I maybe shouldn’t have mentioned Portal in the capsule for this post. Games like Portal don’t come around often. There’s also a fuzzy line between adventure games and puzzle games. Where would Superliminal fall? Human Fall Flat? Maniac Mansion? I’ve chosen to define an adventure game as one with a focus on a single character and tells a story.
Please Leave Me Alone, I Need To Poop (2024)
Boss makes a dollar and I make a dime, that’s why I poop on company time. If you could condense that into a video game, that would be PLMAIN2P.
The game is simple. Each playthrough — and those playthroughs are pretty short — you play a businessman in a crowded office who needs to poop. Desperately. Unfortunately for you, your boss is talking to you. You’re on an important phone call. You’re presenting at a meeting. Someone is already using the toilet and won’t leave. The toilets are broken. You’ll have to navigate everything between you and blessed relief or die trying.
Most of the scenarios have you completing funny minigames to clear them. It’s a quick game that you can play… on the toilet.
Sable (2021)
In this post-apocalyptic story, you play Sable, a young woman who is about to embark upon her Gliding, a coming of age ceremony where she visits tribes throughout the world, takes on its dangers, and discovers the history of her people and her world.
The game’s Moebius-inspired drawings drew me in, but the relaxing gameplay, medium difficulty puzzles and lore kept me playing. There’s always something fascinating just over the next horizon, you don’t kill things, and the story is told environmentally in an engaging way.
This game was controversial when released as the main character and most of the other characters are women, and they live in a matriarchal society. That is a stupid reason to not like a game.
Moss: Book II (VR; 2022)
The sequel to 2019’s “Moss” follows the first game’s protagonist, a mouse named Quill, as she embarks upon another adventure to save her homeland of Moss from a monster who is now hunting her. She isn’t alone in the adventure; she has you, the Reader.
Moss 2 is a game within a game; you are playing the Reader, a person who has come across a mystical library that contains a magical book, the book of Moss. As you open the book, the pages come to life below you, and this is where Quill lives. She can’t get through environments without your help. You can see behind doors and around corners and can move things around to let her through. When monsters come calling, you help her with the battling.
I can’t use VR that has a lot of movement in it. But a VR game where I am canonically sitting at a table, moving things around in front of me, and watching the story unfold — that I can play for quite awhile.
Colossal Cave (1975, 2023)
The very first computer adventure game I ever played was ADVENT on the university’s DEC-10 timesharing mainframe. ADVENT was short for Adventure, naming the entire genre and sparking an industry. It later came to be known as Colossal Cave Adventure to distinguish itself from its thousands of descendants, but this was the first.
Roberta Williams, the developer behind the King’s Quest and Quest for Glory adventure game series, acknowledged her debt to ADVENT; she grew rich off of adventure games, while as far as I know, the original developers never made money from their game. Williams collaborated with her husband, Ken Williams, to bring this mid-20th century game into the 21st, with 3D and VR. (VR is not necessary to play the game, and I played it without).
The game is a faithful recreation of the text adventure, and seeing it in 3D finally makes the confusing map make sense, but also makes it harder in ways. Worth playing if you’re a fan of the original, or want to play the game that started it all without having to type much.
Beyond Shadowgate (2024)
The adventure game I most enjoyed playing this year has to be Beyond Shadowgate, which is the sequel to the 1989 NES port of the original Shadowgate game from the 1987 Macintosh release. Not to be confused with the other game titled Beyond Shadowgate, this one was developed based on the original notes for the game by the original developers.
In Beyond Shadowgate, you play a halfling thief who has been thrown into a dungeon for no reason at all, unless you include stealing precious gems that were just laying around to be a reason to be thrown into a dungeon. You don’t believe so, but while escaping, you find the crown prince and his most loyal counselors locked up in the dungeon with you. It will take you many hours and take you through cameos from all the Macventure games to foil the plot and save the world.
IF you save it. There are four endings, and not in all of them do you save the world from darkness, and not in all of them are you alive at the end.
I thoroughly enjoyed this game, made a ton of videos about it, and bought the Gameboy Color port of the original game to play through that because I didn’t actually play this game back in the day. I swore I had it on my Mac, but I was wrong.
Next up: Role Playing Games. We’re getting to the big categories now.
