A long time ago Adventure games were really the alpha dogs of gaming. This was back when PC-exclusivity wasn’t detrimental to sales and you didn’t have to have a top of the line computer to run games. Back then we were barraged with Adventure games titles like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Carmen Sandiego. But now they’re really passed their prime and games like Machinarium and Tales of Monkey Island no matter how much fun they are to play, seem a like bit of a step backwards.
My problem with adventure games is that I’m always either having a lot of fun solving puzzles or I’m going crazy rubbing every object against every wall trying to get something to do anything. It breaks the flow of gameplay pretty seriously to stop and fiddle around for an extremely irritating duration of time instead of enjoying the simple linearity of action games. And that’s probably where action games have done it right where adventure games did it wrong. Modern action titles like inFAMOUS and Gears of War allow the player to beat the game without having being some kind of puzzle solving savant.
Probably the best step I’ve seen taken in genre melding brilliance is the fusion of action and adventure, or rather “Action-Adventure.” This style of gameplay has made it possible to provide puzzles and challenges while still making the player feel like he is doing more than just clicking randomly at the scenery. Compared to games like Psychonauts, Beyond Good & Evil, and the Metroid series, Tales of Monkey Island looks like a dinosaur. It embraces not only the good aspects of adventure games, but the bad. It embraces the aimlessness, the confusing inventory items, the requirement for Myst level attention to minute details, and stiff movement that have really weakened the genre.
Throw-back games like Machinarium don’t seem bad by any means, but when I hear someone say that adventure games were better than the games we have now-a-days, I have to laugh, obnoxiously. Yes, the story telling of adventure games has a pretty good record, but that is only one aspect. For everything adventure games do right they do about two more things wrong, and by fusing them with the real-time action genre we get a much wider array of possibilities and gameplay. Adventure games aren’t bad, we’ve just been evolving beyond their limitations.
