I'm just wondering, what's everyone's preferred platform to play adventure games on?
With platform I mean PC (with keyboard and mouse) or console (with controller) or any other combination 

I prefer console because then I can sit back and relax on my couch.
For example I played the Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle remasters on PlayStation.

Now that we have finished the Blackwell Legacy CPT, and I don't think the next one is coming out this month, I would like to hold a vote on what we should play next.

I think hard games would be great, especially. People would try to finish the game by sharing ideas and helping each other out rather than looking for a walkthrough online. It would be a combined community effort to beat the game.
This would allow newcomers to try more challenging games without getting frustrated or having to rely on walkthroughs for the entire game.

I can lead the IMAGinE, which is a free game that you can download or play in your browser. It's a good game, but not especially well known. highlighting it wouldn't hurt. It's a hard (but fair) game.
But it doesn't have much of a story. You are trapped in a series of paintings and need to manipulate and interact with them to escape. So it would be difficult to create a CPT in the style of what MenhirMike made with Blackwell Legacy without it purely being a walkthrough.

The CPT experience would be us talking about the art of the paintings and giving hints to people who are stuck.

Would you be interested in this? Or do you have another specific game in mind?

Would it be possible to add a sub-item called “Reviews” to “Adventure Games” in order to collect them?

Pendulo Studios closed several months ago: Management concealed the situation after the last round of layoffs in March
There has been no activity and no employees for six months, a tragic way to end a 30-year history of developing video games
...
Pendulo Studios tarnished in its last years a trajectory of successes and quality titles, including the three titles of the Runaway series, the acclaimed graphic adventure Hollywood Monsters, Blacksad: Under the skin, Alfred Hitchcock Vertigo, and the most recent, Tintin Reporter - Cigars of the Pharaoh, which did not reach sales or quality targets.  https://www.gamereactor.eu/pendulo-studi...h-1613073/

As far as I’m aware, this has never been documented online before. I’ve thoroughly checked the websites that usually write about these kinds of things, including the Nancy Drew Fandom Wiki, The Cutting Room Floor Wiki, etc. Astoundingly none of them had it listed.

Nancy Drew: Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Arguably the best all-rounder of the mystery adventure games produced by Her Interactive. It is definitely the perfect introduction to the series for anyone unfamiliar with the triggering words “It’s locked!”

I played it when the game was a new release title. The alluring cover art finalised by Tim Jacobus of Goosebumps fame gave it an air of mystery too hard to resist. I would have bought it anyway though, having got my first taste of Nancy Drew games via a Scholastic magazine purchase in 2002.

Diving into the game itself, it featured pleasing 3D graphics for the mid 2000s, educational elements about gemstones, a balance of suspects to keep things interesting and a fitting soundtrack by Kevin Manthei. All these positive traits the game contains are only offset by puzzles that ultimately feel shoehorned rather than diegetic.

Comic relief from characters such as Joe Hardy and Fatima get peppered in at only appropriate moments in order to prevent diverting attention from the main plotline about Cheeseburgers long-lost gold.

Speaking of long-lost things, wasn’t I meant to be revealing a 20 year old Easter egg? Lucky I’m not a train driver, or we would have missed our stop by now. Let’s get things back on track, shall we?

I used to frequent the forums of both Her Interactive and Nancy Drew Mania from 2008 to 2009 under a different username handle. I eventually got tired of posting on those sites, and so I decided to quit. Funny thing about that actually... I discovered the Easter egg in 2010. Awkward timing, amirite?!

I was searching through the Bink video files of the game. 1,148 files to be exact, but who’s counting? Don’t worry, I didn’t go through all of them, just the most promising ones for finding secrets.

A lot of these files are literally “blink and you miss it”. This is because they are single-frame videos. I resolved this issue by looping the frame.

You’ve been very patient so far, kind adventurer, let me reward you with an Easter egg for enduring my Trademark Verbosity.

* takes ancient easter egg out of pocket and forces it on you *

It’s Dave Gregory from The Secret of Shadow Ranch with a speech bubble saying “ move along lil’ cowpoke... “

‘Poking’ around those files 15 years ago was well worth it. I’ve attached a screenshot for your convenience. “ CAB_H_Opn “ is the original filename, which matches up with being the internal doorway of the caboose.

So what do you think, folks? Pretty cool, huh?

Right now, the main site has a comment feature, which now feels superfluous. It has the advantage that it doesn't require signup, but I wonder if it makes sense to eventually have a "AGH News" Subforum that serves as the comment section for each news article/review/etc.?

(No idea how much development effort that would take though, since combining two separate systems is always a challenge)

Hey everyone! I'm busy making a first-person, point & click, puzzle adventure game inspired by classics in the genre, such as the Myst and Nancy Drew games series! 

Just yesterday I realised that the amazing, dungeon synth-inspired soundtrack for The Longing (2020) is finally available for streaming, and while listenening to it again, it got me thinking about how absolutely unique and intriguing the game itself is.

On the surface level, it's a very basic point and click adventure: You control Shade, a dark little figure who lives deep underground in seemlingly endless grottos and catacombs together with the mountain king, who is asleep. Your task is to watch over the king and wake him up in 400 days. You can choose to either honor his request and wait patiently, or try to explore the caves and find out what lies above... Freedom? Death? Or nothing at all? Sound easy enough - but here's the catch: everything in the game is in real time, even when you close the game. So if you want to wake the king up, you have to wait for 400 actual days - or find a way to make time go faster. 



There are elements of both puzzling and exploring in The Longing, but since the real time element is such a big part of the game's core gameplay mechanic, a lot of puzzles can't be solved and a lot of paths can't be explored unless you have a good amount of patience. You might be able to break a rock to pass through a tunnel, but it'll take several real time hours of hacking away with your pickaxe. You might be able to jump down a chasm, but not until a big enough fungus has grown at the bottom. A lot of the time, patience is the puzzle and the solution.

The game rewards taking your time, while at the same time encouraging you to find little things to pass the time: there's different actual full length books all over the caverns that you can read(this will actually speed up time in-game), as well as other trinkets and things that you can use to decorate your home and make the waiting process a bit nicer for Shade. This being said, you don't actually need to do anything to "beat" the game, time will pass regardless of what you do, and you can essentially just start the game and wait for the king to wake up. Whether or not you want to explore or not is ultimately up to you. 



The Longing is not a game for everyone. It's philosophical and experimental in a way that might deter most people: we're so used to being able to speed run things, click to skip dialogue and cutscenes, etc, that the hypnotically slow tempo of The Longing almost feels like a standstill. Here, even the walk speed is at an unsusually leisurely pace, with the clapping of Shades foot soles against the hard rock floors serving as a constant reminder of the slow, relentless marching of time. 

It's a melancholy game too, not just because of the eerie dungeon synth music and empty hallways, but because of how endearing our little protagonist is. Shade is seemingly content with whatever fate befalls him, and would gladly stay down in the caves forever unless we as the player force him to strive upwards and find something new - and yet it's impossible to deny his simmering loneliness as he muses to himself about how he'd love to have someone to talk to sometimes. (It's one of lifes big ironies that the game was released in 2020, during the beginning of the covid pandemic and the lock-downs, making this a particularly relatable game to all of the people isolated in their homes, longing for the world outside, much like Shade)



I personally haven't even managed to finish the game yet. I played it quite far, exploring almost everything, forgot about it, and then picked it up again only to realise that the 400 days had passed in-game, and that I had lost the opportunity to solve certain timed puzzles and get to the surface(luckily, there are ways to rewind time in-game). 

I'm still thinking I will return to it some day to try and finish it for real, but even if I don't, the overall impact of this game has been immense for me. Its sense of scale and atmosphere as you explore the winding tunnels and desolate caves combined with the deliberately slow gameplay makes this one of the most moving and rewarding gaming experiences I've had. I can totally understand that the slow tempo is a dealbreaker for most sane people, but something about this kind of deconstruction of the point and click adventure genre just delighted me and still occupies my mind from time to time.

Sorry for the wall of text, I was just reimmersed into the world of this game and would love to hear if anyone else played it, either when it came out or recently, and what your thoughts are about it? It's truly a one of a kind game, whichever way you look at it.

It wasn't my kind of game.

The plot was weak, barely existent between a strong beginning and a very touching ending. There's hardly any plot anyway; you just run through the forest and solve puzzles. Storylines are not brought to a conclusion, so you don't find out what the vultures are all about, and I would have liked to roam through the healed forest again. Apart from Little Mushroom and, to a lesser extent, the guardians, there are no characters with whom you interact much.

This feeling is reinforced by the lack of voice acting; Tove doesn't utter more than a few sounds.

The puzzles range from very easy to quite difficult. I've never needed a walkthrough to find a way to continue playing. It's also illogical that the father and Tove work towards each other without knowing about each other.

 The graphics were too simple for me; the next level down is pixels.

Herdling is a brand new adventure from Okomotive, the developers of the atmospheric and acclaimed FAR games, and Panic, the publisher of Firewatch.

Embark on a grand mountain expedition with a herd of lovable animals, climbing a high-altitude trail, encountering eerie dangers and surprising obstacles, and making your way to the mystery at the summit. Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/3047750/Herdling/

My heart is heavy, as I had to leave my beloved Calicorns behind. I rescued each and every one of them from a difficult situation, only to find that despite the “can't die” mode, I lost at least one. WhiteBeauty, Belle, Grimmbart, LittleOne, Flauschi, Panic, Eule, Beauty, and many others made it and are now back in their homeland.

Many complain that there is no backstory to the rescue and the boy – and they are right. But that's not the point. The point is the dangerous journey, which becomes really stressful towards the end with the icy winds and collapsing ground.

Take care, my friends – we'll see each other again.