Post
Collect nonsense, combine nonsense, and somehow solve a murder, a curse, or both.
Point-and-click adventures reduce direct action and build their identity around navigation, dialogue, inventory puzzles, and authored scenes. The best ones feel like interactive comedy or mystery engines. The worst ones make you try a rubber chicken on every hotspot in the room until you hate computers.
Example
Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Broken Sword, The Longest Journey, and modern revivals like Return to Monkey Island kept the form clever, chatty, and proudly puzzle-brained.
Why it matters
This subgenre taught games how to write voice, pacing, and scene structure. Its influence on narrative design massively outweighs its current commercial size.
Related concepts