I’ve found myself increasingly interested in the adventure genre within video games.  Okay, that might sound like an odd thing to say, since I seem to be everyone’s go-to guy when it comes to writing about the genre.  I’ve always been into adventure games.  I’ve always loved them, when done right.  But what’s interesting me these days is how few are, and how utterly afraid the major players seem to be in deviating from the well-trodden path.

In recent years, there have been a few noble attempts to take the genre to new places.  Back in 2006, Pathologic fused adventuring with a first-person perspective, light RPG elements and some atrociously ropey combat.  Cosmetically it was an action game, but its heavy emphasis on discovery, narrative and dialogue meant it stayed firmly within its genre boundaries.  A couple of years ago, Penumbra excelled in delivering an environment-based puzzle game, again in first-person, and bringing it all together under a twisted survival horror blanket.  But again: totally an adventure game, in terms of the things that mattered.

Both of these games received resonable critical reception and developed a dedicated cult following.  But neither made any real impact.  Instead, we’re looking to Telltale and their work on, well, around eight billion new games a year.  They revamped Sam and Max, released some Strong Bad episodes, converted the loveable Wallace & Gromit into characters for a less-loveable videogame, and now are in the process of telling a whole new Monkey Island story.  And, y’know, they’re not bad.  In terms of developers creating traditional point-and-click adventure games, they’re pretty near to the top of the league.  So why does every single Telltale title, and a huge portion of similar releases, leave me feeling so oddly cold these days?

Frictional Games' Penumbra

Genre innovation is a tricky thing to do within games.  Whereas in other media you just need to play around with themes and be inventive with storytelling devices, interactive entertainment has – well – the interaction to worry about.  That’s always going to be key to the experience, and coming up with new ideas that actually work is the fiddly bit.  Yet other genres have managed fine.  Think about how far the first-person shooter has come in the last couple of decades.  From its origins with Wolfenstein 3D, it’s gone through a whole host of iterations, and we’re now seeing huge, sprawling epics, with multiple paths, unique storytelling techniques, fascinating physics manipulation and enormous atmospheric detail.  Compare Tales of Monkey Island with the games that begat the series, and the only things that are significantly different are the now-cumbersome control mechanics, and the addition of a third dimension.

Earlier this week, I spoke to Charles Cecil at Videogame Nation, the summer-long exhibit at Manchester’s Urbis gallery that I think has just about drawn to a close now.  Cecil is the founder of Revolution Software, who since the early 90s have developed a string of fabulous adventure games (and if you’re not familiar with his work but would like to be, GOG.com have his seminal Beneath a Steel Sky available as a legitimate, free download).  I asked him where he thought the genre would head from here – would it stay true to its roots, or would it divert away?

Revolution Software's Beneath a Steel Sky

He was in no uncertainty in his belief that first-person, direct-controlled adventure games are not the way to go – even though he described Penumbra as “very good”.  But he did point to the Professor Layton series as a fine example of a slightly different approach to the adventure genre.

In traditional adventure games, Cecil explained, the challenges for the player are embedded largely into the game’s environment.  So, to get past a locked door, you might need to find a keycode.  Speak to someone and you might discover the code is on the wall, hidden behind a painting.  Move the painting, and voila, you can access the next area of the game.

In the Professor Layton games, however, puzzles are treated as being separate from the main pull of the narrative, yet vaguely contextualised by the story.  Each character you meet in the game will demand to know the answer to a brain-teaser, and only once you’ve completed this puzzle are you rewarded with progress.  The result, Cecil offered, is that it’s easier to have a game that functions logically, and one in which you always know what you have to do.  Here’s this puzzle; it needs solving.  How you solve it is the tricky part, not working out what you’ve got to solve in the first place.  The locked door scenario, though the eventual goal is clear, strays a little more towards the latter.

It’s true that obtuse puzzles have plagued a great deal of adventure games over the ages, and the Layton series goes some way to fixing that.  It’s also heavily merging with the more basic puzzle game genre, and thus taking the adventure in new directions.  But I’m not sure I’m convinced that’s the only direction it needs to be taking.  I’m also not convinced first-person isn’t the way to go, but that’s another matter entirely.

Tale of Tales' The Path

What I am certainly interested in is a small trend that seems to be developing in indie circles, where the focus is taken away from puzzles entirely and placed firmly on environmental exploration.  These are ostensibly adventure games, but they’re entirely about discovery, and the puzzle is what takes place in your head while you’re playing.  What is this place?  Why am I here?  Who are these characters?  What does it all mean?  These are games like The Path and Dear Esther, and while both such releases are plagued by a number of problems (neither is particularly polished, and many players complained both were, at times, boring), they do ask some fascinating questions of a genre that is quickly stagnating.

Which it is – let’s make no bones about that.  Whether you enjoy sticking with the purist adventures is beside the point. I enjoy a great many myself.  But I constantly yearn for a developer to take a bit of a risk, to pour creativity into the game design as well as the narrative.  It might not pay off – not at first, anyway.  But if no one makes any moves, and the state of the genre remains as it is, many people are going to lose interest all together – and any radical movement at that point will be far too late to matter.

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