Void Breach is a point-and-click adventure where you play as a scientist who must save his daughter after a science experiment goes wrong and sends her to another world. The game is strongly inspired by old Sierra adventure games. While it’s a point-and-click game and you can’t die, the game design and art style are based on those games. The game’s art is very similar to the style you would see in Sierra’s very early AGI games like King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. For the most part it’s very good and nails the look, but unfortunately I’ve spent much more time than I’d like to admit looking at old games and there’s the odd bit here and there that looks off, like pixels being too small in some parts.
I think that the gameplay design and plot is very similar to those old games. Like I said before, you can’t die, but the basic structure where you are given a quest (rescue your daughter) and then are plopped into an open world where you walk around, seeing what other characters need, and grabbing items to help them out or overcome obstacles is very similar to the classic Sierra game structure. I realize it sounds like most adventure games do that, but to me it feels like a very Sierra thing to just plop you into a world and let you have at it. The writing is very similar to those early Sierra games too. The characters aren’t too developed, sometimes they’re just fantasy creatures like mermaids, and mostly exist to give you a quest. This sounds like a criticism but it’s not. It fits for the type of game that Void Breach is emulating and I think they do a good job of that.
Overall I think it’s a nice adventure game and would recommend it if you’re looking for something in this style and want something that you can play in two hours. It’s very affordable too. The game is only $2 and at the time of writing this review, it’s on sale for $0.50. My only real caveat is that while I like this game, Cosmic Void has made so many games and they keep getting better with each game so I guess if you’ve never played a Cosmic Void adventure game before then maybe consider checking out one of those on Itch.io or Steam. But it’s still good! What are you supposed to do when someone makes a lot of games you like? Tell people to play them all? Maybe.
The Steam Sale started a few days ago and people have been doing their recommendations. The Adventure Games Podcast has a nice page with their recommendations, Miri Teixeiri has a good recommendation thread on bluesky, but now I want to do one because that’s what blogs are for. As usual, I also think you should consider buying games on Itch.io but they’re not doing a sale right now. I’m also missing a ton of stuff because I can only write so much, so if you enjoy these then keep looking around. Despite the occasional discourse about it being dead, there’s constantly new games coming out and I even wrote a post a few weeks ago about all the releases this year. So in no order really, here’s a list of recommendations that are more focused on recent releases.
Of course I have to start off by recommending Cyan’s remakes of Myst and Riven. I already loved those games and I think the remakes are an improvement on both. Riven was already a masterclass in world building in video games but I think the remake does a lot to make the game easier to get into. Just make sure the FMV option for the first game is turned on.
Wadjet Eye Games is one of the best modern point-and-click adventure game developers and they keep getting better with each game. I strongly recommend their two most recent games. Old Skies is a time travel story and Unavowed is an urban fantasy thriller that feels a lot like a Bioware game minus the combat, where you build a party before going on missions.
Speaking of Wadjet Eye Games, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is a horror adventure set in rural Victorian England and developed by Cloak and Dagger Games, another adventure game developer I’m a fan of.
Grundislav Games is another adventure game developer that I think should come up when people talk about folks doing great stuff and keeping the genre alive. Lamplight City is a steampunk detective adventure and Rosewater is a western set in an alternate 19th century world. Both games are in the same world but you do not need to play them in a specific order.
Perfect Tides is a point-and-click adventure about being a teen in the year 2000 by Meredith Gran, creator of the comic Octopus Pie.
The Crimson Diamond is a mystery adventure game inspired by Sierra’s Laura Bow series with an EGA color palette.
If you’re looking for something that will challenge you, Lucy Dreaming and Will of Arthur Flabbington are both nice choices and remind me of 90s adventure games from a difficulty level standpoint.
Don’t Escape: 4 Days to Survive is interesting because it should be something I hate. You can softlock yourself into a bad ending and you constantly have to make tough choices to survive but it works! Unlike a lot of old adventures where I put an asterisk next to the recommendation because it’s good despite those things, it’s an intentional part of the game’s design and that’s actually a good thing.
NORCO has some of the best writing in a video game in recent years and was my favorite game overall in 2022. It’s a sci-fi mystery set in an alternate southern Louisiana.
Return to Monkey Island is the most recent game in the Monkey Island series and I think it’s some of that crew’s best work. The game does some really interesting stuff mechanically to update the genre that I hope we keep seeing in other games, and I think the writing (yes, even the ending) are top notch too.
Thaumistry: In Charm’s Way is a great fantasy comedy text adventure made by an Infocom alumni. I’d recommend this one if you’ve never played a text adventure before because it’s very friendly to new players.
Kentucky Route Zero is one of my favorite games ever. It’s described as “a magical realist adventure game about a secret highway running through the caves beneath Kentucky” and the vibes and writing are perfect. If you do play this one, I really recommend playing it slowly over a sequence of nights for maximum vibes.
Cosmic Void is another adventure game dev I’m a fan of. I recommend their sci-fi space opera Blood Nova and horror adventure Devil’s Hideout.
Beyond The Edge Of Owlsgard reminds me so much of 90s adventure games but is very much doing its own thing too and features some great animation and pixel art.
Midnight Scenes is another series with great pixel art. The games are self contained horror adventures that can be played in a single sitting.
The Shapeshifting Detective is a murder mystery where you are able to shapeshift into various characters to get clues from people who will react to you differently based on who you are. It is a game packed with FMV, which has always been cool.
Immortality also uses FMV to have you investigate what happened to a missing actress through viewing clips of three unreleased films.
Hypnospace Outlaw is another favorite. You explore a 90s alternate internet and enforce moderation rules.
The Forgotten City is a mystery adventure where you find yourself in an ancient city and try to find out what’s going on through a timeloop and repeating the day.
Case of the Golden Idol has you solving deaths through a really unique interface where you gather clues and build a theory to what happened.
Phoenix Springs is an adventure I’ve praised a lot on social media. It’s a very surreal mystery adventure and I think the game mechanically does some really interesting stuff by using memories and thoughts as inventory items.
Darkside Detective is a series of very goofy supernatural point-and-click adventures.
Developer: Goloso Games & Julia Minamata Publisher: Panic Year: 2025 Genre: Adventure
I’m attempting to get caught up with all the games coming out each week as a part of the Playdate Season 2 package and saw that Goloso Games and Julia Minamata, two folks I’m a fan of, made a new point-and-click adventure for the system. This season surprisingly has a lot of adventure games (and also a FMV game) and I’m not sure why. I’m definitely not upset about it but I suspect Panic just happens to be big adventure game fans since they’ve published a few of them outside of the Playdate too.
You play as the dog Chance as you are called to help out a criminal mastermind but are delayed by a flat tire. What starts off as a simple tire change puzzle leads to a series of events where you are bailed out by Chance’s extremely good luck.
I loved this one. It’s just a really nice adventure game that lasts about 30 minutes and occasionally uses the Playdate’s built-in features as puzzle solving gimmicks. There’s maybe one chapter where using the crank felt a little clunky but this only stood out because it works most of the time and the game moves at a really nice pace. The game is divided into six chapter and each one is about 5 minutes long. I felt very satisfied doing the puzzles but they weren’t too difficult either. For the most part, the use of the Playdate’s crank and microphone were fun ways to add some variety to the puzzles.
As expected, Julia Minamata’s art is fantastic. It manages to cram in a lot of nice little animations on such a small screen but everything is very readable. The game is very funny too. I really love absurdist humor and the situations in each chapter get more ridiculous as you move from one puzzle to the next.
I also loved the music! It has this nice jazzy soundtrack you would expect from old noir films and Philip Aldous does a great job with that. I’m always surprised at how good the games on the Playdate sound since it’s so tiny and I guess my expectations are low?
Anyway, great stuff. If folks like this one then they should check out other games by the developers. Julia worked on the free Playdate game Recommendation Dog and created the excellent mystery adventure game The Crimson Diamond. Goloso Games made Spike II: The Great Emu War (Itch.io/Playdate store) for the Playdate and Inspector Waffles (Steam/Itch.io).
If you can believe it, it’s a Friday once again. This one is short. Maybe I missed a ton of big announcements or people are just holding off from releasing games during a Steam, or both. That’s fine, there’s still quite a few games that came out this week.
Video Games
Don’t Eat the Cat (Itch.io) is a free Bitsy game where you make an Important Choice in a video game.
Dino Sort (Itch.io) is a cute and free puzzle game made in PICO-8 where you sort dinosaurs into groups.
Quantum Witch (Steam) is a 2D fantasy adventure game heavily built around making decisions and multiple playthroughs to see how the game’s story changes.
Project Silverfish (Steam) is an open-world immersive sim with horror elements that just entered Early Access and may or may not be furry adjacent (I don’t know! I don’t know shit about anything). It looks very neat and maybe I’ll play it when I can stop being a baby.
Ruffy and the Riverside (Steam) is a 3D platformer, maybe one of those that counts as a collect-a-thon. I just really like how the 2D character art looks in a 3D world.
Tabletop RPGs
Break the Law (pdf on developer’s site) is a short uhhhhh roleplaying game that the dev linked to on their site about ways to subvert the system.
cutestpatoot had a birthday and celebrated by releasing a new game. Mixed Feelings (Itch.io) is a tabletop rpg that you play by making mix cds and playlists.
I am a big fan of Cezar Capacle’s solo ttrpgs and there’s a new one! Mausworn (Itch.io) is a ttrpg that combines the solo ttrpg mechanics with the Redwall and Mouse Guard inspired game Mausritter.
Pilgrims is a short adventure game by Amanita Design, the folks who made Samorost and Machinarium. You play as a guy exploring a land so you can get the resources you need to get on a boat. The hook of the game is that each playthrough is very short and you come across a variety of puzzles that have multiple solutions, so the game requires multiple playthroughs to see it all. These playthroughs can also have different solutions based on the people that have joined your party. I’ve played through the game a few times and I was shocked by how different my playthroughs were. The game is only an hour long, which is great, and according to my Steam achievements, my playthrough was very different than the one I did three years ago.
The game uses a deck of cards to represent the inventory items and people in your party, and the deck grows and shrinks in size and you gain items and people, or use them and they leave your deck. I think the card inventory mechanic is great. It’s a very easy and quick way to see everything that is available to you without having to open a separate window. Switching between characters that drop in and out of the game through your playthrough is a fun mechanic too. I really enjoyed seeing how each character would react to puzzles and NPCs.
Since it’s a game by Amanita, it features the excellent artwork and sound design that you would expect from their games. I really appreciate how so many of their games have a different art style but also feel like something only they would make.
Anyway, if you like the studios other games, you’ll enjoy this one too. If you’ve never played a game by this developer, consider giving it a shot. It’s fairly inexpensive and goes on sale a lot, and it doesn’t take long to get through but you’ll probably want to play through it again one or two more times.
Pilgrims is available on computers, mobile platforms, and Nintendo Switch. All of these are linked to on the developer’s site.
Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a point-and-click adventure styled after pulp serials and adventure films from the 1950’s and earlier. You play as Jason Roberts, a man in search of his brother in the Amazon rainforest after hearing his brother was attacked, and the adventure grows into something much bigger from there. This one had been sitting in my backlog for a while, and I decided to finally play it when I saw that the Adventure Tuesday streams were going to play it next and wanted to go through it before any of it would get spoiled for me. I thought I would enjoy this one because it was developed by Access Software, the developers of the Tex Murphy series, and I also love cheesy FMV, but it may have been one of the worst adventure games I’ve played in a while.
One of the biggest issues with the game is that it just feels bad to play. It’s a point-and-click adventure but walking around by clicking barely works, so you need to use the arrow keys to move around. That’s fine, I’ve played plenty of other adventures that do that. Movement is an incredibly frustrating experience though. Your character is constantly getting caught on territory or cannot walk around the rooms that you would expect. It gives you a limited area to walk around in, but you don’t actually know what spaces you can walk in and what you can’t.
The game also feels bad to play because everything just moves too slowly. The game constantly does fade-ins and outs in scene transitions that just last too long, every pop-up box describing something hangs for a few seconds longer than it should and you can’t skip them, and the death scenes also take far too long. I don’t mind deaths in adventure games. I even think they can be funny when they frequently happen in games like Space Quest. However, whenever a death happens in this game it plays an annoying siren and the screen slowly flashes “Shock Warning” three times before it finally shows you the death image and description that again, lingers too long before you can load your game. For some reason the game dumps you to the parking lot screen near the beginning of the game with all the inventory items you had. I’m not sure why it does this. The game is unplayable if you are in this state, so you need to reload it anyway.
You will see this a lot as the game is also filled with timed sequences, sometimes there’s timed sequences inside of the timed sequences, and there’s not really any way to figure it out other than through failure. I’m not against learning through failure, but it becomes painful when you have to keep seeing a tedious sequence every time it happens. This game also really loves to only allow one character to do specific actions during the timed sequences, but they don’t tell you that. They just give vague descriptions of how an action doesn’t work, and then you try it with another character and it will suddenly work. Some of the scenes are very violent too and will show someone covered in blood after you lose. Again, I’m not opposed to this in theory but I don’t think it fits the tone of this game.
The game constantly tells you to move closer to objects. I’ll be standing next to an object and it will say to get closer. At one point I had to clip through the game’s graphics and walk on a table, so I could pick up an item. In the screenshot above you can see that I’m attempting to pick up an item that is exactly one white pixel and I’m standing right next to it. This was not good enough and I had to stand on top of it to pick it up. The item in question were cigarettes and if I forgot to pick up this one-pixel item, it will lead to a softlock later. The game is filled with many opportunities for softlocks that you don’t see until much later.
The softlocks, pixel hunting, and bad controls unfortunately hurt the puzzles as well. Puzzles are difficult to solve because the room art is ugly and everything blends in together, making the pixel hunting even more frustrating than usual. Puzzles are often very finicky with how you interact with the solution so even if you have the right idea, the game gives you the impression that it’s wrong. For example, one part of the game wants you to put a gas cap on a jeep. Ok, so you would pick it up, right? Incorrect, if you try to pick up the gas cap on the ground, it will give you a message saying your character has no interest in the gas cap. You must “Use” the gas cap to pick it up this time, so your character will pick it up and put it on the jeep. This is despite the game just telling you that you have no interest in the gas cap.
Another fussy puzzle is one that wants you to use a coat hanger to break into a car. You have to grab the correct specific hanger in a closet lined with them that all look the same, or else you get a message saying the hanger is attached.
I wanted to like the FMV in this game more but a lot of it is very flat. The main character, Jason, is so incredibly dull and generic. You get to have a second playable character later, Maya, and she’s not great either, but at least I liked her more. I think if anything, the actors should have gone even bigger, but I can’t really fault them that much when they have the script they do and it was a brand-new technology that everyone was trying to figure out. To some extent I even wish it didn’t have FMV because once you leave the office building at the beginning of the game and go on your adventure, half the characters you run into are some sort of racist trope or another. I guess it’s not surprising that a game from the early 90’s that’s inspired by adventure serials would be filled with this kind of thing. It just sucks and it’s a huge bummer to keep seeing as you play. It’s all very weird. It’s a game that feels very ahead of its time technically in some parts, like the FMV, and at the same time it feels like the game is barely holding together because I was constantly running into bugs, frustrations with the controls, and lack of descriptions when trying to use objects.
Here I am, clipping through a table so I can grab the item on it
Even if the game didn’t have these racist tropes, it would still be tough to find anything good about the writing because the game essentially has no interesting ideas. I will give the game this, the serial format is a lot of fun. The game is broken down into chapters and each one has a nice little intro and cliffhanger. I think this format works really well and wish they leaned into the pulp serial nature more. One issue is that it doesn’t commit to a specific type of serial. It is going for more of a Cold War-era vibe at the beginning with references to Communism and a robot security guard in one puzzle at the beginning, and then all of this is dropped as it becomes a jungle adventure story once you leave the office.
Unfortunately, I think most of this part is very dull and feels like busy work. You’re supposed to be on the run from a guy you never really see much and be on the search for Amazon women, who you don’t see until an extremely brief part at the end of the game. Most of this game is spent doing very tedious sequences like stealth sequence, doing the equivalent of side quests in the jungle, or arcade sequences where you ride a canoe down a river. So much of the game feels like filler and then you’re done. There are so many more interesting directions with this they could have gone in than just going down rivers and investigating spots to see what happened at places you already saw in cutscenes. At least it has a pro-environmental message at the end? It’s all very frustrating because I think the game becomes much more interesting at the very end when you get the change of scenery and new characters, but it’s so brief. At least you fight a giant ant. The giant ant looks very good.
The canoe sequences are absolutely miserable. The controls are terrible and you have a massive hit box that is bigger than your canoe. If you touch a single rock, you get the fail screen I mentioned earlier that goes on for too long. In addition to this, you’re supposed to take one of two branches at various points and if you get the wrong one then you fail. The correct sequence is given to you before you start the canoe section, meaning you write it down and look it up as you play. I’m not actually sure if you get the right sequence in the third and longest canoe section though. I did all three so I could say I 100% the game but skipping it is an option. There’s a button in the top left you can click to skip the arcade sequences. It’s like they developed all of this and then realized in testing that people hated it so they added the Skip button as a fix.
Why did this room load with one character standing on the other?
The audio for the game is odd too. The music itself is perfectly fine and some of it is very good. The game keeps choosing to use a cheerful jingle you hear in the office at the least appropriate moments though. An important character is introduced and then immediately killed off and I think it’s supposed to be emotional but doesn’t feel like it because it plays the office jingle. It plays the office jingle when people are shooting arrows at you. The game loves this song.
I’m probably being a bit unfair to the game. This is a lot of words to say that a game that’s over 30 years old isn’t good, and it’s not even a game that anyone is really talking about. But a lot of the frustration comes from it being created by a developer that I like who should have known better, and the reviews for it. Access Software was very successful with the Links franchise and would go on to create some of my favorite adventure games like Under a Killing Moon and other Tex Murphy games after it. Reviews at the time praised the game. I assume it was because of the FMV novelty, because the game is filled with so many faults that Lucasarts and Sierra were not doing. I can be very critical of Sierra at times, but at least they nailed the pointing and clicking part of a point-and-click adventure. Their games felt good to play, even if they could sometimes be loaded with design faults. The reviews for the game on GOG are no surprise. It’s people complaining that the criticisms of racism are by people being too sensitive and generally praising a game because they remember liking it 30 years ago when they were children and haven’t revisited it since then.
So would I recommend this game? Well no, probably not. You could maybe watch a stream of it or play one of their later and much better games like the Tex Murphy series instead. If you want a pulpy adventure, go play Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis or Flight of the Amazon Queen. Both do this thing much better and the latter game is even free.
Developer: Outsider Games Publisher: Outsider Games Year: 2022 Genre: Adventure
Since AdventureGamers has decided to become a gambling slop farm and is slowly deleting all their old content (and was apparently stealing content from other sites before that anyway), I have decided to repost the review I sent to them a few years ago here. The key for the game was directly sent to me so I don’t think the site really deserves any loyalty since they didn’t do anything to enable this opportunity. It’s a good time to repost it anyway since the game just got a release on the Nintendo Switch
Throughout their ups and downs, adventure games have had a devoted following for decades, partly because of their willingness to tell stories where the players can see themselves represented in ways they may not in other genres. Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries by Outsider Games continues this tradition by exploring themes of queerness that I rarely get to see in other games. Despite occasionally frustrating issues with the controls, Jennifer Wilde is a well-crafted adventure game that features a unique story and beautiful black-and-white art.
Jennifer Wilde tells the story of a young French artist named Jennifer Chevalier living in Paris in 1921. Suspecting that the recent death of her father was not an accident, Jennifer investigates her father’s apartment. After finding a locket in his room, she attempts to use her childhood gift of talking to ghosts to summon his spirit. She accidentally summons Oscar Wilde’s ghost instead, with whom her father had an affair many years ago. The two team up and travel across Europe to find the murderer and uncover a massive conspiracy along the way.
The controls, as in your typical point-and-click adventure, feature clicking on parts of a room to walk around, interact with an object, or talk to someone. I thought the speech text moved too fast, and the dialog controls didn’t feel as responsive as they could have been when talking with people, but there were various options that allowed me to resolve both issues. I also appreciated that this game let me play with a controller and found it a very enjoyable way to play.
The primary mechanic for solving puzzles is a fun innovation. Throughout parts of the game, you will come across obstacles, like a police officer not letting you pass a crime scene while they are doing an investigation. To progress, you must gather clues by talking to people and interacting with objects relevant to the mystery. Each time you get a clue, it shows up in your inventory, resembling something that looks like a comic panel. Once you get three or four of these, you must organize them in a linear order that recreates the sequence of events of the mystery you’re trying to solve. I had some issues with this mechanic a couple of times because I wasn’t sure if I was missing a panel or just putting things in the wrong order, but overall I thought it was a commendable concept and would like to see something like it again in the future. I believe some feedback, such as Jennifer saying a line about how that doesn’t seem like the right solution, would have helped me learn the mechanic and know if I had the wrong answer or wasn’t following the procedure correctly.
At first, I thought the game was too easy and linear, but eventually it opens up a bit more and introduces more challenging puzzles. You can switch between Jennifer and Oscar to solve puzzles due to their different abilities, which adds complexity. This never feels too difficult though, and I didn’t get stuck on any puzzle for too long. The game has an objective tracker that helps manage everything you’re investigating, so the process never gets overwhelming once additional goals are added. There’s also some nice variety in the types of challenges later on that keeps the experience from ever feeling tedious.
Jennifer Wilde features incredibly detailed 2D black-and-white artwork that often evokes a comic book style. This is appropriate since it’s based on a comic mini-series released in the early 2010s. Characters have speech bubbles when speaking, and captions appear on the page when describing new locations. The game reminds me of a motion comic; characters generally only have animations when walking, and other actions have a slideshow effect. It all works very well in-game and suits the comic book style.
Aside from the catchy, period-appropriate music on the menu screen, there isn’t much music in the game, and most of what you’ll hear are ambient sound effects that fit the room you’re in.
I was initially skeptical about the inclusion of Oscar Wilde, but I felt it was a good fit with the story they were telling. There aren’t many commercial adventure games that explore queerness, so I thought it was nice to see. I appreciate that this shows a kinder and deeper portrayal of Oscar Wilde than we usually see in media. He often just seems to be portrayed as some guy with witty one-liners. He shows a lot of empathy towards others here, which is also a rarity in a video game. I thought Jennifer was a well-written character, and I liked her interactions with other characters and the arc she goes through. At a few points, you are allowed to make minor decisions that don’t affect the outcome but help make it seem a little more personalized, which was a nice touch.
The core mystery is fine, but it felt rushed towards the end. It took me about 3.5 hours to complete, which usually would be the perfect length since I generally prefer shorter games, but I think I would have preferred some more time in the end to allow the plot elements to unfold more slowly. Where the writing shines is in the character development and the interactions between Jennifer and Oscar, and that is where the majority of the focus remains. Aside from some quirks with the controls and feeling a little rushed toward the end, Jennifer Wilde is a good adventure that explores themes you don’t see too often in commercial games. I enjoyed playing it, and I hope we see these two engaging characters in a game again soon.
A few days ago I made a post about how the forums for AdventureGamers, which had existed for over two decades, were suddenly deleted with no warning. There was speculation it was from a bad site migration but no, it looks like they were intentionally deleted and the site is in the process of being converted to a gambling site. Here is my attempt to recap everything that happened.
It sounds like earlier this year the previous site’s owner Ivo had sold the site to a company that made an offer, based on this message in the AdventureGamers Discord from a moderator who had reached out to the former owner.
The site had been struggling for money for a while now. The site’s editor Jack, who had been here longer than Ivo, was let go a few years ago and went on to start Adventure Game Hotspot, and many of the staff who were working for free left to help with that. I believe an offer to buy the site then was also declined. So I’m not completely shocked the site was sold, but was definitely not prepared for the site to be bought by a gambling company that would delete the forums, break tons of links in the process, and replace huge amounts of text with gambling crap, like this deeply cursed About Us page.
So I suppose that if you wrote for the site or you’re a developer who wants to save a positive review of one of your games, now would be a good time to grab it. I understand having to sell a site but it makes me angry that a place with so much history was just sold off to a gambling company with no care for the history or community there. In addition to everything here, AdventureGamers had also grabbed all the assets for another old adventure game site, Just Adventure, about a year ago with the intention to preserve that. Is that going to be wiped out for gambling info too? Who knows!
There’s also an AdventureGamers patreon that is still running. I have no idea if money is being made off this and if so, is the money going to the previous owner or this new gambling site? The idea of either grosses me out. Like I said at the top, this info was grabbed from the AdventureGamers Discord, which was basically inactive, so it seems very unlikely they know about it. I’m glad that Adventure Game Hotspot is going and is basically AdventureGamers in everything but name, but that doesn’t make up for the history getting wiped out by this sale. I don’t necessarily want people looking at forum posts I made when I was 14, but there was also a lot of history in that community during a very specific time for the genre. That said, they’ve been planning a forum at AGH for a while, before this AG forum deletion happened, and it should be up very soon. I hope that the community can land there and events like the community playthroughs can happen again.
I know it’s not the same as a forum, but I’ll also mention the Adventure Game Club Discord I run, where we do monthly playthroughs and discussions of adventure games, new and old. If you’re curious, feel free to join. There’s no intro channel, so no one will know if you join and spam you with welcome messages. It’s totally fine for you to join, see if it’s your vibe, and leave if it isn’t.
It’s a shame this happened to such a long running community, a site that started in 1998, during a time when the internet continues to feel a little smaller every year.
Poco is a short and free point-and-click adventure game released earlier this year where you are the world’s tiniest clown and have been kicked out of a floating circus, only to find yourself in the undergrowth below and must find a way back. From looking at the Kickstarter, it was a university thesis project that needed some additional funds to cover some costs and get it into festivals.
I was very pleasantly surprised by this one. I didn’t know of it at all until it came out and people started posting it in various Discords, but it’s a very solid point-and-click adventure. I love the music and art. The art sorta reminds me of late 90s games with pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D models, although these are illustrated backgrounds and look very nice. The movement feels great, which may seem like a weird thing to say about an adventure game but so many point-and-click games don’t get it quite right.
The game starts with you failing some clown activities through the form of mini games before getting kicked out of the circus, and more fair versions of these come into play later. I get the feeling they’re a little divisive but I think the mini games in this are actually good. The fishing one in particular was nice, short, and satisfying to play.
Overall the game is very silly and whimsical, but some of the background design is very dark. For example, there’s a series of “rooms” where you can see the skeleton of the dead clown and also need to enter its rib cage. Yet, I would still describe the game as “cute.”
The game consists of inventory puzzles that weren’t difficult and felt fair, with the exception of a minor amount of annoying pixel hunting. Some of the puzzles had nice rewards too like a musical sequence. It’s just a nice, little point-and-click adventure that should only take you 1.5-2 hours to play and I recommend it if you want an adventure game you can play in one sitting.
I didn’t realize it until someone said something in the basically dead AdventureGamers.com discord, but apparently the forums for the site are gone after being around for 25+ years. I haven’t posted there in a very long time, but it used to be a place I hung out a lot about 20 years ago when the genre was struggling commercially and in a very weird place. The site itself is still up and posting, I suppose they just decided the forums weren’t worth the cost anymore. The last time I checked, maybe about a year ago, it was still active. It certainly wasn’t as busy as it was a decade or two ago, but people were still posting there and doing their community playthroughs. It was definitely more active than the AdventureGamers discord and it doesn’t sound like the mods were aware that it was going to happen because they were in the middle of holding a vote for their next community playthrough.
It was a weird place since it happened to be a very weird time for the genre. I had moved there from the Just Adventure forums (also gone), which were getting a bit too grognardy for me. My memories of the adventure game community at the time were that a lot of hope and pressure was placed on every notable game as “The One” that would make the genre commercially big again. So stuff like Broken Sword 3, a game that I think is perfectly fine, getting so much hype behind it because it was one of the bigger releases. I guess this is ignoring stuff like Professor Layton and the Ace Attorney series, which were far more popular but just didn’t seem to get as much attention in the community from what I recall? There was a massive thread at one point because The Moment of Silence, a game that was hyped up at that point and one that I ultimately didn’t care for, got a negative review in PC Gamer and attitude at the time was that critics just “hated” adventure games and that’s why they were getting negative reviews. This was ignoring that some of the better ones got better scores but that would destroy the narrative. Anyway, one or two critics had jumped in to try to explain things and it just turned into a lot of arguing before the thread was locked because it was a ridiculous argument in the first place.
Ultimately I ended up moving on to the Idle Thumbs forums because I don’t stay at communities longer than 5-10 years but the forums kept going until now, so it’s a little sad to see it gone. It’s a weird time for forums since people seem to mostly use Discord now, but that’s a company that controls everything and no one can see what any Discord community looks like until they join it, so that isn’t great either. The other community I was very active on during this time was the Shacknews chatty, where I recently learned that also imploded in the last year (possibly from management decisions, not sure) and looks to be essentially dead now. Oh well. At least Paper Cult Club, a ttrpg forum, launched this year and has been nice.
