anyone ever studied it or contributed to the study of it?

there was a large series of really cool posts by Choice of Games on their blog years and years ago, and it was the thing that almost got me into making video games.  i did some digging and found one i remember reading: "How We Plan a ChoiceScript Game"

the thing that really stuck with me is the post they made about designing choice charts: figure out where the BIG NARRATIVE CHOICES really are, and build your chapter design around getting to each major choice.  from there you can build intermediary choices that can create branches later- just keep track of how your paths part and rejoin and you can create meaningful impact based on historic choices in games.

i ended up applying a lot of this to my D&D games, and naturally it always went really well - the biggest effect it had was on my multi-year Kingmaker Pathfinder 1e game.

I figured this could be an interesting thread to get started. Let’s reminisce together about our initial experiences with the adventure game genre.

So there I am, a young child basking in the otherworldly glow of a green monochrome monitor. An Apple IIe from 1983 specifically. The imagery conjured on the screen is the 1985 release of King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne.

The freedom this game offered my still-developing mind was twofold: First, the open-ended exploration of the various map screens. Second, playing around with the robust text parser. Only the abruptness of the built-in speaker snapped me back to reality... Thanks a lot Hagatha.

It may come as a surprise to you what year this actually was. While most of my peers would have been playing contemporary games, I was making my first foray into the swashbuckler’s favourite genre in the year 1997!

There’s something special about playing a game which was intended for a previous generation that I could have easily missed out on. It evokes a broader appreciation for game design in general I reckon.

Two years later I still hadn’t won the game yet. Coming back home from a long day at school, I was predictably back in front of the computer screen. The spelling test they gave us during the morning lessons featured various new words, in particular the word TAN stood out to me. I typed in the instruction: ‘graham tan’ – it resulted in the following:

“King Graham is not dressed for tanning.”

Naturally I was elated that they programmed in such a response. I like to imagine in my headcanon that Graham’s complexion improved that day on the beach of Kolyma. It certainly didn’t help with winning the game though.

Fast-forward to the year 2021, I finally completed the game as a team effort with a younger sibling, in conjunction with a walkthrough for the more difficult sections. It was rewarding seeing the ending to King’s Quest II with a family member.

However, it’s worth noting that the journey was just as satisfying, as it taught me during my formative years the importance of tenacity and creativity when playing specific video games that require those skills.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to share your nostalgic memories of the games that sparked your passion for adventuring.

Welcome everyone! This is a head-to-head tournament to crown the greatest Sierra box art of all time.
I’ve set up a 32-cover knockout bracket (see below). Each match-up will run for 3 days of open voting. 

The rules are simple:

1. Vote based only on the box art, not the game itself.
   
2. Pick your favorite in each match-up.
   

At the end, we’ll crown the ultimate Sierra cover champion. 

---

A note on the selection
Putting this bracket together was not easy. Many Sierra covers are iconic, and narrowing them down to 32 meant some had to be left out. (Police Quest 4 was actually the easiest to cut, lol). But leaving out things like Castle of Dr. Brain or Leisure Suit Larry 6 was tough, I tried my best to balance the most worthy and striking artworks.

So, without further ado… here’s the full tournament draw:

Hey y'all, my name is Larissa! I'm a cartoonist turned game dev, and I am super excited to be part of this community. I am new to game development, but I've been drawing for most of my life, and working as a UX Designer since 2020, so I decided to make an adventure game featuring cute animals. It's called Mole's Best Friend. 

Mole’s Best Friend is a cozy point and click adventure game about a routine-abiding mole named Topo and his best friend Scrunch, a rebellious young beetle who live together on the planet Little Pebble. One day, the pair have an explosive argument and Scrunch goes missing. It is up to Topo to face his fears, track Scrunch down, and save the planet in the process. 

Here are some screenshots of my WIP vertical slice, and while these are stills, I am working on a lot of animation at the moment:







I grew up in Southeast Texas so I am heavily influenced by the flora and fauna of that part of the world. But there will also be fantasy creatures and magic involved in Mole's Best Friend! 

I am solo developing this but hoping to release sometime in 2026! I post devlogs and do all the social medias but I'm still trying to figure out a marketing plan, determine if I wanna do a kickstarter, understand budget for wonderful things like voice acting and music... lots to wrap my head around. 

Would love any feedback and happy to field any questions, even though a lot is up in the air right now. 

I'm a middle age adventure game lover. Grew up playing adventure games on an brand new 286.
80's and 90's were some of the best times of my life. Loved adventure games.

I was there at the beginning of Troel's Space Quest faq, fell in love with Ron Gilbert when Monkey Island 1 was released, the rise and fall of Sierra, dreading Space Quest 7 3D, usenet, newsgroups and IRC. From 14.4k to break neck speeds of 56k. Waiting for PC Gamer to show up each month. Wanting to be Tex Murphy. Grim Fandango - IMO the peak of adventure game story telling. 3DFX. Man the 90's were a wild time. 

I stopped playing games for probably 10 plus years. I would revisit the classics every couple year but never kept up after the decline.

Here is my ask.... please let me know what the best adventure games I should purchase from the last 10 years. I'm a point and click whore but open to anything. I've been on a Steam/GOG buying spree but let me know friends... what is the best of the best in the Adventure Game realm. The one's the everyone should have in their virtual libraries. 

Please... Make me feel young again.

note: please don't say Broken Sword for the love God. Sorry Joshua, love you dude but I just couldn't get into them. 

One last word. Thank you. Thank you too all the dev's, the programmers, artists, musicians, writers, voice actors, journalists that brought your idea and passion to life to share with us. The game companies; LucasArts, Sierra and all the greats that were lost from the many acquisitions and take overs. The one's that are in our hearts forever. Thanks to the podcasters that bring this world back to life. Thanks to my hero's like Troels, Jess Morrisette, Anna, Paul, Joshua, Jack, all the adventure game website designers on GeoCities, Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, Aaron Conners, Chris Jones and all the countless other individuals that make this community absolutely amazing. And a special thank you to Roberta Vaughan for the being the glue and sharing your love with some many. 

-sneaky

When I am coming to the forum, I have an issues to find a new posts, which I didnt read until now. On mainpage I can recognize by white/grey dot, if there is something new. If I am in thread list, I can see by icon if there are new posts or not. But thats all. It should be good to have easily visible read/unread messages and also have a direct link which will move you to the oldest unread message in that particular thread.

Or this function is somewhere there and I only didnt found it?

Alum: 6.5/10. Difficulty level: 6/10.

 ~8h gospel about good vs. evil.

First things first, it's a game from the team that made Wildwood Down, a game in my top 3 best p'n'c games of 2025. Honestly, I didn't know it was from the same developers until I finished the game. What a surprise.

Second, this game has a 67% rating on Steam, which is pretty bad for Steam and especially bad for p'n'c games, which are pretty beloved by those who play them. To be sure, I looked through ~200 games that came out in the last three years (yes, really), and only 10 of them had a mixed rating.

So why is that? From the negative reviews, it seems that people don't like that this game has a religious theme. It's not a secret; it says so on the Steam page. But people still didn't like it.
As for me (I'm not a religious nut nor a raging atheist)  I found it kinda refreshing. We have an OCEAN of murder mysteries and eldritch horrors, but games heavy on theism? Yeah, they're pretty rare.
That said, while I won't call this game preachy, it's not exactly subtle either. Some of the exposition was delivered pretty heavy-handedly, and some of the ideas were, well, silly. My favorite was magic blue Kool-Aid, which makes you speak with God after drinking it, and God tells you not to be sad about your recently dead love once, because you will die soon and meet them again. 

But how is the game?
Similar to Wildwood Down, the puzzles can be clever, tricky, and challenging. Unfortunately, the game suffers from a "few screens at a time" chapter structure. This means that at any given time, you are confined to a very limited space, and no matter how challenging the puzzles may be, they can still be beaten by brute forcing your way through them. I'm glad they changed it in Wildwood Down, and I hope they will keep it that way in the future.

Characters can range from "I believe in Jesus" to "Kidnapping kids is fun because I'm evil." There are more nuanced ones, but you will quickly realize where everyone falls on the good-evil spectrum. 

The visuals are nice, and the music is good. The voice acting is... well... wooden.  With a small cast of voice actors, everyone sounds the same. There's even a child character with a dude-bro voice in his mid-20s. It was hilarious.


Anyway, pretty fun game, play it if you not gonna melt because there is notJesus in the game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/338420/Alum/

As far as I can tell, there isn't a spoiler tag available to add via the toolbar/BBCode: This would be useful given how plot and puzzle driven most adventure games are?

One of the main things I enjoy collecting are classic strategy guides, especially ones for 1990s PC games. I find them fascinating and almost always fun reads. They would often get really creative with their presentation, doing things like turning games into novelisations and including a bunch of behind the scenes info. I would take these any day over an internet walkthrough.

As we got towards the 2000s, the format changed to be larger full-colour guides and some of them are works of art.

I particular enjoy Prima's 'Secrets of the Games' series. But in the 1990s, before Prima and BradyGames really took over, it was fairly common for companies to produce their own guides with big ones coming from Sierra and Origin.

Anybody else collect game books?

Would it be worth having a sub-forum dedicated to adventure game devs? A place where people can both show off what they're working on as well as ask for help and guidance in getting started with it?