March 29, 2024

Yavniel

Obey Your Travel

Salient Features of Adventure Gaming

• Puzzle-solving

Adventure games contain a variety of puzzles, such as decoding messages, finding and using items, opening locked doors, or finding and exploring new locations. Solving a puzzle will unlock access to new areas in the game world, and reveal more of the game story.

Many puzzles in such games involve gathering and using items from their inventory. They may need to carry items in their inventory for a long duration before they prove useful. There is seldom any time-management required for these puzzles, focusing more on the player’s ability to reason than on quick-thinking.

• Story, Setting and Themes

Adventure games are single player experiences that are largely story-driven. They are typically set in an immerse environment, often a fantasy world, and try to vary the setting from chapter to chapter to add novelty and interest to the experience. Since these games are driven by storytelling, character development usually follows literary conventions of personal and emotional growth, rather than new powers or abilities that affect gameplay. Story-events typically unfold as the player completes new challenges or puzzles, but in order to make such storytelling less mechanical new elements in the story may also be triggered by player movement.

• Dialogue and Conversation

Adventure games have strong storylines with significant dialog, and sometimes make effective use of recorded dialog or narration from voice actors. This genre of game is known for representing dialog as a conversation tree.

Players are able to engage a non-player character by choosing a line of pre-written dialog from a menu, which triggers a response from the game character. These conversations are often designed as a tree structure, with players deciding between each branch of dialog to pursue.

• Goals, Success and Failure

The primary goal in adventure games is the completion of the assigned quest or puzzle. High scores provide the player with a secondary goal, and serve as an indicator of progression. The primary failure condition in adventure games, inherited from more action-oriented games, is player death. Without the clearly identified enemies of other genres, its inclusion in these games is controversial, and many developers now either avoid it or take extra steps to foreshadow death. Some early adventure games trapped the players in un-winnable situations without ending the game.

We can thus say that Adventure games does not include action, combat and other such endeavors unlike its dictionary equivalent of the term ‘Adventure’. Adventure games as such includes a series of puzzle-solving with a calm, reclined approach. These strings of puzzles are woven across a common story-line and laced with dialogues so as to provide a connect to the player. However, today many games have broken this traditional definition of these games to include elements of other genres although they still essentially maintain the features of games at its core.