What's happening to adventure games?Today's Situation: The Crisis Since 1994, no particular style or company were able to rule the world of adventures, like Infocom, Sierra and LucasArts did in the past. Countless styles tried to find the road to glory: the era of The Great Mixture began. It was both good and bad. It was good because the competition encouraged more and more developers to create adventure games; but it was bad because no standards were set and destructive processes couldn't be stopped.
Today, we live in an era where the quantity of adventure games far exceed their quality. More and more companies have joined the race; ironically, the former giants of the adventure, LucasArts and Sierra, have decreased their contribution to this genre.
In the vast variety of modern adventures, it is difficult to clearly distinguish different styles: The classification is extremely hard due to the huge amount of hybrids and mixtures between various directions.
What are the styles that dominate our time? By careful examination, we can see three main directions:
- The so-called "Myst clones". Those adventures continue the decadent tradition set by "Myst". The graphics take the most important place in the game, as well as the complex puzzles, separated from story and characters. This is undeniably the most devastating influence ever to occur to computer games: countless products appear and claim to be adventures, while in fact they could be best described as graphic exercises with puzzles. Even the best examples of this genre couldn't escape the influence. Among those were such games as "Zork: Nemesis". A good example for a "mystified" adventure is the game "Beyond Atlantis" ("Atlantis II"). The most advanced technology was invested in this game; graphics, animations and effects seemed to reach perfection, while puzzles, interaction, story, characters, dialogues - everything was neglected and brought nothing creative, new or original.
- The post-classic comic adventures. The influence of "Secret Of Monkey Island" was very strong and gave birth to many brilliant examples of the comic genre. Those were hilarious games which concentrated mostly on the most wacky characters and crazy puzzles possible. Real life didn't have any significance. Due to lack of depth and original concepts, they didn't change much in the course of history, but were mostly refreshing and enjoyable. Among the best examples of these are the two first games of the "Discworld" series.
Today, this genre seems to be dying - and this death is confused by many with the death of adventure games in general. It seems that the great tradition started by LucasArts has reached its end. Although the technology allows now to make games with the most realistic animations and sound effects, the comic games cannot really bring anything new. "Stupid Invaders", a game that was released in 2001, is a good example. In this game, the graphics and the animations are absolutely brilliant, while the puzzles copy LucasArts games; story, characters and dialogues were given only the slightest attention. Frankly, I can't think of any great comic adventure made in Modern Era, except the last two installments of the glorious "Monkey Island" saga by LucasArts. However, a great deal of their attractiveness is based on resemblance to the first two classics and their sentimental value.
- The hybrids. Those adventures are a very dangerous symptom of our time. When I say "hybrid", I mean mostly the action-adventure. While before this genre was clearly separate from pure adventures ("Alone In The Dark" or "Another World" have almost nothing to do with any classic adventure), today those games claim to be the real adventures. As an example, consider "Indiana Jones And The Infernal Machine" - an action-adventure game that was released after two classic LucasArts' titles and was clearly meant to continue the series. Thus, a death verdict was declared to the pure "Indy" adventures. Today, games like "Tomb Raider" are real adventures in the eyes of many. Puzzle-solving and dialogues are replaced with climbing, running and shooting.
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