Puzzle Solving
Adventure games contain a variety of puzzles, deciphering messages, finding and using items, opening locked doors or finding and exploring new places. Solving a puzzle will open up access to new areas of the game world and reveal the history of the game. Logic puzzles, in which mechanical devices are designed with abstract interfaces to test the player’s deductive thinking skills, are commonplace.

Some puzzles have been criticized for their obscurity, such as the combination of clothes line, clip and downed rubber duck used to collect the key stuck between the subway tracks in The Longest Journey, which exists outside the game narrative and serves only as an obstacle for the player. Others have been criticized for requiring players to blindly guess, either by clicking the right pixel or guessing the correct verb in games that use a text interface. Games requiring players to move through mazes also became less popular, although the earliest text adventure games usually required players to draw a map if they wanted to navigate an abstract space.

Collecting and using items
Many adventure games use the inventory management screen as a separate game mode. Players can only pick up certain objects in the game, so the player usually knows that only objects that can be picked up are important. Because it can be difficult for a player to know if he or she has missed an important item, he or she will often scour each scene for items. In games that use a point-and-click device, players sometimes conduct a systematic search known as a “pixel search,” trying to find a small area on a graphical representation of a location on the screen that the developers have defined, which may not be obvious or consist of only a few pixels on the screen. A prime example is the original Full Throttle from LucasArts, where one puzzle requires a character to kick a wall in a small area, which Tim Schafer, the game’s lead designer, admitted years later was a measure of brute force; in the remastered game, Schafer and his team at Double Fine made solving this puzzle more obvious. More recent adventure games try to avoid pixel hunting by highlighting an element or tying the player’s cursor to it.

Many of the puzzles in these games involve collecting and using items from their inventory. Players must apply lateral thinking techniques when they apply external real-world knowledge about objects in unexpected ways. For example, by placing a downed inner tube on a cactus to create a slingshot, the player needs to understand that the inner tube is elastic. They may need to carry items in their inventory for a long time before they are useful, and so it is normal in adventure games to test a player’s memory when a problem can only be overcome by recalling some of the information from an earlier part of the game. There is rarely a shortage of time for these puzzles, focusing more on the player’s ability to reason than on quick thinking.

Plot, setting, and themes
Adventure games are single-player games that are heavily story-based. Adventure games, more than any other genre, depend on their story and setting to create an immersive single-player experience. They are usually set in an immersive environment, often in a fantasy world, and try to vary the setting from chapter to chapter to add novelty and interest to the experience. Comedy is a common theme, and games often contain comedic responses as players attempt actions or combinations that are “funny or impossible.”

Because adventure games are narrative-based, character development usually follows literary conventions of a personal and emotional nature. growth, rather than new powers or abilities affecting gameplay. The player is often sent on a quest or is required to solve a mystery or situation about which little is known. Such mystery stories allow designers to get around what Ernest W. Adams calls the “amnesia problem,” where the player controls the protagonist but must start the game without his knowledge or experience. Plot events usually unfold as the player completes new tasks or puzzles, but to make this narrative less mechanical, new elements in the story can also be triggered by player movement.

Dialogue and Conversation Tree
Adventure games have strong storylines with significant dialogue, and sometimes make effective use of recorded dialogue or narration by voice actors. This genre of games is known for presenting dialogue in the form of a conversation tree. Players can engage a non-player character by selecting a line of pre-written dialogue from a menu that elicits a response from a playable character. These conversations are often a tree structure , in which players choose between each branch of dialogue to continue. However, there are always a finite number of branches, and some adventure games are reduced to choosing each option individually. Conversation with characters can give clues about how to solve puzzles, including clues about what that character wanted before they start cooperating with the player. Other conversations will have far-reaching consequences: you decide to reveal a valuable secret entrusted to the player. Characters can also be persuaded to reveal their secrets through conversation or by giving them something that will benefit them.

Goals, Success, and Failure
The main goal of adventure games is to complete the assigned quest. Early adventure games often had high scores, and in some, including Zork and some of its sequels, the player was assigned a rank, a text description based on his score. High scores gave the player a secondary goal and served as an indicator of his progress. While high scores are now less common, external reward systems such as Xbox Live achievements serve a similar role.

The main failure condition in adventure games, inherited from more action-oriented games, is the death of the player. Without clearly defined enemies of other genres, its inclusion in adventure games is controversial, and many developers are now either avoiding it or taking extra steps to foreshadow death. In some early adventure games, players found themselves in unwinnable situations without finishing the game. Infocom’s text adventure Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was criticized for a scenario in which the player failed to pick up a bunch of junk mail at the beginning of the game. later, after finishing the game. Adventure games developed by LucasArts intentionally avoid creating a stalemate for the player because of the negative reaction to such situations.