in 2019 about two college students going on a total bender in Hell as they try to outdrink all the demons there. It’s definitely an odd one.A more recognizable adventure game is Star Trek: Resurgence, a 2023 game by Dramatic Labs, yet another developer founded by former Telltale Games employees. The game takes place in the original The Next Generation continuity following Star Trek: Nemesis and even has Ambassador Spock included as a character aboard the USS Resolute and Commander Riker showing up later in the game as an ally, voiced by Jonathan Frakes himself!The gameplay is very similar to a Telltale-style adventure, but the graphics are far more sophisticated and do a good job of depicting realistic-looking characters and environments. Unfortunately, the game’s a bit choppy in places and has some middling minigames, but I’m honestly surprised it didn’t make a bigger impression – it’s exactly the sort of Star Trek fans have been clamoring for, and it’s got a great story. Do yourself a favor and check this one out.I also need to mention last year’s adventure game success story Dispatch, a serial adventure game released across eight episodes by AdHoc Studio, founded by Michael Choung, Nick Herman, Dennis Lenart, and Pierre Shorette, some of the team members who worked on those three truly great Telltale Games, The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us and Tales From the Borderlands. And Dispatch, more than any other game I’ve played, really channels the style of the mid-2010s Telltale Games with animation-quality cel-shaded graphics, some fantastic character moments and episodes that create emotional peaks and valleys to keep you invested. It also includes a strategy component where you literally dispatch superheroes to solve problems and an occasional hacking minigame.You’ve definitely gotta play this one. Oh, and the game’s also known for being a little spicy, so be careful playing it around kids even if it does look like a cartoon.One more offshoot I’d like to mention is the 2016 game Firewatch, which was created by a developer founded by Telltale Games’s Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin called Campo Santo that was eventually acquired by Valve.Firewatch is a first-person adventure game where you follow a fairly linear plot that’s very heavy on dialogue and spectacle but which restricts player choice. It’s a great and fairly short story-heavy game that’s well worth playing, and it gives us a great opportunity as well to segue into other first-person adventure games known by the once-derisive name of Walking Simulators.I’m going to be honest and say that I don’t know what the first true Walking Simulator actually was – or, if you prefer, environmental narrative adventure game or narrative exploration game, which are some of the many other terms I’ve come across trying to describe this subgenre of adventure.I don’t even think everyone agrees on what the term actually means – is it the sort of game that forces you down a particular path with a linear story, or is it a game where your choices matter? Is it a game that rarely challenges you to do more than push a button or complete a quick-time event, or can it include some puzzle-solving and character interactions? Is it a first-person game where NPCs squawk at you via a radio, or can it be a third-person game or a game where you can speak to NPCs who exist in the game world?Or is it literally just a game where you walk around towards a goal until the story’s over, hence the rather insulting name that was slapped on these games before it was embraced by gamers as an apt description of their gameplay?Which games even are Walking Simulators? Most people wouldn’t classify thatgamecompany’s Journey or Playdead’s Limbo as a Walking Simulator despite the fact that both are basically an adventure games where you continue moving forward. The trio of indie games QWOP, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy and Baby Steps are also, likewise, literal walking simulators that most people wouldn’t associate with the adventure genre.But most people would call Fullbright Company’s Tacoma a Walking Simulator despite the fact that you’re literally floating through a space station rather than walking for parts of the game.Where does Galactic Café’s The Stanley Parable fit in with its choice-driven gameplay? What about Dear Esther with its non-linear story?And aren’t some of these games just basically a more linear form of what Telltale Games was doing anyway?So here’s what we’ll have to agree upon – like so many categories for subgenres of games, it’s all about vibes, and we have to fall back to the “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it” rule when it comes to Walking Simulators.Rather than try to cover all of them, let me just mention a few that are really noteworthy and encourage you to check them out.One obscure one that I’d absolutely check out is the 1998 Japanese PlayStation game LSD: Dream Emulator from Outside Directors Company and Asmik. It’s a truly unusual game about wandering around in dreams and shifting from dreamscape to dreamscape. Many dreams are randomized and there’s no real point beyond your own interest and amusement. As such, it’s probably the purest distillation of what a Walking Simulator is, because it’s all about your subjective experience as a player.Another very obscure one is from 2009 by the Belgian developer Tale of Tales and it’s called The Path. The premise begins as a simple take on the story of Little Red Riding Hood – you guide a girl down a path using a third-person perspective and pay a visit to Grandmother’s house, which you explore in the first-person. There are six girls to choose from, and each more or less has the same experience. But then the game lets you know that you missed a number of things along the way, and on your replay, you need to take your girl off the path and see what there is to find. Every girl has a different surreal adventure, and what the story means is mostly up to you as the player, though the game does provide some clues.But the games that most people would associate with Walking Simulators started coming out in 2012 and 2013 as digital indie games, and two of them, Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable, were based on Half-Life 2 mods while Gone Home, Proteus, Thirty Flights of Loving and The Unfinished Swan were all new games that were quite visually distinctive.Dear Esther was first released in mod form in 2007 by a group called thechineseroom and thus is probably closest to the origin story for the Walking Simulator as a distinct genre of adventure gaming because it’s a short, story-driven game sort of like a full 3D version of Myst where you explore an island and trigger narrations that provide context, backstory and motivation for your adventure. The game doesn’t have any puzzles, combat or interactions with other players; you literally just wander around until you reach the ending, which allows you to take flight. The team that made the game went on to create the similar 2015 Walking Simulator Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, a game that puts me to sleep every time I try to play it, and the 2013 and 2024 horror games Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Still Wakes the Deep, which have a lot of the same design ideas.The Stanley Parable first appeared as a mod in 2011 and was created by Davey Wreden and William Pugh with narration by Kevan Brighting. The game was subversive and fun, messing around with the player by trying to direct him or her to follow narrated instructions and then changing what could happen in the unfolding game based upon the player’s choices, leading to six different storylines. The game’s an absolute blast and so self-aware of what it’s doing that much of the fun comes from trying to antagonize the narrator and break free of the linear confines of the storytelling. Much like Portal, the game also eventually shows you the behind the scenes and helps you to understand that everything you’re experiencing is a lie of some sort or another.A standalone release came out in 2013, and a 2022 remake called The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe not only added in a bunch of new content, but also a meta discussion about the game’s reviews on Steam, the need for collectibles, an item Stanely can carry around in the form of a bucket, the focus topics for sequels and so much more. Even if you’ve played the original, the remake’s worth your time!Brendon Chung’s Blendo Games’s Thirty Flights of Loving is a brief experience that tells an action story out of order using cube-headed characters, and while it’s a sequel to a 2008 adventure platformer called Gravity Bone, it’s a pure Walking Simulator, right down to having you wander around a museum exhibit on the Bernoulli principle. Critics gave this game great reviews, but I remember being furious at it when I bought it during a Steam sale, played for 15 minutes and had no idea what I’d just experienced. It’s freeware now, and I’d recommend its 2016 follow-up Quadrilateral Cowboy instead, as it’s more of an actual game.Proteus is a minimalist indie game that’s essentially like LSD: Dream Simulator, except instead of walking through dreams, you walk through seasons over the course of about half an hour. There’s no real story, and it’s really more of an experience than anything else.But Giant Sparrow’s The Unfinished Swan is definitely an interesting take on the Walking Simulator genre because you begin in a completely white area and have to shoot paint splotches to reveal the contours of the world around you, giving everything a black and white painted appearance as you gradually uncover a castle leading to a huge labyrinth. The game eventually drops the need to paint everything to see it and gives you other puzzle-solving powers instead, and it becomes sort of half Walking Simulator, half Portal-style 3D puzzler later on.And speaking of Portal, let’s go ahead and mention both it and its sequel now, because they are adjacent to, and had a strong influence on, the Walking Simulator genre due to their linear paths, heavy use of narration and tendency to force you, as the player, to break free of the psychotic computer GLaDOS’s attempts to murder you like she apparently has other test subjects who’ve come through her chambers. Portal came out in 2007 and was based on a 2005 student game called Narbacular Drop, and while it was a fairly short and easy experience on its own, Valve decided to include it with the 2007 Half-Life 2 compilation known as The Orange Box and also to eventually sell it as a budgetware digital and physical game. The game took on a life of its own due to its sleek design, fun first person puzzler gameplay, sense of humor and, of course, meme-worthy references to cake and a killer Jonathan Coulton song that played over the end credits, sung by GLaDOS herself and letting the player know that she was “Still Alive.”Portal 2 debuted in 2011 and expanded the gameplay and the story, introducing a number of AI orbs within the Aperture Science test facilities and also delving deeper into the backstory of the experiments as well as what happened to all the other humans. This game felt like even more of a Walking Simulator in some places since so much of the game involved narration from offscreen characters.Airtight Games decided to make their own Portal-style game with 2012’s Quantum Conundrum, another Walking Simulator-style puzzler with narration by John DeLancie, the actor who played Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation. And many similar games have followed in the same vein, such as Croteam’s 2014 first person puzzler The Talos Principle, Pillow Castle’s 2019 perspective-based puzzler Superliminal, Sad Owl Studios’s photography-based 2023 puzzler Viewfinder and Dogubomb’s 2025 hit randomized mansion exploration puzzler Blue Prince.And speaking of house explorations, let’s go back to Walking Simulators for a moment, because we still need to discuss Gone Home, a game developed by a team called Fullbright Company who’d just worked on Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den and who wanted to apply many of the same design ideas to a smaller, more personal story that didn’t involve any action. The result was a game where you play as Katie Greenbriar, a 21-year-old who returns home after an overseas trip to find her family gone, things in boxes and a note from Katie’s 17-year-old sister Sam begging her not to go digging around to find out what happened.The resulting investigation involves wandering around the house, picking up items, hearing snippets of Sam’s journal and searching for clues. The story is famous for revealing a teenage romance between two girls and the parents’ unwillingness to accept it, making Gone Home an interactive experience that resides alongside Life is Strange as one of those adventure games bringing visibility to the stories of folks in the LGBTQ+ community.Fullbright Company released their next game, Tacoma, in 2017, and as I mentioned, it takes place aboard a space station and involves playing as an astronaut named Amy who has to piece together what happened to the crew by using the ship’s AI and an augmented reality system to uncover the entire story.Another game that came out in 2017 is What Remains of Edith Finch, made by Giant Sparrow and starting out somewhat like Gone Home before revealing itself to be a game where the 17-year-old Edith Finch can see through the eyes of other people or creatures as she explores the tragic death of everyone in her family. It’s a clever and extremely surprising game that makes the most of its brief length to deliver a very interesting story.A few other Walking Simulator-style games worth mentioning include the following:·         The 2014 adventure puzzler The Vanishing of Ethan Carter from the developer The Astronauts, which involves exploring a decrepit coastal community and solving supernatural puzzles while using paranormal powers to investigate the deaths of people in the town·         The 2015 horror-themed Walking Simulator SOMA from the developer Frictional Games, where you have to uncover why you were abducted from your apartment and have found yourself in an underwater station populated by aggressive mutant creatures.  Frictional’s earlier Penumbra games are more horror-themed, but also worth a look.·         The 2016 Myst-style game Quern: Undying Thoughts, which is more of a first person puzzler than a pure Walking Simulator, though it still involves a story gradually told through narration or hearing from offscreen voices.·         The 2021 hitchhiking game Road 96 from DigixArt Entertainment in which you play a runaway teenager who’s trying to make it to the border as you escape a fictional country that’s under totalitarian rule, but which really resembles the United States. The game is broken into randomized vignettes and plays sort of like a roguelike since you can’t pick exactly what happens, but much like a Walking Simulator as well since the scenes generally give you limited control and are heavy on exposition and telling a broader story.·         The 2021 adventure game The Forgotten City by Modern Storyteller, which started life as a Skyrim mod but then became a full-fledged first person adventure game with characters who follow a daily clock and interact with each other. The game takes place what seems to be a Roman-themed afterlife setting and you find yourself trapped in a time loop, forcing you to have to change how each day goes to solve the mystery of the Forgotten City and free its inhabitants. There are multiple endings, and they’re all worth seeing.While the Walking Simulator genre definitely sounds terribly dull, many of the games I just mentioned are extremely well-regarded and deserve to be played. Be sure to check ‘em out!One game that really hasn’t fit neatly into any of our discussions is 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, a 2016 3D historical fiction adventure game set in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution that uses a Telltale Games style to tell its story. You play as photojournalist Rez Shirazi, who’s being interrogated in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. The game then flashes back to different time periods before and during the revolution where you take control of Reza and make decisions that impact the game. If you’re unfamiliar with the history of Iran or the context of this revolution on the modern-day state, this is a game you absolutely need to try. It’s not a deep dive into the era by any means and it’s way too short – it’s about the length of a feature film - but it’s enough to make you want to go crack open a history book or watch some documentaries to learn more about the era. The only bad thing about the game is that both of its endings conclude with a cliffhanger, anticipating a sequel that never happened.By the way, the man interrogating you is played by Navid Negahban, the actor who brilliantly played Amahl Farouk the Shadow King in the FX series Legion, which is one of my favorite shows of all time. And Bobby Naderi, who plays Reza, is most famous for being in the 2024 movie The Beekeeper and he’s really good here too. And that’s on top of a very talented cast of, from what I can tell, mostly Persian actors.Given how many games have depicted the Middle East as a warzone where everyone’s an enemy combatant, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday is remarkable in the kind of story it tells and the attention to detail it shows in trying to recreate the chaos of the overthrow of the Shah. And who knew that 10 years later, this game would become amazingly relevant? Be sure to check it out.Our focus in this episode has been largely on 3D adventure games, but if you were to ask people today what adventure gaming is, they would still probably steer you towards the point and click genre. Why? Because the fires are burning brightly again for this style of gameplay, and we’re now spoiled with so many choices it’s hard to play them all!So in our next episode, we’re going to look at a different philosophy Amanita Designs, Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games, Yahtzee Croshaw’s Fully Ramblomatic Games, Crystal Shard, AGD Interactive, Clifftop Games and Grundislav Games, as well as a few more!And when that’s all said and done, we’ll close things out with some perspective on why adventure games are still relevant today and why they’ve seen such a resurgence over the last decade.But if you’re sick of adventure gaming, we’re not too far away now from starting our next series on another major genre in video game history – the platform game! And you can bet we’ll go every bit as deep into exploring the many interesting and underrated platformers you’ve probably never thought about between all the major ones you’ve played.If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve (probably) never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore! THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I’m recommending Rakuen, a 2017 point and click adventure by Laura Shigihara. If you don’t know that name, you probably do know Plants vs. Zombies, in which Laura Shigihara was responsible for the sound, music and that fun song at the end, where she’s the voice of the sunflower. She’s also contributed music to a number of games and even recently released a 3D animated music video called “Colony VI” about cute animal astronauts who have a rather unfortunate odyssey where one of the crewmates has to sacrifice himself to save the others.And if that sounds like a surprisingly dark plotline for a song about cute creatures, just know it’s very much in line with Shigihara’s self-published games, Rakuen and Mr. Saitou, which both have some joyful and wonderful moments atop a surprisingly bleak foundation. But since Mr. Saitou is really more of a side story to Rakuen, I of course recommend playing it as a chaser to the main course.Rakuen is about a boy who’s in a hospital with a serious illness and who discovers that a book his mother has given him called “Rakuen” has gone missing. The boy retrieves it from an old vagrant named Uma who’s hiding in unused portions of the hospital, and when his mother comes to visit, she reads the story to him about a fantasy world that contains Morizora’s Forest that’s ruled by the great wish-granting spirit Morizora and which is populated by cute, large-eared creatures called Leebles and talking plants and animals.The hospital is also populated with other patients who are sick or dying, and many of them have some sort of sadness that the boy resolves to correct by doing errands for them or trying to find ways to help them. The boy and his mother find a gateway to Morizora’s Forest, where they find Leebles who are similar to the people in the hospital with the same names and some of the same problems. But the forest is also haunted by wandering spirits called envoys that are trapped between the two worlds, and their presence is causing Morizora to sleep. And so the boy and his mother work to solve the problems on both sides and retrieve the parts of a song needed to awaken the great spirit so the boy can receive his wish.The undercurrent running beneath all of this is terribly sad, and one of the inspirations for the game was the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Shigihara wrote a song called “Jump” for a digital album benefitting disaster relief, and she says that this was the start of the idea of the game. The game itself has several vocal tracks and some really gorgeous music – no surprises there! – and while it looks like a JRPG, it’s an adventure game through and through with light puzzles and absolutely no combat. If you enjoyed To the Moon, this game will be right up your alley.https://store.steampowered.com/app/559210/Rakuen/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, we’re going to talk about adventure gaming in the 2000s as European game development studios and licensed games based on television shows and IPs aimed at girls largely took over the genre and kept the flames burning! Join us on this journey through games you’ve may have loved, some you may have heard of and some you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 13: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 11Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 14: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 12Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:https://lilura1.blogspot.com/2024/03/German-Computer-Games-Late-1980s-Early-1990s.htmlhttps://web.archive.org/web/20160527110729/http://www.gamona.de/games/the-whispered-world,vieles-im-adventuregenre-laeuft-falsch-der-edna-entwickler:article,1499346.html-------------------------------------------------EPISODE 14Coming up in this episode –We’re going to talk about adventure gaming in the 2000s during those dark ages when the genre supposedly died and yet adventure games kept appearing on the shelves somehow thanks to a number of European developers and publishers and licensed games. We’re going to talk about Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, the Syberia games, Post Mortem, Still Life, Nancy Drew, Gray Matter, Ankh , the Black Mirror Trilogy, Runaway: A Twist of Fate, Index+’s Dracula: Resurrection series, Daedalic Entertainment and more!I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! So, adventure gaming died in 2005, or so you might have thought if you were there at the time, because many gaming publications were not only decrying the end of one of PC gaming’s biggest showcase genres, but also PC gaming in general as MMORPGs looked like they were going to take over everything that console gaming hadn’t already.Granted, there were still new adventure games coming out pretty consistently throughout the aughties, that period between 2000-2009, but you know how the games industry is – if it’s not a major title with a AAA marketing budget or some runaway sales success, no one really thinks that much about it. And that was very much the case for some of the games we’re going to talk about in this episode, many of which were far from obscure and some of which even received console ports!But most of these games have one big thing in common – they came from developers and publishers in Europe rather than North America, and even when they did have a big name attached like Sierra’s Jane Jensen, they tended not to attract a lot of attention.One of those games that flew under the radar in North America, but was quite popular in Europe, was Microids and Virtual Studio’s Amerzone: The Explorer's Legacy. And if you’re thinking, “Hey, didn’t that just come out last year?” the answer is yes, the from the ground-up remake of it did. But the original debuted in 1999 and the reason you probably wouldn’t have heard of it then if you were in North America is because it didn’t make it out until 2001 here through DreamCatcher Interactive, a Canadian publisher that served a very specific niche of adventure gamers in the late 1990s and early 2000s before it got acquired by the European publisher JoWooD Entertainment in 2007. DreamCatcher also founded an imprint called The Adventure Company in 2002, and it was through this it released the far more famous series that followed Amerzone, Syberia, which we’ll cover in a moment.Both Amerzone and Syberia were written, directed and designed by the comic book artist Benoit Sokal, by the way, and Amerzone is specifically based on a story in a series he authored in the 1980s called Inspector Canardo. The fifth volume, L’Amerzone, debuted in 1986, and the English translation for the title is The Kingdom of White Birds.I honestly didn’t know any of that before researching this game, and I certainly never would have known it from the game, because Inspector Canardo is a duck with a giant yellow bill who hangs around with non-human characters. But the game itself only involves human characters and portrays the world in a mixture of FMV and 360 degree pre-rendered Myst-style first person exploration sequences, some of which include some light animation. It’s a good-looking game for its time, but it’s a bit of a slow burn that didn’t appeal to those beyond the Myst lovers. I’m not sure if the remake fixes this problem, but based on what I’ve seen, it’s a pretty faithful recreation, and the bulk of the effort seems to be on bringing the graphics into a full 3D world.The Syberia games are also by Benoit Sokal and are set in the same universe as Amerzone, but they’re point and click 3D adventure games that star Kate Walker, a lawyer from America who’s involved in overseeing a corporate acquisition that goes awry when the owner of the company, Anna Voralberg, dies and reveals just before she passes that her estranged brother Hans is still alive and will inherit the company. A good chunk of the first game involves Kate’s journeys across Europe with her animatronic ally Oscar, who drives a clockwork locomotive. After a bunch of things happen, Kate finds Hans Voralberg and decides to abandon her old life to help him on his quest to venture into the realm of Syberia – that’s spelled with a Y, by the way – on his quest to find the last living prehistoric mammoths and a lost civilization called the Youkols.Honestly, I sort of hate this ending because it suggests that everything you’ve done up to this point is largely unimportant. Kate’s abandonment of her life in New York feels low-stakes and the game’s gone out of its way to suggest everyone she knows back at home is a jerk anyway. Clearly, this game’s about the feels through its gorgeous artwork and neat designs, but the sense of wonder the first game tries to inspire in the adventure ahead also falls sort of flat with me because I’m not as fascinated by mammoths as the game wants me to be, and this is coming from someone who’s taken his family to see actual mammoth and mastodon skeletons at several museums, including the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.The second game, released in 2004, finishes Hans’s story and is worth playing if you enjoy the first game. But the third one, released fifteen years later in 2017, is the very definition  of inessential and is generally considered a major misstep due to a plodding story, grating voice acting, lousy controls and a poor release state that made reviewers all too aware of the game’s many flaws. It also has a really aggravating cliffhanger ending.The 2022 follow-up Syberia: The World Before tries to reconcile this by being both a prequel and provide a resolution to Kate Waller’s storyline, and while it’s a far better game than Syberia 3, it also is hopefully the last one since Benoit Sokal passed away during its development and, quite honestly, the story doesn’t have anywhere to go from here.If I sound like I’m not a huge fan of the series… well, I’m really not. The Syberia games are very pretty and emotional, but they’re also really slow and kind of dull, benefitting more from the fact that they were some of the only adventure games available during the 2000s rather than the fact that they were particularly good at providing an adventure worth experiencing. I feel like their popularity had a lot to do with the fact that the first two were also eventually available on console systems, mobile devices and handhelds. Play them if you love beautiful graphics and steampunkish qualities, but I really don’t recommend them to people who don’t have a lot of patience and a desire to see the slow-moving story through.And I’m at odds with some genre fans in saying this – a lot of people regard the original Syberia as being one of the all-time great adventure games! But to me, Kate Walker’s no April Ryan, and I really don’t get what all the fuss is about. Your mileage may vary, of course, and if you want to check Syberia out for yourself, try the 2025 remake, which is probably the best way to see for yourself if you’re interested in more.Microids also created another trilogy around the same time as Syberia that was also published in North America by The Adventure Company, starting with Post Mortem in 2002 and continuing with Still Life in 2005 and Still Life 2 in 2009. Post Mortem is set in the 1920s in Paris with an obvious bent towards film noir inspiration, but also some prominent psychological horror, Broken Sword Templar-style conspiracies and slasher film overtones. In this game, you play as a clairvoyant retired police detective named Gus MacPherson who has visions of two people being murdered by a masked, knife-wielding killer. A woman named Sophia Blake, the sister of one of the victims, shows up at his door to hire him. You can play the game posing as a private detective, journalist or insurance agent, and this does impact the story somewhat.Much of the game involves either first person navigation sequences in pre-rendered 360 scenes or participating in talking head dialogue sequences where 3D characters interact. Much like Amerzone, it feels a lot like Myst in many places, but the story is a little bit stronger because the character interactions are more interesting and there’s a stronger sense of danger since a killer’s on the loose. While Post Mortem is a fairly average mystery game on its own with several rather unsatisfying endings, it’s a little more interesting if you choose to play its sequels and see where things are going.Still Life is a third-person 3D adventure game that takes place in both the 1920s in Prague and 2004 in Chicago, and you play as Gus and his granddaughter, FBI Special Agent Victoria McPherson, and for whatever reason, MacPherson is spelled Mc instead of Mac in this game. Vic also has a strong resemblance to Sophia Blake in Post Mortem, which is also never explained, as that character disappears from the storyline entirely in the sequels. You just sort of have to go with it.Still Life is well-regarded but  notorious for feeling like half of a game because it’s fairly short and has an ending that just sort of… stops. In a world where you couldn’t play Still Life 2 immediately after it, that was very aggravating. In 2026, it’s pretty easy to roll right on into it and continue Vic’s adventures as she heads up to Maine and tries to save a journalist named Paloma Hernandez whom the killer is toying with to lure Agent McPherson to his lair. Series fans weren’t wild about Still Life 2, but it does at least provide a somewhat satisfying conclusion to the story.I personally think the series is worth playing if you enjoy adventure games that involve investigating crime scenes and interrogating suspects, but can also put up with annoyances like spotty voice acting, unskippable dialogue, uncanny valley character models and many signs that the games had more ambition than the developers had the ability to execute. Given that you can often find the entire trilogy on sale for just a few dollars, it’s not a bad value, and the presence of multiple killers throughout the games does add some tension that’s lacking in the Syberia games.Another series from the same era is known as the Dracula Trilogy, developed by the French media company Index+ and starting in 1999 with Dracula: Resurrection, which is similar to Amerzone in featuring 360 degree pre-rendered environments with cutscenes where you interact with characters. Somehow, the game avoids that uncanny valley feeling by stylizing the characters a bit so they feel more like 3D animations than soulless dolls, and that’s very much to its credit, because as Jonathan Harker, you venture back to Transylvania seven years after Bram Stoker’s novel on St. George’s Eve and try to rescue your wife Mina from a seemingly resurrected Dracula. After dealing with unhelpful locals and Dracula’s henchmen, you find yourself embroiled in an investigation that delves deeper into the mythology of the evil Count and his father, Vlad Dracul.The game ends on a cliffhanger with Jonathan and Mina escaping Transylvania, but discovering that Dracula has tricked them and headed off to London. Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary, which came out in 2000, continues the story with similar gameplay but adds in some combat mechanics this time around. It’s a longer game with an extremely involved plot involving Dracula’s secret sanctuary, a hiding place where he can withdraw and regenerate his power. Dracula is eager to retrieve an artifact called the Dragon Ring, which Johanthan found and used in the first game, but which is also missing a diamond that will restore it to full power and allow Jonathan to destroy Dracula once and for all.Even though the second game ends fairly definitively with Jonathan doing just that, a Microids-owned developer called Kheops Studio was tasked with making a third game called Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon that was released in 2008 and which kicked off a brand new story more or less unrelated to the previous two chapters, moving the setting to 1920 and exploring the conflict between Eastern Orthodox Catholicism and Roman Catholicism as Transylvania is absorbed into Romania. The game traces the historical path of Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad Dracula or Vlad the Impaler, but it also acknowledges the existence of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula in-universe and accuses it of popularizing certain superstitions about vampires. This is, surprisingly, a very smart and self-aware game that rises above being an unnecessary cash-in sequel, and its biggest weakness is that it’s just a so-so adventure game due to some very uninspired puzzles and dated mechanics. It also paves the way for two more not-so-great Dracula games released in 2013 by Koalabs Studio and Anuman, Dracula 4: The Shadow of the Dragon and Dracula 5: The Blood Legacy. You can skip those.Despite the existence of two other games that follow the story of the third game, the first three games are still often referred to as the “Dracula Trilogy” and are definitely the ones to play. Their surprisingly detailed plots are worth experiencing and you can finish the first two games in about the same amount of time it takes to complete the third one, meaning that you could easily enjoy the entire trilogy over a weekend.But lest you think we’ve exhausted everything France had to offer when it came to early 21st century adventure gaming, we’ve still got more studios to cover. And one of the big ones is David Cage’s Quantic Dream, a game development studio that’s every bit impressive as it is controversial. It was November of 1999 when an unknown French developer released a highly-hyped game through Eidos Interactive featuring the legendary singer-songwriter and actor David Bowie as both the composer of the game’s soundtrack and also as two characters within it. By the time it hit shelves, Omikron: The Nomad Soul had been in development for years and its premise was already difficult to describe. In some ways, it looked like late 1990s dystopian cyberpunk fare with oppressive robotic cops, a serial killer murder mystery, supernatural bad guys and even some nudity. In other ways, it looked like a science fiction dimensional-hopping adventure with laser gun fights and hand to hand combat. But as the game drew nearer, it was also promising a deep and engaging story with 41 controllable characters and a fully explorable city.The finished game turned out to be so much weirder than any of that – a truly unique third-person 3D adventure that no one’s ever dared to imitate. And I’m going to say now that if you haven’t played Omikron: The Nomad Soul, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. It’s my favorite Quantic Dream game, and it’s also one of those late 1990s experiments like Tom Hall’s action RPG game Anachronox that tried really hard to make 3D gaming live up to its potential by scripting in dialogue, environmental events and player choices. Whether or not it’s even an adventure game is debatable – Quantic Dream pitched it as a “Soul Playing Game.”Oh, and the soundtrack truly lives up to the pedigree of having David Bowie involved. It’s suitably weird, and David Cage’s past life as a musician definitely meant the development team paid attention to how music could help shape the game’s unique atmosphere.The premise of the game is that a red-haired soldier named Kay’l 669 travels through a dimensional portal into your computer screen and asks you to take possession of his soul and re-enter his world, a place where there’s no saving, death is permanent and consequences matter. And that’s sort of true – when you die in this game, unless you have a resurrection item to provide a continue, you’re reincarnated as the closest NPC, and you can also often swap to control other characters on a whim. There are parts of the game where you need to be certain people with certain abilities to progress, but the appeal of Omikron has always been its open world style of non-linear gameplay across a huge city with five very different districts.If the core adventure game has a weakness, it’s that once you discard Kay’l and begin body-swapping, the storyline becomes much less character-driven and starts to feel like you’re just ticking objectives off a checklist. Much of the midgame is just exploring and accomplishing tasks at your own pace. The latter third of the game is where the storyline really kicks in, and this is also where things get pretty bonkers as you transition from what has felt like science fiction into more of a sort of fantasy story with mummies and prophecies and sorcerers and ancient demons and magic swords. There are also some sequences that involve first-person shooting, which is honestly pretty bad in this game, and similarly unfun 3D fighting game-style combat like an ultra-simple Virtua Fighter.Despite some great reviews, a famous musician and tons of ambition, Omikron: The Nomad Soul didn’t sell super well outside of Europe, and its Dreamcast port further exemplified its weaknesses as a game with a massive world, but a low level of interactivity. You also have to remember that Deus Ex came out about seven months later and really set a new standard for how 3D action games could fuse action, adventure and role-playing mechanics into a cohesive whole. It also didn’t help that Omikron was such a wild combination of many ideas that it was – and still is! – a very difficult game to describe to other people. Part of me sees it as a proto-Grand Theft Auto III for its open world, mature themes and exploration, but part of me also sees it as a very innovative attempt to push the adventure game genre into the 21st century by experimenting with new mechanics, much in the way Shenmue tried to on the Dreamcast.Whatever the case may be, Quantic Dream didn’t stick with the formula, and even though they planned to make a sequel, they instead wound up working on a game released in 2005 called Fahrenheit, which was released in North America under the name  Indigo Prophecy. And once again, Quantic Dream proved to be a company for whom reach far exceeded grasp, because Fahrenheit starts out like a moody, atmospheric supernatural 3D adventure mystery game and puts you in the shoes of a guy named Lucas Kane who is possessed by a supernatural force and commits a murder in the game’s opening scene and then tries to run from the police. He’s pursued by Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles, two police detectives who show up on the scene, and you get to control them too at different points.The big conceit of the game is that your choices impact the storyline, and quick time events govern a lot of the gameplay and allow for a bunch of minigames. The game’s oozing with atmosphere and drenched in cinematic style, with shifting camera angles, crane shots, pans and zooms, scenes within scenes and steadycam-style chase cameras. And you can see the movie inspirations, too – there’s lots of cribbing from auteur directors like David Fincher, Alfred Hitchcock, Spike Lee and Ridley Scott as well as cop movies and film noir, and later in the game, there’s some full-on ripping off of The Matrix.And it’s in that latter part of the game where Fahrenheit becomes rather infamous for losing its freaking mind and moving from a moderately-paced mystery into an absolutely crazy mishmash of ideas involved the ancient Mayans, the occult, angels, sentient AI, New Age prophecies, secret societies, conspiracy theories and Lucas becoming a literal zombie. There’s a romance story that comes out of nowhere and makes no sense at all, and that it results in a pregnancy in the epilogue is additionally problematic because of the story implications.It’s such a confusing mess that you have to wonder what happened, and a lot of the blame falls on writer and game director David Cage. While a lot of his excesses could be forgiven in Omikron because it takes place in a fictional world, Fahrenheit takes place in New York City in the year 2009 and detaches itself from reality so firmly that it feels like the development team realized they weren’t going to finish the game as planned and just started tossing in every crazy idea they had.As nuts as it is, Fahrenheit is absolutely worth experiencing, particularly if you enjoy shouting at your screen and wondering aloud who thought any of this was a good idea. It makes Hideo Kojima’s games seem restrained by comparison.Quantic Dream’s next game came out in 2010 for the PlayStation 3 and it was immediately notable for its incredible graphics and its very moody and cinematic murder mystery story that once again took some heavy cues from David Fincher and managed to stay more grounded this time. The premise is that you alternate between four different characters and investigate a serial murderer called the Origami Killer. One character, Scott Shelby, is a private investigator patterned after Orson Welles’s character in the film Touch of Evil. Another, Madison Paige, is a journalist writing a piece on the Origami Killer. A third guy, Norman Jayden, is an FBI agent with a high tech pair of AR glasses that allow him to profile killers. The other main playable character, Ethan Mars, is a father who loses his son Jason to a car accident and then becomes very protective of his younger son, Shaun, who also winds up getting kidnapped years later by the Origami Killer, who seems to be targeting Ethan in particular for some reason.I should add, my full name is Sean Jason Jordan, so this game always hits me a bit differently than most people!The gameplay is similar to Fahrenheit’s quick-time events, but they’re even more granular, to the point that pretty much any action requires you to move an analog stick or press a button for some reason. The game also goes out of its way to make you, as the player, uncomfortable, ratcheting up the tension quite regularly and putting poor, desperate Ethan through situations where he’ll do anything to save his son – even crawl through broken glass or hack off a finger. The game has many different variations on its ending based on the choices you make for all  the suffering you inflict on your characters.I enjoyed Heavy Rain when it first came out, but I immediately saw the game as problematic for several reasons, not the least of which was the treatment of its playable female character, Madison, who largely seems to be in the game to have to avoid being raped or mutilated in horrifying ways and who also gets to be in a nude shower scene and get undressed by the player at different points. I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but there’s a scene where Madison gets captured by a mad scientist surgeon who literally tries to drill into her private parts as she’s restrained on an operating table. There’s another scene where she’s forced to strip off her clothes at gunpoint. And the game’s lone DLC prequel adventure, The Taxidermist, is yet another horrible sequence of events for Madison that adds nothing to the story except more mutilation of women.This is where I started to question whether David Cage is not just a writer whose reach exceeds his grasp, but perhaps is actually one of those people who’s very good at imitating others’ ideas but whose own ideas are pretty rotten. And while Quantic Dreams’s next two 3D adventure games, 2013’s Beyond: Two Souls and 2018’s Detroit: Become Human, aren’t quite as misogynistic as Heavy Rain or as bonkers as Fahrenheit, both have the same problem when it comes to storytelling – they start out strong, feeling like a playable Hollywood movie, but then begin to fall apart as they go on, revealing a hollow core to their slick veneer and emotional moments.They’re also reflective of a deeper problem, because Beyond: Two Souls still has its female main character almost get sexually assaulted and Detroit: Become Human is so tone-deaf about the social issues it attempts to evoke that it almost feels like a parody of 2010s global social movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and Free Palestine.So it should come as no surprise that just a few months before Detroit: Become Human came out, French news outlets began reporting about the toxic workplace culture at Quantic Dream, and it was pretty shocking for the time, depicting the studio as a toxic place full of bros making tasteless, offensive jokes about topics like racism, sexism homophobia, pornography and Nazis, silencing whistleblowers complaining about harassment and forcing workers into contracts that violated French labor laws and made it difficult for them to fight back against a hostile workplace culture or reciprocity from management.As a result, I really don’t feel much of a need to talk about these latter Quantic Dream games in this episode, as they’re neither as influential as the earlier ones on the modern adventure game genre nor games that I feel are worth our time and attention. I’ll give them some credit - they’re both pretty graphically and have some big-name Hollywood stars and some big ideas that result in interesting, very emotional storytelling. Many people like them, and they really do seem, at least on the surface, like they ought to be a big deal, though they’re just as superficial and flawed as Quantic Dreams’s other titles in the end.Play them if you’re curious, by all means. But I’d far rather focus our attention on other games and studios.OK, so before I begin talking about the next several games, I want to mention that there’s sort of this built-in bias online that games from Europe, particularly German and Eastern Europe, are lesser than any of the big American-made games in the 1990s by the likes of LucasArts and Sierra On-Line, and the result is you’ll often see these early 21st century adventure games get rated down and critiqued in ways that are just unfair. If we can celebrate really flawed American titles like Phantasmagoria and Return to Zork as adventure games, we can definitely celebrate some of the ones I’m about to mention. And in fact, I challenge you to try any of these for yourself before you decide they’re not your thing – most of them are very inexpensive, often on sale and definitely have a fanbase in the parts of Europe they hail from.In 2005, a German company called Deck13 Interactive created a point and click adventure game called Ankh, a not-at-all faithful remake of an obscure 1998 game by Artex Software called Ankh: The Tales of Mystery, one of the last commercial games created for the Acorn Archimedes 32-bit computer. The 1998 version is pretty interesting in that it featured 3D-style cartoonish sprites on top of pre-rendered scenery, but it really didn’t find much of a fanbase outside of Germany, and I’ve honestly only seen the first few minutes of it. But I have tried Deck13’s remake, which allowed the game to reach a broader audience not just on Windows and the Mac, but also eventually on the Nintendo DS in Germany. Telltale Games apparently even played some role in advising Deck13 on development.It’s very much in the realm of comedy and fantasy, similar to the way the Monkey Island games take some serious liberties with the golden age of piracy.Ankh’s main appeal in 2005 was its use of the OGRE engine, a then-new open source 3D engine which allowed the development team to depict its cartoony graphics really well and still managed to work with a point and click interface without being too awkward or clunky. Many lower-budget and independent adventure games have used it since, especially in Europe.The premise of Ankh is that you’re Assil, a young guy who got cursed by a mummy during a particularly wild party in a pyramid… but who also picked up a magical ankh in the process. He and his Arabian ally Thara have 24 hours to work together to remove his curse, which of course they do. It’s a pretty silly game overall with dance numbers and goofy characters, and not too bad if you enjoy the Egyptian theming.Two more sequels followed. The first is 2006’s Ankh: Heart of Osiris, in which Assil loses his magical ankh necklace as well as Thara after she finds a love letter from another woman – the Pharaoh’s daughter - and has to get both the ankh and Thara back before Osiris curses Egypt, a quest which also draws in the Pharaoh this time around.2007’s Ankh: Battle of the Gods moves the story forward a bit to a point where Assil and Thara are living together, but this time, you’re battling Seth, who is trying to underhandedly win the Battle of the Gods and thus undermine the power of all the other gods of Egypt … or anywhere else, because one of the game’s big twists is in getting to meet gods from other pantheons before they, too, lose their believers to Seth.While the prospect of playing the entire Ankh trilogy might sound like a lot, the games are pretty short, they’re funny and they hold up well. You could probably blow through all three in a weekend with a walkthrough. There’s even a remastered version of the original.In 2008, a French company called Wizarbox also used the OGRE engine to release a Europe-only 3D point and click adventure game called So Blonde, which was written by former Revolution Software artist and producer Steve Ince, who’d worked on Beneath a Steel Sky and several of the Broken Sword games. The premise of So Blonde is much less serious than the globe-trotting adventures of George and Nico, featuring a spoiled 17-year-old fashionista named Sunny Blonde who gets knocked overboard while she’s on a cruise and winds up on a mysterious pirate island and discovers that everyone who lives there is cursed. And I know, I know, I just railed against sexist games that traffic in tropes, but So Blonde actually takes this premise and does some clever things with it. It’s not a particularly great adventure game, but it did receive a 2010 Europe-only remake for the Wii and Nintendo DS called So Blonde: Back to the Island and 2012 sequel for just Europe and Australia called Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle.The success of So Blonde also helped Wizarbox score a bigger coup – getting Jane Jensen to create a brand new 2011 point and click 3D adventure game for the PC and Xbox 360 called Gray Matter that actually did make it to North America, though only on Windows. And while Gabriel Knight fans who weren’t aware of Gray Matter may already be rushing to locate a copy so they can play it – and you can find it on Steam for 10 bucks - let me offer a couple of words of caution. First, it’s kind of short and easy for an adventure game, maybe 7-8 hours long with lots of talking and cutscenes to pad out the runtime. Second, it’s certainly not as well-built as any of the Gabriel Knight games, and it’s a bit weaker in concept and execution, though it does have some magic of its own where the graphics and music are concerned. It’s still quite an underrated game that deserves more attention, so let’s talk about it!The basic idea of Gray Matter is that you play as Samantha Everett, a hot goth girl who’s a wannabe magician and natural con artist, and Dr. David Styles, a Phantom of the Opera-ish reclusive neurobiologist who’s a tortured genius and also disfigured enough to need to wear a partial mask. He’s also a professor at Oxford, and Sam tricks her way into being his assistant. One of the most famous aspects of the game is the need for Sam to perform magic tricks to distract people or to recruit volunteers for David’s research project, and the system for doing the tricks requires understanding the sequence of motions and items required. The game begins alternating between Sam and David around the third chapter, and this allows some needed tonal shifts between Sam’s almost annoying pluck and David’s off-putting world-weary crankiness. Neither character is helped by the voice acting, which is OK, but certainly not great.Like any Jane Jensen game, the real appeal is the writing, and Gray Matter does have a neat storyline that juxtaposes the grounded worlds of science and performance magic with the paranormal mysteries of the occult, ghosts, real magic and psychic phenomena. A major part of the game involves Sam attempting to join the magical society known as the Daedalus Club, which leads to some of the most fun moments, and there’s also a neat magic shop called The Black Wand owned by a creepy but harmless magician named Mephistopeles.Probably the worst thing about Gray Matter is that it’s a one and done. Jane Jensen attempted to follow it up with a crowdfunded game in 2014 called Moebius: Empire Rising, but it is, and I’m saying this as a backer of the project, a really lousy adventure game where pretty much the only redeemable aspect is the story, which still feels half-baked  and more like an imitation of Jane Jensen’s style than a game she directed and wrote. It was also, unfortunately, her last adventure game to date.Let’s move on to another series that’s known for its gothic style, and that’s The Black Mirror, which came out in 2003 from the Czech developer and publisher Future Games. This studio would also become known for the 2005 point and click adventure game NiBiRu: Age of Secrets, a remake of a 1998 Czech game called Posel Bohů, or Messenger of the Gods, which is sort of an Indiana Jones-style game set in the modern day where an archaeologist has to uncover clues leading to a secret planet in our solar system that both the Mayans and the Nazis were once aware of. It’s a decent game, though a little dull, and the chief complaints about it in the 2000s were its dark color palette and tedious puzzles.The Black Mirror is quite similar to NiBiRu in that it’s very dark, has some lousy puzzles and was way more popular in Eastern Europe than it was in the United States. I won’t champion it as an essential adventure game, but I will say that it has enough of a fanbase that it received two sequels from the German studio Cranberry Production, a 2017 3D reboot by KING Art featuring a different storyline, and even has a prequel called Messenger of Death: Blood Bond on the way in 2027 led by the The Black Mirror’s creator Zdeněk Houb.The original game takes place in 1981 and involves a man named Samuel Gorrdon who returns to his family’s manor, the Black Mirror in Suffolk, England, and begins investigating the death of his grandfather. It turns out Samuel’s ancestors brought a curse on the family by opening up a portal to an evil realm back in the 13th century, and Samuel discovers his grandfather’s dying wish was to locate the five secret keys needed to close the portal and end the curse.This is all pretty standard stuff, but what makes The Black Mirror a little more distinctive is that wherever Samuel goes, killings tend to follow. This is definitely connected to the family curse, but the how and why is a nice surprise which serves as the definitive twist ending for the game as Samuel seemingly puts a stop to it for good.That’s why it’s a little surprising that the sequels, 2009’s Black Mirror II: Reigning Evil and 2011’s Black Mirror III: Final Fear pick up the story 12 years later in Maine with all new characters. These two games split a broader story about a physics student named Darren Michael who gets tied up with an English girl named Angelina who’s eventually accused of murdering Darren’s awful boss. The game makes it seem like Angelina is being framed, but if you keep on playing, you’ll discover she is definitely not the innocent patsy she pretends to be.What’s amazing about Black Mirror II and III is that they actually improve upon the original game without undermining its importance to the series. They’re good-looking point and click adventures with decent production values and some stronger puzzles. The first half of Black Mirror II kind of has a Silent Hill II vibe due to its foggy, dilapidated New England setting and Darren’s lack of awareness about what he’s being pulled into. The second half of the game introduces some interesting twists as Darren discovers how he’s connected to the Gordon family. And this story ends on a cliffhanger and continues right on into the third game with clearer eyes about where the broader plot’s leading and what the stakes really are as the evil Gordon family curse turns out to still have a foothold in our world.As I mentioned, the German game developer KING Art produced a modern 3D Black Mirror reboot, but they are far better known for a 2009 point and click OGRE engine adventure game called The Book of Unwritten Tales, often regarded as one of the best European adventure games of the 21st century. It’s a fantasy-based 3D point and click adventure game with great production values for its time and a strong parodic style that lampoons a lot of different things – Indiana Jones, The Lord of the Rings, the Chronicles of Narnia, Discworld and many other pop culture and fantasy properties. The game’s plot is kicked off with a mishmash of ideas as the evil agents of a tentacled witch they call Mother kidnap a Yoda-like gremlin archaeologist named Mortimer MacGuffin who’s the key to stopping a war going on in the background as well as the dispenser of a magic ring, and that should tell you everything you need to know about how seriously this game takes itself.The game is built around four characters – Wilbur Weathervane, the gnome with the heart of a hero, Ivo , the plucky Wood Elf princess with a bird companion, Captain Nate, the abrasive human sky pirate adventurer and Critter the what the heck is it creature that sort of looks like the Mahna-Mahna Muppet and speaks just about as intelligibly. Though the game is built in a 3D engine, the art design is gorgeous and it almost looks hand-painted if you just look at screenshots. The gameplay is also similar to many more modern adventures like the Telltale Games titles where the narrative and dialogue take precedence over some fairly light and easy puzzles. And this game delivers a surprisingly lengthy adventure – easily 12-15 hours your first time through and maybe even a little longer if you savor the experience.The series also has two more games – the excellent but shorter 2011 prequel The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles, which tells the story of how Captain Nate Bonnet and Critter first met and even lets you see where Critter came from, and then the 2015 sequel The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, which is definitely a good time and even a little longer than the original, as well as significantly prettier.If you’ve missed this series, you really should play it. It’s fun, it’s laugh out loud funny and it’s deserving of its reputation as one of the best adventure game series of the last couple of decades. Given that you can often find the entire series on sale for around $10-15, it’s worth buying and playing.Another great trilogy I want to mention comes from the Spanish developer Pendulo Studios and it begins with the 2001 adventure game Runaway: A Road Adventure, a cartoony point and click adventure game that has a fusion of 2D backgrounds and objects and cel-shaded 3D graphics and which is often compared to the first Broken Sword game because of its smooth animated style and pairing of a blond-haired male and a dark-haired female who become embroiled in a conspiracy. Only this time, the girl’s named Gina and is being chased by the Mafia, you’re a grad student named Brian who’s got a road trip to make between New York and California, and there are also subplots involving alien abductions, some stranded drag queens, Hopi Indians, a severed finger, a weird crucifix and even the Mayans for some reason.And seriously, what was going on in Europe in the early 2000s to make everyone so obsessed with the Mayans? The whole Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world thing wasn’t really big news until 2012 when it was supposed to happen, and people were still buzzing about Nostradamus’s predictions in the early 2000s, not the Mayans. But I digress.Runaway is a hidden gem of an adventure game I definitely recommend. Brian and Gina are great characters, and Gina is sort of a damsel in distress, femme fatale and two-faced criminal all rolled into one. Suffice it to say that Brian’s one of those people who’s book-smart, but not particularly street smart, and Gina is such an attractive and charismatic girl that he falls for her every time and even falls for the old sunk cost fallacy when he realizes for the umpteenth time he can’t trust her, but has put his time in.The sequels are also worth checking out. The 2006 follow-up Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle makes it look like Brian and his now-girlfriend Gina are going to spend some quality time together at a tropical island resort. No such luck – they get separated during a plane crash and Brian winds up on a globe-trotting adventure having a bunch of wacky encounters as he attempts to find Gina again. And in the third game, 2009’s Runaway: A Twist of Fate, you’re led to believe Brian is dead after the events of the second game landed him on trial and being held in a prison psych ward. The game even opens with his funeral and Gina standing over his grave! But, hardly a surprise here, it’s all an elaborate ruse Brian planned to get himself out of trouble.And to be fair, I don’t think anyone would put it past the very duplicitous Gina to pull a fast one and let Brian pay for her crimes, but she’s grown a bit by the third game, and that’s good, because she’s the character you play as this time in a few chapters. And the third game has it all – Martian MacGuffins, a goofy mime, the Yakuza, hypnosis, a golden chicken, an eccentric screenwriter who’s working on screenplay of all your adventures, and so much more! The game also wraps up the entire trilogy storyline perfectly. There’s even a fun meta-joke end-credits sequence along with a stinger to explain that last hanging thread.Don’t run away from this series; it’s really good stuff!In the mid-2000s, the German game development scene was starting to flourish, and it’s worth remembering that up until the 1990s, Germany was separated into two countries – East Germany and West Germany – and both had a parallel growth in how they approached computing in the 1980s. West Germany had free-er access to a lot of the hardware standards and software coming out of France, Spain, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom while East Germany, which was facing the same electronic embargoes for Western technology that many of the Eastern Bloc countries were under, became a major producer of microchips for the Eastern Bloc during the last decade of the Cold War. This is important to understand because the reality was that German software developers on both sides of the Berlin Wall had to learn how to program for a variety of chipsets of varying degrees of quality.As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and German Reunification began, a German software scene began to flourish, and like the software scenes in other developing nations like the Czech Republic, Poland, South Korea and China, much of the initial effort went into cloning or porting popular titles from the US, UK and especially Japan. One of the earlier developers to rise to prominence in the 1980s was Rainbow Arts, from which another developer called Factor 5 broke off following the success of the Turrican games – and many gamers would come to know them in the 1990s and early 2000s for the technically impressive Star Wars: Rogue Squadron games. Crytek, the original development studio behind Far Cry and Crysis, came out of Germany. So did Blue Byte, the makers of The Settlers games.And so did Daedalic Entertainment, a studio founded in 2007 to both make and publish games, and they’re probably one of the best-known European adventure game studios today thanks to games like State of Mind, Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav, The Night of the Rabbit, A New Beginning, Anna’s Quest, The Whispered World and its sequel Silence, the Edna & Harvey games and, of course, the Deponia games.I want to say right off the bat I am not going to cover all of Daedalic’s adventure games, though you certainly should give them a try. Currently on Steam, you can get a huge bundle of them for $5, and that’s a pretty normal price. Pick it up; you won’t be disappointed!But let’s begin with Daedalic’s first adventure series which started with 2008’s Edna & Harvey: The Breakout, which is a crudely-drawn animated adventure that looks like it might have debuted on a website like Newgrounds originally due to its odd geometric angles that lack any semblance of perspective and Microsoft Paint aesthetic. It actually began life as a student project by creator Jan Müller-Michaelis and was built in a custom-made engine coded with Java. By today’s standards, we’d definitely call it an indie game, and it has the charm of a game made by someone who was clearly inspired by the adventure games of the 1990s but who also didn’t have the skill or resources to make something quite as slick and polished. Even the 2019 Anniversary Edition remake preserves the simple style by upgrading the art to look a little more polished, but really just smoothing over rushed edges, and that’s great, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with this adventure.The premise of the game is that Edna is a young, dark-haired emo girl who’s trapped in an insane asylum along with her stuffed blue rabbit, Harvey, who occasionally becomes real and talks to her. From time to time, you see scenes outside the asylum and get a sense that Edna may be mentally ill, but she may have been framed and that Harvey’s her psyche’s connection to the real world. It’s also not unreasonable to wonder if she’s an unreliable narrator and exactly as dangerous as her circumstances suggest. It’s like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets Calvin & Hobbes, and it’s distinctive for its memorable cast of oddball characters, tenuous grasp on reality and the fact that Edna’s angelic hospital gown doesn’t fully close on the back and you wind up seeing her pinkish-purplish underwear a lot. There are also two endings, both of which don’t end too well for poor Harvey. I realize this all sounds like a disaster in the making, but somehow, the game pulls it off, and while it wasn’t well-received when it first debuted, it’s something of a cult classic today.Oddly, the 2011 sequel, Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes, doesn’t star Edna, but instead features a blond-haired girl named Lilli. The narrator in the introduction is definitely messing with you, explaining that due to spyware installed on your computer, it can’t provide the experience it wants to because children clearly use your PC, and thus it’s going to censor the tale. Lilli is described by the game’s introduction as the most virtuous girl in the world, and you quickly realize she’s definitely shy, insecure and unable to speak for herself or make choices of her own. When Edna shows up and starts talking to Lilli, it’s hard to know what the game is doing, especially since Edna is trying to tempt Lilli to abandon her chores and go on a treasure hunt, which results in Edna digging up a bomb thinking it’s pirate treasure and persuading Lilli to keep the secret. Not long after, Edna enlists Lilli’s help in hiding her from a psychological examination being administered by Dr. Marcel, the first game’s villain and someone whom Edna was pretty sure she’d killed in one of the game’s endings. And when he gets his hooks into Lilli with psychotherapy, part of his treatment involves using Harvey to hypnotize her and send her diving into her own mind to literally face her demons.The subtext of the game is that Lilli is suppressing a dark secret, and to make that point even more obvious, little gnomes will appear at times and start painting sections of the screen pink as students in the school start to go missing. It’s a deeply demented game that has many wonderful humorous moments, but which is also quite disturbing in places. Whether or not Edna is even real or a figment of Lilli’s imagination is an immediately obvious mystery – and I’ll let you play the game and find out! There are even three ways to end the game, and all of them really depend upon the way you see Lilli at the end. But I will say that one of the most remarkable things about this adventure is that even the narrator is found culpable in one of the endings – and maybe the player, too.I really like the Edna & Harvey games and I wish more people knew about them, because they channel the same sort of strange energy as Tim Scafer’s adventure games, particularly Day of the Tentacle and Psychonauts. But chances are good if you’re going to start with a Daedalic game, you’re going to play one of their major titles, and if you do, I hope it’ll be The Whispered World, a visually splendid point and click adventure game where you play as a melancholy clown named Sadwick.The first thing you’ll notice in this game is how much the animation looks like a feature film instead of the flat, cartoony quality the Edna & Harvey games utilized. Some serious effort went into creating multi-layered backgrounds that have rich colors and lighting effects. The characters are also amazingly well-animated, and Sadwick in particular moves so fluidly and has such a nice idle animation that he truly looks like he belongs in the game’s world. He’s also accompanied by his pet caterpillar, Spot, who can transform into a fiery slug or a green ball or a flat inchworm-like sheet to help solve puzzles.The premise of the game is that the fantasy world of Silentia is falling apart, and Sadwick seems to be the only one who can actually see it in the horrible nightmares he’s been having. None of his family believe there’s anything to them. Sadwick travels into the Autumn forest and meets a messenger named Bobby who’s carrying the Whispering Stone, and Sadwick convinces Bobby to give it to him. This leads him to an oracle named Shana who reveals to Sadwick that his dreams are true – his destiny is to destroy the world.Sadwick convinces himself that a race of demons called the Asgil are actually the ones destroying the world, and he goes on a Chicken Little-like journey to try to convince the other residents of Silentia to take all of this seriously. He believes that if he can revive Silentia’s king and bring balance back the world, he’ll be able to save everyone, but the way the game ends… well, let’s just say Sadwick’s hero’s journey is not at all what it appears to be and that the pessimistic narration with which the game opens will make you think very differently once you see the ending!If I do have a critique of The Whispered World, it’s that the voice acting can be a bit grating. Many of the characters have cartoonish voices that aren’t well-suited to delivering a lot of dialogue, and Sadwick in particular wears thin on me after several hours. The writing is acerbic at times and a lot of the characters in the world of Silentia are sad and self-interested, laughing at Sadwick because they find him pathetic and not because he’s good at his job as a clown. It all makes sense when you see where everything’s going, but until you get to the end, you just have to proceed knowing the game’s tone has a purpose, from the golden decaying fall-like colors of the landscapes to the contemplative music to the obvious irritation of the game’s characters to Sadwick’s hopeless quest itself.There is a 2016 sequel to this game called Silence with the on-the-cover subtitle of The Whispered World II, and it’s a very different game, though it’s by the same creator, Marco Hullen. It involves two siblings named Noah and Renie who are forced into a bunker as a war rages outside and bombs are falling. The bunker turns out to be the gateway to a fantasy world, and this time, the fantasy world is called Silence, though it’s clearly the same place we saw in The Whispered World and even has Spot the caterpillar, who becomes an ally. While it may not look like it’s connected to the original game at first and may even seem like a tone-deaf Chronicles of Narnia-esque way to return to Sadwick’s world even though that shouldn’t be possible given what happened at the end of the original, the story does eventually explain itself and totally pays off.Once again, this is an absolutely gorgeous and melancholy adventure game, this time with characters rendered in 3D amidst incredible hand-drawn backgrounds, and I’d describe the overall aesthetic as being very similar to the look of the gorgeous 3D action game Kena: Bridge of Spirits. It honestly has the quality of a feature film when you see it in motion. The storyline introduces some new friends such as the wise adventurer Samuel and the rebel warrior Kyra, who is not only an important character but also a considerable reason for much of the danger Noah and Renie find themselves in. The voice acting’s also a lot better this time around and suits the characters and the surprisingly dark tone.And I do mean dark, because if this game reminds me of anything, it’s the German author Micheal Ende’s novel The Neverending Story where the Nothing is consuming everything in sight. In this game, it’s shadowy obsidian-black masked creatures resembling a cross between dogs and beetles called the Seekers, and they can be terrifying when they show up unexpectedly and change the course of the story… or when they take down a character and turn him or her into one of them. Like The Neverending Story, the incredible sadness that pervades what’s happening in the background has a purpose in the tale the game is telling, but I’m going to warn you – while that book has a happy ending, both endings in Silence have a bitter bite to them.Even so, I hope you’ll play Silence. It’s criminally underappreciated.Let’s move on to happier games, and Daedalic definitely made a few of those with its series, Deponia, which started out in early 2012 with the point and click adventure game of the same name. This time, Daedalic went for something that’s sort of like tossing The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, Day of the Tentacle, The Book of Unwritten Tales and The Curse of Monkey Island into a blender and then adding in a theme song similar to the “Ballad of Freddy Pharkas” to top it off.The result is a deeply sarcastic adventure starring a really reckless guy named Rufus who dreams of getting off the landfill of a planet called Deponia and living in the flying city of Elysium high above. Every time he tries to get up there, he fails badly, but as the adventure begins, his latest escape attempt results in a mistake where he accidentally knocks a red-haired Elysian girl named Goal into a garbage hatch aboard a cruise ship and the fall breaks her cybernetic brain. He’s offered a big reward to get her back to her fiancé, but there are three problems – she’s in an intermittent coma, she’s being hunted by cyborg soldiers from a group called the Organon who want some codes in her brain implant, and Rufus has become infatuated with her.What follows is a largely silly adventure that uncovers a sinister plot to destroy the trash heap below and introduces Rufus to Cletus, Goal’s evil Elysian fiancé who happens to look just like him and who doesn’t know – and honestly, also doesn’t care – that Deponia is even inhabited. You have to love the subext there that the citizens living in a trash heap matter so little to the privileged people above that they don’t even think of them as living people. And Rufus saves Deponia in a pretty ingenious way by sending Goal back to Elysium with a backup brain implant that will cause her to use her station there to advocate for the people below.In the second game, released the same year, the story continues and it turns out Cletus and Goal never made it back to Elysium and that Goal’s seemingly split personality in the first game is a result of her brain implant splitting into two personas. After another series of accidents, Goal’s brain breaks and splinters her into three pieces. Rufus has to restore her true personality and also once again save Deponia from the Organon, and, as it turns out, Elysium too this time. This game is not only twice as long as the original, but also way wilder, allowing for some really crazy situations to unfold and a lot of comedy to play out, including a whole sequence about platypus poetry. Whatever potential the original game failed to live up to, Chaos on Deponia fully realizes.The third game, released in 2013, finishes off the story and includes a section where Rufus carelessly splits himself into three pieces under the assumption he’ll be three times as effective. There’s really no need for me to recommend it – if you play the first two, you’ll want to see how the story ends. What I will say is that it’s every bit as good as the others, has a fantastic scene where you have to deliver a ridiculous fascist-style speech to an enormous assembly of the Organon, and the intentionally ambiguous ending results in stopping the bad guys for good… though there is a cost, and that gets explored in depth in the fourth game, which is sort of a series epilogue released in 2016 called Deponia Doomsday. And we may get some further resolution in this year’s Surviving Deponia, which is not a point and click adventure, but a survival RPG.One more Daedalic game I want to mention is Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, based on the 1989 novel and set in the 12th century in and around a fictional English town called Kingsbridge and a neighboring town called Shiring. It’s a really amazing adventure game with a distinctive animated style that aims for realism rather than the cartoonishness of the Deponia games and which has a dark, gothic feel that suits its dark themes and more serious story. That’s not to say that there aren’t fun moments or jokes, because there are, but this is a game about a troubled and dangerous period that includes a major civil war breaking out. The game was released in three chapters, or books, between 2017 and 2018, though any version you’d play today is going to be the entire story, which encompasses several decades.One of the criticisms of this video game adaptation of The Pillars of the Earth is that it’s slow-paced and has a lot of dialogue, but I’d argue that’s actually what makes it special. The game’s fairly faithful to the novel and makes good use of its complex, nuanced characters to explore the historical period less through the actions that you take than the dialogue choices you select. The use of light and darkness creates some really powerful visual cues about where the story’s going, and it’s really neat to be able to travel around 12th century England and France and visit actual historical locations.As such, it feels a lot more like the Telltale Games adventures than the traditional point and click titles Daedalic is better known for, but as a piece of interactive fiction, it’s really remarkable and probably one of the best video game adaptations of a novel I’ve ever come across.As for Daedalic’s other adventures, which include State of Mind, The Night of the Rabbit, A New Beginning, Anna’s Quest and The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav and its sequel, Memoria, I encourage you to check them out for yourself!Now that we’ve covered adventure gaming’s so-called stagnant years, I want to close by briefly talking about another group of adventure games that didn’t get much respect despite often being quite good – licensed games based on television shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigators, The X-Files, Law & Order, Murder, She Wrote and House, M.D. or on intellectual properties geared towards girls like Nancy Drew and yes, even Barbie.The earliest of these worth mentioning is the 1998 first person FMV adventure The X-Files Game by Hypberole Studios and Fox Interactive. In the absence of FBI Special Agents Mulder and Scully, you play as Agent Craig Willmore and have to find them in a Myst-like fashion as you explore in and around Seattle. You do get to see them, of course, and Assistant Director Walter Skinner and The Lone Gunmen are also in the game, which helps to add to the authenticity of the storyline. It’s supposed to be set sometime within the third season’s arc and was actually developed by several of the show’s writers.The Windows version of this game was an absolute beast, with 7 CD-ROM discs and multiple storyline paths including a horror-themed Paranoia track, a more empathetic Loss track and “The X-Track” where more of the show’s broader conspiracy themes tie into the game’s story. Despite some low review scores, the game found its fans and sold well and is today considered one of the better TV licensed FMV adventure games of the 1990s. The PlayStation port, which came out a year later, was only on 4 CDs, but failed to impress console gamers quite the same way.Adapting television and movie properties was big business in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Radical Entertainment was one of the developers who was especially good at winning bids to do it. In the early 2000s, they opened up a subdivision called 369 Interactive to develop a line of adventure games that would be published by Ubisoft based around the CBS show C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation, and though the first game didn’t please critics any more than The X-Files Game did, fans of the show loved it, and it wound up selling quite well as a budgetware title. The game involves playing through 5 cases with members of the team rendered in 3D and voiced by their onscreen actors, and much of the game involves searching for clues, using crime lab forensic tools and connecting the dots well enough for the show’s characters to take over.The success of this game led to a 2004 sequel based on the spin-off show CSI: Miami and also a return to Las Vegas’s original cast with CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Dark Motives. But in 2006, development shifted over to Telltale Games with the 3D engine-powered CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - 3 Dimensions of Murder. Telltale would also go on to create 2009’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Deadly Intent and 2010’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Fatal Conspiracy. None of these games is particularly great, but they’re all solid and enjoyable if you’re a fan of the show or just enjoy completing repetitive detective work with the game holding your hand.Another developer who took a crack at CSI was Legacy Interactive, who developed 2008’s CSI: NY - The Game, definitely an uninspired and fairly unchallenging adaptation of the least popular CSI show. But Legacy Interactive was another one of those developers and publishers that was really good at landing licensed games and creating original casual titles and series like Emergency Room, Code Blue, Vet Emergency, 911 Paramedic and D.A: Pursuit of Justice. What they became better-known for were a series of games running from 2002-2005 based on the long-running TV show Law & Order and then, in 2009, a hidden object game based on Murder, She Wrote with a sequel coming out in 2013.The Law & Order games are quite similar to Capcom’s Phoenix Wright games, breaking cases down into an investigation phase and a trial. The goal is to do the best job you can investigating cases so you have a better chance of winning the trial using the evidence you’ve procured. All of Legacy Interactive’s Law & Order games were released as budgetware, but they had decent production values and felt quite authentic to the show. I like them better than the CSI games because they add a bit more variety to the gameplay with the trials and offer far more interesting investigations. They look a bit dated by today’s standards, but they’re decent to play all the same.Capcom also took a stab at adapting a TV show in a manner similar to Phoenix Wright’s structure, and that was with 2008’s Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, an adventure game developed by High Voltage Software. If you’re a fan of the Adult Swim cartoon show, this game is more or less a pitch perfect adaptation, using the same cheap-o style of animation, goofy characters and random referential style of humor. Capcom even let them throw in some Street Fighter II character cameos that show up when you make certain ill-advised choices or poke around in your evidence-gathering.Moving over from television shows to more general licensed properties, I’d also like to mention Gorilla Systems Corporation and Runecraft, makers of the Mattel Interactive Detective Barbie adventure games, which were released from 1998-2000. I wasn’t even aware of these myself, but my friend and colleague Holly, who handles production on my day job’s marketing podcast, told me that these were some of her favorite games growing up, and as she described them, I realized that they, too, are point and click adventure games with investigation elements. They’re certainly easy and intended for children, but they’re well made, with the first two using pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds to approximate the look of the toys and the third even getting some 3D characters atop pre-rendered backgrounds in a game released solely for the PlayStation.If you’re going to play any of these, Detective Barbie 2: The Vacation Mystery is probably the most fun since it has a more interesting story than the original game and also some engaging minigames. Even though Barbie had a reputation for being an airhead in the 1990s, these games definitely leaned into her being smart and capable, and I’m glad these games existed and offered young girls a chance to have adventure games that weren’t patronizing the way the toy aisle itself all too often could be.Another developer called HeR Interactive took the idea of games for girls even further in the years that followed, releasing dozens of quality mystery adventure games based on Nancy Drew over the last two and a half decades, starting with Secrets Can Kill in 1998 and most recently releasing Mystery of the Seven Keys in 2024. The original game had Nancy Drew navigate realistic pre-rendered environments populated with cartoon characters, but the games that followed included 3D models with limited animations and a more plastic uncanny valley appearance. The first-person sensibilities and dialogue trees of the earlier games honestly feel more like Japanese visual novel-style detective stories than other Myst-style games, and when the series finally started incorporating actual 3D environments in its 2019 release Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem, the gameplay was also updated to be a little more like contemporary 3D adventure games with scripted sequences and more sophisticated events. That might be because it was by a different developer - the most recent game, 2024’s Nancy Drew: Mystery of the Seven Keys, actually took a step backwards into the older style.One thing I will say for HeR Interactive is that they’ve always made these games for a female target audience and have focused on telling compelling stories and offering interesting but largely non-violent experiences that anyone can enjoy. And despite their focus on female gamers, HeR Interactive did try to get The Hardy Boys going, too, in 2009, but Frank and Joe Hardy only got one game from them, a Nintendo DS title called Treasure on the Tracks, and two other PC and Wii games released around the same time by other developers and published by JoWooD, none of which I’d recommend.With all of that out of the way, there are two studios I haven’t brought up in detail yet despite the fact that both of them were based in North America and were making adventure games in the aughties. One of them is Double Fine Productions, which released the action adventure platformer Psychonauts in 2005. They’d go on to launch a Kickstarter in 2012 for the “Double Fine Adventure” and not only break records on that platform, but also bring back a significant amount of attention and enthusiasm for point and click adventure games in the process.The other is Telltale Games, which launched Bone: Out from Boneville in 2005, and then Bone: The Great Cow Race  and Sam & Max: Season One in 2006. By the end of the decade, Telltale had also released Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, Tales of Monkey Island, Wallace & Grommit’s Grand Adventures and a second season of Sam & Max, and they were still just getting started – The Walking Dead, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, Game of Thrones, Tales from the Borderlands, The Wolf Among Us, Minecraft: Story Mode, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, a third season of Sam & Max and two seasons of Batman: The Telltale Series were all still yet to come!We’re going to cover both of those studios in our next two episodes along with some other indie studios like the Brothers Chaps and Videlectrix, Amanita Designs, Frictional Games, Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games, Yahtzee Croshaw’s Fully Ramblomatic Games, Crystal Shard, AGD Interactive, Clifftop Games and Grundislav Games, as well as a few more!And when that’s all said and done, we’ll close things out with some perspective on why adventure games are still relevant today and why they’ve seen such a resurgence over the last decade.But if you’re sick of adventure gaming, we’re not too far away now from starting our next series on another major genre in video game history – the platform game! And you can bet we’ll go every bit as deep into exploring the many interesting and underrated platformers you’ve probably never thought about between all the major ones you’ve played.If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore! THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I’m recommending Death of the Reprobate, a 2024 point and click adventure by Joe Richardson which is actually the last part of a trilogy of games sometimes described as Rabelaisian and other times described as Pythonesque because of their resemblance to Terry Gilliam’s classic art cutout cartoons on Monty Python’s Flying Circus and in their various movies. So if Death of the Reprobate sounds good to you, you need to check out the other two games, 2017’s Four Last Things and 2020’s The Procession to Calvary, as well.The premise of this game is that you’re the elderly son of a character named Immortal John, the hero of Four Last Things. Your character is constructed from various pieces of classical artwork, and every character you’ll meet either comes from a painting or is constructed from pieces of various paintings from different eras. As you walk around the game’s dozen or so screens, all of which are also assembled from classic paintings, you’ll also encounter musicians who are playing various pieces of classical music, a character who appears to be Jesus Christ literally telling you who you need to go talk to by holding signs over their  heads, and many different birds you’ll eventually have to identify to solve one of the game’s puzzles.The hardest puzzle in the game involves some math, but it’s not too difficult once you work out what’s being asked of you. It took me a few minutes of frustration to realize two characters in that scene are holding up fingers to contribute numbers to the equation, so that hopefully helps you somewhat! But most of the other puzzles are simple, and there’s even a built-in answer system a sagely character provides if you really get stuck.This game’s not for kids; as God Himself decides to unleash some plagues on the world towards the end, most screens basically turn into a “last day on Earth” orgy with lots of nudes cavorting around, and there’s quite a bit of scatological humor and some occasional profanity. But since the game isn’t voiced and, hey, it’s all classy artwork from hundreds of years ago, you can still enjoy this game – and the two that came before it! – for its own artistic merits. At least, that’s what I told my wife when she saw my son watching me play it.For the meager $13 asking price, Death of the Reprobate is a good way to kill a couple of hours, but you can probably get the entire series in a bundle for the same price if you check IsThereAnyDeal.com or wait for a sale.As Our Series Continues…We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, we’re going to talk about visual novels, that particularly Japanese style of adventure game that also led to dating sims, murder mysteries and more! Join us on this journey through games you’ve may have loved, some you may have heard of and some you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 13: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 11Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:“What is a Visual Novel?” academic paper - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3474712https://danganronpa.fandom.com/wiki/DISTRUSThttps://otomekitten.com/glossary/https://princessmaker.fandom.com/wiki/Father_Marriage_Ending_(PM2)https://www.eurogamer.net/unfinished-symphony-castlevanias-keeper-speakshttps://www.famitsu.com/news/201506/29081240.htmlhttps://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/projectbook/koei/3-------------------------------------------------Coming up in this episode –We’re going to talk about console and handheld visual novel-style adventure games and the shaping influence they had on the adventure gaming genre as they also evolved into other types of games such as murder mysteries, dating sims and more!I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed!In our last episode, I talked a little bit about the visual novel genre as we discussed Capcom’s Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, which debuted outside of Japan in 2005 on the Nintendo DS. I know it was the first game I ever really played in that style, and it honestly took me by surprise because I had no idea it was part of a much longer tradition of visual novels in Japan.And I want to say right off the bat that the term visual novel is loaded because it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. The purest definition of a visual novel is a game in which the story is being told to the player with little deviation beyond perhaps some choice mechanics that have a bearing on where the story goes or how characters respond.Some visual novels are pure stories. Some allow you to choose your own path through branching stories. Some involve romance which are also known as nakige or “crying games”, and some are adult eroge that have sex and nudity in them. Some are detective stories. Some include other styles of gameplay that might be part of a visual novel include role-playing, horror, strategy, puzzle-solving or minigames.An academic article from 2021 titled “What is a Visual Novel?” by Janelynn Camingue, Elin Carstensdottir, & Edward F. Melcer examined 30 different definitions and 54 visual novels and attempted to craft a unified definition.Here it is:A Visual Novel (VN) is a digital narrative focused game that requires interactions where the player must be able to impact the story world or the story’s progression. The story and interactions are most commonly presented through a text box and often employ additional forms of interaction including menu choices—which often contain sets of actions that the player character can perform—or dialogue options representing the player character’s speech or thoughts. Crucially, VNs have On-Click Progression, where the player clicks, taps or presses a button to see the next part of the story. The aesthetics of VNs are most often conveyed through static images of characters, background art, sound effects (SFX) feedback, and soundtracks.Whew! That’s a mouthful. So for our purposes, we’re going to look at visual novels in three particular styles: storyline adventures, detective adventures and dating simulators. And if a game or series hasn’t received a major release outside of Japan, I’m not going to provide much detail beyond a quick namecheck.There’s another problem, too – I really can’t tell you what the first visual novel is. Some of the earliest proto-visual novels include Enix’s 1987 science fiction game Jesus, Hideo Kojima’s 1988 game Snatcher and System Sacom’s 1988 game DOME, which was part of its Novel Ware series. What most people seem to agree established the format more or less the way we see to it today is Chunsoft’s Sound Novel series, which began in 1992 with studio founder Koichi Nakamura’s Otogirisō.Chunsoft, if you are not aware, has long been the co-developer the Dragon Quest games along with Enix, so this completely tracks. Chunsoft’s 1994 murder mystery game Banshee’s Last Cry and 1998 day in the life of eight characters game Machi followed in the same vein.But remember how I mentioned before that many Japanese publishers tended to make adult-oriented eroge adventure games? Well, another studio named Leaf formed in 1995 and created a four-part “Leaf Visual Novel Series” starting in 1996 that included Shizuku, Kizuato, To Heart and the later Routes. Each of these was definitely geared towards a mature audience and Kizuato in particular is shockingly dark and violent. To Heart became the foundation for a popular series that spun off into anime, manga and audio dramas.Also in 1996, a studio called ELF, best known for eroge adventure games like the Dragon Knight series and the Dōkyūsei dating sims, released a landmark science fiction visual novel called YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World that apparently featured such a compelling story that it was ported to the Saturn and Windows without the sex. I have not played it myself, but it was localized by Spike Chunsoft in 2019 for Windows and modern consoles, and it’s also been adapted as a manga and anime OVA.Yet another eroge studio released a visual novel in 1997, and this one, a horror game this time, was called Moon – not to be confused with the game Moon: Remix RPG Adventure that we just discussed! While the name of the developer was Tactics, the team behind it jumped ship the next year to create the developer known as Key, which would go on to create 1999’s romantic games Kanon and 2000’s Air, both of which received sanitized releases after their initial adult versions shipped. Key went on to create the all-ages 2004 game Clannad, and it’s for this game we should pause and take a closer look, because Clannad is widely considered to be one of the best visual novels ever created.The word Clannad is derived from the name of an Irish band that performed as a family known as the Clann of Dore, or Clannad for short, which caused the game’s writer to think the word meant “family.” And family is a major theme in the game’s story.The game tells the story of a high school student named Tomoya Okazaki who begins the game in a toxic relationship with his abusive father following the passing of his mother. He meets a sickly girl named Nagisa Furukawa who is quite socially awkward and who is trying to restart the school’s drama club. Tomoya helps her and meets the four other girls who star in the game. This is the meat of the game, where you can pick different paths and explore the first half of the game, the School Arc, a fairly well-written social sim with some good character stories. If you enjoyed the social links in the Persona games, you’ll enjoy Clannad’s first half. One of the main objectives involves collecting items called “Orbs of Light,” and as you do so, you can unlock the second part of the game, the “After Story.”And here’s the twist – the game shifts into the future where Tomoya and Nagisa are married, and what occurs in that future is one of the most emotionally affecting stories you’ll ever experience in a video game. Beyond the events that occur, you keep seeing glimpses of this place called the Illusory World, a realm Tomoya sees in visions that is inhabited by a lone girl and where he is a wandering spirit. This world has a spiritual and psychological connection to his story in the real one, and in order to see the game’s true ending, Tomoya has to come to understand its significance and collect the remaining Orbs of Light.Clannad is a very long game – easily 40-50 hours long due to the need to complete every facet of the School Arc and then made longer by the need to replay the After Story to achieve the true ending. If you don’t want to bother with that sort of commitment, there’s an anime TV series from 2007-2009 that covers both arcs over 47 episodes and two OVAs. It’s well-regarded and worth watching even if you like the game, though some folks really seem to hate the particularly large and widely spaced eyes Nagisa and the other female characters have.Key went on to create a long series of visual novels after Clannad, and their most recent one, the all-ages adventure Anemoi, actually comes out this month in Japan and centers around a man and his sister returning to their childhood home in rural Japan for the reopening of a time capsule buried ten years ago.Another studio known for visual novels was KID, a video game developer that made a lot of action console games in the 1990s – including the cult classic Pepsiman! – before creating two very popular visual novel series that are known as the Memories Off series, which first launched in 1999 and is still going strong today with over a dozen sequels, prequels and spin-offs, and the Infinity series, which started in 2000 with Never 7: The End of Infinity and continued on into games including Ever 17: The Out of Infinity, Remember 11: The Age of Infinity, the spin-off 12Riven: The Psi-Criminal of Integral and the reboot Code_18.Though these games are all science fiction titles, Ever 17, Remember 11, and Never 7 also have a thematic tie-in to the Zero Escape series by establishing the premise of trying to escape from enclosed places. This is not an accident; they share a writer, the incredible Kotaro Uchikoshi.But let’s now turn to another visual novel series that can probably rival any of these games for popularity, and that’s the Science Adventure series, which begins with the 2008 game Chaos;Head and then was followed up by Steins;Gate in 2009. There are currently six main chapters in this series, and each of them is comprised of two words with a semicolon in between: Robotics;Notes, Chaos;Child, Occultic;Nine and Anonymous;Code. There’s also a new Steins;Gate sequel on the way with the name I guess will be Steins semicolon three question marks, which only a Japanese visual novel studio would think is a good name for a game.The Science Adventure series is primarily developed by a studio called Mages and directed by Chiyomaru Shikura, who has also written the theme music and credits songs for the games. Suffice it to say he takes these games very seriously, and the mythology and lore that extend from them is pretty sprawling and way too complex to summarize here. In the first game, Chaos;Head, you play as a character in the Shibuya district in Tokyo who seems to be having a psychotic break seeing things that aren’t there. As you might expect, the story gets a lot crazier from that premise, and I don’t even want to try to explain what happens. Play it and find out!Steins;Gate is the sequel, and while it takes place a year later in Akihabara, it’s a game about time travel and it’s by far the most popular entry in the series, with several spin-offs, a prequel and a sequel, and even a Famicom-style retelling. Steins;Gate is a great entry point into the series, and if you want to see if you’ll be up for the rest, it’s well worth your time. There’s also an anime adaptation if you prefer to watch it, and you won’t be disappointed if you do – over 24 episodes, it arguably tells the story better than the game and is widely considered one of the best anime series ever made, shifting gears about halfway through from really good to amazingly great.There are a lot of other visual novels out there – more than I’d ever care to describe. But don’t worry – we’re not done yet! In fact, we’re just getting started as we now delve into a subgenre of the visual novel – detective adventure games!Detective adventure games have long been a staple of the Japanese form of the adventure game genre, and whether you’re talking about Nintendo’s Famicom Detective Club, Riverhillsoft’s J.B. Harold Murder Club, Data East, WorkJam or Arc System Works’s lengthy Jake Hunter series, you’ll find that pretty much all of these games owe their style to one game in particular: Yuji Horii’s 1983 game The Portopia Serial Murder Case, which, as I’ve already mentioned, went on to not just establish the Japanese adventure game format, but also the basic mechanics for the JRPG.Unfortunately, most of these games never made it outside of Japan, and while Riverhillsoft did port the first Murder Club to the DOS PC and the TurboGrafx CD in two very different versions in 1989 and 1990, that series has also largely remained in Japan aside from a couple of super obscure ports for the LaserActive format, both of which are essentially just FMV mysteries.So, let’s jump forward to the 2000s, because this is the first time in which most American and European gamers got much of a chance to play the detective style of Japanese adventure games. We covered the Ace Attorney series in our last episode, and Phoenix Wright and his friends helped pave the way for even more mystery-style visual novels on the Nintendo DS as well as the PSP, 3DS and Vita down the road.But there was another Nintendo DS game that came out in 2005 that offered a mystery to solve in visual novel style with some point and click adventure gaming puzzles thrown in: Cing’s Trace Memory, also known in Europe as Another Code: Two Memories. The premise of the game is that you’re a teenage orphan named Ashley Robbins who’s been raised by her aunt in suburban Seattle. But Ashley starts having nightmares about a traumatic murder and then receives a package from her father in advance of her fourteenth birthday. Inside is a device and a message telling her to come to Blood Edward Island. Ashley and her aunt travel there and Ashely meets a ghost boy named D who’s trying to understand why he’s dead.The two begin exploring the Edward family mansion and learn the truth of Ashley’s memories as well as her family’s connection to the Edward family and more about D’s mysterious past. There’s a lot to uncover, including a device that creates fake memories, hence the name of the game. And there’s also a sequel on the Wii that was only released in Japan and Europe called Another Code: R – A Journey into Lost Memories which continues the story, and fortunately, both games received a 2024 remake on the Nintendo Switch released worldwide called Another Code: Recollection, though there are quite a number of changes from the original games.Cing also released three Nintendo DS games that offered an interesting conceit – hold the system sideways, like a book! The first of these was 2007’s Hotel Dusk: Room 215, a detective story where former cop and current traveling salesman Kyle Hyde is stuck with several other people in a hotel out in the middle of nowhere and winds up investigating the staff and the other guests to solve the mystery of room 215. Once again, there are a few puzzles present, but the game’s mostly about following a fairly linear storyline where you mostly have to be careful not to antagonize the guests and earn a game over screen for making poor choices. In 2010, Cing released a sequel called Last Window: The Secret of Cape West in Japan and Europe with a more dynamic storyline, but otherwise following a similar structure.And Cing also released a 2009 game in the same vein called Again in both Japan and North America, this time starring an FBI agent named Jonathan Weaver, or just “J,” who can use psychic powers to see scenes from the past. Unlike the other two games, which have a distinctive sketchy art style, Again uses digital scans of actors and looks more like a police procedural show. It’s not as awful as reviews of the era might lead you to believe, but it’s certainly not great.Three other handheld games in a similar vein are BeeWork’s 2006 release Touch Detective, also known as Mystery Detective in Europe, Capcom’s 2010 game Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective and the indie game Corpse Party, which first appeared on the PC-88 in 1996 as an RPG Maker game and eventually was ported to the PSP, 3DS, mobile devices and modern consoles in the 2010s by Team GrisGris and the developer now known as Mages.Touch Detective is the oddball of the bunch mechanically; it’s a point and click adventure game with really stylized cute character designs and a point and click stylus-driven interface. I really should have included it in the last episode, but because it’s a Nintendo DS game with some very chatty characters and inner monologues, it tended to get lumped in with the Phoenix Wright and Another Code games in reviews of the era.The premise is that that you’re a young girl detective named Mackenzie who has an affinity for touching objects to aid her powers of deduction. The first Touch Detective offers four cases plus a bonus case. The second game, titled Touch Detective II ½, debuted in 2007 on the DS, but the third was initially only released in Japan on the 3DS until a compilation including all three games plus a few other bonuses was released on the Switch in 2022 with upgraded graphics. If you like point and click adventure games with a very heavy Japanese feel, these are worth your time!Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective looks like a point and click adventure game due to its pixel art characters and action sequences, but it’s similar to the Phoenix Wright games in some ways – no surprise since it’s by the same creator, Shu Takami. The premise of the game is that you’re a ghost named Sissel who doesn’t know why he was murdered, but who’s tasked with investigating and then preventing other murders by using his ghostly powers to go back in time 4 minutes and then apply his haunting “ghost tricks” to the environment to change the outcome of the event.It’s a neat game that’s told over 18 chapters and which includes some adventure-style puzzle solving as well as a lot of dialogue amidst a ton of very memorable characters. If you’ve missed this one, play the 2023 remaster available on modern consoles, because it’s an improved experience overall that plays nicely on larger screens.One more game in the same vein is Corpse Party, which, as I mentioned, started out as a 1996 RPG Maker title in Japan but which was eventually remade for Japanese audiences for Windows in 2008 as Corpse Party: BloodCovered and for the PSP in 2010 in a version called Corpse Party: Blood Covered… Repeated Fear. Later versions, such as the 3DS and mobile games and the modern console remake, are based on these remakes.While the original game was an RPG, the newer games were adjusted into being adventure horror titles with lengthy dialogue sequences, multiple endings and lots of side story content to explore other characters. The 2011 sequel Corpse Party: Book of Shadows is actually mostly just a bunch of additional side stories taking place within the same storyline as the main game, but then setting up an epilogue for the 2014 sequel, Corpse Party: Blood Drive.But as it happens, those games are all considered part of the same story; there’s a quasi-official 2013 fan game by Team GrisGris and Grindhouse called Corpse Party 2: Dead Patient. Mages and Team GrisGris are also planning to release an official sequel this year called Corpse Party II: Darkness Distortion scripted by original creator Makoto Kedōin that will offer a new entry point for those who haven’t played the original games.There is some debate about which genre the Corpse Party games belong in since the games have their roots in the JRPG genre. But the gameplay of the most modern versions of the games definitely feels most like the visual novel genre. The original game and Blood Drive both have do have overhead sequences where you maneuver chibi-ized versions of the characters through the haunted school in more of an RPG style, but the games frequently break away into sequences with static backgrounds, character art and text.I won’t even try to explain the story in these games – each installment is lengthy and there are lots of characters and plotlines to experience – but what I will say is that you play as Japanese high schoolers exploring a haunted school called Heavenly Host Elementary School that once stood where the high school Kisragi Academy now exists, and a magical incantation winds up transporting some students to the ruins of the old school in a spiritual world filled with the bodies of other students who had also found their way into Heavenly Host and who’ve been forgotten in the real world. The place is haunted by a girl in a red dress named Sachiko Shinozaki who serves as the original game’s antagonist, and once you get past the original content from the first game, things get very twisty-turny with all the character stories involved. The characters are all more or less anime and manga tropes and it’s very easy to get on the path for a bad ending instead of the true one. That’s one reason why some fans prefer to just watch the anime adaptations before playing the games.But Corpse Party’s mixture of detective work, horror and character relationships doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and there are many other games in the same vein, many of which come from a run of titles created by Spike Chunsoft by Kotaro Uchikoshi and Kazutaka Kodaka.OK, so a quick history lesson. Chunsoft is a long-time Japanese publisher that was responsible for the Sound Novel series we covered earlier, but in 2012, it became Spike Chunsoft when it was combined with another publisher known as Spike, which was founded in 1989 as Mizuki by a former Enix employee and which took on the name Spike in the mid-1990s as it absorbed an influx of people from Human Entertainment. Sadly, Spike didn’t pick up Kono Hifumi, the director of Clock Tower – he went to a company called Nude Maker to make, you guessed it, the Xbox mech simulator with a $200 controller, Steel Battalion. His colleague Goichi Suda – also known as Suda51 - went on to form Grasshopper Manufacture and some of the other team members went to Sandlot to start creating niche titles like Robot Alchemic Drive and Earth Defense Force.But many of the Human Entertainment folks wound up at Spike, which was the developer of games like Lupin the 3rd on the Saturn, the King of Colosseum and DragonBall Z Budokai Tenkaichi games on the PlayStation 2 and the publisher of the Way of the Samurai and Kenka Bancho series. Spike also continued Human Entertainment’s Fire Pro Wrestling games.In 2005, an entertainment and software corporation called Dwango bought both Spike and Chunsoft, and the two created several parallel visual novel-style series. Chunsoft’s creator Koichi Nakamura produced a complex live action FMV visual novel called 428: Shibuya Scramble, which was a spiritual successor to their previous Sound Novel game Machi, a 1998 non-linear visual novel on the Saturn in Japan that was notable for its large city to explore and eight different characters simultaneously experiencing five days of their lives, all depicted with live action photographs. 428: Shibuya Scramble takes place over a ten-hour period told over one-hour segments and features five main characters trying to solve a mystery, though each has a different approach and tone to their story. Even wilder, there are reportedly 87 different possible endings from over a hundred different story paths, which means that this game has loads of replay value. And since it features photography rather than anime characters, it feels more like an interactive TV show, though most of the scenes are stills, not video.The game also included a bonus scenario about a character named Canaan that was unlocked by achieving the true ending, authored by Type-Moon’s Kinoko Nasu with character designs by Takashi Takeuchi. The Canaan story shifts to a more conventional anime look and even spawned an anime television sequel series. And the live action director Jiro Ishii went on to Level-5, the makers of the Professor Layton series, to produce a Japan-only 2012 game called Time Travelers for the 3DS, PSP and PlayStation Vita featuring 3D anime-style character FMV sequences that fit into a massive flowchart of choices dictating how the game unfolds.In 2009, Chunsoft’s write4 Kotaro Uchikoshi launched another series that became a really big deal on handheld platforms: 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. The premise is that you are a college student named Junpei who’s been drawn into a deadly competition called the Nonary games along with eight other people and run by a character named Zero. The game’s broken up into escape room-style segments to provide puzzles and action and visual novel-style sequences to advance the story. The title pretty much tells you everything you need to know – there are nine hours in which to find a door with the number 9 on it, and since you’re all aboard a sinking cruise ship with sealed exits and windows and will blow up if you try to escape, you have no choice but to play along.I will not attempt to explain the plot, as it’s not only quite serious and complex, but also far more fun to experience in the game itself. But I’ll mention that the game has two sequels: 2012’s Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward and 2016’s Zero Time Dilemma, which is actually more of an interactive movie than a visual novel and draws some clear inspirations from Time Travelers. All three received amazingly high reviews from many publications and are considered some of the best games of the 21st century. If you haven’t played them, you absolutely must.Another popular visual novel series that debuted alongside the Zero Escape games began in 2010 with Spike’s Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, written by Kazutaka Kodaka, who’d previously worked on Clock Tower 3, the Jake Hunter games and a video game adaption for the Detective Conan manga series.During a call for new pitches at Spike, Kodaka came up with a battle royale killing game concept called DISTRUST where 15 teenagers would kill each other over a 7-day period. The pitch started out as a visual novel but gradually added in the elements for which the series would become known – trials, deduction minigames, investigations, anime trope characters and a mysterious authority figure with black and white halves – originally a human-like robot named Phantom who looked like a boy on one side and a visible anatomy doll on the other. The concept gradually morphed into the first Danganronpa game and Phantom evolved into the series mascot, the evil black and white robot bear Monokuma.I remember playing the original Danganronpa game on the PS Vita in 2014 and first wondering if it was a Persona 4 knockoff with some Phoenix Wright trial elements because, at least superficially, it felt like a weird fusion of those two games combined with some ideas from the Japanese film Battle Royale about high school students killing each other on a remote island. Even so, the game surprised me with its strong sense of comedy atop its bleak backstory and surprisingly strong main characters, and I was absolutely stunned by the ending, which contained some pretty amazing twists explaining how the “Ultimate” students who’d been selected to attend the prestigious Hope’s Peak Academy had been drawn into a killing game without any knowledge of the craziness going on in the world outside. I think it’s pretty safe to say that if you go into Danganronpa without knowing anything about the game or the anime and manga it ultimately spawned, you will be absolutely shocked when the game drops its last set of twists in the final chapter.The same is true for the first sequel, and one of the first titles for Spike Chunsoft once they merged together in 2012, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. The sequel has an entirely new cast of characters – well, one of them looks familiar and certainly a lot fatter than before, but keep playing! – and absolutely jerks you around with a new killing game set on an island resort and a sort-of secondary antagonist named Nagito Komaeda who is both supremely lucky and also completely nuts, often throwing a wrench into the gears of any attempt to make progress in the game. Once again, there’s a big twist towards the end which is completely wild, and I honestly love the second game as much or maybe even a little more than the first. Again, go in knowing as little as possible and you’ll really enjoy it, and that includes skipping the sidestory action game Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls until you’ve finished the first two.The third game, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, came out in 2017 and it’s a true love it or hate it sequel, featuring some of the best characters and moments in the entire series but also some of the worst contrivances and plot twists. It’s super self-aware and serves as a broader commentary on society’s obsession with competitive reality show-style games sacrificing young people for entertainment. Suffice it to say that this sequel is basically non-canonical where the other games are concerned and doesn’t need to be played if you don’t enjoy what it does early on to apply its first big twist.Spike Chunsoft has made a few spin-offs to capitalize on the popularity of the anime and manga extensions of the series, and there’s also a new game coming up this year called Danganronpa 2×2 that’s essentially an alternate take on the second Danganronpa game. I personally don’t have high hopes for it, as I feel the series pretty much did everything it can do, but for those who can’t get enough, I guess it’s an option!Two other Spike Chunsoft games I want to mention are 2019’s AI: The Somnium Files and 2023’s Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, both of which are new enough that I don’t feel a lot of need to describe them – you can easily play them right now on modern consoles or Steam!AI: The Somnium Files is a visual novel by Kotaro Uchikoshi that alternates between reality and dream worlds called Somnia. As Kaname Date, a detective who delves into dreams to try to solve a murder of a young woman who’s had her left eye removed, you and your cybernetic AI-powered eye Aiba investigate a trail of clues leading you down five different paths that are broadly categorized in the left and right routes depending upon where you take your investigation.It’s a really cool story with excellent 3D sequences, great voice acting and a lot of twists and turns to suit its nonlinear story. There are even two sequels, 2022’s AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, which partially takes place six years after the first game with a new main character, and 2025’s No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files, which takes place between the two games as a side story.Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is co-written by Kazutaka Kodaka and features a detective named Yuma Kokohead who’s followed around by a cute spirit named Shinigami solving mysteries together. Much like AI, the game moves between the real world and an imaginary one, in this case a place called the Mystery Labyrinth which is a visual representation of the mysteries that need to be solved. This game plays much more like Danganronpa, though, with Reasoning Death Match sequences, evidence-gathering and minigames to get through portions of the labyrinth. Though it has some of the same psycho-pop neon-infused look and chaotic energy of the Danganronpa series, Rain Code has 3D models and much more exciting animations. Yuma Kokohead has a piece of hair sticking up in the form of a question mark on his head, and Shinigami transforms Sailor Moon style into a scantily-clad goth girl in the Mystery Labyrinth. It’s an enormous game with dozens of hours of mysteries and a great blend of humor and drama.By the way, Rain Code was developed by Too Kyo Games, which in Japanese means “Too Crazy Games” and it was formed by Kazutaka Kodaka, Kotaro Uchikoshi and the Danganronpa composer Masafumi Takada and character artist Rui Komatsuzaki. And they’ve since released another game in the same vein in 2025 called The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy that has 100 different endings, a school setting full of over-the-top characters and a squishy, sarcastic robot mascot character named Shirei. If that sounds like a wonderful fusion of 428: Shibuya Scramble and Danganronpa along with some tactical RPG combat to boot, then yep, you’re more or less on the money in thinking the game was co-developed by Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi with art by Rui Komatsuzaki and music by Masafumi Takada. So, it’s pretty much guaranteed that if you enjoy any of the Spike Chunsoft games we’ve just discussed, you’ll love this one too!I want to cover one more topic, and I’m going to keep it brief because I really have little experience with this subgenre of the visual novel – dating sims! But they’re an important style of game to discuss and, quite honestly, one of the most influential in their impact on other genres from farming sims like Harvest Moon to tactical strategy games like Fire Emblem: Three Houses to JRPGs like Persona 3, 4 and 5 to pretty much anything else involving romantic interactions with anime-style girls.Before we dive in, I’m only going to cover a few notable titles from the 1990s that helped to establish the genre – I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about eroge or hentai or NSFW games or anything else in that vein because it’s far outside my interests, and I’m also not going to get too much into the games from the 21st century. There are just too many!I also want to take a moment to differentiate between dating sims and another subgenre of the visual novel known as otome, which means “maiden game.” Today, these two genres more or less look alike and it’s just a matter of selecting whether you want to play a game starring a boy or a girl who’s interacting with other characters, and both have strong roots in the bishojo tradition in Japan of products made for girls.But dating sims have traditionally starred a male character in a harem anime sort of story where he had his pick of a variety of girls while otome games typically starred a female protagonist in a romance story that’s a bit more nuanced and which may or may not involve a large number of suitors. Dating sims are generally meant to project the feelings of the female player on the girls being seduced; otome games are meant to project the feelings of the female player on the protagonist as a self-insert and tend to go beyond mere seduction.Of course, there are a lot of men in Japan who also enjoy dating sims and otome games, and they’ve also been quite popular outside of Japan with players of all genders, and particularly the LGBTQ+ community. And many of these fans are additionally interested in niche genres like Boy’s Love, Yuri, Amare, Joseimuke and Galge.So, let’s start with dating sims, which are typically traced back to the 1991 game Princess Maker, which is actually not a dating sim at all, but a child raising simulation in which you are responsible for making parental decisions for an orphan girl during her adolescence and teenage years with the intention of preparing her to become the princess of a fantasy kingdom. In the first game, the daughter’s goal is to marry a prince, but the second game, released in 1993, includes the cringey element of being able to groom the daughter to become flawlessly perfect, avoid romance, and marry you, her adoptive father. Eww.This game was developed by Gainax, the folks who brought us Neon Genesis Evangelion and FLCL among many other games and anime series, and it spawned a series that’s still producing games today - Princess Maker: Children of Revelation is currently in early access on Steam and planned for release later this year. But even though Princess Maker is not a dating sim per se, it established the framework under which many of the dating sims that followed would operate – your success with the various ladies in dating sims depends upon the actions you take, the gifts you give and the stats you raise.As the player, your job is to maximize your chances for seduction by making the right moves to capture the heart of each girl you encounter, often amidst a time limit such as a schedule or set number of days. Some games allow you to go after multiple girls at once, and others prune your path more narrowly once you’re in a committed relationship.The game that established many of these conventions is ELF Corporation’s 1992 eroge visual novel Dōkyūsei, which means “Classmates,” where you play as a male student on summer break wandering around different towns in Japan over a 22-day period, meeting fourteen different girls and trying to win their affections while also competing with suitors. While the game initially included explicit scenes and dialogue, ELF eventually released all-ages editions as well. And of course there was not only a sequel, released in 1995, but also an anime OVA series and a spin-off series called Kakyūsei, or “Underclassmates.”Another notable dating sim is Tokimeki Memorial, or “Heartbeat Memorial,” a 1994 game by Konami that was released as an all-ages title from the start and thus became very popular in Japan. The premise is that you’re a first-year student at Kirameki High School looking for love and you not only have to keep the various girls you encounter happy, but watch out for someone souring on you and gossiping to their friends via a mechanic known as the “bomb” feature.Interestingly, the scenario writer for the game was Koji Igarashi, who’d go on to work on the Castlevania series. While he got stuck working on a romance game, his girlfriend was working on Castlevania: Rondo of Blood. He would sneak into her office and play that game while asking her for tips on the romance game he was making. The success of Tokimeki Memorial allowed Igarashi to name his next project, which was of course Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. He didn’t work on the Tokimeki Memorial sequels, nor was he involved in the series’ shift to otome in 2002 when Konami released Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side, a sidestory series popular enough to have had its most recent sequel released in 2021.But the entire otome genre owes its existence to the 1994 game Angelique, created by Keiko Erikawa, the wife of Yoichi Erikawa, with whom she’d co-founded the development studio Koei. That’s right, yet another adventure gaming power couple – and Keiko Erikawa is essentially the Japanese Roberta Williams! Angelique was intentionally created to serve the market of female gamers, and to create it, Keiko Erikawa had built a team called Ruby Party made entirely of female game developers. While Koei’s Shibusawa Kou had to step in to help guide the inexperienced team on the first Angelique, Ruby Party soon became one of the main otome game development teams, and their strategy was pretty simple: create fun games and then create mixed media to go along with them such as manga, drama CDs and anime OVAs. Many other visual novel, dating sim and otome developers followed that same playbook to broaden their appeal to women. And Ruby Party’s Neo Romance series of otome, dating sims and role-playing games established a strong market for games targeted at women in Japan.Sega, seeing the potential for a mixed media dating sim, began developing a concept first proposed by Oji Hiroi for a theater-based cross-genre game called Sakura Taisen, also known as Sakura Wars, featuring tactical role-playing, visual novel adventure sequences and dating sim elements. Sega wanted the game to be a big hit for the Saturn and commissioned the famous manga artist Kōsuke Fujishima to design the characters and designed the story like an anime television series, complete with an animated intro set to the rousing song “Geki! Teikoku Kagekidan,” which cheers on the game’s Imperial Combat Revue, a troupe of actors who also double as demon-fighting mecha pilots. Their best fighters are the Flower Division, made up of actresses with spiritual powers. As Imperial Navy Ensign Ichiro Ogami, you double as an usher and eventual manager of the theater, and you can also choose which of the girls you’d like to romance as a cataclysmic war with Satan himself gradually escalates in the background.Sega wanted Sakura Taisen to have a broader appeal than just the bishojo audience, and thus the game really plays up the action. The game was popular enough in Japan to spawn a long-running series and many tie-in media and also to inspire other games fusing visual novel and dating sim elements with role-playing and strategy mechanics. Even so, Sega never saw a market for it outside of Japan until 2010 when they finally released the fifth game, 2005’s Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love in North America for the PlayStation 2 and also in Europe on the Wii. The sixth game, 2019’s reboot simply titled Sakura Wars, got a global release, though it was reportedly not a huge seller.I mentioned Leaf’s 1997 game To Heart earlier when we discussed their Visual Novel series, but let’s come back to this game again for a moment because it wound up being a big hit in Japan, spawning an anime series and several sequels and remakes. The original PC version was an eroge game, but the console version stripped out the adult content and was better off for it, broadening the audience and offering players a chance to romance ten different girls – including a robot! – and play some minigames amidst a busy school day schedule very similar to what you’d see in the later Persona 3, 4 and 5 games. A more recent version from Aquaplus was released in 2025 under the name ToHeart with no space between the words, but fans of the original seem to be lukewarm on the choices made in the new one.Of course, To Heart wasn’t available outside of Japan until this recent remake, nor were a lot of the other games we’ve covered. But Red Company and Atlus’s 1998 PlayStation game Thousand Arms was released in North America, and though it’s a role-playing game, it’s best-known for including a dating sim system in which your main character, the womanizing blacksmith Meis Triumph, attracts a few female companions he has to take out on dates so he can increase his intimacy level with them. It’s a really goofy game that’s something of a deep cut for PlayStation-era RPG fans, but aside from Harvest Moon or the Private Actions in Star Ocean: The Second Story, I can’t think of too many other games from the era released outside Japan that included dating sim mechanics.Let’s close out this section with one more game, the 1999 dating sim Kanon, Key’s first release and definitely an eroge with the same sort of unsettlingly cute anime girls you’ll see in Clannad. But as I mentioned, this game was liked well enough to justify all-ages versions when it hit consoles, and it, too, spawned a number of tie-in media, including anime, manga, light novels, a trading card game and drama CDs. Interestingly, Kanon is not quite as remarkable today as it was when it was released because it’s best-remembered as the game that established a lot of the modern anime visual style used in the genre and which popularized the calmer, slice of life storytelling often found in visual novels, dating sims and otome games. The story only has five paths and it’s not nearly as memorable as Key’s later games, but it and its dreamlike 2000 follow-up Air are still well-regarded as classics today.We could talk about many other visual novels if we wanted to. One popular game is Doki Doki Literature Club, a freeware game that has since been released commercially and which is best played thinking that you’re just a male student trying to date girls in the book club. There’s the Nintendo DS launch title Sprung, which was reviled by reviewers at the time despite merely being a European ski resort take on the dating sim genre. There’s Hatoful Boyfriend, a game where you literally date birds, and there’s Christine Love’s visual novels Digital: A Love Story, Analogue: A Hate Story, Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story and…My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress as Him and Now I Have to Deal with a Geeky Stalker and a Domme Beauty Who Want Me in a Bind!!, which is also known as Ladykiller in a Bind.And those are just a small sampling of the many contemporary visual novels out there, many of which are now being authored by developers outside of Japan. There’s a particularly strong indie scene for LGBTQ+ visual novels and dating sims coming from all parts of the world with games like Butterfly Soup, and there are even parodic dating sims like Panzermadels: Tank Dating Simulator, the Trolley dating sequence in The Trolley Solution or the 2025 game Date Anything which, I’m told, completely misunderstands the genre and is mostly popular among people who don’t actually play dating sims.One of the reasons for the proliferation of visual novels is that there are easy tools available to make them. In the old days, RPG Maker could be forced into it via plugins, but there are now commercial-grade tools like Visual Novel Maker, TyranoBuilder and Ren’Py with devoted communities and plenty of documentation to make it easy for anyone to make a visual novel and launch it on a modern marketplace. And while a lot of these games really aren’t that remarkable, there are a surprising number that are completely free and high in quality.Now that we’ve non-exhaustively covered this frankly exhaustingly vast topic, I’m ready to move back to Western games and see how things evolved over the last 25 years as adventure gaming supposedly died and then came back to life. It turns out the rumors of the genre’s death were definitely exaggerated, but the last decade in particular has been an exciting time for the games to grow in commercial appeal!So in our next episode, we’re finally going to talk about how games like Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, which is also known as The Indigo Prophecy, Microids’s adventure games including Amerizone: The Explorer’s Legacy, the Syberia games, Post Mortem and Still Life and Index+’s really wild Dracula: Resurrection series all moved us forward. And we’re also going to talk about the rest of the Quantic Dream library and Daedalic Entertainment as well as a few of the other European series of note.And then we’ll bring things to a near-conclusion by talking about the influence of Telltale Games and indie studios like Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games, Yahtzee Croshaw’s Fully Ramblomatic Games, Crystal Shard, AGD Interactive, Clifftop Games and Grundislav Games, as well as a few more!And when that’s all said and done, we’ll close things out with some perspective on why adventure games are still relevant today and why they’ve seen such a resurgence over the last decade. And I’ll also set things up for us to begin a new series to talk about another genre that features progression-based storytelling, lots of variety and a long tradition of evolution in gaming – the platform game.If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I’m recommending Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, a 2024 game from Panik Arcade and Those Awesome Guys which is, essentially, Super Mario 64 meets Choro Q. I know, I know, I threw you a curveball there by invoking the name of an obscure Japanese game that actually was released in North America for the PlayStation 2 about little cars driving around. And yet that’s what we’re doing in Yellow Taxi – driving a cute yellow cab that can dash or flip as it gets airborne and use its momentum to get to places a taxi probably shouldn’t go, like the roofs of houses or mountain peaks or underwater. It’s built around a hub world with many different non-linear levels you can visit, each of which has objectives and collectibles. Most importantly, the game doesn’t include a jump button, so there’s a lot of puzzle-solving involved in figuring out how to get to those places you can see, but can’t easily visit.The game takes heavy inspiration from Mario’s 3D outings. There’s a Wario-like character named Morio – spelled with an O – who guides you, and the incredible soundtrack by Jacob Lincke really needs to be listened to on repeat, because it both evokes various 3D Mario game tunes but also puts its own spin on them and creates something wild and new. I think the fact that the game’s designers are Italian and repurposing Mario for their own creation is also sort of cool.This game’s normally $17 but each to find cheap – it’s $5.26 on Steam today, and I got it in a bundle on Fanatical for about 10% of that along with some other games! – and you’ll have a great time with it. I found myself playing it far longer than I thought I would, and its variety and “what are they going to do next?” sensibility really makes it fun to pick up and play when you need something sort of challenging, but unimposing.As Our Series Continues…We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, we’re going to talk about console and handheld adventure games from the 1980s, 90s and 2000s that often offered players a different style of gameplay, but still had those puzzle-solving story-driven sensibilities. Join us on this journey through games you’ve may have loved, some you may have heard of and some you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 12: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 10Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:https://www.avclub.com/easter-eggs-the-hidden-secrets-of-videogameshttps://www.pcgamer.com/80s-adventure-game-onry-senki-took-horror-gaming-in-a-slower-spookier-direction/http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/d/ https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/917844-d/80392231 (Archive of http://www.1up.com/features/kenji-eno-breaks-silence.html)“What is a Visual Novel?” academic paper - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3474712-------------------------------------------------EPISODE 12Coming up in this episode –We’re going to talk about console and handheld adventure games from the 1980s, 90s and 2000s including a deeper look at a few great titles and an overview of how the genre was shaped by the Japanese adventure game scene!I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! In 1980, Atari released a game for its Virtual Console System, later known as the Atari 2600, called Adventure. The game was originally intended to be a graphical adaptation of the mainframe Adventure that took place in the Colossal Cave by Will Crowther and Don Woods, but designer Warren Robinett ran into a few problems as he was designing the game.First of all, the console system didn’t have anywhere near the memory that a mainframe computer had, which meant that the game needed to be designed using some very clever techniques designed to maximize the limited available space.Second, the game’s graphical output was very limited in terms of how it displayed environments, items, characters and enemies.And finally, the game had to be designed to work with a single-button joystick rather than a keyboard that could accept more sophisticated text input.Robinett worked on the game for a year while a disbelieving management team tried to discourage him from continuing the project. It went on to be a million-seller for Atari, providing a surprisingly sophisticated fantasy gaming experience for the era and allowing players to explore a thirty-room kingdom, locate items within castles and battle dragons.Oh, and get pestered by a very annoying bat.It was a groundbreaking game in 1980, but today, Adventure is more famous for something else – being the first game to contain an “Easter Egg” due to a secret room Robinett hid in the game with a simple credit of himself as the game’s author. The reason he had to hide it at all was because Atari’s President, Ray Kassar, believed programmers were prima donnas and he didn’t want them to receive public credit for their work, both because they were not paid well and because it would make it easier for competitors to poach them. But the hidden room made it in to the final build, and Atari didn’t even know it existed until players started writing in inquiring about it.According to Steve Wright, who was the manager of the Atari Home video game department at the time, Atari’s management wanted to remove the code for future printings of the game, but he persuaded them that not only would it cost too much to do so, but that gamers would love finding “Easter eggs” like this in their games. It was a metaphor that stuck, and Wright started insisting that every game include something like this, leading to several games at least including the developers’ initials. Adventure is now famous not just for being one of the great Atari 2600 games, but also for establishing the idea of a game developer receiving credit in a home console game.But by the time the game had shipped, Warren Robinett had moved on to co-found The Learning Company, and the basic ideas and mechanics he’d developed for Adventure went on to shape some of their graphical edutainment computer games including Rocky’s Boots, Think Quick! and the surprisingly sophisticated programming adventure Robot Odyssey. His ideas also shaped a few Atari 2600 games like the Swordquest series and Haunted House, and also 1979’s Superman, which shipped before Adventure and which was built by John Dunn using some of Robinett’s ideas.But in the wake of the 1983 market crash and the death of the second-generation consoles, adventure gaming on console games transitioned away from Robinett’s style and largely began either adapting the Japanese style popularized by Yuji Horii’s 1983 game The Portopia Serial Murder Case, the Filmation style popularized by Ultimate Play the Game’s 1983 isometric adventure Knight Lore or the point and click style of computer adventure games like Uninvited, Shadowgate and Déjà Vu as well as Maniac Mansion and King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!, all of which, by the way, got actual ports to the NES.So did Princess Tomato and the Salad Kingdom, a Hudson Soft adventure originally released for home computers in Japan, and also a remake of a 1986 Nihon Falcom computer adventure role-playing game called Taiyo no Shinden: Asteka II that was localized for the NES in North America as 1988’s Tombs & Treasure.But the NES also got a few original adventure games of its own. One of these is Beam Software’s Nightshade, a 1992 release that’s an honest to goodness point and click adventure with some light combat. Like a lot of adventure games, it’s lighthearted, and the premise is that Metro City’s superhero has been dispatched and a supervillain named Sutekh unites all the criminal gangs under his banner. A trenchcoat and trilby hat-wearing vigilante in sunglasses named Mark who prefers to go by the name Nightshade (but is sometimes called “Lampshade” or “Nightcart” by the denizens of Metro City) decides to take on Sutekh and the four criminal gangs under his control, but he has to solve a number of puzzles to do so. It’s a fascinating game that definitely has become a cult classic over time, but which was almost entirely ignored when it first debuted. Today, it’s far easier to play since you can use save states; the original game had to be completed in a single sitting.The 1989 NES game Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is also an adventure game, though not a very good one. As Eddie Valiant and Roger Rabbit, you search around Hollywood, Toontown and the surrounding areas for pieces of Marvin Acme’s will. You also have to talk to characters you run into on the street or in buildings and search for items and joke punchlines, the latter of which Roger uses to get out of trouble when Judge Doom’s weasels catch up with him. The game looks great – it was made by Rare for publisher LJN Toys, and it honestly has a lot of good ideas in it, but as an adventure game, it’s boring and repetitive and doesn’t make enough use of the movie’s incredible ideas.I also consider David Crane’s 1989 NES game A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia an adventure game because it involves exploring a Pitfall II-style world and making use of your blob pal Blobert, who can transform into different things when you feed him various flavors of jellybeans. There’s a puzzle solving aspect to this because you have to deduce the right transformations needed to overcome different challenges that you face and also do a little bit of lateral thinking to understand how the jellybean flavors correspond to Blobert’s powers. The punch jellybean, for example, turns Blobert into a hole because it plays into the phrase “hole punch.” The ketchup-flavored jellybean will make Blobert catch up with you. And the Licorice jellybean turns Blobert into a ladder because… um, they both start with L?Codemasters also released a 1992 game for its Aladdin modular cartridge system on the NES called Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade, and while it’s a point and click adventure and platformer hybrid, I can’t recommend it as more than a curiosity.Beyond all of these, a couple of action games infused the Japanese menu-driven style of adventure gaming in some interesting ways. One of those games is Dr. Chaos, which is part Castlevania-style platformer in a haunted house and which turns into a point and click first-person adventure game when you enter rooms. And on the Sega Master System, there’s Spellcaster, a localized port of a game based on the Peacock King manga that starts out as an action sidescroller set in Japanese mythology but turns into a first-person adventure game halfway through.You might get the sense that adventure games just weren’t very popular on console systems, and you’d be right. What’s far more common are action adventure titles like The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, The Battle of Olympus, Faxanadu or Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest where players have to explore large worlds, collect items or powers and overcome obstacles to progress, with a lighter emphasis on puzzle-solving.And yet on the Sega Genesis, players did get Scooby-Doo Mystery, an honest-to-goodness Day of the Tentacle-style adventure game starring the Scooby gang. This game debuted in 1995 and was developed by Illusions Gaming Company and it’s honestly really good if you enjoy adventure games. It even breaks up the gameplay into two episodes, and in both of them, Fred, Daphne and Velma get trapped and need help from Scooby and Shaggy. The first is called ‘Blake’s Hotel’ and features a guy in a monster suit who’s terrorizing everyone to scare them out of the hotel, who chases you through hallway doorways and who’s revealed to be exactly who you thought it was once he’s captured. The second is called ‘Ha Ha Carnival’ and it involves a phantom clown who’s scaring everyone on a boardwalk and sabotaging some of the rides. Once again, he’s stopped because of those meddling kids.I’m not even a big Scooby Doo fan and I had a blast with this game. Give it a try!Another interesting point and click adventure for both the SNES and the Sega Genesis is the 1994 release Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, though the twist is that you don’t control Pac-Man directly, but instead guide him as he wanders around Pac-Land and shoot at things that might affect him with a slingshot. It’s a very odd concept for a Pac-Man game and its unusual control scheme takes some getting used to. The game’s broken up into four missions with a couple of intermissions to play some classic Pac-Man, but the gameplay and art style more closely resembles the 1984 Pac-Land platform game that adopted a lot of the Hanna Barbera cartoon aesthetics.Both Scooby Doo and Pac-Man 2 illustrate a trend for many console adventure games going forward – they were games largely made for kids based on popular characters or intellectual properties. There are games like the 1996 adaptation of the movie Casper on the PlayStation, Saturn, 3DO and Game Boy Color, which is an isometric adventure game with heavy puzzle elements. There’s the game Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster and the Beanstalk, originally released in 1996 for Windows but better known for its 1998 PlayStation version, which features a mixture of platforming and point and click adventuring. And there are the Game Boy Color and Advance Hamtaro games such as 2001’s Ham-Hams Unite! and 2002’s Ham-Ham Heartbreak featuring cute hamsters who have to learn “Ham-chat” words that also serve as an expanding dictionary of actions Hamtaro can take within the game. There’s the 2001 platformer adventure on the Game Boy Color, SpongeBob Squarepants: Legend of the Lost Spatula, and there’s also the 2006 direct to video movie tie-in The Barbie Diaries: High School Mystery.But I also want to mention Blazing Dragons, a 1996 adventure game on the Saturn and PlayStation made by The Illusions Gaming Company, the same developer that made The Scooby Doo Mystery. While this is a licensed game as well – it’s based on a Canadian cartoon show by Nelvana created by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame along with Gavin Scott – the lack of familiarity most gamers will probably have with the property is an asset towards enjoying the game, because it’s very much in the vein of Discworld, but with dragons!The premise of the show is a sort of twisted take on Arthurian legends where dragons in the castle of Camelhot sit around the Square Table under the guidance of King Allfire, who holds the legendary sword Exaliburn. The show and the game center on Squire Flicker, who serves under Sir Loungelot, a lazy but favored knight who constantly forces Squire Flicker to complete tasks for him that he can take credit for.Obviously, the show has a lot of terrible puns, but the writing’s a lot more clever than you might assume, and the voice acting is top-notch, featuring the voices of Terry Jones, Cheech Marin and Harry Shearer, who’s not only famous for being a member of the fictional band Spinal Tap but also one of the main voice actors on The Simpsons.The game itself could have been a lazy FMV adaptation, but nope – this is a true icon-driven point and click adventure game with pixel art characters, painted backgrounds, inventory puzzles, dialogue trees and even the odd arcade sequence. Even more surprising, this game is truly fun – it has a complete story to tell, doesn’t require any familiarity with the source material and it’s amazingly well-crafted all around. I think if it’d been released on Windows as well it might have made a slightly bigger impression, and it’s every bit as good as the Sierra and LucasArts adventures of the era.But console adventure games that didn’t fit into the licensed adaptation mold tended to fit into some of the styles more popular in Japan – anime and manga-style games, visual novels and dating sims and mysteries.And, of course, games designed to provide a spine-tingling sense of horror.In 1981, Atari released James Andreasen’s Haunted House, an adventure game in the style of Adventure that replaced that game’s blocky avatar with a pair of eyes wandering around a dark four-story mansion filled with rooms populated by ghosts, spiders and bats. The game was well-known for the rather frightening sense of atmosphere provided by its spooky sound effects, flashing lightning and, in the harder game modes, persistent darkness. Suffice it to say that few 8-bit adventure games managed to be anywhere near as tense or scary as Haunted House was, and it’s still a bit nerve-wracking today. On home consoles, however, few games bothered to deliver the horror vibes that Haunted House was able to pull off.But in Japan, horror adventure games became popular on home computers thanks to developers like System Sacom, which produced the Novel Ware line of games, the adult game developer Fairytale’s Dead of the Brain series and Soft Studio Wing, the creators of Mirrors and Onryō Senki, the latter of which even includes a protective ofuda design on the box to ward off evil spirits.But as far as consoles go, one of the most notable horror adventure games of the 1990s was the Mega CD game Yumemi Yakata no Monogatari, which came out in 1993 in Japan from System Sacom and SEGA. Vik Tokai published a North American port in 1994 for the Sega CD under the name Mansion of Hidden Souls, offering players a spooky Myst or 7th Guest-style mansion exploration with pre-rendered full-motion video sequences transitioning between screens. The hidden souls the title refers to are butterflies representing other souls who’ve gotten trapped in the mansion and who sometimes help you along the way as you attempt to rescue your sister.The 1994 sequel, which was this time published by Sega as a launch title for the Saturn console, is confusingly called The Mansion of Hidden Souls but has you take on the role of June, one of the butterflies in the mansion who’s tasked with trying to figure out why the moon has gone blood red, which is weakening the mansion’s power. Most of the game is spent talking to the other inhabitants of the mansion, and it’s honestly a very weird sequel because it sort of continues the story without preserving the horror vibes of the original. It’s also notorious for bad voice acting and uncanny valley-style floating heads.If you’re going to play any of System Sacom’s games, the one to try is Lunacy, a 1996 Saturn game published by Atlus. It’s similar in style, but a bit better than either of its predecessors and the chief complaint about it is that the first half is something of a walking simulator – sure, you can wander around, but the game tends to guide you to where you need to go and there’s not much to interact with besides watching the story play out. This time, you play as an amnesiac named Fred who’s arrived in a place called Misty Town and who’s trying to find the City of Moons so he can escape a death sentence. The second half of the game is where all your choice and agency as a player finally arrive and allow you to complete actions that impact the game’s ending. Unfortunately, the game’s a bit clunky as adventures go and you’ll probably need a walkthrough to know how to obtain the ending you want. There’s also very little reason to play The Mansion of Hidden Souls before it – there’s no important storyline connection, just more of a thematic one.One other adventure horror series I want to mention is the loosely-connected trilogy from Kenji Enjo’s studio, Warp. I’ll mention first that Kenji Eno was known for being one of those unhinged, boundary-pushing game creators in the mold of Suda51 or Swery65, and if you ever read The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers or any of the interviews with the man, you’ll see just how wild he was. He was also a provocateur of the highest order, perhaps because he also had a background as a musician and knew how to play the press for attention. One of his most famous stunts was in 1996 when he was showing off one of his games to the Japanese press and had it start out with a PlayStation logo that morphed into a Saturn logo so he could announce that he was going Saturn-exclusive. It was horribly offensive to Sony, especially since it was their press event.The three games for which Warp and Kenji Eno are best known are the loosely-related D, D2 and Enemy Zero, all of which share some common ideas but are entirely different games with no continuity between them. One of the oddest conceits is that each game stars the same heroine, Laura, but she always has a different last name and is treated like an actress starring in standalone stories.The original D was first released for the 3DO and, surprisingly, was the game that sold the best of the three, perhaps because it was also ported to the PlayStation, Saturn and PC afterwards. It’s an absolutely bizarre game where Laura Harris is sent into a hospital where her father, Richard, has barricaded himself and reportedly killed a bunch of people inside. She’s supposed to get him to surrender. But as she steps foot in the hospital and sees a bunch of corpses on the ground, she winds up in a medieval castle in an alternate dimension and has to explore it, 7th Guest-style, while she uncovers the mystery of what her father has been up to. The uncanny valley-style plastic human characters aren’t too engaging, but the game does have a few shocking moments worth seeing. And yes, a lot of the game’s weirdest moments have to do with cannibalism.But rather than describe it, let me just encourage you to check it out for yourself, because the plot leads to a pretty bizarre connection to a famous monster whose name also begins with D. Or you can just watch a playthrough, because even though this game was released on multiple discs, all that FMV means it’s a relatively short experience you’ll finish in a couple of hours.D-2 was supposed to be the killer app for Panasonic’s ill-fated M2 console, which was being designed to replace the 3DO.  The original version was supposed to be a sequel featuring Laura’s son and featuring a different D as a villain – this time the Devil himself! But that game never got finished, and what we instead received was a Dreamcast follow-up featuring Laura Parton, a plane crash survivor who winds up in the Canadian wilderness where she and her fellow survivors discover others have blossomed into hostile mutants with plant-like tendrils. There are also evil angels to contend with. The story at first sort of seems like it’s inspired by The Thing, but it’s way crazier and turns into a survival horror shooter as it goes, complete with a leveling system to give Laura more health as she kills more monsters. The ultimate story is sort of an Eldritch horror sort of conflict with evil aliens who want to annihilate mankind, but who are thwarted by Laura and her connection to the Earth Mother. It takes a lot of cues from the style of Metal Gear Solid, complete with lengthy cutscenes.This game is sprawled across 4 CDs and is significantly longer than the original D. Also, the end credits sequence ends with a bunch of stock footage of Earth’s history and many alarming statistics about how overpopulated the world is about to get and how crummy things are for us and everyone else here, which, again, if you’ve finished Metal Gear Solid, seems like D-2 took some pretty direct inspiration from Hideo Kojima but went a different way with it.Warp’s other famous game is Enemy Zero, in which Laura Lewis is trapped on a space station with invisible aliens that are killing everyone. The game is also divided between FMV sequences and 3D exploration sequences with some first person shooting, in which Laura has to locate the aliens with an audio device that tells her when they’re in range of her gun sights. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t produce stereo sound so it doesn’t quite work as an auditory 3D signal. That’s a shame, because it’s a neat idea.The game’s definitely inspired by the film Alien, but it’s got its own wrinkles, and while I don’t want to ruin the story, I would definitely encourage you to go in with your eyes open that this game is hard. One hit and you’re dead, forcing you back to the main menu to reload. Fortunately, there are checkpoints where you can save, but unfortunately, they are limited due to the use of a mechanic where saved games are stored on an audio recorder where a save takes 3 charges and loads deplete one. You only have 64, which means you can run out. Enemy Zero’s reputation for being one of the Saturn’s obnoxiously difficult games is well-earned. I would recommend the 1998 Windows version, however – it looks and plays better.  Much like the actor character of Laura, some of the cast of Enemy Zero show up in D-2 in different roles. Again, this is a really interesting idea, and it helps make some of the weirder stuff between the three games feel like it’s connected in a broader way, even though none of it is. These games are all very interesting, but I wouldn’t say any has aged particularly well, and the main reason you’d want to play any of them today is for the absolutely bonkers storytelling.Another horror-themed adventure game was Human Entertainment’s 1995 Super Famicom game Clock Tower, which was inspired by the 1985 Italian film Phenomena, better known as Creepers in the US and UK, though this version is about 20 minutes shorter than the original. In the movie, which stars Jennifer Connelly as Jennifer Covino, an American girl attends a Swiss boarding school and has to track down a serial murderer who’s killing other girls at the school. Oh, and Jennifer has a telepathic link to insects for some reason, and makes friends with a chimpanzee named Inga. It’s a weird movie.But Clock Tower takes some of its ideas and adapts them into a maddeningly tough survival horror game about an orphan named Jennifer Simpson who’s taken in, along with other orphaned girls, to live in castle-like mansion called the Clock Tower owned by the Barrows family. Jennifer soon finds one of her fellow orphans murdered and is chased by a terrifying and heavily deformed boy with a huge pair of shears – the Scissorman. Jennifer has to find a way to escape him, but winds up uncovering a deeper plot involving his mother, his brother and a devil-worshipping cult. It’s a 2D point and click adventure game with pixel art-style graphics, but also quite tense and timing-oriented and really difficult to solve without a lot of trial and error.Clock Tower was recently remade by WayForward in 2024’s Clock Tower: Rewind, and it looks and feels like the original but now has animated cutscenes, voice acting and some amazing new songs by Dale North that feature vocals from the Silent Hill series’s Mary Elizabeth McGlynn and NieR series’s Emi Evans. It’s a great way to play the game.Of course, outside of Japan, the game that most people would know as Clock Tower is actually the 1996 sequel, which was released on the PlayStation. This game involves the Scissorman hunting down Jennifer and her new adoptive mother Helen, and the two have to find an artifact called the Demon Idol, return to the Clock Tower and open a portal to Hell to destroy Scissorman for good. Though the game is in 3D, it retains the same basic point and click control scheme as the Super Famicom game and feels quite different from Resident Evil, which debuted the same year.The Clock Tower series got two more games – one in 1998 called Clock Tower: Ghost Head but released in the West as Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within and a 2002 PlayStation 2 game called Clock Tower 3, which eschews the point and click style for direct control over your character. Neither game is connected in story or even has you visit the Clock Tower mansion – the premise becomes more of a theme about school girls running away from terrifying killers and monsters. And unfortunately, the series has stayed dormant ever since.One other horror adventure from the PlayStation is FromSoftware’s 1998 title Echo Night, a first person game aboard a haunted ship that has you solve puzzles and help spirits solve their personal problems and atone for their regrets. It’s a fairly short and rough-around-the-edges adventure I can’t really recommend to anyone but the curious. There are two sequels – one only released in Japan and a PlayStation 2 sequel from 2004 called Echo Night: Beyond – as well as a spiritual successor from 2018 for VR called Déraciné.Speaking of which, there are also many other 1990s horror adventure games from Japan that have never made it into North America, and I can’t even pretend to be an expert in them because I don’t speak or read Japanese. I come across them occasionally, like the 1999 SNK game Athena: Awakening from the Ordinary Life that stars Psycho Soldier’s Athena Asamiya. If you want to dive into those sorts of games, you’ll need to learn Japanese, but you’ll find plenty to play.Recently, a rather intriguingly named digital game called Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening shipped on Windows and modern consoles. It’s developed by Magic Pockets and published by Microids and based on a 1970s and 80s manga and anime series by Buichi Terasawa featuring the psychogun-armed, blonde-haired adventurer Cobra, who battles space pirates led by Lord Salamander and duels with Crystal Boy or Bowie – it depends on the translation – who’s a man made out of incredibly strong glass. Cobra has an assistant named Lady Armaroid and a complicated relationship with triplets with the last name of Royal who each have parts of a treasure map tattooed on their backs.It’s a fun story; total 80s cheese with a Total Recall or Bourne Identity framing device thrown in for good measure. And it’s also pretty mature in its themes and attitudes towards sex and nudity, which might explain why it was very popular in France despite being only a minor hit in Japan. So it’s surprising to see a modern retro-style action game based on it given that it’s not really trying to make a comeback as a property and it’s not exactly a nostalgic anime series for anyone else in the world.But it’s even more surprising that this isn’t the first time a Cobra game has been released with some connection to France. Loricels made two of them for home computers in the 1980s, simply titled Cobra and Cobra 2. And there was also a Mega CD game called The Space Adventure released in 1995 by Virgin interactive Entertainment’s European division.But The Space Adventure was actually created by Hudson Soft as a 1991 PC Engine sequel to the 1989 PC Engine CD game Cobra: Kokuryū Ō no Densetsu, and while both North America and Europe got the sequel on Sega’s CD-ROM console, the original game, which tells the first part of Cobra’s story, was never released.That’s a shame, because The Space Adventure is a decent game in its own right. It’s also the first game to ever receive an ESRB rating of M due to the extreme violence, skimpy outfits and outright nudity present in the game. But more than anything, it’s a typical example of the Japanese style of adventure game we’ve already discussed when I mentioned Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher a few episodes back – a menu driven experience depicted by selecting actions accompanied by still or slightly animated images with occasional moments of controlling your character. In Cobra’s case, that’s on his spaceship, or in certain corridors, where you get to walk up and down paths and move between rooms in third person perspective.The game’s story more or less follows the manga and the anime adaptation, leading to a climactic battle with Crystal Boy. There are many twists and turns that get you there, including quite a few moments of ultra-violence and one midgame encounter with an ancient giant robot. Cobra’s almost always up for a fight with a grin on his face and a cigar hanging out of his mouth, and when he is in trouble, he can count on Lady to come and rescues him as the plot requires it. Everything looks cool and there are even sections with some voice acting. I’m not sure why critics panned this game so much in the 1990s – it’s a decent experience today, and surprisingly lengthy for a console adventure, clocking in around 10-15 hours the first time around.Another outer space adventure game from Japan that many English-speaking gamers would like to see get an official release is Hideo Kojima’s Policenauts, which came out in 1994 on the NEC PC-98 before getting ported to the 3DO, PlayStation and Saturn in the following years. Unlike Snatcher, which draws so heavily from Blade Runner that it might as well be called a manga-style adaptation, Policenauts feels more like its own thing – sort of a buddy cop in space story, sort of a hard science fiction meditation on the problems with space colonization and organ trafficking, sort of a procedural murder mystery. Sure, it draws from many influences – especially Lethal Weapon – but it feels more original.As a game, it’s primarily a visual novel style of adventure in the style of J.B. Harold Murder Club where you exhaust every available menu option to proceed and, like Snatcher, there are shooting sequences. The story has a few twists and turns and even two different prologues, but it’s an entertaining and surprisingly straightforward ride that takes about 10 hours to get through.The biggest problem with Policenauts is that it’s never officially been translated into English, which meant that some of the slyer references made to the game in Metal Gear Solid went right over players’ heads. For example, Meryl Silverburgh is a main character in Policenauts, FOXHOUD tattoo and all, and the protagonist from Policenauts, Jonathan Ingraham, smokes the same brand of secondary smoke-less cigarettes as Solid Snake. And Snake’s real name – David – is an allusion to Meryl’s partner, Dave Forrest, in Policenauts, though it’s a bit tongue in cheek, since Dave’s a pacifist who shoots to wound and Snake is constantly telling Meryl to shoot to kill.Thankfully, a massive fan translation effort resulted in the PlayStation version of the game receiving a high-quality English translation in 2009, and if you want to play it, the good news is that it’s not hard to do so provided you can get your hands on the original discs or an image of them. I’d say the mystique of Policenauts is probably a bit stronger than the game itself, but it’s still well worth playing.Another PlayStation-era adventure game long stuck in Japan has been Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, a 1997 release by Love-de-Lic that only recently got a full worldwide release in English and other languages. Now, I’m going to be honest and say I that I have not played this game all the way through myself, and with good reason – it’s only been available in English the last few years and my focus has been on games from the 80s and early 90s during my research project, The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played. I’ll get to Moon one of these days. But I’ve played the first few hours, I’ve watched some playthroughs to get what it’s about, and let me tell you - it’s a brilliant game I’ll be excited to spend more time playing when it’s time.The premise of the game is that you begin as a hero in the style of Dragon Quest and make your way to the final boss, a dragon. But before you finish the battle, the game pulls back to reveal a boy playing a video game on his TV, and his mom orders him to stop playing and go to bed. Before he can, he’s mysteriously absorbed into the TV and falls into the world of the game, landing next to the towspeople of the castle in the Moon world where the Hero resides in a land called Love-de-Gard. The boy is a spirit who can’t be seen but who can be understood, so he puts on a few spare clothes an old lady gives him – she mistakes him for her grandchild – and walks around town in a green stocking cap, a pair of gloves, a pair of boots and a vest, which is all anyone can see of him. He’s also contacted by a benevolent Queen who tells him to get to know the townspeople and help them with their problems.This sets up the first part of the game, which is basically built around the conceit of, “what does the rest of the game world do when a JRPG hero isn’t around?” And honestly, it’s kind of a miserable place because the hero is so obsessed with leveling up that he’s abusing the world around him, particularly the monsters, who are really just animals and whose corpses are strewn about the woods and whose spirits need to be reunited with their bodies so they can be taken to the moon and resurrected. He’s also stealing from people, bothering them with inane questions and murdering their pets in a misguided effort to save the villagers from animals that look dangerous. Every opportunity to help a person or a creature is essentially a puzzle to be solved, and as you do, you earn love, which in turn helps you to level up your love level and gain more actions so you can travel further in the world.It’s a wonderfully subversive adventure game that looks and plays like an RPG but which has no combat and forces you to do good by helping people instead of battling your way to glory. The characters and game world are absolutely captivating, the game’s look is distinctive and the soundtrack is amazing. I particularly adore the game’s fusion of traditional art, pre-rendered art and Claymation, and nothing in this game, even the design of the hero, looks like any other RPG or adventure game you’ve played before. The story’s also really funny and interesting and has a lot of heart, as you might expect.Fans of Toby Fox’s Undertale and Deltarune will definitely see a lot of thematic similarities between those games and Moon, and the game’s artwork reminds me a lot of the TV World in Chapter 3 of Deltarune since Tenna very closely resembles the look of characters from Moon. While it wasn’t a direct inspiration, Fox has said in interviews that just hearing about Moon while he was working on Undertale helped shape his own concept. But I’d suggest the pacifist route in Undertale and the complex character interactions of Deltarune are very much in the vein of what Moon pulled off back in the late 1990s. If you enjoy those games, you’ll love this one too!Love-de-Lic made some other unusual games like the 1999 adventure puzzler UFO: A Day in the Life and the 2000 evolutionary strategy game LOL: Lack of Love, both of which were only released in Japan. When Love-de-Lic folded, some of the staff went on to form Punchline, which created the very odd 2002 PlayStation 2 kissing game Chulip and the interesting 2006 psychological horror game Rule of Rose. Some of the staff later formed a new developer called Onion Games to release 2016’s Dandy Dungeon: Legend of Brave Yamada, the global port of Moon and a 2024 Moon sequel called Stray Children.Well, I’ve done it to myself again – I had a whole other section on Japanese visual novels to talk about and I realized that this episode was getting far too long. And so I’m going to file those away for next week so we can go into a lot more detail and instead talk about a few other console and handheld adventure games worth mentioning.Let’s begin with the 1997 PlayStation and Saturn game Swagman, which was created by Core Design and which honestly defies easy description. It’s an action-adventure game sort of in the style of The Legend of Zelda depicted from a top-down view, and it superficially looks a bit like Zombies Ate My Neighbors, but with pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds.But this is an adventure game through and through about a brother and sister who are on vacation in a place called Paradise Falls where a sinister being called Swagman is unleashing monsters and trapping the adults in perpetual nightmares as he rounds up the Dreamfly fairies.  You begin the game as Zack and have to rescue your sister, Hannah, who’s captured in the opening cinematic by Swagman’s goblin-like Skallywag minions. Eventually, both of you have to venture into the nightmare realm known as the Terrortries to rescue the fairies who make up a group called the Dreamflight so they can spread enough Dreamdrew to counteract Swagman’s nightmare-inducing Dream-Ash. Oh, and Zack and Hannah’s hit points are measures in Zees, and if they lose them all, the dream is over and they, too, are consumed by nightmares.I realize this all sounds like the fever dream of a person who’s spent too much time imbibing in some odd substances of their own, but Swagman is actually a really neat game. Though it is an action title with boss battles and a Zelda-style emphasis on exploration, rescuing fairies, collecting keys, blowing holes in walls and progressing into new areas, you also pick up items that extend your abilities and often have to think a bit to solve the game’s surprisingly involved puzzles. Zack and Hannah also can transform into monsters when they enter a mirror and step into the Dream World.While Swagman didn’t earn super great review scores when it was released, it’s actually well worth your time to play today, particularly on the Sega Saturn.As for more traditional adventure games, Capcom produced a pretty neat one in 2001 for the Game Boy Advance called Gyakuten Saiban, which means “Turnabout Trial.” In this game, a rookie lawyer named Ryuuichi Naruhodou has to successfully argue cases in court, including two against an aggressive opponent named Reiji Mitsurugi, who’s never lost and who gets angrier and more cunning in defeat until he himself winds up a murder suspect. The game was popular enough to warrant two Game Boy Advance sequels, but Capcom’s American division started pushing for a localization as well. The resulting game was christened Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and it debuted on the Nintendo DS in 2005 to low expectations.Obviously, it caught on, because the series, which is now simply called Ace Attorney, is still going strong. But for many American gamers, myself included, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was the game to expose players to the modern style of Japanese visual novels and detective games. In each chapter of the first release, players are charged with investigating a crime, gathering clues, preparing a defense and then getting into the thick of things in the courtroom, where the prosecutors will introduce arguments that need to be interrupted and refuted with hard evidence. The tennis-like rhythm of things going your way and then suddenly going the wrong way as a new argument is introduced makes these games tense and fun, and the wacky characters, strange contrivances, ridiculously permissive judge and the fact that at one point you have to put a parrot on the stand make this game incredibly memorable.The Nintendo DS version also allowed players to shout “Objection!,” “Hold it!” or “Take that!” into the microphone and also to play a brand new fifth chapter prosecuted by Phoenix Wright’s rival Miles Edgeworth with some added touchscreen elements. While both of the other Game Boy Advance games were also localized for North America and Europe and ported for the Nintendo DS, they didn’t receive any other features. Fortunately, every sequel since has been released worldwide in some form.And this includes the 2012 crossover game Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, co-developed by Capcom and Level-5, the studio behind the Professor Layton games.We might as well talk about Professor Layton as well, because each of the games in his series is an adventure game with traditional puzzles to solve like brain teasers and logic puzzles and even manipulation puzzles like sliders or a jigsaw puzzle. The first game, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, was released in 2007 in Japan for the Nintendo DS and a year later in North America. Unlike a lot of DS games of the era, the Professor Layton games feature animated cutscenes and occasional voice acting,The setup of the games tends to be the same from entry to entry – Professor Hershel Layton is dressed like Arense Lupin and is part Indiana Jones, part Sherlock Holmes and, in the third game, part Doc Brown from Back to the Future, and he’s accompanied by his young assistant Luke Triton, the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’s Dr. Watson. The series was originally intended as a trilogy, but Level-5 had such success that it started creating prequels and side stories for subsequent entries, and a new sequel, Professor Layton and the New World of Steam, is due out sometime this year to finally continue the story.As adventure games, the Professor Layton games are primarily little drips of story between arbitrary puzzles, with lots of talking head dialogue and accordion music in between. The beginning and the end of the game tend to be where most of the interesting storytelling takes place, and thus these games are less about the adventure than the destination. Even so, they’re fun and interesting and extremely well-made.Another interesting adventure game from around the same time is the 2007 Capcom-developed game Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, a truly remarkable title for the Wii that uses the game’s unique controller to facilitate a point and click adventure while also including some minigames that often involve shaking the Wiimote. Zack is a young pirate boy and Wiki is a monkey friend who can fly by spinning his tail. Along with their crew, The Sea Rabbits, Zack and Wiki are following the directions of the skull of Captain Barbaros to find an island of treasure… but of course they have an adversary, the Rose Rock gang led by the beautiful but annoying Captain Rose.But the really treacherous character is of course Captain Barbaros, who betrays Zack and has a personal grudge against Wiki. The game’s story is primarily told through non-voiced dialogue, but since it’s in full 3D and has you point and click to move Zack around, it really does feel like a substantial adventure game. It feels more like One Piece than The Secret of Monkey Island, but it’s still quite fun.I’m not sure why this game got overlooked as badly as it did – it’s really good and well-made, with great graphics, a fun story and wonderful characters. It also makes amazing use of the Wiimote by having you do things like build Rube Goldberg-type machines, play rhythm games, complete laser puzzles, go fishing and so much more.One final game I wanted to mention this episode is Sega’s 2012 Nintendo 3DS title Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure, a truly one of a kind fusion of adventure gaming, rhythm gaming and platforming that really deserves more attention. The story is absolutely bonkers and involves the resurrection of Napoleon in France in some vague era in the 20th century, and you play as a boy named Raphael who’s leading a double life as the thief Phantom R. The adventure portion of the game involves running around Paris both during daylight and nighttime hours in visual novel style and occasionally dipping into minigames. The production values are amazing, and the music and character art add a lot of charm to the Parisian setting. Don’t miss this one – it’s truly an underrated gem.If you’re paying close attention, you may notice I just mentioned the visual novel style of gameplay, which is a major subgenre of adventure gaming in Japan. So in our next episode, I’m going to give you a crash course in Japanese visual novels, murder mysteries, eroge and dating sims. Many of these games have never made it outside of Japan, but some of the ones that have, like Clannad and Steins;Gate, are considered some of the best narrative games ever made. Don’t miss it!And now that we’ve brought console gaming and PC adventure gaming to a point where things are starting to converge in the 21st century, our next episode after that will talk about how games like Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, which is also known as The Indigo Prophecy, Microids’s adventure games including Amerizone: The Explorer’s Legacy, the Syberia games, Post Mortem and Still Life and Index+’s really wild Dracula: Resurrection series all moved us forward. And we’re also going to talk about the rest of the Quantic Dream library and Daedalic Entertainment as well as a few of the other European series of note.And then we’ll bring things to a near-conclusion by talking about the influence of Telltale Games and indie studios like Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games, Yahtzee Croshaw’s Fully Ramblomatic Games, Crystal Shard, AGD Interactive, Clifftop Games and Grundislav Games, as well as a few more! And when that’s all said and done, we’ll close things out with some perspective on why adventure games are still relevant today and why they’ve seen such a resurgence over the last decade. And I’ll also set things up for us to begin a new series to talk about another genre that features progression-based storytelling, lots of variety and a long tradition of evolution in gaming – the platform game.If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore! THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I’m recommending Decline’s Drops, a 2024 action platformer from, and I’m going to butcher this I’m sure, the French game developer Le Moulin aux Bulles (la moo-lan-oh-byool). It’s not a complicated game or even a particularly fresh take on the genre. You play as a puppet girl named Globule armed with boxing gloves, a dash mechanic, a double jump and a dodge roll, and you make your way through levels gathering dew drops and defeating the six heads of a hydra who wrecked your garden.Gameplay-wise, it’s a lot like Donkey Kong Country Returns by way of Super Smash Bros., and that’s not a bad thing. The controls are tight, the animations are smooth and you have enough variety to your attacks to keep things interesting. There are puzzles to solve and collectibles to pick up, as well as some great boss encounters.No, what makes this game stand out is the absolutely gorgeous hand-drawn artwork and a wonderful soundtrack. Decline’s Drops is a tremendously beautiful game that’s fun to play simply because it’s so much fun to watch and hear. Globule is an adorable animated character with hose-like arms and legs to give her a lot of motion, and her enemies are things like chickens and frogs and slugs rather than the same old sorts of bad guys. It’s not a super long platformer, either, requiring at most about 10 hours to finish.It’s well worth the $15 it normally costs, but you can easily find it on sale if you look, and I myself found it in a bundle. Give it a shot! It’s a really enjoyable time.https://store.steampowered.com/app/1500180/Declines_Drops/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, we’re going to talk about 1990s adventure games using pre-rendered scenes and 3D, including The Longest Journey, Grim Fandango, Escape from Monkey Island, Chronomaster, Sanitarium, BioForge and more! Join us on this expedition through games you’ve may have loved, some you may have heard of and some you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 11: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 9Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:https://web.archive.org/web/20050308133426/http://www.justadventure.com/Interviews/TLJ2/TLJ2.shtmhttps://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-last-express-revisiting-an-unsung-classichttps://insidethemagic.net/2012/02/interview-imagineer-jonathan-ackley-details-the-creation-of-sorcerers-of-the-magic-kingdom-at-walt-disney-world/https://mixnmojo.com/news/Jonathan-Ackley-ensures-my-future-children-get-lost-at-Disney-World-UPDATE-Ahern-shares-culpabilithttps://www.kickstarter.com/projects/venture-moon/duke-grabowski-mighty-swashbuckler-point-and-click/posts/1562717https://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/features/376/-------------------------------------------------EPISODE 11Coming up in this episode –We’re going to talk about adventure games from the 1990s that attempted to move the genre into three dimensions including The Longest Journey, Grim Fandango, Escape From Monkey Island, BioForge, Chronomaster and more! And we’ll also look at some of the odd offshoots of the genre like The Neverhood, The Last Express, Sanitarium and Twinsen’s Odyssey!I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! If you’ve been hanging in there with us week after week, you might have wondered why I haven’t delved into talking about LucasArts’s last few adventure games, which are generally considered some of their best. But don’t worry – I haven’t lost the thread. I was just waiting for the right time to bring them back up, because LucasArts found itself on a very interesting trajectory between 1995 and 2000 as it released four adventure games that gradually evolved away from the style the developer had become famous for and into the 3D style we’re going to talk about in detail in this episode.So let’s start off with Full Throttle, a point and click adventure game by Tim Schafer that came out in 1995 as a CD-ROM exclusive title. And this was actually a pretty big deal at the time because many adventure games to this point were still shipping on floppy disk editions with optional enhanced CD-ROM versions. Full Throttle certainly looked like a Day of the Tentacle or Sam & Max-style adventure at first blush, with hand-drawn sprites, painted backgrounds and an icon-driven point and click system.But seeing this game in action made it clear why the multimedia features were needed, from the awesome theme song by the hard rock band The Gone Jackals to the cool cinematic sequences featuring the game’s protagonist, Ben, riding his fat, noisy Corley Motors motorcycle down the road and getting into scraps with rival gangs. In fact, a significant part of the game involves arcade action fighting sequences that are sort of like a cartoon version of the game Road Rash where Ben has to knock other bikers off their rides. Full Throttle turned out to be one of the best point and click adventures ever made, and it also gave Tim Schafer enormous license to try something wildly different with his next game, 1998’s Grim Fandango.And wow, did Grim Fandango deliver, though it was a rather polarizing game among adventure game fans at the time because of the changes it made to the familiar formula of the genre. The game’s set in an afterlife based on Meso-American folklore and stars Manny Calavera as a grim reaper agent of death who helps guide departed souls to the appropriate place in the great hereafter. But when he meets a woman named Meredith who ought to be bound for eternal paradise aboard the number 9 train, but who’s somehow stuck in the lower levels with people who lived far less saintly lives, Manny realizes something’s up and that there are nasty souls who’ve decided to make themselves comfortable in the slums instead of trying to ascend to the heavenly realm. The game’s scope and imagination is, quite frankly, absolutely amazing, and it has a dio de los muertos vibe fused with a film noir art style that makes for an unforgettable story and experience.But there was a practical reason for this style of art as well. Tim Schafer was trying to figure out how to bring adventure gaming properly into 3D, and more abstract character designs and pre-rendered backgrounds were better-suited to the relatively low-polygon capabilities of computer systems of the day. Grim Fandango also was designed to ditch the mouse cursor and GUI common to most adventure games and instead allow players to move Manny around with arrow keys and recognize areas of the world he could interact with by tilting his head – an elegant solution to having to wave a mouse pointer all over the screen in search of objects or characters who were interactive.I really don’t want to go into much more detail about Grim Fandango because it’s such a brilliantly-made game that it’s held up over time and become regarded as a classic. But in the 1990s, it definitely wasn’t for everyone. Hardcore adventure game fans thought the gameplay was too linear and the puzzles were too easy, and navigating Manny around the backgrounds could be an awkward affair because of the odd shape of his body and the sometimes less-than-obvious pathways. The fixed camera angles were also awkward in the same way other 3D games like Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII struggled to fuse 3D characters and backgrounds.Gamers who weren’t adventure fans, on the other hand, just thought the game looked weird, and since it was only available on CD-ROM and really needed a beefy computer with a 3D graphics card to run optimally, it’s no surprise that it was a commercial failure despite receiving fairly strong critical reviews. Remember, Grim Fandango came out during a major year for games – Half-Life, StarCraft, Thief: The Dark Project, Baldur’s Gate, Unreal, Starsiege: Tribes and Fallout 2 all came out that year as well on PC – and given the pedigree of those games, you can see what stiff competition it was up against.Not that gamers were suffering from a lack of great games, because 1997 also happened to be an amazing year for computer gaming. And one of the titles that debuted was The Curse of Monkey Island, the last of the SCUMM engine games, but also by far the most sophisticated in terms of art design and multimedia features. With all of the original designers off doing their own thing, LucasArts turned to Larry Ahren and Jonathan Ackley to helm this sequel. Both had worked on other LucasArts adventures, and both eventually wound up working in theme park design, notably teaming up again in the early 2010s to work on the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom experience for Disney theme parks.This is an interesting note because one of their jobs in reviving the Monkey Island games was to deal with the twist ending of Monkey Island 2, which heavily hinted that LeChuck and Guybrush were actually children playing in an amusement park called Big Whoop and the entire adventure had been make-believe, but that Chuckie was actually infused with some sort of demonic magic. How do you make a sequel to that?Ron Gilbert would claim over the decades he knew exactly what was going to happen next, but to the LucasArts team responsible for continuing the story, the best choice was to pretend most of that never happened and to return Guybrush to the Caribbean, floating his way into a siege on Plunder Island where LeChuck and his undead pirate minions were busy trying to forcibly capture Governor Elaine Marley the same way Bowser is constantly trying to snatch and grab Princess Peach.Honestly, this was a good choice. No offense to Ron Gilbert, who is a brilliant adventure game designer, but the Monkey Island 2 ending never sat right with me and risked undermining all the fun of a series that was part Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride and part On Stranger Tides pirate shenanigans inspired by Tim Power’s crazy 1987 novel.And The Curse of Monkey Island added in a few nice new things that have stuck with the series since. The first is an all-star voice acting cast led by Dominic Armato, who nails the role of Guybrush so well he basically was the character we all heard in our heads all along, and he’s since voiced every Monkey Island game released, including the remasters of the originals.And the same is true for the other voice actors, at least mostly – Earl Boen is LeChuck, except in the final game, because he was retired from voice acting. Alexandra Boyd is Elaine Marley, except in the fourth game for some reason where she loses her English accent and sounds completely different. Leliani Jones is the Voodoo Lady, except in Tales of Monkey Island. Neil Ross is Wally B. Feed, a.k.a. Bloodnose the Pirate.And Denny Delk is Murray, the aggressively evil demonic talking skull, a brand new character introduced in this game who’s the second great addition. Every game since has included Murray, and he always steals the show.The third addition is the ability to play the game in an easy, story-driven mode or a more challenging puzzle mode, and what I particularly like about this feature is that the puzzle isn’t just more difficult, but holds back some of the game’s best jokes and moments to reward players to pick the tougher path. Since the interface adopts Full Throttle’s icon-driven commands, The Curse of Monkey Island is more focused on pointing and clicking on the environment than the previous games, and it also runs in full-screen since the action menu pops up as a doubloon with regions to click for different interactions. This allows players to not only enjoy the scenery, but to search it for areas allowing them to do something. It feels less like a pixel hunt and more like a multimedia cartoon.The game’s story, too, makes some smart choices as Elaine gets turned into a golden statue after Guybrush proposes to her with a cursed ring in the opening animated sequences and then sends him on a chase around Plunder Island, Blood Island and Monkey Island. The end of the game even attempts (rather confusingly) to retcon the whole Big Whoop issue by having LeChuck and Guybrush have a showdown on a roller coaster. The game puts all that stuff to rest, lets Guybrush triumph and rescue Elaine, and ends with them both getting married and, presumably, ready for a sequel.But Escape From Monkey Island didn’t make it out until 2000, this time led by LucasArts vets Sean Clark and Mike Stemmle, who’d worked together before as the designers behind Sam & Max Hit the Road. This time, the series utilized the Grim Fandango game engine and eschewed the cel-animated style of the previous game for 3D characters. I don’t think I’m out of step with most series fans in saying Escape From Monkey Island is the weakest game in the entire series, and while it’s good by adventure game standards, it feels like a downgrade after the great leap forward The Curse of Monkey Island offered.The plot feels like a “where do we go from here?” sort of contrivance and focuses on LeChuck pretending to be a gubernatorial candidate named Charles L. Charles trying to unseat Elaine Marley and acquire her family’s voodoo talisman that will unleash the Ultimate Insult. There’s a bad guy named Ozzie Mandrill who is constantly criticized for being an “Australian developer buying up everything,” which is a very dated reference to Rupert Murdoch. There’s also a parodic restaurant called “Planet Threepwood”, filled with references to the previous games in a manner that’s clearly making fun of the ill-fated Planet Hollywood restaurants and their penchant for displaying minor film props as major treasures.And the second half of the game is bogged down by an enormously unfun sequence called “Monkey Kombat” where Guybrush battles the island’s simians with insulting monkey noises and eventually pilots a monkey mecha suit to defeat a giant statue of LeChuck.It sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is. And despite some amusing moments and some great character interactions, there’s also a lot of silly stuff. Did we really need to know the origin story of Herman Toothrot or the lineage of the three-headed monkey?After LucasArts stopped producing adventure games and a Sam & Max and Full Throttle sequel were both canceled, Mike Stemmle wound up moving over to Telltale Games and was involved in several of their adventures, including Tales of Monkey Island, for which he was a co-director, designer and writer.This five-part series is actually pretty good in terms of its story and humor, preserving the art style of Escape From Monkey Island but also offering different gameplay experience, returning to a point and click interface that has Guybrush move around 3D environments and investigate interactive objects. I’d argue that the Telltale series is best for long-time fans, but it’s fairly standalone in terms of its continuity and I really enjoy some of the new characters, particularly Morgan LeFlay, a Guybrush fangirl and bounty hunter who becomes sorry to meet her hero, and who plays a significant role in this story.As I mentioned, Ron Gilbert started teasing on social media that he’d always wished he could finish the Monkey Island trilogy with his planned third game because he had an amazing idea of where to take things from the ending he’d concocted for Monkey Island 2. Once Disney acquired LucasFilm, that seemed like it would never happen since Disney was even less interested than LucasArts in producing new games and LucasArts itself had been turned into a licensing arm. But then Ron Gilbert made the surprise announcement in 2022 that he was finishing up Return to Monkey Island for release later in the year along with several LucasArts veterans like Dave Grossman and David Fox at his current development studio, Terrible Toybox. While the game introduced yet another art style – this time sort of like paper dolls atop more stylized backgrounds – it initially underwhelmed some fans when it was shown off. And when it debuted that September, it finally brought a close to not only Ron Gilbert’s big idea, but also, surprisingly, the series itself.Whether or not Return to Monkey Island effectively pulls off the idea Ron Gilbert was so excited about is a matter of taste. But is the game funny? Absolutely. Are the puzzles worthwhile? Mostly. Does the ultimate storyline pay off by finally revealing the Secret of Monkey Island? Pretty effectively, in my opinion, while still incorporating all of the continuity of the games Gilbert wasn’t involved in and showing respect for the contributions of the other creators. Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman even include a letter to series fans dated June 18, 2020 to talk about their perspective on the series at the very end.  That’s about as nice of an ending as you could hope for, and I’d glad we finally got it.But I want to point out that the Monkey Island series is a microcosm of many of the changes that the adventure gaming genre went through. It started off solving the problems inherent to the adventure game genre by removing pointless deaths and focusing players on actions they could do instead of the ones they couldn’t, then it evolved into one of the great multimedia adventure games, and then tried to move into a more console-friendly 3D style. As the genre returned to the flatter point and click 2D style, so did the final entry, and it de-emphasizes tough puzzles while adding in clues, comfort systems and lots and lots of self-awareness.But before we move on to talking about other games that, like Grim Fandango and Escape From Monkey Island, took the adventure game genre into 3D, let’s briefly mention two games that took direct inspiration from Monkey Island to deliver pirate adventures worth playing. The first is called Voodoo Kid, and it’s a 1997 point and click adventure from Infogrames that uses digitized character renders and pre-rendered environments to depict a haunted pirate ship with a literal skeleton crew. The premise is that you fall asleep reading the story of Baron Saturday, who turned his crew into zombies and is heading for the Island of Lost Souls. In your dream, you awaken on the ship and have to find a way to divert the ship from its course. It’s a fairly short and easy adventure, definitely targeted at kids, but it at least allows you to pick if you’d rather play as a boy or girl and it’s fully voice-acted and well animated, with lots of fun little moments. The only downside is the puzzles, which tend to be along the lines of The 7th Guest’s arbitrary brainteasers.Another interesting game is Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, a 2009 game from Autumn Moon Entertainment first released in Germany that made it to the English-speaking world in 2010. Its biggest claim to fame is the involvement of studio co-founder Bill Tiller, a former LucasArts designer and artist who worked on The Dig and The Curse of Monkey Island.Autumn Moon’s 2008 point and click adventure game A Vampyre Story was a reasonably good time, and I do recommend it, particularly if you’d like to play as a busty French vampiress and pull items out of a coffin to try to cast a spell to allow you to escape from the cursed castle in which you’re imprisoned. It’s a gorgeous game bursting with personality and which has an incredible soundtrack.Autumn Moon’s follow-up game The Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island is a really interesting adventure because you play as a trio of ghosts named Papa Doc, Jane Starling and Blue Belly, all of whom are trying to get back into their bodies and who have to work together to solve their problem and then defeat the evil Queen Zimbi. While the characters are rendered in 3D, the backgrounds themselves are painted and multilayered, offering a strong sense of the artistry from The Curse of Monkey Island while also utilizing the fluid animation that 3D characters can provide.If you enjoy the Monkey Island games, you should definitely give Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island a try. It definitely has its own vibe and is often seen as being lesser-than the Monkey Island series, but I think it stands on its own pretty well. The puzzles are decent, the voice acting’s good and the artwork and animation are spectacular! The Day of the Tentacle-style teamwork adds some variety to the game, and the characters are varied enough that they don’t overstay their welcome if they start to annoy you.Unfortunately, Autumn Moon never got to make a true sequel to either of its adventure games, and the most we’ve gotten is episode one of Duke Grabowski: Mighty Swashbuckler! in 2016 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. It’s a great looking game very much in the piratey spirit of Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, but after 10 years and some promises about four more episodes that have never manifested, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that we’ll ever see Duke’s adventures continue.I mentioned Alone in the Dark in our last segment, and now seems like a good time to explain why I did. In 1992, Infogrames released this interesting horror-themed adventure featuring two 3D characters – Edward Carnby and Emily Hartwood – exploring a haunted mansion in Louisiana called Decreto. While Alone in the Dark certainly looked odd for its time due to its use of low-polygon, slow-moving 3D character models atop pre-rendered environments and static cameras depicting each room, hallway or scene, the game was able to create a mood unlike anything that had come before it, and while games like Elvira, WaxWorks and Harvester were going for gore, the Alone in the Dark games were able to build a much more unsettling experience that became the template for the survival horror genre that Resident Evil would later popularize.It’s funny, though, because I don’t think many people consider Alone in the Dark an adventure game despite the fact that it’s not that different from The 7th Guest or Dark Seed in terms of structure and design. One reason why it is a bit different is because it involves limited combat with enemies who can definitely kill you, but you’re still exploring a mansion and trying to find ways to solve puzzles with items. I think the best way to categorize Alone in the Dark is as an action adventure game that had an enormous influence not just on horror games, but also the burgeoning field of 3D adventures.BioForge is definitely a game with a similar design philosophy. It’s a 1995 3D action adventure game from Origin Systems that still focuses on combat and horror, but which has a science fiction premise. After a cryptic introduction, you awaken as a cyborg in a derelict station aboard a moon somewhere in space. You not only have to fight your way through the robots and cyborgs left on the station – early in the game, you can literally beat one foe with his severed arm when he won’t stop attacking you! – but also get your bearings as you strive to understand what happened to everyone there.I actually feel like BioForge is a little bit closer to an adventure game than Alone in the Dark because so much of it is focused on puzzle-solving. Many of the solutions to the puzzles are found by reading logbooks or computer monitors – an idea that’s pretty common today, but which was a fairly novel and immersive way of sharing information with the player in the mid-1990s. The game also has an unfolding cinematic story brought to life by voice acting and in-game events rather than cutscenes or narration, which was again pretty exciting for the era. While the gameplay itself is a bit clunky due to tank controls and lousy combat, there are several places in the game where you need to outsmart your enemies rather than beat them down, and that helps BioForge overcome its weaknesses somewhat. I definitely recommend it if you can put up with its limitations as an awkward 90s action adventure game.Speaking of games set in futuristic settings, let’s take a look at Chronomaster, which came out the same year as BioForge, and which had the bona fides of being created by a famous Hugo and Nebula award-winning author.Roger Zelazny was a science fiction writer who was very popular in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, particularly for his novel Nine Princes in Amber, which was the basis of an illustrated text-based adventure game adaptation by Tellarium in the 1980s. Those novels are about a true world called Amber that casts shadows across the multiverse to create every other reality. Some shadows have different laws of nature and even allow for magic. Zelazny loved the idea of alternate worlds and used them to play around with what was possible without violating the accepted rules of hard science fiction. The canon in the Chronicles of Amber thus tends to focus on the characters themselves, not the inconsequential worlds they inhabit.Zelazny was also well-known for infusing mythology into his writing as well as a strong sense of action due to his prowess in fencing and various martial arts. If you’ve never had a chance to read some of Zelazny’s novels, you absolutely should; they’re often energetic and interesting, with fast-moving plots and cool characters and that overwrought, thoughtful, philosophical style of dialogue that’s so strongly associated with the wooden characters in science fiction magazines.Chronomaster is not a novel, but a multimedia adventure game from 1995 that Zelazny was working on with his partner and collaborator Jane Lindskold when he passed away of cancer. The game was developed by DreamForge Interntainment, a US-based studio mostly known for making Dungeons & Dragons games and other role-playing games like DarkSpyre and Veil of Darkness, which I’ll absolutely talk about another time when our discussion is centered on underrated 90s CRPGs. But Chronomaster is not like anything else DreamForge ever made, both before and after. It’s a 3D-style icon-driven point and click adventure game where you explore a pre-rendered game world as Rene Korda, a sort of godlike scientist who creates customized pocket universes for wealthy people with exacting tastes. He’s brought out of retirement to repair some universes that have entered a state of “temporal stasis” where everyone and everything is stuck in time.And when I say pocket universes, I mean that literally, because within some of these, Korda can visit multiple worlds. This sense of scale is both the game’s greatest asset and its biggest weakness. As an adventure game, Chronomaster is absolutely massive. But on the other hand, the game definitely weakens as it goes on because the more focused science fiction story of the initial sections gives way to a  wild, anything goes approach later on where the game nearly turns into a parody of itself as Korba begins exploring universes that are built to some very strange specifications.One of the most notable aspects of Chronomaster is the voice acting, which is provided by Ron Perlman as Korba, Brent Spiner of Star Trek: The Next Generation as his eventual ally Milo and Lolita Davidovich as his chripy computer assistant Jester. They all do a good job, though Ron Perlman sounds half-awake in a lot of his narration. But there are dozens of other characters who’re voiced in this game as well by a fairly large cast of actors ranging from suitable for the roles to absolutely amateurish.The game also has a rather strange sense of art design. Korba is a goofy-looking character with spiky blond hair, opaque goggles and Halloween costume-level body armor, Milo sort of looks like an outer space Steven Seagal and Jester has the appearance of a Western comic book artist’s take on an anime girl. There’s also a later ally named Selene who’s wearing revealing spandex but who has a cybernetic eye and a crew cut so you’ll know she’s supposed to be tough. The ultimate bad guy looks like a reject from the Borg. All of this is rendered in that awkward mid-90s plastic uncanny valley style that looked dated the moment the game shipped.Even so, you’ve got to overlook this game’s rough edges because the story is unique and interesting and the gameplay is rewarding if you can stick with it. The puzzles are quite challenging, but there is some openness to the design, with multiple solutions to many of the problems you face, making every playthrough feel a bit different if you don’t stick to a walkthrough. There are also a few different endings, so the game responds somewhat to your playstyle. There’s even one way to finish the game midway through, though I’ll note this is not the good ending.Speaking of endings, DreamForge Intertainment inserts itself into the game’s ending newsreel, suggesting a pocket universe in which the company is still making wildly creative games today. Unfortunately, they’d wind up closing their doors while working on Myst IV a few years later, but before that happened, they created one of my favorite 3D-style adventure games of the 1990s – the very trippy and weird 1998 isometric adventure Sanitarium. At first blush, this game looks a lot like Fallout or Baldur’s Gate because you wander around pre-rendered environments viewing everything from a diagonal top-down angle. But the gameplay follows the mechanics of adventure games, putting you in the shoes of the fully bandaged coma patient Max, who awakens in a horrifying sanitarium and soon finds himself wandering around a village of mutant children who have been adopted by an evil alien they call “Mother.”And just when you think you have a handle on where this game is taking you, the game throws you an incredible curveball I won’t spoil. As I was playing it, I assumed that it was going to turn out to be one of those games where Max turns out to be the villain facing his worst crimes in the form of a coma-induced nightmare so he can seek redemption, but nope, that is not at all where this game’s story ultimately goes. It’s definitely a game I’d describe as “messed-up,” but it’s not quite the horror experience it appears to be, so if you’re more a fan of psychological horror and tension as opposed to jump scares, this one is definitely worth a playthrough.In the 1990s, video gaming got its first cover girl in the form of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Core Design and Eidos’s self-assured polygonal gun-toting adventurer came at the right time to represent console gamers who were starting to outgrow Mario and Sonic, who were getting bored with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and who were ready for a little bit of sex appeal. That Lara Croft was one of the first 3D characters who managed to pull off being attractive rather than hideous didn’t hurt, and Core Design was more than happy to generate pictures of her in swimsuits and provocative poses to ensure every magazine had ample reasons to cover her.PC gamers tended to be a little bit older in the 1990s than their console gaming counterparts, and so it’s not surprising that when April Ryan came around in the game The Longest Journey in late 2000 in the English-speaking world, most gaming magazines barely noticed it despite the fact that April spends the beginning of the game in skimpy pajamas and much of the rest of the game dressed in skin-tight clothes with a visible midriff like she’s headed to the club. But that also might be because April’s a stylish artist who’s not just tossed in the game for sex appeal, but part of a story where she can go and have lengthy conversations with her friends and neighbors and where she fits into the worlds she inhabits instead of plundering them. The Longest Journey was originally released in Scandanavia and Europe everywhere but the UK by a developer called Funcom, largely known at the time for making licensed console games. While the game was a big hit in its home country of Norway and sold well in its neighboring countries, the decision to wait on an English-language release was primarily due to the desire to get the game into the North American market, not an easy feat since a lot of publishers wanted nothing to do with adventure gaming. And you can tell that the excitement for this game was not high despite the glowing reviews it received once it shipped; Computer Gaming World and PC Gamer gave far more pre-release coverage to Escape From Monkey Island than The Longest Journey, often in the context of discussions about whether or not the adventure game genre was truly dead.The premise of the game is that there are two parallel worlds that have split off from the original Earth. One is called Stark, and we see it in the year 2209, with a similar history and culture to our own world, though it has a sort of steampunkish, science fictiony Blade Runner vibe and takes place within a fictional city on the US West Coast called Newport. It’s governed by science. The other world is called Arcadia, and it’s a lower-tech, fantasy-style place governed by magic.April has a dream in which she meets a white dragon who tells her she’s going to play a part in a future that may bring about a different world. But before April can get any clarity on what this means, a force of dark chaos rises up beside her and shatters her dream, sending her back to her regular life on Stark, where she’s worried about finishing off a piece for an upcoming art show.And yet April’s life keeps being interrupted by moments where strange things are happening, and there’s some subtext to suggest that maybe her dreams are being influenced by the things around her and she’s going crazy. But an odd man she encounters named Manny Cortez explains that she is special in some way. He eventually opens a portal to Arcadia and explains that once she steps inside, she will take the first step on the longest journey of her life.And as April emerges in the other world, she finds she cannot understand anyone there, though her ears gradually acclimate to allow her to understand the magical Alltongue. This opens her up to learning from a priest named Tobias Grensret, who walks her through the backstory and explains that April is a Shifter, a rare person who can travel between both worlds. Both worlds exist in a balance that’s maintained by a dragon-like alien race called the Draic Kin, twelve humans called the Sentinel and a quasi-divine individual known as the Guardian, but he’s gone missing and his replacement has not been found. April eventually discovers that a group called the Vanguard is trying to merge both worlds back together, which will plunge both worlds into chaos, and her quest is to restore a disc that will help allow the Guardian to return.I’m really oversimplifying things, because The Longest Journey has a very detailed storyline that is frequently dropped on April through lengthy conversations and info dumps. If you’re not into complex lore and detailed characters with complex motivations for doing things, this is definitely not the game for you. And if you assume that April is going to become the Guardian in the end, well, no, this game’s not that straightforward either. The entire experience is incredibly lengthy and this has often led gamers to joke that this game is aptly named – your first playthrough can easily last 15-20 hours if you sit through the conversations and work to solve the puzzles.But oh, what a fantastic journey The Longest Journey has to offer! The game’s built on vibes, and so many of its ideas feel like they were inserted because the development team took some inspiration from something and decided to jam it into their game. Normally, this is the mark of a bad game, but the dreamlike feel of the adventure actually handles this structure really well. April’s young and naïve, but she’s no dummy, and her cleverness and ability to persevere carry her through this game and make you feel really attached to her by the end. The game even seems to hint that she survives to be an old woman in Arcadia, telling stories about her young exploits.That’s why it was such a surprise that the sequel, 2006’s DreamFall: The Longest Journey, didn’t really continue April Ryan’s story so much as sideline her to introduce a new character named Zoe Castillio who’s living in the city of Casablanca in Stark in 2219, ten years after the first game. And from the start, you know that Zoe’s in a coma, telling you the story of how she got there. Zoe’s quest before the coma is to find and save April Ryan, who’s now living in Arcadia as a part of a resistance movement there, and Zoe begins receiving cryptic directions from a little girl named Faith whose consciousness exists in Stark’s global computer network, DreamNet. Zoe’s ultimate quest is to thwart a plot to infiltrate the dreams of people in both worlds and brainwash them, which sounds kind of stupid as I say it out loud, but I promise, it makes sense in the game.DreamFall is an action adventure game, eschewing most of the traditional adventure game conventions and focusing more on combat. Like The Longest Journey, it’s filled with dialogue and complex lore. There’s a whole backstory about an event called the Collapse that isn’t even really explained in the game and the rise of an Arcadian faction called the Azadi and a conspiracy in Stark involving a mysterious Japanese toy company. Oh, and the world is being plagued with static that keeps knocking technology out. Again, as I say this out loud… just trust me, it’s not as dumb as it sounds, and the dreamlike quality of the game glosses over the silliness of the story.Like The Longest Journey, DreamFall also draws obvious inspirations from all sorts of different things that were popular during its development – the films The Ring, AI: Artificial Intelligence and Lost in Translation are three of the most obvious influences just in the first few minutes of Zoe’s adventure, and many of the things that happen in Arcadia seem to be visually influenced by Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films this time around.My only real gripe about DreamFall is that it ends April’s story rather unceremoniously and, in my estimation, to the detriment of the continuation of the series. When Funcom continued the story in their five-part episodic adventure game DreamFall Chapters in 2014-2017, they had to retcon this with a rather silly contrivance designed to bring April back into the fold. I really only recommend DreamFall Chapters in its 2017 Final Cut edition, and even then, only if you’re really interested in seeing how the story ends.Let’s close out our look at 1990s adventure games with a few that don’t really fit neatly into any category. All of these games are absolutely excellent, and I hope you’ll check them all out. But the first is still not available commercially, and that’s a shame, because this 1996 adventure, The Neverhood is a really great game that was released by Dreamworks Interactive.But before we begin, let me go ahead and rip off the band-aid and talk about Doug TenNapel, the artist and co-designer of this game who’s largely responsible for its distinctive look. Doug TenNapel is a brilliant animator who’s responsible for some great stuff, including some wonderful graphic novels and kids’ books, some cool album art for the band Five Iron Frenzy, many television shows from the 1990s and early 2000s and, most famously, for creating the character of Earthworm Jim and even voicing him in the first two games.Dan Castellenata, the guy who voices Homer Simpson, played Jim in the cartoon show. But Doug TenNapel was responsible for that show, too, which is probably why it does such a good job of sticking to the game’s goofy premise.But here’s the thing. Doug TenNapel is a very problematic personality who’s allowed his very conservative Republican politics and support for figures like Andrew Breitbart and Donald Trump to tarnish his artistic career. He’d be the first to tell you this because he has talk show called Doug in Exile where he complains about being cancelled by the progressive left, SJWs and an LGBTQ culture he says is waging a culture war against him. I don’t believe I’m misrepresenting him in any way here, but I want to be clear: I don’t support or endorse anything he stands for. We’re all entitled to our opinions, but when we use those opinions to be hurtful to other people, we take it too far.It really stinks when someone who’s so creative and who’s made some really cool stuff also turns out to be a heel, and if you don’t want to support Doug TenNapel, I understand. In that case, you should definitely skip the 2015 game Armikrog, which was intended to be a sort of spiritual successor to The Neverhood and which turned out to be a half-finished game in the end. Full disclosure: I was a Kickstarter backer, but I didn’t realize at the time that Doug TenNapel was such a polarizing figure.Anyhow, The Neverhood is not a problematic game in any way, and since it was made by a team of people who have not followed Doug into exile as far as I can tell, let’s presume the game’s still worth checking out, because let me tell you – The Neverhood is truly something special. The game’s built from digital scans of claymation figures and offers some of the most imaginative point and click adventure gaming you’ll ever see. It also has one of the most tedious mechanics ever seen in an adventure game in the form of its seemingly never-ending “Hall of Records,” but we can forgive that because the rest of the game is so good.The premise is that you are Klaymen, a misleadingly named clay man who wanders around the mysterious Neverhood searching for discs that fill in the game’s backstory and provide clues on where to go next. You wander around the world in both first-person FMV sequences and third-person screens representing puzzle rooms, and the game looks absolutely incredible because all of it is built on Claymation sets with professional-grade animation. Even more amazingly, the game’s soundtrack is an all-timer, filled with whimsical music sung mostly in a nonsense language and evoking a sort of jazzy, folksy, cinematic sense of whimsy that fits the graphical style perfectly.The Neverhood is the type of game where you’ll fool a monster that wants to eat you with a dummy made of dynamite. It’s the sort of game where if you need to make a door to walk though, you just direct Klaymen to expand one out of a hole in the clay, shrinking another one elsewhere in the room. It’s the sort of game where it feels like anything and everything can happen and you simply need to figure out the right insane logic to open the game world up to your wild ideas. It’s also the only game I’ve ever seen where you defeat the bad guy by pantsing him when he thinks he’s won.Aside from my gripes with the creator, my biggest complaint about The Neverhood is that it was only available for a short time and has never gotten a reprint or a digital release, making it extremely expensive to buy secondhand due to its rarity. And while it does have two follow-up games – Skullmonkeys on the PlayStation and the aforementioned Armikrog – neither is nearly as good as the original. If you get a chance to play it, you should.Another game that bombed badly when it was released, but which is at least available digitally today, is Jordan Mechner’s 1997 rotoscoped mystery game aboard a train, The Last Express. Jordan Mechner was already a pretty big name for his publisher, Brøderbund – he’d created Karateka and Prince of Persia for them and essentially had carte blanche to do what he wanted, and that gave him an almost unheard-of four-year development period to see his idea through.And wow, is The Last Express an impressive game even today. It begins sort of like an Agatha Christie meets Myst-style adventure aboard the Orient Express, but it has a few important deviations from that formula. First of all, the game takes place in real time at a pace of about six game minutes per actual minute. Secondly, the game will frequently break into rotoscoped Art Nouveau-style cutscenes in the third person where you see your character, the American doctor Robert Cath, interacting with other passengers. Finally, you have the ability to rewind time to undo the effects of any bad decisions you make, and you can also fast forward to later points in the story, provided you’ve already reached them once.And yes, by the way, this mechanic was the inspiration for a key mechanic in Jordan Mechner’s next game, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, though it’s executed very differently there.But what’s really wild about The Last Express is how detailed the game’s character interactions are. Every character in the game – there are about thirty of them – has an agenda and behaves differently depending upon the choices you make. Where they are and what they’re doing at a given time can vary a lot, and your conversations and inquiries can  put some of them on edge. The script for the game is very well-written and has a lot of conversational dialogue that’s voiced extremely well and which feels authentic to the setting and the context of traveling on a train, including multiple languages where the characters speak natural dialogue. Your character also has to be careful not to blow his cover, as he’s assumed the identity of his murdered friend.I don’t want to say too much about the story because part of the pleasure of the game comes from seeing how things unfold and finding the right path to reach the game’s true ending. Over the three days of your journey between Paris and Constantinople in 1914, you explore the Orient Express and discover a botched arms deal, a spy, another planned murder, a stolen Serbian treasure and so much more. The train gets hijacked at one point, and there’s even a bomber who threatens to blow the up the Orient Express and everyone on it. And all of this is happening while Europe is fast approaching the start of World War I, which breaks out if you survive to see the game’s ending.The Last Express should have been a major success – it was a critical darling, attracted a lot of broader media attention and really looked like a game that everyone would want to play. But the problem was that Brøderbund was going through a tough time and its entire marketing department quit, resulting in the game being poorly supported and reportedly only being on the shelves for a couple of months. It wound up being one of their last games, and certainly their most expensive; their other adventure game that year, the comedy adventure Koala Lumpur: Journey to the Edge, was hardly a hit, and Brøderbund got acquired by The Learning Company the next year and was gutted by extensive layoffs.One other unusual adventure I’d like to comment on is actually made up of two games. The first is known as Little Big Adventure in Europe and Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure in North America. And the sequel, called Little Big Adventure 2 in Europe, is also known as Twinsen’s Odyssey.Both games were created by the French developer Adeline Software International, which also created the more conventional 3D action adventure game Time Commando in 1996. But the Little Big Adventure games, or Twinsen games if you prefer, are very different because they’re overhead isometric adventures where your main character, the blue-robed, top-knot ponytailed, dragon-riding Twinsen, has to solve problems in the normal adventure game manners – dialogue, puzzle-solving and with items – but also sometimes with his fists, his reflexes or with stealth. To enable these actions, Twinsen has four stances – Normal, Aggressive, Discreet and Athletic.What makes these games a bit different from others in the genre is that like The Last Express, the action takes place in real time and parts of the map open up as you complete actions that unlock certain conditions or knock enemies off their routes and task schedules. It’s a very unique series that was quite a big deal in Europe, but which barely made a dent in North America because it was published by Electronic Arts and they simply didn’t understand its appeal, changing its title and making it look more like an action game than any sort of adventure game. That the game also shipped in a disk version and multimedia edition didn’t help, because the CD-ROM voice acting adds a lot of charm to the game.The original Twinsen game features pre-rendered graphics with 3D character models on top of it, very similar to Alone in the Dark’s look, but with a far more family-friendly feel. Both take place on the world of Twinsun – named for the two stars the world sits between – and yes, it’s a little confusing that the hero is named Twinsen. But he’s such a likable and fun character who has a chipper personality and often over-exaggerates his movements, reeling back before he runs and throwing his magic orb weapon like a baseball pitcher. The second game keeps a lot of this style but also adds in portions that are actually 3D instead of pre-rendered, which means the camera is free to show things from different angles. It’s a little weird, but it absolutely works.Unfortunately, Electronic Arts published the game in Europe and then handed the North American publishing rights off to Activision, which was similarly clueless about how to market a French adventure game that deviated so much from the Sierra and LucasArts formula.But the good news is that both games are pretty easy to find and play today – GOG has them both and even has the original versions available as free add-ons, and they’re also on Steam. Be sure to give them a try – they’re wonderful family-friendly games with neat characters, strong art design and incredible soundtracks.As usual, my desire to cover everything notable has gotten me into trouble, and I’m going to have to wait until we start talking more about the 21st century to cover the next step in adventure gaming evolution with games including Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, which is also known as The Indigo Prophecy, Microids’s adventure games including Amerizone: The Explorer’s Legacy, the Syberia games, Post Mortem and Still Life and Index+’s really wild Dracula: Resurrection series. All of these games are worth more than a name check and we’ll get to them in a future episode.I don’t want to suggest that adventure gaming completely died after 2005, but it did change. Many of the characteristics of the 3D fork of adventure gaming were adopted into other genres such as action-adventure games, first person shooters, survival horror, role-playing games and even platformers, and aside from a handful of developers like Quantic Dream and Telltale Games, you really didn’t see a lot of adventure games coming out in 3D between 2005 and the indie gaming boom of the mid-2010s. Myst-style games, too, largely tapered off in favor of full 3D first person games like Portal, The Stanley Parable, The Talos Principle and Superliminal.But adventure games remained a popular genre in Eastern Europe, and Daedalic Entertainment was one of the most prolific producers of the traditional style of 2D adventures, releasing series such as Edna & Harvey, Deponia and The Dark Eye as well as standalone titles like The Whispered World, Anna’s Quest, The Night of the Rabbit and A New Beginning.And of course there were other adventure game makers as well. The Spanish studio Pendulo Games made the excellent Runaway: A Twist of Fate trilogy, the Czech studio Future Games made NiBiRu: Age of Secrets and the Black Mirror trilogy – no relation to the Netflix show of the same name - and various studios around Europe produced other halfway decent adventure games like Secret Files: Tunguska, Ceville, The Inner World and So Blonde.Another popular breeding ground for adventure games was the Adventure Game Studio, and this led to hundreds of adventure games being developed and published, mostly as freeware, but in some cases as commercial titles. One of the most prolific publishers of AGS adventures is the indie studio Wadjet Eye Games, started by Dave Gilbert – no relation to Ron – and we’ll talk about them in much more detail in an upcoming episode. But there’s also of course Yahtzee Croshaw’s Fully Ramblomatic Games, Crystal Shard, AGD Interactive, Clifftop Games and Grundislav Games, just to name a few! And we’ll be covering them all as well in our last couple of episodes for this series.But you know what we still haven’t covered in detail? Consoles and handhelds! So in our next episode, we’re going to talk about games like Adventure, Haunted House, Nightshade, The Space Adventure, Night Trap, Mansion of Hidden Souls, D, Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, Blazing Dragons, Scooby-Doo Mystery, Policenauts, Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, Swagman, Steins;Gate, Clannad and Moon. And, if we have time, we may even delve into the incredible Sakura Taisen series, find a Zero Escape sort of dilemma or spend some time righting wrongs in the Turnabout Courtroom with an Ace Attorney on the rise!If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore! THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I’m recommending Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, a game that came out last year from Pocket Trap and PM Studios and which promised the first “yoyovania.” OK, so that’s a clever little bit of marketing fluff, but what this game actually involves is a top-down puzzle-focused perspective like classic Zelda with a really capable yo-yo, far more useful than the one in the NES Startropics series. One of the most interesting ideas in the game is the ability to use angled surfaces to change the direction of your yo-yo so you can hit enemies at different angles and solve some surprisingly clever puzzles. The further into the game you get, the more abilities you earn for your yo-yo to allow you to resolve puzzles that weren’t previously possible to solve.The game also has a goofy story about restoring your family’s power plant, which has been raided by gangsters who’ve made off with four powerful batteries. As the bat creature Pippit, you have to use your super-charged, spectrally-infused yo-yo that’s carrying the spirit of your auntie to catch up to the gangsters and set things right. Most of this is just a rationale to offer four different themed areas representing the elemental powers of the batteries, and the story’s probably the least interesting part of the game. It’s all about puzzle-solving, room-clearing action. There’s also a city hub world you can wander around and complete missions so you can upgrade your moves.Oh, and did I mention one prominent song in the game’s score is by the great Yoko Shimomura, composer for Street Fighter II, Super Mario RPG, Parasite Eve, The Legend of Mana and Kingdom Hearts, among many other games?If you’re the sort of person who really enjoys the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance Zelda games with all their timing and technique-based puzzles, this is the game for you. It even can be set to look like it’s playing on an approximation of the Game Boy Advance, which is pretty neat! Give Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo a shot – it’s one of last year’s best retro-style indie games, and you won’t regret playing it!https://store.steampowered.com/app/2870350/Pipistrello_and_the_Cursed_Yoyo/  OTHERS TO RECOMMEND – 3DEternam (1992) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1368/eternam/)Dragon Lore: The Legend Begins (1994) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/3776/dragon-lore-the-legend-begins/)Normality (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1999/normality/)Time Commando (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/342/time-commando/)The City of Lost Children (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/3842/the-city-of-lost-children/)Dark Earth (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2874/dark-earth/)Koala Lumpur: Journey to the Edge (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/4462/koala-lumpur-journey-to-the-edge/) Mission Sunlight (1998) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/100362/mission-sunlight/) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, we’re going to talk about 1990s point and click adventure games made yet another group of like Westwood Studios, Cryo, Access Software, Cyberdreams, Infogrames, Revolution Software, Viacom and more! Join us on this expedition through games you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 9: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 7Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:Shelley Day’s court case: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/waw/press/2005/dec/day.htmlThe KGB File: http://thekgbfile.50webs.com/index.htmlRick Gush on Kyrandia: https://web.archive.org/web/20021122190852/http://www.adventuregamers.com:80/display.php?id=110https://muds.fandom.com/wiki/Kyrandiahttps://www.well-played.com.au/broken-sword-parzivals-stone-has-been-delayed/Harvester on GameGrumps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_lcJD7-gOohttps://kotaku.com/how-harlan-ellison-s-most-famous-short-story-became-an-1827327887https://www.pcgamer.com/saturday-crapshoot-i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream/-------------------------------------------------EPISODE 9Coming up in this episode –We’re going to talk about all sorts of point and click adventure games from the 1990s that weren’t published by Sierra, including The Legend of Kyrandia, Beneath a Steel Sky, Dark Seed, Call of Cthulhu, Dune, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, Beavis and Butthead and of course, Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream!I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! One name you haven’t heard much about since we left LucasArts a few episodes ago is Ron Gilbert, and you might wonder what he was up to after leaving LucasArts following Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. And the answer is, “making dozens of games with his colleague Shelley Day,” another established game developer who’d worked at LucasArts. Together, they’d found Humongous Entertainment and make games about characters like Putt-Putt, Fatty Bear, Freddi Fish and Pajama Sam, with many of these point and click adventures utilizing the SCUMM engine.But because these games are for little kids, I don’t feel a lot of need to go into detail about them. Suffice it to say Ron Gilbert did eventually return to modern adventure games and we’ll cover him in later episodes.And as for Shelley Day… well, that’s a sad story, and you look her up in the show notes if you want to see why she and Gilbert parted ways.But I bring up Ron Gilbert because he’s one of the few adventure game creators who really stayed active in the 1990s working on point and click adventure games and not trying to evolve things into 3D or to chase after trends like pre-rendered artwork or controller-friendly mechanics. He’s also one of the people who most influenced the style of point and click adventure games by not only articulating a philosophy he largely followed, but also by showing people how it could be done with the first two Monkey Island games.And as we’ve already discussed with games like Simon the Sorcerer and Discworld, that Monkey Island style was pretty prevalent throughout the 1990s, especially with Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle and some of the less aggressive Sierra games. But not everyone was copying that style, and one developer that certainly tried to do its own thing was Cryo Interactive, a French developer founded by several folks from ERE Informatique. While ERE was bombastic and included the intergalactic logo for Exxos in its branding, Cryo adopted the face of a female android in a sleep pod, first seen in the French-only puzzle game Extase, based on a minigame called “Brain Bowler” in ERE’s truly odd 1989 outer space Olympiad, Purple Saturn Day.Cryo’s next project was an adventure game based on Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel, Dune, in 1992, but which also drew heavy visual inspiration from the 1984 David Lynch feature film adaptation, even using the film’s logo and a production still of Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides in a stillsuit on the cover of several editions of the North American release. According to the credit, MacLachlan’s appearance was licensed for the game, probably to help enhance its marketability.Within the game, some characters resemble the film’s actors. Feyd-Rautha Harkonen still closely resembles Sting, for example, and Lady Jessica looks a lot like Francesca Annis. Virgina Maden’s Princess Irulan also shows up in footage from the film to narrate the story in the Sega CD version. Other characters, however, like Thufir Hawat, Baron Harkonen and Duncan Idaho, look so different they’re not remotely recognizable.Dune is a fascinating point and click adventure because it takes place from the first person perspective as you control Paul Atreides visiting various sites on the planet of Arrakis, but it also transforms into a strategy game about midway through once the Harkonens kill Duke Leto and you have to work to evict them from strongholds.Throughout the game, the Fremen recognize you as Muad’Dib and pledge their loyalty to you as you visit their sietches, and a lot of the political and social dynamics of the book and film are relaxed to make the adventure simpler and more focused. But you still get to fly around in ornithopters, ride sandworms and raise armies… as well as fall in love with Chani, whose fate is a little happier in this telling than the source material where she’s only permitted to be Paul’s concubine when he seizes the Imperial throne.Cryo’s work on the game, however, was famously troubled due to a number of issues going on behind the scenes, and as they were working on their Dune game, an American developer called Westwood Studios was building one of its own, a real-time strategy base-building and resource-gathering game that would come out the same year as Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty. It’s one of my favorite games of all time, by the way, and the direct inspiration for Blizzard’s Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Westwood’s own Command & Conquer series. But we’ll talk about those games another time.As for Westwood, we’ll come back to them in a few minutes, because they, too, were building adventure games in the 1990s.But I want to touch on a few other games Cryo released in the 1990s that were also adventure games, including their 1992 adventure KGB, which has a reputation for being one of the most difficult graphical adventure games ever made, and yet which is still well-regarded as being a legitimately good game. And by the way, there is a 1993 CD-ROM re-release called Conspiracy that adds in some clips where Donald Sutherland plays the main character’s deceased father, but these scenes really just provide some vague advice and don’t add much to the game.The premise of KGB is that the Soviet Union is days away from collapsing in 1991 and you are an officer named Captain Maksim Mikhailovich Rukov, or either Maks or Rukov for short, who’s joined the KGB’s Department P and who has to investigate some problems within the KGB that eventually lead to an assassination plot to murder Mikhal Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the USSR.I’m not sure exactly how historically accurate the game actually is, but in real life, there was a failed coup attempt in August of 1991 that involved the KGB and the State Committee on the State of Emergency, more popularly known as the “Gang of Eight,” who opposed Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost, which meant restructuring and transparency.KGB is all about spycraft and catching some of the slipperiest people you’ll ever see in an adventure game through a variety of methods, such as recording conversations and making use of a snuff film as leverage.The KGB conspirators are very hard to pin down, and wouldn’t you know it, they also have a corrupt CIA ally in the mix as well as a man who’s been surgically altered to look like Gorbachev and who’s been brainwashed so he can go on TV and resign the presidency in place of the actual Gorbachev, who gets kidnapped. Your main ally is your Uncle Vanya, an older man in a wheelchair who’s been working undercover at the KGB and who pulled strings to get you on the job. He also has a friend named Major Vovlov who serves as your bad-tempered boss and the game’s ultimate antagonist.Because the game is so challenging, I recommend consulting a website I’ve linked in the show notes called The KGB File to help you through it. KGB is definitely a game made for adults who want an engaging and sophisticated plot; it doesn’t hold your hand and it has some seriously mature themes it explores along with a lot of Russian names to keep track of from a surprisingly large cast of characters. There are drugs and prostitutes and murders and multiple layers of bureaucracy to keep track of. If you enjoy the intrigue aspects of Metal Gear Solid games, you might find KGB to be a really engaging experience.Another Cryo’s adventure game is from 1995: Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure, which is also for mature audiences and might seem more accessible, but it’s a polarizing game for multiple reasons. It’s based on the Dark Horse comic book series from the 1990s, primarily the graphic novel Aliens: Labyrinth, to which this game is actually an adaptation but also a sort of sequel.In the graphic novel Aliens: Labyrinth, the plot revolves around a scientist and former Colonial Marine named Tony Crespi who’s sent to a research space station to secretly monitor Colonel Doctor Paul Church, who’s experimenting on Alien Xenomorphs by putting them in a dark, labyrinth-like maze and learning about how they hunt and make decisions. But it all sort of goes Jurassic Park and, predictably, tragedy occurs.The game takes place  at a time that would simply be defined as “later” and isn’t officially part of the Dark Horse canon despite drawing liberally from it. You play as Lt. Col. Hericksen, not-so-subtly named for the actor Lance Henriksen who played Bishop in the Aliens film. The gameplay is interesting because it’s sort of a point and click adventure due to Hericksen’s appearance in many scenes, but it also looks and plays like a 3D Myst-style game at times.Even so, this one is mostly a point and click adventure with dialogue trees, inventory puzzles and illustrated characters who pop up in visual novel-style conversations. But there are also some RPG elements and turn-based strategy sequences where you pilot an exosuit and battle Xenomorphs and facehuggers and, towards the end, Colonial Marines.It’s a surprisingly pretty and interesting game, though the illustrated characters and the pre-rendered scenes do clash a little bit. The voice acting is also pretty bad and clashes with the otherwise dark atmosphere of the game. But probably the biggest complaint about Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure is that it’s so easy to make mistakes and undo all your hard work, and it doesn’t help that the game is also quite buggy. My advice is to play with a walkthrough, because the game isn’t so much challenging as it is limited by a bad interface, time constraints and poor directions.But if you like your games dark and gritty and set in the future, you might want to check out what Westwood Studios had on tap in 1990 with a different adventure also based on a book.Infocom’s final years as an Activision adventure game imprint gave rise to a few graphical adventure games and RPGs, many of which were created by Brett W. Sperry and Louis Castle’s Las Vegas-based game studio, Westwood Associates, soon after renamed Westwood Studios. One of Westwood’s earliest games was a 1990 DOS point and click adventure and RPG hybrid called Circuit’s Edge, based on the novel When Gravity Falls by George Alec Effinger. While the game has a cyberpunk feel to it, you’ve never played a setting quite like this because the premise of the story is that the Islamic Arabic culture has become the principal world power and you play as an investigator named Marid Audran who lives in the city of the Budayeen and gets caught in a web of intrigue involving a client he’s framed for murdering and a crime lord benefactor who hires him to get to the bottom of what really happened.Now, I want to specify that Circuit’s Edge is more a role-playing game with an involved story than a true adventure game. The interface shows stats on the side, a small graphical window with character portraits beside it and a big text box underneath, and moving through the Budayeen is similar to the first person navigation around the town of Skara Brae in The Bard’s Tale. But the game also follows a lot of the classic adventure game conventions of having you collect inventory, solve puzzles and talk to NPCs fairly liberally. There are also a lot of very adult themes in the game, including quite a bit of prostitution and even nudity. It’s interesting and worth checking out, if for no other reason than it tells a story that is quite different from most other games of the era.Westwood’s next adventure series is one of the ones it’s best-known for, and the proper name of the series is Fables & Fiends, though this was retooled later to reflect the first game’s subtitle, The Legend of Kyrandia. This initial chapter debuted in 1992 and features a character named Brandon, an orphaned young man who has to battle the murderous jester Malcolm, who’s escaped his magical confinement and is using the magical Kyragem to sow mischief around the land, including turning Brandon’s grandfather, the powerful wizard Kallak, into stone. In many ways, the game feels like a King’s Quest-style adventure, though apparently, at least according to the game’s writer and the designer of the sequels, Rick “Coco” Gush, Westwood licensed it from an earlier MUD game called Kyrandia by Richard Skurnick and Scott Brinker, though the inspiration appears to be superficial at best.The Legend of Kyrandia is a true point and click adventure game in the style of a Sierra or LucasArts adventure with all the elements you’d expect – gorgeous artwork, an inventory scroll at the bottom of the screen and a context-sensitive cursor that allows you to interact with the game world depicted in the top two thirds of the screen. The music by Westwood’s house musician Frank Klepacki is wonderful, and there was even a CD-ROM talkie version released alongside the disk-based version with voice acting, though it’s kind of cringey and nowhere near as good as what Westwood would start to be known for once they started shipping games like Command & Conquer.The story is basically what you’d expect – as Brandon, you are the chosen one who has to prove his mettle as a hero, discover your claim to the throne and overcome the mischievous machinations of Malcolm, who shows up occasionally to bother you, but who never comes across as particularly menacing. You also befriend a young alchemist named Zanthia who teaches you how to make potions. That might seem like an unimportant detail, but as you’ll see in a moment, she’s not a trivial character.The Legend of Kyrandia is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s really more in the realm of “lighthearted” than comedic. The jokes are mostly just slapstick or Brandon grumbling about things, and Malcolm has to be one of the least funny jesters in the history of gaming, and also one of the least capable. Suffice it to say he’s the sort of villain who tells you not to go into the room you need to go into to defeat him, and then also is the sort who’s easily defeated by a trick a child would see through. He’s also kind of annoying, a point that’s not lost on Zanthia when she returns in the second game as its protagonist.And the second game is a little confusing to identify at first because it was originally published in 1993 as Fables & Fiends: The Hand of Fate with a box that didn’t match the first game’s storybook aesthetic and instead depicts a purple hand inset inside an even larger hand and which doesn’t really say “The Legend of Kyrandia - Book 2” anywhere. The back cover’s text is hard to read due to a confusing layout and since Malcolm and Brandon are nowhere to be seen, it’s hard to connect this game to its predecessor. Even worse, the title screen for the game itself also just says “The Hand of Fate.”But if you play the game, especially if you’re playing the CD-ROM talkie edition, it’s pretty clear you’re playing a sequel as Brandon’s voice kicks off a narration and shows some familiar scenes and characters as Brandon explains that the world is disappearing, piece by piece, and that Zanthia has been selected to retrieve a stone from the center of the world.  In fact, later versions of the game even received new box art more in line with the first game and more clearly calling this game “Fables & Fiends – The Legend of Kyrandia Book Two” with no mention of the Hand of Fate, but instead a painted picture of Zanthia traveling through the skies on her quest.And make no mistake – marketing issues aside, The Hand of Fate is a superior game to the original in every way. It’s more imaginative, it’s funnier, it has better puzzles and Zanthia is just a far more charismatic character than Brandon, with a dry wit and a recast voice actress who adds so much more to the character in the talkie version. And actually, the voice acting in this game is better all the way around, much more in line with the best of Sierra and LucasArts. Frank Klepacki’s score even ups the ante this time with a little more variety and some funk as well as some island-style music. It’s pretty clear the Westwood team took some inspiration from The Secret of Monkey Island instead of King’s Quest this time around, right down to featuring a segment with pirates, but it results in such a better game it was honestly a good move.Zanthia’s travels are of course not straightforward, and she not only attempts to visit the center of the world, but also wanders around swamps, castles, coves, lava pits, the high reaches of the world and even across a rainbow bridge into the surreal realm of the Wheels of Fate. One of the most-lauded aspects of the game is that she approaches her challenges with a certain confidence and world-weariness that’s unusual for adventure games of the era. She even changes her outfits to suit the places that she goes.But if you ask me, the best aspect of the game is that there’s no Brandon and no Malcolm. And unfortunately, the game’s standalone story ends with a cliffhanger where Malcolm is freed, setting up a sequel for him to make his return.The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three: Malcolm’s Revenge came out in 1994 and while it is very clearly part of the series from the box art and the introductory cinematic, it also looks and plays a bit differently from the other two games. The hand-drawn aesthetic is replaced by largely pre-rendered backgrounds, the inventory bar that lines the bottom of the screen in the previous two games is gone, popping up only when needed, and the gameplay is occasionally interrupted by pre-rendered cutscenes. The credits sequence also has full-motion video sequence featuring the development team at Westwood, with Malcolm causing havoc around the office. You can even see Joe Kucan, who famously played Kane in the Command & Conquer games, make an appearance as the game’s vocal recording director.And speaking of the acting, Malcolm, thankfully, has been recast with a nastier, more villainous voice for this sequel, and since you play as him this time around, it’s good to see the character be less of a cartoon clown and more of an actual bad guy. That is, of course, assuming you keep him in that persona – this game actually allows you to choose if you want to lie to other characters or be nasty, measuring Malcolm’s behavior with a meter that appears next to the inventory bar.As adventure games go, Malcom’s Revenge isn’t much of a revenge tale; rather, it’s one of the most surreal, bonkers ones you’ll ever play, with much of the game devoted to realms with talking animals and obnoxious humans who tend to get under Malcolm’s skin. As you might expect, he becomes an unlikely hero and has to kick a group of pirates out of Kyrandia to restore things to the way they used to be. In the end, all he really wants to do is take a nap, but he’s unfortunately blamed for pretty much everything that goes wrong in Kyrandia, which means he also has to clear his name before the game is over.While Malcom’s Revenge is often thought of as a step down from The Hand of Fate in terms of its adventure game credentials, it’s still a decent adventure game with an absolutely killer soundtrack that’s very much in line with the sort of funky hip-hop industrial tunes you’d hear in Command & Conquer. The strong production values help make the game fun, and thankfully, the humor is a lot sharper than Malcolm’s first outing.Westwood worked on one more point and click adventure game in the 1990s, and while it was a bit of a slow burner in terms of sales, it did make a positive impression and has since become a true classic. The name of that game? Blade Runner, based on the 1982 feature film of the same name and released in 1997 with an eye for recreating many of the movie’s strongest visuals while telling a parallel story to Rick Deckard’s adventures with the escaped Nexus-6 replicant units led by Roy Batty.The game focuses on a rookie Blade Runner named Ray McCoy who winds up on the trail of a warrior poet replicant named Clovis who is leading a group of rogue replicants who are all suspects in a crime involving murdering animals – a heinous crime in a future were real animals are exceedingly rare. McCoy has to hunt down all of Clovis’s replicants, but the way the game is structured, who those replicants actually are is randomized, and there are multiple endings available, some of which include McCoy himself being a replicant.One of the most notable things about Blade Runner is how well it nails the aesthetic of the film. The team at Westwood not only recreated some of the locations, camera transitions and lighting effects, but also extended the world out with new places that look as if they came from scenes we just didn’t get to see in the film. Many of the film’s characters make an appearance and are voiced by the original actors, and the new characters are all voiced by established screen actors, some of whom, like Jeff Garlin and Lisa Edelstein, went on to became quite famous.The graphics were also quite interesting for the time, fusing pre-rendered footage and a sort of voxel-based rendering of the characters that was able to be done in software without a 3D accelerator card. In the 1990s, this was crucial since it meant delivering graphics that looked 3D without actually having to be 3D. While the game looks movie-accurate in many places, everything was created specifically for the game and nothing was used from the film footage. Since the target resolution was lower than we’d use today, the game does have a sort of grainy look and feel to it that modern ports have not been able to fix since the original source code was lost, but it’s still a darned impressive-looking game that’s still one of the best and most authentic cyberpunk stories out there.I would love to talk more about Blade Runner, because I’m a huge fan of the original novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Ridley Scott film and the game itself. It was one of the first games I reviewed as a pro game reviewer back in the 1990s and definitely one of my favorites I ever got to write about. But what I’ll ask you to do instead is just go out and get yourself a copy and play it, because it’s one of the best adventure games of the late 1990s and short and straightforward enough that you can play it multiple times and see its many variations.And while I don’t think you’ll need a walkthrough, I will say that there are some pretty good guides that explain how the innerworkings of the game function, and if you want to see the thirteen different endings the game has, you’d be wise to use them!In the 1990s, Ray McCoy was far from the only detective in a trenchcoat running around a post-apocalyptic 21st century California, and some of his stiffest competition came from a character introduced by Access Software in 1989 in an adventure game called Mean Streets. I covered this game way back in Episode 4 of the podcast when we talked about 80s adventure games, and listeners may recall that this is the first game featuring Tex Murphy, a character who’d come to be played by Chris Jones, who posed for the digitized pictures of Tex in this game. The game was originally supposed to be a follow-up to Access Software’s 3D flight game Echelon, which is why it included a 3D engine for flying Tex’s car.The 1991 sequel, Martian Memorandum, ditched the 3D in favor of a more conventional adventure game design with some digitized movies and sounds, and it is an interesting adventure in its own right, largely focusing the gameplay built around dialogue and interrogations, with a handful of inventory puzzles to help grease the conservational wheels.Unfortunately for Martian Memorandum, it’s also sort of the black sheep of the series today because the next few games not only brought  back the 3D gameplay by allowing Tex to walk around and explore the game world first person style, but also added in significantly more digital footage to make the games feel more like interactive movies. We’re going to talk about all of these games – Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Detective, the Mean Streets remake Tex Murphy: Overseer and even the more recent 2014 revival Tesla Effect – in our next episode as we cover 3D and FMV games.But Access Software made some other adventure games in the 1990s, and both of them are quite a bit more obscure than the Tex Murphy games. The first of these is 1990’s Countdown, a point and click adventure that uses digitized characters, portraits and backgrounds to tell a story about an amnesiac CIA agent who wakes up in a mental hospital in Turkey and has to escape so he can foil a terrorist plot. While I know that this sounds like pretty well-trod territory, Countdown is one of the better games using the old Bourne Identity setup, and one of the most interesting things about it is that the game includes a dialogue system where you can try different approaches as you talk with other characters and sometimes get really interesting outcomes, though one of the game’s biggest faults is how you can wind up in unwinnable situations and find yourself having to replay earlier sections. It’s definitely a game where you need to save often.The first half of Countdown is definitely the stronger portion as you find a way to escape your room in the mental hospital and gear your bearings. One of the nicer aspects of the game is that you only enter rooms where you can actually do something and otherwise navigate using a top-down map. This limits the number of red herrings you have to deal with in screens or locations that are really just there to string important areas together, and once you finally are able to travel around the Mediterranean in the second half of the game, it feels like the game world really opens up, though you have to be careful you don’t waste precious time going places too far out of the way. The game could also give you some more hints about what you have to do, however – a lot of essential items are hidden and you need to get used to using the move command on just about everything you see.Beyond the frustrations around Countdown’s difficulty, which are easily solved today with walkthroughs and longplay videos, there are some goofy things that make it endearing. For example, you run into a fellow patient who’s sitting nude in an interrogation room and making goofy faces while you talk to him. Many of the other characters don’t look so much like actors as corporate drones Access Software grabbed from a nearby office and asked to make some funny faces. Your main character, who’s named the oh-so-creative name of Mason Powers ugh looks like an Eddie Bauer model in a button-up shirt and khakis.There’s also a bad guy named Scorpio and another character named McBain, which is quite funny if you enjoy The Simpsons but which we can’t really fault the developers for since the show hadn’t introduced those characters yet. Call that a happy coincidence.I really recommend Countdown and hope more people will check it out – it’s way better than Sierra’s 1990 thriller adventure Codename: ICEMAN and while it’s a bit dated and has a pretty anticlimactic ending, there’s a lot of fun to be had if you bother to play through it.The 1992 point and click adventure game Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a little harder to recommend because it has aged so badly. It’s very easy to confuse this game with Sierra Discovery’s Lost in the Rainforest, but it’s actually quite a different game, much more in the style of Indiana Jones or the 1984 film Romancing the Stone and featuring some absolutely dated tropes from old movie serials and the 1958 film Wild Women of Wongo, a movie that designer Chris Jones enjoyed so much that he adapted ideas from it. I’m assuming he did so because the movie’s in the “so bad it’s good” camp, but the problem is that the game itself doesn’t feel like it’s in on the joke.Amazon is broken up into fourteen short chapters that play sort of like a movie serial. You’re Jason Roberts, a researcher in search of your brother Allen, who disappears in the Amazon during an expedition due to what seems to be foul play. On his journey, Jason meets an attractive blond white woman named Maya who seems to hate men but of course turns out to be a scout for a tribe of literal Amazons who live in the Amazon, complete with low-cut outfits and grass skirts or swimsuit bottoms. Oh, and did I mention the actual natives are cannibals who are wowed by little tricks you do with your inventory items and apparently believe white-skinned people are gods?Sensitivity to other cultures is pretty lacking here, as is a sense of direction – background NPCs will have elaborate backstories, narration will take over when the game doesn’t want to depict the next logical action, and the game rarely tells you what you actually need to do in order to advance the plot. There are also moments where the story will end one chapter of the serial and then recap what just happened. It sort of feels like this is all by design in some sort of parody of other adventure games, but again, it’s not executed well enough that the designers tip their hand to show you it was on purpose.One of the weirder things about the game is the audio narration, which sounds like it’s being delivered by an infomercial announcer reading a script rather than an actor attempting to set the mood. Many of the other lines in the game that get an audio reading also tend to be of the overly flat or scenery-chewing variety, as if the actors were just the folks Access Software could round up from their social circles. The audio is also noticeably highly compressed, but you can’t be too picky about that because the game was only released on floppy disk.Another odd aspect of the game is the graphics are about half digitized and half hand-drawn. The main character, Jason, has a digital portrait, but his walk-around avatar is noticeably illustrated. Many of the other characters he encounters are digitized from real actors, but some, especially the native Amazon tribe later in the game, look like they came from a storybook. It’s really jarring visually, and it feels like Access Software’s ambition may have exceeded their grasp, especially since this game uses a Super VGA display mode.But by far the weirdest thing is that the game features a number of death scenes preceded by glowing red letters that say “SHOCK WARNING” before showing your often not-so-gruesome demise. There’s also a weird note in the credits that no insects were harmed in the making of the game, which is weird because a giant ant that murders Jason in one of the death scenes. Again, you have to imagine this was all part of an attempt to spoof the source material and amuse the audience, not to play any of this seriously.I’m not saying Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a bad game by any means – it’s reasonably engaging and has some good moments. But it’s definitely not Access Software’s best, and when we talk about Tex Murphy in our next episode, we’ll see how far they were able to evolve adventure gaming with a far better setting and design.Another adventure game I can only recommend as a curiosity comes from Revolution Software, and that’s not because it’s a bad game so much as their first attempt at a genre they’d go on to master later on. This game came out in 1992 originally for the Amiga and it’s called Lure of the Temptress. I don’t even really want to spend a lot of time describing it because it’s honestly a pretty dull game where even the promise of a sexy villainess is barely realized since she has so little presence in the game. You mostly see humans who are under the oppression of pig-faced monsters called Skorl, and even an encounter with a dragon mid-game is anticlimactic. If you want to try Lure of the Temptress, it’s freeware now and easy to try out. But you’d be better off playing Revolution’s next game, which is also freeware, but much more interesting: the 1994 cyberpunkish point and click adventure Beneath a Steel Sky, a game that was mostly popular in Europe in the 1990s but which has since become an international cult classic that even got a sequel in 2019.The premise of Beneath a Steel Sky is that you are a survivor of a helicopter crash in the Australian Outback who was raised by Aboriginees who live there. You’re given the name “Robert Foster” because the tribe spots a can of Foster’s Lager in the wreckage. As you grow up, you build a companion robot named Joey who can be upgraded into other robots during the game. And this is really useful, because you’re kidnapped and taken to a place called Union City, where you have to escape the minions of LINC, a powerful computer mainframe that runs the city.By the way, most of this backstory is relayed through comic book artwork drawn by Dave Gibbons, the co-creator and artist of Watchmen. It’s really neat.As the game proceeds, you have to work your way through the city and learn more about who you really are and how you’re connected to LINC. I won’t spoil the story, because it’s actually interesting, but it has heavy overtones of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with Foster playing the role of the Savage, but also inverting things so he’s the savior of a dystopian society instead of the self-flagellating misfit of a misguided utopia.Beneath a Steel Sky is also notable for having a fairly interesting tone with lots of humor interspersed within the game’s more serious science fiction premise. The writing is good and the voice acting helps to bring the characters to life, though I find Robert a Joey a bit grating since Robert sounds like a generic hero and Joey’s voice sound like’s it’s filtered through a cheap electric fan.Revolution’s defining moment, however, is their next game, 1996’s Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, which was released in North America under the rather stupid name Circle of Blood. The game opens with an amazing and lavishly animated introduction in Paris where the main character, the American tourist George Stobbart, is sitting outside his favorite café when a sinister-looking clown drops off an accordion loaded with explosives and blows the place to smithereens, killing a mysterious old man in the process. And as soon as the animation ends, the game puts you right into the scene, maintaining roughly the same level of animation and launching George into a lengthy adventure investigating why this strange bombing even happened, though he finds no help from the local French authorities, who seem more interested in covering up the case than solving the mystery.George soon meets a photojournalist named Nicole “Nico” Collard who becomes his ally in uncovering what’s really happening, and the two find themselves mixed up in an intriguing story that involves  the Knights Templar and a group of Neo-Templars who are trying to acquire the power of an ancient deity. Unlike most adventure games, which can be beaten in a few hours, Broken Sword is a really long game that can last a dozen or more hours in your first playthrough thanks to a lot of lengthy conversations that make the characters feel as if they exist to do more than just hand out puzzle clues and inventory items as well as some fun puzzles that never get in the way of the game but do require some thought here and there.The original version of Broken Sword is great, but if you play it today, chances are good you’ll be playing the Director’s Cut edition from 2009 that adds in additional Nico scenes where she’s actually playable and kicks off the game with her own introduction, which adds in a sinister mime who appears to be involved in the murder plot. This version also adds in portraits for the characters whenever they’re speaking and comic book panel-style action windows, especially in the new scenes. I’m personally not sure that Broken Sword needed all this extra content, as it was fine on its own, but it did help the game to reach a broader audience on the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS and mobile devices.The 1997 sequel, Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror, sends George on a quest to rescue Nico from a group of cultists who are trying to once again obtain the power of a God, this time from the Mayan mythology. Once again, this is a lavishly animated game with absolutely stunning graphics and lots and lots of fully voiced dialogue, but it’s also noticeably shorter than the original. I definitely recommend this one, but it feels like a made for TV sequel rather than a true continuation of the original game.From the third game onward, the Broken Sword series has changed things up with each entry, but each also has a much longer and more satisfying story than the second game. 2003’s Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is an action adventure game with some climbing and platforming mechanics and also gives you direct control over the characters rather than a point and click interface, which is good, because it was also released on the Xbox and, in Europe, on the PlayStation 2.The fourth game, Broken Sword: The Angel of Death, released in 2006, only made it out on Windows computers. It’s once again a 3D game, but this time, it uses a point and click interface in some parts and direct control in others. It’s somewhat polarizing because it initially sidelines Nico and instead introduces a blonde American woman named Anna Maria, but it’s a fine adventure on its own and worth playing if you’re invested in the series.The most recent game, Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse, debuted in 2013 as part one of a two-part series that concluded in 2014. This chapter returned to the more traditional point and click animated style of the original game and it’s easily the best-looking game in the series. The story and puzzles are a little less inspired, but if you’ve bothered to play the first four games, you’re of course going to want to see what happens to George and Nico in the fifth, particularly since this story’s mystery comes the closest to many of the themes explored in the first game, though this time it’s a Gnostic cult trying to destroy God with the help of Lucifer himself. The game also hints at the end that George and Nico might finally get together, which will hopefully be what will happen in the upcoming Broken Sword: Parzival’s Stone, which keeps getting delayed, but which series creator Charles Cecil continues to say is coming.Here’s to hoping we’ll see it soon.I know you’re probably worried that we’re getting close to the dregs now that we’ve talked about so many fantastic 1990s point and click adventure games already, but I promise that we still have a few left worth mentioning.And since Broken Sword is so lavishly animated, this seems like as great a time as any to bring up another game that evokes that feeling of watching a cartoon: the 1997 adventure game from Burst and Virgin Games called Toonstruck, starring the great character actor Christopher Lloyd as Drew Blanc, a human who gets pulled into the animated world he’s created. It felt like Christopher Lloyd was in everything around this time after Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Back to the Future movies really raised his stature, and this game has plenty of other famous 90s staples from comedies and animation, including Ben Stein, Tim Curry, Dan Castellaneta, Jeff Bennett, Corey Burton, Rob Paulsen, April Winchell, Tress MacNeille, Jim Cummings, Frank Welker, David Ogden Stiers and Dom DeLuise.Yes, this is the rare adventure game where the voice cast isn’t just imitating famous actors, but actually has a cast full of them!The premise of the game is that Drew Blanc is the creator the Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun Show, a show that pays his bills but which he hates. He really wants to build a show around his snarky purple cartoon character Flux Wildly, but his studio head isn’t interested in that and demands more cute bunny designs instead. Drew falls asleep and enters the world of his creations, where he finds out that an evil character named Count Nefarious is changing the world of Cutopia into a dark and twisted place, and Drew and Flux have to stop Nefarious and save the world from disaster.If I have a complaint about the story, it’s that Drew and Flux only briefly see the effects of Nefarious’s evil plan before they’re already taking on a quest to undo it. It makes the story feel poorly-paced and completely erases the stakes established in the first part of the introduction, and I don’t feel like Toonstruck ever fully recovers from that choice. If you’re here for story or puzzles, you’ll find Toonstruck to be quite a letdown. It’s better to just play it as a game that’s full of cartoon antics and enjoy the ride, because this game’s way more of a looker than anything else.Of course, if you want something starring cartoon characters who are way stupider, there’s another animated adventure game from Viacom Games that’ll be right up your alley: the 1995 game MTV’s Beavis & Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity, a pitch-perfect adventure game that feels like the cartoon show has come to life on your computer, complete with the same disclaimer and introduction at the beginning and plenty of included animation. When you finally get to play the adventure game itself, you get to take Beavis and Butt-Head around Highland High School, annoying Daria and interacting with Principal Vicker and Mr. Buzzcut and hocking loogies off the roof in the first of several minigames.As far as a plot, there’s about as much of one as you’d expect from a game starring Beavis & Butt-head. They’ll sit on the couch and watch music videos, they’ll try to follow around their aggressive idol Todd and they’ll annoy Mr. Anderson or their boss at BurgerWorld or even get tossed in prison for awhile. The interface for the game is somewhat like the one LucasArts used in Full Throttle, allowing you to pull up a sort of radial menu with icons for actions. You can also choose whether or not you want Beavis or Butt-head to respond in conversations with various characters.The result is a really funny game that makes amazing use of its license and which honestly is one of the stronger mid-1990s point and click adventure games, right up there with anything LucasArts or Sierra published and extremely well-crafted all around. The various arcade action minigames keep the adventure game elements from becoming too tedious, but they also don’t wear out their welcome. The game’s plot, while meandering, fits the characters perfectly, and unlike every other Beavis & Butt-Head game made in the 1990s, you’re not doing anything the duo wouldn’t do. The end of the game even has them get locked in the trunk of Todd’s car so that Daria can overhear them making stupid jokes and rescue them, only for Beavis and Butt-head to return home, having learned nothing. It’s a perfect ending to a surprisingly great adventure game, and probably the best adaptation of a cartoon show until 2014’s South Park: The Stick of Truth pulled off a similarly great game.And just to illustrate how bad things could have been, GT Interactive published its own adventure game in 1999 called Beavis and Butt-Head Do U. and it’s pretty boring and completely unchallenging despite trying to replicate the same gameplay.But let’s now turn to a few of the other great adventures of the 1990s that dip a little more into the realm of horror instead of animated antics.We’ll start with a title published by Electronic Arts and developed by Flashpoint Productions called Noctropolis, and it is a fascinating fusion of digitized characters, gorgeous artwork often warped by a fishbowl perspective and full-motion video. The game begins in our world, where a comic book shop owner named Peter Grey is reading through his favorite comic, which features a trio of villains named Luscious, Tophat and Desperado facing off with a shadowy caped hero named Darksheer and his beautiful sidekick Stiletto. Darksheer’s powers come from an ancient Egyptian substance called Liquidark. It’s peak 1990s Image Comics-style cheese; the heroes don’t have a code against killing and there’s plenty of T&A, but everyone also avoids swearing and the heroes agonize about their crimes to a priest. The intro is surprisingly lengthy and nearly the size of a full comic book.Then Peter has a dream about a vampire succubus seducing him and wakes up to receive a package from a courier with another comic inside, this time detailing the formation of a new supervillain team under the leadership of a mysterious villain named Flux. An obelisk appears and Peter steps inside, and steps out into perpetually dark world of the “City of Night,” Noctropolis. With Darksheer missing, Peter assumes his identity and teams up with Stiletto to take on this new threat.As you can probably already tell, this game was made for a certain target audience and was marketed as being sexy and violent, though there’s actually very little sex or violence in the actual game. It’s actually a lot sillier than it looks. One of my favorite puzzles involves getting a dog who’s guarding a platform to jump into a huge pit by dangling a sausage on a string in front of him, with a pitiful howl playing as he falls for it. It makes me laugh every time.But much of this game involves wandering around and reading lots of text. And I mean lots of it – think of a comic where there’s more captions than dialogue and where the action is told to you as often as it’s shown. All of the dialogue itself is fully voiced and acted out by one of the hammiest green screen casts you’ll ever see, but the production values are high, and once again, we have a game that pulls off a lot of what Phantasmagoria was trying to do, but more effectively.Noctropolis is definitely a game I’d recommend, both for its endearingly cheesy story and its beautiful graphics. Even your pop-up action menu looks interesting as you see the verbs you can use divided up into sections atop a pyramid-like triangle. It’s more style than substance and quite a tease, like the 90s comics it’s imitating, but it’s a definitely an adventure unlike any other you’ve ever played.Another sort of wacky horror game from the same era is called Harvester, and it was made by DigiFX Interactive and published in Europe by Virgin Interactive and in North America by a schlockhouse publisher called Merit Studios in 1996. And Harvester is schlock of the highest order, a horror game where you play as an amnesiac named Steve Mason who awakens in 1953 in a town called Harvest where everyone seems to be more than a little off. Every character you meet feels like they’re playing a role in a 1950s sitcom that’s simmering with anger and resentment underneath, sort of like Twin Peaks meets Silent Hill. Things quickly get weird in ways I don’t want to describe because so much of the fun of this game is its shock value.And Harvester is shocking. At different points in the game, full motion video sequences will play where Steve watches absolutely bewildering things play out, and they’re rendered more interesting by the fact that the acting in this game is so endearingly bad that you’ll find yourself wanting to rewatch certain scenes and imitate the tortured dialogue. If Mystery Science Theatre 3000 had ever found an adventure game to feature, it’d be Harvester, and I mean that in the best possible way, because it’s absolutely entertaining to play through, provided you’re old enough to handle its gore and clumsy handling of sex.Speaking of which, the Game Grumps, who are the closest thing to video gaming’s MST3k, have a great video featuring Harvester, and it’s in the show notes!But if you’d like your horror games a little less silly, you might want to turn to Infogrames’s two Call of Cthulhu adventures from 1993 and 1995. The first is called Shadow of the Comet, and it’s generally regarded as an excellent take on the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos, placing you in the New England coastal village of Illsmouth and having you investigate a case where a scientist went mad during the previous passing of Halley’s Comet. As you arrive in town in 1910 three days before the comet can be observed, some of the people in the town are standoffish and suspicious, and some have strange characteristics that suggest they may be connected to the horrific Old Ones, ancient evil eldritch beings who are worshipped as gods by the local cultists but who will bring about the end of the world if they’re successfully summoned.For those familiar with the Mythos, you encounter Yog-Sothoth, Dagon and of course Cthulhu in the course of the game, and you’ll also hear a namecheck for at least one other elder god as well. The story is a combination of elements from several Lovecraft stories including “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and of course “The Call of Cthulhu,” but it does depart in a couple of ways. First of all, most of the residents of Illsmouth are not evil and actually are glad that you rid them of the evil cultists in a surprisingly upbeat ending, which is atypical for a Lovecraft-based story. Second, you face the elder gods directly but never succumb to insanity, another common trope of Lovecraft’s tragic heroes.While Shadow of the Comet isn’t perfect by any means, it plays like an icon-driven Sierra adventure and has a lengthy, interesting plot to uncover and some memorable character interactions and great horror scenes.The sequel, Prisoner of Ice, hews much more closely to the story “At the Mountains of Madness” and while the original game had a nice illustrated style, this one uses digitized characters walking around painted backgrounds. It also shifts the plot forward to 1937 and adds in some Nazis, which is honestly where the game gets pretty silly. While it’s tangentially connected to the original game in a very unsatisfying manner, it’s also half as interesting and about a quarter of the length of it. I honestly don’t recommend it unless you are really curious.Another horror series you should check out, however, is Dark Seed, which was released in two parts in 1992 and 1995 by Cyberdreams and which prominently features the artwork of H.R. Giger, best-known for the design of the Alien Xenomorph in the feature film Alien. You play as Mike Dawson, a mustachioed self-insert of the game’s creator and owner of a newly purchased old mansion that turns out to be a gateway to a parallel world that’s sort of like the Upside-Down in Stranger Things. He dreams that an alien embryo gets shot into his brain, and sure enough, this creature, the Dark Seed, is intended to hatch from his head and destroy his world, paving the way for the ancients from the Dark World to take over.Dark Seed is a very average adventure game with an oppressive timing mechanic and tricky puzzles, and thus it’s best-played with a walkthrough. But the reason you’d even want to is because the story is interesting, the horror atmosphere is tense and the graphics are incredible, utilizing large swaths of Giger’s artwork to create the Dark World and give the game a true sense of otherworldliness. The higher resolution used in the game necessitated a more restricted color palette for the graphics hardware of the day, and that actually adds a distinctive quality to the game, with our world being rendered in browns, greens and blues and the Dark World having a cold, sterile white, blue and gray quality to it. The frame around the gameplay window also changes from ornate curtains to alien gargoyles framing a monitor.The second Dark Seed was made without Mike Dawson’s involvement, but the character in the game is still based on him. H.R. Giger’s artwork still features prominently, but the game’s far more digitized this time around, using a blend of photography and pre-rendered objects. Chris Gilbert plays Mike this time, and he sounds ten years younger despite the fact that this game’s a sequel. Tone is also a problem. Crowley, Texas is not nearly as good a setting as the mansion from the first game, and the motivation of catching a Dark World shapeshifter is a lot less pressing than getting an evil alien embryo out of your head.The game’s music is absolutely awful and the normal world just feels… off. I’ve seen people compare it to David Lynch works like Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks and I think that comparison is appropriate since the intent of the scenes seems to be to skewer small town culture. Once you get into the Dark World, though, the game goes a bit bonkers, and by the end of the game, the body count’s surprisingly high and the ending has a twist that you’ll either love or hate, but which made it impossible to make a third game with Mike Dawson as the lead.That’s just as well, because Cyberdreams published another game the same year based on the Harlan Ellison short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” and the game is notable for having Ellison’s involvement. It was a commercial flop that has since become a cult classic, though I’ll warn you it’s very much a love it or hate it kind of game.I’m going to presume listeners probably don’t know much about Harlan Ellison, but he was a well-respected and award-winning science fiction writer primarily known for television and magazine stories. He was always a polarizing figure in his lifetime, outspoken about his conviction that writers deserve to be paid and credited for their work, obsessive about creative control and also quite happy to torch collaborators, producers and Hollywood studios when he felt his work was being tampered with.He had a long feud with Gene Roddenberry over the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which he originally wrote. He hated Roddenberry’s rewrite and made such a stink that he published several of the teleplays in a 1995 book that included a lot of self-important essays.He also sued a lot of people, quite famously including James Cameron, alleging that The Teminator’s core concept was stolen from one of Ellison’s old Outer Limits episodes called “Soldier.” The connection was tenuous at best and it’s debatable Ellison’s idea about a time-traveling soldier was even that original, but he got his settlement from Orion Pictures all the same.Ellison was also an outspoken critic of the video games, which he said were “time wasters.”So you can imagine what a mess Cyberdreams had on its hand trying to market their ambitious adventure game, which has a gripping and memorable title, but which is based on an absolutely bonkers story about a supercomputer named AM that kills off the global population except for five people – a woman and four men – and then extends their lives and changes their bodies so it can torture them indefinitely.In the short story, the humans eventually escape to go and find some canned food and wind up killing each other. But one survives, and AM turns him into a gelatinous blob who no longer has a mouth or any ability to end his own life – hence the title.In the game, this is one of the endings, but the story is changed to AM coming up with a new way to torture everyone by playing a game in which they each enter a sort of psychodrama and have to find a way to defeat AM. The game sort of follows the same template of the later Persona RPGs where each character has to overcome a flaw and find a way to live with their past, but two of AM’s three supercomputers that make up its electronic brain have sympathy on the humans and attempt to help them.The game is incredibly messed up and features a number of endings, including an actually happy one as well as a lot of unhappy ones where your chosen character in the final chapter becomes a blob. Curiously, Ellison didn’t seem to understand that the game was winnable and bragged both before and after release that the only way to win was not to play – perhaps a promise Cyberdreams had made during production but chickened out on in the final build. But Ellison still looms large over the game – he voices AM and he clearly really loved having the chance to play his most psychopathic character, because he relishes reading those lines in the game.I do want to mention that there are some very controversial aspects of the game, not the least of which is the trauma and rape of the lone female character, Ellen. But there’s also a Nazi scientist named Nimdok who AM relates to the most, but who resulted in the game being censored in France and Germany, making the game almost impossible to win since you need Nimdok – or at least the knowledge he has - to be able to get the actual good ending without consulting a walkthrough or guessing at a puzzle. That might account for why Ellison was confused about the game actually having one.As a point and click adventure, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is a fascinating game well worth playing today. It’s unique in how it plays, it has a strong story that will keep you captivated and it’s fairly short and not too difficult. Just be aware that it’s not for everyone, and if you’re easily triggered by trauma, this game’s going to be an intense suffering simulator you’d best avoid.There’s one more series I want to cover before we close out this week, and it’s The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, a surprisingly well-crafted adventure game series from Mythos Software and Electronic Arts that uses a point and click style to set Holmes and Watson out and about exploring London and investigating cases. The first game 1992’s The Case of the Serrated Scalpel, puts you on the trail of either Jack the Ripper or, as Holmes suspects, a clever copycat who has left behind the clue of a scalpel with a serrated blade.The game is portrayed in an illustrated style with a verb and dialogue panel on the bottom third of the screen and the action shown in the top two thirds. Much of the interaction involves examining things and letting Holmes and Watson talk to one another, and there are of course some inventory puzzles and other basic deductions to be made.This is largely a traditional point and click adventure game with a lot of text to read and dialogue trees to exhaust as you search for clues and try to trap people with deductive logic so they’ll provide needed information. The story isn’t based on one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales and thus feels a bit twisty turny and contrived at times, but it’s still a decent take on the source material.There’s also a 1996 sequel called The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Rose Tattoo which ditches the illustrated look and feel of the original game for digitized characters and tries to recreate Victorian London with period costumes and scenes. I actually prefer the look and feel of the 1992 game to this one, but I can’t deny that it’s an impressive sequel that succeeds in using filmed digitized characters on sets far better than Sierra’s experiments with Phantasmagoria did the year before. The game world feels substantial and, when you’re out on the streets, even alive. The detailed map of Victorian-era London is also a lot of fun, particularly if you know the city and can spot locations that correspond to today.Both games are also right up there with ICOM Simulations’ full motion video series Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, which we’ll discuss next week.We’ve covered so much ground in our adventure gaming series that I know you’re thinking, “Sean, there is no way there could possibly be more 1990s point and click adventure games we need to discuss. You’ve covered them all!”If only that were true! I have here in front of me a list of a whole bunch of games I didn’t even get a chance to cover, and if you take a look at the written version of my script on greatestgames.substack.com, you can find all of these games along with links to their entry on MobyGames.And by the way, let me clarify: have I played all these games through? Heck no! At most I’ve played enough to get an impression of what they have to offer, and in a few cases, I’ve just watched video playthroughs or read about them. But here’s the thing. Many of these games came from smaller publishers or from outside the US and UK, and as a result, they didn’t get as strong of coverage and don’t have the same sorts of fanbases as more popular games. That doesn’t mean they’re bad! It just means that they’re obscure and that one of them might become your new favorite game if you play it and like it.So, once you exhaust all of the other games we’ve discussed, give some of these a shot!And with that, we’ve reached the end of our exploration of point and click adventure games from the 1990s! In our next episode, we’re going to finally cover the multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Under a Killing Moon, Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, The Last Express, Black Dahlia and The Neverhood. And of course we have an obligation to accept Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.And guess what? We haven’t really covered console and handheld adventure games, so we’re going to talk about those too. Count on an episode devoted to those!Then we’ll finally close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream.We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore! THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I’m recommending Mini Motorways, a game by Dinosaur Polo Club that came out in 2019 on iOS devices as part of Apple Arcade before getting a port to Windows in 2021 and the Switch in 2022. It’s the follow-up to their earlier minimalist train game Mini Metro, and while it’s not quite as simple as drawing lines on a route map, it’s a little more strategic because you have a few tricks up your sleeve to route traffic that weren’t there in the earlier title.The game is presented in a minimalist SimCity sort of format where you need to connect homes of a certain color to destinations of the same color using roads, of which you have a limited number of tiles you can use. As the weeks advance, you earn tools like stoplights, roundabouts, tunnels, bridges and highways that can help you deal with traffic jams and route traffic more effectively. The game goes until you have a destination that’s not receiving enough traffic, and then it ends, allowing you to start over and try again.I enjoy this game because it’s simple and fun and doesn’t take much of my time, and yet has enough layers of complexity to make loading up a new map a challenging and interesting experience for a coffee break or a few moments of Zen. For $10, it’s a good deal, and even better, it’s often on sale and offered in a bundle with the equally great Mini Metro. Give it a try – it’s really wonderful!https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127500/Mini_Motorways/In 1990, we’ve gotEarthrise (1990)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2151/earthrise/The Hugo Trilogy (1990-1992)https://www.mobygames.com/game/71030/the-hugo-trilogy/Murders in Space (1990)https://www.mobygames.com/game/4803/murders-in-space/ In 1991,The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian (1991)https://www.mobygames.com/game/5024/the-adventures-of-maddog-williams-in-the-dungeons-of-duridian/Spaceship Warlock (1991)https://www.mobygames.com/game/22016/spaceship-warlock/Suspicious Cargo (1991)https://www.mobygames.com/game/54818/suspicious-cargo/ In 1992, we’ve gotCoktel Vision’s Bargon Attack (1992)https://www.mobygames.com/game/13178/bargon-attack/Eternam (1992)https://www.mobygames.com/game/1368/eternam/Hook (1992)https://www.mobygames.com/game/20230/hook/Rome: Pathway to Power (1992)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2232/rome-pathway-to-power/ 1993,Black Sect (1993)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2571/black-sect/Blue Force (1993)https://www.mobygames.com/game/1478/blue-force/  1994,Igor: Objective Uikokahonia (1994)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2170/igor-objective-uikokahonia/Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb (1994)https://www.mobygames.com/game/4008/inherit-the-earth-quest-for-the-orb/  1995,Bureau 13 (1995)https://www.mobygames.com/game/6601/bureau-13/Chewy: Esc from F5 (1995)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2339/chewy-esc-from-f5/Dračí Historie (English: Dragon History) (1995)https://www.mobygames.com/game/44689/draci-historie/Flight of the Amazon Queen (1995)https://www.mobygames.com/game/352/flight-of-the-amazon-queen/Teen Agent (1995)https://www.mobygames.com/game/6423/teen-agent/ 1996,Housemarque - Alien Incident (1996)https://www.mobygames.com/game/1924/alien-incident/Down in the Dumps (1996)https://www.mobygames.com/game/652/down-in-the-dumps/Fable (1996)https://www.mobygames.com/game/1893/fable/Imperium Romanum (1996)https://www.mobygames.com/game/6300/imperium-romanum/ 1997,Ark of Time (1997)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2156/ark-of-time/Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths (1997)https://www.mobygames.com/game/7659/tony-tough-and-the-night-of-roasted-moths/U.F.O.s (1997)https://www.mobygames.com/game/4556/ufos/VooDoo Kid (1997)https://www.mobygames.com/game/16006/voodoo-kid/ And in 1998,Galador - The Prince and the Coward (1998)https://www.mobygames.com/game/30716/galador-the-prince-and-the-coward/Team17 - Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy (1998)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2564/nightlong-union-city-conspiracy/Hopkins FBI (1998)https://www.mobygames.com/game/3994/hopkins-fbi/ As for 1999? There really weren’t any notable point and click adventures from that year we haven’t already covered except for Cookie’s Bustle, a peculiar Japanese point and click adventure that’s most famous for being targeted by a copyright troll from 2022 to 2023 to try to erase all evidence of its existence. It’s only playable in Japanese without a fan patch and it’s quite dark and challenging despite its cutesy exterior, so while it’s a fun curiosity, it’s not an easy game to pick up and play. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, we’re going to talk about 1990s point and click adventure games made yet another group of like Westwood Studios, Cryo, Access Software, Cyberdreams, Infogrames, Revolution Software, Viacom and more! Join us on this expedition through games you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 9: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 7Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:Shelley Day’s court case: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/waw/press/2005/dec/day.htmlThe KGB File: http://thekgbfile.50webs.com/index.htmlRick Gush on Kyrandia: https://web.archive.org/web/20021122190852/http://www.adventuregamers.com:80/display.php?id=110https://muds.fandom.com/wiki/Kyrandiahttps://www.well-played.com.au/broken-sword-parzivals-stone-has-been-delayed/Harvester on GameGrumps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_lcJD7-gOohttps://kotaku.com/how-harlan-ellison-s-most-famous-short-story-became-an-1827327887https://www.pcgamer.com/saturday-crapshoot-i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream/-------------------------------------------------EPISODE 9Coming up in this episode –We’re going to talk about all sorts of point and click adventure games from the 1990s that weren’t published by Sierra, including The Legend of Kyrandia, Beneath a Steel Sky, Dark Seed, Call of Cthulhu, Dune, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, Beavis and Butthead and of course, Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream!I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! One name you haven’t heard much about since we left LucasArts a few episodes ago is Ron Gilbert, and you might wonder what he was up to after leaving LucasArts following Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. And the answer is, “making dozens of games with his colleague Shelley Day,” another established game developer who’d worked at LucasArts. Together, they’d found Humongous Entertainment and make games about characters like Putt-Putt, Fatty Bear, Freddi Fish and Pajama Sam, with many of these point and click adventures utilizing the SCUMM engine.But because these games are for little kids, I don’t feel a lot of need to go into detail about them. Suffice it to say Ron Gilbert did eventually return to modern adventure games and we’ll cover him in later episodes.And as for Shelley Day… well, that’s a sad story, and you look her up in the show notes if you want to see why she and Gilbert parted ways.But I bring up Ron Gilbert because he’s one of the few adventure game creators who really stayed active in the 1990s working on point and click adventure games and not trying to evolve things into 3D or to chase after trends like pre-rendered artwork or controller-friendly mechanics. He’s also one of the people who most influenced the style of point and click adventure games by not only articulating a philosophy he largely followed, but also by showing people how it could be done with the first two Monkey Island games.And as we’ve already discussed with games like Simon the Sorcerer and Discworld, that Monkey Island style was pretty prevalent throughout the 1990s, especially with Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle and some of the less aggressive Sierra games. But not everyone was copying that style, and one developer that certainly tried to do its own thing was Cryo Interactive, a French developer founded by several folks from ERE Informatique. While ERE was bombastic and included the intergalactic logo for Exxos in its branding, Cryo adopted the face of a female android in a sleep pod, first seen in the French-only puzzle game Extase, based on a minigame called “Brain Bowler” in ERE’s truly odd 1989 outer space Olympiad, Purple Saturn Day.Cryo’s next project was an adventure game based on Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel, Dune, in 1992, but which also drew heavy visual inspiration from the 1984 David Lynch feature film adaptation, even using the film’s logo and a production still of Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides in a stillsuit on the cover of several editions of the North American release. According to the credit, MacLachlan’s appearance was licensed for the game, probably to help enhance its marketability.Within the game, some characters resemble the film’s actors. Feyd-Rautha Harkonen still closely resembles Sting, for example, and Lady Jessica looks a lot like Francesca Annis. Virgina Maden’s Princess Irulan also shows up in footage from the film to narrate the story in the Sega CD version. Other characters, however, like Thufir Hawat, Baron Harkonen and Duncan Idaho, look so different they’re not remotely recognizable.Dune is a fascinating point and click adventure because it takes place from the first person perspective as you control Paul Atreides visiting various sites on the planet of Arrakis, but it also transforms into a strategy game about midway through once the Harkonens kill Duke Leto and you have to work to evict them from strongholds.Throughout the game, the Fremen recognize you as Muad’Dib and pledge their loyalty to you as you visit their sietches, and a lot of the political and social dynamics of the book and film are relaxed to make the adventure simpler and more focused. But you still get to fly around in ornithopters, ride sandworms and raise armies… as well as fall in love with Chani, whose fate is a little happier in this telling than the source material where she’s only permitted to be Paul’s concubine when he seizes the Imperial throne.Cryo’s work on the game, however, was famously troubled due to a number of issues going on behind the scenes, and as they were working on their Dune game, an American developer called Westwood Studios was building one of its own, a real-time strategy base-building and resource-gathering game that would come out the same year as Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty. It’s one of my favorite games of all time, by the way, and the direct inspiration for Blizzard’s Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Westwood’s own Command & Conquer series. But we’ll talk about those games another time.As for Westwood, we’ll come back to them in a few minutes, because they, too, were building adventure games in the 1990s.But I want to touch on a few other games Cryo released in the 1990s that were also adventure games, including their 1992 adventure KGB, which has a reputation for being one of the most difficult graphical adventure games ever made, and yet which is still well-regarded as being a legitimately good game. And by the way, there is a 1993 CD-ROM re-release called Conspiracy that adds in some clips where Donald Sutherland plays the main character’s deceased father, but these scenes really just provide some vague advice and don’t add much to the game.The premise of KGB is that the Soviet Union is days away from collapsing in 1991 and you are an officer named Captain Maksim Mikhailovich Rukov, or either Maks or Rukov for short, who’s joined the KGB’s Department P and who has to investigate some problems within the KGB that eventually lead to an assassination plot to murder Mikhal Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the USSR.I’m not sure exactly how historically accurate the game actually is, but in real life, there was a failed coup attempt in August of 1991 that involved the KGB and the State Committee on the State of Emergency, more popularly known as the “Gang of Eight,” who opposed Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost, which meant restructuring and transparency.KGB is all about spycraft and catching some of the slipperiest people you’ll ever see in an adventure game through a variety of methods, such as recording conversations and making use of a snuff film as leverage.The KGB conspirators are very hard to pin down, and wouldn’t you know it, they also have a corrupt CIA ally in the mix as well as a man who’s been surgically altered to look like Gorbachev and who’s been brainwashed so he can go on TV and resign the presidency in place of the actual Gorbachev, who gets kidnapped. Your main ally is your Uncle Vanya, an older man in a wheelchair who’s been working undercover at the KGB and who pulled strings to get you on the job. He also has a friend named Major Vovlov who serves as your bad-tempered boss and the game’s ultimate antagonist.Because the game is so challenging, I recommend consulting a website I’ve linked in the show notes called The KGB File to help you through it. KGB is definitely a game made for adults who want an engaging and sophisticated plot; it doesn’t hold your hand and it has some seriously mature themes it explores along with a lot of Russian names to keep track of from a surprisingly large cast of characters. There are drugs and prostitutes and murders and multiple layers of bureaucracy to keep track of. If you enjoy the intrigue aspects of Metal Gear Solid games, you might find KGB to be a really engaging experience.Another Cryo’s adventure game is from 1995: Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure, which is also for mature audiences and might seem more accessible, but it’s a polarizing game for multiple reasons. It’s based on the Dark Horse comic book series from the 1990s, primarily the graphic novel Aliens: Labyrinth, to which this game is actually an adaptation but also a sort of sequel.In the graphic novel Aliens: Labyrinth, the plot revolves around a scientist and former Colonial Marine named Tony Crespi who’s sent to a research space station to secretly monitor Colonel Doctor Paul Church, who’s experimenting on Alien Xenomorphs by putting them in a dark, labyrinth-like maze and learning about how they hunt and make decisions. But it all sort of goes Jurassic Park and, predictably, tragedy occurs.The game takes place  at a time that would simply be defined as “later” and isn’t officially part of the Dark Horse canon despite drawing liberally from it. You play as Lt. Col. Hericksen, not-so-subtly named for the actor Lance Henriksen who played Bishop in the Aliens film. The gameplay is interesting because it’s sort of a point and click adventure due to Hericksen’s appearance in many scenes, but it also looks and plays like a 3D Myst-style game at times.Even so, this one is mostly a point and click adventure with dialogue trees, inventory puzzles and illustrated characters who pop up in visual novel-style conversations. But there are also some RPG elements and turn-based strategy sequences where you pilot an exosuit and battle Xenomorphs and facehuggers and, towards the end, Colonial Marines.It’s a surprisingly pretty and interesting game, though the illustrated characters and the pre-rendered scenes do clash a little bit. The voice acting is also pretty bad and clashes with the otherwise dark atmosphere of the game. But probably the biggest complaint about Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure is that it’s so easy to make mistakes and undo all your hard work, and it doesn’t help that the game is also quite buggy. My advice is to play with a walkthrough, because the game isn’t so much challenging as it is limited by a bad interface, time constraints and poor directions.But if you like your games dark and gritty and set in the future, you might want to check out what Westwood Studios had on tap in 1990 with a different adventure also based on a book.Infocom’s final years as an Activision adventure game imprint gave rise to a few graphical adventure games and RPGs, many of which were created by Brett W. Sperry and Louis Castle’s Las Vegas-based game studio, Westwood Associates, soon after renamed Westwood Studios. One of Westwood’s earliest games was a 1990 DOS point and click adventure and RPG hybrid called Circuit’s Edge, based on the novel When Gravity Falls by George Alec Effinger. While the game has a cyberpunk feel to it, you’ve never played a setting quite like this because the premise of the story is that the Islamic Arabic culture has become the principal world power and you play as an investigator named Marid Audran who lives in the city of the Budayeen and gets caught in a web of intrigue involving a client he’s framed for murdering and a crime lord benefactor who hires him to get to the bottom of what really happened.Now, I want to specify that Circuit’s Edge is more a role-playing game with an involved story than a true adventure game. The interface shows stats on the side, a small graphical window with character portraits beside it and a big text box underneath, and moving through the Budayeen is similar to the first person navigation around the town of Skara Brae in The Bard’s Tale. But the game also follows a lot of the classic adventure game conventions of having you collect inventory, solve puzzles and talk to NPCs fairly liberally. There are also a lot of very adult themes in the game, including quite a bit of prostitution and even nudity. It’s interesting and worth checking out, if for no other reason than it tells a story that is quite different from most other games of the era.Westwood’s next adventure series is one of the ones it’s best-known for, and the proper name of the series is Fables & Fiends, though this was retooled later to reflect the first game’s subtitle, The Legend of Kyrandia. This initial chapter debuted in 1992 and features a character named Brandon, an orphaned young man who has to battle the murderous jester Malcolm, who’s escaped his magical confinement and is using the magical Kyragem to sow mischief around the land, including turning Brandon’s grandfather, the powerful wizard Kallak, into stone. In many ways, the game feels like a King’s Quest-style adventure, though apparently, at least according to the game’s writer and the designer of the sequels, Rick “Coco” Gush, Westwood licensed it from an earlier MUD game called Kyrandia by Richard Skurnick and Scott Brinker, though the inspiration appears to be superficial at best.The Legend of Kyrandia is a true point and click adventure game in the style of a Sierra or LucasArts adventure with all the elements you’d expect – gorgeous artwork, an inventory scroll at the bottom of the screen and a context-sensitive cursor that allows you to interact with the game world depicted in the top two thirds of the screen. The music by Westwood’s house musician Frank Klepacki is wonderful, and there was even a CD-ROM talkie version released alongside the disk-based version with voice acting, though it’s kind of cringey and nowhere near as good as what Westwood would start to be known for once they started shipping games like Command & Conquer.The story is basically what you’d expect – as Brandon, you are the chosen one who has to prove his mettle as a hero, discover your claim to the throne and overcome the mischievous machinations of Malcolm, who shows up occasionally to bother you, but who never comes across as particularly menacing. You also befriend a young alchemist named Zanthia who teaches you how to make potions. That might seem like an unimportant detail, but as you’ll see in a moment, she’s not a trivial character.The Legend of Kyrandia is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s really more in the realm of “lighthearted” than comedic. The jokes are mostly just slapstick or Brandon grumbling about things, and Malcolm has to be one of the least funny jesters in the history of gaming, and also one of the least capable. Suffice it to say he’s the sort of villain who tells you not to go into the room you need to go into to defeat him, and then also is the sort who’s easily defeated by a trick a child would see through. He’s also kind of annoying, a point that’s not lost on Zanthia when she returns in the second game as its protagonist.And the second game is a little confusing to identify at first because it was originally published in 1993 as Fables & Fiends: The Hand of Fate with a box that didn’t match the first game’s storybook aesthetic and instead depicts a purple hand inset inside an even larger hand and which doesn’t really say “The Legend of Kyrandia - Book 2” anywhere. The back cover’s text is hard to read due to a confusing layout and since Malcolm and Brandon are nowhere to be seen, it’s hard to connect this game to its predecessor. Even worse, the title screen for the game itself also just says “The Hand of Fate.”But if you play the game, especially if you’re playing the CD-ROM talkie edition, it’s pretty clear you’re playing a sequel as Brandon’s voice kicks off a narration and shows some familiar scenes and characters as Brandon explains that the world is disappearing, piece by piece, and that Zanthia has been selected to retrieve a stone from the center of the world.  In fact, later versions of the game even received new box art more in line with the first game and more clearly calling this game “Fables & Fiends – The Legend of Kyrandia Book Two” with no mention of the Hand of Fate, but instead a painted picture of Zanthia traveling through the skies on her quest.And make no mistake – marketing issues aside, The Hand of Fate is a superior game to the original in every way. It’s more imaginative, it’s funnier, it has better puzzles and Zanthia is just a far more charismatic character than Brandon, with a dry wit and a recast voice actress who adds so much more to the character in the talkie version. And actually, the voice acting in this game is better all the way around, much more in line with the best of Sierra and LucasArts. Frank Klepacki’s score even ups the ante this time with a little more variety and some funk as well as some island-style music. It’s pretty clear the Westwood team took some inspiration from The Secret of Monkey Island instead of King’s Quest this time around, right down to featuring a segment with pirates, but it results in such a better game it was honestly a good move.Zanthia’s travels are of course not straightforward, and she not only attempts to visit the center of the world, but also wanders around swamps, castles, coves, lava pits, the high reaches of the world and even across a rainbow bridge into the surreal realm of the Wheels of Fate. One of the most-lauded aspects of the game is that she approaches her challenges with a certain confidence and world-weariness that’s unusual for adventure games of the era. She even changes her outfits to suit the places that she goes.But if you ask me, the best aspect of the game is that there’s no Brandon and no Malcolm. And unfortunately, the game’s standalone story ends with a cliffhanger where Malcolm is freed, setting up a sequel for him to make his return.The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three: Malcolm’s Revenge came out in 1994 and while it is very clearly part of the series from the box art and the introductory cinematic, it also looks and plays a bit differently from the other two games. The hand-drawn aesthetic is replaced by largely pre-rendered backgrounds, the inventory bar that lines the bottom of the screen in the previous two games is gone, popping up only when needed, and the gameplay is occasionally interrupted by pre-rendered cutscenes. The credits sequence also has full-motion video sequence featuring the development team at Westwood, with Malcolm causing havoc around the office. You can even see Joe Kucan, who famously played Kane in the Command & Conquer games, make an appearance as the game’s vocal recording director.And speaking of the acting, Malcolm, thankfully, has been recast with a nastier, more villainous voice for this sequel, and since you play as him this time around, it’s good to see the character be less of a cartoon clown and more of an actual bad guy. That is, of course, assuming you keep him in that persona – this game actually allows you to choose if you want to lie to other characters or be nasty, measuring Malcolm’s behavior with a meter that appears next to the inventory bar.As adventure games go, Malcom’s Revenge isn’t much of a revenge tale; rather, it’s one of the most surreal, bonkers ones you’ll ever play, with much of the game devoted to realms with talking animals and obnoxious humans who tend to get under Malcolm’s skin. As you might expect, he becomes an unlikely hero and has to kick a group of pirates out of Kyrandia to restore things to the way they used to be. In the end, all he really wants to do is take a nap, but he’s unfortunately blamed for pretty much everything that goes wrong in Kyrandia, which means he also has to clear his name before the game is over.While Malcom’s Revenge is often thought of as a step down from The Hand of Fate in terms of its adventure game credentials, it’s still a decent adventure game with an absolutely killer soundtrack that’s very much in line with the sort of funky hip-hop industrial tunes you’d hear in Command & Conquer. The strong production values help make the game fun, and thankfully, the humor is a lot sharper than Malcolm’s first outing.Westwood worked on one more point and click adventure game in the 1990s, and while it was a bit of a slow burner in terms of sales, it did make a positive impression and has since become a true classic. The name of that game? Blade Runner, based on the 1982 feature film of the same name and released in 1997 with an eye for recreating many of the movie’s strongest visuals while telling a parallel story to Rick Deckard’s adventures with the escaped Nexus-6 replicant units led by Roy Batty.The game focuses on a rookie Blade Runner named Ray McCoy who winds up on the trail of a warrior poet replicant named Clovis who is leading a group of rogue replicants who are all suspects in a crime involving murdering animals – a heinous crime in a future were real animals are exceedingly rare. McCoy has to hunt down all of Clovis’s replicants, but the way the game is structured, who those replicants actually are is randomized, and there are multiple endings available, some of which include McCoy himself being a replicant.One of the most notable things about Blade Runner is how well it nails the aesthetic of the film. The team at Westwood not only recreated some of the locations, camera transitions and lighting effects, but also extended the world out with new places that look as if they came from scenes we just didn’t get to see in the film. Many of the film’s characters make an appearance and are voiced by the original actors, and the new characters are all voiced by established screen actors, some of whom, like Jeff Garlin and Lisa Edelstein, went on to became quite famous.The graphics were also quite interesting for the time, fusing pre-rendered footage and a sort of voxel-based rendering of the characters that was able to be done in software without a 3D accelerator card. In the 1990s, this was crucial since it meant delivering graphics that looked 3D without actually having to be 3D. While the game looks movie-accurate in many places, everything was created specifically for the game and nothing was used from the film footage. Since the target resolution was lower than we’d use today, the game does have a sort of grainy look and feel to it that modern ports have not been able to fix since the original source code was lost, but it’s still a darned impressive-looking game that’s still one of the best and most authentic cyberpunk stories out there.I would love to talk more about Blade Runner, because I’m a huge fan of the original novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Ridley Scott film and the game itself. It was one of the first games I reviewed as a pro game reviewer back in the 1990s and definitely one of my favorites I ever got to write about. But what I’ll ask you to do instead is just go out and get yourself a copy and play it, because it’s one of the best adventure games of the late 1990s and short and straightforward enough that you can play it multiple times and see its many variations.And while I don’t think you’ll need a walkthrough, I will say that there are some pretty good guides that explain how the innerworkings of the game function, and if you want to see the thirteen different endings the game has, you’d be wise to use them!In the 1990s, Ray McCoy was far from the only detective in a trenchcoat running around a post-apocalyptic 21st century California, and some of his stiffest competition came from a character introduced by Access Software in 1989 in an adventure game called Mean Streets. I covered this game way back in Episode 4 of the podcast when we talked about 80s adventure games, and listeners may recall that this is the first game featuring Tex Murphy, a character who’d come to be played by Chris Jones, who posed for the digitized pictures of Tex in this game. The game was originally supposed to be a follow-up to Access Software’s 3D flight game Echelon, which is why it included a 3D engine for flying Tex’s car.The 1991 sequel, Martian Memorandum, ditched the 3D in favor of a more conventional adventure game design with some digitized movies and sounds, and it is an interesting adventure in its own right, largely focusing the gameplay built around dialogue and interrogations, with a handful of inventory puzzles to help grease the conservational wheels.Unfortunately for Martian Memorandum, it’s also sort of the black sheep of the series today because the next few games not only brought  back the 3D gameplay by allowing Tex to walk around and explore the game world first person style, but also added in significantly more digital footage to make the games feel more like interactive movies. We’re going to talk about all of these games – Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Detective, the Mean Streets remake Tex Murphy: Overseer and even the more recent 2014 revival Tesla Effect – in our next episode as we cover 3D and FMV games.But Access Software made some other adventure games in the 1990s, and both of them are quite a bit more obscure than the Tex Murphy games. The first of these is 1990’s Countdown, a point and click adventure that uses digitized characters, portraits and backgrounds to tell a story about an amnesiac CIA agent who wakes up in a mental hospital in Turkey and has to escape so he can foil a terrorist plot. While I know that this sounds like pretty well-trod territory, Countdown is one of the better games using the old Bourne Identity setup, and one of the most interesting things about it is that the game includes a dialogue system where you can try different approaches as you talk with other characters and sometimes get really interesting outcomes, though one of the game’s biggest faults is how you can wind up in unwinnable situations and find yourself having to replay earlier sections. It’s definitely a game where you need to save often.The first half of Countdown is definitely the stronger portion as you find a way to escape your room in the mental hospital and gear your bearings. One of the nicer aspects of the game is that you only enter rooms where you can actually do something and otherwise navigate using a top-down map. This limits the number of red herrings you have to deal with in screens or locations that are really just there to string important areas together, and once you finally are able to travel around the Mediterranean in the second half of the game, it feels like the game world really opens up, though you have to be careful you don’t waste precious time going places too far out of the way. The game could also give you some more hints about what you have to do, however – a lot of essential items are hidden and you need to get used to using the move command on just about everything you see.Beyond the frustrations around Countdown’s difficulty, which are easily solved today with walkthroughs and longplay videos, there are some goofy things that make it endearing. For example, you run into a fellow patient who’s sitting nude in an interrogation room and making goofy faces while you talk to him. Many of the other characters don’t look so much like actors as corporate drones Access Software grabbed from a nearby office and asked to make some funny faces. Your main character, who’s named the oh-so-creative name of Mason Powers ugh looks like an Eddie Bauer model in a button-up shirt and khakis.There’s also a bad guy named Scorpio and another character named McBain, which is quite funny if you enjoy The Simpsons but which we can’t really fault the developers for since the show hadn’t introduced those characters yet. Call that a happy coincidence.I really recommend Countdown and hope more people will check it out – it’s way better than Sierra’s 1990 thriller adventure Codename: ICEMAN and while it’s a bit dated and has a pretty anticlimactic ending, there’s a lot of fun to be had if you bother to play through it.The 1992 point and click adventure game Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a little harder to recommend because it has aged so badly. It’s very easy to confuse this game with Sierra Discovery’s Lost in the Rainforest, but it’s actually quite a different game, much more in the style of Indiana Jones or the 1984 film Romancing the Stone and featuring some absolutely dated tropes from old movie serials and the 1958 film Wild Women of Wongo, a movie that designer Chris Jones enjoyed so much that he adapted ideas from it. I’m assuming he did so because the movie’s in the “so bad it’s good” camp, but the problem is that the game itself doesn’t feel like it’s in on the joke.Amazon is broken up into fourteen short chapters that play sort of like a movie serial. You’re Jason Roberts, a researcher in search of your brother Allen, who disappears in the Amazon during an expedition due to what seems to be foul play. On his journey, Jason meets an attractive blond white woman named Maya who seems to hate men but of course turns out to be a scout for a tribe of literal Amazons who live in the Amazon, complete with low-cut outfits and grass skirts or swimsuit bottoms. Oh, and did I mention the actual natives are cannibals who are wowed by little tricks you do with your inventory items and apparently believe white-skinned people are gods?Sensitivity to other cultures is pretty lacking here, as is a sense of direction – background NPCs will have elaborate backstories, narration will take over when the game doesn’t want to depict the next logical action, and the game rarely tells you what you actually need to do in order to advance the plot. There are also moments where the story will end one chapter of the serial and then recap what just happened. It sort of feels like this is all by design in some sort of parody of other adventure games, but again, it’s not executed well enough that the designers tip their hand to show you it was on purpose.One of the weirder things about the game is the audio narration, which sounds like it’s being delivered by an infomercial announcer reading a script rather than an actor attempting to set the mood. Many of the other lines in the game that get an audio reading also tend to be of the overly flat or scenery-chewing variety, as if the actors were just the folks Access Software could round up from their social circles. The audio is also noticeably highly compressed, but you can’t be too picky about that because the game was only released on floppy disk.Another odd aspect of the game is the graphics are about half digitized and half hand-drawn. The main character, Jason, has a digital portrait, but his walk-around avatar is noticeably illustrated. Many of the other characters he encounters are digitized from real actors, but some, especially the native Amazon tribe later in the game, look like they came from a storybook. It’s really jarring visually, and it feels like Access Software’s ambition may have exceeded their grasp, especially since this game uses a Super VGA display mode.But by far the weirdest thing is that the game features a number of death scenes preceded by glowing red letters that say “SHOCK WARNING” before showing your often not-so-gruesome demise. There’s also a weird note in the credits that no insects were harmed in the making of the game, which is weird because a giant ant that murders Jason in one of the death scenes. Again, you have to imagine this was all part of an attempt to spoof the source material and amuse the audience, not to play any of this seriously.I’m not saying Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a bad game by any means – it’s reasonably engaging and has some good moments. But it’s definitely not Access Software’s best, and when we talk about Tex Murphy in our next episode, we’ll see how far they were able to evolve adventure gaming with a far better setting and design.Another adventure game I can only recommend as a curiosity comes from Revolution Software, and that’s not because it’s a bad game so much as their first attempt at a genre they’d go on to master later on. This game came out in 1992 originally for the Amiga and it’s called Lure of the Temptress. I don’t even really want to spend a lot of time describing it because it’s honestly a pretty dull game where even the promise of a sexy villainess is barely realized since she has so little presence in the game. You mostly see humans who are under the oppression of pig-faced monsters called Skorl, and even an encounter with a dragon mid-game is anticlimactic. If you want to try Lure of the Temptress, it’s freeware now and easy to try out. But you’d be better off playing Revolution’s next game, which is also freeware, but much more interesting: the 1994 cyberpunkish point and click adventure Beneath a Steel Sky, a game that was mostly popular in Europe in the 1990s but which has since become an international cult classic that even got a sequel in 2019.The premise of Beneath a Steel Sky is that you are a survivor of a helicopter crash in the Australian Outback who was raised by Aboriginees who live there. You’re given the name “Robert Foster” because the tribe spots a can of Foster’s Lager in the wreckage. As you grow up, you build a companion robot named Joey who can be upgraded into other robots during the game. And this is really useful, because you’re kidnapped and taken to a place called Union City, where you have to escape the minions of LINC, a powerful computer mainframe that runs the city.By the way, most of this backstory is relayed through comic book artwork drawn by Dave Gibbons, the co-creator and artist of Watchmen. It’s really neat.As the game proceeds, you have to work your way through the city and learn more about who you really are and how you’re connected to LINC. I won’t spoil the story, because it’s actually interesting, but it has heavy overtones of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with Foster playing the role of the Savage, but also inverting things so he’s the savior of a dystopian society instead of the self-flagellating misfit of a misguided utopia.Beneath a Steel Sky is also notable for having a fairly interesting tone with lots of humor interspersed within the game’s more serious science fiction premise. The writing is good and the voice acting helps to bring the characters to life, though I find Robert a Joey a bit grating since Robert sounds like a generic hero and Joey’s voice sound like’s it’s filtered through a cheap electric fan.Revolution’s defining moment, however, is their next game, 1996’s Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, which was released in North America under the rather stupid name Circle of Blood. The game opens with an amazing and lavishly animated introduction in Paris where the main character, the American tourist George Stobbart, is sitting outside his favorite café when a sinister-looking clown drops off an accordion loaded with explosives and blows the place to smithereens, killing a mysterious old man in the process. And as soon as the animation ends, the game puts you right into the scene, maintaining roughly the same level of animation and launching George into a lengthy adventure investigating why this strange bombing even happened, though he finds no help from the local French authorities, who seem more interested in covering up the case than solving the mystery.George soon meets a photojournalist named Nicole “Nico” Collard who becomes his ally in uncovering what’s really happening, and the two find themselves mixed up in an intriguing story that involves  the Knights Templar and a group of Neo-Templars who are trying to acquire the power of an ancient deity. Unlike most adventure games, which can be beaten in a few hours, Broken Sword is a really long game that can last a dozen or more hours in your first playthrough thanks to a lot of lengthy conversations that make the characters feel as if they exist to do more than just hand out puzzle clues and inventory items as well as some fun puzzles that never get in the way of the game but do require some thought here and there.The original version of Broken Sword is great, but if you play it today, chances are good you’ll be playing the Director’s Cut edition from 2009 that adds in additional Nico scenes where she’s actually playable and kicks off the game with her own introduction, which adds in a sinister mime who appears to be involved in the murder plot. This version also adds in portraits for the characters whenever they’re speaking and comic book panel-style action windows, especially in the new scenes. I’m personally not sure that Broken Sword needed all this extra content, as it was fine on its own, but it did help the game to reach a broader audience on the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS and mobile devices.The 1997 sequel, Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror, sends George on a quest to rescue Nico from a group of cultists who are trying to once again obtain the power of a God, this time from the Mayan mythology. Once again, this is a lavishly animated game with absolutely stunning graphics and lots and lots of fully voiced dialogue, but it’s also noticeably shorter than the original. I definitely recommend this one, but it feels like a made for TV sequel rather than a true continuation of the original game.From the third game onward, the Broken Sword series has changed things up with each entry, but each also has a much longer and more satisfying story than the second game. 2003’s Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is an action adventure game with some climbing and platforming mechanics and also gives you direct control over the characters rather than a point and click interface, which is good, because it was also released on the Xbox and, in Europe, on the PlayStation 2.The fourth game, Broken Sword: The Angel of Death, released in 2006, only made it out on Windows computers. It’s once again a 3D game, but this time, it uses a point and click interface in some parts and direct control in others. It’s somewhat polarizing because it initially sidelines Nico and instead introduces a blonde American woman named Anna Maria, but it’s a fine adventure on its own and worth playing if you’re invested in the series.The most recent game, Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse, debuted in 2013 as part one of a two-part series that concluded in 2014. This chapter returned to the more traditional point and click animated style of the original game and it’s easily the best-looking game in the series. The story and puzzles are a little less inspired, but if you’ve bothered to play the first four games, you’re of course going to want to see what happens to George and Nico in the fifth, particularly since this story’s mystery comes the closest to many of the themes explored in the first game, though this time it’s a Gnostic cult trying to destroy God with the help of Lucifer himself. The game also hints at the end that George and Nico might finally get together, which will hopefully be what will happen in the upcoming Broken Sword: Parzival’s Stone, which keeps getting delayed, but which series creator Charles Cecil continues to say is coming.Here’s to hoping we’ll see it soon.I know you’re probably worried that we’re getting close to the dregs now that we’ve talked about so many fantastic 1990s point and click adventure games already, but I promise that we still have a few left worth mentioning.And since Broken Sword is so lavishly animated, this seems like as great a time as any to bring up another game that evokes that feeling of watching a cartoon: the 1997 adventure game from Burst and Virgin Games called Toonstruck, starring the great character actor Christopher Lloyd as Drew Blanc, a human who gets pulled into the animated world he’s created. It felt like Christopher Lloyd was in everything around this time after Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Back to the Future movies really raised his stature, and this game has plenty of other famous 90s staples from comedies and animation, including Ben Stein, Tim Curry, Dan Castellaneta, Jeff Bennett, Corey Burton, Rob Paulsen, April Winchell, Tress MacNeille, Jim Cummings, Frank Welker, David Ogden Stiers and Dom DeLuise.Yes, this is the rare adventure game where the voice cast isn’t just imitating famous actors, but actually has a cast full of them!The premise of the game is that Drew Blanc is the creator the Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun Show, a show that pays his bills but which he hates. He really wants to build a show around his snarky purple cartoon character Flux Wildly, but his studio head isn’t interested in that and demands more cute bunny designs instead. Drew falls asleep and enters the world of his creations, where he finds out that an evil character named Count Nefarious is changing the world of Cutopia into a dark and twisted place, and Drew and Flux have to stop Nefarious and save the world from disaster.If I have a complaint about the story, it’s that Drew and Flux only briefly see the effects of Nefarious’s evil plan before they’re already taking on a quest to undo it. It makes the story feel poorly-paced and completely erases the stakes established in the first part of the introduction, and I don’t feel like Toonstruck ever fully recovers from that choice. If you’re here for story or puzzles, you’ll find Toonstruck to be quite a letdown. It’s better to just play it as a game that’s full of cartoon antics and enjoy the ride, because this game’s way more of a looker than anything else.Of course, if you want something starring cartoon characters who are way stupider, there’s another animated adventure game from Viacom Games that’ll be right up your alley: the 1995 game MTV’s Beavis & Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity, a pitch-perfect adventure game that feels like the cartoon show has come to life on your computer, complete with the same disclaimer and introduction at the beginning and plenty of included animation. When you finally get to play the adventure game itself, you get to take Beavis and Butt-Head around Highland High School, annoying Daria and interacting with Principal Vicker and Mr. Buzzcut and hocking loogies off the roof in the first of several minigames.As far as a plot, there’s about as much of one as you’d expect from a game starring Beavis & Butt-head. They’ll sit on the couch and watch music videos, they’ll try to follow around their aggressive idol Todd and they’ll annoy Mr. Anderson or their boss at BurgerWorld or even get tossed in prison for awhile. The interface for the game is somewhat like the one LucasArts used in Full Throttle, allowing you to pull up a sort of radial menu with icons for actions. You can also choose whether or not you want Beavis or Butt-head to respond in conversations with various characters.The result is a really funny game that makes amazing use of its license and which honestly is one of the stronger mid-1990s point and click adventure games, right up there with anything LucasArts or Sierra published and extremely well-crafted all around. The various arcade action minigames keep the adventure game elements from becoming too tedious, but they also don’t wear out their welcome. The game’s plot, while meandering, fits the characters perfectly, and unlike every other Beavis & Butt-Head game made in the 1990s, you’re not doing anything the duo wouldn’t do. The end of the game even has them get locked in the trunk of Todd’s car so that Daria can overhear them making stupid jokes and rescue them, only for Beavis and Butt-head to return home, having learned nothing. It’s a perfect ending to a surprisingly great adventure game, and probably the best adaptation of a cartoon show until 2014’s South Park: The Stick of Truth pulled off a similarly great game.And just to illustrate how bad things could have been, GT Interactive published its own adventure game in 1999 called Beavis and Butt-Head Do U. and it’s pretty boring and completely unchallenging despite trying to replicate the same gameplay.But let’s now turn to a few of the other great adventures of the 1990s that dip a little more into the realm of horror instead of animated antics.We’ll start with a title published by Electronic Arts and developed by Flashpoint Productions called Noctropolis, and it is a fascinating fusion of digitized characters, gorgeous artwork often warped by a fishbowl perspective and full-motion video. The game begins in our world, where a comic book shop owner named Peter Grey is reading through his favorite comic, which features a trio of villains named Luscious, Tophat and Desperado facing off with a shadowy caped hero named Darksheer and his beautiful sidekick Stiletto. Darksheer’s powers come from an ancient Egyptian substance called Liquidark. It’s peak 1990s Image Comics-style cheese; the heroes don’t have a code against killing and there’s plenty of T&A, but everyone also avoids swearing and the heroes agonize about their crimes to a priest. The intro is surprisingly lengthy and nearly the size of a full comic book.Then Peter has a dream about a vampire succubus seducing him and wakes up to receive a package from a courier with another comic inside, this time detailing the formation of a new supervillain team under the leadership of a mysterious villain named Flux. An obelisk appears and Peter steps inside, and steps out into perpetually dark world of the “City of Night,” Noctropolis. With Darksheer missing, Peter assumes his identity and teams up with Stiletto to take on this new threat.As you can probably already tell, this game was made for a certain target audience and was marketed as being sexy and violent, though there’s actually very little sex or violence in the actual game. It’s actually a lot sillier than it looks. One of my favorite puzzles involves getting a dog who’s guarding a platform to jump into a huge pit by dangling a sausage on a string in front of him, with a pitiful howl playing as he falls for it. It makes me laugh every time.But much of this game involves wandering around and reading lots of text. And I mean lots of it – think of a comic where there’s more captions than dialogue and where the action is told to you as often as it’s shown. All of the dialogue itself is fully voiced and acted out by one of the hammiest green screen casts you’ll ever see, but the production values are high, and once again, we have a game that pulls off a lot of what Phantasmagoria was trying to do, but more effectively.Noctropolis is definitely a game I’d recommend, both for its endearingly cheesy story and its beautiful graphics. Even your pop-up action menu looks interesting as you see the verbs you can use divided up into sections atop a pyramid-like triangle. It’s more style than substance and quite a tease, like the 90s comics it’s imitating, but it’s a definitely an adventure unlike any other you’ve ever played.Another sort of wacky horror game from the same era is called Harvester, and it was made by DigiFX Interactive and published in Europe by Virgin Interactive and in North America by a schlockhouse publisher called Merit Studios in 1996. And Harvester is schlock of the highest order, a horror game where you play as an amnesiac named Steve Mason who awakens in 1953 in a town called Harvest where everyone seems to be more than a little off. Every character you meet feels like they’re playing a role in a 1950s sitcom that’s simmering with anger and resentment underneath, sort of like Twin Peaks meets Silent Hill. Things quickly get weird in ways I don’t want to describe because so much of the fun of this game is its shock value.And Harvester is shocking. At different points in the game, full motion video sequences will play where Steve watches absolutely bewildering things play out, and they’re rendered more interesting by the fact that the acting in this game is so endearingly bad that you’ll find yourself wanting to rewatch certain scenes and imitate the tortured dialogue. If Mystery Science Theatre 3000 had ever found an adventure game to feature, it’d be Harvester, and I mean that in the best possible way, because it’s absolutely entertaining to play through, provided you’re old enough to handle its gore and clumsy handling of sex.Speaking of which, the Game Grumps, who are the closest thing to video gaming’s MST3k, have a great video featuring Harvester, and it’s in the show notes!But if you’d like your horror games a little less silly, you might want to turn to Infogrames’s two Call of Cthulhu adventures from 1993 and 1995. The first is called Shadow of the Comet, and it’s generally regarded as an excellent take on the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos, placing you in the New England coastal village of Illsmouth and having you investigate a case where a scientist went mad during the previous passing of Halley’s Comet. As you arrive in town in 1910 three days before the comet can be observed, some of the people in the town are standoffish and suspicious, and some have strange characteristics that suggest they may be connected to the horrific Old Ones, ancient evil eldritch beings who are worshipped as gods by the local cultists but who will bring about the end of the world if they’re successfully summoned.For those familiar with the Mythos, you encounter Yog-Sothoth, Dagon and of course Cthulhu in the course of the game, and you’ll also hear a namecheck for at least one other elder god as well. The story is a combination of elements from several Lovecraft stories including “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and of course “The Call of Cthulhu,” but it does depart in a couple of ways. First of all, most of the residents of Illsmouth are not evil and actually are glad that you rid them of the evil cultists in a surprisingly upbeat ending, which is atypical for a Lovecraft-based story. Second, you face the elder gods directly but never succumb to insanity, another common trope of Lovecraft’s tragic heroes.While Shadow of the Comet isn’t perfect by any means, it plays like an icon-driven Sierra adventure and has a lengthy, interesting plot to uncover and some memorable character interactions and great horror scenes.The sequel, Prisoner of Ice, hews much more closely to the story “At the Mountains of Madness” and while the original game had a nice illustrated style, this one uses digitized characters walking around painted backgrounds. It also shifts the plot forward to 1937 and adds in some Nazis, which is honestly where the game gets pretty silly. While it’s tangentially connected to the original game in a very unsatisfying manner, it’s also half as interesting and about a quarter of the length of it. I honestly don’t recommend it unless you are really curious.Another horror series you should check out, however, is Dark Seed, which was released in two parts in 1992 and 1995 by Cyberdreams and which prominently features the artwork of H.R. Giger, best-known for the design of the Alien Xenomorph in the feature film Alien. You play as Mike Dawson, a mustachioed self-insert of the game’s creator and owner of a newly purchased old mansion that turns out to be a gateway to a parallel world that’s sort of like the Upside-Down in Stranger Things. He dreams that an alien embryo gets shot into his brain, and sure enough, this creature, the Dark Seed, is intended to hatch from his head and destroy his world, paving the way for the ancients from the Dark World to take over.Dark Seed is a very average adventure game with an oppressive timing mechanic and tricky puzzles, and thus it’s best-played with a walkthrough. But the reason you’d even want to is because the story is interesting, the horror atmosphere is tense and the graphics are incredible, utilizing large swaths of Giger’s artwork to create the Dark World and give the game a true sense of otherworldliness. The higher resolution used in the game necessitated a more restricted color palette for the graphics hardware of the day, and that actually adds a distinctive quality to the game, with our world being rendered in browns, greens and blues and the Dark World having a cold, sterile white, blue and gray quality to it. The frame around the gameplay window also changes from ornate curtains to alien gargoyles framing a monitor.The second Dark Seed was made without Mike Dawson’s involvement, but the character in the game is still based on him. H.R. Giger’s artwork still features prominently, but the game’s far more digitized this time around, using a blend of photography and pre-rendered objects. Chris Gilbert plays Mike this time, and he sounds ten years younger despite the fact that this game’s a sequel. Tone is also a problem. Crowley, Texas is not nearly as good a setting as the mansion from the first game, and the motivation of catching a Dark World shapeshifter is a lot less pressing than getting an evil alien embryo out of your head.The game’s music is absolutely awful and the normal world just feels… off. I’ve seen people compare it to David Lynch works like Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks and I think that comparison is appropriate since the intent of the scenes seems to be to skewer small town culture. Once you get into the Dark World, though, the game goes a bit bonkers, and by the end of the game, the body count’s surprisingly high and the ending has a twist that you’ll either love or hate, but which made it impossible to make a third game with Mike Dawson as the lead.That’s just as well, because Cyberdreams published another game the same year based on the Harlan Ellison short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” and the game is notable for having Ellison’s involvement. It was a commercial flop that has since become a cult classic, though I’ll warn you it’s very much a love it or hate it kind of game.I’m going to presume listeners probably don’t know much about Harlan Ellison, but he was a well-respected and award-winning science fiction writer primarily known for television and magazine stories. He was always a polarizing figure in his lifetime, outspoken about his conviction that writers deserve to be paid and credited for their work, obsessive about creative control and also quite happy to torch collaborators, producers and Hollywood studios when he felt his work was being tampered with.He had a long feud with Gene Roddenberry over the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which he originally wrote. He hated Roddenberry’s rewrite and made such a stink that he published several of the teleplays in a 1995 book that included a lot of self-important essays.He also sued a lot of people, quite famously including James Cameron, alleging that The Teminator’s core concept was stolen from one of Ellison’s old Outer Limits episodes called “Soldier.” The connection was tenuous at best and it’s debatable Ellison’s idea about a time-traveling soldier was even that original, but he got his settlement from Orion Pictures all the same.Ellison was also an outspoken critic of the video games, which he said were “time wasters.”So you can imagine what a mess Cyberdreams had on its hand trying to market their ambitious adventure game, which has a gripping and memorable title, but which is based on an absolutely bonkers story about a supercomputer named AM that kills off the global population except for five people – a woman and four men – and then extends their lives and changes their bodies so it can torture them indefinitely.In the short story, the humans eventually escape to go and find some canned food and wind up killing each other. But one survives, and AM turns him into a gelatinous blob who no longer has a mouth or any ability to end his own life – hence the title.In the game, this is one of the endings, but the story is changed to AM coming up with a new way to torture everyone by playing a game in which they each enter a sort of psychodrama and have to find a way to defeat AM. The game sort of follows the same template of the later Persona RPGs where each character has to overcome a flaw and find a way to live with their past, but two of AM’s three supercomputers that make up its electronic brain have sympathy on the humans and attempt to help them.The game is incredibly messed up and features a number of endings, including an actually happy one as well as a lot of unhappy ones where your chosen character in the final chapter becomes a blob. Curiously, Ellison didn’t seem to understand that the game was winnable and bragged both before and after release that the only way to win was not to play – perhaps a promise Cyberdreams had made during production but chickened out on in the final build. But Ellison still looms large over the game – he voices AM and he clearly really loved having the chance to play his most psychopathic character, because he relishes reading those lines in the game.I do want to mention that there are some very controversial aspects of the game, not the least of which is the trauma and rape of the lone female character, Ellen. But there’s also a Nazi scientist named Nimdok who AM relates to the most, but who resulted in the game being censored in France and Germany, making the game almost impossible to win since you need Nimdok – or at least the knowledge he has - to be able to get the actual good ending without consulting a walkthrough or guessing at a puzzle. That might account for why Ellison was confused about the game actually having one.As a point and click adventure, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is a fascinating game well worth playing today. It’s unique in how it plays, it has a strong story that will keep you captivated and it’s fairly short and not too difficult. Just be aware that it’s not for everyone, and if you’re easily triggered by trauma, this game’s going to be an intense suffering simulator you’d best avoid.There’s one more series I want to cover before we close out this week, and it’s The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, a surprisingly well-crafted adventure game series from Mythos Software and Electronic Arts that uses a point and click style to set Holmes and Watson out and about exploring London and investigating cases. The first game 1992’s The Case of the Serrated Scalpel, puts you on the trail of either Jack the Ripper or, as Holmes suspects, a clever copycat who has left behind the clue of a scalpel with a serrated blade.The game is portrayed in an illustrated style with a verb and dialogue panel on the bottom third of the screen and the action shown in the top two thirds. Much of the interaction involves examining things and letting Holmes and Watson talk to one another, and there are of course some inventory puzzles and other basic deductions to be made.This is largely a traditional point and click adventure game with a lot of text to read and dialogue trees to exhaust as you search for clues and try to trap people with deductive logic so they’ll provide needed information. The story isn’t based on one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales and thus feels a bit twisty turny and contrived at times, but it’s still a decent take on the source material.There’s also a 1996 sequel called The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Rose Tattoo which ditches the illustrated look and feel of the original game for digitized characters and tries to recreate Victorian London with period costumes and scenes. I actually prefer the look and feel of the 1992 game to this one, but I can’t deny that it’s an impressive sequel that succeeds in using filmed digitized characters on sets far better than Sierra’s experiments with Phantasmagoria did the year before. The game world feels substantial and, when you’re out on the streets, even alive. The detailed map of Victorian-era London is also a lot of fun, particularly if you know the city and can spot locations that correspond to today.Both games are also right up there with ICOM Simulations’ full motion video series Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, which we’ll discuss next week.We’ve covered so much ground in our adventure gaming series that I know you’re thinking, “Sean, there is no way there could possibly be more 1990s point and click adventure games we need to discuss. You’ve covered them all!”If only that were true! I have here in front of me a list of a whole bunch of games I didn’t even get a chance to cover, and if you take a look at the written version of my script on greatestgames.substack.com, you can find all of these games along with links to their entry on MobyGames.And by the way, let me clarify: have I played all these games through? Heck no! At most I’ve played enough to get an impression of what they have to offer, and in a few cases, I’ve just watched video playthroughs or read about them. But here’s the thing. Many of these games came from smaller publishers or from outside the US and UK, and as a result, they didn’t get as strong of coverage and don’t have the same sorts of fanbases as more popular games. That doesn’t mean they’re bad! It just means that they’re obscure and that one of them might become your new favorite game if you play it and like it.So, once you exhaust all of the other games we’ve discussed, give some of these a shot!And with that, we’ve reached the end of our exploration of point and click adventure games from the 1990s! In our next episode, we’re going to finally cover the multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Under a Killing Moon, Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, The Last Express, Black Dahlia and The Neverhood. And of course we have an obligation to accept Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.And guess what? We haven’t really covered console and handheld adventure games, so we’re going to talk about those too. Count on an episode devoted to those!Then we’ll finally close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream.We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore! THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I’m recommending Mini Motorways, a game by Dinosaur Polo Club that came out in 2019 on iOS devices as part of Apple Arcade before getting a port to Windows in 2021 and the Switch in 2022. It’s the follow-up to their earlier minimalist train game Mini Metro, and while it’s not quite as simple as drawing lines on a route map, it’s a little more strategic because you have a few tricks up your sleeve to route traffic that weren’t there in the earlier title.The game is presented in a minimalist SimCity sort of format where you need to connect homes of a certain color to destinations of the same color using roads, of which you have a limited number of tiles you can use. As the weeks advance, you earn tools like stoplights, roundabouts, tunnels, bridges and highways that can help you deal with traffic jams and route traffic more effectively. The game goes until you have a destination that’s not receiving enough traffic, and then it ends, allowing you to start over and try again.I enjoy this game because it’s simple and fun and doesn’t take much of my time, and yet has enough layers of complexity to make loading up a new map a challenging and interesting experience for a coffee break or a few moments of Zen. For $10, it’s a good deal, and even better, it’s often on sale and offered in a bundle with the equally great Mini Metro. Give it a try – it’s really wonderful!https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127500/Mini_Motorways/In 1990, we’ve gotEarthrise (1990)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2151/earthrise/The Hugo Trilogy (1990-1992)https://www.mobygames.com/game/71030/the-hugo-trilogy/Murders in Space (1990)https://www.mobygames.com/game/4803/murders-in-space/ In 1991,The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian (1991)https://www.mobygames.com/game/5024/the-adventures-of-maddog-williams-in-the-dungeons-of-duridian/Spaceship Warlock (1991)https://www.mobygames.com/game/22016/spaceship-warlock/Suspicious Cargo (1991)https://www.mobygames.com/game/54818/suspicious-cargo/ In 1992, we’ve gotCoktel Vision’s Bargon Attack (1992)https://www.mobygames.com/game/13178/bargon-attack/Eternam (1992)https://www.mobygames.com/game/1368/eternam/Hook (1992)https://www.mobygames.com/game/20230/hook/Rome: Pathway to Power (1992)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2232/rome-pathway-to-power/ 1993,Black Sect (1993)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2571/black-sect/Blue Force (1993)https://www.mobygames.com/game/1478/blue-force/  1994,Igor: Objective Uikokahonia (1994)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2170/igor-objective-uikokahonia/Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb (1994)https://www.mobygames.com/game/4008/inherit-the-earth-quest-for-the-orb/  1995,Bureau 13 (1995)https://www.mobygames.com/game/6601/bureau-13/Chewy: Esc from F5 (1995)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2339/chewy-esc-from-f5/Dračí Historie (English: Dragon History) (1995)https://www.mobygames.com/game/44689/draci-historie/Flight of the Amazon Queen (1995)https://www.mobygames.com/game/352/flight-of-the-amazon-queen/Teen Agent (1995)https://www.mobygames.com/game/6423/teen-agent/ 1996,Housemarque - Alien Incident (1996)https://www.mobygames.com/game/1924/alien-incident/Down in the Dumps (1996)https://www.mobygames.com/game/652/down-in-the-dumps/Fable (1996)https://www.mobygames.com/game/1893/fable/Imperium Romanum (1996)https://www.mobygames.com/game/6300/imperium-romanum/ 1997,Ark of Time (1997)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2156/ark-of-time/Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths (1997)https://www.mobygames.com/game/7659/tony-tough-and-the-night-of-roasted-moths/U.F.O.s (1997)https://www.mobygames.com/game/4556/ufos/VooDoo Kid (1997)https://www.mobygames.com/game/16006/voodoo-kid/ And in 1998,Galador - The Prince and the Coward (1998)https://www.mobygames.com/game/30716/galador-the-prince-and-the-coward/Team17 - Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy (1998)https://www.mobygames.com/game/2564/nightlong-union-city-conspiracy/Hopkins FBI (1998)https://www.mobygames.com/game/3994/hopkins-fbi/ As for 1999? There really weren’t any notable point and click adventures from that year we haven’t already covered except for Cookie’s Bustle, a peculiar Japanese point and click adventure that’s most famous for being targeted by a copyright troll from 2022 to 2023 to try to erase all evidence of its existence. It’s only playable in Japanese without a fan patch and it’s quite dark and challenging despite its cutesy exterior, so while it’s a fun curiosity, it’s not an easy game to pick up and play. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, we’re going to talk about 1990s point and click adventure games made by publishers other than Sierra On-Line, including MicroProse, Activision, Adventure Soft, Interplay, Revolution Software, Legend Entertainment, and more! Join us on this expedition through games you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 8: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 6Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES: https://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/168https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564784-timequest/faqs/81243What happened to Shelley Day: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/waw/press/2005/dec/day.htmlThe Space Bar Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxOgmTThiyw&list=PL9tH-kQslZN0J0HlGMe6lYTSjixaolCJn--------------------------------------------------Coming up in this episode –We’re going to talk about all sorts of point and click adventure games from the 1990s that weren’t published by Sierra, including Spellcasting, Death Gate, Simon the Sorcerer, The Space Bar, Elvira, Return of the Phantom, Dragonsphere and Star Trek!I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! One of the things you might have realized about me by now is that I don’t like to leave stones uncovered when we’re talking about a topic like adventure gaming – there are just too many great games to mention and so many of them have gone unnoticed over time. I really don’t want you to miss out on experiences that might become your next favorite game from the retro era!But we’ve also reached a point in our discussion where if I try to be comprehensive with all of the point and click adventure games released in the 1990s, we’ll never get to talking about other genres. Even so, there’s a lot of ground to cover.And so in this episode and the next one, I’m going to intentionally keep our discussion limited to the point and click adventure games I think are most notable or which hold up the best today, and I’m also going to save most of the Myst-style adventures, 3D games and full motion video games for their own episode.So, please forgive me if I don’t bring up one of your favorites or if I just mention in passing, because there’s really so much ground to cover!But to kick us off I need to devote some time in this episode to talk about Steve Meretzky, the legendary text-based adventure game developer behind the classic 1980s Infocom games Planetfall, Stationfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Sorcerer and, along with Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.But by 1990, Steve Meretzky had made the transition to a company called Legend Entertainment, a publisher founded by Infocom veterans Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989. Neither of these guys had actually worked for Infocom; both were contractors with their own companies, and they’d worked together on the Infocom-published titles Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels and Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur in the 1980s.They were supposed to work on a third game about Robin Hood, but Infocom was shut down by its new parent, Activision, before that could happen.Bob Bates had a chance to work on a video game tie-in for James Cameron’s feature film The Abyss around this time, though it fell through, and Mike Verdu’s company was providing software for the US Department of Defense in addition to renting out programmers as contract workers for software development.In their time working with Infocom, they got to know many of the implementors there, including Steve Meretzky. When Infocom collapsed, they saw an opportunity to carry on the text-based adventuring tradition, albeit with some newer technology.And these games also occupied an interesting middle ground between traditional text-based adventuring and the more popular graphical adventures Sierra and LucasArts were publishing. Like Maniac Mansion’s SCUMM engine, Legend’s games allowed players to click on commands with a mouse and assemble actions together, and like a graphical adventure game, the image pane had pictures with interactive elements players could click on. By today’s standards, they look rather intimidating due to all the text onscreen, and even then, they were clunky. But the text allowed Legend’s games to go beyond the more distilled storytelling of Sierra and LucasArts’s output of the early 1990s.But because of all that text, the games needed to have a great hook. Steve Meretzky was brought aboard as a contractor to make a fantasy series similar to Leather Goddesses of Phobos that would have a strong appeal to the older adults who still like text-based adventures, and he started work on what would become a trilogy called Spellcasting.The first game, 1990’s Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls, featured a cover that basically played on the same tropes the movie Revenge of the Nerds had established in 1984 – a dorky-looking wizard with a pocket protector, big glasses and a pointy hat stands between a buxom cheerleader and a bikini model, both with long blond hair like Farah Fawcett. It’s honestly a little cringey today, but in the 1990s, it was great marketing for a game that was actually quite tame compared to the raunchy humor of Leisure Suit Larry.But not too tame, because the Spellcasting games do allow you to turn on a naughty mode and get some more explicit language and opportunities for hooking up than you’d see in normal mode. And unlike Leisure Suit Larry, the girls in the game aren’t just there to mostly tease you – they are quite willing to head into the bedroom, though the games generally just note that they did and the action scores you some points without much description of what happens.The Spellcasting series has the sensibilities of an 80s college frat boy movie combined with the fantasy of being an up and coming wizard named Ernie Eaglebeak at Sorcerer University who also has to face challenges and foes and occasional fantasy creatures. It’s essentially Harry Potter Goes to College and Gets Laid Repeatedly, but released years before those books even existed. You even have a rival sorcerer, the evil Joey Rottenwood, who happens to be your stepfather.Rather than try to explain the plot of the games, I’ll just summarize them. Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls came out in 1990 and covers the setup: you’re a horny young man lusting after your voluptuous neighbor, Lola Tigerbunny, and you enroll in Sorcerer University to impress her, but spend much of the game going to parties and then, when tragedy strikes, getting involved with a plot about saving the school and stopping a bad guy.In Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer’s Appliance, released in 1991, you decide to join a frat in your sophomore year and spend the first part of the game getting hazed and the second part of the game navigating another tragedy as the school’s president dies of shock due to the lascivious behavior of his wife and you have to uncover the secrets of the Sorcerer’s Appliance, the first game’s MacGuffin, in order to defeat this game’s pair of villains. This game is significantly longer than the first, but also a lot more focused on the plot this time around.In Spellcasting 301: Spring Break, released in 1992, you and your frat brothers ride your magic carpet to the beach at Point Blather and party, only to find your rival frat from another college, the St. Weinersburg Academy of Magic, already there, and your frat has to defeat them in several contests, including bullfighting. This is important because the final chapter in the game involves tracking down a mythical Prokturingham Bull that terrorizes Point Blather every 89 years. You have to bring back its head but discover the game’s hidden villain has other plans for the bull. A fourth chapter is promised at the end of this game, but it never happened.Each of the Spellcasting games is basically written in the form of a novel where the game takes place over days or chapters of the story, depending upon which you’re playing. And the writing is good – Steve Mertezky had a lot of freedom with the Spellcasting series and really seemed to enjoy extending out the ideas of his Infocom game Sorcerer and making it into a bunch of smutty college adventures. But by the standards of the day, these games felt pretty outdated with their text parsers and heavily verbose descriptions, and as time has gone on, their misogynistic attitudes towards women you have to score with to score in the game have also not aged well, so I’m hesitant to recommend them.Steve Meretzky also made a Leather Goddesses of Phobos sequel for Activision in 1992 called Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!. Unlike the original text-based game or the Spellcasting games, this one’s a true graphical point and click adventure that takes place in a retro-50s setting and you play as a guy named Zeke, a girl named Lydia and an alien named Barth. It’s also a really lousy game that’s focused on showing off a lot of cheesecake but which doesn’t deliver in the story or puzzle department. Worst of all, it’s boring. Don’t waste your time with it.Steve Meretzky’s odd 1994 adventure game and RPG hybrid Superhero League of Hoboken is probably his crowning achievement at Legend Entertainment, and it has a strong flavor of the same sorts of low-rent, last on the list superheroes you’d see in Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot and Mystery Men comic books. You play as Crimson Tape, leader of the titular team, and your superpower is creating organizational charts, a skill you don’t even get to use in the game. The game is filled with similarly useless heroes like Princess Glovebox, who excels at folding paper maps, Tropical Oil Man, who raises the cholesterol of his enemies, and Captain Excitement, who puts his foes to sleep. The writing is really what makes this game palatable, because the RPG mechanics are pretty weak and the game is very heavy on text with illustrations in a central pane. While it uses a point and click interface for the adventure game elements, you still select verbs from a list or cardinal directions to interact with the game world.I personally think the game is one of Steve Meretzky’s least funny adventures, far better in premise than execution, and definitely lacking on the RPG side of things. But many players seem to have a strong sense of nostalgia for it, so it’s worth a try to see if it’s your cup of tea!I’m much more interested in getting people to try The Space Bar, a 1997 comedy adventure game Steve Meretzky created after he stopped contracting for Legend Entertainment and co-founded Boffo Games with Mike Dornbrook and Leo DaCosta. After their first game, the minigame collection Hodj ’n’ Podj, didn’t sell very well, Meretzky turned back to adventure games one last time. Though he served as the game’s director, he worked with a team this time around that included Ron Cobb, a concept artist who worked on many science fiction films, including designing some of the aliens seen in the Mos Eisley cantina scene in the original Star Wars. And thus the premise of The Space Bar is that you’re hanging out with some weird-looking aliens, trying to solve a mystery and locate a shapeshifting killer hiding in the bar The Thirsty Tentacle on the planet of Armpit VI.As the human detective Alias Node, you have to interrogate the aliens using dialogue trees and a power called Empathy-Telepathy, or emp-tel, that allows you to access the memories of some of the aliens you meet and enter into their worlds. This is definitely one of the neatest ideas of the game, because every alien has different ways of interacting with their memory world and some also see things differently due to their sensory organs. The aliens are really interesting and varied and are rendered in a style that makes them look like something between puppets and claymation creations. These segments are also the most fun part of the game because they’re not constrained by the same draconian timer that makes the main portion of the game so tense.And that timer really is the main reason The Space Bar is such a polarizing game, because this is the sort of adventure that begs to be explored at a leisurely pace, but it instead requires a lot of trial and error and save scumming because it gives you very little opportunity to deviate from the correct series of actions. In fact, it’s hard to find a walkthrough or even helpful hints for the latter parts of the game because it’s so ridiculously hard to complete – and I myself have never finished it. I had to watch a Let’s Play series by the Youtuber Rocket Baby Dolls LP to see the ending, which shows off the game’s concept art. A link to that playlist is in the show notes.The best advice I’ve come across is to save often and keep notes about which actions help you move forward so you can make the most of the time. And while I love so many things about this game, I’d welcome a fan patch to make it more accessible.Sadly, Steve Meretzky took the commercial failure of The Space Bar as a sign he needed to move into making more casual games, and that’s pretty much what he’s done since then. But he wasn’t the only creator at Legend Entertainment.Timequest is a 1991 game created by Bob Bates, and it’s both a serious adventure game and a far more sophisticated one than any of the Spellcasting games. The premise of the game is that you’re a low-ranking member of the Temporal Corps from the year 2090 AD who is sent back in time to different periods and places to undo ten changes that a rogue officer has made to the timeline, and there are also two more overarching problems you need to correct.This officer’s name, by the way, is Zeke S. Vettenmyer, which is an anagram for Steven E. Meretzky. I love that little detail.Your adventures involve many major historical events, like the assassination of Julius Casear, the signing of the Magna Carta or the crowing of Charlemagne, and you can visit six major locations around the world in many different time periods ranging back from 1361 BC all the way to 1940AD, for a total of 55 spacetime locations counting your starting point.Even better, you can play the game in a fairly nonlinear fashion, but in doing so, you have to follow a rule that once you visit a location, you can only travel forward in time and you can’t revisit an area you’ve already been to… at least until the end of the game, when any pretense of causality gets tossed out the window. So, if you plan to play without a walkthrough, it’s a good idea to visit every location, take lots of notes and what you find, and then restart your game and try to figure out the sequence that allows you to make it through the game.Fortunately, you don’t need a map; the game creates one for you, and most locations are pretty simple. Unfortunately, the game gives you a lot of inventory items to juggle with no constraints on how much you can carry, and this adds to the complexity of the puzzle-solving.Timequest is very interesting and it’s fairly well-written, but it’s so ridiculously hard without a hint book or walkthrough that it’s a tough game to recommend to anyone but the most serious adventure gamers out there, particularly since it uses the same text parser and limited graphic user interface seen in Spellcasting. The game’s plot is also full of plot holes and contradictions, like most time travel stories, and I highly recommend the very entertaining GameFAQs walkthrough by an author who simply goes by AMC – it not only tells you how to complete the game but offers a thoughtful and amusing analysis of how stupid the villain’s plan really is.So, Timequest isn’t for everyone.But Bob Bates’s next game, 1993’s Eric the Unready, is a far more palatable affair because it’s intended to be a parody of Zork and King’s Quest-style adventures as well as the broader geekdom of fantasy and sci-fi. While the game still uses a text parser with a small pane for graphics, it will occasionally shift into full-screen graphical cutscenes with text popups or dialogue, and there are also minigames like a card game or a trivia contest and an occasional newspaper to read that often contains darkly humorous stories about happenings in the crazy world around you.If the title didn’t already tip you off, this is a deeply unserious adventure game, and definitely up there with Space Quest and Quest for Glory in its willingness to abandon the story for a humorous tangent that’s really just there to make you laugh.There are all sorts of characters you’d never expect to appear in the game, like Khan Noonien Singh from Star Trek and the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz and a clan of Killer Attack Turtles.There’s a sequence where the game basically turns into Zork, and another sequence where you have to pull a sacred banana from a stone to impress some knights. There’s a whole plotline about visiting the Greek gods and finding out they’ve decided to upgrade their temples to be more like tacky Hollywood offices, with Clio running reception and a toga-wearing agent named Morty booking gigs for deities who need something to do. There’s a Fantasy Island parody with an actual Monkey Island where you’ll find a four-headed monkey – that’s one more head that the one Guybrush Threepwood is constantly using as a deflection.As an adventure Eric the Unready is fairly even-keel. It’s not too challenging, but it does have a few puzzles that push you, especially in the latter sections of the game. The game’s sharp sense of humor and anything-goes sensibilities certainly make it fun. And it even ends with the tease of a sequel by saying, “And so endeth the saga of Sir Eric the Unready – Part I.”Sadly, Eric never got that sequel, but Bob Bates’s partner and co-founder, Michael Verdu, designed another great adventure for Legend Entertainment released in 1995 called Misson Critical that utilized a far more sophisticated interface with full-motion video and pre-rendered backgrounds as well as a graphical user interface to replace the text parser. It’s a great game, but it’s very much in the style of Myst and really doesn’t fit as well into our discussion here, so we’ll talk more about it when we get to those Myst-style games.Legend Entertainment also created several games adapted from the works of fantasy and science fiction authors. I’m not going to go into detail on any of these because they are all pretty dependent upon your love for the fiction they’re adapting. For example, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway and Gateway II: Homeworld, which came out in 1992 and 1993, are based on the Heechee saga that was set up in the 1977 novel Gateway, which tells the story about a hollowed-out asteroid that serves as a space station for humans and a source of technology from a long dormant alien race called the Heechee. The saga spans five novels, and I truly recommend these books – they’re quite good!But the games deviate pretty significantly from the novels, beginning with the basic setup but then establishing their own stories. As illustrated text-based adventures that springboard off a classic hard sci-fi novel series, the Gateway games are decent enough, but your enjoyment of them will go way up if you read the original Frederik Pohl novel first.Likewise, the 1993 graphical adventure Companions of Xanth, which is based on the Piers Anthony book Demons Don’t Dream, part 16 in his sprawling Xanth fantasy novel series, is mainly going to appeal to fans of the source material who get the jokes and enjoy seeing the characters from the series depicted onscreen. One of the game’s worst ideas is pretending to give you a choice of companions to guide you and then forcing you to use Nada Naga, who’s featured on the box in her half woman, half snake form, but who actually looks like a human female in the game. While this is in line with the plot of the novel, it makes the game feel small and linear by comparison. The voice acting is also really spotty, as is the use of digitized graphics in sections to portray the characters from the non-magical realm of Mundania.I read every one of the Xanth books available as a teenager – he’s almost reached 50 of at this point! - but I never really enjoyed this game. As it happens, Piers Anthony had a 1993 book about video games called Kilobyte that would have made a far better adventure game, and I also think some of his other more popular books, such as the Incarnations of Immortality novels or the Apprentice Adept series, would have been better-suited to a video game adaptation than Xanth.Speaking of other fantasy novels, Death Gate is a 1994 adaptation of the seven-part fantasy series The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, who are also quite famously the authors of the original Dragonlance novels upon which many games have been based.Of all the Legend Entertainment adventures, it’s also by far my favorite, and probably the one where it’s least necessary to be familiar with the novel it’s based upon. The premise is that you’re Haplo, a member of a race called the Patryns who were banished to a land called the Labyrinth when the world was broken thousands of years ago by the evil Sartans, and you have to find the pieces of the world seal to break the power of the Death Gate and make the world whole again.The adventure is lengthy and text-heavy, but it’s controlled similarly to the adventure segments of Superhero League of Hoboken with a compass for movement and a list of verbs and an inventory panel, quite similar to a Sierra SCI1 or SCUMM engine games if they were in the first person perspective. Since the story has so many fantasy terms and strange names, voice acting helps to make the story more understandable, and fortunately, the voice acting is also quite improved in Death Gate, and used during the game’s extensive dialogue trees to bring characters to life.Though Death Gate might look like an RPG, it’s a pure adventure game from start to finish. The puzzles aren’t super challenging and often rely on object utilization, but they are well-designed and put up an occasional challenge without making the game feel impossible.I’m less impressed by Shannara, a 1995 fantasy adventure based on the novels by Terry Brooks and created by Corey and Lori Ann Cole, the creators of Quest for Glory. Josh Mandel, who also worked at Sierra and had just departed while working on Space Quest 6, was a writer on this game as well. This story actually takes place between the novels The Sword of Shannara and The Elfstones of Shannara, and you play as Jak, the son of Shea Ohmsford from the original novel and father of Wil from the second one.The problem with Shannara is that the game is trying to follow a similar design template to the Coles’ Sierra games, but it doesn’t work quite so well in Legend’s engine because the gameplay takes place in the first person and the combat and overworld travel sequences are just terrible. The adventure game portion of Shannara is fine, but it’s also sort of generic, lacking the spark of Terry Brooks’s novels and the humor of the Coles’ earlier games. I’d like to say this one’s a hidden gem, but it’s really not; it’s definitely just a mediocre game that occasionally rises above its station before sinking right back down to it. Keep in mind that in 1995, role-playing games had already significantly surpassed many of the technological hurdles Shannara was facing and had far more compelling stories and mechanics.A far better game is Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, a 1997 adventure game from Josh Mandel, this time as a designer. It’s also based on a novel, this time a 1977 book of the same name by Spider Robinson that spawned a longer series, and Josh Mandel managed to persuade Robinson to get more and more involved in consulting on this game to make it something fans of the novels would enjoy, and Robinson even wrote and performed some songs for the game.It wasn’t a commercial success, but it’s one heck of an adventure game, still following the Legend Entertainment model of a central graphic pane above an inventory bar and text scroll, but movement is handled by panning around environments on the top half of the screen and clicking on doorways rather than using a compass, and the cursor is context-sensitive. The game’s also quite dialogue-heavy, featuring wonderful characters – even a talking dog! - and great voice acting to accompany Jake Stonebender’s journeys through six wild adventures spanning cities, ruins, rainforests, a satellite in space and even a bizarre aurora borealis-tinged simulated universe.And of course every adventure includes plenty of time spent in Callahan’s Place, the bar run by Mike Callahan that attracts all sorts of misfits from other worlds, dimensions, fictional universes and timelines.Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon was mismarketed as being a Western game in the style of Josh Mandel’s earlier co-creation, Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, but it’s a much different sort of game more in the style of the modern Disco Elysium. You definitely need to play this one – it’s absolutely fantastic! While you’re at it, read the broader series of Callahan’s Place books as well.The 1998 adventure John Saul’s Blackstone Chronicles: An Adventure in Terror is based on a horror novel series spanning six books, and the game is actually its seventh chapter, starring series protagonist Oliver Metcalf in the town of Blackstone, which is home to a haunted asylum. This game is much more in the vein of Myst or The 7th Guest, with full screen pre-rendered video graphics making it feel like you’re playing a 3D game with many spirits to talk to. There are no inventory wheels, verbs or compass icons to help you interact with the game world; you instead have a context-sensitive cursor.While this all sounds like the makings of a pretty big disaster for a company that tended to be behind the curve technologically in the adventure game experiences it offered, Blackstone Chronicles is actually a pretty decent and overlooked game. It’s spooky and has a story worth experiencing, and it’s also well-designed as an adventure, with puzzles that are fun but not overly frustrating and narration that helps you along. Surprisingly, John Saul seems to have had little to do with this game; Bob Bates wrote the story and designed the game, and Mike Verdu served as executive producer.That unfortunately brings us to the end of Legend Entertainment’s adventure games, as the studio largely moved on to first person action games powered by the Unreal Engine like The Wheel of Time and Unreal II: The Awakening before shutting down in 2004. While they’ll never be quite as well-regarded as Infocom, Sierra or LucasArts, they were among the last bastions of traditional adventure gaming in the 1990s, and victim to the same commercial pressures to get out of that business as everyone else.But Legend Entertainment wasn’t the only game in town when it came to adventure gaming, and one studio that managed to produce a big hit was Interplay, who managed to find a way to allow adventure gamers to boldly go where several games had not so impressively gone before! Star Trek has a long history with gaming going back to the early 1970s when it inspired many mainframe computer games, but as official Star Trek games go, the 1980s was kind of a bust where the official license was concerned. Sure, you have the 1982 Sega arcade game and the Vectrex’s surprisingly good Star Trek: The Motion Picture space combat sim, most of the best Star Trek games were actually retooled into original IPs, generally for strategy and role-playing games.Computer gamers did get a few releases, though – the lousy text adventures Star Trek: The Kobayahsi Alternative and The Promethean Prophecy, the pretty good Mike Singleton strategy adventure Star Trek: The Rebel Universe and the halfway decent illustrated text adventure Star Trek: First Contact, which centers on making covert First Contact with a planet called Gothica and has nothing to do with the later Next Generation movie about the Borg.There’s also the sort-of-space sim Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which is held back by being based on one of the worst movies in the franchise, and Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Transinium Challenge, an obscure 1989 tie-in to the show’s first and second seasons that uses a graphical interface and digitized character portraits, but has you play as Commander Riker because Captain Picard decides he needs more training.Some of these games are interesting, but none of them is really great.And then Interplay got its shot in 1992, resulting in a true point and click adventure game that’s structured to provide players with new episodes of the classic show. It’s known as Star Trek 25th Anniversary, a name it shares with far less impressive and unrelated NES and Game Boy games released the same year. But it has one thing almost no other Star Trek game has – a 1993 CD-ROM talkie edition where most of the original cast returned to voice the characters.I cannot emphasize enough how much the voice acting adds to the game, because unlike the movies, which often felt quite different from the original show, this game and its 1993 sequel, Star Trek: Judgement Rites, already felt like a true continuation of the original series, with the same sorts of self-contained plots, puzzles to solve and conflicts to resolve along with occasional ship to ship combat sequences aboard the Enterprise. Adding in the original cast to read those lines made an already excellent adventure gaming series feel truly authentic, even if the cast tended to read the lines flat and don’t always quite sound like the television versions of the characters since the actors were so much older.The gameplay in each game generally involves either being on the bridge of the Enterprise, where Captain Kirk can give orders to the crew, or beaming to each chapter’s locale with an away team, often represented by a small area with a few screens and some puzzles to solve to advance the plot. The character interactions are by far the best thing about these games, and if you enjoy hearing Dr. McCoy and Spock bickering or Captain Kirk taking charge in unwinnable situations, you’ll have a great time playing through these games.   As point and click adventure games go, Interplay’s Star Trek games felt a little behind the more stylized games Sierra and LucasArts were producing at the time, and they’re known for being a little too easy as far as puzzle solving goes. Their audience was never hardcore adventure game fans, however, and aside from the fact that the ship combat sequences are mandatory, both games were quite popular with casual players, and the CD-ROM editions with voice-acted lines justified being a multimedia early adopter during a time when many DOS-driven desktop computers still didn’t have sound cards or CD-ROM drives.But an equally impressive Star Trek game came out in 1995, this time from Spectrum Holobyte. Star Trek: The Next Generation – “A Final Unity” is a point and click adventure game that includes rendered videos, painted sprites and voices sourced from the actual actors from the TV show. While it’s not perfect, it truly looks and feels like an extension of the show so well that it’s portrayed as an episode within the seventh season of the series, and it’s definitely as well-written and engaging to play through.Much like Star Trek 25th Anniversary, the game shifts between Bridge interactions and Away Team missions, and there are occasional strategy and combat sequences that are far weaker than the actual adventuring and puzzle solving. You can also visit engineering or the holodeck, though you sadly can’t do anything fun in the latter like catch Lieutenant Barclay making out with a simulation of Deanna Troi or accidentally set Professor Moriarty loose on the ship.Even so, this game’s great if you’re a Star Trek fan, and also a bit more challenging than Interplay’s adventures. Most of the Star Trek games that followed this one were either full motion video games, action games or space combat simulators, so it’s really the last true point and click adventure game for the franchise.Another intellectual property that received some adventure games in the early 1990s came from Horror Soft, who’d originally created the well-regarded 1989 horror adventure game Personal Nightmare and then got the rights to create two horror-themed adventures featuring Cassandra Petersen’s sexy TV hostess Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. All of these games were designed under the direction of Horror Soft’s owner, Mike Woodroffe, a name we’ll be hearing again a little later in this episode.By the way, if you remember our discussion several episodes ago about Adventure International’s UK branch that employed Brian Howarth to port Scott Adams’s text-based adventures to other platforms, Mike Woodroffe was the owner of the UK side of the business and eventually changed its named to Adventuresoft UK when Adventure International went bankrupt and then again to Horror Soft to reflect a change in focus towards more mature themes.The Elvira games play like first-person point and click adventure games with some RPG elements and combat, but what’s most impressive about them is that both were released for the Commodore 64 as well as DOS, Amiga and Atari ST formats, which made them far more accessible to gamers of the early 1990s. Given that the other versions all feature digitized graphics, the 8-bit conversions are actually quite good with a more limited palette and constrained resolution.Both the 1990 Elvira, which involves wandering around a castle searching for a way to free the mistress of the dark from the evil Lady Emelda, and the 1991 Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus, which takes place in a demon-infested movie studio, are appropriately spooky and filled with monsters to battle and horrors to uncover. The second game is far longer than the first and also involves enormous mazes that are difficult to navigate, requiring you to take the time to map them out in classic CRPG style.Horror Soft also released another 1992 RPG-style adventure through Accolade that didn’t use the Elvira license, but which does involve time travel as you wander around a wax museum. This game, WaxWorks, is today considered a classic horror computer game, though at the time, it wasn’t regarded quite so well. Part of that might be because it’s extremely gory, far more so than the already disturbing Elvira games, but also because the gameplay is quite challenging. It also was only available on DOS and Amiga systems, which limited its audience, particularly in the UK.While Horror Soft and its North American publisher Accolade were courting mature audiences with blood, guts and gore, MicroProse was going for sleaze with Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender, a science fiction point and click adventure game where you visit a planet of technologically advanced women called Keepers who can alter their gender to become men and impregnate women they call Stock who live aboveground in primitive dwellings. As the only actual man on the planet, you’re of course going to evoke some passionate feelings, one way or the other.The game was marketed to sound like a Leisure Suit Larry meets Space Quest IV, but in reality… it’s not nearly as funny or interesting as either of those series, and the voice acting is atrocious. It’s actually more like Leather Goddesses of Phobos in that it’s a big tease that doesn’t really take its premise far enough. But I don’t want to suggest it’s a bad game, because it’s not. The puzzles are fine, the dialogue is at least amusing and the game is long enough to feel substantial without overstaying its welcome.MicroProse released two other games using the same engine, 1993’s Return of the Phantom and 1994’S Dragonsphere. I actually like both of these games much better than Rex Nebular, though Return of the Phantom wins a lot of points because I love the 1910 Gaston Leroux novel The Phantom of the Opera and the 1980s Andrew Lloyd Weber musical adaptation of it.The game does too, and its take on the story is to start out in the then-present day of the 1990s where a situation quite similar to the events of the novel is taking place at the Paris Opera House, which is staging an opera called Don Juan Triumphant. Unfortunately, a chandelier falls on the audience and the Opera House’s Ghost is blamed for it. An investigator named Raoul Montand gets too close to the case and discovers the Phantom, who shoves him off a catwalk.For reasons never really explained, Raoul goes back to 1881 and experiences the actual events of the novel, where the Phantom of the Opera, an escaped sociopathic sideshow feature named Erik, kidnaps a girl named Christine Daae and Raoul, now mistaken for the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, has to locate Erik’s lair and free her.I won’t defend this game as being great – Raoul is very slow whenever he’s moving, the characters are very chatty but poorly voiced, and the story doesn’t really make a lot of sense due to the time travel nonsense, something which was maybe intended to distinguish this story from other adaptations of the novel, or maybe which made sense from a design point of view to give the player more information about the Phantom.Even so, if you’re a fan of the story like I am, there’s something wonderful about getting to play a Phantom of the Opera adventure game, and it does have some nice visuals and interesting moments, including the Phantom’s diabolical labyrinth and the duel on the famous chandelier.Dragonsphere, on the other hand, is an adventure game I’d recommend to anyone. It’s become something of a cult classic today, but when it debuted in 1994, it was amazingly overlooked despite playing very much like a King’s Quest-style fantasy adventure game with a SCUMM-style interface with clickable verbs and an inventory pane. The premise of the game is that you’re a newly-crowned young king named Callash who is trying to find a way to stop the return of the sorcerer Sanwe, who’s imprisoned in his tower by a magical trap called the Dragonsphere. Sanwe and Callash are destined to duel as Sanwe’s powers return, and Callash ventures out and attempts to gain the support of the rulers of nearby realms, with all of them knowing his showdown with Sanwe is near.And then the game throws you an incredible, unguessable curveball I won’t spoil, but will instead say makes the final act of the game change dramatically as the whole purpose behind your quest changes. And this is part of what makes Dragonsphere such a cult classic – its seeming King’s Quest-style story is a little sharper than it first appears.As an adventure game, it’s also a lot of fun. Though the voice acting isn’t great, the characters are interesting and some attempt was made to use effects to at least convey a sense of otherness when you encounter the different races of the kingdom. The graphics look very much like King’s Quest V’s painted backgrounds and animated sprites, and the introductory cinematic at the beginning does a great job of setting the story in motion.Dragonsphere also has a lot in common with another game from around the same time period, Adventure Soft’s Simon the Sorcerer, which was released in 1993 through Activision and which features a similar fusion of King’s Quest-style fairy tale fantasy and a SCUMM-style interface along with a wicked sense of humor that will appeal to anyone who loves the LucasArts games of the era. There’s also a 1995 sequel that takes the premise in even wilder directions.Oh, and just a fun aside here – Adventure Soft was formerly known as Horror Soft. So yes, this is the same developer that created the Elvira games and WaxWorks, though the game is very different in sensibilities.The first game is about a 12-year-old boy named Simon who receives a magical spellbook for his birthday, and then one night reads a spell from it and opens a portal to another world. He finds himself in a fantasy land where he’s asked to help rescue a wizard named Calypso, but much like Guybrush Threepwood in the Monkey Island games trying to be a mighty pirate, Simon is a wannabe wizard who has to convince the other wizards in the village to take him seriously by completing arbitrary quests.Aside from LucasArts, the game’s other clear inspiration is Terry Pratchett, and Simon the Sorcerer feels a lot like the later Discworld games by Teeny Weeny Games and Perfect 10 Productions, right down the distinct British sensibilities. In the talkie edition, Simon’s voiced by Red Dwarf’s Chris Barrie and the cast is mostly made up of British actors who do a great job of bringing the characters to life. This is a very high-quality adventure with great graphics, laugh out loud humor and a number of truly memorable moments.Unfortunately, Simon the Sorcerer II: The Lion, the Wizard and the Wardrobe, isn’t quite as inspired. While the original game was designed by Mike Woodroffe and written by his son, who actually is named Simon, Mike Woodroffe took more of a managerial role in the second game and Simon Woodroffe took over on game design. The sequel’s Simon’s supposed to be older, and so Brian Bowles provided his voice for this one, but he doesn’t quite have the same mildly annoyed charm that Chris Barrie brought to the role and honestly sounds too old for a teenager. Simon also comes across as being a bit of a jerk at times, which again is a little jarring.The sequel’s still very funny, but the puzzles aren’t quite as good and the story’s kind of all over the place. Fans of the first game will enjoy the second, but definitely play the first one first.The series was successful enough to spawn a 2002 sequel called sigh Simon the Sorcerer 3D made by the Woodroffe’s side project development studio, Headfirst Productions, and it’s pretty widely loathed. There’s also a fourth and fifth chapter from 2007 and 2009 that was produced by the German developer Silver Style Entertainment, and most Simon fans consider them both the equivalent of fan games. A sixth chapter was planned by an Irish developer called StoryBeasts with Chris Barrie back onboard, but it never happened.Interestingly, Smallthing Studios S.r.l. just released a new game in 2025 called Simon the Sorcerer: Origins that retcons the original story and has Chris Barrie return to voice the character. Though it’s not perfect, it’s pretty and well-animated, and it’s far closer in spirit to the first two games.But going back to the 1990s, one more game I want to talk about from Adventure Soft is The Feeble Files, a 1997 science fiction point and click adventure by Mike and Simon Woodroffe and starring Robert Llewellyn – Kryten in Red Dwarf – in the starring role as Feeble, an alien whose job is to burn crop circles in Earth’s farm fields before an encounter with the Voyager space probe makes him aware of the Freedom Fighters who are struggling against the Big Brother-like OmniBrain – and yes, The Feeble Files has some heavy dystopian overtones and inspiration from George Orwell’s novel 1984.The game’s something of a hidden gem today and was marketed terribly at the time – the box art isn’t very appealing, the back of the box did a terrible job of explaining what the game was about and the in-game graphics, which feature lots of polygonal 3D aliens, are a little off-putting since the characters aren’t particularly cute or charismatic. The voice acting is also spotty in many places due to some odd choices made by the mostly British cast.But what The Feeble Files delivers is a great adventure with some challenging puzzles that actually worth scratching your head to solve. It’s not a game I’d recommend to everyone, but it is an interesting one that’s enjoyable enough if you need a challenge or don’t mind using a walkthrough.We’ve talked about a couple of series of games about young wizards in training already, but one point and click series we have not yet mentioned is Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, a 1995 point and click adventure by Perfect 10 Productions and Teeny Weeny Games and published by Psygnosis.And this was not Psygnosis’s first foray into adventure gaming – they’d already published the very British 1993 Space Quest IV-style adventure game Innocent Until Caught by the developer Divide By Zero and its 1995 sequel Guilty and they’d later publish a 3D adventure called The City of Lost Children in 1997 that we’ll discuss when we get to that style of game.Both Innocent Until Caught and Guilty are fairly average point and click adventures that try to spice up their adventuring with some humor that doesn’t really land too well and some sleaze in the first game that involves a scene set in a brother. They’re worth checking out if you enjoy the genre, but the second game is the only one that has any voice acting, and it’s pretty spotty in quality.Divide by Zero also created two other adventures that are similarly obscure, though they do have some interesting moments. One is a 1995 science fiction game called The Orion Conspiracy, and it’s sort of an Alien or Aliens style adventure with shapeshifting aliens that have to be hunted down Among Us style. It’s rather infamous for its bad writing, long cutscenes and heavy use of profanity and homophobic slurs, so I’d recommend playing it with caution.Divide By Zero’s other adventure, a 1996 cel-animated style point and click game called The Gene Machine, is actually a far better game and quite underrated. It’s what we’d today called a steampunk-style game, clearly inspired by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and set in the Victorian era. There’s a talking cat, which might make you think it’s for children, but like Innocent Until Caught, there is a scene in a brothel. Generally speaking, however, the writing’s more family-friendly. The voice acting is also far more consistent and helps deliver the dry, British wit that fuels the humor. There are even some laugh out loud moments amidst some standard icon-driven graphical adventuring.If you get a chance to try The Gene Machine, you really should. It really surprised me when I checked it out, particularly since it was published by Vik Tokai, a publisher that was known for some really lousy computer games including the absolutely awful Western-themed graphical adventure Silverload.But we were talking about Psygnosis and the Discworld adventure games, and let me first say that if you’re not familiar with the source material by Sir Terry Pratchett, you really should read the novels The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, which are not only the initial novels in the long-running series, but also your introduction to Rincewind, the game’s main character, who is here voiced by Eric Idle. The Discworld is a planet sized disc being help up by four elephants riding a giant turtle that’s flying through space, and it’s filled with all sorts of fantasy creatures and evokes many familiar tropes. Most of the stories take place in a city on that Disc called Ankh-Morpok which is filled with a vast cast of characters who appear in multiple stories and who sometimes parody celebrities in the real world or in literature.The original Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, stars the wizard Rincewind and was adapted into a text-based adventure game in 1986 by Delta 4 and Pirahna Software. It’s notable for being a badly-made game that cleaves too closely to the book but still manages to be incredibly hard.The 1995 game, by contrast, is depicted in an animated cartoon style that really helps to sell the humor. The plot itself is not based on one of Rincewind’s normal adventures, but instead mostly upon the eighth Discworld novel, Guards! Guards!, about a group of characters called the City Watch who have to foil an evil plot to install a puppet king by summoning a dragon that provides a pretense for getting rid of the lawful ruler, the Patrician of the city of Ankh-Morpork. The dragon causes a lot of problems, though, and someone has to figure out how to stop it when it proves to be uncontrollable even by those who summoned it.Rincewind’s insert into this story works pretty well because the game adds in other familiar characters like the walking Luggage that follows Rincewind like a puppy as well as The Librarian and Death, who show up in a lot of Discworld books. The writing is very sharp and voiced extremely well, and the animation style is quite fluid with lavishly illustrated artwork despite the game’s limited resolution and 256-color palette. My only real complaint is that the game can be incredibly obtuse in places, and even being familiar with the source material doesn’t always make it clear what you’re supposed to do next. It’s best-played with a walkthrough, and since it’s also available on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn, it’s pretty accessible, though I would definitely recommend the DOS or Amiga version since they both use a mouse.The 1996 sequel Discworld II  is known in Europe by the subtitle Missing Presumed… !? and in North America as Mortality Bytes!, and it is a far more impressive-looking game with a cel-shaded animation style and Super VGA graphics. Imagine the difference between Monkey Island 2 and The Curse of Monkey Island and you’ll get the difference here – the dour look on Rincewind’s face is far easier to see since there aren’t as many pixels obscuring things and the game’s screens and scenes are more capable of showcasing different angles and perspectives to make things more visually interesting.The game’s also significantly longer, but also easier, this time drawing on the novels Moving Pictures and Reaper Man and having Rincewind investigate why Death’s gone on holiday and using a movie to draw the Grim Reaper out of hiding. The game’s quite aware of how irreverent it is and even includes a song written and sung by Eric Idle called “That’s Death” and later includes “gratuitous 3D scene” near the end to poke fun at how every game was doing those back then. Thankfully, it reverts back to the animated style, which holds up way better today anyhow.The first two Discworld games are truly excellent and are well worth playing today. But there is a third one as well called Discworld Noir that came out in 1999 that abandons Rincewind as a protagonist and plays more like a detective story with a main character named Lewton who was once part of the City Watch in Ankh-Morpok.While the game is very good – and probably longer than the first two games combined! – it’s such a shift in graphics and style that it really feels like something else entirely. Instead of the lavish animated style of the second game, this one features pre-rendered scenes and characters and abandons objects and inventory puzzles in favor of clues Lewton collects in his notebook. The tone is also quite different, with a darker look and feel, and the story eventually turns into a sort of cultish cosmic horror tale, which is quite distinct from the sillier style of the early games. Even though Terry Pratchett came up with the story and contributed some of the dialogue, I wouldn’t describe the game as feeling like it has his fingerprints on it so much as the inspiration of his humor and characters.Lewton’s turn as the protagonist also seems like an odd choice since Rob Brydon, who voices the character, feels far less comfortable with the role than Eric Idle did as Rincewind despite being a well-established comic actor in his own right. Rounding out the voice cast are Kate Robbins, who voices female characters in all three games, Robert Llewelyn of Red Dwarf fame and The Young One’s Nigel Planer, who’s also known for reading Discworld audiobooks and was even in the television adaptations of some of the Discworld novels.But for all those critiques, Discworld Noir can stand on its own as a legitimately decent adventure game with a lot of gameplay to offer. It can be long-winded and isn’t as visually engaging during all that talking, but it’s well-written and the clues system makes the game far more accessible than many adventure games of the era, anticipating some of the changes that were coming to the genre in the next decade as adventure gaming largely shifted to 3D.And now that we’ve covered the Discworld games, we’ve also reached a great stopping point. In our next episode, we’ll talk about some other point and click adventure games like The Legend of Kyrandia, Beneath a Steel Sky, Dark Seed, Call of Cthulhu, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Dune, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, Beavis and Butthead and so much more… as well as Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream!And then after that, we’ve still got to cover multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Under a Killing Moon, Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, The Last Express, Black Dahlia and The Neverhood. And of course we have an obligation to accept Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.Then we’ll finally close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream. We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore! THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I’m recommending Old Skies, a 2025 adventure by Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games that features one of the most interesting and world-weary time travel concepts I’ve ever encountered. The premise of the game is that you are Fia Quinn, a time traveling agent for ChronoZen, a future company that allows people to go back in time and make changes to the timestream… for a price. The result is often that history changes in the process without anyone being aware but the agents, but ChronoZen and its employees ensure that the things that are important to their own existence can’t be changed.But their present lives can, and Fia might find herself with a spouse and children in one timeline only to have it washed away by someone else’s choices a moment later.The entire game is excellent and makes great use of its time travel conceit to create fun puzzles and interesting interactions. Fia’s adventures take her to many different times and places, but  the standout moment is when Fia has to travel to New York City on September 10th, 2001 knowing that tomorrow, the city is going to be thrown into chaos and some of the people she meets will die and yet seeing the unsuspecting people of New York just going about their lives as if nothing big is going to happen.Being a time-traveler, she knows how things are destined to turn out as well. As she winds up uncovering connections between various people and timelines, she’s forced to have to make a drastic choice of her own to preserve the existence of  someone she comes to care about.I highly recommend Old Skies, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys adventure games. The voice acting is fantastic and the writing offers both a serious story and some humorous moments as you spend time growing to care about the game’s characters. It’s not difficult, but it is fun and it even has some neat connections to other Wadjet Eye Games titles and a developer’s commentary mode for those who want to learn how it was made.It’s normally $20 on Steam, but also available for a discount in many bundles with other great adventure games. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, we’re going to talk about some of the other adventure games published by Sierra from Coktel Vision and Dynamix including the Gobliiins games, the Inca games, The Adventures of Willy Beamish, Rise of the Dragon and Funny Bone Interactive’s Stay Tooned! Sean will take you on an expedition through games you’ve probably never played. He’s Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 7: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 5Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:https://www.sierragamers.com/Heart-of-China/“Inca People” song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdskBQ5uS-Q--------------------------------------------------Coming up in this episode –We’re talk about Sierra’s educational adventure games including the Dr. Brain series, the EcoQuest games and Pepper’s Adventures in Time, and then we’re going to take a look at what Dynamix was up to with The Adventures of Willy Beamish and Rise of the Dragon and also what Coktel Vision added to adventure gaming with the Inca games, The Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, Gobliiins and more.  I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Consider this the B-side to last week’s episode of more familiar Sierra games from the 1990s, because we’re gonna cover some titles you may have seen or played as well as some you may even not be aware of!When people think Sierra On-Line, they tend to think first of games with “Quest” in the title – King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory, Conquest of Camelot, The Colonel’s Bequest, and, of course, Leisure Suit Larry, which doesn’t have quest in the title, but promises a titillating view of some body parts that at least rhyme with quest.But I covered Leisure Suit Larry and many of those other titles in last week’s episode, and so it seems only fitting that we cover the opposite end of the spectrum now by starting out with the Sierra Discovery titles, an edutainment line that started life in the 1990s and which were geared more generally towards children. Many of these games featured an animated style that helped to sharpen the studio’s skills as graphical adventure games progressed from the painted realism of the early 1990s to the cartoonish buffoonery of the mid to late 1990s.One of the most notable series is the quadrilogy of Dr. Brain games created by Corey Cole, which began in 1991 with Castle of Dr. Brain and eventually spawned the Island, Lost Mind and Time Warp of Dr. Brain between 1992 and 1996. The Dr. Brain games were marketed as part of the Sierra Discovery edutainment series due to their puzzles and allusions to science and math, but beyond the first one, which was the only entry in the series in which Corey Cole was involved, I don’t find any of these particularly special or worth recommending today. Sierra also produced two remakes of Roberta Williams’s Mixed-Up Mother Goose and a sequel called Mixed-Up Fairy Tales designed by Lori Ann Cole under the Discovery era. We’ve covered the original AGI version of Mixed-Up Mother Goose already, but I’ll note that the 1991 version came with digitized speech on both the floppy and CD-ROM edition and fully ported the game’s action to the point and click system common to the SCI1 games, though there are some differences between the two versions in terms of gameplay as well as some changes from the original. There’s also the 1995 Mixed-Up Mother Goose Deluxe, which looks and plays like an adventure game storybook and offers Super VGA graphics and lots of well-produced music to entertain the little ones, though it has some pretty awful voice acting. I actually prefer the 1991 version to it.But Mixed-Up Fairy Tales only got one version, and it’s actually quite a good game for what it is. When it starts, you choose your gender and appearance from some pre-selected avatars and begin wandering around a fairy tale village where, as you might expect from the title, things need to be set right so you can help various fairy tale characters from the tales of Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk and the animals who intend to become the Bremen Town Musicians complete their stories. The game looks great and has a wonderful soundtrack of arrangements from classical music. If you have an hour or two to kill with a little one and don’t mind reading the text to them, it’s a decent time.The Sierra Discovery series had a few other games as well. The 1992 game Quarky & Quaysoo's Turbo Science was produced by Jeff Tunnell Productions. If you don’t know who Jeff Tunnell is, by the way, he was one of the co-founders of Dynamix, which we’ll talk about in a bit, and he broke off in 1990 to form his own development studio, which created games like The Incredible Machine, Sid & Al’s Incredible Toons and 3-D Ultra Pinball. His team also made three graphical adventure games we’ll cover in more detail when we talk about Dynamix later in this episode.Quarky & Quaysoo's Turbo Science is about two space creatures who race around with other aliens using science to help their vehicles gain an edge. The game’s broken up into animated screens where you answer quiz questions about various science-related events before you hop in your vehicle and move on to the next checkpoint. It’s well-animated and mildly fun for an educational title, but a bit tedious due to all the pop-ups with science questions you need to answer to advance. What’s most notable about this game is its emphasis on strategy, which is a bit unusual for an adventure game – it actually rewards skillful play and encourages players to learn to answer questions correctly so they can beef up their racing gear earlier on in the game.1993’s Pepper's Adventures in Time is a more conventional point and click adventure game with a red-haired girl named Pepper traveling to different eras in time to save her dog, Lockjaw. While it doesn’t feature voice acting, the game’s dialogue is presented in cartoon bubbles. This game is actually a legitimately decent adventure that’s mildly educational but also quite funny, perhaps because it was designed by many of Sierra’s all-stars, including Bill Davis, Mark Seibert, Jane Jensen, Josh Mandel, Gano Haine and Lorelai Shannon, who’d all worked on many of the Sierra games most people know today. The game’s graphics and animation are also wonderful, very much portrayed in the same quirky style of the Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network shows of the 1990s. If you’re a fan of the Hoagie section of LucasArt’s Day of the Tentacle where you get to interact with the founding fathers of the United States, you will love this game. It even has a scene with Benjamin Franklin and a mad scientist character named Uncle Fred!Sierra Discovery’s EcoQuest series is also worthwhile, less an educational series than a product of the sort of preachy environmentalism of the early 1990s that spawned things like Free Willy and Captain Planet and the Planeteers.The first game, 1991’s EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus, was created by Bill Davis and designed by Gano Haine and Jane Jensen, and it’s an easy point and click adventure where a ten-year-old boy named Adam Greene befriends a distressed dolphin named Delphineus, who happens to be able to speak perfect English for some reason. The two eventually head out on a journey to the undersea kingdom of Eluria in search of a whale king named Cetus, with Adam learning about underwater ecosystems and pollution and marine conservation along the way.The 1992 sequel, which is simply titled Lost Secret of the Rainforest, was this time led by Gano Haine and features a slightly older Adam now able to speak to all sorts of animals – and y’know, that was probably how they should have played things in the first game, just making Adam a Dr. Doolittle type from the start.This time, Adam’s on the ground above, exploring tropical rainforests in search of some medicine to help a distressed tribe. I personally think this game’s a little more interesting than the first EcoQuest, but also guilty of the white savior narrative you often see with stories about indigenous tribes. It also gets a little Indiana Jones-ish towards the end when you start exploring ruins. I’d recommend giving this one a try if you haven’t, because it is a fun and worthwhile adventure that’s not nearly as preachy as you might assume.But a word of warning - if you like voice acting in your adventure games, only the first EcoQuest got an upgrade to a multimedia talkie edition.Alongside Sierra’s edutainment series, the publisher was also busy localizing games from the French publisher Coktel Vision that also had a strong appeal to children. Ken Williams had already had Sierra localize some Japanese action titles like Thexder, Silpheed, Sorcerian and Zeliard from Game Arts, but the Coktel Vision games were a better fit for the publisher because many of them were adventure games. In fact, with the exception of the educational series Adibou and a few of their earlier games, Sierra published almost everything Coktel Vision developed from 1990 through 1996 and even decided to purchase them, with a sale closing in 1993. Coktel Vision remained a part of Sierra throughout the 1990s, and while I won’t bore you again with the convoluted history lesson of late 1990s mergers and acquisitions in software publishing that eventually knocked Sierra out of business, let’s just say that by the early 2000s, Coktel Vision was a shadow of its former self.But in the 1990s, it was still a popular and exciting European studio that produced some really interesting games, many of which were directed by Muriel Tramis, who’s often known as “The Roberta Williams of France.” We talked about her in the previous episode of this show, but we didn’t get to her most famous series, co-created with the artist Pierre Gilhodes: Gobliiins, which currently just released its sixth installment, by the way, but which debuted in Europe in 1991 and saw its first three games come out in 1992 through 1994 in North America through Sierra.The premise of the original game is that you control three goblins – which is why the game’s title has three I’s in the word Gobliiins – and solve puzzles to locate some magic components so you can stop an evil wizard and rescue your king. This is not a traditional adventure game, because it’s broken up into single-screen levels, but the point and click interface makes it really feel like one. Each of your three goblins has a different power and personality, and the result is a game that feels like a cross between Lemmings and The Lost Vikings. It’s really fun and original, and I highly recommend it today!The second game, Gobliins 2: The Prince Buffoon, only has two I’s in its name because you only control two goblins this time around. This one feels more like an actual adventure game because you pick up items and move between screens to accomplish goals. The third game, Goblins 3, has one I in its name because – guess what? Just one goblin this time around! But Sierra for some dumb reason decided to call it Goblins Quest 3. Instead of controlling multiple goblins this time around, your lone character recruits sidekicks to help out with different tasks.Coktel Vision is long gone, but Gobliiins lives on thanks to Pierre Gilhodes. The more recent games from 2009, 2023 and yes, this year, 2026 all feature the same art style and characters as well as the goofy pseudo-speak gibberish the characters make when they talk. The fourth and fifth chapters both have three I’s in their name, so they take after the style of the original game. And the sixth chapter, which has two I’s in its name, is a direct sequel to Gobliins 2 and certainly the best-looking game in the series thanks to some really gorgeous painted artwork and awesome animations.I’m so glad these games are still a thing, and I’m also glad I got a chance to explain their odd naming convention to listeners who actually might care about it!Coktel Vision also produced another game series in a cartoony style called Playtoons. There were five of these, all released between 1994 and 1995, and while they are really more like living storybooks and aren’t adventure games in the traditional sense, their big idea was that players could create animations from assets included in the stories they owned. Unfortunately, the fifth game never got released outside of Europe, and I don’t think the other four sold very well based on the scant information I’ve been able to find on them. Each of the games has such a distinctive European look that they’re not nearly as interesting as something like Sid & Al’s Incredible Toons, which was definitely better tuned to the sensibilities of an American audience.Likewise, I don’t think Coktel Vision found too much success in North America with The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the  Schnibble, a 1994 point and click adventure game directed by Muriel Tramis and once again featuring the visual style of Pierre Gilhodes. This game is sometimes presumed to be a part of the Gobliiins series, but it’s actually a standalone game set in its own continuity.So in The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the  Schnibble, you play as Woodruff, a wild man who wakes up outside the house of Professor Azimuth having forgotten pretty much everything, including why he’s disturbed to find a button from a missing teddy bear, why society is prejudiced against creatures called “boozooks” and why he can’t remember the meaning of the word “schnibble.” He also has forgotten – or perhaps never learned – how to read, so none of the local literature or signage around town can help him. Oh, and he doesn’t have any shoes, which is a problem he has to solve almost immediately in the game to progress.And so Woodruff has to get his bearings by wandering around and talking to people, many of whom are self-absorbed and who speak cryptically about the Schnibble, which to some is a force for good that makes the world a better place, but to a sad boozook seems to be some sort of messiah and to a cult of believers seems to be a roaming beast who punishes the unrighteous.If you haven’t picked up on it already, this game involves a lot of made up words to keep straight in your head, including “tobozon,” which is a sort of tablet-like device where you can input nonsensical strings of words to see recordings of things like a message from Professor Azimuth or the local news. The game even makes fun of how odd all of this is with a brief cutscene where one of the game’s animators is sitting near his computer, reading the script and questioning what he’s being asked to depict. This sort of fourth wall breaking is par for the course in this game, and if you’re the sort of person who loves to see characters doing zany stuff for no reason, hear fart noises when you trigger actions or battle villains with on the nose names like BigWig., you’ll enjoy this adventure. It has a simple point and click interface with a context-sensitive cursor and it’s well-illustrated and animated, with some really distinctive graphics and surprisingly decent voice acting for the era. Many of the puzzles involve making use of the game’s strange vocabulary to use the tobozon or compel other characters to act.Unfortunately for gamers of the 1990s, The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the  Schnibble was probably a little too out there to be a hit. It’s not nearly as accessible as Sierra’s mainstream games and its French sensibilities made it a little too offbeat. The localization team also neglected to translate some of the captions into English, which means you absolutely must play it with the audio on. I think modern gamers who are more used to playing indie games from all over the world will probably find it a little more palatable, but it’s definitely a weird one that you have to go into with an open mind. I’d suggest playing the  Gobliiins games first.But if your sensibilities are a little more in the realm of American animation, Sierra also published an adventure game in 1996 by Funny Bone Interactive called Stay Tooned!. It opens up with an FMV sequence that leads to a television where you take control of the remote and have to change channels to watch several different shows ranging from old cartoons to parodies of things you might recognize like “Whinefeld” or “The XXX Files” or “Steven Seagull’s In the Line of Danger.” But what eventually happens is that you stumble on a cartoon where the characters break out of the TV, and their escape cartoonizes the world around you, including your apartment building. A blue cartoon cat named Chisel swipes your remote, and you have to retrieve it in order to zap Chisel, his pink twin sister Pixel and the other toons like the neurotic cat Fiddle, the easily irritated bulldog Schmooze, the cheerfully aggravating dog Scoops, the mad scientist Dr. Pickles, the purple gelatinous Dad joke-spouting creature known as The Glob and a bunch of German accented-critters known as the Uberbugs back into their world.Stay Tooned! is an absolutely wild adventure that’s full of arcade action sequences and other odd events and happenings. But it’s also not a conventional point and click adventure game because you don’t control a character onscreen. It’s more like a twisted, cartoony version of one of the MacVenture games by way of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. It’s the sort of game where Pixel the cat may steal your cursor, where the toons will lock you up in the Wild West jail cell you thought you were going to put them in or where Chisel the cat will ask if you want to play catch, toss a lit bomb at you and then, when you manage to toss it back and blow up an entire floor of your building, a cow dressed up like Smokey the Bear will pop up and say, “Only Moo Can Prevent Hallway Fires.”And yes, that is an actual sequence in the game.You’ll also encounter the game’s lead programmer Ben Howard, who occasionally shows up in the game in video clips. He first appears at the beginning to give you tips on how to play, but you’ll also find him in secret areas or breaking the fourth wall whenever it’s funny.I love Stay Tooned!, and I cannot believe this game has lingered in obscurity for decades now. It’s filled with great gags, fun minigames and interesting moments I absolutely would have loved back in the 1990s when I was watching Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain and Freakazoid! on TV and it’s really incredible that this game got overlooked.As with many of the other late 90s Sierra games, I think it would have benefitted from being available on a console system.Sadly, the only way to play it today is the same way you’d play most of the games featured in this episode – by getting Windows to cooperate or finding an emulator capable of running it.Let’s go back to Coktel Vision for a moment and talk about one of their most visually distinctive and ambitious series of games: Inca, which had two parts released in 1992 and 1993 in Europe and published in North America by Sierra in the years that followed. This series is about as high concept as it gets, taking the quest for the fabled city of El Dorado into space and pitting the Inca against the Spanish in a battle across the stars, complete with starships that look like Spanish galleons and Incan Tumi tools, Spaniard warriors wearing 16th century metal armor and Nazca lines decorating everything.While these games were definitely an acquired taste in the 1990s due to their fusion of adventure game and Wing Commander-style arcade action mechanics, they have an impressive combination of full-motion video and gameplay that kind of feels unlike anything else you’ve ever played. The first game is definitely the better of the two, putting you in control of an Incan warrior named El Dorado who has to gather the Time, Energy and Matter gems to battle Aguirre, the commander of the Spanish army. The game of course includes a lot of Incan artwork and locations like Machu Pichu, but you also have to interact with the Mayans at one point in the game for some reason. Oh, and Inca has several mazes to navigate, though they’re thankfully made more fun by shooting gallery sequences where you blast digitized sprites of actors in Spanish army costumes.The sequel is definitely ambitious and has such a crazy story I’m not even going to attempt to explain it. While I prefer the first game, I love them both and definitely recommend them.I also want to mention that the both games’ CD-ROM edition soundtracks are incredibly good, and there’s even a soft rock song called “Inca People” by J.M. Marrier that really deserves to be played more. But the second game definitely is let down by a less sophisticated use of full-motion video and some really hammy voice acting.Coktel Vision created a similar, but less interesting, game in 1995 called The Last Dynasty, but it’s less of an adventure game and more of a space sim with full motion video sequences that occasionally give way to first person puzzle solving. The story is sort of like a low-rent take on the movie The Last Starfighter, where a wannabe astronaut named Mel Raauq and his friend Dok make contact with some aliens and wind up taking control of a spaceship and fighting the forces of the galactic tyrant Lord Iron. It’s not a bad game at all, but it’s also not nearly as memorable as either Inca game.As for more traditional adventure games, Ween: The Prophecy is another early 90s Coktel Vision game Sierra localized for North America by dropping the name of the adventure’s main character, “Ween,” from the title. It’s a distinctive-looking game with great graphics and gameplay reminiscent of the second Gobliiins adventure where puzzles are fairly sequential, but its sensibilities are different enough from Sierra adventures that it isn’t for everyone. I’d even caution fans of The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble about this one, because it’s not nearly as engaging as that adventure.The main complaint seems to be that the game’s scant on story and heavy on inventory and object-placement puzzles, which is true, but it also has a strange, dreamlike atmosphere that includes some peculiar sequences where costumed characters show up onscreen in FMV sequences and speak to you. If you enjoy adventure games that are willing to go to weird places, Ween: The Prophecy might be a good one to try.A less polarizing game is the 1993 adventure Lost in Time, which was developed by Muriel Tramis and released in two parts in Europe due to its size. And while this game has many redeeming qualities, I’m going to warn you right away that talkie edition has some occasionally atrocious voice acting in its North American version where it sounds like the same handful of people voiced all the characters.The premise of Lost in Time is that a woman named Doralice [SJ1] is mysteriously sent back in time from 1992 to 1840 to explore a wooden ship that in her time was a shipwreck. Aboard the vessel, she encounters several different characters who gradually help her to understand what is happening. I don’t want to say too much more because the story works best if you know very little about it going in, but suffice it to say that this is a tale involving time travelers and Doralice has a connection to them somehow. This isn’t too much of a giveaway, because the game’s box is subtitled, “He plotted your doom centuries before you were born.”The game is played in the first person and uses intercut animated sequences in smaller overlay panes to communicate movement, but it does have an inconsistent visual style due to some scenes being pre-rendered and others being hand-painted. The game’s characters are digitized sprites of actual actors, and the game will also occasionally cut away to a view of Doralice’s eyes as she investigates or speaks. It’s a neat trick that probably allowed the development team to conserve resources during a time when games needed to be able to fit on floppy disks, but the version most people in North America might have played is probably the CD-ROM edition, which didn’t have the same constraints.One interesting facet of Lost in Time is that it evokes some of the same themes from Muriel Tramis’s earlier adventures, including themes about slavery and indigenous peoples. This game in particular has some interesting relationships between characters of different ethnic backgrounds, and Doralice herself is dark-skinned and has an indefinite racial identity. In the 1990s, this was incredibly progressive, and that may be one reason Doralice looks like a white woman and most of the other characters are also white on the game’s North American box. In Europe, the box art features the ship upon which the game begins.Muriel Tramis’s last adventure game published by Sierra was 1996’s Urban Runner, and it’s a tremendously interesting full motion video game featuring rooftop parkour chase sequence like you might see in the 2008 first person platformer Mirror’s Edge… at least at the beginning of the game. But the running hinted at by the game’s title and interface ends pretty quickly, and unfortunately, the excitement of the introduction sequence quickly gives way to  a more conventional adventure game where the tension evaporates as your character, Max, tries to clear his name from a murder he’s been mistaken for committing.This eventually leads to uncovering a conspiracy that also threatens Adda, a woman who’s connected to a drug trafficking ring Max was initially investigating. And as plots go… Urban Runner doesn’t have the best one. After you escape the initial chase, it turns into a fairly nonsensical detective story that feels like it was rewritten several times to go along with the footage the development team was able to actually get from a far more ambitious film shoot that didn’t quite work out. Given that Urban Runner ran famously over budget and had to be a major hit to even break even, I’m probably not too far off in my assessment there, and this is a game with basic cable sensibilities, unconvincing acting, incoherent camera angles and a very bland narration by Max that’s delivered at a rapid speed but a flat inflection that makes it sound like the actor is just trying to get through his lines.And I should mention – the main actor is Brandon Massey, who also stars in Police Quest: Open Season. Oddly, most of the dialogue in the game isn’t spoken during the filmed scenes but is overdubbed, and there are even scenes where the actors are pretending to speak but there are no actual lines of dialogue.The game’s puzzles, for better or for worse, are largely simple and easy to understand inventory puzzles, and there’s even a hint system if you get stuck. Unlike Coktel Vision’s other games, most puzzles don’t require a lot of lateral thinking. Unfortunately, a few of them are time-based, which means you have to put up with some aggravation here and there. I’m not really sure it’s worth it, because Urban Runner’s story doesn’t pan out too well and the choice of endings are both ridiculously anticlimactic and barely changes what happens.As you might guess, I recommend Urban Runner more as a curiosity than a great game. Unlike a lot of other Muriel Tramis games, it’s missing the sense of social justice that gives most of her other adventures more of an edge. It’s a pretty sad outcome because it cost so much to make that Coktel Vision shifted to exclusively making educational games from that point forward.Unlike Sierra’s Roberta Williams, who had a hit with Phantasmagoria the year before, the “Roberta Williams of France” had gambled on full motion video adventures and lost.And I want to be clear in saying I take no joy in that statement, because Muriel Tramis is an important creator who not only helped build Coktel Vision into one of France’s greatest game publishers in the 80s and 90s, but who also revolutionized European adventure games and educational software. She is often recognized as the first black woman who designed a video game, and she’s championed both women and black creators throughout her career and was even the first woman in France to be appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour back in 2018.So let’s celebrate her for what she’s done. She’s truly one of the greats. In 1984, Jeff Tunnell and Damon Slye founded a software developer in Oregon to create a Battlezone-style game for the Apple II called Stellar 7. This development studio, Dynamix, would go on to create many groundbreaking games throughout the 1980s that used 3D polygonal engines and digitized graphics and sound in ways that were well ahead of the curve. In addition to a sequel to Stellar 7 called Arcticfox, some of their 1980s games included The Train: Escape to Normandy, Caveman Ughlympics, MechWarrior, Deathtrack, Project Firestart, David Wolf: Secret Agent and the fantastic arcade action-style combat flight sim, A-10 Tank Killer.But Dynamix was still just getting warmed up when they were acquired by Sierra On-Line in 1990, because the games they’re really known for today include classics like The Incredible Machine, Red Baron, the Front Page Sports games, the Metaltech, Earthsiege, Starsiege and Tribes games and 3-D Ultra Pinball,Dynamix wasn’t really known for adventure games, but under Sierra, the studio released five of them. One game, Space Quest V: Roger Wilco – The Next Mutation, was covered in our previous episode. But the other four are all definitely worth talking about as well, especially since two of them were quite popular and most really hold up today.One of those games is Rise of the Dragon, a cyberpunk adventure game that’s so clearly inspired by Blade Runner that the main character is literally named William “Blade” Hunter. In the Sega CD talkie version of the game, he’s voiced by Cam Clarke, a voice actor I’ve mentioned before because, among other characters, he’s the guy who voiced Leonardo in the original Ninja Turtles TV show as well as Liquid Snake in Metal Gear Solid. It’s a little jarring to hear him in this game trying to be a hard-boiled detective, but I’ve gotta say, Sega CD cyberpunk adventure game fans of the early 1990s were sure lucky to have this game and Snatcher available on the same console. My parents would have killed me if I’d brought either of them home.The original version of the game, though, was on DOS, and it’s actually quite a good-looking version that makes use of a limited color palette and lightly animated cinematic-style scenes to convey a sense of the same sort of dystopian mid-21st century Los Angeles the movie Blade Runner brought to life. The graphics are painted and drawn in the style of an underground graphic novel, and as the title suggests, the game involves a world in which Asian corporations and gangs have become quite prominent in society, which is kind of a defining quality of the cyberpunk genre. Instead of replicants, Blade hunts drug dealers who are mutating citizens of LA with a substance called MTZ, and while I don’t want to spoil the game’s surprise ending, I will say that this plot element means the title is far more literal than you might realize!One of the most interesting things about Rise of the Dragon is that the game will occasionally break into action sequences where Blade has shootouts with armed foes. These are definitely the weak spot of the game due to their clunky controls, but they’re skippable in the computer versions. On the Sega CD, you do get better controls, but the arcade sequences are also mandatory.Rise of the Dragon was very influential for its time because it played quite differently from other point and click adventures. It’s largely played in the first person and mouse-driven, much like the MacVenture games, but it also features dialogue trees and an internal clock that governs characters’ actions. The game’s story was surprisingly mature for its time and really felt like it was trying to deliver a more grounded, plot-driven adventure than the lighter fare seen in many Sierra and LucasArts games. Playing it today, it’s a little less impressive because so many of its ideas were integrated into the genre over the 1990s, but I still do recommend it – it’s one of my favorite games of that era.Dynamix followed Rise of the Dragon up with the Indiana Jones-styled game Heart of China, and perhaps because we already had a great Indiana Jones adventure game when Heart of China debuted in 1991 and another on the way the following year, the game just feels less exciting than Rise of the Dragon overall. But it’s still a fun and worthwhile adventure game, and I do recommend it as one of those games you probably missed but still ought to play.The plot, which is told through an opening cinematic featuring digitized characters, involves the kidnapping of a girl named Kate Lomax by an evil warlord named Li Deng who is holding her in a fortress in Chengdu. As the former World War I fighter pilot Jake Masters – but everyone, including the game’s dialogue window, calls him Lucky - you have to head to Hong Kong, rescue Kate and get her back to her father in Paris to collect your reward money, but the longer you take, the smaller that reward is. Your journey takes you through Mongolia, Nepal and Istanbul as the story twists and turns, and your willingness to build a relationship between the three characters and your negotiation skills has an impact on the story overall.One of the interesting things about Heart of China is that you also play portions of the game as the ex-ninja Zhao Chi and as Kate once she’s been set free. And yes, I know that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a Chinese character also be an ex-ninja. Chalk that up to ninjas just being really popular in 1991.Heart of China also has a couple of arcade action sequences – one where you drive a tank down a polygonal 3D landscape with bitmapped trees and another where you have a side-scrolling duel on top of the Orient Express train cars. Both are pretty intuitive and fun but also, mercifully, skippable.The other interesting thing about Heart of China is that the game has a number of endings. I haven’t seen an exact count, but I know that beyond the deaths, there are at least five mentioned in the official hint book, including one where Kate leaves Lucky in Istanbul to marry a princess while she returns home. The game will even tell you where the plot is branching so you can go back and try different things out.I hope I’ve at least whetted your appetite for this underrated adventure game. I will say that it’s not the most culturally sensitive game I’ve ever played, but I also didn’t find any parts where it was playing on racist 1930s movie serial stereotypes quite the same way the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom did, so that’s a plus.But enough of the real world. Let’s move on to the tale of a cartoonish young boy who likes to skateboard, play video games, torment babysitters and annoy his teachers and principal. He’s got two sisters, a terrifying bully, and a loyal pet and, of course, a tree house to hang out in with his friends.And I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Did Bart Simpson get his own adventure game?” But nope, we’re talking about The Adventures of Willy Beamish, a point and click adventure game from 1991 that definitely has a lot of Simpsons-style humor and takes some clear inspiration from that show, but also channels the same sorts of creative, imaginative mischief you’ll find in the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, which was also very popular at the time.The premise of the game is that Willy, who’s 9 years old, is a master of the Nintari video game console and desperately wants to participate in an upcoming video game championship, but his low grades and the loss of his father’s job at a public relations agency results in him not only losing access to his video games, but also not having enough money to pay the $2,500 registration fee. And no amount of chores Willy can do on his summer vacation will get him anywhere close to earning that money.Fortunately, Willy has some hope. A local company called Tootsweet that runs an artificial sweetener factory in town is having a frog jumping contest, and Willy happens to have a loyal frog named Horny who’s not just his pet, but also his best friend. Horny can easily jump 15 feet when he has the right motivation, but give him some flies and a Slam Dunk Cola and he can even beat the champion Turbofrog!Things are soon looking up for Willy’s dad Gordon, too, because he gets a job managing PR for Tootsweet. But what he doesn’t realize is that the company’s president, Leona Humpford, is planning to set Gordon up to take the fall for a plumber’s strike she’s crookedly arranged with union leader Louis Stoole. The strike will eventually result in causing the local sewers to overflow and pollute the town, a crisis Leona plans to turn to her advantage since she also owns the town’s sludge processing plant, which the game suggests produces the actual raw ingredients for the sweetener. Oh, and Leona’s also behind the frog jumping contest, which is a ruse to gather all the tastiest frogs in town so she can enjoy some frog legs. This lady’s evil!The story’s good and filled with great characters, but what’s actually most memorable about the game is how it looks and plays like a cartoon. Sure, it’s not quite as sophisticated as some of the later games from the 1990s in its animation, but it has a strong sense of art design that really make the town of Frumpton and its inhabitants feel believable.Playing the game all the way through is like enjoying a lengthy feature film where the kid is smarter than the adults, but also rather innocent in the face of the bleak, toxic adult world that are threatening to crush his hopes and dreams. You know the main character’s going to prevail, but where you’re also excited to see what sorts of hijnks and misadventures he’s going to get into next, whether it’s trying not to push his little sister too high on the swing, battling a babysitter who turns into a bat, befriending Japanese tourists who are secretly a clan of ninja or literally flushing a giant toilet to dispose of the bad guys and save his father from being ruined.The original 1991 release is a fantastic game on its own, but Sierra eventually released a talkie edition on CD-ROM and a Sega CD port that has some extra features. I will say that the voice acting is hit or miss, but the talkie version adds in additional animations for the characters as they’re speaking, so it feels more like a cartoon as a result.If you have yet to play The Adventures of Willy Beamish, you need to play it immediately. It’s a classic and one of my all-time favorite games.I’ve got one more Dynamix adventure to mention, and it’s quite different because it wasn’t developed by Jeff Tunnell Productions. It’s a 1996 adaptation of the Arthur C. Clarke novels Rendezvous with Rama and Rama II, with the latter novel’s co-author, Gentry Lee, serving as the game’s designer and writer. As you might recall, this was actually the second game based on this particular novel series – the first came out in 1984 and was developed by Telarium.The premise of Rama is that an alien cylindrical object has entered the solar system and the authorities on Earth, having used up all the Greek and Roman pantheon names, have turned to Hindu deities and named this object Rama. The game follows the plot of the second novel much more than the first, and how that hits you really depends on whether you liked the second novel – many Clarke fans were divided on it. But I will say that both Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee appear in this game in some of the full motion video scenes, and it’s pretty cool to see a famous author interacting with his own creation and encouraging the player.As for how the game plays, it’s more in the style of Myst with some full motion video sequences featuring actors mostly at the beginning of the game. Once you actually make it aboard Rama, it’s pretty much just a series of puzzles to solve and occasional bits of story. How engaged you remain depends on how much you care about exploring the ship and solving logical puzzles and math problems. There are a couple of events that occur to give the story a sense of urgency, but honestly, puzzle-solving’s the main objective here.Sadly, the game hints at a sequel – Arthur C. Clarke himself even mentions it in the game’s final scene – but Dynamix never got a chance to make it. Sierra thought the game was going to be a huge hit and really miscalculated how interested people still were in adventure games in 1996. They should have paid attention to the commercial failure of another science fiction adventure game based on a famous writer’s work, 1995’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, which we’ll cover in the next episode.And even more  sadly, Dynamix didn’t make any more adventure games after Rama. Most of their output after that was just sequels and expansions, with their only hits being Starsiege: Tribes in 1998 and its sequel in 2001. Sadly, the latter game was also one of their last, because Dynamix was fully shut down in August of that year and several of the core team went on to found a new development studio in Eugene called GarageGames, which would spend the next 20 years supporting its Torque game engine and working on commercial simulators and educational software. We’ve reached the end of the road for Sierra and its development studios, and I’d like to close out this episode by mentioning that while I’m not sure Sierra would have fared too well in the 2000s as everything shifted to 3D, the games industry was definitely a far less interesting place without Sierra taking big risks and trying new things. As toxic and difficult as the Sierra workplace could be at times, the people who worked there often talk about it as being one of the best jobs they ever had, and the creative freedom many of the designers at Sierra were able to obtain from Ken Williams despite his primary focus on making a lot of money was pretty remarkable for the time.It’s pretty much an established fact that the point and click adventure game genre died in North America by around 2002, and it’s only because gamers in Germany and Eastern Europe developed such a strong love for solving puzzles and playing through adventures that the genre was ever able to make a comeback about 10 years later. Sure, people credit DoubleFine for its famous Kickstarter campaign that brought us Broken Age, and Telltale Games did a lot to try to keep adventure gaming evolving as a genre. But the fact that we have so many commercially viable point and click games today isn’t due to nostalgia or a steady stream of remakes and reboots of older titles; it’s because there’s an appetite for new adventure games that these hardcore genre fans helped to create.But before we can talk about all those modern adventures, we still need to cover the games we haven’t talked about from the 1990s.After all, there were plenty of other 90s adventure game developers of note, and I owe you an update about what Steve Mertetzky was up to at Legend Entertainment and Boffo Games during that decade making games like Spellcasting and The Space Bar. And we also need to talk about the efforts of developers and publishers like Westwood Associates, Interplay, Adeline Software International, Humongous Games, Activision, Revolution Software, Cryo, Perfect Entertainment and MicroProse!And then we’ll turn our focus to the multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, Blade Runner, The Last Express, Black Dahlia and The Neverhood. And of course we have an obligation to accept Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.Then we’ll finally close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream. We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore! THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I want to recommend Is This Seat Taken?, a 2025 puzzle game by Poti Poti Studio SL that started out on Android and received a port to the PC by Wholesome Games Presents. And this game is wholesome, because it involves helping a bunch of little anthropomorphic shapes find seats in a variety of social situations like movie theaters, diners, train cars and stadiums while also indulging their picky preferences. Some don’t want to shower, and others don’t want to sit next to people who smell bad. Some want to be near their kids, and others want to be anywhere but beside a kid. Some want to make lots of noise and have fun while others want to be quiet and read a book. And the game’s all about optimizing these situations in visual logic puzzles that are quite fun to solve and occasionally even challenging, though never in a rage-inducing way.The game’s just $10 on Steam, the Switch eShop and mobile stores and it’s worth every penny. It’s fun on any platform and well worth a few hours of your time! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, we’re going to keep talking about Sierra On-Line and some of their other big games in the 1990s, including Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest 4-6, King’s Quest 6-8, Gabriel Knight, Freddy Pharkas, Torrin’s Passage, Phantasmagoria, Shivers and more! Enjoy your adventure through adventure gaming with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!(NOTE: Blast this cold! Sean will get his voice back soon.)-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 6: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 4Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:https://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/234/https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-20-year-estrangement-of-the-two-guys-from-andromedahttps://www.filfre.net/2025/04/the-end-of-sierra-as-we-knew-it-part-1-the-acquisition/https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-sierra-and-a-disgraced-cop-made-the-most-reactionary-game-of-the-90s/https://policequest.fandom.com/wiki/Criticism_and_controversies#Police_Quest_IVhttps://policequest.fandom.com/wiki/Video_Vigilantehttp://www.hardcoregaming101.net/freddy-pharkas-frontier-pharmacist/https://allowe.com/games/fpfp/about-freddy.htmlhttp://www.eufrasio.com/resume/https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Daventry_Suitehttps://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tla3z/comment/c4nl8ew/https://gkpages.altervista.org/Interviews/DesignerDiaries_04.htmlhttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/LighthouseTheDarkBeing--------------------------------------------------We’re going to cover the rest of the Sierra SCI games including the Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest series and even Police Quest IV: Open Season. We’ll also talk about Roberta Williams continuing to push the adventure game genre forward with King’s Quest VI, VII and Mask of Eternity and Phantasmagoria. We’ll cover Jane Jensen’s rise to prominence as an adventure game master with the Gabriel Knight games, explore Al Lowe and Josh Mandel’s collaborations on Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist and Torrin’s Passage and even touch on the Shivers series of horror games the far more obscure Lighthouse: The Dark Being.It’s gonna be an epic adventure through the 1990s, and I’m happy to take you through it! I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Let’s delve back into the golden era of 1990s adventure games you probably have heard of, as well as a few you possibly haven’t!As we discussed a few of episodes again, Sierra’s reputation for adventure game excellence went well beyond the family-friendly King’s Quest, the grounded-in-reality Police Quest, the science fiction silliness of Space Quest or the fantasy adventuring of Quest for Glory. In fact, one of Sierra’s most popular series, Leisure Suit Larry, was aimed at adults, and while it was far from the only raunchy software out there – Infocom’s Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Free Spirit Software’s Sex Vixens from Space, Coktel Vision’s Emanuelle and Megatech Software’s Cobra Mission: Panic in the Cobra City and Metal & Lace and Knights of Xentar are just some of the many examples of games released for various computer platforms that didn’t require players to put on a trenchcoat and dark glasses and buy the games in a seedy location in the bad part of town so the neighbors wouldn’t see.Leisure Suit Larry was smutty, sure, but it was also relatively tame. In most of the games, you had to work pretty hard to see any actual sex, and the nudity was so pixelated even in the Super VGA games that it wasn’t too titillating. I’d argue what made the series so successful was that it was loaded with humor that would make adults laugh out loud but sail right over the heads of the kids who snuck into their parents’ bedrooms to try to play it. Even Larry’s continued insistence on wearing a leisure suit was such a dated reference by the 1990s that the subtext of gold medallions, disco dancing and flop sweat being masked by stinky cologne were all lost on those who hadn’t lived through the 1970s – myself included, because I only lived in that decade for a couple of months.We discussed the first Leisure Suit Larry game when we talked about Sierra’s original Advanced Game Interpreter, or AGI engine games, but the next two games, released in 1988 and 1989, received an upgrade to the Sierra Creative Interpreter, or SCI0 engine, for both better graphics and some gameplay enhancement. In fact, if you complete the original Leisure Suit Larry and seduce the final woman, Eve, in the penthouse hot tub, Ken Williams walks onscreen after the fireworks go off and tells you all about the soon to be released sequel, which he admits they haven’t made up a name for yet.But that sequel is actually quite different from the original night out in Lost Wages.Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), fakes out players with an intro that makes them think Larry Laffer has found a lasting relationship with Eve as he mows her lawn in his trademark leisure suit. She pulls into the driveway and doesn’t know who he is, kicking him to the curb and releasing her Scottish terrier, Brutus, to stand guard. After he takes a whizz on Larry’s leg (with Larry remarking that this dog looks familiar!), the game moves into its actual story, which is……kind of a spy/intrigue story? Really? In an odd twist, Larry wins a million dollars in the lottery, then also wins a spot on a dating show and is accidentally selected as the winner by the empty-headed, but very beautiful, Bachelorette Barbara Bimbo. They’re supposed to go on an all expenses paid month-long cruise together about the U.S.S. Love Tub in the South Pacific. Larry’s dumb luck has never been greater.But Barbie turns out to be a little more cunning than her TV appearance suggested. She fakes being sick and sends her horny mother on the trip instead. Larry escapes from the ship and winds up on at an island resort that’s crawling with KGB agents. As it happens, Larry accidentally picked up some microfilm they’re searching for.Larry eventually evades them by sneaking off the island on a plane, landing on the island of Nontoonyt and crossing paths with the evil Dr. Nonookee, who’s also searching for the microfilm and who’s also hypnotized all of the native women to serve him without question. And by the way, if you’re paying attention to those puns, here’s another one – this is a virgin island, by which the game literally means all the girls are saving themselves for marriage. And when Larry meets the girl of his dreams, a topless princess named Kalalau, he has to earn the right to marry her by impressing Chief Keneewauwau, a man who looks suspiciously like Ken Williams from the original game.As big of a loser as Larry is, things go right for him in the end. He accidentally kills Dr. Nonookee, frees the island and gets married to Kalalau and we get to see them naked and running on a beach while Larry, feeling younger than ever, gets a happy ending in every sense of the phrase.It doesn’t last, though, and we find out why in the third game, Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals. Five years later, the island’s become a commercialized tourist trap full of condos and resorts. Chief Keneewauwau is now Chairman Kenneth and Kalalau has realized she’s in love with someone named Bobbi, who Larry soon finds out isn’t another man, but a woman. She announces that by the customs of the island, they’re now divorced. Even worse, Chairman Kenneth fires him since he’s no longer part of the family.His pride stung and his job now over, Larry struts around the island in his trademark leisure suit, getting into a series of raunchy misadventures. And in many ways, this game is a return to form, because the second game actually penalizes you for flirting with women and tones down a lot of the more overt sexual humor, while this game almost immediately features nudity, sex on the beach and an enormously gifted statue Larry manages to pawn off on a tourist who loves to spend her money on stupid things.But then there’s a curveball, and it’s a big one. See, there was this character in the second game named Polyester Patty who was part of Dr. Nonookee’s hypnotized harem. Five years later, she’s a jazz pianist performing under the name Passionate Patti, and for some reason, she falls for Larry, but accidentally lets it slip that she’s still in a relationship with someone else. While a crestfallen Larry takes off, you take control of Passionate Patti and have to go find him, using your feminine wiles (and most of your underwear) to track him down.The game ends with Larry and Patti being captured by Amazonian Lesbian cannibals and imprisoned in a village. Al Lowe must have realized he wrote himself into a corner with this twist, because the pair open up the background, literally fall out of the game and wind up in Coarsegold, California on the Sierra backlot where games like Space Quest II, Police Quest and King’s Quest IV are being made using practical effects and soundstages.Roberta Williams even gets annoyed as Larry and Patti walk on set and ruin a shot of Rosella inside the mouth of a whale. But she’s intrigued as Larry tells her he’s had some adventures of his own, and he winds up working for Sierra, staying at the Williams’ lake house and coding his adventures in Lost Wages into a computer while a topless Patti sits beside him.Once again, Larry gets a happy ending as he turns from former software salesman into software developer, and there’s even a fan theory that he’s coding the SCI1 remake of his first adventure, which debuted in 1991 using King’s Quest V’s SCI1 engine icon system and featured far more stunning 256-color VGA graphics with more alluring portraits of all the girls from his first adventure.And the remake also looks quite similar in style to the over-the-top cartoonishness of Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work, released the same year.Before you ask, no, there is no Leisure Suit Larry 4. Like I said, Al Lowe knew he’d written himself into a corner and recognized that it was far funnier to make the missing floppies for the fourth game a running joke and a plot point in the fifth one. He’s also said at different points that there was a fourth game in the works for the online service The Sierra Network and it never came to be. Either way, the absence of Leisure Suit Larry 4 became one of the longest-running jokes in adventure gaming, and the series refers to it constantly.And Leisure Suit Larry 5 advances the story to a point where Larry has amnesia because of the missing floppy disks from the fourth game and is working for an adult films producer and is sent out to record secret footage of three women who are going to appear on television on America’s Sexiest Home Videos. Meanwhile, Passionate Patti is working for the FBI as an undercover agent investigating the music industry. Their two independent adventures eventually dovetail and bring them together as national heroes as they meet President George H.W. Bush and have dinner at the White House.Leisure Suit Larry 5 marks a high point for the series because it’s the first game in which neither Larry nor Patti can die, and there’s also no way to find yourself in an unwinnable situation. The game’s really more about humorous storytelling than puzzle-solving. As such, it’s a great game to play if you just want to check the series out, because it fits the modern sensibilities of what point and click adventure games are far better than the earlier, text-driven titles.I wish I could say the same for the next game, 1993’s Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out!. It’s fairly easy, but it’s also a return to some of the earlier ideas of the series, like cheap deaths and goofy inventory-based puzzles. Passionate Patti is nowhere to be seen, and there are no other characters to play as besides Larry. It also has a rather jarring visual style because Larry himself continues to look like a cartoon character, but the girls and environments look more realistic, as if they were digitized from photos and paintings.But more than anything, the formula just starts to feel a little tired, and the addition of Super VGA graphics and voice acting don’t help with that, though I will say Sierra at least hired professional voice actors instead of whomever was in the office that day.Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love For Sail debuted in 1996 and takes a completely different approach, depicting everything in the luscious animation style similar to Ralph Bakshi’s smutty 1992 film Cool World. If you’ve seen that movie, its inspiration is clear, right down to naming all of the female characters after celebrities with sex puns for names, like Drew Barringmore and *ugh* Jamie Lee Coitus and *retch* Dewmi Moore.If you want to play a saucy cartoon show, this is your game. But this is also where the series feels like it’s straining its premise to its limits. What’s more, it ends with a post-credits scene where the cruise ship on which the game takes place gets abducted by aliens while Larry’s in the middle of some nasty cartoon sex with the voluptuous Captain Thygh. Thank goodness we never got Leisure Suit Larry Explores Uranus, one of the proposed titles for the game, which was apparently in development as a full 3D adventure.But the creative mind behind the Leisure Suit Larry games did make a couple more that I think are much better – a Wild West comedy in the style of Blazing Saddles and an animated adventure game that feels like a spiritual sequel to The Black Cauldron.Al Lowe is a pretty funny guy, and if you ever hear him in interviews, he comes across as one of those people who likes to laugh as much as he likes to make other people laugh. So it’s no surprise that when he got a little bored with the Leisure Suit Larry schtick, he turned to some classic sources of humorous inspiration and decided he’d really like to do something set in the Old West in the style of Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. After making a pitch to Roberta Williams that included accidentally saying the word “farmer-cist,” he realized that a pharmacist might make for a great adventure game character.And so he partnered with Josh Mandel and wrote a lengthy backstory for his new character they turned into an introductory ballad you get to hear in the game about a retired gunslinger with a silver ear, a high S.A.T. score and penchant for pharmacology – and I won’t torture you with my singing again, I promise.But I will say that the ballad is the perfect way to kick off Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist, one of the funniest and most fun adventure games I’ve ever played. The story opens in Coarsegold, California, where Freddy is running a pharmacy but is also troubleshooting various problems like overly flatulent horses, diarrhea outbreaks and a snail stampede, often using his knowledge of chemistry. Playing on old western tropes, Freddy has an Indian sidekick – East Indian, as in from India – and also a schoolteacher love interest named Penelope Primm. And of course he has an arch-rival, Kenny the Kid, a caricature of Ken Williams who was the outlaw responsible for shooting off Freddy’s ear. There’s even a cameo from Leisure Suit Larry’s grandpappy and several other nods to Sierra games.Because graphical adventure games aren’t great at being action games but are wonderful at having gamers solve puzzles, the setup for Freddy Pharkas is actually quite brilliant. The game forces you to spend time mixing together concoctions and is able to introduce real danger without allowing Freddy to just pull out a gun to solve his problems. And even when Freddy does return to gunslinging and gets a rematch later in the game, it doesn’t go well and he still has to use his wits to survive the final act’s surprising twists and turns.If you play the game today, chances are good you’ll be playing the CD-ROM talkie edition, and it’s a great version because it includes voice acting from some seasoned pros like Cam Clarke, Kath Soucie, Lewis Arquette, Michael Gough, Neil Ross, Susan Silo and Nicholas Guest, among others. Al Lowe himself performed the musical numbers at the beginning and end of the game. But the talkie edition is actually inferior to the original disk-based version in terms of the actual script for the game, and some of the gags and hints are removed from the CD-ROM edition.The year after Freddy Pharkas debuted, Al Lowe worked on a very different game called Torrin’s Passage, this time designed to be a family-friendly affair that had plenty of cartoon gags for the little ones and some wink and nod jokes for the adults. The animation in the game is probably its stand-out feature, and with good reason – James G. Murphy designed the characters before leaving Sierra for Pixar to become a lead animator there, and he partnered with Sierra’s talented animation director Al Eufrasio, who also worked on games like Leisure Suit Larry: Love For Sail, Space Quest 6 and King’s Quest 7.Torrin’s Passage reminds me a lot of Al Lowe’s earlier 1980s Disney games for Sierra including The Black Cauldron and Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, which he designed and programmed, as well as Mickey’s Space Adventure, which Roberta Williams designed and for which Al Lowe composed the music. While it’s far more sophisticated and obviously a lot better-looking than any of these games, featuring lavish animation, an icon-driven interface and a deeper storyline, it still has a simplicity to it that really seems to be more focused on telling an entertaining story than providing a tough adventure. That’s not to say there aren’t some puzzles that need solving, and I suspect this game was probably a bit much for younger children in that regard. But as Sierra games go, the puzzles are at least straightforward and don’t require too much lateral thinking, and the game has a built-in hint system.Whenever I play Torrin’s Passage, I tend to think of the 1983 laserdisc game Dragon’s Lair, because this game’s animation style is cut from the same cloth as Don Bluth’s lavish fantasy adventure. Torrin is an extremely well-animated blond-haired young man with a purple and green pet named Boogle who follows him around and helps him solve puzzles. Many of the characters in the game look like they’re straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon show, and the interesting series of worlds in which the game takes place, which consists of five different realms nested within each other, add a lot of variety to the gameplay. If you’ve missed this one, you definitely should play it.But as fun as Torrin’s Passage is, it never quite achieved the same status of some of Sierra’s other games, and this may be because the game’s box art shows a bunch of crystals on the front instead of selling the kid-friendly, cartoony vibe, and it may also be because Al Lowe’s name was so synonymous with smut that adults were hesitant to try to play the game with their kids. It exists in a weird place, then – not quite childish enough for children, not quite adult enough for grown-ups, and not marketed well enough to crowd the family around a computer to play together. It might have done better as a console game for a system like the PlayStation, but Sierra never really got into making those.And that’s a real shame, because after King’s Quest V got a port to the NES, Sierra missed a big opportunity to port the next three King’s Quest games to a multimedia console, where they would have likely found a wider audience. The 1992 sequel King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow would have made a great console game on a platform like the 3DO or the Sega CD because it utilized a more streamlined approach to King’s Quest V’s point and click icon-based system.It’s also, of all the King’s Quest games, probably the best-known for its storytelling, and this has a lot to do with the fact that Roberta Williams partnered with an up-and-coming writer at Sierra named Jane Jensen. The storyline in King’s Quest VI picks up right after King’s Quest V and involves Prince Alexander striking out for the Land of the Green Isles to find Princess Cassima, whom he discovers is being forced to marry the evil Vizier Abdul Alhazred who’s running the kingdom now. If this sounds a little like the 1989 game Prince of Persia’s setup, or even like Disney’s Aladdin, which also came out in 1992, yep, the whole Arabian Nights motif was having a moment during that time, and remember that Sierra had also made Conquests of Camelot and Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire prior to this game, both of which featured Middle-Eastern settings. But the further you get into King’s Quest VI, the more It abandons this setting in favor of some other traditions like Alice in Wonderland, Greek mythology and European fairy tales, and this patchwork approach to fantasy is actually to the game’s benefit because it helps the story to feel more structured.One of the most interesting aspects of King’s Quest VI is that the production team used motion capture of filmed, costumed actors as reference for the game’s sprites and animations. The backgrounds are also hand-painted and quite visually lush. The result is one of the best-looking point and click adventure games of the era, and the 1993 CD-ROM version is even better thanks to professional voice acting and a rendered introductory sequence video. Sierra even followed Disney’s lead and released a soft rock power ballad single called “Girl in the Tower” they tried to get played on radio stations by encouraging fans to call in and request it. By today’s standards, it’s totally cheesy, but this was a pretty bold move for a game publisher in the 1990s and yet another great example of how Sierra thought outside the box.As Jane Jensen went on to work on her most famous Sierra game, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Roberta Williams took further inspiration from Disney and decided to make her next King’s Quest game in the style of the animated films Disney was producing at the time, complete with musical numbers. And so King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride upped the production as it brought back Princess Rosella and her mother, Queen Valanice, to star in a game together. The result was a game that was both visually stunning for its time but also not quite sophisticated enough to resemble the Disney films it was imitating. Much like Torrin’s Passage, the animation has more of a Don Bluth characteristic to it, but because Queen Valanice is a little too regal for cartoon antics and Rosella is drawn like a Disney Princess, the cartoony fun doesn’t translate to the characters quite as well as it does for Torrin.Even so, the animation is well-implemented in many places. Early in the game, Rosella gets transformed into a troll, and this actually allows for a lot more slapstick and exaggeration, which are far-better suited to the animation style. And the villainess enchantress Malicia is perfect for this game since animation allows her swirling robes and magical abilities to make her look quite fearsome and dynamic. Valanice also encounters many characters who are depicted beautifully in animation, such as the Fates, a headless horseman, a city of trolls, a ghostly horse, the goddess Ceres and King Oberon and Queen Titania.And that last couple of names – another power couple, this time, from mythology! – ought to tip you off that King’s Quest VII is not just steeped in fairy tales, but literally is one, complete with the handsome prince and the true love’s kiss at the end. That is, of course, assuming you don’t get the bad ending where the prince dies.But King’s Quest VII is also a logical conclusion to the series, both in terms of the story it’s telling and the way it evolves the gameplay to use a contextual cursor and a graphic interface that shows inventory items along the bottom of the screen. There are chapters and checkpoints and screens that actually pan as you move rather than staying static. And curiously, King Graham never makes an appearance – this is truly Rosella and Valanice’s story to tell, providing an exciting epilogue to everything that’s come before it.Unfortunately, it’s also not the last King’s Quest games in the original series, though it is the last to feature Graham and his royal family as playable characters. In the 1998 love it or hate it game King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, Sierra decided to render the adventure in full 3D using a game engine Dynamix had originally built for the Red Baron flight sims. I’ll give Roberta Williams some credit – this game was ambitious, and the transition to 3D is very different from what you see in games like Grim Fandango or Escape from Monkey Island because Mask of Eternity plays more like a 3D action RPG with a clunky point and click interface than a traditional fixed camera point and click adventure. There’s even a first person perspective mode and a combat system.I don’t really want to get into the story of this one, because it’s about a brand new character named Connor who’s a peasant, but also somehow a knight of Daventry who’s forced to save the kingdom from an evil magician – and you know, I guess that’s kind of Graham’s origin story too, but it feels a lot less believable in a more sophisticated game from the late 1990s. Anyhow, Connor has to restore the Mask of Eternity, which is broken by an Arch-Archon named Lucreto at the beginning of the game and turns everyone to stone.There are some really heavy Biblical undertones to this story that are kind of out of place for a King’s Quest game – Lucreto is basically Lucifer, there’s an altar in an area called Paradise Lost and Connor basically equips himself with spiritual armor and a fiery sword and even gains immortality from a stand-in for the holy grail. I’m guessing this was more about Roberta Williams pulling ideas from European medieval folklore than anything evangelical, but it all strikes a different tone from the normal King’s Quest games, especially since the game plays so differently.There are conflicting reports about how successful Mask of Eternity was as a game, but I remember it being quite polarizing among people who actually played it. The low-poly models, janky combat and aggravating camera definitely make it hard to love today, and given that it has almost nothing to do with the other games in the series besides some superficial connections, I’d suggest skipping it, though I do recommend the game’s soundtrack, which even inspired a musical sequel multi-movement composition by Donald M. Wilson called the “Daventry Suite,” which Sierra touted as “the first musical work of extended scope to be inspired by a computer game.” I’m not sure that’s actually true – Japan has a long tradition of audio dramas and rearrangements and covers and such to accompany its games, but it’s definitely interesting. I unfortunately haven’t been able to find a recording of it.Those who want a more traditional King’s Quest sequel might enjoy the fan game The Silver Lining by Phoenix Online Studios, which currently has four of its five parts available online – though I wouldn’t hold out for the final part, since it’s been over 15 years since part 4 came out. But if you love the earlier King’s Quest games, you’ll enjoy seeing the game open with Rosella and Edgar’s wedding as they convene in the Land of the Green Isles alongside Alexander and Cassima as well as King Graham and Queen Valanice. Unfortunately, tragedy strikes, and game allows you to play as King Graham, who dons his traditional adventurer’s garb and tries to find a way to revive his children, who have been cursed into a magical coma. For a fan game, it’s really well-done, complete with voice acting and cinematics as well as some great music.Activision also produced a remake of King’s Quest released in 2015 as an episodic adventure game. This game has no involvement from Roberta Williams and was developed by The Odd Gentlemen, an indie game developer behind games you’ve probably never heard of like The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, Slap Happy Sam, Wayward Manor and Flea Symphony. This reboot takes a lot of liberties with the original canon and reinterprets the stories of King’s Quest’s first, second, third and fifth games.It’s a good and interesting take on the material written by The Odd Gentlemen’s Matt Kobra and Lindsey Rostal, but I’m unsure of who it’s really for. It’s a little too referential to the original series for new fans and a little too different for existing fans to fully sink into.But if you want to hear Christopher Lloyd and Josh Keaton take turns playing Graham and other familiar voice actors like Wallace Shawn, Fred Tatasciore, Kath Soucie, Zelda Williams, Kevin Michael Richardson and Tom Kenney playing roles in a King’s Quest game, this is the one for you!I think it’s clear that Sierra has a profound influence on me as a gamer in the 1990s, but so did a show running on TV at the time that has since become a comedy classic: The Simpsons, which was still in its golden years then. In one episode, the animation studio behind Itchy & Scratchy decides to introduce a new character, Poochie, who sucks up so much energy in his debut that Bart’s friend Millhouse grows agitated and starts asking, “When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?”If you’re feeling that way now, knowing that we still have some pretty incredible Sierra games to cover, you can rest easy, because it’s finally time to talk about Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers, one of my favorite games of all time and definitely my favorite Sierra game, especially in its CD-ROM talkie version.If you recall from one of our earlier episodes, Space Quest III ends with Roger Wilco dropping off the Two Guys From Andromeda off with Ken Williams to work at Sierra while he returns to space for more adventures. And like Al Lowe with the Leisure Suit Larry series, creators Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe had more or less written themselves into a corner with that ending. And so Space Quest IV opens with a scene where Roger is sitting in a bar, regaling the patrons with his adventures, when two robots members of the Time Police, armed with rifles and clad in fascist-friendly black outfits, storm inside and arrest him. They reveal they’ve been sent by Sludge Vohaul, the enemy from Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge, and that they’re there to kill Roger and prevent him from stopping Vohaul’s domination of the universe.But before they can execute him, a group of freedom fighters called the Time Rippers save Roger and send him through a time portal. He wakes up in Space Quest XII: Vohaul’s Revenge II, and discovers that he has to steal a time machine from the Time Police and travel through time to find a way to stop Vohaul’s return. If you can’t already guess, the game’s full of meta-style jokes as Roger journeys to other games in his timeline like Space Quest X – Latex Babes of Estros and even Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter in its original AGI glory. And you never actually get to play as him in Space Quest IV – that game only appears in the intro and the credits.Beyond being hysterically funny in places and offering strange diversions like going to the mall, working at Monolith Burger and playing the arcade game Mrs. Astro Chicken, Space Quest IV’s talkie edition is perhaps best-known for its narration by Gary Owens, the famous announcer from the classic comedy show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and many other radio and television programs, including voicing the original iteration of Hannah Barbera’s Space Ghost. Sierra had many of its own staff provide the voices of characters in the game, but the cheesy voice acting adds considerable charm since Space Quest IV plays it all for laughs.It’s strange, then, that Space Quest V: The Next Mutation, never got a talkie version. Part of this might be because Sierra delegated the development to the financially-troubled Dynamix, with Mark Crowe leading the time minus Scott Murphy. In this game, Roger applies to Starcon Academy hoping to become a starship captain in the mold of Star Trek, but after he cheats his way through his exams, his dreams are somewhat tempered when he’s given command of a garbage scow called the SCS Eureka. As Space Quest games go, it’s actually one of the funniest of the bunch, really mining all that Star Trek humor and also giving Roger a pet facehugger like you might see in Aliens. It also advances one of the plot twists from Space Quest IV, introducing Roger to Beatrice, the buxom blond woman whom he’s been told will one day be his wife, though this plotline is entirely dropped in the next game.And if you play Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier immediately after you finish part V, you may even find it a little frustrating because the game essentially resets the plot by demoting Roger back to the status of space janitor and introducing a new love interest named Stellar Santiago, a character whom Roger ultimately has to enter in miniaturized form to destroy some evil nanobots. Santiago is a definite downgrade from Beatrice as love interests go – she has no charisma as a character and plays a fairly insignificant role in the story despite her body serving as a plot device. But this is also because Space Quest 6, in general, isn’t nearly as funny as the previous games, which is a shame, because it’s probably the best-looking graphically thanks to a cartoony style, Super VGA graphics and lots and lots of sight gags involving crazy aliens and hidden references. It also has a stronger voice cast of professional actors this time around, with Gary Owens returning to narrate.Behind the scenes, what happened was that Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe had parted ways as development partners and while Mark Crowe was at Dynamix in Eugene, Oregon, Murphy remained at Sierra’s Oakhurst facility, but he was busy working on Police Quest: Open Season when Sierra decided to begin development on Space Quest 6. Josh Mandel took over as the lead designer and Scott Murphy was placed in a consulting role. But then Josh Mandel left Sierra as things began deteriorating there and Scott Murphy had to finish the game.I want to add that Scott Murphy has always come across as a terribly nice guy, as has Josh Mandel, and I suspect the issue with Space Quest 6 was less about Mark Crowe’s lack of involvement and more about the game just not quite coming together creatively due to all the internal friction at Sierra. Scott Murphy has described Space Quest 6 as an “abortion” in an infamously candid 2006 interview he gave to Adventure Classic Gaming and also said, in the same interview, that his friend and Sierra co-worker Doug Oldfield contributed a lot to the humor of the series without much credit. He also indicates that Sierra colleague Leslie Balfour helped him out a lot during the final years, including during his fruitless time spent working on Space Quest 7 before the infamous “Chainsaw Monday” event in 1999 resulted in most of Sierra’s staff being fired.I think that part of what helped Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe have such a fruitful partnership on their first four games was the fact that they creating the games they wanted to play while working in an increasing pressure cooker at Sierra in which their creative input was not nearly important to Ken Williams as his business interests. They were also getting a chance to work on the Space Quest games as a respite from their other assignments, which they clearly weren’t as passionate about. As they grew apart, they lost their ability to find that common ground. In fact, when the Two Guys From Andromeda got back together in 2012 to work on their Kickstarter game SpaceVenture, their partnership became strained again, and the game ultimately took 13 years to finally see release.Full disclosure, by the way – I was a backer on that project and… let’s just say I’m glad they finally got it finished so we can put an end to that whole saga.But as we close out talking about Space Quest, I want to mention that one thing that’s come across in many ex-Sierra employee interviews is how Ken Williams and the Sierra management often treated their intellectual properties outside of Roberta Williams’s projects as second-rate and less worthy of investment and promotion. Ken’s dream was never to run a thriving game developer – it was to make a lot of money. This is something that’s parodied all the time in Sierra’s games similar to the way that Saturday Night Live alums love to heckle Lorne Michaels. I’ve also mentioned before that Ken Williams often comes across as someone who made business decisions that didn’t make a lot of sense to his staff, and one of the series where things really got out of control was Police Quest.Police Quest: Open Season, also known as Police Quest IV, was made after retired California Highway Patrol officer Jim Walls departed from Sierra in 1991. I’ve never seen a published reason why Jim Walls left, but it seems to be a situation where he felt it was the right thing to do. And so Ken Williams saw the opportunity to put the name of a different police consultant on the box. To the chagrin of many of his employees, he chose Daryl F. Gates, the former LAPD police chief who’d been in charge during the 1991 riots that led to the savage beating of Rodney King, a black motorist. The violence was videotaped and broadcast around the world, leading to a major scandal that took Gates and many other police officers in the LAPD down.But I don’t want to suggest Daryl Gates was a victim of circumstance. There are few figures in policing who are more controversial or impactful. He was a reactionary leader who helped transform policing into what it is today, greatly expanding the police force, establishing the first SWAT team, running the extremely controversial and racist Operation Hammer in the 1980s, creating gang infiltration units called CRASH that were frequently accused of illegal tactics and racial profiling, and also helping to create the frankly useless DARE program to further sow hysteria and fear about the war on drugs.And that’s just the short list. Suffice it to say that by 1992, when Ken Williams decided to bring Daryl Gates on and publicize his role at Sierra, he was one of the most polarizing people in the state of California. And his name was not only emblazoned on the box for Police Quest: Open Season and the publicity materials, but Gates himself appears as a character in the game.I really don’t have much to say about this title as an adventure game. It’s a step down from Police Quest III in design, set in LA instead of the fictional town of Lytton and featuring digitized graphics and full motion video instead of the painted and animated graphics of the earlier games. It also has some tremendously hammy acting, homophobia and transphobia, a literal Nazi as a character and absolutely racist portrayals of Korean convenience store owners who speak in broken English and what the game portrays as no-good black people from the ghetto who are always criminals and speak in the caricature of street speak once known as “Ebonics.”Yikes. There’s a word I haven’t thought about in 30 years.I don’t want to suggest the other Police Quest games were any better in this way, and they all have their cringey moments, but here’s the thing – even Daryl Gates, perhaps realizing how bad the optics were given his reputation for oppressing communities of color, distanced himself from the worst elements of Open Season and blamed it on Sierra’s writers, which means much of the blame for the game’s worst elements was shifted to Tammy Dargan, the director and chief writer for the game and a former producer for America’s Most Wanted. She in turn in a 1994 article in Vibe magazine blamed the script on her purported reference guide for how black people talked in the 1990s, Fab Five Freddy’s rap dictionary Fresh Fly Flavor, a claim to which I’m sure Fab Five Freddy raised an eyebrow.Cultural racism is a shameful, shameful thing.Some people say that criticisms of the racism in Police Quest: Open Season are overblown, so I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself. But this was the last adventure game in the series; the next four Police Quest games were spin-offs based around SWAT teams and included an FMV simulator, an isometric tactical strategy game and two Rainbow Six-style tactical shooters. These games definitely fit Daryl Gates’s reputation for representing the police as a force that needed to use paramilitary-style violence to keep the streets safe, and while I do like the third and fourth game as tactical shooters, they’re still problematic for advancing the idea that police need to be armed like soldiers and ready to shoot to kill the moment they see a gun.Now that we’ve descended into the darkness, we might as well continue with Sierra’s actual line of paranormal and horror adventure games.I’ve name-checked Jane Jansen quite a bit in this episode, but let’s give her a proper introduction now with the game she’s best-known for creating: 1993’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. And I don’t think I’m going too far in saying this is considered to be one of the best, if not the best, of all of Sierra’s adventure games, and perhaps even for the entire point and click genre. At the time, it was only a modest seller, but over time, it’s developed a reputation for being one of the greatest horror games ever made as well as for having one of the best voice casts of all time in the CD-ROM edition, with well-known actors Tim Curry, Leah Remini, Mark Hamill, Michael Dorn all playing major roles alongside a number of talented voice actors and character actors.The premise of the game is that Gabriel Knight is a horror novelist and bookstore owner in New Orleans who starts investigating a series of serial killings that are being called the “Voodoo Murders.” Gabriel’s friend, Detective Frank Mosely, thinks the voodoo stuff is all hype, but Gabriel believes there’s something more to it and along with his loyal assistant Grace Nakimura, he investigates further and starts talking to local voodoo experts. When one of those experts winds up dead, Gabriel finds himself on the actual trail of a supernatural killer who has a mysterious connection to the past… and to Gabriel’s ancestors.I don’t want to spoil any of the plot because I want you to play this game, but suffice it to say that this game winds up going deep into exploring the occult, the mythology around the practice of voodoo and a secret society of supernatural hunters known as “Schattenjägers” or Shadow Hunters, who protect the material world from the evil forces of the spiritual one. And though Jane Jensen his cited the 1987 movie Angel Heart as an inspiration for the game, the game goes well beyond that premise and reflects not just a great adventure, but a fantastic story told well through the conventions of adventure gaming.The gameplay itself is typical illustrated point and click adventure game fare, but it has a distinctive look and feel due to many scenes that are shown at isometric angles or in comic book style cutscenes. The game was known for its gory sequences and voodoo rituals, and if there had been an ESRB rating system then, it would have been rated “M” for certain.The 1995 sequel, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery, is a completely different creature because it’s done in a multimedia style with actual sets and digitized actors, making it look much more like the Tex Murphy games. The story moves to Munich, Germany, where Gabriel is studying his heritage. When a local little girl is murdered by a wolf, Gabriel is asked to investigate if it might actually be a werewolf, and he contacts Grace in New Orleans and asks her to join him on a new investigation. During the game, you get to play as both characters, this time played by onscreen actors who supply their own voices and animations.While this significant change in style, setting and plot might sound like the makings of a disaster, this sequel is regarded by most fans as being just as good as the original if not even better. I personally prefer the first game, but it’s Jane Jensen’s strong writing and design that ensure both games are truly great. And did I mention that her husband, Robert Holmes, wrote the music for these games? That’s right – they’re yet another power couple from Sierra, and they’ve since partnered on some other games Jane Jensen has made like Gray Matter and Moebius: Empire Rising.The duo also worked together on the third Gabriel Knight game, Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, released in 1999, and this one is notable not only for being a full 3D game built in a custom 3D engine, but also bringing back Tim Curry as the voice of Gabriel Knight, though he sounds a lot less excited to be here in this installment. Though the other characters from the first game have new voice actors, this is yet another top-notch slate of voice actors and character actors who bring the game to life.Not that Gabriel Knight 3 needs it – this is the rare adventure game that survives the transition to 3D and which elevates not just the storytelling, but the puzzle-solving by getting past the constraints of more traditional SCI-style games. One of the most famous elements of the game is the Le Serpent Rouge puzzle, which involves a poem broken into fourteen segments. Grace Nakimura has to decipher riddles within this poem and then solve additional puzzles that are revealed through solutions and additional information. It reminds me a lot of the Macintosh classic puzzle game The Fool’s Errand, which also uses interlocking zodiac-themed puzzles to reveal bigger and better mysteries, and I’d love to see more modern adventure games apply this level of depth, complexity and puzzle-solving satisfaction.Unfortunately, Gabriel Knight 3 was also the final adventure game from Sierra, and it’s often considered a swansong for the genre since adventure games pretty much died in the years that followed. As we know two and a half decades later, the point and click adventure has made a pretty incredible comeback, but at the time, this game was seen as one of the best, last gasps of a dying era.So, with Jane Jensen as the shining star of Sierra in the 1990s, you might wonder what happened to Roberta Williams when she wasn’t working on King’s Quest. The answer is that she’d returned to the roots of where it’d all began for her career as an adventure game designer – by having players venture into yet another house filled with mystery. This time, the game was called Phantasmagoria, a multimedia game spanning seven CDs and featuring footage compiled from dozens of hours of filmed footage captured over several months in front of a blue screen, which is one of the reasons the game looks so phony and unbelievable compared to its sequel, which was filmed on actual sets.I want to mention before we start talking about these games that I am not a fan of Phantasmagoria for a very simple reason – it’s incredibly boring, punctuated with lots of terrible comedy and cheesy excuses for horror. Imagine playing a point-and-click adventure game where you spend 90% of your time walking around and looking at things in a giant, empty house while spooky soap opera music is playing but nothing actually happens, and that’s what you get with this game. Groundbreaking for its time? Sure. But fun to play today? I wouldn’t recommend it.The premise of Phantasmagoria is that a mystery novelist named Adrienne Delaney and her photographer husband Don Gordon move into an abandoned mansion in New England that was once owned by a magician named Zoltan Carnovasch, known by his stage name of “Carno.” In the introduction, Adrienne has a nightmare filled with horrific torture devices and wakes up in bed with her husband, who consoles her and has sex with her. You might think this is going to set the tone for an interesting adult-oriented game, but no, Adrienne is going to spend a good chunk of the game just wandering around and pining for Don, who decides he’s going to set up a dark room photo lab in one area of the mansion.And Don… *sigh*. He’s just this unlikable guy from start to finish, at first sort of seeming like an empty-headed companion who’s just kind of self-interested but gradually getting crazier and crazier the longer the game goes on, eventually going full-on Joker in the game’s final act. It’s not his fault; it turns out he’s under the influence of a demon sealed away in the mansion that Carno once summoned with black magic. Because, you know, a stage magician would totally be practicing actual magic and not just performing stage illusions. But it turns out Carno murdered all five of his wives when he was alive, and as Adrienne begins seeing visions of each of them, she’ll stumble across some rather silly and unconvincing horror sequences where she sees how each wife met their end in some silly, contrived way, like being force fed entrails through a funnel. There’s also a famous scene where she’s laying on a bed and a bunch of hands reach up out of the mattress to grab her, one of the few effects in the game that actually looks like it was done practically, but which is also sort of silly.The big conceit of Phantasmagoria was that it was going to show the way to a brand new fusion of Hollywood film-making and adventure gaming. Unfortunately, the game’s just so limited in so many ways that it doesn’t really work in execution as well as it should. For example, though the story takes place across multiple days, Adrienne is always wearing the same outfit unless she’s in a self-contained cutscene. Why? Because Roberta Williams designed the game so that Adrienne could wander around the mansion in a non-linear way, which would have made different outfits impractical on a digitized sprite. Another problem is that the mansion and area around it is mostly made up of pre-rendered backgrounds that are lit differently than the blue-screen actors, so Adrienne’s movements through the mansion don’t look remotely believable. And then there’s the fact that the camera is constantly switching perspectives to suit what could be filmed, making a lot of that movement jarring.Compared to some of the other point and click-style games of the era that used digitized actors in pre-rendered scenery, like The 7th Guest and Tex Murphy and Blade Runner and heck, even Gabriel Knight 2, Phantasmagoria just feels like an awkward evolutionary dead-end in the genre. Most games that wanted to do what this one does would wind up doing it in 3D, and for those that wanted to continue to use full motion video, the 1996 sequel, Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, did everything much better, which is not a compliment to Roberta Williams since she was not involved in its design.In fact, it was designed by Lorelai Shannon, a longtime Sierra writer who’d largely worked in the background at Sierra as a writer and designer, but who’s since become known for her horror novels and short stories.OK, so let me say here that I am not necessarily in line with other adventure game fans when I say Phantasmagoria’s sequel is the better game, because it’s more of an interactive movie with some light point and click elements than a true point and click adventure. But let me tick off the list of why I like it better:* The story is much better written and actually goes into to the dark, psychological themes that help shape a good, adult-oriented horror story* The game has a far more mature outlook on sexuality, including an entire sequence set in a BDSM club as well as characters who are openly gay, bisexual or polyamorous* The acting is actually decent, and while I’d say it’s more cable TV or VHS horror film than feature film quality, the actors do a good job of creating believable characters* The twists in the story are actual, pull the rug out from under you twists that materially change your understanding of the game and its characters* The tone of the story is far less Stephen King’s The Shining and much more in line with the unsettling extradimensional horror, open sexuality and body mutilation of Clive Barker, who Lorelei Shannon cited as an influenceI won’t say a lot about the story itself beyond the fact that you start off as a corporate office worker named Curtis Craig who is very uncomfortable in his own skin and who is regularly having strange visions or seeing odd things. Curtis has to navigate an office romance while he sees another co-worker on the side, make sense of bizarre emails he’s receiving and deal with the fallout of the mysterious death of an unlikable colleague who was killed in Curtis’s cubicle.I will say that the game finishes in a very different place that it starts, and if you can see it through to the end – not an easy feat, because it explores a lot of topics related to trauma and exploitation so shocking it was censored in some parts of the world – you will be surprised where this story takes you. The “puzzle of flesh” hinted at by the title is pretty much unguessable. I dare you to play the game to the end to find out what it’s really about.Provided you’re at least 18, of course. This game’s about as hard an “M-rating” as anything I’ve played.I want to briefly mention three other adventure games Sierra published in the 1990s that really don’t get much attention. The first two are Shivers and its sequel, Shivers II: Harvest of Souls. Both games are in the style of Myst or The 7th Guest and played in the first-person perspective as an unnamed protagonist. Both are also heavy on puzzles and atmosphere, and both are also fairly nonlinear in terms of how you play through them. Surprisingly, this series was also built in Sierra’s SCI engine despite feeling quite different from just about every other game built in it aside from Phantasmagoria II.I also want to mention both Shivers games have interesting music. The first game has one of the most unsettling scores I’ve ever come across in an adventure game, written by Guy Whitmore, and the second has more of that but also includes a set of gothic hard rock style songs by a fictional band called Trip Cyclone that are good enough to listen to without even playing the games, though you absolutely should, because both Shivers games are decent adventures if you enjoy paranoia and puzzle-solving in equal measures.The other game I wanted to mention is the 1996 release Lighthouse: The Dark Being, another spooky first person adventure in the style of Myst. It’s definitely not a top-tier title; the graphics have that mid-1990s pre-rendered look and the story is mostly told through notes and the puzzles are often of the object and lever manipulation variety. But I actually think it has a decent setup and story about a scientist who accidentally opens a portal to a pocket universe that’s a reflection of our own and which has an interdimensional traveler known as the dark being within it. For reasons the game eventually explains, the Dark Being has come into our world to kidnap the scientist’s baby daughter Amanda. It’s up to you, as the neighbor who stumbles in on all of this, to head into the parallel dimension and set things right.As a Myst clone, it’s a perfectly acceptable game, and it feels like it was Sierra’s attempt to try to break into that market just in case their other more ambitious adventure games didn’t pay off. The game was designed by Jon Bock, who’d worked on many Sierra games in the 1990s as an artist and animator and it honestly shows a lot of good design sensibilities in terms of its atmosphere, environmental design and mechanical creations you encounter. There’s even a sequence where you get to fly in a glider and another where you get to drive a train car! The game even has multiple endings that I’m sure very few people saw, because the downside, more than anything, is the absurd difficulty, which was so bad Sierra had to issue several patches to make it easier.If you get a chance to play this one, give it a shot. It’s not so bad with a walkthrough, and I think it’s a better game than people gave it credit for at the time.Beyond Sierra’s horror games, there was some true horror going on behind the scenes as well as Ken Williams got scammed by a sale in 1996 to Walter Forbes’s CUC International under the false promises that Forbes was creating a super-publisher that would include LucasArts, Broderbund and Blizzard Entertainment’s owners, the educational software company Davidson & Associates. In the end, only Davidson was part of the deal, and management strife between the two units ultimately led to the Williamses losing control of their company.Despite the fact that Sierra has some strong publishing plays including the release of Valve’s Half-Life in 1997, Homeworld in 1999 and the late 1990s online gaming platform WON.net, for which I wrote some paid freelance articles way back in the day, Sierra ultimately turned into a publishing label, got acquired by a new conglomerate called Vivendi Universal, and struggled for years, despite some successes, before closing down operations in 2004 and becoming little more than a publishing brand name from that point forward.Their brand and IPs ultimately wound up under Activision Blizzard in 2008 and now, those IPs that didn’t get sold off during that acquisition are owned by Activision Blizzard’s new owner, Microsoft.But there were a few other pillars of Sierra’s 1990s output that we haven’t covered yet, including Sierra’s educational Discovery line. Another is Dynamix, which created adventure games like The Adventures of Willy Beamish, Rise of the Dragon and Heart of China. And the other is Coktel Vision, the creators of the Gobliiins games, the Inca games, and several adventures by Muriel Tramis, the French Roberta Williams, which include The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, Lost in Time and Urban Runner.I also want to talk a little bit about another Sierra title no one seems to remember called Stay Tooned, which is a pun on the word “cartoon,” by the way. I was planning to include those here, but I’m going to save those for our next episode so we can give these lesser-known titles the attention they deserve.Being the 1990s, there were plenty of other adventure game developers of note, so after that, I’ll talk a little bit about what Steve Mertetzky was up to at Legend Entertainment and Boffo Games making games like Spellcasting and The Space Bar. And we also need to talk about the efforts of developers and publishers like Westwood Associates, Interplay, Adeline Software International, Humongous Games, Activision, Revolution Software, Cryo, Perfect Entertainment and MicroProse!And of course we have an obligation to accept Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.And then we’ll turn our focus to the multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, Blade Runner, The Last Express and The Neverhood.Finally we’ll close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream. We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I want to recommend The Trolley Solution, a goofy little point and click indie game by the developer byDanDans which is based on the thought experiment originally proposed by Phillippa Foot about whether or not you should pull a lever if a trolley is going to murder a bunch of people if you do nothing. Thanks to a great scene in the show The Good Place, I feel like the idea’s pretty well-known today, but this game takes it a step further by not only adding in a total of 20 increasingly silly scenarios, but also adding in 20 strange minigames and wild stuff like a dating simulator where you play as a Japanese schoolgirl who’s fallen in love with a trolley.If you’ve ever wanted to do things like play a trolley-themed idle clicker or play a literal on-rails shooter or grind your way around a train track by treating the trolley like a skateboard, this is the game for you. The game’s far more comedic than philosophical, and I like that there’s even a meta-gag that requires you to pull a metaphorical level to buy the DLC (which barely adds to the total cost of the game if you use Steam’s bundle feature) to access a minigame. The DLC provides some additional content as well, so it’s worth the negligible cost, but I have to admire the idea for its comedic value and also for making the player truly put their money on the line.For $10 plus another buck or so for the DLC, The Trolley Solution is a great experience for a few fun hours. I do recommend playing it with a mouse rather than a gamepad or touchscreen, particularly if you’re going to play on the Steam Deck, and it’s a lot of fun to play with a group of people just to laugh at the silliness together.Especially that dating sim, which even has multiple endings to enjoy!Thanks for reading The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, Sean details tons of other 1980s and early 1990s adventure games LucasFilm Games/LucasArts and Sierra On-Line. Even better, this episode helps to trace how this run of games helped shape the standards of the point and click genre! He’s Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!(And yes, Sean still has a cold, so pardon his creaky voice, nasally tones, bad singing and the sounds of sniffling here and there!)-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 5: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 3Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:LOOM Audio DramaThe Dagger of Amon Ra: Why Almost No One Solves This Game: https://adventuregamehotspot.com/feature/5349/why-almost-no-one-solves-this-gamehttps://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-11-The-Dig/5https://www.adventure-treff.de/Interviews/11754-chris-joneshttps://kotaku.com/relooted-review-heist-game-steam-game-pass-2000667754--------------------------------------------------Coming up in this episode –We’re going to continue our survey of late 1980s adventure games by talking about LucasFilm Games and the development of the SCUMM engine. We’ll cover Ron Gilbert’s no-death, always winnable philosophy that would make their 1990s games the most popular alternative to Sierra On-Line’s adventures. And speaking of Sierra, we’re going to talk about some of the early games powered by their SCI engine that eventually would cement many of the standard mechanics of the point and click genre. And we’ll touch on how one of Sierra’s earliest SCI engine games, made by yet another awesome power couple, would show just how far adventure games could go as players embarked on a Quest for Glory!I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Let’s delve into the golden era of late 80s and early 1990s adventure games you probably have heard of, as well as a few you possibly haven’t!If you were to ask the average person on the street what comes to mind when they hear the name George Lucas or the word “LucasFilm,” chances are good they’re going to mention Star Wars or maybe Indiana Jones. But if you were to ask a gamer the same question, particularly if they’re an old-school gamer like myself, you’d probably also hear about adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Sam & Max Hit the Road, The Secret of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango.But LucasFilm Games, which changed its name to LucasArts in late 1991, created a whole lot more than just adventure games and Star Wars games. In fact, its first batch of games, which include Ballblazer, Rescue on Fractalus!, Koronis Rift and The Eidolon, were all 3D action titles, and while Ballblazer is a surreal competitive splitscreen game set on a flat checkerboard plane, the latter three of those games all used a novel fractal-based game engine that allowed players to explore large environments despite the fact that the games were running on mere 8-bit computer hardware.LucasFilm Games also was known for building simulators, including the naval hydrofoil sim PHM Pegasus in 1986, the naval fleet simulator Strike Fleet in 1988 and the World War II Pacific Theatre flight simulator Battlehawks 1942, which was developed by Lawrence Holland’s development studio Totally Games and which led to a series of flight sims that included Their Finest Hour, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and, of course, the later Star Wars: X-Wing and TIE Fighter games.But as I said, LucasFilm Games and LucasArts are probably best-known today for adventure games, and that takes us back to 1986 when two similar-looking, but very different-playing, games were in development.Our story begins with yet another Jim Hensen fantasy property, this time one that mixed live action with puppets to create an interesting feature film about a teenager who has to venture through a gigantic maze to defeat Jareth the Goblin King, a character famously played by David Bowie. The film is, of course, the 1986 movie Labyrinth, and LucasFilm Games’s Labyrinth: The Computer Game is a loose adaptation of it, allowing players to select their own gender and work their way through the labyrinth using a word wheel that allows them to select which commands they’d like to input. The game was directed by David Fox, a LucasFilm Games veteran who’d go on to make several other graphical adventure games.There is really nothing quite like Labyrinth: The Computer Game – it begins as a text adventure game where you go to the movies and settle in as Jareth appears onscreen, calls you out by whatever name you selected and explains that he and his goblins have been watching you and are challenging you to find his castle in the center of the labyrinth or be trapped in the game. He even gives you a time limit of 13 hours, and the action morphs into a side-scrolling adventure.The game itself is mildly confusing at first but gets easier if you take some time to map things out. The side-scrolling hallways have doors you can open with corridors that lead to other sections that have items laying on the ground. Once you recognize that this is truly just a graphical representation of the same basic design of a text-based adventure game, Labyrinth: The Computer Game gets much easier. The game’s word wheels also make your range of actions simple to understand, and there’s really no way to fail beyond getting stuck in a dungeon you can’t get out of. Even though this game was designed for the Commodore 64, it has relatively good graphics for its time, and it owes a lot of its design and style to another 1986 LucasFilm Games title called Habitat designed by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer.I don’t want to get too deep into discussing Habitat in this episode because it’s not an adventure game, but rather a sort of graphical take on a multi-user dungeon that focused on social interactions between players who were using the QuantumLink online service. But it was also a bit more sophisticated than Labyrinth because it utilized a point and click GUI driven by a joystick-controlled cursor with four available commands. The game allowed players to not only create their own avatar and complete quests but actually acquire a house and a pet and exist within a persistent world where players themselves created the rules.We’ll talk about Habitat another time. But for now, I want to focus on one of the most important games LucasFilm Games released in the 1980s, a classic adventure called Maniac Mansion, created by a team led by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick.In Maniac Mansion, you play as a guy named Dave who is infiltrating the Edison mansion to rescue Sandy, your kidnapped girlfriend. But unlike most adventure games, Dave can select two friends to accompany him, and each of the six selectable friends have skills and motivations that ultimately determine how the game’s puzzles have to be solved and what ending you will see.One of the most famous elements of the game is the creepy Dr. Fred Edison’s two sentient tentacle henchmen, the friendly green one and the more hostile purple one. But the mansion is also populated by Dr. Edison’s family members, including Nurse Edna, his son Weird Ed and even a mummy by the name of Dead Cousin Ted. There’s also a mysterious meteor that seems to be influencing Dr. Fred and even a surprisingly chill piece of greenery simply known as Chuck the Plant.The genius of Maniac Mansion is that the game uses a graphical user interface where players move a cursor around with a joystick to select words from a grid and then apply them to specific areas on the screen. While Maniac Mansion wasn’t the first adventure game to use a graphical user interface, the system works so well that it allows the game to run on simpler 8-bit hardware like the Commodore 64, Apple II and even the Nintendo Entertainment System while also scaling up quite well to mouse-driven 16-bit and 32-bit systems with a more graphically impressive enhanced edition.This game engine, known as the SCUMM engine because it’s the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion,” became so well-known that one of the most popular adventure game interpreters today is known as SCUMMVM, primarily because it was first used to make LucasFilm and the later LucasArts adventure games playable on modern computer hardware.The SCUMM engine led to several more games in the 1980s, but none of them are quite like Maniac Mansion in offering multiple storylines and characters to choose from. Maniac Mansion is also atypical in that the player characters can die under certain circumstances, particularly if players are cruel enough to put Weird Ed’s beloved hamster in the microwave and then bring Ed into the kitchen to show him.Oddly, Maniac Mansion even got its own 1990 TV show on the religiously-themed cable outlet The Family Channel with a writing team led by Eugene Levy, who’s a lot more famous today than he was then. The show has almost nothing to do with the game, though, and even though I personally found it pretty dull when I watched it in the 1990s, it made it for three seasons with 66 episodes, ending right around the time the game’s sequel, Day of the Tentacle, debuted.But moving on to other SCUMM engine games, let’s talk about the less familiar Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, a 1988 graphical adventure from David Fox that follows the adventures of the tabloid journalist Zak McKracken as he travels around the globe in search of parts needed to neutralize dumbifying devices that evil aliens are using to make humans stupider through a nefarious plot involving telephones. Zak is eventually accompanied by three other characters named Annie, Melissa and Leslie, and they head to all the places you’d expect – the Bermuda Triangle, Stonehenge, the Egyptian Pyramid and even the face on Mars.As intriguing as Zak McKracken may sound – and it is a good game well worth playing! – it’s not quite as polished as Maniac Mansion and is both known for having a more linear story and for having some frustrating parts that truly feel like they’re there to pad the game out. The game was intended to launch a series, and several fan sequels have since continued its story. One of these fan sequels even got professionally published in Germany in 2008 as Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space, though it wasn’t officially licensed.After Zak McKracken, LucasFilm Games moved on to use the SCUMM engine to create another movie tie-in game with 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, which had to be differentiated from another game released the same year that was more of an arcade action adaptation. This one was designed by David Fox, Noah Falstein and Ron Gilbert, and after it, David Fox moved on to other things.While this Indiana Jones adventure follows the plot of the feature film fairly closely, it also deviates in many places and requires you to solve some puzzles crafted specifically for the game that aren’t made easier by being familiar with the film. Unlike most LucasFilm and LucasArts adventures, there are also a number of arcade action sequences that require players to master some additional control schemes.One of the most innovative ideas in the game is a point system called the IQ or “Indy Quotient” system, which allows Indy to find some different ways to solve puzzles by earning points by taking actions in line with his character. The game also introduces some nice lighter moments that would go on to influence other LucasArts adventures down the road. One of the most familiar gags is when Indy tries to talk his way past a Nazi guard by saying, “I’m selling these fine leather jackets.” If you pay attention during later LucasArts games, you’ll see this line reappear.Of course, this game is often seen as the warm-up act for 1991’s Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which I maintain is still the true 4th chapter in the Indiana Jones saga and which is way better than either of the official Steven Spielberg films that have come out since. This one was designed by Noah Falstein and Hal Barwood, and it was not only one of the first games to use the LucasArts branding, but also among the first CD-ROM talkie games released by the publisher, with Doug Lee playing the role of Indiana Jones alongside a very talented voice cast that helped set the standard for the voice acting LucasArts games would become known for.The Fate of Atlantis is similar to The Last Crusade in how it looks and plays, but it uses a three-tiered approach to allowing players to experience the game the way they’d like to play it with a Teams Path where Indy is joined by a partner name Sophia Hapgood, a Wits Path where the puzzles are harder and a Fists Path where Indy can fight more often. The story itself revolves around a race to beat the Nazis to the lost city of Atlantis in the year 1939 and to prevent the evil Nazi Klaus Kerner and his associate Dr. Hans Ubermann from unlocking the power to make men into gods.Perhaps the most famous LucasFilm Games adventure aside from Indiana Jones, and certainly the most successful in terms of the series it inspired, is The Secret of Monkey Island, a 1990 point and click adventure that was created by Ron Gilbert and co-designed with Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer. If you haven’t played it – and you absolutely should, because it’s a true classic! – it’s the story of a wimpy but optimistic adventurer named Guybrush Threepwood who visits the Caribbean port on Mêlée Island on a quest to become a mighty pirate. He eventually runs afoul of the evil ghost pirate LeChuck and has to travel to the mysterious Monkey Island to save Governor Elaine Marley, whom LeChuck desperately wants to marry, and Guybrush eventually does in later games.The Secret of Monkey Island is known for its incredible sense of humor and its reliance on clever mechanics like insult sword fighting to replace the often frustrating arcade action sequences too many graphical adventures were relying upon to pad out their gameplay. The game also implemented a new philosophy that Ron Gilbert had articulated in a 1989 essay called “Why Adventure Games Suck” that argued for getting rid of deaths, eliminating the need for forced saves and eliminating situations where players could not progress due to forgetting to pick up a needed item now gated off by the game.Suffice it to say that Ron Gilbert’s philosophy is present in most adventure games today because so many modern designers were heavily inspired by the accessibility of the LucasArts games compared to the frustrating dead ends found in Sierra titles and games from other developers.So, in The Secret of Monkey Island, the gameplay allowed Guybrush to escape death in almost every scenario by ramping up the cartoon violence and making the pirates in the game more silly than fearsome. Guybrush also receives the quality of being able to hold his breath for ten minutes so he can solve one puzzle where he’s stranded underwater without any stress on the player – though stubbornly waiting out the clock can result in Guybrush’s demise! There’s also one other point in the game where Guybrush can fall off a panoramic peak, only for the typical “restart, load the last save or quit” prompt to give way to Guybrush announcing he was saved by a rubber tree below.The Secret of Monkey Island is one of those games that absolutely lives up to everything you’ve ever heard about it. It’s well-designed, hysterically funny, genuinely fun to play and filled with well-designed puzzles that aren’t overly tricky but which force you to think a little bit. The highlight of the game is a sequence where Guybrush has to learn how to swordfight and you expect the game to move into an arcade sequence along the lines of Sid Meier’s Pirates!, but once Guybrush actually finds the Swordmaster and learns to fight, he finds out that sword fighting is really won by having a sharp wit, not a sharp blade. For example, the first insult he learns, “You fight like a dairy farmer!” is countered with the phrase, “How appropriate. You fight like a cow.” And so Guybrush has to go around Mêlée Island and swap insults with other swarthy pirates to find the right lines to attack or defend. It’s an absolutely awesome way to make an adventure game feel like a true adventure and to bypass the need for lousy arcade sequences that were infesting the genre at the time.One of the other memorable moments in The Secret of Monkey Island takes place in the SCUMM Bar on Mêlée Island where Guybrush sees a pirate named Cobb wearing a button that says “Ask Me About Loom.” If he does, the pirate says:You mean the latest masterpiece of fantasy storytelling from Lucasfilm’s™ Brian Moriarty™? Why it’s an extraordinary adventure with an interface of magic, stunning high-resolution, 3D landscapes, sophisticated score and musical effects. Not to mention the detailed animation and special effects, elegant point ‘n’ click control of characters, objects, and magic spells. Beat the rush! Go out and buy Loom™ today!The character Cobb, by the way, also appears in Loom, and in that game, he actually dies when he sees the face of your player character, Bobbin Threadbare, who wears a hood to keep other characters he encounters from having the same fate. But this little advertorial moment in The Secret of Monkey Island is not only a great way to make fun of the product placement in media that was already becoming a big problem in the late 1980s, but also to remind players that yeah, if you enjoy Guybrush Threepwood’s adventures, you might like Loom as well.And Loom is a really good game, even if it’s not a very funny one. It was designed by Brian Moriarty after he left Infocom and features one of the most unique stories I’ve ever seen in a video game. The premise is that you are a Weaver who can manipulate reality by playing sequences of four musical notes on your distaff, a spinning tool that in this game is carried around like a walking stick and capable of casting spells called drafts. Unlike most LucasFilm Games and LucasArts adventures, Loom has a serious story with a lot of lore backing up its world and characters, and this is shared with the player through a 30-minute audio drama that was originally included on a cassette tape in the game box.The gameplay of Loom is quite unusual because you don’t use any sort of parser and there are no dialogue trees. You click where you want Bobbin to go and meet up with characters who talk with you but primarily give you information about things you need to know to progress. Most of the game’s action involves clicking on certain objects and then attempting to manipulate them with your drafts. Some drafts can even be played backwards so you can create an opposite effect with them – for example, the draft to open things can be played backwards to close them, and the draft to turn straw into gold can be played backwards to turn gold into straw. A few drafts are also the same backwards and forwards so they never have a counter effect.To add some challenge to the game, the drafts are different every time you play, and you also sometimes learn them before Bobbin has advanced enough to be able to use them, which means it’s a good idea to keep a notepad handy.Loom is not a terribly long game, but it is a very memorable one with incredible realms to visit and some truly distinctive characters. As graphical adventure games go, it’s one of a kind and well worth playing today. Many players today prefer the 1992 Talkie edition with voiced lines as well as a rewritten audio drama prologue. But there is something special about the original disk-based version as well.We might as well continue talking about LucasArts, because their next few games helped to set a standard for what adventure games could be. The talkie editions of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Loom were successful enough that LucasArts continued to create fully voiced CD-ROM versions of many of its adventures to come, but Maniac Mansion, Zak McCracken and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade didn’t receive any talkie editions, and the first two Monkey Island games didn’t get them until much later.Speaking of Monkey Island, its 1991 sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge brought back the trio of Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer for an even more irreverent trip through the Caribbean, this time tasking Guybrush with searching for the secret treasure known as “Big Whoop.” A series of misadventures lead to the ghost pirate LeChuck being resurrected as a zombie, and Guybrush learns that whatever Big Whoop actually is, it’ll give him the ability to be free of LeChuck for good. And after even more misadventures, including the game’s very famous loogie-spitting contest on Booty Island, Guybrush learns the truth about Big Whoop in one of the most surprising endings ever to grace an adventure game.In fact, it’s so stunning and literally game-changing that when LucasArts decided to make a sequel without Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman or Tim Schafer in 1997 called The Curse of Monkey Island, the new development team had to contrive a scenario to get Guybrush and LeChuck back into the Caribbean rivalry players had gotten used to, and the series proceeded from there, largely retconning the whole Big Whoop plotline to fit the new direction. I do want to say that I actually like the third, fourth and fifth games a lot and they have some of the funniest moments in the entire series. But Ron Gilbert’s development studio Terrible Toybox ultimately did get to conclude the series his way in 2022 with Return to Monkey Island, tying up lots of loose ends, including, as it happens, what the secret of Monkey Island actually is.I’ll give you a hint – it’s not the friends we made along the way. But it might as well be, because both Ron Gilbert and Guybrush Threepwood are smart enough to know that any revelation is bound to be a letdown, and the game doesn’t mind making that point as it literally closes up and turns the lights off on Guyrbush’s pirate adventures.But let’s go back to the 1990s, when some of the Monkey Island 2 staff broke off to create their own adventure games. Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman took the helm on a sequel to Maniac Mansion, and they upped the ante on cartoon graphics and wild chicanery while also reducing the playable characters down to three pre-selected college students – the nerdy Bernard Bernoulli from the original game, his neurotic friend Laverne and his roadie buddy Hoagie. The game begins with the Purple Tentacle drinking some toxic sludge and sprouting arms, a unibrow, and a desire to take over the world.The Green Tentacle, terrified of this turn of events, convinces Bernard and his friends to head to the Edison mansion to put a stop to the Purple Tentacle’s machinations. But when they arrive, they discover the Purple Tentacle has escaped, and Dr. Fred reasons the only way to stop him is to send the three friends back in time one day to prevent any of these strange events from happening.Unfortunately, he cheaped out on the diamond powering the time machine, and Hoagie is sent 200 years into the past while Laverne is sent 200 years into the future. Bernard is stuck in the present day, and he and his friends have to work together to stop the coming Day of the Tentacle.While I originally played the disk-based version of this game without the voice acting, Day of the Tentacle was one of LucasArt’s gold-standard titles for excellent voice work. Every character has a strong personality and sounds like they’re voiced by a professional actor instead of the programmer from the next cubicle over like the early Sierra talkies did, and the game plays like a living cartoon show with heavily stylized graphics, wonderfully funny moments and a lot of time travel shenanigans. We didn’t have Adult Swim in 1993, but we did have Day of the Tentacle, and it perfectly delivered that exact flavor of irreverent, adult-oriented humor.But LucasArts had another ace up its sleeve, the 1993 adventure game Sam & Max Hit the Road led by Sean Clark and Mike Stemmle and based on the comics by Steve Purcell, an artist who’d contributed heavily to the Monkey Island games and also had his characters appear in cameos in earlier LucasFilm and LucasArts games as well as in fun full-color strips in the LucasArts magazine The Adventurer, which was included inside game boxes.Sam and Max are the anthropomorphic dog and psychotic rabbity thing who form the Freelance Police, a questionably legal pseudo-detective agency dispatched to solve weird crimes and interact with the stranger elements of society. In their debut adventure game, Sam and Max are investigating the case of a missing frozen sasquatch named Bruno and Trixie the Giraffe-Necked Girl, who’s disappeared from a carnival freak show with him.But the pair run into a British country music sensation named Conroy Bumpus who seems to be suspiciously trying to track down a sasquatch to add to his collection of taxidermied animals. Sam and Max have to jump in their DeSoto and travel all over the US to track Bruno down, visiting landmarks such as the world’s largest ball of twine, Frog Rock, the Gator Golf swamp, the Mystery Vortex, the Mt. Rushmore bungie jumping experience and dinosaur tar pits, a bigfoot convention, and, of course, various Snuckey’s locations, based on the once-common Stuckey’s chain of gas stations and tchotchke stores.Perhaps one of the most revolutionary aspects of Sam & Max is that it ditches the array of words used in previous SCUMM engine games to instead replace the actions with icons similar to those seen in the Sierra game, though with their own twist – the use icon, which shows a hand squeezing the classic children’s toy known as the “Martian Popping Thing,” also allows you to pick up Max and use him to unleash chaos at key points in the game. The game also enjoys mocking the player for selecting actions that don’t make any sense, including a sequence where Sam will start crying and Max will scold the player if they repeatedly try to pick up something Sam says can’t be picked up.Sam & Max Hit the Road is again one of those games that’s enhanced by its talkie version – the characters are perfectly voiced by Bill Farmer and Nick Jameson. One of the standout moments in the talkie version is a song called “King of the Creatures” performed by Conroy Bumpus in his thick Liverpool accent. Around him, the stuffed heads of all the animals he’s killed and collected sing along, and I love this verse in particular:Happy to be King of the Creatures!I’m proud to be the Lord of the Odd!I love collecting things with grotesque features!It makes me feel like some Chaldean God.That is Steve Purcell’s style of humor at its finest, and it’s one of the reasons why Sam & Max Hit the Road is one of my favorite games of all time.Beyond the adventuring itself, the game also has a ton of minigames that are actually fun because they’re completely optional. There’s a Whack-a-Mole game, a Highway Surfing game, a dress-up doll game, a Battleship-style board game called Car Bomb and even a paint by numbers coloring book. Beyond Whack-a-Mole, which has a small bearing on the story, these games are really just an opportunity to spend more time with the characters, and that’s welcome given that LucasArts never produced its planned sequel and the games that eventually did get made, while certainly tons of fun, have their own vibe.I’ll also take a moment to note that yes, Steve Purcell also worked with Nelvana to make an animated Saturday morning cartoon show in 1995 called The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police also based on his comics. Sadly, it’s just not as fun as the game itself, and it’s hard to explain why the pair doesn’t translate as well to a kid’s cartoon despite sometimes literally adapting the same comics the game was based off of. Ah well.But let’s take a break from the cartoon antics of these 1993 adventures, because another LucasArts adventure game I want to get to is The Dig, an ambitious and serious science fiction adventure pitched to LucasFilm Games in 1989 by, of all people, Steven Spielberg. And while it’s far from a perfect game, it is at least a distinctive one that’s notable for starring Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s Robert Patrick as well as prolific voice actors like Steven Blum and David Lodge.The Dig begins with an asteroid nicknamed “Attila” heading towards Earth on a doomsday collision course, so a five-person astronaut crew is sent up to intercept it and plant bombs to divert its course. After the bomb goes off, three of the astronauts discover Attila is hollow and drop down inside. But the asteroid transforms into a space pod and rockets away from Earth, taking them with it. They emerge on an alien world that seems to be devoid of life, but upon exploring it, they discover some mysterious crystals and the remains of an alien life form, both of which play heavily into the story.It’s a good-looking game, making great use of rendered videos and a Super VGA resolution to show off some cool alien vistas, some of which were apparently designed by the movie special effects studio Industrial Light & Magic. The music is also one of its more notable features, composed by Michael Land and offering a sweeping orchestral-style score to add a sense of wonder to the gameplay.The Dig took LucasArts over five years to develop, and Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card was tapped to write the dialogue while Brian Moriarty, following his time working on Loom, worked built a team to restart the game after development stalled. But when he left the company, Sean Clark, fresh off Sam & Max, agreed to take over as project leader. The Dig was an entirely different type of adventure, however, and with Steven Spielberg’s name attached to the project, Clark and the development team found themselves under a significant amount of pressure to not only get the game completed, but also to ensure it lived up to the standard of previous SCUMM engine games.And whether or not it does is a matter of taste. I personally find The Dig pretty dull. The dialogue is atrocious and overwritten, and the story is almost completely humorless and way too invested in a story that I don’t feel pays off as well as it should. One of the most aggravating aspects involves the lack of agency you have as a player – your character, Commander Boston Low, interacts with the world through a streamlined point and click system that selects actions for him, and there are events that occur in the game that proceed regardless of your choices. On the other hand, there are many adventure game fans who consider it a well-crafted exploration adventure that’s second only to Cyan’s Myst, a game we’ll cover in a future episode.My advice? Play The Dig for yourself and see what you think.Now that we’ve gotten most of the LucasArts catalog out of the way – and don’t worry, we’ll talk about Full Throttle and Grim Fandango in a future installment! - it’s time to turn our attention back to Sierra On-Line, who, as we discussed in previous episodes, really set the standard for point and click adventure games with King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Yonder!, a game powered by its SCI1 engine. Sierra’s clever use of a tilted perspective to offer screens with three-dimensional depth, an icon system with many different actions and puzzles that could be communicated through visuals, dialogue and fine details led to a winning formula still largely in use today.And this allowed for a better player experience, too, because the days of trying to figure out what commands the text parser would accept gave way to the more intuitive – though occasionally still frustrating – task of trying to figure out what you could interact with onscreen.The AGI games Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards and Police Quest all received VGA remakes in the SCI1 engine to make them play more like King’s Quest V, and those became the preferred versions of the games. But curiously, none of the King’s Quest games got the same treatment under Sierra – only King’s Quest V, VI and VII were developed under the new icon-driven system, while King’s Quest VIII went for a context-sensitive cursor.After King’s Quest IV and prior to King’s Quest V, Roberta Williams created a very different kind of game in the SCI0 engine called The Colonel’s Bequest, first released in 1989 and offering players the chance to solve a mystery as Laura Bow, a journalism student at Tulane University in the 1920s who has a penchant for solving mysteries since her father is a detective. The game’s story, much like the much earlier Mystery House, is inspired by Agatha Christie-style mysteries, and the unfolding plot involves a cast of characters who all have different motivations for murder as Colonel Henri Dijon – yeah, that’s a mustard reference - gathers his relatives to share his will. Laura Bow is caught up in the drama as a bystander and has to wander around the old sugar plantation searching for clues and listening for characters to give away their hidden motivations as they respond to a clock that governs the game’s progression.Unfortunately, The Colonel’s Bequest is built around a text parser and is only available with 16-color EGA graphics, and so many modern players prefer its 1992 sequel, The Dagger of Amon Ra. Roberta Williams had minimal involvement in this title – it was designed by Bruce Balfour instead - but it’s actually the better of the two games, taking place in a museum where an Egyptian artifact has been stolen and Laura Bow is tasked with writing an article about it. Of course, being a great detective, she can’t help but get wrapped up in the surprisingly complex plot, and she not only has to find the dagger, but navigate romantic interests, solve some murders and uncover an ancient mystery involving an Egyptian cult.The Dagger of Amon Ra is a great-looking game thanks to its 256-color VGA graphics and museum setting, and its point and click icon system does a great job of allowing you to interact with the game world without getting too frustrated. Even so, the game starts off slow and has a lot of talking to get through before you actually get to go adventuring, and the talkie version of the game has some absolutely amateurish voice acting from Sierra employees who were clearly called in to record some lines.The Dagger of Amon Ra has another problem, too, in that it’s pretty much impossible to solve the mystery using logic alone. You either need to consult a walkthrough or play it multiple times to gather all of the information needed to successfully solve the crimes. While this isn’t such a big deal in a time where you can simply consult the internet for help, it can lessen your enjoyment a bit if you prefer to go old-school and solve things on your own with limited hints.Sierra released another SCI0 game in 1990 called Codename: ICEMAN, designed by Jim Walls in between Police Quest games. Like The Colonel’s Bequest, it’s built around a text parser, but instead of being a murder mystery, it’s a more of a secret agent sort of experience that mostly takes place aboard a submarine, with a bookend story about a whirlwind romance in Tahiti leading to a mission in Tunisia to rescue an Ambassador from a terrorist group being sponsored by the KGB.Honestly, I can take or leave Codename: ICEMAN as an adventure game, because it’s so focused on unexciting tasks like piloting a submarine and decoding messages and playing dice games that it’s just kinda dull overall. Your mileage may vary.Fortunately, Sierra had some better games in that rough transition between the SCI0 and SCI1 engine. Under producer Guruka Singh Khalsa, Sierra On-Line also created another series led by a female creator, this time a writer named Christy Marx who partnered with her husband Peter Ledger, who largely focused on the art while she handled the design.And together, they created an intriguing game about history, mythology and the pursuit of a legendary relic that Indiana Jones was also looking for around that time.The holy grail.Christy Marx has worked on many games since those days at Sierra, but she’s also well-known for her work on comic books and animation. If you watched cartoons in the 1980s and 90s and early 2000s, you probably saw something she wrote, since she worked on shows like G.I. Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spider-Man, Dino-Riders, Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars!, Mighty Max, ReBoot, that terrible Daktstalkers cartoon and X-Men Evolution. She also worked with J. Michael Stracynski on some his syndicated live-action shows like Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future and Babylon 5. Oh, and did I mention she was the creator of Jem, that series about the glam-rock band that’s truly outrageous? And that she was also the creator of the Conan the Adventurer cartoon and synonymous with both Conan and Red Sonja as a comic book writer?Peter Ledger, in the meantime, worked in film, comics and television as an illustrator and painter, and he is probably most closely associated with the work he did helping colorize and revive the Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge comics that would later inspire the cartoon show DuckTales and with the work he did for Marvel Comics. But he also created the early logo and some concept art for Babylon 5 and worked with his wife on some independent graphic novels like The Sisterhood of Steel.Together, these two created a very impressive game for Sierra, a surprisingly grounded foray into the legendary King Arthur called Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail, a peculiar fusion of myth and legend that sent the king of Camelot to investigate stories about a mysterious relic left behind by Jospeh of Arimathea and to locate the missing knights of the Round Table, Lancelot and Galahad. Though the first half of the game takes place in England and includes several stories more familiar to those who know the Arthurian legends, the second half of the game sends Arthur off to Palestine and has him explore both Gaza and Jerusalem. One of the odder aspects of the game is that Arthur’s destiny is shaped by several gods from different traditions, including Jesus Christ, Mithras, Cernunnos, Fatima and Aphrodite. The end of the game suggests that these non-Christian deities are losing their power over mankind and that only Christ’s power remains once the quest is completed. Suffice it to say that this is a game deeply steeped in myth and legend beyond just the Arthurian tales, and there’s even one puzzle where you need to know some pretty detailed information about Greek mythology to advance.OK, so before I continue let’s pause here and talk about a couple of terms I keep mentioning and that we talked about in our previous episodes on Sierra – the SCI0 and SCI1 game engine.From 1984 to 1989, many of Sierra’s adventure games were made with its Adventure Game Interpreter engine, also known as AGI. It’s what powered their earliest games like King’s Quest and Space Quest and Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. But starting with King’s Quest IV in 1988, Sierra adventures were built with a new tool called the Sierra Creative Interpreter, or SCI engine. The earliest version is today called the SCI0, and it also powered games like Space Quest III, the 2nd and 3rd Leisure Suit Larry and The Colonel’s Bequest, and the biggest differences between it and the next version, which we call SCI1 today, is that the SCI0 games had 16-color EGA graphics and limited use of an optional mouse cursor to go along with a text parser that still had you typing in your commands.Conquests of Camelot was an SCI0 game as well, and the text parser is probably its biggest drawback. The game’s graphics look great and the world itself is rendered splendidly, but getting around it requires a lot of figuring out where to go on the screen and what command you need to type in. In the earlier AGI adventures from Sierra, it’s a little easier to discern what you can do in the game because the simpler graphics make it more obvious. It’s much more challenging when the graphics provide more detail.Fortunately, Christy Marx got a second chance with Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood, an SCI1 point and click adventure game in the style of King’s Quest V released in 1991 in splendid 256 color VGA. While this game’s a bit simpler in scope, it’s also a little easier to play and understand since the entirety of it takes place in England and you don’t have to guess at the right words to use to solve the puzzles. And whereas Conquests of Camelot features arcade-style minigames like jousting and swordfighting, Conquests of the Longbow features archery, quarterstaff duels and Nine Men’s Morris. My only real complaint about this game is that Peter Ledger didn’t return to do the artwork, though the game still looks good.Of course, speaking of power couples in adventure gaming, there’s yet another duo that I haven’t yet mentioned in detail, and that’s Corey and Lori Ann Cole, the husband and wife team who created a game for Sierra called Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero? in 1989.Hero’s Quest was an interesting proposition from the get-go, offering players a fantasy role-playing experience built within Sierra’s early version of the SCI engine. This name made sense given the King’s Quest, Space Quest and Police Quest games Sierra On-Line already had available. Unfortunately, there was also a fantasy board game being marketed by Milton Bradley called Hero Quest at the same time, and so Sierra was forced to rebrand the series as Quest for Glory in the sequels that would follow as well as the game’s eventual VGA point and click remake.To keep things simple, I’m just going to call the game Hero’s Quest, because there are some differences, the biggest of which is of course the text parser. The game begins by asking you to select a character class: you can be a fighter, a magic user or a thief, each of whom will have a slightly different adventure as you explore the barony of Spielburg. The fighter tends to carve the most straightforward path while the magic user gets to play through a challenge called the Mage’s Maze and the Thief can actually break into places and steal things, though it’s a good idea to do so under the authority of the Thieves’ Guild.Unlike just about every other point and click adventure game ever made, you also have to assign skill points to your character to boost your chances of success at the tasks you want to accomplish, and you can even import your character into the other Quest for Glory games and earn the benefit of playing as a Paladin from the third game onwards.But what’s particularly great about Hero’s Quest is the game’s balance of folklore, puzzling and good old fashioned humor. The original game is pretty much Shrek before Shrek was a thing, lampooning old fairy tale tropes but also taking them seriously enough to tell a meaningful story. This is even more pronounced in the VGA remake, Quest For Glory I, because the graphics and gameplay feel so similar to King’s Quest V, but also have this sense of playfulness and fun that Lori and Corey Cole have become well-known for injecting into all of their games.While we’re talking about Quest For Glory, I might as well mention what happens in the sequels, which came out in 1990, 1992, 1993 and 1998.The second game, subtitled Trial By Fire, takes the hero into the Arabian Nights-themed city of Shapeir, once again allowing you to play through the three paths of Fighter, Magic User or Thief, but giving the Magic User the opportunity to become a full-fledged Wizard and the Fighter to join the Eternal Order of Fighters. This game is also probably the least popular of the bunch because it was never remade in the later SCI point and click style and requires a text parser. Fortunately, a group of fans at a developer now known as AGD Interactive made a VGA-style point and click remake of this game (as well as the first three King’s Quest games) using Adventure Games Studio, and it even supports importing and exporting characters.And that’s good, because in Quest for Glory III: Wages of War, the Liontaur Paladin Rakeesh will allow those who’ve played the previous game to play the Paladin class as well as the other three. This time, you’re thrust into a setting based on African folklore, which includes some Egyptian elements as well – you can actually visit this world’s Egypt during your travels! The game was designed natively for the SCI1 point and click engine and has 256-color VGA graphics from the start, making it quite a step up from the second game’s 16-color palette. But Quest For Glory III is a love it or hate it entry because it involves a lot more fighting than the others, uses an overworld map instead of a continuous game world and has a story that isn’t quite as satisfying as the others. The game feels like a filler episode because it actually is – the Coles originally intended to make the third chapter the dark one, and then opted to save that story for the fourth game instead.Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness wasn’t initially regarded as being the best game in the series because it was so buggy and ran so poorly on many PCs of the day, but it has since become beloved as perhaps the only game in the series to rival the original. It’s also by far the darkest and most serious, featuring Slavic folklore this time around and bringing back the villains from the first and second games as they attempt to awaken a Cthonic Eldritch Horror-style monster.Sierra’s disk-based release was so broken and buggy that it’s essentially forgotten today; the CD-ROM version is the one you’ll find in compilations, and it noticeably includes voice acting from big-name talent like John Rhys-Davies, Bill Farmer and, in her first credited video game voice acting gig, Jennifer Hale. But the production isn’t quite up to the level of the LucasArts games from the same era, and some of the voice acting doesn’t match the actual lines the characters speak in the game.Nearly four years after the CD-ROM release of the fourth game, Sierra released the fifth and final game, Quest For Glory V: Dragon Fire, developed by Yosemite Entertainment and published under the imprint of Sierra FX. This time, the Hero is sent to a realm based on Greek and Roman culture, and while the Coles say this game was always intended to be the conclusion to the saga, it departs so much from the other games it really feels like a sequel made by a completely different team, despite Lori Ann Cole’s direction.Rather than talk about all the reasons I don’t prefer Quest for Glory V as much as the others, I’ll just note that the modern packs on GOG and Steam include all five games and you can try it for yourself and see what you think. As with so many games that take a significant deviation from their original design, your mileage may vary. As for me, I much prefer the Coles’ more recent 2018 game, Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, which feels a lot like the Quest for Glory series overall. I also recommend the 2013 game Heroine’s Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok by Crystal Shard, a completely free title that feels like Quest for Glory in the realm of Norse mythology.I realized while I was writing this script that there’s just no way we can talk about all of the Sierra SCI games in this level of depth without this episode getting way too long. So we’ll save the rest for next week. But I want to close this episode by talking a little bit about Sierra and Lucas’s incredible influence on the adventure games we play today, because pretty much every modern traditional point and click adventure game embodies the philosophies of those two studios by following a few rules.1. Pretty much everything is driven by a graphical interface with little to no text input beyond an odd puzzle or a specific mechanic like a keypad or an in-game database to search2. An always-winnable design, with deaths often being reversible or taking you back to a checkpoint rather than a restore or new game screen3. Inventory items that can’t be permanently lost, missed or consumed before the puzzle they’re needed for it completed4. Hints being integrated into the game itself, often suggested by NPCs, dialogue or in-game text5. A segmented puzzle design with maps gating off areas that aren’t relevant for now and focusing you on a smaller set of screens so you can more easily discern what needs to happen nextThere are definitely other influences – many games infuse a healthy sense of humor and puzzles that require some lateral thinking, for example – but there’s no question that modern point and click adventure games tend to feel a lot like the games from the first half of the 1990s and a lot less like the cel-animated, full motion video, digitized sprites and partial or full-3D adventures that were more common in the late 90s and early 21st century.A lot of this is due to the fact that one of the main tools for writing adventure games today – the open-source Adventure Game Studio created by Chris Jones – started out as a tool to allow players to replicate games like Space Quest IV and the SCI remake of Quest for Glory I. By the way, this Chris Jones is a British software developer not related to the Chris Jones from Access Software who became known for playing Tex Murphy.But Adventure Game Studio has definitely preserved the style of these older games and in many ways, pruned the genre to follow those mechanics and design ideas and to avoid some of the ideas of what were intended to be more evolutionary for the genre in games like Phantasmagoria, The 7th Guest, Gabriel Knight 3, King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity and Syberia, among others.But the earlier 90s style also proved to be really accessible to gamers of all ages and nationalities because it required more of a visual pixel hunt than puzzling out how to solve the mystery of which string of words the parser might accept. This also simplified design to some degree because the developers didn’t have to put the parser through the paces – they instead had to try to figure out what sorts of actions might warrant a click and how the game world could evolve in what it revealed to players as the storyline progressed.Some critics have, quite rightfully, accused the graphical adventure games of this era of dumbing down the actual adventures and focusing more on presentation elements and linear storytelling rather than encouraging players to experience a story driven by their imagination. I do get this criticism. If you just compare King’s Quest IV to King’s Quest V, for example, the adventures of Rosella require so much more thought and care than Graham’s wanderings in part 5. In Rosella’s journeys, you have to outthink the game world and find ways to get it to respond to you, which feels very personal. But in Graham’s graphically splendid adventure, you just have to keep clicking on the screen until you can find an icon or item that will allow you to do something.These 1990s graphical adventure games also don’t require the same level of exploration in the game world because they tend to close things off to a few screens at a time. Space Quest IV, as we’ll talk about in our next episode, is a great example of both a strong game design for keeping you focused on a few things at a time but also a quite limited one that has to rely heavily on humor and theme to make up for the fact that you really only get to do what the game wants you to do at any given moment. When you compare this to earlier graphical adventures like King’s Quest or Police Quest or Quest for Glory or to the designs of the often massive text-based adventures, the thrill of exploring a more open world is lost, and even seemingly open games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis or Sam & Max Hit the Road really mask how small they are by creating the illusion of distance between screens.One more evolution during this era, for better or worse, is the shift away from danger and excitement through deaths and arcade sequences and the increased focus on staying constrained within the game’s adventure mechanics. This led to many traditional adventure games becoming less realistic and more cartoony since it allowed characters to ensure more implausible physical violence, but that also limited their appeal since their cartoonish qualities felt more like games for children than adults.Incidentally, this vestige carries over even into today – I remember a scene in the excellent modern adventure game Unavowed where a battle between a dryad and a djinn is undercut by the fact that the game doesn’t actually have any action mechanics, resulting in the same sequence of events happening over and over until you solve a puzzle. There’s another part where a giant merman is chasing your boat and the way to defeat him is to figure out how to lower a pole so a sword-wielding character can walk out and poke him. I want to say again - I love this game, but moments like that do take you out of the story for a bit, and it’s due to the genre limitations more than anything else.Speaking of games like Unavowed, I’m really excited to get to those in a future episode of the Great Game Guide, but we’ve still got more 1990s Sierra games to talk about as we explore the topic of adventure gaming, and we’re going to do that in our next episode.First, we’re going to continue our look at other graphical adventure games made by Sierra using the SCI engine and we’ll explore what Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest’s Roger Wilco got up to along with talking about the rise of Jane Jensen, Al Lowe and Josh Mandel’s other games like Freddy Pharkas and Torrin’s Passage, Roberta Williams’s forays into full motion video and Sierra’s interesting attempts at creating animated games that looked like living cartoons!Then, we’ll turn our focus to other developers like Dynamix, Westwood Associates, Interplay, Adeline Software International, Humongous Games, Activision, Revolution Software, Cryo, Perfect Entertainment and MicroProse! I’ll also talk a little bit about what Steve Mertetzky was up to at Legend Entertainment and Boffo Games and Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.Next, we’ll turn our focus to the multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, Blade Runner, The Last Express and The Neverhood.Finally we’ll close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream. We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I’m close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I want to recommend Relooted, a parkour platform game from the South African studio Nyamakop that is quite honestly one of the coolest games I’ve played in awhile. The premise is that you’re a parkour runner named Nomali who’s been recruited into a crew focused on repatriating artifacts that have been stolen through colonialism and which are now housed in museums in private displays so they don’t have to be returned to the cultures they were plundered from. Your job is to plan a series a heists, work out your exit strategy, grab the loot and then run to your escape point before you’re chased down.The game isn’t quite set in the real world – the developer describes it as “African-futurist” – but it does involve real world artifacts, and it’s happy to give you detailed info about where they’re from and why they’re important to the cultures they were taken from. Talk about a perfect game for Black History Month, but also a subversive way to remind the world that yeah, colonialism sucks and we still have a lot of work to undo its influence on many cultures around the world and to give them back the records of their own history.I’ve seen a lot of hate directed at this game and also some surprisingly tone-deaf reviews written by white people like myself who want to criticize this indie game for what they consider to be a so-so story amidst a promising premise.I personally feel this is the wrong way to handle a game that is literally about white people telling the story of black people around the world, and so I’ll instead quote the great headline from a review by Ash Parrish on Kotaku: “Relooted is a big black middle finger to history controlled by white people.” I couldn’t say it better myself.We need more games like this. We need more people to tell their stories through games so the rest of us can have a chance to understand what it’s like to feel what they feel and to experience what they experience. But I want to be clear – I am not recommending Relooted just because of that. I’ve played it, and it’s indeed a very good game that I had a blast with. It reminds me a lot of the 2D version of Mirror’s Edge, which was itself borrowing many things from Prince of Persia. But there are also some cool ideas from other 2D platformers thrown in to keep things fast and fun. I personally get some of the feelings of games like Gunpoint and Mark of the Ninja when I’m playing this one, and I love it.So be sure to try out Relooted. It’s just $15 on Steam and well worth it! And even if it’s not your cup of tea, you’ll be supporting a great South African game studio that I hope will continue to make more games in the years to come.SOURCES:LOOM Audio DramaThe Dagger of Amon Ra: Why Almost No One Solves This Game: https://adventuregamehotspot.com/feature/5349/why-almost-no-one-solves-this-gamehttps://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-11-The-Dig/5https://www.adventure-treff.de/Interviews/11754-chris-joneshttps://kotaku.com/relooted-review-heist-game-steam-game-pass-2000667754Thanks for reading The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, Sean details tons of other 1980s adventure games from North America, Europe and Japan, from Transylvania to Tass Times in Tonetown to Mewilo to the MacVenture games and more! He’s Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!(And yes, Sean has a cold, so pardon his creaky voice and the sounds of sniffling here and there!)-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 4: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 2Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack @greatestgames (https://greatestgames.substack.com) or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/06/heirs-of-infocom-where-interactive-fiction-authors-and-games-stand-today/https://www.filfre.net/tag/berlyn/https://www.mobygames.com/game/90/tass-times-in-tonetown/https://dn710309.ca.archive.org/0/items/Tonetown_Times_Newspaper_HQ/Tonetown_Times_Newspaper_HQ.pdfhttps://www.theverge.com/2013/10/1/4791566/timothy-learys-neuromancer-video-game-could-have-been-incrediblehttps://advgamer.blogspot.com/2013/04/game-31-mean-streets-introduction.htmlhttp://www.hardcoregaming101.net/beyond-shadowgate-2024/https://shadowgate.fandom.com/wiki/Before_Shadowgate_(Worlds_of_Power)Before Shadowgate: https://web.archive.org/web/20010819174552/http://www.shadowgate.com/circle/novella.htmlhttps://obscuritory.com/essay/muriel-tramis-interview/Coming up in this episode –We’re going to step away from Sierra On-Line for a bit and take a look at some of the other graphical adventure games that came out alongside theirs in the 1980s and early 1990s, including adventures from Penguin Software, Accolade, Konami, Riverhill Soft, Denton Designs, Artech, Coktel Vision, Ultrasoft, ICOM Simulations, Interplay, Access Software, Activision and Cyan.I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Let’s delve into adventure games you might be less familiar with that helped to shape the point and click genre we recognize today!What is an adventure game, and what separates it from other genres of gaming? I don’t mean to ask this question in some sort of navel-gazey way where we explore all the possible definitions of the term and then wind up pretty much agreeing that an adventure game is what we thought it was all along. In the 1980s, role-playing games and adventure games as we think of them today were both marketed as adventure games, and it took years before people started recognizing those two types of games as being not just mechanically different, but as having a different kind of appeal to different kinds of players.While we’re at it, let’s ask ourselves – what truly separates a text-based adventure game from a true graphical one? You might say, “graphics!”, but as I’ve discussed in our earlier episodes, it was pretty fashionable in the mid-80s to create or remake text-based adventures with some static illustrations to help make the games more marketable, even if the illustrations didn’t add much to the gameplay. On the other hand, Roberta Williams’s Hi-Res Adventures were proto-graphical adventure games because the games were built around your being able to see what was happening onscreen in a way that illustrated text adventures like The Hobbit or Amazon or The Pawn or even Infocom’s graphically splendid late 80s adaptation of James Clavell’s Shogun were not.You might also say “a text parser,” but it wasn’t until the 1990s that most adventure games had ditched the text parser and started to adopt mouse-driven inputs. You can blame King’s Quest V for really popularizing icon-driven point and click gameplay. It wasn’t the first game to offer it, but it was so popular with both gamers and critics that it pushed the genre forward. At least, mostly. We’ll talk about some of the most stubborn holdouts, like Legend Entertainment, in another episode.I would argue that what makes a graphical adventure game truly different from a text-based adventure is more of a feel than a list of features. Text-based adventures tend to draw your attention to the actual text that the developer authored, and that’s where you’re going to find all of the cues you need to advance through the game. Even illustrated text-based adventures can be played competently without graphics. The pictures don’t add anything meaningful to the gameplay.But graphical adventure games rely on you responding to the visual cues onscreen and often don’t describe those details effectively in the text descriptions. In the earliest graphical adventure games, like Mystery House, the graphics help to set the mood and create an atmosphere for the game that isn’t left entirely up to your imagination to fill in.I can actually offer a really good example of this from a game we haven’t talked about yet, one from 1982 that was written by a high school student named Antonio Antiochia, who created a text-based adventure centered around horror movie monsters like a vampire and a werewolf and a goblin and a witch and even space aliens. He submitted his work to a guy named Mark Pelczarski, who’d started a publisher called Penguin Software and, along with another developer named Jon Niedfeldt, created a program called The Graphics Magician for the Apple II. It was based on an earlier program called Magic Paintbrush Pelczarski had written, and similar to the graphics drawing routines Ken Williams wrote for Sierra, this program broke images down into vectors that could be drawn onscreen and filled in rather than trying to store entire finished graphic files.Pelczarski told Antiochia to illustrate the game, and this smart decision led to an adventure that was able to more effectively set a mood that fit its theme of attempting to rescue a princess named Sabrina before dawn, when she would die. But one of the most distinctive aspects of the game was a werewolf who’d stalk you mercilessly around the map, showing up onscreen in a fear-inducing silhouette.Unlike Sierra’s Hi-Res Adventures or Scott Adam’s Graphic Adventure series, the artwork for Transylvania didn’t feel like a hodge-podge of assorted images. Its artwork had a certain cohesive style that, while still amateurish by today’s standards, made the game come to life in a way that a lot of other adventures didn’t. If you remember that game I talked about a couple of episodes back called Vampire’s Castle, a pure text adventure with a frustratingly limited parser and terse descriptions of things? Transylvania did what that game was trying to do, but correctly.In fact, it was good enough to be ported pretty widely to many different home computer standards and also to receive a 1985 sequel called The Crimson Crown, which leans even more heavily into its graphics, and a 1990 sequel called Transylvania III: Vanquish the Night, a quite underrated game that might have been more popular if it hadn’t continued to use a text parser.But it wasn’t the only adventure game from Penguin Software, which would eventually change its name to Polarsoft. In 1983, the publisher also launched a sword and sorcery-style fantasy adventure called The Quest, a game that looks like an RPG from its packaging and theme, but which is really just a text-based adventure. You don’t even get a sword until late in the game!And in The Quest, we see the difference between what Transylvania pulled off and what an illustrated text adventure game looks like, because this one’s just a series of trails and paths with some occasional scenes you’ll come across, but not really much to look at. Even so, the illustrations later in the adventure do help to communicate ideas that go beyond the text, like showing off skeletons or warning signs… or a sexy gal named Lisa inside a rather modern-looking house who’s a nice change from the seemingly endless tunnels you have to travel through after you meet her and together discover some Aztec-style ruins.I don’t really recommend The Quest, by the way. But if you want to play something sort of like it, a 1982 game from Ultrasoft called The Mask of the Sun used its graphics to get you off boring walking trails and instead depict the idea of driving in a jeep between different locations on the map. This game’s notable for featuring some rudimentary animation and also some occasional sound effects, both of which were rare in adventure games of this era.One of the neater scenes involves assembling a jaguar statue, only to have it transform into an actual jaguar in front of you and then saunter off. Another involves stepping into a dark room where the graphics vanish and the text describes that you hear the sounds of snakes nearby. Suddenly, a snake appears in the darkness onscreen! It’s a fun way to add some drama to what would otherwise just be fairly unexciting text.If you happen to enjoy The Mask of the Sun, Ultrasoft also made a sequel set in Asia called The Serpent’s Star where you have to track down the city of Kara-Koram in Tibet.Let’s take a moment now to talk about some early graphical adventures in other parts of the world. In the UK, a company called Legend released a very interesting 1983 title for the ZX Spectrum called Valhalla that anticipated a lot of the ideas Roberta Williams would use in King’s Quest a year later. I doubt she ever saw this game – I wasn’t even aware of it myself until recently! – but it’s basically a sidescrolling adventure game where you wander around locations in Asgard, Midgard, Hell and Valheim in search of six treasures and type commands into a text parser. It’s nowhere near as sophisticated as King’s Quest in terms of movement or puzzles, but it’s definitely one of the earliest adventure games that can’t rely on text alone and absolutely requires graphics to portray what’s happening onscreen.Another UK-only adventure game from the ZX Spectrum was the 1984 game Tir Na Nog by Gargoyle Games. This one’s pretty wild, featuring the Celtic mythological hero Cuchulainn, which means there’s plenty of action. The gameplay involves a lot of sidescrolling movement down paths that occasionally have a crossroads allowing you to move up or down or into doorways. But it’s an adventure game at heart, requiring you to solve rather cryptic puzzles to advance. It’s also quite well-animated, using parallax scrolling to add a sense of depth and a detailed walking animation to give Cuchulainn some presence in the very visual game world he inhabits. I recommend this one if you’re willing to give ZX Spectrum games a try, and the 1985 prequel, Dun Darach, is even better.Moving to the other side of the world, let’s look at Japan, where Yuji Horii created an interesting game called Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken or Portopia Serial Murder Case for the Sharp X1 in 1983. If you’ve ever played a Japanese adventure game, this one will feel very familiar because the graphics are shown in a small pane while there’s a text scroll on the bottom half of the screen to provide clues and dialogue and some menu options on the right hand side. In fact, this style of gameplay got so popular that it not only became the template for other Japanese adventure games, but also Yuji Horii’s far more famous role-playing game, Dragon Quest, which came out the next year.What’s interesting about Portopia Serial Murder Case is that it was designed around the same basic philosophy Roberta Williams developed for King’s Quest about creating a more non-linear adventure with some scripted scenes to make the gameplay feel like you were moving through a series of vignettes you stumbled upon rather than being forced to follow a pre-scripted path. Given that Japanese gamers were primarily familiar with Mystery House and a handful of other illustrated text adventures, it’s fascinating to see how the genre evolved into both crime-solving mysteries like Portopia Serial Murder Case as well as more varied fantasy fare.One of the earlier Japanese adventures, Hudson Soft’s 1984 game Salad no Kuni no Tomato-hime, better known in North America as Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, started life as a rather bizarre illustrated text adventure that only accepted English commands before getting ported to the Famicom in the menu-driven style Portopia Serial Murder Case had established.But you’ve really got to see the original to believe it – the artwork is absolutely gorgeous considering the simplicity of the graphics hardware of the day, and the decision to use fruit and vegetables becomes clear since they can be depicted with expressive faces while also having simple enough shapes that they can be rendered clearly onscreen. The thing I find most impressive is how dramatically each screen depicts things as boring as buildings or pathways – always from interesting angles showcasing great use of 3-point perspective and making nearly every moment of the game visually striking.These early 80s efforts were nothing compared to what was coming a few years later, however, and as computer game graphics became more sophisticated, so did the adventure games that were incorporating them.In our previous episode, I described Ken and Roberta Williams as one of gaming’s first power couples. But of course, they’re not the only couple to have ever worked together on a game, and another couple who was involved in the creation of adventure games was Michael and Muffy McClung Berlyn.A little bit of background on Michael Berlyn – he was a writer and novelist who started out at Sentient Software before moving to Infocom as an implementor and writing Suspended, Infidel and Cutthroats and also joining the team to create Infocom’s one of a kind digital board game Fooblitzky, a dismal flop of a cool idea which we’ll talk about in a future episode. Michael soon bounced around between large publishers like Activision, Electronic Arts, Accolade and even created a game you probably have heard of called Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, an animal mascot platformer we will also talk about in a later episode. Muffy assisted Michael on several of his games as a writer and contributor, but most of the games she’s credited on aren’t titles that are widely familiar today, including Oo-Topos, Altered Destiny and Dr. Dumont’s Wild P.A.R.T.I..After awhile, Michael burned out on making console games and tried to start a new publisher called Cascade Mountain Publishing to focus on interactive fiction. It made it just a couple of years, and he and his wife largely vanished from game development before emerging making mobile interactive story games for casual audiences under the label Flexible Tales. These titles included The Art of Murder, A Taste for Murder, Reconstructing Remy, Ogg! and the wonderfully-named Grok the Monkey, also known as Carnival of Death. Unfortunately, all of those mobile games have been delisted and I could barely find any information about them in my research.I also sadly must say that Michael Berlyn passed away from cancer in 2023.But let’s go back to the 1980s, where Michael and Muffy were younger game developers also teaching creative writing at Harvard. According to an interview Michael gave to a MobyGames contributor, the two liked to play on Harvard’s motto, “Veritas,” which means truth in Latin, by saying “very tass” to agree with something as being true. Their students picked up on it and started using it to describe things that were hip or cool.That’s part of the origin story behind their 1986 adventure game Tass Times in Tonetown, a graphical adventure game that started out under the working title Ennio: The Legend Begins, referencing the hip dog in the game who is a pet named Spot in our reality but a celebrity journalist named “Ennio the Legend” in the alternate reality of Tonetown. And as the manual’s opening poem asks, “are you tass? Are you tone?” And even if you’re not, you might find this adventure to be a quirky favorite, because it really is quite different from anything else from the mid-80s, or the decades that came after, really. The included 4-page Tonetown Times newspaper definitely gives you a feel for this intriguing alternate reality.One of the interesting aspects of Tass Times in Tonetown is that it uses a graphical interface to accompany its text parser, and you can navigate the game with a joystick or mouse and type in occasional commands instead of relying entirely on the parser. The game’s bold graphics, fun fashions and bizarre characters add a lot of charm to the adventure, and the images are even lightly animated, which was not common for games of the era.While this game clearly falls in the realm of “cult classic” rather than “major hit,” Michael and Muffy got another shot at taking players into a different reality at Accolade with Altered Destiny. It’s a 1990 graphical adventure game that looks quite similar to Space Quest III, but which involves a modern day human named P.J. Barrett getting sucked into a portal in his TV and wandering around a strange new world called Daltere, eventually learning he has to find the Jewel of Light to save the galaxy from an evil alien. Unfortunately, Altered Destiny also featured a text parser in a year where gamers were getting more used to mouse-driven commands thanks to adventure game publishers such as Sierra On-Line and LucasFilm Games. It’s an interesting, but also clunky, adventure game to play today.Michael also worked on another adventure game series at Accolade that began with Les Manley in: Search for the King, a Leisure Suit Larry-style adventure game that’s very funny, but which was likewise hampered by its text parser. The 1991 sequel, Les Manley in: Lost in L.A. adopted the point and click style of the Sierra games but also went for inserting mostly cringey digitized graphics in close-ups instead of character animations to suit the game’s otherwise traditional point and click style. It’s kind of jarring.Speaking of Accolade, the company wasn’t always chasing Sierra’s lead, and one of their more innovative adventure games by Distinctive Software, called Accolade’s Comics, came out in 1987 with the promise of allowing players to play a branching story starring Secret Agent Steve Keene, Thrillseeker! At the beginning of the game, you’re given the choice to investigate what’s happening with some strange fire hydrants spontaneously reproducing around town or visit Vienna in search of a professor who’s gone missing. The game is presented in comic strip form and you choose Steve Keene’s dialogue choices to shape the story. While the game was designed for 8-bit computers and the graphics are low-resolution, the cartoony charm does make this one an adventure worth experiencing, even if the story itself is largely a framing device for a bunch of so-so minigames.Activision released an interesting graphical adventure game in 1986 called Portal and no, it’s not the one you’re thinking of, but instead something more akin to what we’d call a “walking simulator” today written by Rob Swigart, who’s also since made a novelization of the game available. The premise is actually pretty neat – you’re a human astronaut who’s been away from Earth for 100 years and you return to find everything’s gone wrong in your absence. Tapping into a global network, you and your helpful AI companion Homer try to uncover clues to figure out where humanity went. It’s a truly interesting game that’s well worth experiencing.Another Activision adventure from this era that’s quite unique is called Hacker, a game that famously shipped without a manual and challenged players to figure things out for themselves. It simulates breaking into a remote computer terminal and eventually stumbling on a global conspiracy that requires you to take control of autonomous robotic drones to travel through a subterranean tunnel between cities so you can locate contacts and gather evidence to foil the conspirators. This game came out in 1985, and a sequel, Hacker II: The Doomsday Papers, followed in 1986. I recommend them both.If you recall our previous episode about text-based adventure games being adapted into bookware, you might wonder when the first true graphical adventure games based on books debuted. One of the earliest was Interplay’s adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, which was intended to tie into a film adaptation that never happened. Interplay got the rights after a prior attempt by psychologist and psychedelics enthusiast Dr. Timothy Leary fell through. Interplay’s version wasn’t nearly as ambitious as what Leary had in mind, but it did turn out to be a competent point and click adventure game where players used a cursor to click on icons and environmental elements, all while a Devo song called “Some Things Never Change” plays in the background.By today’s standards, Neuromancer doesn’t look anything like a cyberpunk game beyond its forays into Cyberspace. It’s brightly colored, the characters speak in cartoon bubbles and the main character, Chase, often has a smile on his face as he explores Chiba City. The razorgirl Molly Millions, a major character in the book, doesn’t make any appearance in the game, and you also never travel around the world or get into any of the crazy intrigue that occurs in the book.Even so, it’s long been one of the only visual adaptations of the famous novel, and until the Apple TV show comes out at some point in the future, it’s one of the only ways to experience the story without just reading the book, which you absolutely should, by the way.And I’m looking forward to a future episode where we can talk about the cyberpunk genre in a lot more detail.But now, let’s transition over to the Macintosh, where a developer called Cyan published a game through Activision called The Manhole using the Mac’s HyperTalk programming language. It’s a whimsical adventure for children quite similar to, but not explicitly based upon, Alice in Wonderland. It’s also the sort of mouse-driven experience where you click on the screen to make everything happen – there’s no parser, and beyond some cartoon dialogue bubbles or labels on things, very little text. It’s also a splendid-looking title with gorgeous graphics even in its original black and white version. Cyan followed it up with a couple of other kid-friendly adventures called Cosmic Osmo in 1989 and Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo in 1991, but if you know this developer by name, it’s probably because of their 1993 smash hit, Myst, which became a turning point for graphical adventure games. We’ll talk about it in our next episode as we explore the influence of multimedia gaming on the genre.I want to mention one more 80s adventure game from North American developers, and it’s Mean Streets, a 1989 release from Access Software starring a detective named Tex Murphy, who’d go on to star in a number of games, including a sort-of remake in 1998 called Tex Murphy: Overseer. Mean Streets definitely takes some cues from Blade Runner and has a dystopian cyberpunk vibe, but it leans a little more heavily into the tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction as you roam around San Francisco in the year 2033. The game was originally intended to be a story-driven follow-up to Access Software’s 1987 space flight sim adventure hybrid Echelon, but it turned into more of a pure adventure, fusing hand-drawn and digitized graphics to tell its story. Fortunately, these were a little more convincing than those in games like the Les Manley sequel.As the series evolved, writer Chris Jones, who also stars as Tex Murphy in the games, took more and more of a role in designing them as traditional adventures and ditching the elements derived from Echelon. The 1992 sequel, Martian Memorandum, added in digitized video, something that would become a staple of this series as it became one of the showcases for multimedia gaming.Again, we’ll cover that in our next episode. But for now, let’s turn our attention back overseas for some other adventure games from the late 1980s.In 1980, author Umberto Eco published an Italian-language novel called The Name of the Rose, a fantastic murder mystery set in the medieval era that included elements of Catholicism, monastic life, semiotics and classic literature. The book received a 1986 Hollywood film adaptation starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater, but it did a poor job of translating the cerebral story and also completely changed the ending. As usual, the book is better than the movie, and I’d recommend the novel to anyone who enjoys literature for its ability to provoke you to think.I mention this because as we talk about European adventure games, we can turn to 1987, when the Spanish publisher Opera Soft released a game called La Abadia del Crimen, which means The Abbey of Crime, and it was pretty clearly an adaptation of The Name of the Rose in all but name. As it happens, Opera Soft couldn’t get the rights to the book, so they had to change the story enough to keep the game original. Even so, this surprisingly strong isometric adventure managed to be one of the jewels in the crown of the Spanish software scene during a time now referred to as the Golden Era of Spanish Software between 1983 and 1992. Sadly, the game has never been officially released in English and is only playable in English with a fan patch. Fortunately, it’s not too hard to find one, and it’s entirely worth your trouble.Another isometric adventure game from the same era is 1988’s Where Time Stood Still, a truly remarkable game from Denton Designs in the UK where a family and their plane’s pilot crash in a strange prehistoric land and have to try to survive a harrowing journey to safety. Part of what makes the game so interesting is that it’s possible for some of your characters to die, limiting your options in dealing with hazards or the people you encounter. The limited graphics also allow the game to make strong use of its black and white classic movie vibe – an effect Denton Designs had used in their 1986 isometric adventure The Great Escape, but which fits this game’s atmosphere so much better.Over in France, the publisher Infogrames created a two-part adventure game series for the MSX called Passengers on the Wind, based on the comic book series by Francois Bourgeon. I’ve never read the comics myself, but the games are supposed to follow their seafaring historical fiction plot very closely, and they also replicate the look of comic books with paneled artwork, speech bubbles and a graphical interface. The 1986 original game involves a seaward journey to Africa from Brittany, France during the time of the French Revolution and allows players to take on the roles of many different characters. The 1987 sequel has the crew land in Western Africa and further explores the dynamics of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.On that note, I also don’t want to forget the French studio Coktel Vision, which in 1986 hired a game designer named Muriel Tramis, widely acknowledged not only as the first black female game developer, but also as the Roberta Williams of France. Her first game, Méwilo debuted in 1987 and told a story about the town of Saint-Pierre on the Caribbean island of Martinique the day before a volcano would erupt and destroy the town. This game had particular relevance to Muriel Tramis because it’s set on the island her family is from, but the story also puts you in the shoes of a paranormal investigator who’s looking for a zombie that’s reputed to be the spirit of a slavemaster. Unfortunately, the game was only released in French and German, and many of her other games from the 1980s only came out in French. One that did make it to the US is 1989’s Emmanuelle: A Game of Eroticism, which is based on the erotic 1974 novel that’s been the inspiration for plenty of pornography, but the game itself was not well-received because it’s told from the perspective of the man trying to seduce the book’s sexually liberated female rather than from the female’s point of view. Another of her erotic games, Geisha, debuted in 1990 and got a multinational release as well, but it’s not a game I’d recommend.We’ll talk more about Muriel Tramis when we get to the 1990s, because she’s also the driving force behind the family-friendly Gobliiins series and the cartoony adventure The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, both of which were published outside of France by Sierra On-Line.Another French developer who was making adventure games in the late 1980s was Exxos, a label of ERE Informatique known for some really strange and surreal games like Captain Blood and Purple Saturn Day. They’d later go on to reform as Cryo Interactive, but as Exxos, they released a strange point and click adventure game through Infogrames called Kult: The Temple of Flying Saucers, but released in the United States as Chamber of the Mutant Sci-Fi Priestess. This game is incredibly bizarre, taking a lot of design cues from the artwork of H.R. Giger and featuring a disembodied fetus in the upper corner of the screen and an action menu that resembles some sort of alien creature. Oh, and you also get to fight lizardman aliens. It’s definitely a trip.In 1989, the similarly French publisher Ubisoft published developer Computer Dream’s cyberpunk spaceport game B.A.T., which means Bureau of Astral Troubleshooters. It’s a really good-looking adventure game where the action is presented in graphic novel-style frames, and while there’s plenty of text to read, the game itself involves clicking rather than attempting to type commands into a text parser. The first game’s a tad on the short side, though, and it’s really the 1992 sequel, B.A.T. II – The Koshan Conspiracy, that delivers on the promise the first game shows.And one more French developer worth mentioning from 1989 is Delphine International, who released the absolutely visually striking time travel game Future Wars: Adventures in Time, an interesting but way too short adventure that is most famous today for the involvement of Eric Chahi, who’d go on to create Another World, also known as Out of This World, in 1991. But Delphine got to make a more high-profile adventure game in the meantime, 1990s’ 007: James Bond - The Stealth Affair, which tells an original story about Ian Fleming’s classic spy but delivers a point and click adventure game experience as good as anything else that was on the market that year.Delphine followed this game up with 1991’s Cruise for a Corpse, a game that feels like it might have started as an Agatha Christie adaptation before being retooled as an original game. Even so, it’s a gorgeous point and click adventure and offers a compelling mystery to solve, and that leads us to another subgenre of graphical adventure games we haven’t really talked about yet: murder mysteries.In 1983, Free Fall Associates released a crime-solving game through Electronic Arts called Murder on the Zinderneuf where you play as a detective trying to solve a crime aboard a dirigible where fifteen different passengers are suspects. Every single time you play, the clues change, as does the identity of the killer and his or her motive, and it’s up to you to try to figure out how to get the right information in time to accuse the killer before the Zinderneuf lands.This basic concept is more or less the structure for many mystery games, though as the years went on, the mysteries tended to cement the identity of the killer and make the gameplay more linear as a result. This of course allowed for more sophisticated puzzles, but it also meant that the games lost a lot of their replay value.Killed Until Dead is one of the games that held onto the idea of randomizing the details. It debuted in 1986 developed by Artech and released through Accolade and, I must admit, has a gripping yet absolutely silly title. But the game also doesn’t take itself seriously. The premise is that five mystery writers have checked in to your hotel and you have to catch one who intends to murder another one before the deed actually happens. You do this by conducting incredibly intrusive surveillance with listening devices, cameras and room sweeps. Even so, the game itself is a lot of fun and involves some pretty serious logic puzzles to solve.Interplay’s Borrowed Time, released through Activision in 1985, takes the opposite approach of providing a linear mystery you solve by visiting suspects at the right times in the right places. The game is basically a text adventure with an added graphical user interface on top, and it’s built on the text parser from the game Mindshadow, but the graphics go a little beyond just illustrating the plot, providing animations and even some details that you can’t get from the text alone, particularly when it comes to hidden objects.The Scoop is a 1987 point and click adventure from Dale Disharoon and Telarium based on a novella by the London Detection Club, a group of writers that included Agatha Christie as a member. The game’s actually about a reporter, not a detective, who’s trying to save the newspaper The Daily Courier from going out of business and has to solve a series of crimes resulting in two murders. The game’s somewhat aggravating because it requires you to be in the right places at the right times to hear characters in the game world give needed information, but modern players who are used to roguelikes will have no trouble restarting the game over and over to get the details right.Murder on the Mississippi is a 1986 mystery adventure game from Activision that’s basically a parody of Agatha Christie’s novel Death on the Nile. Instead of traveling in Egypt, you’re heading up the Mississippi River on a steamship from St. Louis to New Orleans. As Sir Charles Foxworth, you have three days to solve the murder. The game plays a little differently from other adventure games because you control it with a joystick instead of the keyboard, and this led the game to be ported to some Japanese systems and the Famicom. Unfortunately, the Japanese versions are so bad this game is well-known as a kusoge, or “crappy game.” The American version, however, is quite playable, and even fun, particularly on the Commodore 64.Speaking of Japan, let’s turn our attention for a moment to Riverhill Soft’s Murder Club, also known in Japan as the first game in the J.B. Harold series. The premise of the game is that you’re a private detective who has to go around and talk to people to gather evidence to locate the murderer of a rich man. If you’ve played modern visual novel-style mysteries like the Ace Attorney games, you’ll have a pretty good understanding of how this game’s menu-driven dialogue trees and opportunities for action work – you can question witnesses, review old cases, examine evidence and even visit the crime lab. In Japan, this game led to several sequels that even culminated in a fully digitized multimedia game in 1994.Another Japanese game in a similar vein is Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher, which also uses the menu-driven interface Japanese adventure games have tended to utilize since Portopia Serial Murder Case, but which takes place in a cyberpunk world that’s more or less Blade Runner with some different names for things, like JUNKER Runner for Blade Runner and Snatcher for Replicant. Snatcher is not only a fun mystery game with some unexpected bursts of action, but also features the cute Metal Gear mk. II mech as your constant companion. Kojima’s 1994 adventure game Policenauts is similar mechanically, but entirely different in terms of tone and structure.One more game I want to mention from outside the US is The Detective, a 1986 UK Commodore 64 game by Argus Press Software where you control Inspector Snide of Scotland Yard. Your job is to investigate the mansion of Angus MacFungus, who’s recently been murdered. Similar to Murder on the Mississippi, the game’s joystick-driven with a menu that pops up when actions are available. Though it’s an isometric game, the graphics are quite cartoony and distinctive, quite similar in style to Maniac Mansion, but with more of a British flair. As the game progresses, more murders happen, and you have to solve the case before time runs out. But part of the fun is understanding how the NPCs move around the mansion and how you can use secret passages to shorten your time traveling around it.Surprisingly, the 1980s didn’t have a lot of Sherlock Holmes games, something that would become a staple in the 1990s multimedia era. Infocom and Challenge’s 1988 Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels was a text adventure, and the 1986 Commodore 64 game 221 B Baker St. was a board game adaptation. Bantam Software did create a 1985 Macintosh game called Sherlock Holmes in “Another Bow”, but it’s so easy it’s not worth recommending.Beyond everything we’ve discussed, the 1980s also had a great run of mystery games on the Macintosh, so good that they’re today referred to as the “MacVenture” games. And if hearing about them gives you a sense of Déjà vu, you know what’s coming next.You don’t have to be super familiar with the history of the Apple Macintosh to know that the computer was released in 1984 following a very famous advertisement playing up the whole “let’s tear down Big Brother with our hip new computer” idea. The Apple Macintosh was one of the first mainstream personal computers to be driven by a graphical user interface, and though it was certainly a niche machine that appealed to a certain type of computer user, the clean graphics, windowed environments and mouse-driven interface made the Mac a lot less intimidating to a casual user than a typical keyboard-driven command-line computer.But one thing the Macintosh is also famous for is its lack of games, though that notion is a little overblown. According to MobyGames, the Mac had about 300 games released between 1984 and 1989 and close to 2000 games released in the 1990s. A lot of these were ports, of course, and even the Mac’s own exclusives tended to get ported to more popular platforms where they could sell better.In 1985, a little developer in Wheeling, Illinois called ICOM Simulations created one of the Mac’s first truly great games, a graphical adventure game called Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True. The game takes place in Chicago in the 1940s and puts you in the shoes of a gumshoe with a bad case of amnesia who has to clear his own name from a murder for which he’s been framed.It’s quite different from many other graphical adventure games of the era because you have to find an antidote to cure your memory loss and fill in gaps in the backstory. Failing to take the antidote on time can actually cause you to lose your mind entirely and wind up in a mental hospital, and it’s easy to wind up in that state when you get out on the streets and start getting hassled by a time-wasting mugger. Déjà Vu is definitely a game where even knowing the exact sequence of required events won’t necessarily get you through the adventure without having to reload or start over, and Déjà Vu is also rather infamous for killing your character suddenly and without much warning.But the other thing about Déjà Vu that’s notable is that everything is entirely cursor-driven. There is no text to type in and you can interact with objects in the game world directly by clicking or double-clicking on them, depending upon which version you’re playing. This interface design made sense on the Mac with its including mouse, but it also allowed the game to be ported to other platforms like the Commodore 64 and even the Nintendo Entertainment System, where the cursor could be moved around with a joystick or d-pad instead of a mouse. Déjà Vu is so well-designed as an adventure game that even on these less graphically-intensive 8-bit platforms, the game plays well and remains fun. In fact, I’d hazard to say far more people have played the slightly sanitized NES version than the Macintosh original.ICOM’s next game debuted in 1986, but instead of offering another hard-boiled detective story, this game, Uninvited, has you survive a car accident and go searching for your missing sibling at a nearby mansion that’s noticeably decrepit and almost certainly haunted. As the game progresses, it becomes clear that the place was once the home of a powerful sorcerer whose evil apprentice trapped the souls of many of the people who lived there. And if you somehow survive all the danger but don’t complete the game within a proscribed set of moves, you, too, will become one of its undead residents.Uninvited is often considered the lesser of the MacVenture games because it’s tremendously difficult and requires players to piece together cryptic clues found around the mansion to solve puzzles. You also have to locate the lengthy magic phrases used to cast spells and type them in to use them. It’s also the one case where the NES port is probably the best version to play because it gets rid of the time limit, offers clearer hints and lets you select spells from your inventory, among other changes.ICOM Simulations followed this one up with a far more popular adventure in 1987 called Shadowgate, and while it is similar to Uninvited since you’re exploring a Warlock’s castle this time around, the setting is more clearly grounded in a medieval fantasy world and you’re a more traditional hero-king saving the day than a hapless adventurer trying to piece things together. Unlike Uninvited’s move limit, Shadowgate has a finite number of torches you can use, and once you’re out of them you stumble in the darkness and break your neck.Shadowgate’s most defining quality, however, is how gleefully it kills you. This is a game where you will die a lot and the game will take seemingly delight in describing your demise. In fact, some of the game’s darker elements managed to sneak past Nintendo of America’s censors, so even the NES version retains a lot of the horror-infused flavor of the original, and it’s definitely the best-known and most popular version today. Even so, there’s a certain charm to playing the game on the Mac because the black and white graphics add to the horror, and the game’s balance of battling monsters, solving puzzles and collecting the three pieces of the Staff of Ages needed to stop the Warlock Lord make for a compelling adventure that feels a bit like an RPG even if it’s more firmly rooted in traditional adventure game mechanics.Shadowgate was so popular it inspired a 1993 TurboGrafxCD sequel exclusive to North America called Beyond Shadowgate, but it is very different, looking and playing much more like a Sierra-style adventure game with more cartoonish graphics. This is not to be confused, by the way, with a 2024 game published by Zojoi that plays much more like the NES port of the original and which is based on a sequel design document by the game’s co-creator, Dave Marsh, that was never used. It takes place a few decades after Shadowgate and stars a hero named Del who’s trapped in the castle.There’s also a 1999 sequel called Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers developed by Infinite Ventures for the Nintendo 64 that also stars a hero named Del, but this story takes place centuries later and has a far more fleshed-out storyline that involves stopping an evil apprentice from resurrecting the Warlock Lord.And there’s even a prequel novel! If you recall in an earlier episode, I mentioned Seth Godin’s “Worlds of Power” youth novel series written by the fictitious author F.X. Nine. Most of these books are really terrible, but the book Before Shadowgate actually had some input from the original developers, Dave Marsh and Karl Roelofs. No need to track the book down, though – Infinite Ventures released it freely on their website and you can check the show notes if you’d like to give it a read!ICOM Simulations’ final MacVenture game definitely feels like history repeating itself, because it’s the 1988 sequel Deja Vu II: Lost in Las Vegas. But this time, the action moves out of Chicago and doesn’t involve an amnesia storyline. It’s instead a more conventional private eye type of story where you have to find a way to track down some missing mob money before a hitman decides you’re out of time and ends the game for you. It’s not quite as memorable as the original game and feels like a more conventional graphic adventure game in many ways, but it’s also notable for some rather obtuse puzzles that practically require you to consult a walkthrough.After the MacVenture series, ICOM Simulations largely moved on to making games for the TurboGrafx-16 and TurboGrafxCD as well as creating the Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective multimedia series for the PC that shifted their focus from graphical adventure gaming to the flashier, but less interesting, full motion video adventures. They also developed some Looney Tunes Super Nintendo games through Sunsoft before they got acquired by Viacom and started cranking out games based on cable television IPs like Rocko’s Modern Life, Aaahh!! Real Monsters and MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head.ICOM’s last great game before this shift was, quite fittingly, a full-motion video adventure in the style of Shadowgate but also based on a popular IP at the time. It was called Dracula Unleashed, and we’ll definitely cover it when we talk about multimedia adventure games in a future episode.But for now, we really need to finish out the 1980s by talking about LucasFilm Games and the advent of Sierra On-Line’s SCI interpreter, which led to the modern style of point and click adventure games we still play today and which allowed some other power couples and female creators beyond Roberta Williams to make some truly great graphical adventure games!And we’ll cover that, and more, in our next episode!If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I want to recommend Rosewater, a point and click adventure game from Grundislav Games and designed by Francisco Gonzalez. The premise of the game is that you’re a writer named Harley Leger who’s taken a newspaper job in the frontier town of Rosewater. Your first assignment is to cover a Wild West frontier show being performed in town by Gentleman Jake Ackerman, a quick-witted Buffalo Bill-type who can talk himself into trouble as quickly as he can talk himself out of it. He’s also relying pretty heavily on his young assistant, Danny Luo, to do the actual trick shooting and cowboy stuff.Later on, you head out on a treasure hunt and soon stumble onto a plot involving an errant scientist who’s behind some wild technology that feels like an offshoot of Rosewater’s predecessor, the 2019 steampunk adventure Lamplight City. And this is where the game gets interesting, because you begin acquiring other allies and soon embark on a road trip where you begin playing through vignettes that can last a few minutes or involve a far deeper encounter. Over time, you get to know all of your allies far better as Harley learns more about their backstories, and there are many points where you have to make choices in the game that impact the outcome of those relationships.Though Rosewater takes place in the fictional world of Vespuccia, its reflection of our own Wild Western frontier is interesting because it offers some critique of the dynamics of the day through both a historical and modern lens. There are ne’er do wells who try to scam you, freedom fighters who are trying to hold onto their land, native tribes who are trying to balance kindness and caution, and even a religious cult that’s trying to make a better life for its people by covering up a dark secret. Once you reach the city of El Presidio and move into the endgame, Rosewater makes you feel like the journey you’ve been on has been more than just a sequence of events, but a true adventure across a wild land where anything can happen.It reminds me a lot of the Sierra On-Line games Gold Rush! and the Conquests of Camelot and Conquests of the Longbow games, and that’s high praise, because I love those games and wish there were more adventures like them.Rosewater is worth the $20 asking price – it’s a surprisingly lengthy game with great voice acting, a memorable story and distinctive artwork – but as of this writing, I’ve seen it on sale as low as $15 on Steam and GOG. That’s a great value, and you can often even find it bundled with Lamplight City, another tremendously worthwhile game that of course has some intersection with this one. Be sure to play them both!https://store.steampowered.com/app/1226670/Rosewater/ This is a public episode. 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In this episode, Sean details the history of On-Line Systems and Ken and Roberta Williams's development of the Hi-Res Adventures that gave birth to the genre of graphical adventure games! He's Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 3: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 1Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack @greatestgames (https://greatestgames.substack.com) or BlueSky @greatestgames.substack.com And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean's free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music "The Great Game Guide Theme" written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He'd love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------Coming up in this episode –We’re going to dive into graphical adventure games by taking a look at the early adventure games by Roberta and Ken Williams, talk about the evolution of adventure games from text parsers to point and click experiences and highlight a few of the lesser-known 1980s graphical adventure games you should definitely check out!I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Let’s see what one of computer gaming’s earliest showcase genres has in store!I grew up as a PC gamer, largely because my parents made my brothers and I skip out on the Nintendo Entertainment System when it arrived and PC games were all we had to play. We did have an Atari 2600 when I was really young, but when our TV started going on the fritz, my dad blamed it on the Atari and that was pretty much the end of console gaming in our house. And my dad was so adamantly against the slop on TV that he got rid of cable on our family television and we were pretty much restricted to watching what was on the local networks or whatever we could find on VHS – PG-rated, of course.For a lot of people, this would have probably been a good signal to go outside, get some fresh air, explore the world around them. And I did! But we lived in the Midwest where it got way too cold in the winter and way too warm in July, so there were many days that we were stuck indoors, trying to find something to do. And since our computer time was limited to just a half an hour each per day, we’d usually burn through that before lunchtime.Being a PC gamer, one of the genres my brothers and I played a lot were adventure games, and it might have had a shaping influence on how we all think, because when I was a teenager, my brother and I figured out how to utilize an old RGB monitor to essentially become a TV, at least one we could watch VHS tapes on thanks to a VCR we’d hooked up that could play video through the composite video input and sound through some external speakers. But the VCR had a coaxial cable input, and that meant we could hook up a video game console – an absolutely perfect plan, because we had friends who were getting tired of their Super Nintendos and Sega Genesises and willing to sell them to us or even give them to us, and they worked great with that RGB monitor.What was particularly interesting about this workaround was that my parents didn’t fight us on it. We weren’t taking up the TV downstairs and preventing them from watching whatever they wanted, we weren’t doing anything that might harm the TV and we weren’t monopolizing the computer. Somehow, we’d solved this really illogical, arbitrary puzzle, and the reward was getting to graduate from being exclusively PC gamers to getting to be console gamers as well.I’ve had many situations in my life that are just like that, and I credit adventure games for teaching me to think outside the box. And for me, the adventures that were the most gripping weren’t the text-based games we covered over the last two episodes. It was the graphical ones where you didn’t just have to imagine what was happening around you from a bunch of text, but you could actually see things depicted on the screen and interact with the game world directly.The first adventure games I recall actually seeing were the trio of King’s Quest III, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, and that’s because at the base exchange on the Air Force Base I lived on, those three games were running on a non-playable demo loop on the computers in the electronics department. I was captivated by them because each game featured its own world in which the characters could freely move around in what seemed like three dimensions due to the perspective, pick things up and talk to other characters. That might not seem like a big deal today, but in the mid-1980s, when a lot of games were sidescrollers or overhead action games with single button inputs, the difference was incredible.And what’s more, I liked fantasy, and I liked science fiction, so King’s Quest and Space Quest were right up my alley. As for Leisure Suit Larry… dancing with girls in a disco – eh, not so much for a kid in the first grade. But I remember being really curious what a “lounge lizard” was and, being only six or seven at the time, I had a pretty literal understanding of what that might mean. It wasn’t until I was a little older, hit puberty and the themes of Leisure Suit Larry were suddenly very interesting to me that I had the wisdom and maturity to understand figurative language.And sleaze, which Leisure Suit Larry delighted in, though I maintain to this day that the game’s not nearly as filthy as people made it out to be and that it was actually a parody of all those truly sleazy XXX adult games and graphics disks you’d see advertised in computer magazines. If you know the history of Leisure Suit Larry, you know I’m not far off the mark, either, because it’s actually both a parody and a remake of an earlier 1981 text-only adventure game called Softporn Adventure published by a company called On-Line Systems.The game was written by Charles Benton in BASIC for the Apple II, and Benton happened to meet an enterprising software publisher at a trade show who eventually decided to help him reach a wider audience. The game’s box art features a now-infamous cover where three nude women are sitting in a hot tub sipping champagne while a mustachioed waiter stands behind them with a tray and bottle. Just the hint of sex and nudity in a computer game was shocking enough for the 1980s, a time where the Moral Majority was in full force trying to censor anything even remotely provocative, but there’s an even more interesting detail about this cover. Two of the women, on the left, worked for On-Line Systems. Their names are Diane Siegel and Susan Davis. But the third woman, sitting alone on the right, has long brown hair and bangs, and it’s not only her home in which the photo for this cover was taken, but also her influence that led to the rise of graphical adventure games as one of the genres through which video game stories could be told.Her name is Roberta Williams, and she and her husband, Ken Williams, had co-founded On-Line Systems two years before this version of Softporn Adventure debuted. While they’d started the company to write business software, they’d also used it to publish Roberta’s hobby project, a game called Mystery House, in 1980.It kicked off a series called Hi-Res Adventures that would become the very foundation for graphical adventure games not just in the United States, but around the world.I don’t know if you saw it in early 2023, but a company nobody had heard of called Cygnus Entertainment released a game called Colossal Cave that offered a full 3D remake of Will Crowther and Don Wood’s Adventure … and with graphics, of course, since the original game didn’t have those. You can even play it in VR if you want, which is a pretty amazing option given that the game it’s based on is now 50 years old.The Steam page lists Colossal Cave as being “by the award winning designer of King’s Quest and Phantasmagoria”, and no, that’s not a fake-out. This remake was directed by Roberta Williams, creator of both of those games, and Cygnus Entertainment is co-owned by her and her husband, Ken.And it makes sense that they’d put out a visual reimagining of Colossal Cave Adventure, because as Roberta Williams says herself, this is the game that inspired her to become a game developer.And by the way, this leads me to want to add a little bit of detail to the story of the creation of Adventure, because I was not aware until I watched Roberta William’s video about the origins of Colossal Cave Adventure that Will Crowther had originally mapped the caves in the Mammoth cave system with his wife, Particia. In fact, it was Patricia who first discovered the passageway linking the Mammoth Cave to the nearby Flint Cave system, and the two worked together to digitize their maps on a teletype terminal they had at home connected to the PDP-1 at Will’s workplace.So, why does Will get so much credit for mapping the caves? It’s probably because the two separated before he wrote the game that made his exploration of them famous. But it just goes to show, behind every major accomplishment made by a man, there’s usually a woman who deserves more credit.That’s never been the case with Ken and Roberta Williams, though. They’re gaming’s first true power couple and they are absolutely fascinating people who had a powerful shaping effect on the modern video game industry, particularly in the United States and Japan, but also in Germany and Eastern Europe, where point and click adventure games never really fell out of fashion like they did in most of the rest of the world.You could make a whole movie about them, and in fact, someone is – later this year, there will be a documentary film called The Legends of Adventure: The Story of Sierra On-Line coming out for which, I’m happy to say, I was a proud Kickstarter backer.Maybe one day, they’ll inspire a biopic about their young lives together as a business-minded programmer and a wildly creative game designer trying to get away from it all and make amazing computer games they sell in ziplocked baggies from their home at the foot of the Sierra mountains.But to those of us who’ve been following PC gaming for awhile, the story of how Ken and Roberta founded On-Line Systems and then pivoted to Sierra On-Line is pretty well-known because they were both so willing to give interviews during the 1980s and 90s and also published their own company magazine. What’s more, a lot of the people who were there and worked with them have also given lots of interviews, so we have a pretty clear picture today of what working at Sierra was like.But let’s back up to 1979, when Ken Williams discovered a game called Colossal Cave Adventure and introduced it to his wife, Roberta. They were both captivated by the game, and Roberta started searching for others like it. She tried out other games like Scott Adam’s Adventureland, but both she and Ken felt the experience could be improved with graphics.Unfortunately, the microcomputers of the day weren’t very good at displaying detailed graphics for a few important reasons. One of these was storage – the cassettes and disks of the day were low-density and had very serious limitations when it came to storing both images and programs. Another was the graphics hardware itself on home computer platforms, which was still quite primitive, and also not standardized. And then there was also the issue of memory – some platforms required games to loaded entirely into RAM before they could be played because the storage media were too slow to read from during the game itself. This was particularly a problem with cassette tapes.But Roberta and Ken recognized that the Apple II was capable of displaying hand-drawn graphics in conjunction with a tool called VersaWriter that allowed users to trace physical images place on a drawing board and digitize the tracing in medium or hi-resolution formats.This is an important detail, because the games this husband and wife duo were about to create would come to be known as the Hi-Res Adventures. And even though the games are laughably low-resolution by today’s standards, in 1980, computer graphics of any sort were still a very novel idea, particularly on home PC.But the VersaWriter had a big limitation, and that was that the out of the box software was only used for digitizing images, not actually using them. So Ken Williams had to write software to allow the Apple II to display them, and he also rewrote the scanning software to improve upon it.And when Roberta created seventy drawings for the game she was writing, he had to additionally write software to compress and display them, which meant reinterpreting the lines in the graphics like vectors with coordinates.This led to an effect that became common in the Hi-Res Adventures of seeing the computer draw each scene whenever you’d enter a room, which slowed the action down considerably from the faster pace of text-based adventure games. This slowdown but which became even more tedious when subsequent entries in the series added color graphics that had to be filled in once the objects were drawn.But we won’t focus on how clunky Mystery House feels today because in 1980, it was a revolutionary title, allowing players to explore a Victorian mansion populated by seven other people, each of whom would get killed one by one by the murderer in their midst. Roberta Williams took inspiration from the Agatha Christie novel And Then There Were None, a style of mystery we’d today call a thriller because it involves a hidden murderer picking off people one by one while the others try to solve the case.I also need to pause here and add that Christie’s book is not one I’d recommend to modern readers unless you’re clear-eyed that the book was originally called Ten Little [N-Word]s and that it’s built around the 19th century minstrel song of the same name. Some versions changed the theme to Ten Little Indians, which is not any better, or Ten Little Soldiers, which helps to sanitize it somewhat, but the book is steeped in cultural racism that isn’t so easily sanitized.Fortunately, Mystery House doesn’t have any of those problems, and Roberta Williams also took inspiration from the board game Clue – or Cluedo, if you’re from outside the United States – to make the gameplay comprehensible to players.The result is an adventure game that is tremendously interesting for its time because it’s able to evoke a sense of ratcheting terror as you begin finding bodies and messages from the killer around the house. Eventually, you can find and confront the killer and escape, which is good because no one else survives the story. But if there’s one thing to knock Mystery House for, it’s that the game is brief – so much so that once you figure out the correct range of actions you can complete it in under 15 minutes.Even so, Mystery House was a showcase title for the Apple II in 1980, and if you were in the United States, that was where you were going to play it. Ken and Roberta Williams were surprised to discover that there was an audience for it, and the game sold thousands of copies. Not bad for a hobby game that only took them about a month to code.This also gave Roberta Williams the opportunity to work on a follow-up that could be bigger and better, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But before we do, I want to offer a few comments about Mystery House that might help those who weren’t around during the early days of computing – and hey, I was a wee babe myself – to understand just how foundational of a game it is.First of all, I want you to think about just how many games you’ve played that involve exploring a house or village full of unfolding horrors and trying to solve puzzles while you also evade bad guys. I can name a few just off the top of my head – Alone in the Dark. Resident Evil. Silent Hill. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. Gone Home. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. What Remains of Edith Finch. All of these games owe a tremendous debt to Mystery House for establishing the rules and format of their gameplay.And lest you think I’m overstating the importance of Mystery House, there’s one place where the game was widely ported, and that was in Japan. And this is a rather important detail, because Mystery House was huge there, both in its original form and also in a pseudo-remake by Micro Cabin in 1982 that simplified the story, a sequel by Micro Cabin called Mystery House II and a remake in 1983 by a developer called Starcraft that included redrawn graphics. Because Japanese computers tended to have higher-resolution display capabilities to display Japanese written characters, graphical adventures were a natural fit for the various platforms in Japan and were widely played by the emerging game developers and computer programmers who were part of Japan’s young PC gaming industry.Second, I want to point out that Mystery House was quite different from the many text-based adventures that would emerge in the early 1980s because the gameplay was dependent upon those graphics to create atmosphere and tension. Most text-based games that included graphics could easily be played without them. But in Mystery House, the text descriptions alone were not very evocative of the action and the game probably wouldn’t have been very much fun without the opportunity it granted to see the house from a first-person perspective and to stumble across visual representations of in-game items, freshly dug graves and, of course, dead bodies.Finally, Mystery House helped adventure gaming break free of the more open treasure-hunting framework of Will Crowther’s Adventure and add some direction to the gameplay with a more linear story to experience. This turned out to be both a good and bad thing for the genre, and if there’s one thing graphical adventure games are particularly well-known for even today, it’s what a lousy value they are once you known the solutions to their puzzles. They tend to be far easier to solve than text-based adventure games and often have to add in serious padding like scripted sequences, cheap deaths, arcade action minigames and lots and lots of dialogue to ensure the games can’t be completed in 15 minutes like Mystery House can be.But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, and before we start talking about all the games Ken and Roberta Williams would eventually become known for, we need to talk about another Hi Res Adventure that would form the scaffolding for their far more famous series about King Graham’s adventures in Daventry.Before Graham could take his first King’s Quest, Roberta Williams had a story to tell about a wizard and a princess.Roberta Williams grew up loving fairy tales and fantasy storytelling, and it’s fitting that her next game after Mystery House turned out to be an adventure in the kingdom of Serenia, a world of myth and magic where players took on the role of a wandering hero tasked by King George to rescue Princess Priscilla from the castle of the evil wizard Harlin.If some of these details sound familiar, it’s because Roberta Williams would later recycle some of this plot, and even the entire land of Serenia, in her later and more famous adventure game series, King’s Quest. But whereas King’s Quest was a fairly impressive game graphically for its time, this earlier title, initially known as Wizard and the Princess, is quite a bit less so.I don’t want to pick on the game’s artwork, because the game’s from 1980 and was produced in a manner similar to Mystery House where hand-drawn pictures were digitally traced, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that they are crude. The biggest difference is that they’re also in color, which was accomplished on the Apple II original using a process called dithering to display a broader palette of colors onscreen. For 1980, having full-color graphics in an adventure game was pretty revolutionary, even if the graphics themselves weren’t particularly impressive, and when you consider that the competition included games like Zork and the Adventureland series, Ken and Roberta Williams definitely looked like they were on the cutting edge, and there’s no question that they pushed the graphical adventure genre forward.But one problem with Wizard and the Princess was that the game was amazingly challenging despite its seeming accessibility, designed for more advanced adventure gamers rather than people just starting out. I personally don’t recommend it without a walkthrough because there are puzzles you will absolutely not solve on your own without beating your head against the wall, including one part where you have to enter a specific word that isn’t obvious and which requires some serious magical thinking to divine. Roberta Williams would pull something even more baffling with an infamous puzzle in King’s Quest in 1985, but we’ll get to that in a bit.The challenge was high enough that Ken and Roberta added another entry to their Hi-Res Adventures line, making it part 0 in their series. This game, Mission Asteroid, offered new players a more linear storyline with straightforward puzzles to solve as they attempted to launch a rocket to intercept and blow up an asteroid heading towards Earth. While not a terribly compelling game on its own, it completed the initial triad of Hi-Res Adventures and gave On-Line Systems some breathing room to start working on something bigger and better.Here’s where things get interesting. Roberta Williams got to work on a six month project that would eventually take up most of 1981 and include an additional 10-person development team to help her build her most ambitious game yet – a six-disk, $99 adventure game with 1300 locations to visit and a dedicated telephone help line to offer hints.This game, Time Zone, was technically the fifth game in the Hi-Res Adventures series, but, for whatever reason, dropped that branding on the actual box. It was also an enormous flop of an adventure. $99 in 1982 was about $350 in today’s dollars, and even worse, Time Zone was incredibly tedious.Having well over a thousand locations to visit while using a text parser built for two word verb and noun commands, and the thrill of using a time machine to visit other periods in history wasn’t quite as exciting as it sounded.The illustrations were also still quite cartoony and crude – better than Wizard and the Princess, to be sure, but not anywhere near the level of other graphical adventure games that it was meant to compete with, like Ultrasoft’s The Mask of the Sun, Penguin Software’s spooky Transylvania or even Scott Adams’s Graphic Adventure line that added graphics to his text-based adventures.“But what about the other Hi-Res Adventure games that came before Time Zone?” you may be wondering. Neither was developed by Roberta Williams, so they tend to be forgotten. #3 in the series was called Cranston Manor, a graphical adaptation of an earlier Atari 8-bit text adventure written by Larry Ledden. The full-color artwork adds a little value to the game, and it actually looks better than the art in any of Roberta Williams’s Hi-Res Adventures, but the gameplay is still based on that simplistic Adventure trope of plundering a game world of an arbitrary number of treasures – in this case, a rich man’s mansion.Hi-Res Adventure #4 was created by Bob Davis, a liquor store employee from Oakhurst who Ken Williams hired to not only create this game, but also later help out with Time Zone. Interestingly, the game is called Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, and if you know anything about Greek and Roman mythology, the title’s already problematic because it’s a hodge-podge of names and myths from different traditions. The cover art also shows Ulysses riding Pegasus which… no, that’s not how things went down. Maybe if Ulysses had met Pegasus, he wouldn’t have been stuck stranded at sea for ten years. Suffice it to say that this adventure isn’t too worried about staying true to its source material.If you can let that all go, what you’ll find is a thoroughly average text adventure with graphics, not particularly special, but certainly playable. If you know your mythology, most of the puzzles aren’t too difficult, though there is a rather strange sequence where you have to lash your ship to a fjord and bribe a dragon to go away, which just feels like Ulysses has stepped into the Norse tradition somehow. There are also puzzles with magic words you have to figure out and an ocean that behaves like a maze. Definitely play it with a walkthrough if you try it out today.The final Hi-Res Adventure game debuted in 1983, and of all of them, it’s the one I recommend you play today. It’s also the first title to use On-Line System’s new name, Sierra, in its branding, this time calling itself a SierraVenture.The name of the game: The Dark Crystal, based on the feature film of the same name.The movie The Dark Crystal came out in 1982 and was an ambitious dark fantasy film co-directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz that was notable for featuring only puppets and animatronics with no onscreen human actors. It’s a profoundly strange and visually striking film that today would be made easily with computer graphics, but then had to be done entirely with practical effects that pushed the talented puppeteers behind previous productions like The Muppet Show, The Muppet Movie and Sesame Street to their limits.The story, which involves a young Gelfling boy named Jen setting out on a quest to heal an ancient crystal and stop the evil birdlike beings known as the Skeksis, is actually the weakest part of the film. Even so, it allows for an adventure that moves from strange location to even stranger location, eventually introducing a second Gelfling character named Kira and sending the two across the world riding on giant creatures called landstriders. It all leads to a terrifying castle where the Skeksis are about to gain ultimate power as three suns converge in the sky unless Jen and Kira can restore the crystal.All of this makes for a pretty weird movie. But it also makes for a great adventure game, especially when that game depicts the considerable artistry of the film in each of its screens.And that’s exactly what Ken and Roberta Williams elected to do with their adaptation of The Dark Crystal, a fairly linear and straightforward adaptation of the feature film that nonetheless looks and plays well because it relies so much on the movie’s story and assets. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the game improves upon the film’s story by cutting it down to its most important action and then makes smart use of the production art and filmed scenes to depict the best moments of the action.It’s almost like playing an interactive storybook based on the movie, and because it wasn’t kid-friendly, Sierra even had Al Lowe recreate the game in a new version called Gelfling Adventure that debuted in 1984 as something that could be marketed towards schools. A more modern version of the game also exists on the website DarkCrystal.com with updated graphics and a simplified text parser that helps you to know which actions you can take at any point.In about five minutes, you can experience the entire story, and that was a criticism at the time, too – for a game that spanned three disks and had such strong production values, it sure was short and easy.But let’s talk about why this game is important for a moment. First of all, The Dark Crystal was one of the first licensed video games to ever exist, and certainly the first graphical adventure game built as an official tie-in to a feature film. When you compare it to other popular licensed titles of the day like Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial on the Atari 2600, Sierra’s The Dark Crystal really stands out for capturing the look and feel of the film and truly immersing players into the movie’s world without taking major liberties with the characters or plot.There’s also the fact that Sierra also recognized that it needed to make the game easier and more accessible for younger audiences led to a third style of Roberta Williams adventure games that Sierra would go on to publish for years: educational games for children, which she’d begin making just a few years later with her 1987 graphical adventure Mixed-Up Mother Goose. Combine that with her mysteries like The Colonel’s Bequest, The Dagger of Amon-Ra and Phantasmagoria and her long-running fantasy-based King’s Quest games and you get a tremendous and varied run of adventure games that demonstrate that, Time Zone aside, Roberta Williams absolutely knew her stuff when it came to adventure gaming.But in 1983, nobody really understood the business of gaming that well, and Sierra made a lot of mistakes, one of which included The Dark Crystal. The problem wasn’t that the game was bad, but that it was dated by the standards of the day and not the big hit it needed to be. Trusting in the reputation of Jim Henson and the Hollywood film industry, Ken and Roberta had anticipated the game would be a big seller that would bring them the fledgling computer game industry broader exposure. And unfortunately, it just wasn’t the game to do that.The bigger problem, however, was that Sierra had also gotten into the cartridge market for home computers, primarily for computer platforms like the VIC-20, Atari 8-bit and Apple II that were about to get absolutely slaughtered by the Commodore 64, which would become a dominant format in North America. Suddenly, they had a lot of expensive inventory they couldn’t sell and very little to offer in a world where game consoles were crashing and home computers were realigning. Sierra cut its staff down from 100 people to about 20-30 and Ken and Roberta had to find ways to keep the company afloat by taking out personal loans, including mortgaging their new $800,000 home.During all of this there were discussions about how to keep Sierra solvent. One idea was for them to merge with Spinnaker Software, the educational software company responsible for many Apple II games you’d find in school computer labs. Spinnaker, as we know from a previous episode of this show, eventually did get into the text-based adventure gaming business along with Byron Preiss by establishing a label eventually known as Telarium, but Roberta Williams didn’t think much of them, and Ken Williams even says in his book that she protested that they were a joke of a publisher not taken seriously within the computer software industry and she opposed any merger with them.I want to pause here and say that Sierra was one of many publishers that probably would have gone under in 1983 if it hadn’t gotten profoundly lucky with what happened next. When you read the company’s history, there are several times where it appears that Ken Williams may have made business decisions that led to costly detours or held the company back while Roberta, as the creative force, was the one who pushed the company forward. On the other hand, Roberta was also the person who had the most clout and who got the most support whenever she had a game to ship, an issue that did impact other creators at Sierra when they wanted their games to be more visible.I personally think that Sierra needed both of their personalities to provide a sort of yin and yang to help them weather the constant storms Sierra would face during the many changes occurring in the world of microcomputers and home video game console systems. It’s really hard when you’re in a newer industry to anticipate where the future is heading because things change so quickly, and Sierra placed both good and bad bets along the way. In later interviews, Roberta has always said that while Ken is a great salesman and businessman, he’s also more trusting of other people than she is, and that did lead to situations where he made some business deals that he probably shouldn’t have, including one 15 years later that would wind up with the Williamses losing control of the business entirely.But back in 1983, with no sustainable revenue and a lot of personal capital on the line, Sierra might have vanished if it hadn’t been for a fortunate side deal Ken Williams worked out with IBM to create software for their new PCJr platform, including a brand new adventure game that would be built around the idea of replayability and showcase a more dynamic, complex game world than the simple room to room adventure game designs driven by text interactions that Sierra had been utilizing. IBM had plenty of funding and wanted their new format to succeed, and so Sierra had enough runway to create something revolutionary and new. It took them 18 months to do it. And as I’m sure we all know, that’s exactly what they did.The idea Ken and his associate Jeff Stephenson ultimately pitched was an adventure game that would de-emphasize text to the point that the parser would only be used for specific commands. The player would use arrow keys to walk around a game world made up of interconnected screens, and what would happen on those screens would be dynamic and different, with characters who’d wander around and action sequences that would occur. And the gameplay would be animated!After some convincing back at Sierra, Roberta Williams decided to lead the team in designing this game, and Jeff Stephenson, with some guidance from Ken, wrote the tool called the Adventure Game Interpreter that would be used to program it. This new tool would once again use hand drawn graphics traced into a digital format and then drawn onscreen using vectors, allowing the game to make good use of precious disk space. But it would also feature a controllable playable character who could move left, right, up or down on each screen and be stopped by boundaries and objects that fit the scene.The result was King’s Quest: Quest For the Crown, a fairy tale-inspired game where a knight named Sir Grahame – originally spelled with an e on the end - is tasked by King Edward with retrieving three hidden treasures from the land around the Kingdom of Daventry to resolve the disasters and hardship everyone’s facing.After the PCjr original released in May of 1984, Sierra released several new versions that gradually expanded the backstory and made some changes to the storyline. Sir Graham lost the e at the end of his name, the King’s name was changed to King Edward the Benevolent and the quest was now about defeating an evil witch who had tricked the King and absconded to the nearby land of Cumberland with three treasures.This is the version of the story most players will remember, particularly since it’s offset with several other villainous foes including a giant, a troll, an ogre, a dragon and a leprechaun king as well as an old gnome with an extremely difficult-to-guess name – and no, it’s not Rumpelstiltskin, but you do need to figure that much out to deduce his real name. There are also other creatures wandering around like birds, elves, goats and wolves.Now, if you play classic King’s Quest today, you’ll probably be playing the MS-DOS remake from 1987 with EGA graphics or the 1990 remake in their newer Sierra Creative Interpreter, or SCI, engine. If you somehow manage to track down the old PCjr or Tandy 1000 version, you may be surprised at how much slower it is to play because the game has to drawn all the background graphics before allowing Graham to move around the screen. But even that version, when compared to other games of the era, stands out as being an incredibly groundbreaking game.In 1984, seeing King’s Quest in action and comparing it to the games that had come before it was similar to seeing the jump between Nintendo’s Donkey Kong or Mario Bros. and the later Super Mario Bros.. It was a revelation of what games could become, and it was also the first graphical adventure game to establish a style fully dependent on the graphics not just to replace some of the text description, but to allow the player to navigate and interact with the game world.King’s Quest is also where the most distinctive facet of the graphical adventure game genre – being in exactly the right spot to use an intended action – came into play. Skills that had been crucial for previous adventure games, like mapping and using inventory items as breadcrumbs, were not nearly as important in King’s Quest as they’d been in more abstract adventures of the imagination. But learning how the game world’s more dynamic elements responded to the player and understanding what the graphics were saying about where you could go and what you could do – those skills suddenly became quite crucial.But for all its originality, King’s Quest was not an immediate hit because it was tied too closely to the PCjr. Fortunately, the game got a second life on the Tandy 1000 and became one of its showcase games. Sierra also ported the game to the Apple IIe and IIc, though players needed to upgrade their RAM to 128kb to play King’s Quest on the IIe, which could easily cost another $80-100 in the mid-1980s– at least a couple of hundred bucks in today’s dollars.King’s Quest also made its way to the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Macintosh and even the Sega Master System. Interestingly, Sierra did not support the Commodore 64 with King’s Quest or any other game in the AGI series because the system didn’t have the graphical chops or memory needed to display the game properly. As a result, the Sierra adventure games were far more popular in North America than they were overseas, where they weren’t ported to many of the popular Japanese or European formats.But in North America, they were the foundation of an entire series of games, not just including King’s Quest, but the aforementioned Space Quest and Police Quest and Quest for Glory and yes, Leisure Suit Larry, too.Sierra knew it had a good thing going, and Roberta Williams and the development team began work on King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne, an ambitious sequel that had Graham, now king of Daventry, head to the land of Kolyma to rescue a woman named Valanice from a crystal tower. While the setup sounds very similar to Wizard and the Princess, the gameplay has a lot more going on, allowing Graham to encounter an evil witch and Dracula and Neptune and mermaids and the Big Bad Wolf and, of course, Little Red Riding Hood. and roam around a world that would change as he progressed through the story. Unlike the first King’s Quest, in which you can retrieve the three treasures in any order, King’s Quest II has a far more linear story that requires you to complete the puzzles in a more structured order.This approach would continue to define the series, but King Graham himself would take some time off. King’s Quest III: To Heir Is Human would feature a boy named Gwydion in the land of Llewdor who would discover a startling connection to King Graham and head to Daventry to rescue Graham’s daughter, Princess Rosella, from a terrible three-headed dragon. And King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella continued that story as Rosella would embark on a quest to the land of Tamir to find a fruit to heal her dying father.I don’t want to tell you any more than that because King’s Quest III and IV are really good adventures with some surprising plot twists and even some alternate endings in the case of the latter game. But I will say that when the news broke that King Graham might die and that his daughter would be the hero of King’s Quest IV as she worked to save him, gamers of the day were surprisingly on board with the premise, and the game had particularly strong appeal with female gamers, a vastly underserved market in the 1980s.Rosella has also long been associated with Roberta Williams as a sort of self-insert into the universe, and while she doesn’t look too much like her creator, she certainly has many of the same qualities.But even with Rosella’s adventure completed, Roberta Williams wasn’t done with King Graham. But before we get to King’s Quest V, which is where we’ll end this episode, I’d like to talk a little bit more about the other games that came out of Sierra’s AGI engine.One of those games is The Black Cauldron, based on the 1985 Disney animated film of the same name, which is in turn based on elements of the first two books of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. Roberta Williams and Al Lowe worked together on the design for the game, using the basic framework of King’s Quest along with a simplified input system that eliminated the text parser in favor of having players press function keys to conduct actions. The reason for this was to make the game easier for kids to play, but when you play The Black Cauldron today, it’s clear that this system is actually a rudimentary form of the same design philosophy that could come to typify point and click adventure games.The Black Cauldron is one of my favorite early Sierra games because it makes great use of the artwork and setup of the film to deliver a surprisingly complex adventure with nonlinear elements and multiple endings depending upon how you choose to do things. The basic idea is that you, as the assistant pig-keeper Taran, are supposed to escort the magical pig Hen Wen to safety before she can be captured by the evil Horned King, who wants to use her power to find the Black Cauldron and create an undead army of cauldron-born.In the course of the game, you can allow Hen Wen to be captured or you can be sneaky enough to get her into hiding with the aid of a fairy. In either event, you have to then go to the Horned King’s castle and locate a magic sword so you can swap it for the cauldron and destroy it. Along the way, you can meet the film’s other characters: Gurgi, Flewdudur Fflam and Princess Eilonwy.Disney apparently didn’t like how nonlinear the game was or how the player could die and fought with Roberta Williams about the game’s design. Had it been obvious then that the film was about to be a huge flop, perhaps they wouldn’t have cared so much. Much like The Dark Crystal, I personally prefer the game to the movie.Roberta Williams also channeled her love of fairy tales into a nursery rhyme-themed adventure game called Mixed-Up Mother Goose that released in 1987. The gameplay is extremely simple – you can move in four directions and pick up one item at a time by getting close to them until your character picks them up. You can also grab animal or human characters and take them with you on your quest to set right the mixed-up nursery rhymes. A sequel called Mixed-Up Fairy Tales debuted in 1991, though it and the later editions of Mixed-Up Mother Goose were built in the more sophisticated SCI engine.Perhaps the most famous series alongside King’s Quest is the Space Quest series, created by Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, two Sierra staff members who’d worked together on The Black Cauldron before pitching their own game to Ken Williams. Space Quest starts out quite similarly to Steve Meretzky’s Planetfall, right down to having its hero, Roger Wilco, serve as an interstellar janitor, but the game quickly becomes its own thing as Roger, stranded on a desert planet, tries to find a way to get back into space to retrieve the Star Generator from evil aliens called the Sariens.While the series is itself known for its numerous parodies of science fiction properties, particularly Star Wars and Star Trek, the original game is the most serious and straightforward, with the most famous scene being an alien bar you visit that makes allusions to the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars while featuring acts such as the Blues Brothers, ZZ Top and an alien band, the latter of which is replaced by Madonna in the later SCI remake.Space Quest came out in 1986, and Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge followed in 1987, providing a popular but notably tougher experience. The series truly hit its stride in 1989 with Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon, an early SCI engine game that’s notable not just for its enhanced graphics and music, but also its storyline that allows Roger Wilco to rescue Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe – depicted in game as “The Two Guys From Andromeda” – from a company called ScumSoft that’s trying to flood the galaxy with awful games. The satire is strong in this game, particularly when you see cubicles full of programmers being whipped so they can churn out crappy games faster. Oh, and Roger ends the adventure by dropping the Two Guys from Andromeda off with Ken Williams, who gives them a job, but sends Roger packing.We’ll talk about the other Space Quest games in our next episode.Another AGI series that was quite prominent was Police Quest, which was created by a retired California Highway Patrol police officer named Jim Walls that Ken Williams had met. While Walls knew very little about computers or adventure games, he knew a lot about police procedure and he insisted on making a game that required players to do things by the book in order to advance. In the first game, 1987’s Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel, Officer Sonny Bonds starts out on traffic duty before he stumbles on a trail of clues that lead to a vicious drug ring run by a kingpin named Jesse Bains, “The Death Angel.”This game has it all – a mystery to solve, romance, drama, murder, a shootout, a criminal underworld to explore and even a donut shop to visit. And it’s also so grounded in reality that some police departments reportedly even used it for training new officers.1988’s sequel, Police Quest II: The Vengeance, Sonny Bonds joins the Homicide Department and has to work on tracking down Jesse Bains, who’s escaped from prison and who’s now seeking revenge on those who put him in there in the first place. It’s a bit less bogged down in procedural elements, but still quite grounded.As for the other games in the series and the remake of the original, we’ll talk about those in a future episode.The Manhunter games probably seem like they’re in the same vein as Police Quest, but no, no, they are definitely not. 1988’s Manhunter: New York opens in a dystopian New York City where aliens that look like floating eyeballs have taken over the world and have forced everyone to dress link monks and take a vow of silence. It’s a deeply weird game that not only involves evading the alien Orbs, but also tracking down and stopping a serial killer. The 1989 sequel, Manhunt: San Francisco, continues the story, but leaves things on a cliffhanger as the villain heads for London. That chapter never got made. As AGI games go, however, both of these are among the most advanced to run on Sierra’s then-aging game engine.A lesser-known AGI game is the 1988 release Gold Rush!, a game I actually really like because it allows you to try out three different paths as you head out to California in search of gold in the year 1848. You can leave New York by stagecoach and cross the country, you can take a ship down to Panama, cross through the jungle and then hop on a different ship, or you can take a really long voyage and head down around Cape Horn at the tip of South America. While the game’s not perfect, it is fun.And now our discussion brings us back to perhaps the most infamous of all of Sierra’s games from the mid-1980s – Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, Al Lowe’s extremely funny remake of Sierra’s earlier text adventure game Softporn Adventure by Chuck Benton, who’d since left Sierra for greener pastures. During Sierra’s days as On-Line Systems, Softporn Adventure had proven to be a good gamble, generating both positive and negative publicity and helping to boost sales during the few months the game was available.But the main reason for remaking that game was that Sierra had lost their license with Disney, and Al Lowe saw some potential in updating it as a graphic adventure using the AGI engine. He joked that the design of Softporn Adventure was so dated it should be wearing a leisure suit, hence the ultimate concept of the remake.Interestingly, Sierra also licensed the game to a Japanese developer called Starcraft, which made a parallel remake called Las Vegas. If you’re familiar with Leisure Suit Larry and play Las Vegas, you’ll find essentially the same basic storyline and puzzles, but with none of the charm of Al Lowe’s game, which is constantly poking fun at its loser of a protagonist, Larry Laffer, as he attempts to find love in the city of Lost Wages.In many ways, Leisure Suit Larry is one of Sierra’s most impressive adventure games because it has no real sense of urgency to push the player forward beyond the desire to chat up women, includes many detours and tangents to the nebulous goal and allows players to die in many humorous ways, including Larry offing himself in despair if the game isn’t completed within seven hours. The game also includes a humorous quiz at the beginning to ensure players are old enough to play and even has a boss key that can be triggered to make the game display a fake graph, humorously depicting a bar chart of condom types. Unfortunately, the boss key also ends the game, so you’d better save often if you plan to use it to fool your boss into thinking you’re working.The various sequels to Leisure Suit Larry as well as a VGA remake of the first game were all developed using the SCI engine, and though the series made it up to part 7 under Sierra, it also famously has no fourth chapter, creating an intriguing narrative cap between parts 3 and 5. We’ll definitely talk more about them all in a future episode.Ken and Roberta Williams were major pioneers when it came to PC gaming, and Sierra On-Line’s 80s and 90s catalog is still beloved today because the adventure games they created starting with King’s Quest in 1984 really became something special and enduring.And no game was more special than 1990’s King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Yonder!, which finally ditched the text parser they’d been using since the beginning and fully embraced a mouse-driven, icon-based graphical interface to replace any hint of nouns or verbs. While this was not the first game to provide a point and click interface for adventure gaming, it’s the adventure that set the standard for the genre’s evolution in the 1990s to be driven by icons rather than lists of words.This system became Sierra’s go-to for remakes of its aging AGI games like Space Quest, Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry as well as for its 1989 SCI game Hero’s Quest: So You Want to be a Hero, which was renamed Quest for Glory in its 1992 remake.What’s more, fans have recreated the first three King’s Quest games, Space Quest II and Quest for Glory II in this point and click style as well. Competitors such as LucasArts, Access Software and Westwood Associates also followed suit and imitated this style of adventure gaming, and if you play a modern point and click adventure game today, chances are good it’s going to be most similar to the style of gameplay King’s Quest V established.We’ll talk about that game and everything that came after it in our next episode as well as other adventure games not made by Sierra that pushed the genre forward in different ways.If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I’m close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I want to recommend Wanderstop, a really incredible 3D adventure from 2025 by Ivy Road about making tea. And while this is described as a “narrative centric cozy game” on its Steam listing, it is really an adventure game at heart with very little action but a lot of puzzling out how to solve particular problems.The premise of the game is that you’re a world-famous fighter named Alta who flees into the woods after losing a fight and breaking your undefeated streak. You’re searching for a master to get you back on your feet, but your sword gets so heavy you can barely hold it, and before long, you pass out, exhausted. A large, bald, gentle man named Boro saves you from the forest and brings you to his tea shop, Wanderstop, and asks you to stay and help him serve tea to other people who wander in from the forest. Because you can’t lift your sword and you’re too exhausted to travel back through the woods yourself, you begrudgingly agree.At that point, the game shifts to a cycle of days where different people with different preferences will come in and you have to figure out how to make the right tea for them. You can grow different plants to get specific flavors, and in some cases, you can also be creative and try to meet their criteria with your own interpretations of what they want. Though this sounds like a concept for a time management game, there’s no timer in Wanderstop; beyond a couple of recipes that require a little bit of time between steps, you can take as much time as you want with just about anything you do.Feel like gardening for awhile? You can do it. Would you rather tidy up the grounds and search for items that get left behind by guests? You can do that too. Would you rather take pictures of things and then plaster them up on the walls to decorate the shop? You can not only do it, but the game will give you plenty of opportunities to snap gorgeous photos thanks to its lovely graphics. There’s even a series of books to read, a group of penguin-like creatures called Pluffins to play with and lots of no-stakes conversations to be had.The ultimate point of Wanderstop is to consider how you deal with being burned out, and when the game begins to draw to a close, it tries several times to gently discourage you from reaching the end because, if you’ve been paying attention to its message at all, rolling the credits isn’t your goal. It’s truly about being in the moment and thinking about your experiences not as a progression to win achievements or earn trophies, but the comforting zen of just doing things you enjoy without a purpose beyond the pleasure of the moment.I also want to mention that the game’s soundtrack by Daniel “C418” Rosenfeld is lovely, and if you’re a fan of his other scores to games like Minecraft and Cookie Clicker, you’ll absolutely love this one too.SOURCES:https://www.company-histories.com/Sierra-OnLine-Inc-Company-History.htmlhttps://www.atarimagazines.com/atariclassics/v2n3/looking_back.phphttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1980s-roberta-williams-brought-graphic-adventure-games-home-180962160/https://www.britannica.com/topic/And-Then-There-Were-None-novelRobert Williams on the history of Colossal Cave Adventure (Youtube)https://www.filfre.net/2012/06/time-zone/Ken Williams’s book, Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Linehttps://www.howtogeek.com/749864/gaming-when-you-should-be-working-the-history-of-the-boss-key/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, Sean touches on Scott Adams's contributions to gaming before he heads across the Atlantic to look at the interactive fiction scene in Europe and the UK, covering developers like Digital Fantasia, Level 9 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls and DIY software like The Quill, Eamon, PAWS as well as modern interactive fiction!He's Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 2: The Adventure of Imagination (Part 2)Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack @greatestgames (https://greatestgames.substack.com) or BlueSky @greatestgames.substack.com (http://greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean's free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music "The Great Game Guide Theme" written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He'd love to hear from you!PIMANIA SONG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXk9VuPwGXwINTERACTIVE FICTION ARCHIVE: https://www.ifarchive.org/Other Show Notes and sources: At the episode post on Greatestgames.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, Sean dives deep into the inspiration for all adventure games - fittingly named Adventure! - and how a cave system in Kentucky helped an entire genre to blossom. But these games also didn't involve graphics... they took place entirely in players' imaginations!He's Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 1: The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never PlayedEnjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack @greatestgames (https://greatestgames.substack.com) or BlueSky @greatestgames.substack.comAnd if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean's free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music "The Great Game Guide Theme" written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He'd love to hear from you! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this inaugural episode, Sean explains why yet another podcast about video games needs to exist, how searching for games you’ve never played can lead to some awesome discoveries and why his philosophy on gaming is a little bit different from everybody else’s.He's Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 0: The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never PlayedEnjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack (@greatestgames) or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com).And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean's free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music "The Great Game Guide Theme" written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He'd love to hear from you! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com