I was going to write a post recommending adventure games to play during winter but it looks like the Adventure Games Podcast has done a series of episodes doing just that and doing a much better job than I ever could have. I highly recommend the series, which is still going on, that recommends games based on regions. I’ll link to each episode below. Each page has a link to the podcast audio but also lists all the games mentioned and links to their pages.
There’s only a couple of games I’d like to add to this list. It’s possible they’ll come up on the podcast too since the series isn’t done yet but I think they’re worth a mention.
Heroine’s Quest is an adventure rpg inspired by the Quest for Glory series and my favorite of all the ones that have come out since that series ended. Like Quest for Glory, you choose between one of three classes, with each class giving you different solutions to puzzles. The game also adds some survival mechanics since you are in a snowy climate, but these can be turned off with the difficulty slider. It’s a really nice game and best of all, it’s free. I’m glad that the Steam page basically has tip jar DLC though because it’s a really impressive and long game and I felt like I should give them some money while playing it.
Watch Over Christmas is a nice one to check out if you’re looking for something with a Christmas theme. It’s just a solid adventure game that’s family friendly and never felt too frustrating since it had some nice features like hotspot highlighting and the puzzles weren’t too difficult.
The Puzzle Agent series is a great one to check out if you’re looking for something focused entirely on puzzles, without the exploration elements. The games feature fantastic artwork by Graham Annable and a wide variety of puzzles that always felt fair to me. It’s unfortunate there aren’t more games in the series but at least Graham is still creating a lot of great art on social media and through his shop.
If you have a friend to play adventure games with, the We Were Here series is a nice choice. You and a friend must talk through walkie talkies as you work together to explore a frozen castle and solve puzzles. The first game is free and short so it’s a nice way to try this style of game out before buying more.
It’s not surprising that there’s a lot of tabletop rpgs based on video games. They often have an interesting universe to base a tabletop game on and many already have rpg mechanics, where while it’s not a 1:1 conversion to a tabletop game it does give designers a place to start. What I was surprised by was the number of tabletop rpgs that are based on or directly inspired by adventure games. I knew a lot of ttrpg creators grew up playing them but there’s quite a few that mention specific games or license the IP. Here are the ones I could think of but please let me know if the comments if I left anything out.
Myst
With Myst being one of the best-selling games ever, it’s not surprising that it has inspired a few tabletop rpgs. Unwritten: Adventures in the Ages of MYST and Beyond is a game that uses the Myst license and uses the FATE core system for the foundation of its rules. The game is strongly influenced by Uru/Myst Online and has players exploring modern or historical D’ni and the ages connected to it. The game has received a few smaller supplements as well as a larger sourcebook that was recently Kickstarted and focused on the reconstruction of D’ni
There’s fan games too. Bring the Page With You is a free one-page ttrpg where there is no GM/DM and is focused on players collaborating together to create Myst ages.
Text Adventures
There’s also a few games inspired by the Infocom-era of text adventures. Parsely is a collection of games where a group of players control one character by telling one player, known as the Parser, what they would like to do in the form of text adventure commands and the Parser describes what happens next. The collection even features a trilogy of Zork-like games known as Action Castle. The creator of Parsely has a few games in the series on their Itch page.
Uresia: Grave of Heaven is a system-neutral setting book by S. John Ross that is strongly inspired by the Zork series, with there even being a section explaining how it influenced the book and why they love the series so much. The book is now available for free here. Check it out and then consider hiring him for book or map design if you’re a ttrpg designer. The author also wrote a Z-Machine text adventure game that ranks as Polite on Andrew Plotkin’s cruelty scale. This game is also available for free.
Point-And-Click Adventures
I found a few games on Itch.io inspired by point-and-click adventure games. Pocket Full of Stars is a cozy two-player ttrpg inspired by Samorost where the players have the roles of an Astronomer and the Storyteller and work together to tell a story about a giant jumping from planet to planet and meeting people.
Loom is a fan fiction game based off the classic Lucasarts adventure game of the same name. It’s a solo journaling game where you explore the game’s world using the mechanics described in the book and write about what happens. Both games are available as Pay-What-You-Want.
Citizen Sleeper
With it being so strongly inspired by indie tabletop rpgs like Blades in the Dark, it would make sense that Citizen Sleeper has its own tabletop rpg. It’s not actually out yet so I can’t say much about it but it is available for pre-order here.
TTRPG Supplements
Instead of developing their own systems, many designers have created supplements for existed games. Blood Mountain Resort & Spa is a free download for fantasy ttrpgs. Inspired by the Monkey Island series, players explore a pirate themed resort. The NPCs are statted for DURF but the rest of the supplement is built to be system neutral. Lost to the Starlit Reptiles is another adventure for DURF by the same folks that is inspired by adventure games.
In Other Waters: Tidebreak is a supplement for the horror ttrpg Mothership that is set in the In Other Waters universe. The supplement is playable in either as a group or solo and designed to be less stressful than the typical Mothership adventure.
Let me know if I’ve left anything out. I would love to know what else exists out there. If you enjoyed this article you can play any of my tabletop rpgs inspired by adventure games like Accomplice, my Gabriel Knight inspired solo game, Alone in Cyberspace, inspired by Hypnospace Outlaw, Friendship Quest, my two-player map drawing game, and ERROR, a play out loud text adventure. The first two games are paid but just take a free community copy if you’re interested.
It’s the first of December and this year is coming to an end. Hope it’s been going well for you all. There was some really exciting stuff this week.
Not indie game related, unless you count indie game soundtracks, but today is Bandcamp Friday so consider buying some music. Spotify really doesn’t pay anything and buying music (or at least use a streaming service that pays better royalties) is the only way they can really keep doing this for a living.
The Lawnmower Man In the early 90s it felt like the film adaptation of The Lawnmower Man had a video game on every single platform so it makes me happy that there is now one for PICO-8.
Markus Ritter – Ghosts of the Past Markus Ritter – Ghosts of the Past is a FMV point-and-click adventure game described by the developers on the Steam page as “queer cheesy trash” and that is a 100% accurate description. Fortunately I am a goblin for FMV trash, especially ones inspired by Gabriel Knight 2, so this is absolutely for me. That said, it is EXTREMELY cheesy and might be too much for some people, so I would maybe recommend playing the free prequel game first to see if it’s your thing.
Madvent Calendar 4 – End of the Line Since it’s December, we also have a new Madvent calendar from the HauntedPS1 community. Every year they release a free anthology of small horror games with a Playstation 1 aesthetic, with a new one unlocked each day. They’re really nice collections and it’s impressive that they manage to put together one of these every year and for free.
This week was bananas so this is a rushed collection of stuff in indie games that I really liked. This week it’s mostly focused on adventure games, since that’s a genre I’m really into in general, but also just a lot of stuff happened this week.
Screenshot from The Will of Arthur Flabbington
The Will of Arthur Flabbington is now out! This is a point-and-click adventure that originally started as a jam game for the AdventureX jam. It got a Kickstarter funded to help turn it into a full game with voice acting and from the little I played of it, seems really neat!
Lake got some Christmas DLC. I really enjoyed playing Lake two years ago and found it was exactly what I needed during a very stressful time in my life. I know a Christmas themed DLC is not going to be for everyone but I’m looking forward to revisiting the game and I think I even have some nostalgia for holiday themed games and DLC just because of the time I spent playing stuff like Jazz Jackrabbit Holiday Hare and Xmas Lemmings.
This one is much more local, but the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University are doing a showcase of their student games on December 6 at 7pm in Ann Arbor. There’s always an incredible batch of games that come from both schools every semester so if you’re local, consider checking it out!
Excuse Me Sir is a demo for an upcoming horror game made by a bunch of cool folks. I really liked the 90s adventure game vibes it has and it’s really short and not frustrating at all, which was surprising since it’s very heavy on ways to die.
Inspector Waffles Early Days is a game on Kickstarter looking for funding to develop a physical version of a Game Boy game. I never played the original game, a point-and-click adventure for the PC, but I heard it’s very good and liked the Playdate game the developer made, which also got a physical release. I just think it’s fun seeing the Game Boy have a revival because of GB Studio and Analogue.
Midnight Margo is a new adventure game by some of the folks that worked on Whispers of a Machine, a point-and-click adventure that I really enjoyed. From the reactions I saw, the art style seems to be very divisive but I think it’s really neat. The game also seems to have some RPG elements and I think that will be a nice way to make the game stand out from others in the genre.
Screenshot from Midnight Margo
A demo was just released for Heir of the Dog. I believe it was originally a jam game or freeware? Anyway, I really liked the dev’s previous game Lucy Dreaming and it’s nice to see that we’ll be getting more games from them.
The Blathering Keep looks like a really fun free game by Danielle Riendeau. I haven’t played it yet but the art is really cute. I like the concept of a dungeon crawler where you’re attacked by corporate jargon, and I really like her writing elsewhere so I bet it’s a very funny game.
Finally, earlier this week it was announced that Uppercut Crit will be going on hiatus. I was really sad to hear this because I thought it was a great place for games crit and lots of great indie game coverage. It sounds like the podcast Indie Mixtape will still be going on so be sure to follow that and consider supporting other outlets of independent games crit like No Escape, Kritiqal, Into the Spine, and all the other cool places I have listed in my Cool Site Zone.
I don’t watch streamers too often but when I do, it’s usually of adventure games. It’s my favorite genre of game and I like watching people figure out puzzles or talk about why one doesn’t work when they come across a bad one. Luckily there’s a ton of great folks streaming adventure games and this list only covers a very small amount of them. Generally I find all these streamers to be relaxing and I’m not into streams where people are yelling a lot.
Emmxyzzy – Streamer from Australia that plays MS-DOS games, which includes a lot of adventure games. They translated the first commercial Czech MS-DOS game to English, The Secret of Donkey Island.
sonneveld – Another streamer from Australia that plays a variety of adventure games, with a focus on older games. They also helped translate The Secret of Donkey Island into English.
SummerB76 – Very chill streamer with a focus on adventure games but there’s also plenty of other fun streams like the ones for wine making simulator Hundred Days with her brother who makes wine in real life. Also a speedrunner of the new Colossal Cave remake by Ken and Roberta Williams.
pixel_turkey – Streamer focused on retro games, which includes a lot of adventure games. Also a great pixel artist
The Genesis Temple – Games historian that streams a ton of obscure games as well as games in other languages and live translating them as they are played.
robotspacer – Streams a variety of adventure games and has also been building an adventure game for the Macintosh using World Builder
Julia Minamata – Developer of The Crimson Diamond that streams development of the game every Tuesday night along with playing some retro games.
LotusLovesLotus – Indie game streamer that includes a lot of new adventure games and single player story-driven games.
PS_Garak – Every Tuesday night Ben, Sarah, and Grayson do a comedy stream where they play adventure games (both new and old) and go on fun tangents.
BogusMeatFactory – Variety streamer that includes playing a lot of adventure games and text adventures.
The Obscuritory – Video Game History Foundation member and owner of The Obscuritory website Phil Salvador streams incredibly obscure games on Wednesday nights.
Grundislav – Francisco González, the developer of the Ben Jordan series, A Golden Wake, Shardlight, and Lamplight City has been streaming development of his newest game Rosewater!
ivydupler – Video game voice actress for games like Whispers of a Machine and Unavowed streams a variety of games, with a focus on adventure games and the Nancy Drew series.
Conversations with Curtis – The lead actor of the FMV game Phantasmagoria 2 started doing interviews with the cast of the game at the beginning of the pandemic, which has evolved into doing streams of the game he was in as well as other adventure games, both old and new. Highlights include his streams with the lead actress of Phantasmagoria 1 and co-host Daniel doing a ton of interviews with classic adventure game developers. It’s also just been fun watching someone who is new to games developing opinions on the genre and correct takes like new adventure games being just as good, if not better, than classic adventure games.
It looks like a massive update is coming to Myst Online tomorrow.
If you thought this MMO was dead, or never even knew about it, I don’t blame you. Uru came out in 2003 and while it did alright critically, it was a big commercial flop and nearly killed Cyan. The online portion of the game was quickly shut down and was unplayable until Gametap paid to revive the game and have Cyan create new content for it. Eventually this ended too and Myst Online was shutdown again until Cyan brought it back again for free on their own servers, which are kept up by donations. It was essentially the same game as the one at the end of Gametap’s run, static and no new content, until a few years ago when Cyan started adding fan content. While it will never be a massively popular game, it does receive regular updates now and seems to be getting a big one tomorrow. I’m not sure if this will include the Descent Expansion update that has been in development for a long time, which uses content from Myst 5.
If you’re a Myst fan but have never played Myst Online, give it a shot! It’s a bit clunky and dated, but I think it still looks nice for a game from 2003 and there hasn’t really been anything like it since then. Plus you can play it entirely for free here.
Gobliins 6 has been officially announced through this Facebook post, with it looking like a crowdfunding campaign planned for the beginning of next year. An extremely brief preview of it was shown in an interview a few months ago and seems to feature the two characters from Gobliins 2, explaining why there’s only two I’s in the title this time.
This is very exciting news for me since I thought Gobliiins 5 was a very nice revival and the thought of getting a new Gobliiins game every other year seems very nice.
Here’s a bunch of recent games I’ve enjoyed lately and other neat stuff
We got a new batch of Domino Club games! Domino Club is an anonymous collective of game developers creating games for jams for the last couple of years. Every jam provides a bunch of interesting experimental games and I recommend checking out the other jams too.
The Games for Gaza bundle is still going! Get a ton of great games and help some people out.
A new Click Or Treat bundle is out. I was lucky enough to be in the one last year with a bunch of great games and this one has a new batch of great games for the season.
Schloss der Wölfe is a short, free horror-themed World War II FPS by David Lindsey Pittman, who has made some great games like Neon Struct and Eldritch.
A new Choicebeat is out! Choicebeat is a free zine covering interactive fiction, adventure games, and other narrative focused games.
The new Indie Tsushin for October covers a bunch of indie games from Japan and features a lot of interviews as well.
karyogenesys is a short atmospheric walking sim with light puzzle elements with a style inspired by the first System Shock. It is now available for pre-order with a launch planned for early next year.
A Kickstarter has launched for the adventure game Brain Hotel: Remodeled. The game is designed by Mark Darin, who worked at Telltale and made indie adventure games like the Nick Bounty series
While ScummVM is the go-to emulator for LucasArts adventure games these days, there’s another one people should consider using. DREAMM is an emulator focused on LucasArts games that relies on low-level emulation instead of reverse engineering, providing a more accurate emulation of these games over ScummVM. The emulator was created by Aaron Giles, who previously worked at LucasArts and created many of the Mac ports for their games. You can hear him discuss the emulator here.
In addition to it providing more accurate emulation for LucasArts adventure games, having a focus on LucasArts games means it supports a lot of games ScummVM never will, like Yoda Stories, Rebel Assault 2, and Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion. You can view the complete list of games it supports here.
Developer: Anima PPD Publisher: Got Game Entertainment Year: 2003 Genre: Adventure Game
I just noticed from browsing MobyGames out of boredom that it has been 20 years this month since the game Conspiracies was released in the US. Conspiracies is a FMV game developed by Anima Ppd Interactive that I’ve had a long fascination with. I picked the game up near release when I saw it was pretty cheap at a Best Buy, during a time when we were desperate for new adventure games but also because back then I already had a morbid curiosity in FMV games. You play as the detective Nick Delios as you investigate a murder and along the way you discover a bunch of weird subplots and bigger mysteries. This case takes the player all around the world, to outer space, traveling through time, and also a concert for a Greek blues band that the developers seem to be a fan of since you must watch a music video featuring them. It plays exactly like a Tex Murphy game, but not quite at the level of quality that we would expect from that series. It’s hard to know where to start with why this game is so fascinating to me. Richard Cobbett wrote a great article about the game for PC Gamer a while ago about it.
Our hero, Nick Delios
I guess a lot of the weirdness in Conspiracies comes from the main character, Nick Delios. He’s not particularly interesting but he’s just such an odd protagonist for an adventure game. Like all characters in FMV games, he wears the same outfit throughout the entire game but it’s just a grey hoodie and grey sweatpants. Since it was a game developed in Greece, he is also dubbed and it doesn’t quite fit but it’s also endearing at the same time?
The PC Gamer article mentions the starting puzzle where you cannot leave the apartment until you make coffee using water from your fish tank, but that’s just the beginning of the odd puzzles. Another puzzle requires you to get by a robotic dog, that is not intimidating at all, by filling an inner tube with water and feeding it to the dog. The most famous puzzle in the game requires you to get a signed cd from a real band called Blues Wire and give it to someone in another location to proceed.
Nothing about it really makes sense. Why is a band from today playing in the future? Why this Greek blues band? Why do you have to pretend you’re dying for them to give you the cd? Like most of the game, it’s not a particularly difficult puzzle, just a really weird one.
However, there is one puzzle that beats them all and caused my friend and I a lot of pain when we played through it. Conspiracies is a game that gives you a ton of inventory items, many of them being completely useless, and a very limited inventory space. Some of these items are small sticks of gum that are scattered throughout the game. My friend and I were playing through the game on our own computers while chatting about it over voice chat and while we each had to dump inventory items to make space, he chose to drop some of those sticks of gum. After all, surely you don’t need six sticks of gum? Well, it turns out you do. Apparently you can figure out what items are needed and which ones aren’t by going to your apartment, and using items on your trash can. If an item isn’t needed, the game will dispose of the item in the trash, otherwise nothing will happen. You’re meant to use the gum much later in the game, where you reach a cutscene of a flying car taking off and Nick combines gum and a tiny gps and throws it at the moving car to get it to stick. If you do not have all six pieces of gum, the game reaches a fail state. We did not know this and my friend spent an hour looking for the stick of gum that he dropped somewhere in this massive 3D space to get past this point. Eventually he gave up and I just sent him my save file so he could proceed. Even the cutscene itself is ridiculous and shows Nick unwrapping and chewing on all six pieces of gum before throwing the gps unit at the flying car.
The reception to this game was a bizarre thing to watch as well. This came out during a time when the adventure game community was desperate for adventure games and would rally behind every single game in the hopes that it would “revive” the genre that many perceived as dead. I think you could make a solid argument that the genre was fine if you were including freeware games and the adventure games coming from Japan, but if you were looking for commercial adventure games for the PC then it was a rough time. Adventure game sites often gave the few commercial games we had glowing reviews, only for bigger outlets to trash the games. This led to accusations that the mainstream gaming press was biased against adventure games and sounds oddly like a conservative talking point we’d hear today but no, the games were frequently just terrible. I have a vivid memory of PC Gamer giving The Moment of Silence, a completely forgettable adventure game, a poor review and the Adventure Gamers forums having a massive thread about it. Even games that I thought were decent, like Broken Sword 3, had unrealistic expectations placed on them and people in the community expected them to single-handedly make the genre popular again. This basically went on until companies like Telltale started making games and I’m glad I don’t see it anymore other than the occasional person at a games outlet saying the genre is dead and then the resulting discourse from that.
Anyway, this all meant that when PC Gamer gave the game a poor review, as it should have, people were not pleased. The developers wrote an angry letter to PC Gamer and the magazine actually published it.
“We at Anima PPD-Interactive are new developers. Conspiracies is our first game, and it took us five years of development and our own funding. Do you believe that judging the game that hard is leaving us anything? The most likely thing that may occur is that we sell nothing in the U.S. and stop our efforts here. Is that what your magazine wants? Fewer independent developers?
Also, did you play the game till the end? You think there’s nothing worthwhile? Not even the story or the Puzzles? I think that you’re on the slope that Hollywood is on – lots of effects and explosions, but boring stories or no stories at all. Just kill, kill, kill. Of course I don’t say that our game is at the edge of technology , but all of the gamers that played our game up to now had a lot of fun. FMV games are very expensive to develop, and there aren’t many of this kind on the market anymore.
We’re very frustrated that you don’t count the story factor or human factor but only graphics and effects. As adventure gamers we feel that a game with a boring story and great graphics is worse than a game with a good story and poorer graphics.
We feel sorry that you’re not supporting us independent developers at all.”
To which PC Gamer writer Chuck Osborne responded with:
“I’m not sure which is more surprising: That we’re supposed to award brownie points to independent developers, or that Conspiracies took five years to make. As I said in my review, I’d gladly play an all-text adventure game (and have!) if it had a great story and compelling puzzles. Sadly, Conspiracies received a 23% because of its confounding plot and pathetic gameplay. To answer your question: Yes, we enthusiastically support small developers – we just don’t support bad games.“
Again, this was a thing that frequently happened with negative reviews of adventure games in the early 00’s. I remember Chuck Osborne going onto the Just Adventure forums to explain how he’s not biased against adventure games just because he gave a negative review to the latest Dreamcatcher game and what not, and other journalists would pop onto the Adventure Gamers forums to explain the same thing.
The game must have been a success because in 2011, 8 years after the first game, there was a Conspiracies 2. Even with the long gap between games, it manages to bring back everyone from the first game, including the people who did the dubbing for the English version. It’s an improvement over the first game, although I felt like it removed the weirdness from the game so I never finished it. One day I’ll have to, so I can see how the cliffhanger from the first game is resolved.
While they only developed the two games, Anima PPD seems to still be around today doing video production. You can even buy physical copies of Conspiracies 1 and 2 from their website. I believe this is the only place where you can legally buy them, as they never got a release on Steam or GOG. I hope they do get a digital release someday. While it’s clear I don’t think they’re “Good” games, they are fascinating and must have done something right if I’m still thinking about Conspiracies 20 years later.
On a final note, after our playthrough of the first game together, my friend wrote the studio an email thanking them for making the game. I don’t think the email was entirely sincere but there wasn’t any sarcasm in it either. To his surprise, the studio responded and sent him a bunch of Conspiracies swag like a poster and a copy of the game with a bonus dvd of extra material, which I believe was signed? Just an incredibly kind gesture from a small studio that didn’t need to do so, and this enthusiasm is probably why I’m still recommending it to streamers and enjoyers of obscure games today. It’s not a good game and I strongly recommend having a walkthrough open while playing it, but good lord is it a fascinating fever dream.
