In Which I Rank Every Adventure Game I Played In 2020
Jake Spencer
Gosh, I’m tired of hearing about how much everyone hated 2020.
But since you brought it up, 2020? Not my best year.
I spent most of it feeling too sick to move. Sounds like a great excuse to catch up on some old video games, but I couldn’t handle fast-paced actions, not even the digital kind.
This was also the year I first asked a doctor what we could do about my pesky ADHD. The answer: Pills!
So here I am with lots of time, slow reflexes, and heretofore unimaginable patience. The perfect opportunity to play adventures games. By my count (and loose definition of the genre), 32 adventure games. Yikes.
And because I can’t just enjoy things, I’ve written about each one and placed them in a ranked list, starting with the worst:
32. Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls
1990, Legend Entertainment, PC
Look at that box art. A smutty Harry Potter text adventure that predates the first Harry Potter book by seven years? I had to see what it was all about.
Zork-style text adventures were a hard sell in1990, so Legend tried to make their games a bit more accessible by listing valid commands and items of interest on the screen and even including illustrations of each setting with some interactive hotspots.
I went in blind and found it virtually unplayable. The interface is an absolute mess. Right away, you’re on a sort of timer, with every action you take bringing you closer to a confrontation with ̷H̷a̷r̷r̷y̷’̷s ̷Ernie’s abusive ̷u̷n̷c̷l̷e̷ stepfather. Want to look around, maybe get a sense of your surroundings? That’s gonna cost you a turn.
I finally gave up and looked up a walkthrough, which made me feel a bit better about my pathetic attempts. Nothing about the winning path is remotely intuitive or logical. Even following a guide for every single action, I still made a mistake somewhere and died, which was just as well. If Harry Potter hadn’t retroactively made this such a bizarre curiosity, there would be nothing of value here.
I hate it.
31. PAN-PAN A tiny big adventure
2017, Spelkraft, Switch
Not bad, but definitely not good. I played this game this year, and I’ve already forgotten almost everything about it except that it was short and it still outstayed its welcome.
30. Earthworms
2018, All Those Moments, Switch
Perfectly okay, but it’s just sort of slow and unpleasant. The developers say they took inspiration from Edward Hopper and Twin Peaks. As great as that sounds, I’m afraid they missed the mark this time.
29. The 7th Guest
1993, Trilobyte, PC
Everybody had this game in the ’90s. Everybody except for me. Sometimes I’d see it on a friend’s CD-ROM rack and say, “Hey, let’s play that one!” and they’d say, “Nahhhhh.”
I get it now.
For those of you who missed it, The 7th Guest is a set of logic puzzles connected by a House On Haunted Hill-style story about strangers invited to spend a night in a toy maker’s spooky mansion.
I love logic puzzles. I made a real effort to reach the end. I couldn’t do it.
I told myself I wouldn’t use a guide, and for a while, it was going well. It felt rewarding, even! Then I reached some puzzles where I wasn’t slowed down so much by the logic as I was by the cumbersome interface. I looked up the solution. Just so I wouldn’t lose momentum. Then I hit puzzles that were more frustration than puzzle. Then the maze. The cumbersome, disorienting, ridiculously long, first-person maze.
Would you believe I completed the maze, and I still kept playing?
Eventually, though, I found that I was just letting the walkthrough play the game for me, and I was not enjoying it one bit. A few of the puzzles are decent, and the gloriously cheesy live-action video and instantly dated computer animation are amusing, but I can’t imagine anything short of amnesia convincing me to ever go back to the mansion.
28. Grim Fandango
1998, LucasArts, PC
I’ll give Grim Fandango credit for originality and aesthetic. It’s so cool, so attractive.
I just wish I liked anything about playing it.
27. Sam & Max Save the World: Episode 2: Situation: Comedy
2006, Telltale Games, Wii
It wasn’t as bad as Episode 1.
26. Wheels of Aurelia
2016, Santa Ragione, PC
Give strangers rides around 1970s Italy. Talk while you drive.
I respect everything about it, even if it didn’t quite click with me.
25. Flight of the Amazon Queen
1995, Interactive Binary Illusions, PC
The thing you need to know about Flight of the Amazon Queen is that the hero’s name is Joe King. It’s not like he goes by Joseph or Mr. King or something and rolls his eyes when someone puts it all together. He just tells people, “I’m Joe King,” and that’s the whole joke.
It’s Monkey Island with the wit turned down and the Boomer comedy turned all the way up. If you’re looking for “unga chunga” native stereotypes, out of place Star Wars quotes, and hee-larious jokes about men who want to be kidnapped by Amazonian women and forced into sexual slavery (can you even imagine?), here’s your game. While the small teams of men behind most irreverent adventure games were content to slip in a ribald double entendre or two, the Amazon crew went hog wild on the sex funnies. The very first puzzle has Joe put together a sexy lady disguise, complete with a pair of rubber “comedy breasts,” drawn with as much detail as can fit in in 64 pixels.
It’s never smart, and the puzzles are almost uniformly tedious — the kind that make you walk back and fourth across ten screens without anything interesting happening in between— but there’s something pathetically endearing about its blunt and artless attempts to make middle-aged nineties dads laugh.
24. 5 Days a Stranger
2003, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, PC
A thief breaks into a mansion and finds himself trapped with a group of strangers who have a bad habit of turning up dead.
I evidently found it compelling enough to reach the ending, despite getting stuck a few times because the game expected me to be in some location or take some action without providing any clues or motivation. The central mystery is underwhelming, and while the small cast and “bottle episode” structure should let players get a good peek inside everyone’s head, there’s disappointingly little character development.
What kept me going, then? I suspect it’s that title. As the days tick down and the bodies pile up, you never lose track of how close you are to the conclusion. You walk up and down the same halls. You meet up with the same people. You become familiar with the routine, and you never forget for a moment that it has an expiration date.
It’s a brilliant trick.
23. 7 Days a Skeptic
2003, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, PC
Take the general 5 Days a Stranger scenario and set in on a space ship in the far future.
Like Jason X.
Or Hellraiser: Bloodline.
Or Dino Crisis 3.
Or Leprechaun 4: In Space.
Or The Brave Little Toaster Goes To Mars.
22. Nick Bounty: A Case of the Crabs
2004, Pinhead Games, PC
This game is amateurish. The puzzles and dialogue aren’t particularly brilliant. And it’s just so darned likeable.
While the LucasArts classics that so obviously inspired this game often felt like they were padded to justify their price, A Case of the Crabs whizzes by in maybe an hour of lean, idiosyncratic noir silliness.
21. The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One
1992, Westwood, PC
Most of this game is spent in a gigantic maze with instant death lurking behind every turn.
For a large portion of adventure game fans, that’s enough to disqualify the first Kyrandia, but if you’re still with me, let’s talk about some of the other things you’ll hate, like limited inventory, consumable items, items appear in random locations, and the ability to put yourself in an unwinnable state without any hint that you’ve done anything wrong.
But a game is more than the list of sins it commits. The gorgeously drawn and animated land of Kyrandia is appealing enough to make the rough design tolerable (with a little help from a guide, at least), and those sloppy puzzles are the price you pay for a respectable attempt to shake up the adventure formula. Snatching up every loose item you see and tossing them at every obstacle won’t work here.
If this were the start and end of the legend, I’d have a hard time recommending it, but it’s worth trying if for no other reason than to better appreciate the rest of the Kyrandia trilogy.
20. Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood
2018, Artifex Mundi, Switch
There is nothing — nothing! — remarkable about this hidden object adventure, and I don’t care. Sometimes you just want to find some objects, y’know?
19. The Secret of Monkey Island
1990, LucasArts, PC
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down. Take a breath. I know what you’re thinking. The Secret of Monkey Island just barely made the top 20?
It’s important to keep in mind that this is only a list of the adventure games I played this year. If this were a list of the best adventure games of all time, there’s no way it would be this close to the top.
Yeah, yeah, I know this game’s reputation. Maybe if I’d played it when I was ten, I would care more, but I didn’t, and I don’t.
I do like it. It’s memorable. It has a distinct voice. It’s incredibly important to the history of the genre. That one scene where Guybrush and Shinetop fight behind the wall in the governor’s mansion is one of the smartest, funniest things to ever happen in an adventure game.
The good stuff is great, but the bad stuff is murder. Everything on Monkey Island is torturous. Insult sword fighting is a fairly clever way to turn dialogue into combat, but it’s repetitive and not nearly as funny as you remember. I’m still not sure I actually know what I did to get through that maze on Mêlée Island.
This was my second play through, and I will say that I enjoyed it a lot more this time than I did the first. As I said, if you were a little kid and this was the only game you owned, I can see why you’d love it forever. As an old curmudgeon with other options, though, clicking through a zillion dialogue options so I can read all the jokes about what used car salesmen are like isn’t added value; it’s a reminder that editors are valuable.
Alas, the The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition passed up the chance to axe the filler. If you want uneven voice acting and hideous new graphics that completely miss the point, though, you get that option.
18. The Inner World
2013, Studio Fizbin, PC
The Inner World is the story of a world on the brink of destruction as a fascist religious leader murders all who oppose him. How do you combat such darkness? With this list’s cutest, sweetest, gentlest game.
17. Teenagent
1994, Metropolis Software House, PC
Mark Hopper is an ordinary teenager. He does normal teenager things. He wears his hat backwards. He gets nervous around pretty girls. He is not the guy from Blink-182.
And now…he’s a secret agent!?!?!?
The ’90s was a time of irreverence, and brother, let me tell you, Teenagent has no reverence.
The set up is just, like, “Hey, teenager, you’re a secret agent now. Don’t think about it too much. Go pick up everything you can find and get to the end of the game, alright?” So you wander around, stealing shotguns and going through overly elaborate steps to make heart-shaped chocolate, and then wacky stuff happens.
Most of the puzzles are fair within the game’s logic, and a good amount of the funny stuff is actually funny. There are a couple misses that hurt the momentum, but overall, there’s not too much about Teenagent that I don’t like.
16. Agent A: A puzzle in disguise
2015, Yak & Co, Switch
As casual as casual adventure games get, there isn’t a lot to say about Agent A’s story or world. You’re a secret agent. You solve puzzles to get to a bad guy. It’s slick. It tickles the brain. It’s simply pleasant all around.
15. Milkmaid of the Milky Way
2017, Mattis Folkestad, PC
Despite its pulp sci-fi novel title, Milkmaid of the Milky Way takes its time before blasting off to outer space. The concerns are quaint and human: Big business threatens a small dairy farm.
Protagonist Ruth traverses the sprawling Scandinavian mountainside where her family has raised cows for generations, tending to the herd, taking care of menial chores, and mourning for her parents under the looming shadows of big-box grocers and factory farm production.
And then the aliens show up.
I completed Milkmaid in one sitting. It’s designed well, with only a few frustrating puzzles. The visuals are simple and lovely, and I could say the same about the story and themes. The writing, unfortunately, is not as strong. All the dialogue is meant to be rhyming couplets, but many of the lines simply don’t scan or rhyme.
Coincidentally, I played Milkmaid of the Milky Way a only a few months after playing Child of Light, another European game that sold itself on rhyming couplet dialogue that did not, in fact, scan or rhyme. Maybe they work better in other languages? As a monoglot, however, the awkward English text in both made me wish the writers hadn’t tried to be quite so cute and clever.
It’s a problem, but it’s not such a big problem that you should keep you from this wonderfully sincere adventure.
14. Day of the Tentacle
1993, LucasArts, PC
Maniac Mansion is the best game LucasArts ever developed. Its intentionally cheesy, B-horror-comedy sensibilities appeal to me, but what I like most is the open-ended playfulness. Even before approaching the Edison family’s creepy house, it’s your choice which archetypal teens will make up your team. Do you want the cool punk rocker? The nerd? The surfer dude? Changing your lineup might force you to rethink your whole approach. Aspiring writer Wendy will have a lot more use for a typewriter than new-wave musician Syd.
The sequel, Day of the Tentacle, carries forward the conceit of multiple protagonists with different personalities and skills, but this time, the group is predetermined and they’re not exploring the mansion together. That is, they’re all in the same mansion, but they’ve been separated by hundreds of years.
The time travel gags are what make this one. It’s just fun to think about what Hoagie, stranded back at the signing of the U.S. Constitution, can do to help Laverne in the far-flung future, where humans are enslaved and treated like competition poodles. The voice acting is generally strong, and while the zany visuals couldn’t touch Chuck Jones on his worst day, they’re bold and fun enough to set the tone.
The preset trio of unwitting heroes and linear story/puzzle progression keeps Day of the Tentacle’s writing more focused than Maniac Mansion, which might be why it’s more popular. As mentioned in my Monkey Island thoughts, though, I think clicking through scads of dialogue options just to hear jokes is kinda boring. Moreover, while Tentacle has an abundance of moments I might describe as goofy, wacky, witty, clever, and otherwise enjoyable, I’m struggling to recall anything that’s funny.
Time travel, though. You have to think differently in a time-travel cartoon. That goes a long way. And best of all? The original Maniac Mansion is fully playable on an in-game computer. I’m not factoring that into Day of the Tentacle’s placement on this list, but it’s always neat to buy one game and get another, better game included for free, even if it’s just the PC/C64 version that lacks the funky-fresh NES music.
13. One Night Stand
2016, Kinmoku, PC
You wake up naked in a stranger’s bed. What do you do?
While reaching the end takes only a few minutes, the experience is about exploring how else your morning could go.
I love short, mundane, personal Choose-Your-Own-Adventures (so much so that I made one), and this is among the best I’ve played. Computer games aren’t usually known for approaching sexual topics with much maturity or restraint, so I was hesitant to buy a game called One Night Stand, but like several other entries on this list, it was part of this year’s gargantuan Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. With nothing to lose but the time it took to download, I gave it a shot, and what do you know? There’s nothing salacious about it at all. Definitely not all-ages material, but you can safely buy it without worrying that you’ll need to explain what it’s doing on your credit card statement.
The characters in One Night Stand feel like real, believable, decent people who are just trying to put some pieces together after a foggy night and decide how they feel about it. You can make creepy choices, and you will be met with appropriate consequences. You can try to do the right thing and fumble anyway because you’re in a tricky situation and your companion doesn’t have any reason to be forgiving. Maybe you’ll even learn about her and make a real connection.
The game keeps track of every ending you’ve reached and provides gentle hints to nudge you toward the others. It’s not about the ticking off items on a list, though. Like Maniac Mansion, this bedroom is a fantastic, confined narrative space that encourages play and reflection over trying to “beat” anything. Yes, there are challenges to overcome, maybe even in a frustrating way, but I never had any urge to open a walkthrough. The experience is the reward.
12. KIDS
2019, Playables, PC
A beautiful, abstract, and laugh-out-loud funny dissection of what it means to be human. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it is that and also more.
The mostly wordless odyssey of these void-dwelling Keith Haring children is clearly packed with meaning, and it’s up to you to make sense of it. Although KIDS is composed of a linear series of scenes that advance when you, the player, find and complete the correct action to progress, it’s less like a traditional narrative or game and more like a painting or a piece of instrumental music.
KIDS would feel at home in an art museum. Not a stodgy art museum; one of those cool art museums. It successfully pulls off serious and fun at the same time, and with its dead-simple interface and length of well under an hour, it’s something you can share with anyone — not just video game aficionados — if you need someone to debate its meaning with you.
Yes, even kids.
11. The Dagger of Amon Ra
1992, Sierra, PC
I didn’t own many adventure games in the ’90s. I had to get my fix at friends’ houses. The games I knew were the games they had.
There were games like the aforementioned 7th Guest that everyone had and no one liked. Sometimes a game that I would later learn had no real cultural cache or commercial success, like Lighthouse: The Dark Being or Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, would inexplicably sweep through my friend group. Likewise, it was easy to miss the era’s biggest hits.
The Colonel’s Bequest: A Laura Bow Mystery was a game that only one of my friend’s had; a friend who happened to be disconnected from all of my friend circles. We played it a couple times on the computer in his parent’s bedroom, and I was absolutely riveted. It had a little red spyglass that you had to use to identify a fingerprint before you could begin the adventure! (Kids, this is something we call “copy protection.” Look, I thought it was cool at the time.)
Adventure games were always long and involved, and as much as I liked them, it was hard to keep up with a narrative-driven game when I was playing with friends who were likely to keep making progress between the time I had to go home and the time I could come back to play more. The Colonel’s Bequest offered the sort of playful, open-but-confined space I keep praising throughout this list.
It was inspired by those immersive murder mysteries, where the audience walks among the actors rather than sitting in front of a proscenium, getting into character and trying to deduce who the killer is based on whatever snippets of conversation they’ve managed to overhear. I’ve never had a bit of luck making any real progress in The Colonel’s Bequest, but wandering the old New Orleans mansion’s eerie grounds, bumping into suspicious strangers and hunting for all the ways I could doom poor Laura to a grisly death was always macabre fun, regardless.
So I played The Colonel’s Bequest. I loved it. My friend moved. None of my other friends had any idea what it was. I couldn’t remember the name.
The end.
Just kidding.
Imagine my teenage shock when I came across a tiny blurb in a game history book that not only jolted free memories of The Colonel’s Bequest, but casually mentioned that it had a sequel, and oh, yeah, everyone agrees it’s even better!
You know what I did with that information? I’ll tell you what I did!
Nothing. Sorry, I know I built this up, but it was still really hard to find old games back then. Eventually, I found The Colonel’s Bequest on an abandonware site, and I was still just terrible at it. I didn’t try The Dagger of Amon Ra until just a few years ago, and it seemed dry and slow. I couldn’t even find a way to bisect Laura or drop a chandelier on her head. Yawn.
I gave it another shot this year, though, and…I was right. It is dry. It is slow. There’s kind of a lot of racism. Of all the games on this list, this has been the hardest to rank. I quit when I accidentally died after almost an hour without saving.
It was then that I looked to a walkthrough to see where I went wrong. My mistake was playing it like any other adventure game. I assumed I just needed to hoard stuff and muscle my way through every conversation to advance the story. On the contrary, this is more like The Colonel’s Bequest than it seemed. You might not always be in the right place at the right time, and that is an intended part of the experience. It’s important to pay attention to everything you hear.
The Dagger of Amon Ra might be ranked too high. There’s a lot about my time with it that I didn’t enjoy. This was just the beginning of my understanding of its clockwork mystery, though. The thought of starting fresh with a new approach is exciting. For that reason, this ranking might be too low.
And there’s also this:
I mean, come on.
10. The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Two: Hand of Fate
1993, Westwood, PC
Kyrandia: Book One was an admirable attempt. Book Two delivers on the promise.
The original had quippy one-liners and a proclivity for puns, but it was a pretty generic noble-quest-through-a-fantasy land.
The sequel is an all-out comedy, and it finds a lot of its best laughs from making fun of everything you hated on your first trek through Kyrandia. It’s worth enduring the worst of Book One just to understand the jokes at its expense.
Personality-free Brandon has been kicked out of the lead role. This time, you’ll instead play as spunky alchemist Zanthia, one of the few interesting side characters from the first game. Clicking on a pair of eyes floating through the murky swamps near Zanthia’s hut in the first game caused a giant frog monster to pop out and swallow Brandon whole. (Hope you saved first!) Click those same eyes in the sequel, and Zanthia with catch the creature’s tongue, tie it in a knot, and top it off with a sassy joke. The message is clear: Your new hero is far more capable, far more fun, and she’s not going to get killed and spoil your progress.
Even better is that alchemist bit. Most puzzles are solved by concocting ridiculous potions. Why simply make a sandwich when you could instead brew a sandwich spell? Throughout your journey, you’ll fill your potion book with new recipes that challenge you to think laterally and work out what kind of tortured wordplay might allow you to substitute the items you have for what you thought you’d need.
It is too obtuse sometimes, and getting stuck because you couldn’t distinguish a necessary item from the background is never fun. Hardly perfect, but as long as you keep a walkthrough handy for those frustrating moments, this is a must-play for anyone seeking a traditional point-and-click outside of the Sierra and LucasArts canon.
9. Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter
2016, Frogwares, PC
You ever hear of this guy? Silly name, isn’t it? Sherlock. Who names a kid that? What did they call him as a baby? It’s dumb is what it is. Sherlock is a dumb name.
Just kidding, folks! That’s my Sherlock Holmes comedy! I hope you enjoyed it!
According to Guinness World Records (according to Wikipedia), Holmes is “the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history.”
So, yeah, we’re all familiar with the character, but would you believe that I’ve never read or seen a Sherlock Holmes story? No joke this time. I haven’t read one Sir Arthur Conan Doyle book. Haven’t seen Sherlock Gnomes. Missed that Will Ferrell movie. I was pretty into The Great Mouse Detective when I was three, but the detective is named Basil, so that doesn’t count.
I’m not sure why I assumed I wouldn’t like Sherlock Holmes, but it looks like I was wrong. If nothing else, he makes for a fine adventure game character. He instinctively knows how to spot relevant details, and he’s quirky enough to get away with gathering strange objects without bothering to explain himself to anyone. Let Watson be the audience surrogate, shaking his hands and trying to figure out why Holmes is filling his pockets with debris and staring intently at the walls — my man has crimes to solve, and he doesn’t have to explain nothin’ to nobody.
Frogwares’ Holmes series combines classic adventure game fundamentals (examine everything in the environment, pick up and use items, work your way through dialogue trees) with modern sensibilities. The methodical deductive reasoning is occasionally interrupted with active minigames, and most of the time, they’re pretty good, adding a welcome jolt of tension. Fortunately, if that’s not your cup of tea, or you’re just not in the mood, you can skip these sections without any penalty. You also have Batman’s Detective Vision. Who’s the world’s greatest detective now, Mr. Wayne?
But what I like best is the way you are allowed to make mistakes. You can skip over clues, or even entire locations and characters. You can reach the wrong conclusion at the end of a case, recklessly sending innocent men to their death and letting criminals go free. If the idea of doing something wrong fills you with anxiety, it’s easy to check your work and correct your mistakes without having to consult a guide or juggle multiple save files. It’s remarkably player-friendly.
If you pay close attention, though, you should have enough information to solve each case on your own. I say that, but I don’t mind admitting that I bungled plenty of investigations. These are the best kinds of mysteries: The clues are there, and they seem obvious in hindsight, but putting it all together for yourself takes keen attention to detail and careful consideration.
8. Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments
2014, Frogwares, PC
You ever hear of this Sherlock Holmes?
Hold on, have I already done my Sherlock Holmes bit?
Yeah, Crimes & Punishments plays almost identically to The Devil’s Daughter except the tech is a little older and cheaper. I think I slightly prefer the cases in this one, but that might just be because I played it second.
If you like one, you’ll like the other. If you hate one, you’ll hate the other. I’m the one writing this list, though, and I think they’re both great.
7. Loom
1990, Lucasfilm Games, PC
Hey, LucasArts fans, why did you tell me Loom was the bad one? Why was this the object of Space Quest IV’s sneering derision?
Maybe it’s Loom’s wistful sincerity, a far cry from the irreverence that defined Lucas’ ’90s adventures (aside from The Dig, which I’ll have you know is also unfairly maligned.) Sad, lonely Bobbin, who uses music to weave the ethereal thread that makes up the universe, doesn’t exactly fit in with wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood or freelance police dog Sam and his sociopath bunny buddy, Max.
I get it. Loom pulls direct inspiration for Swan Lake. Yeah, that Swan Lake. Tchaikovsky. Given the option between cartoons and ballet, I’d take cartoons every time, and yet, this is the Lucas game I’d put above all other except Maniac Mansion.
Loom’s detractors complain about its short length and easy puzzles. They’re wrong. This is the only Lucas adventure that’s ended while I still wanted more. There’s no bloat. Nothing overstays its welcome. I can see how it would be disappointing to someone who paid full price for it in 1990, but taken on its own, it is just right.
I played on the hardest difficulty. In this mode, it’s up to you learn and play each spell by ear. See, Bobbin can influence the world around him by playing short melodies by tapping different spots on his wooden staff for different notes. (If you’re thinking of Ocarina of Time, yes, is a lot like that.) If you have any aptitude for music, hard difficult is the way to go. Listening to sounds in the game, humming them back to myself, matching the pitches on a keyboard, and writing down the notation was one of the most rewarding experiences I had with any game this year.
Ignore popular opinion about Loom. Listen to me. Loom is cool. I am smarter than all those other people. I am very handsome and good at video games.
6. Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
2007, Capcom, Nintendo DS
I bought this a few years ago and haaaaaaaaated it. Didn’t find it remotely appealing. Had no idea how to make any progress. Couldn’t even make it to the first save point. Just abhorred the whole thing.
But you nerds couldn’t stop yammering about how great these stupid anime lawyer games are, could you?
So I finally picked it up again and cheated my way through the beginning with the help of a walkthrough. I got a feel for it. I found out how to think like a successful anime lawyer, even when all my hair flopped down and giant sweat droplets and crosshatched lines covered my forehead.
Like the Sherlock Holmes games above, Apollo Justice is about using the adventure game clues you amass to thoughtfully piece together a cohesive and plausible theory. Unlike the dirty, downtrodden turn-of-the-century London riffraff Holmes encounters, though, everyone Justice meets is a flamboyant magician or rock star or gangster with EXTREME EMOTIONS! ! ! ! !
Everyone speaks like they’re getting paid by the word, and they emote as if they’re *sniiiiff* just as curious as you *sniff, sniff* about how that big pile of cocaine disappeared. I would hardly consider myself an anime fan, but here, the tropes I often find irritating are put to use burying key information. It’s up to the player to suss out the meaning behind each character’s repetitive tics and remember the little details that don’t quite add up. The artifice has to be over the top to contrast the small, human motivations at the heart of each case.
There were several times when I put the pieces together a few steps ahead of when the game expected me to crack the case, and I would lose because I just didn’t know how to make Justice say what I was thinking. That kind of obtuse design is infuriating. I also wasn’t a fan of the instances where you have to advance by using magic lawyer powers rather than deductive reasoning, which, yes, really happens. When Justice and I were working in sync, though, it was clear why this series is so highly acclaimed.
5. Phantasmagoria
1995, Sierra, PC
The only thing adventure game fans hate more than Phantasmagoria is Roberta Williams’ continued insistence that Phantasmagoria is her proudest achievement.
Where does one even start with something like this? The hokey acting? The derivative plot? The absurd design of the mansion?
There’s something laugh-out-loud terrible in plain sight on every screen. For any fan of cheesy, misguided horror, this is Heaven.
That alone is enough to cement Phantasmagoria as a classic, but my love isn’t all ironic. Roberta Williams was a master of the genre, and the truth is, there’s a pretty decent point-and-click adventure hiding under all the Silliwood excess.
Like 5 Nights a Stranger and 7 Days a Skeptic, Phantasmagoria mostly takes place within a contained location across several days. You get to know the Carnovasch Estate, picking up on small differences as the week progresses, like the way that bottle of absinthe in the foyer keeps slowly draining.
The puzzles are often silly and simple, but they rarely slow the momentum. It’s a smooth experience the builds as you go. It starts ponderously, and then the days get shorter and the outrageous murder scenes get gorier.
The opening theme is phenomenal. The built-in hint system and ease of skipping walking animations when you just want to get around in a hurry are surprisingly player-friendly for an adventure game of this vintage, especially coming from Sierra. And yes, the campy parts are hysterical.
4. The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three: Malcolm’s Revenge
1994, Westwood, PC
Who could have guessed that the generic fantasy land of Kyrandia would eventually become home to one of the strangest, most inventive games in the adventure genre?
In the first Kyrandia, Malcolm was an evil jester who would cold murder a you just because. Book Three proposes that perhaps he was just misunderstood. The opening explains that he lost the angel on his shoulder, and he’s been left with only a devil to guide him.
The idea of playing an amoral villain is intriguing, but it’s only the start. You’re given a dial that determines whether Malcolm should approach any given interaction with outright malice or deceptive sweetness. The slightly flexible potion-brewing of Book Two has been tossed out and replaced with what might be the most open-ended puzzle structure I’ve ever seen in an adventure game. Almost every goal can be accomplished in multiple ways that are, incredibly enough, varied and interesting.
I don’t want to spoil too much about the story, but like I said, it’s weird. You end up in fish purgatory for a while. There’s a laugh track. This game is incredible.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot to hate about it, as well. I don’t know why this series is so in love with tedious mazes, but that’s back. A lot of the 1994 3D CG looks rotten, especially compared to the incredible bitmap graphics in the previous Kyrandias, and it can sometimes be hard to tell what you’re supposed to click as a result. I don’t think I could have reached the end without a guide.
It’s frustrating, and it’s worth it. It might not be as well known as other point-’n’-click adventures, but if you have any love for this genre, Malcolm’s Revenge is essential.
3. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
1995, Cyberdreams, PC
I first played this a few years ago and didn’t like it. I found it ugly, buggy, and poorly designed. More than that, I found the messages of the story supremely distasteful. Why, for example, was a rape victim facing the same punishment for her sin of having PTSD as a Dr. Mengele’s assistant was facing for being Dr. Mengele’s assistant?
Cut to now, and I still stand by most of that criticism. The biggest difference is that this time I went in knowing what to expect, and as a result, I was able to better understand its metaphor and worldview.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is challenging in ways that games are seldom challenging. It doesn’t provide answers. It doesn’t intend to make you feel good. It is a treatise on hatred. It asks what the difference is between the evil of malice and the evil of simply doing as you’re told without asking questions. It asks what good means, if it’s even attainable, in a vast machine of hatred.
Playing I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream isn’t pleasant. It’s more like picking a scab. There’s no winning. And yet, even once I’d closed the software and powered down my computer, no game spent more time in brain this year.
2. Myst
1993, Cyan, PC
Even if you aren’t familiar with anything else on this list, you’ve heard of Myst, so I won’t bother with any long description.
I’ve been tinkering with this game since 1993, and like most people, I thought it was impossible. I loved it, but there was no way I’d ever finish it without a lot of cheating.
But this year, I decided I would do it. Start to finish, no guide. And I did! And it was more rewarding than I ever imagined.
It turns out it’s not really that difficult, after all. You just need to take it slow and keep notes. Read everything. Write down everything. Enjoy one of the greatest worlds the medium has to offer.
And if you like Myst…
1. Obduction
2016, Cyan Worlds, PC
I’ve gone back and forth quite a bit in ranking these 32 games, but there was never any question which would be number one. Wandering Obduction’s surreal wastelands left me in near-constant awe.
The visuals are gorgeous and the puzzles are inspired, and blah, blah, blah, sure, but what makes it so extraordinary is the cohesion. It’s the expression of a singular vision through the environment, the interactions, the writing — every part of this world is like Chekov’s gun, playing on your curiosity and still, against all odds, managing to deliver a surprise.
Like Myst, I found the only way to make progress was with a pen, a notebook, and enough patience to fill a hospital. This is a contemplative experience, and rushing will get you nowhere.
Obduction is brilliant, beautiful, and not just the best adventure game I played this year, but one of the best games I have ever played in any genre.
Jake Spencer loves adventure. Nothing’s better to him. You can listen to him talk about the joy of sadness on Of Horse: A BoJack Horseman Fan Cast. He wishes he knew the way out of Twitter. His hobbies include pointing and clicking.