Has anyone else noticed that space missions in adventure games ALWAYS go wrong?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially with Artemis II literally flying around the Moon right now. In real life we're finally going back after 54 years... but in point & click adventures, every single mission ends in disaster. The Dig, Mission Critical, Observation, Tacoma, Event[0], Analogue: A Hate Story — nobody comes home safe.

I ended up going down a rabbit hole connecting this pattern to Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Ridley Scott, and even Joseph Conrad, and it turned into a full video essay exploring why games have spent 30 years rehearsing space disasters while humanity couldn't even get back to the Moon.

The video is in Spanish but has subtitles in English, French, Portuguese and more.

Would love to hear what this community thinks — especially if there are space-themed adventure games I missed.

Interesting thought!
Maybe because it's something to do how we, humans, behave and function?
I am developing currently a space adventure game. I've released already The Silent Sky Part-I, which is a humble prologue to the series and doesn't explore the space yet, but the second part will get a fair chunk of it, thats for sure. I am a very big sci-fi and space enthusiast and appreciate you bringing up these topics.
Indeed this specific topic has been rehearsed since the sci-fi was invented, but disasters and catastrophes have always sent human species along, and I guess we like to put our attention to it. The bigger the bang, the longer we look. Other way to say it, we seek problems, and then solve them. And space is a dangerous place, as far as we know it - really doesn't hold any form of life, unless one is protected beyond measures. Any small detail that you miss or don't consider not just can but will cost you your life and extra, with any mercy. But as awful as it may sound, problems and mistakes move us forward.
And to be fair, if nothing goes wrong, and you don't get any sense of fear during the mission, then where is the adventure, really?

It's like I said to my wife when she was watching one of her favorite TV shows...

"You know something about the plots of Star Trek episodes? It's ALWAYS SOMETHING."

How about Rama? That was a space mission game where nothing went wrong (as far as I can remember...)

It's like I said to my wife when she was watching one of her favorite TV shows...

"You know something about the plots of Star Trek episodes? It's ALWAYS SOMETHING."

Interestingly, the (original) Star Trek games are maybe the closest to where you can complete a mission without incident. Things can go "wrong" of course (or not), but that's always within the expectations of a Trek mission. Nothing necessarily needs to go wrong. I feel this is one reason why these games are so highly regarded.

So many thoughts here -- about the ORIGINAL original Star Trek adventure games (The Promethean Prophecy and The Kobyashi Alternative), and the ORIGINAL ORIGINAL original Star Trek game (the one that started life on mainframes in the early 70s)...

But mostly thinking that almost ALL adventure games are about calamity. Yes, the scale of the calamity could range from galactic or universal to personal and private, but trying to overcome adversity is the essence of drama. Detective games are almost always about murders, which are calamitous to the individuals involved. Fantasy games are almost always about some big, powerful source of evil, calamitous to whole populations. Outer space missions, from our standpoint, tend to be uniquely hazardous, expensive, and important, so of course the conflicts are going to tend to 'scale up' as well.

Not that you couldn't make an outer space adventure where the only conflicts are minor inconveniences, kind of like some episodes of ST: TNG, but it's very difficult to turn that into a compelling story. Hard to care how "it all turns out" if nothing much unexpected ever happens.

Well said! I agree to that

So many thoughts here -- about the ORIGINAL original Star Trek adventure games (The Promethean Prophecy and The Kobyashi Alternative), and the ORIGINAL ORIGINAL original Star Trek game (the one that started life on mainframes in the early 70s)...

But mostly thinking that almost ALL adventure games are about calamity. Yes, the scale of the calamity could range from galactic or universal to personal and private, but trying to overcome adversity is the essence of drama. Detective games are almost always about murders, which are calamitous to the individuals involved. Fantasy games are almost always about some big, powerful source of evil, calamitous to whole populations. Outer space missions, from our standpoint, tend to be uniquely hazardous, expensive, and important, so of course the conflicts are going to tend to 'scale up' as well.

Not that you couldn't make an outer space adventure where the only conflicts are minor inconveniences, kind of like some episodes of ST: TNG, but it's very difficult to turn that into a compelling story. Hard to care how "it all turns out" if nothing much unexpected ever happens.

Yes, they've got to make those "minor inconveniences" affect you later on in a meaningful way. Which isn't hard if what you say can change the direction of the plot dramatically. This depends, of course, on the game not being linear and there being more narrative paths than just A) plot progression or B) endgame.

I haven't played The Promethean Prophecy or the Kobayashi Alternative to know if that's the case. The games I was thinking of (25th Anniversary and Judgement Rites) have branching paths and what you do early on influences how each mission progresses. They're very unique games in that respect and they're far from perfect. But they show what can be done in adventure games with more of a CYOA (with puzzles) style. This doesn't rule out unexpected events and scenarios, they just have to be incorporated into each path. So it's more of a RPG design philosophy. And yes, it's very difficult to make such a game. Most developers won't be bothered because it's a lot of effort and very few gamers will see most of the paths. And the tendency of gamers to use savegames as a workaround when they make wrong decisions hasn't helped either.

But in 99.999% of AGs, you're right - there's no reason to care.