The best adventure games

Adventure games are a genre of video games that take place from the perspective of a character and feature narrative elements prominently. Under the control of the player, a main character explores a cohesive world and interacts with various non-player characters. Advancing the plot requires solving puzzles which are often seamlessly integrated into the game’s environments.

Since this narrative framing establishes no particular constraint on the nature of the puzzles being solved, adventure games may often be described in relation to additional video game genres. While the adventure genre has been associated historically with point-and-click games and “puzzle-adventure” games, adventure elements have also been included in detective games (e.g. Tangle Tower, Duck Detective), platformer games (Portal 2, Fez), and even sokoban games (Isles of Sea and Sky, Void Stranger).

Incidentally, first-person non-systemic puzzle games like Myst have become known as “puzzle-adventure” games. It should be noted, as evidenced by the games previously mentioned, that video games may feature both puzzle and adventure elements yet still be very different from so-called “puzzle-adventure” games.

The games listed below are the most favorited adventure games in the Thinky Games database.