Are Adventure Games Finally Dead? - Part 1

I know we have been asking that same question for the past twenty years or so and the answer has always been a loud 'NO'. But, I'm not so sure nowadays. As an avid adventure gamer I find almost nothing to play or be excited about these days. Everything has been watered down for the casual and console crowd or simply stretched to fit the label. Honestly I'm starting to believe that adventure games are not made any more. Not by real software companies at least. I know many of you will disagree with my assertion but it all depends on what 'you' define as an adventure game and what are your standards for an adventure game 'release'.

Are those the graphics we want in 2020?

Now, by the term 'release' I mean a finished product that matches today's criteria for a game production. Or to make this more clear I mean a game that is an actual 'product' and not the result of a guy spending one hour with an existing engine and putting his 'game' on Steam for fun and kicks (and the occasional buck). Because that's what the scene has stooped down nowadays. We either have AAA games, which you have to stretch the definition to its limits to include in the adventure genre, or we have completely amateurish productions that no one ever will care about. Not even YouTubers who are desperate for unique content would go near them and that's saying something.

Man Of Medan. Nice to watch, but is it even a game?

That's exactly the problem today. There are no big, or even decent to average, companies making adventure games any more with production values that match today's standards. Companies would claim that there is no audience, no scene, any more to support those games, but that is a vicious circle. There are no adventure game enthusiasts exactly because there are no adventure games, NOT the opposite. I happened to check the list of the 'adventure games' released in 2019 posted on the website AdventureGamers as part of their annual Aggie Awards. They list 180 adventure games released in 2019! Yes, 180 in 2019! That's completely crazy and obviously false! And that's what has prompted this article because the actual adventure games released in 2019 are less than 10! Let me be clear because I may have different standards than you. In order to consider a game as a proper adventure game release it must fulfill three criteria. 

Yu-No is an amazing visual novel, but it is not an adventure game.

 First, their core gameplay must be the gameplay of an adventure game and must abide by the mechanics and rules as those have been established in the last 40 years or so. Having a slider puzzle after 2 hours walking around and 'exploring' doesn't make a game an adventure. Second, it must have decent graphics. I am not talking about AAA graphics but it has to at least have graphics similar to games made in the last decade or so. So all those retro and pixel-art game are by definition out. No kid today will play a pixel-art adventure game after the latest AAA game and say 'I love this. I want to play more like that.' Having pixel art just turns away all new gamers and therefore they  are aimed at 40+ guys which lived this era and now are filled with nostalgia but that is a crowd that is declining rapidly due to real life.  Third it must have a decent duration. The limit for me is 4 hours. Anything below 4 hours I consider it a demo and not a proper release. I know many will disagree with that rule but if you think about it, you have also your own rule. Would you consider an one hour game as a proper release? A half-hour game? How about a game that lasts 2 minutes, has one screen with one hot-spot and one inventory item? So you seen you do draw the line somewhere yourself. It's just probably at a different limit. I'll get back to that later. So with that criteria the above-mentioned list shrinks a lot, it almost disappears. Instead of a great year with 180 releases we end up with a miserable year with less than 10 releases. 

Trüberbrook is just so easy and finishes right when it starts to get interesting.

Now it is time to explain why I am so focused on duration and how it directly affects the overall quality of an adventure game and whether it is a real and proper adventure game or not. The gameplay of an adventure game is based on two pillars, obstacles and rewards. First the game sets you in front on an obstacle, then the player uses the environment, the items and the characters around him to overcome this obstacle, then the game rewards him and sets in front of him the next obstacle and so on. What I call obstacles are what most people call puzzles. Now, the rewards have changed over the decades but there are still an integral part of the adventure game experience. Once upon a time when adventure games used to have text parsers a reward could be a verbose and funny reply on a weird action you performed. Later it was replaced by a narrator that made quirky comments on everything you tried even if it didn't advance the plot. Sometimes you gained score, sometimes an extra animation or a cut-scene was played. The important thing is that the game had a lot to offer besides the main plot and it had various ways to reward your experimentation and involvement with the game. We used to say that if you played the game using a walkthrough you missed more than half the game. 

Even the unfinished Warcraft Adventures had more animation than all 2019 adventures put together!

The modern games have forgotten that and worse removed from their gameplay the rewards system therefore making them very short. Now there is only one correct next move and everything else usually does nothing. There is no reward for trying. The developers also usually give away what your next move should be in order to avoid 'unnecessary' experimentation so that you won't feel how empty their game is. That's why I don't consider as adventure games the ones with very small duration. Because half of the game is missing. They don't have any rewards. It's not so much about immersion, although it is very important. It is about the missing rewards on every move you make. An adventure game that doesn't regularly give you rewards is simply an incomplete product. I know nowadays games have those trophies and achievements and that is some kind of reward but most of the time are not part of the game experience but something outside that forces you either to replay the game or try on purpose to do something weird or wrong on a specific time in order to unlock it. Rewards should be rewarding the involvement you have with the game and not be 'outside' of it. By telling you need to investigate this desk 20 times in order to unlock this achievement the game forces you to try doing the same pointless move again and again instead of letting you enjoy the game. It doesn't promote involvement. Especially if you know what you need to do in advance. But achievements and trophies in today's gaming scene is a topic for another time. 

To be continued...