Top 5 Adventure Games on Steam
Looking at the steam sale, which 5 adventure games should I really get to round out my understanding of the genre? Which 5 on offer are the best of the best?
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Beyond good and evil was a fantastic game aswell, and is a must at £2.49.
Kings Quest
The time gentleman please Pack
Big Brain wolf
Runaway if it's still there.
Machinarium is awesome, I can't stop playing and I should because I have to work tonight.
Lena buy Machinarium.
Though I haven't played it yet, I will buy it very soon as a result of some awesome-looking trailers and gameplay footage on youtube. From what I've seen, it's got a nice Grim Fandango charm to it which really appeals to me. And the game was designed by Larry Ahern and Mike Levine who both, I think, worked on Day of the Tentacle! I also think that Dave Grossman might've also chipped in with Insecticide's creation (but I'm not completely sure of that).
If I recall correctly, that's not a "pure" adventure, more like a an action hybrid. That, and Part 2 hasn't been released on PC (and maybe it will never be).
Larry Ahern and Mike Levine
Notable titles: Sam and Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, The Dig, Curse of Monkey Island, A Vampyre Story, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 2.
It's fair to say the two of them have worked on a few adventure games, although mostly just as artists.
Oh and Mr. Grossman is credited on Insecticide as a "creative consultant"
The pack on Steam makes you pay for TGP, and throws in BTDT as well. If I didn't already have them, I'd have bought them by now, and will not hesitate in recommended the pack to you. They're brilliant.
The Longest Journey is highly recommended for all adventure fans. Brilliant, long story, good voice-overs, traditional adventure game gameplay and a memorable soundtrack make it a fun game despite a few unfair puzzles here and there. Dreamfall is a good continuation story-wise and is graphically beautiful but suffers from console-y gameplay, way too easy puzzles and an abrupt cliffhanger ending.
Playing Indigo Prophecy now, have to say it's great so far. Not sure about the quick time button pressing (that with 4 buttons is bad enough, nevermind 8) but think I'm getting the hang of it.
NO.
These are what killed adventure games. The game designers behind these games are ones that share the logic of morons, or conspiracy theorists, or whatever you call the birdbrained dream logic of the creator of all human suffering, Roberta Williams. This review from Just Adventure sums it up perfectly, though not for the reasons they think: "Most of the puzzles in Kings Quest 5 are the Sierra standard--collect as much inventory as is possible and attempt to use it on everything."
Larry Ahern was co-lead on Curse.
Guys, you should know before getting Insecticide: the second part of the game was cancelled. You can only finish the game on the rather meh DS version. Your call.
I said mostly.
Sierra adventure games did not kill the genre, they WERE the genre. They were consistently the most popular and best-selling adventure games from the mid-80s to the mid-90s.
Sierra's "defeat the player" design philosophy was a continuation of Infocom's, and it was the standard for every single adventure game created before Loom and The Secret of Monkey Island. Yes, the games were intentionally cruel and frustrating and death lurked round every corner. But at the same, though, they were often extremely open-ended and non-linear with multiple solutions to puzzles and multiple branching paths through the storyline. They wanted to create the sense that the player could do anything, and that meant allowing the player to fail. This design philosophy is not better or worse than the more linear and player-friendly one eventually popularized by the LucasArts adventures of the mid-90s onward, it's merely different.
And that's why Lena should play the games. She specifically asked which games to get in order to "round out her understanding of the genre." She'd be doing herself a huge disservice if she completely ignored the popular and influential games on the other end of the design philosophy spectrum. The Sierra adventure games are historically important to the genre, and on top of that they're also really, really great games.
If you just come into the games with the right mindset and realize that they're going to be extremely difficult and that you're not going to be able to beat them on your first playthrough, you'll probably really enjoy them.
Listen: solving these puzzles is, no matter how you spin it, absurd. Sierra made them difficult, made them punish you and, quite frankly, missed the point. You said it: their games sold, and they never bothered to make them better. If I buy 5 adventure games only to realise they got worse as time went on, then I'd give a big eff you to the genre too. Sierra's games are examples of some of the worst design in any game, ever, no matter what genre. Anything with the seal of bad quality - "by Roberta Williams" - on its cover is to be avoided.
I think Old Man Murray, again, summed it up perfectly. I linked to the article that deals with Roberta Williams' attitude at the beginning of the thread. That's all I have to say.
That Old Man Murray article you linked to is rather amusing, and I'd agree that Sierra did some things to deserve a bad reputation. But not all Sierra games are so unforgiving.
The King's Quest pack on Steam is worth getting just for KQVII, which is quite modern and is a good game. Unlike its predecessors, puzzles are pretty logical, it uses a point & click interface (rather than a command parser), and although there are a few places where you can die, there's an "un-die" function that will take you back to just before you kicked the bucket.
Sierra also produced Shivers, one of the most atmospheric and absorbing games I've ever played. Some of the puzzles are difficult, but that's because they're the brain-bender type rather than inventory-based. Most of them (such as the difficult peg solitaire puzzle) require logic to solve. Again, although you can die, this is part of what makes the game scary and foreboding. Like KQVII, there is an "un-die" function.
Then there's Torin's Passage, a very sweet game suitable for kids as well as adults. Once more, puzzles are logical (in the usual adventure game sense of "logical"), and there's an in-game hint system that means it's almost impossible to get stuck.
Neither of the latter two are on Steam, I just wanted to point out that not all Sierra games are as bad as you seem to think.
And I was already going to get Machinarium and The Longest Journey. I fell in love with Machinarium's demo, and a friend suggested The Longest Journey to me about a month ago. Oh, and I saw the Indigo Prophecy quicklook on Giant Bomb, and I've been thinking of picking it up since then. Looks like a good game my brother and I could play together. (The interactive sex scene is cut from the American release, right?)
Yes you can save. Best advice for any player of Sierra games is to save frequently.
Again yes. Also, Steam only have the American version up so that's what I've got even living in the UK.
Yep, you can save at any point.
Apologies, I should have responded to the original question too...
Of the adventure games that Steam has on sale, I'd recommend the following as being excellent value:
There are a couple more on sale that I've heard good things about, but haven't played.
I'll be getting a few things based on the recommendations in this thread - thanks guys!
Oh good, I was worried there for a minute!
Yay! I love making people happy. Although I subsequently learned stuff about snow in San Francisco, which I'm sure will come in useful one day, so really it's all just part of the machinations of my evil plan for world domination.
King's Quest VI is pretty close to the perfect adventure game in my book. It's quite literally epic in scope; it even involves
The Space Quest series is an absolutely brilliant work of science fiction comedy. And the death sequences are absolutely hilarious. You'll almost certainly find yourself intentionally killing Roger just to read the game's responses.
I hope so. Jensen and Williams left a bad taste in my mouth, one oddly reminiscient of bile. It may have affected my judgement of Sierra's other offerings.
Considering that Roberta Williams gave birth to the animated graphic adventure, does that mean the genre was stillborn?
Agreed. KQV had many flaws, and KQVI patched almost each of them up. It's got a good story, interesting characters, fantastic music and locations, and most importantly, it allows you to choose from many paths (most minor in differences, but subset of two major ones), and the story reacts accordingly.
Now, Space Quest, THERE'S a series with some unfair deaths and dead ends. But they're HILARIOUSLY unfair, so it's hard to stay mad.
Slapping color on another person's pencil sketch doesn't make you the artist. Text adventures existed before Roberta Williams; graphic adventures almost disappeared because of her and her ideology.
I'm going to bring up Old Man Murray again. In response to why adventure games died, she says:
Which is to say that adventure games died because you, my friend, are retarded for not figuring out that you needed to dip the cat hair in maple syrup to sprout a moustache, and that is because you are not a highly-educated genius like Roberta Williams or Jane Jensen, but a TV-watching moron surviving on welfare.
Many people, myself included, enjoy Sierra's games. If you don't, that's perfectly fine. And you may not like everything they brought to the adventure game genre, but they brought a lot of techniques and technology that shaped adventure games, for better AND worse, to this day. Before "Mystery House" nobody was making adventure games with graphics. Before the first "King's Quest", nobody was using animation. Their games aren't flawless, but they paved the way for a lot, and did at least as much good to the genre as harm.
Anyways, Sierra's games are not something you start with to get a "well-rounded" view of adventure games. Pick up something light (Strong Bad, for example) or well-grounded (Day of the Tentacle, I guess?) and go from there.
*Well, she also co-owned the company with her husband, so she probably did have quite a bit of control over other people's projects too, but still...
Only thing, for some of the games you may want to have a guide near. Most of them can be solved by multiple and frequent saves, but sometimes you did something wrong way back at the beginning of the game, and you are screwed way later.
Also, watch your points carefully. If you lost points doing something, for the love of all that is holy, restore an earlier game!
is not on steam.