For as long as I can remember I’ve been playing point + click adventure games. I used to play them with my brothers when we were younger and pre-internet days so that when we got stuck we got really stuck. I remember thinking of possible things we could try during the school day and being impatient to get home to try them out in the evening, only to get frustrated again when my ideas didn’t work. Someone said somewhere that point & click games were for people who liked reading and I like that description.
We played a lot of the Sierra ones (clearly my parents had no idea of the content of the Leisure Suit Larry games), and over time got into the more sophisticated and slightly more forgiving LucasArts ones like Monkey Island (Police Quest was so ridiculously difficult, you’d get “killed” for not following a specific American police procedure that you had no way of knowing about).
It’s a dense volume with interviews and a nostalgia overload that goes into depth about the background of these games and has sent me down a nostalgia path.
I still play them now, and actually find some of the more recent ones have genuinely great plotlines and some very creative puzzles. Every one I’ve played from Wadjet Eye Games so far has been amazing (including The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow which was a great recommendation from @manches) and I’m currently playing Whispers Of A Machine after really enjoying Kathy Rain and quite enjoying its recent sequel.
The advancement of open world games kinda killed point & click with so much more potential for storytelling, but there’s something so fantastic about the tight plotlines of these games, and the relaxed, cosy idea of just doing them at your own pace that I still really enjoy.
I know these are sometimes mentioned in other threads, but for purely selfish purposes I wanted to make a thread dedicated just to them. Whether it’s nostalgia for old ones, or talking about new ones, or just shitposting, there’s now a thread for it.
Me and my sibling learned how to read more confidently partly because of the floppy disk version of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantic, which didn’t have voices. If I remember right, basically my dad would play them and we’d sit cross legged on the floor making suggestions as to what he should do early on
Outside of the usual Lucas Arts games, my favourite was Beneath A Steel Sky. I played it through twice: once on the Amiga, and then many years later on the PC with the British regional accents doing all the voices. Hearing strong Midlands accents in a cyber punk future worked well.
I’ve not played too many of them since, but I think the Room puzzle games on mobile probably count, as does Cara Ellison’s excellent ‘Sacrilege’
That is so wholesome. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was an all-timer. I remember the reviews for that were so mind-blowingly positive at the time. It was one of those ones which I was obsessed with for a while.
Not a point and click but a free text based game. I never got past the first screen because I kept trying “drop pumkin” and it didn’t understand I meant pumpkin. Had a moment of realisation a couple of years later by which time the old 486 had long gone
I had an advert for that book in Instagram a few weeks before my holiday so was going to order it when I got back. You’ve now reminded me about it and I have just ordered it now.
I absolutely love a good point and click game. I grew up playing the Monkey Island games which still hold up today. Loved a bit of Loom. Also the Discworld Point & Click games were great:
I’ve been getting into Wadjet Eye’s stuff recently. Their latest one, Old Skies, is well worth your time:
I also picked up a copy of Lucy Dreaming (the first game by a studio called Tall Story Games) last week, but not had much of a chance to get stuck into it yet:
I wish these games were more easily available. A lot of the drawn backgrounds in Discworld II are pretty much soldered onto the contours of my brain, and Discworld Noir is such an underrated game esp where the mechanics of this genre are concerned
