My first PopMatters article of the year is up. After a weeklong hiatus or as I called it my “fuck off” week after the excruciating process of Critical-Distance’s end of year projects.
If any genre could say to have made a comeback in recent years, it’s the adventure game. The Walking Dead, Machinerium, Gemini Rui, Resonance, Primorida, Analog: A Hate Story, Don’t Take It Personally Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story and so on. (Though to be real it never went away it just lost the limelight.) That right there is a wide variety of premises and characters.
One profession that adventure game characters have never done is a scavenger or salvager. Given the general actions done in adventure games you’d think it would have been done sooner. And in the exploring that one thought and diving into the characterization of the protagonists of Deponia and Primordia that getting the rationalization of the adventure game behavior out of the way opened them up for more and deeper possibilities.
Here’s looking to the future of the genre.