Adventure games
While adventure games are categorized by the style of their gameplay, the genre focuses on an interactive story-based experience, during which players must complete challenges, participate in various dialogues, solve puzzles and manipulate items within a story to advance further.
Many adventure games have quite a few variants to the story ending and even those that do not, still have numerous options for a player to manipulate events within a story. With most adventure genre games, the emphasis is on the decision over action, as more often precisely your decisions, instead of your actions will impact the story line towards one of the possible outcomes.
Adventure game genre is the most story-driven computer game genre. Usually, games in this category are engaging and thoughtful, they also provide players with some good mental practices. This genre is all about storytelling, world exploration and puzzle cracking. The three characteristics are always present in an adventure game; however, different sub-genres tend to focus on one aspect more than the others:
- Narrative – most of the time is considered as a focal point. Plots can vary in setting, range of scope and tone like the aim of novels and movie industries.
- Puzzles – many ingenious variations can be found throughout different games of the genre. It can be an inventory puzzle, where you gather certain pieces and then solve them in a correct way, or a clue told during a dialogue, that guides a player to some hidden place, as well as many more.
- Exploration – while exploration capabilities in the adventure genre are not limitless, many clues and mysteries can also be hidden in the surrounding setting.
Adventure genre games did not change much in terms of what the genre is aiming at, although with technology advancing at such a fast pace, developers have more freedom and innovative options required to explore storytelling than ever before.