Is Adventure dead? God I hope not!
Now this is a question that has been troubling me for many years. As a big fan of games like Syberia, The Longest Journey, Sanitarium, Still Life and many other great adventure games, I’ve tried to deny that the genre may really be dead and buried. But, in recent years, reality and all the people around me are trying hard to tell me otherwise and I’ve reached a point where I truly don’t know what to think anymore.
It’s true that Adventure isn’t where it was in the late 80’s and 90’s, when it really was the hottest genre and everybody was playing it. And most of you will say that’s only normal, things change, social values change, technology evolves and it’s only natural to move on to bigger and better things (these being all types of mindless shooters), but I call it involution. See the way I see it, technology has evolved so much and so fast that it changed our Society in a bad way, people don’t have the patience to work hard for something and receive a well earned reward anymore. We’ve grown accustomed to getting anything with an unnatural ease and choosing to just move around and shoot people to finish a level rather than twisting our brain to solve a challenging puzzle is a reflection of this “anomaly”.
And then there’s the marketing aspect of the gaming industry… apparently adventure doesn’t sell. Let me ask you this: how many of you know that The Adventure Company has been publishing quite a number of adventure video games in recent years? Of course most of them are crappy but still, you didn’t even know they exist That’s because unless you access the company’s official site there’s practically no other way to learn about them. Sure the big gaming sites like Gamespot and IGN have them in their data bases but you won’t see any commercials anywhere. On the other hand, you couldn’t remain clueless about Halo 3 if your life depended on it.
If to this point you are convinced the Adventure genre is dead…I’m going to try to show you the other side of the coin. After Syberia 2, I too really thought we’ve seen the end of an era…but then something called Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in the US) appeared, a game so innovative, so engaging, so refreshing that it made me forget about everything for two days…the only thing I hated about it was the fact it ended too quickly. Quantic Dream really hit a homerun with this one. And then along came Dreamfall…oau what a great adventure game people, great storyline, interesting characters and incredible voice acting made it one of the best titles I’ve ever played, and I’ve played a few. Now what these games have in common is that you don’t have to be an adventure fan to enjoy them. They’re just fun…like watching a movie in which you get to play the main part and I know you’ve all wanted to do this at least once in your life. No hard puzzles to make you punch a whole through the monitor, great graphics to rival anything other more popular games could sport…in a word FUN.
That’s what the future of Adventure should be actually, and I really hope developers like Quantic Dream, Funcom, Microids and others understand that the “hard-core” Adventure games are really dead…no one wants to play games based on best-selling crime novels written by Agatha Christie that offer no fun, just puzzles after puzzles that try to stop you from finishing the game and finding out who killed some unimportant person you don’t want to know a thing about anyway. Now by trying to combine the beautiful aspects of the genre, like the rich storyline, believable characters, interaction and accessible puzzles, with great graphics, RPG elements, like improving the characters stats to help him get through his adventure more easily… and who knows maybe they’ll even implement shooting if that’s what will keep gamers happy.
So the bottom line is…ahhh who really knows, I’m subjective on the matter, I really like Adventure, but those of you who don’t will only say it’s dead just because you hate it…so like pretty much everything in life, this matter is relative. I for one hope Adventure is still alive and kicking and to convince myself of it I’m waiting for Quantic Dream’s next project, Heavy Rain, God I hope it doesn’t let me down, I need another Fahrenheit!
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Great article, but please add some links, so we can easily find these games that you mention.
Comment by Tom | October 22, 2007
I guess like everything, it’s relative. Keep up the good work. - Eric Monse
Comment by Eric Monse | October 22, 2007
@ Tom
I added some links if you still want to check out some great games
Comment by admin | October 22, 2007
Sanitarium is one of my favorite games, Grim Fandango and the Monkey Island series are also awesome.
I love Adventure games ^_^
Comment by ThatGirl | October 24, 2007