Great topic
@Princess Niki
I really like point and click adventure games. Both the Classic and modern ones. I do also like some of the games that used the SCUMM engine.
The first point and click game I ever played was
Shadowgate on the NES. One of the better NES games of this genre. I really liked it though it was on the short side and a little hard.
After that I played
Maniac Mansion. The game that SCUMM is named after. I remember always throwing Dave in the dungeon. He had no special skills but his music was the best. Tons of replay value if you want to beat the game with lots of different character combinations.
Then shortly after this I discovered two games in this genre that totally hooked me and are the reason I love this genre of games.
Secret of Monkey Island 2 - LeChunk’s Revenge.
I played this before the first game in the series. Since then I have played all 5 games in the series and can easily say this second game is my favourite. It is certainly the black sheep of the series. Quite different in tone and Guybrush appearance to the other four games. I highly recommend this game to all fans of the genre.
I play the VGA port with full midi soundtrack. This is also present in the remade special edition. It’s the classic mode and classic music. The modern version there is good too but just does not capture the atmosphere like the classic version does.
Overall I enjoyed the four original games and the 5th Telltale game.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
The second game that hooked me to this genre. A great game with a story so good it could have been a movie. Better than that Crystal Skull thing. This game is split up into 3 parts. There is three totally different ways to play the second part. Visiting different locations. It’s fun to try them out.
Also these 3 paths are forshadowed at the begin of the game.
Fight Biff to make the fight path easier to access.
Talk your way past Biff to make the conversation path easier to access.
Avoid Biff entirely and push the boxes to enter the theatre to make the teamwork path easier to access.
Mind you, when you talk to Sophia (I think that’s her name) in her office just before part 2, you can choose any of the 3 options for part 2 if you know what to say regardless of how you got past Biff. Not that hard.
Some decent replayability here because of this.! A great game:
Also another old school game of this genre I liked back in the day was
Simon the Sorcerer. I think it’s sequel was not as good, but the first game was quite good and worth a play for fans of the genre.
Of the more modern games on this genre, a couple stabs out to me as great. Apart from the 5th Monkey Island game.
Back To The Future
This was a Telltale game in 5 parts. I really liked it. I thought the story was so good it could have been made into a hypothetical 4th movie. Really fun and really well done.
The
Samorost trilogy of games are very different. Still point and click adventure games but a reimagining of the genre. There’s no item list at the bottom or push/pull/talk/etc set of buttons either. You just move and interact with the environment. It sounds basic in practice but it’s done really well in reality and they will make you think really hard to finish them. I really liked these games.
Machinaruim and
Botanicular by the same folks who made Samorost are also worth checking out. Quirky, puzzle filled and are not the standard type of point and click adventure game.
There is a lot more games out there in this genre. I have played some of them but I thought I would just mentioned some of my favourite ones.
To finish off, this I’d like to share some trivia about point and click adventure games.
Almost all games are developed by first making a quick demo to test the base concept. To see if it works and if it’s fun. For Splatoon this demo was rectangular blocks (ie tofu) shooting the ink on the ground. A quick and basic test of the base concept of the game. This usually occurs before story and characters are thought of.
However point and click games are the one exception to this rule. A quick demo does not show how good the concept is as all games on this genre are played in very similar ways. It’s the story and interactivity that make or break the game. So you don’t k ow if your idea is good or not till much later in development. This makes point and click adventure games very tricky and risky to develop. A risk that few developers are willing to take today.