What Is an Adventure Game? From Text Adventures to Visual Novels
Adventure games explained: core appeal, subgenres from text adventures to walking sims, and classics from Colossal Cave Adventure to The Walking Dead.
The word "adventure" first brings to mind movies about hacking through jungles in search of treasure. But in games, "adventure game" names a way of playing, not the mood of a story. Instead of sword fights or shootouts, these are games where you push the story forward by looking around, collecting objects, talking to people, and solving puzzles.
The name comes from a text game from the 1970s. As more and more games imitated it, it became a genre, and since then its form has changed dramatically, from graphical screens and mouse clicks to dialogue-driven visual novels and walking simulators where all you do is walk.
In this post, we look in turn at the definition and core appeal of adventure games, their subgenres, landmark titles through history, what designers pay attention to, who the genre suits, and what it looks like today.
Definition and Core Appeal
English Wikipedia names three core elements of adventure games: story, exploration, and puzzle-solving. The genre's name comes from Colossal Cave Adventure, a text game Will Crowther made for the PDP-10 mainframe in 1976. Because the genre was formed by games that followed this one, commonly just called "Adventure," adventure in games is defined by how it is played, unlike the adventure novel in literature.
Comparing it with other genres makes the boundaries clearer.
- Difference from action games: There is little or no combat or test of reflexes. This doesn't mean there is no conflict, only that fighting is not the main activity.
- Difference from RPGs: There are few numerical rules or progression systems such as experience points, stats, and skills.
- Difference from puzzle games: In a puzzle game, the puzzle is everything, but in an adventure game, exploration and story are central and puzzles are placed in between.
So the fun of adventure games comes from wanting to know what happens next. Finding the clues in a room one by one, the "aha!" moment when two seemingly unrelated items combine to open a door, and the next piece of the story opening up as a reward: this flow is the genre's basic rhythm.
Subgenres
Adventure games split into several branches depending on input method and how they present their story.
| Subgenre | Characteristics | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Text adventure (interactive fiction) | Situations described in text; the player types commands like "go north" or "take lamp" | Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork |
| Graphic adventure | Scenes shown as pictures, controlled with text commands or menus | Mystery House, King's Quest |
| Point and click | Click on objects and characters on screen with a mouse cursor to examine and use them | The Secret of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango |
| Puzzle adventure | Mechanical and logic puzzles weigh more than story | Myst, Professor Layton series |
| Escape room | Short format where you examine a small space to get out | Web and mobile escape room games |
| Visual novel | First-person dialogue and choices, few puzzles | Ace Attorney, Japan's Sound Novel series |
| Narrative adventure | Cinematic structure where the story branches based on choices | The Walking Dead (Telltale) |
| Walking simulator | Experience a story just by walking and looking around; may have no win or loss | Gone Home |
| Interactive movie | Combines live-action or animated video with short inputs | Dragon's Lair |
The name "walking simulator" was at first sometimes used mockingly to mean "all you do is walk," but it has since become established as a genre name for games that tell stories through clues in the environment. Action-adventure games that mix in action (such as The Legend of Zelda series) involve far more physical challenges, so they are usually treated as a separate major genre.
Landmark Titles Through History
| Year | Game | Developer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1976 | Colossal Cave Adventure | Will Crowther (expanded by Don Woods in 1977) | Origin of the genre's name, short English command input |
| 1977 | Zork | Tim Anderson and others at MIT, later Infocom | More sophisticated sentence parsing, commercial release from 1980 |
| 1980 | Mystery House | On-Line Systems (later Sierra On-Line) | Regarded as the first graphic adventure |
| 1983 | The Portopia Serial Murder Case | Yuji Horii / Enix | Classic Japanese mystery adventure, Famicom version in 1985 |
| 1984 | King's Quest | Sierra On-Line | Pseudo-3D screens where you move the character directly |
| 1990 | The Secret of Monkey Island | Lucasfilm Games | Design where the character almost never dies, humor |
| 1993 | Myst | Cyan | Exploration by clicking through pre-rendered 3D images |
| 1998 | Grim Fandango | LucasArts | LucasArts' first 3D adventure, strong reviews but disappointing sales |
| 2001 | Ace Attorney | Capcom | Courtroom visual novel, went overseas with the 2005 DS version |
| 2012 | The Walking Dead | Telltale Games | Episodic format, choices carry over to later episodes |
| 2013 | Gone Home | The Fullbright Company | Walking simulator where you piece together a family's story by exploring an empty house |
In the 1980s and early 1990s, adventure was one of the most popular genres in PC gaming. Sierra and LucasArts competed and released many classics. But from the late 1990s, a flood of Myst-like games appeared, and FPS games like Doom and Half-Life began delivering story and action together, so the market shrank rapidly. Grim Fandango was well reviewed but sold poorly, and Sierra closed its doors in 1999.
Japan took a different path. The Famicom version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, lacking a keyboard, had players choose from a command menu instead, and it sold over 700,000 copies. This approach led to visual novels centered on dialogue and choices, and Chunsoft's Sound Novel series sold over 2 million copies in total. Portopia was also what led Hideo Kojima to join the game industry.
Design Characteristics
The most important thing when making an adventure game is keeping puzzles from feeling out of place in the story. Wikipedia cites puzzles that don't break the flow of the story as an example of good design.
- Combining and using items: Using objects collected in your inventory on other objects or places is the classic puzzle format. But if the answers are too far-fetched, players fall into "brute forcing," trying every item on everything.
- Dialogue trees: You gain information by choosing questions, and different paths open depending on the answers.
- The weight of failure: In early Sierra games, the protagonist often died, or missing a needed item could leave you unable to progress. In The Secret of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert made the character almost never die so players could focus on exploring, and this approach became the standard for many later games.
- Hints and guidance: When you're stuck for too long, the fun stops. Modern games reduce this with tiered hints, markers for examinable spots, and story summary screens.
- Branching and choice: Narrative adventures create tension through the consequences of choices instead of puzzles. The key is the feeling that a choice affects later scenes and even the next episode.
Who It's For
- People who prefer slow, thoughtful play over fast reactions
- People who want to immerse themselves in story and characters like a novel or TV drama
- People who enjoy mysteries, collecting clues, and escape room experiences
- People who want to play in short sessions but still see a whole story through to the end
On the other hand, if you want the sense of growing a character or the tension of competing against other people, RPGs or competitive games may suit you better.
Adventure Games Today
After a slump in the early 2000s, adventure games came back to life thanks to new platforms and new ways of funding. Touchscreens were a good fit for "tap to examine" point-and-click play, and on the Nintendo DS the Ace Attorney and Professor Layton series became popular overseas as well. According to Wikipedia, the Ace Attorney series has sold over 13 million copies and the Professor Layton series over 18 million.
Digital distribution made episodic releases possible, with one episode coming out every few months, and Telltale's The Walking Dead became the leading success story. In 2012, Tim Schafer's Double Fine raised over $3.4 million on Kickstarter, far exceeding its $400,000 goal, to make Broken Age, and crowdfunding became a new channel for adventure games.
Today, elements of adventure games have spread across many genres. Casual games where you "carefully examine the screen to find clues," such as hidden object and spot-the-difference games, share the same roots. Keke Studio's JIGGLEBELL Hidden Hunt also has you find and tap objects in a scene, making it a good way to get a light taste of the investigative fun of adventure games.
