Since the late 1990s and the arrival of sparkly 3D graphics, Adventure games have been steadily retreating further and further from the gaming spotlight. As great games like Beneath a Steel Sky were released as free open source software, and copies of The Curse of Monkey Island and The Longest Journey mouldered in bargain bins, most of us though thought we'd never see Adventure Games return to the mainstream. Throughout the Adventure Gaming dark ages there were always a few underground titles appearing (such as Farenheit or Dreamfall), but the game mechanics never really sat well with all of the 3D dual-stick control malarkey that was expected from modern games. The games felt a little like adults dressed in teenage clothing in order to make them more "down with the Kids".
It may have had an emotional and atmospheric story, but Farenheit had fugly graphics and weird mini-game fighting tacked on.
As I received my very first laptop in 2005, I was most disappointed to find that a lot of the older games wouldn't play without severe patching, and that their shiny 3D successors wouldn't play on my inferior hardware. I remained trapped in a corridor of the adventure game timeline that contained games that were not-so-old that they needed Windows 95 to play them with (excluding such gems as The Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle) but not-so-new that my 256MB of RAM could handle them. Thankfully, The Curse of Monkey Island, The Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey all hang around in that self same corridor, so all was not lost. Irritating though this situation was, hope was in sight!
Recently, Adventure games have been slowly returning to the spotlight. This resurge is due to the release of two excellent touch-screen consoles in the past 5 years, both of which favour clean 2D graphics over awkward 3D. They are, of course, the DS lite and iPhone/iPod Touch. The genre took its first cautious footsteps back towards popularity with the brilliantly mad Phoenix Wright series on DS, allowing us to use our DS styluses to search for clues and intimidate witnesses until they gained anime-angry-hair. The whimsical Professor Layton series also won our hearts, with traditional puzzles in place of item-combining and pixel hunting. Hotel Dusk: Room 215 also proved to us that Adventure games don't all have to be about laughs or complicated puzzles, but are perfectly suited to conveying drama and tension. Last year, the DS also hosted the re-release of the legendary original Broken Sword, this time with hints included and unnecessary deaths removed.
You wouldn't call him if you had an injury claim, but Phoenix may have saved the Adventure game from obscurity.
Although the DS Lite has recently won the honour of selling the most units of any console in history, these games were sadly not the system's bestseller blockbusters. With the exception of the ever popular Phoenix Wright and Professor Layton series, few other Adventure games have been produced for the DS in recent years, leaving the iPhone in prime position to take up the baton. In many ways the iPhone is unique as a games console, not least in that some people deny its status as one. The low-low pricing of games in the app store is also a point of contention for some, although at £4.99 The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is hardly cheap. Whatever you think of apple's touch screen wonder, its low priced store with cheap development costs and easy distribution (coupled with its great touch screen) has made it the perfect home for Adventure games. To this date, only 2 major games released of this genre have graced the app store, but both have done superbly.
The aforementioned Secret of Monkey Island:Special Edition gave me the opportunity to experience this titan of a game with improved graphics and a spot-on voice-over from the now well known cast. It's been one of the most highly rated games on the app store, and also one of the most popular (despite it's hefty price tag). Beneath a Steel Sky has also been released, and at only 59p is an absolute steal of a game. It's my hope that the Apple and Andriod app stores will encourage the development of new games like these, as the costs of making and distributing them are now much lower than ever before. I'd also love to see the return of more influential older games, like Day of the Tentacle or Full Throttle.
Back on PC, the original home of Adventure Gaming, this trend also seems set to continue. I recently came across a wonderful and completely free game entitled "Ben There, Dan That", created by Dan Mashall and Ben Ward of British based Zombie Cow Studios. The game is bizarre, creative, relentlessly self-referential fun, and has a wickedly rude sense of humour. While I appreciate that its hardly that new (nearly 2 years old now), both the game and last year's sequel have unfortunately received next to zero coverage on Gamespot, which is puzzling considering the 84% Metacritic score that the follow-on game "Time Gentlemen, Please!" has garnered.
The graphics have a certain "stylised" charm, but the game is genuinely funny, and having two protagonists is genius.
I can't wait to get my teeth into "Time Gentlemen, Please", which costs just £2.99 on Steam. Add this to the recent Tales of Monkey Island series (rumoured to soon be heading to XBLA), and it looks like our old friend the Adventure game is secure for now. I'm glad we live in a time when older forms of games, like 2D Platformers, simple Puzzle games and retro Shooters can all co-exist peacefully with the HD graphics juggernauts. What will happen next for these games, however, as the graphical processing capabilities of modern handhelds start to rise, mirroring the 32bit-128bit revolution that once spelled death for them in the mid 1990s? Are they here to stay, or will they be discarded once more? For our sakes, (not to mention Ben and Dan's) I hope they stick around forever.
If you're interested in getting hold of "Ben There, Dan That", then you can find it for free here: http://www.zombie-cow.com/?page_id=17