Text adventure and interactive fiction

Computer Terminal launch Zork (1977), one of the first commercially successful text adventure games
Text adventures convey the game’s story through passages of text revealed to the player in response to typed instructions. Early text adventures, Colossal Cave Adventure, Hugo’s House of Horrors, and Scott Adams’ games, used a simple verb — noun parser to interpret these instructions, allowing the player to interact with objects at a basic level, such as typing “get the key.” Later text adventures and modern interactive fiction use natural language processing to incorporate more complex player commands, such as “get the key from the table.” Prominent examples of complex text adventures include most of the games developed by Infocom, including Zork and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. With the advent of graphic adventures, text adventures receded into the background, although the medium remains popular as a medium for writing interactive fiction (IF), especially with the introduction of the Inform natural language platform for writing IF.

Interactive fiction can still offer puzzle-based tasks such as adventure games, but many contemporary IF works also explore alternative narrative methods unique to the interactive medium and may avoid the complex puzzles associated with typical adventure games. IF readers or players may still need to determine how to properly interact with the narrative in order to move forward and thus create a new type of challenge.

Graphic Adventure.
Graphic Adventure are adventure games that use graphics to convey the environment to the player. Games under the graphic adventure banner can have different types of input, from text parsers to touch screen interfaces. Graphical adventure games will vary depending on how they present the avatar. Some games will use a first- or third-person perspective in which the camera follows the player’s movements, while many adventure games use drawn or pre-drawn backgrounds or a context-sensitive camera that is positioned to show each location as much as possible.

Point-and-click adventure games
The Whispered World (2009) is an example of a “point and click” contextual adventure game using high-definition graphics and animation.

Point-and-click adventure games are games in which the player usually controls his or her character through a point-and-click interface using a computer mouse or similar pointing device, although additional control schemes may also be available. The player clicks to move his character around, interact with non-playable characters, often initiating conversation trees with them, exploring objects in the game settings, or using his character’s item inventory.

Many older point-and-click games include a list of on-screen verbs to describe certain actions in the manner of a text adventure, but newer games use more context-dependent UI elements to reduce or eliminate this approach. Often these games are reduced to collecting items for a character’s inventory and figuring out when best to use that item; the player will need to use cues from the game’s visual elements, descriptions of various items, and dialogue from other characters to figure it out. More recent Sierra On-Line games, including King’s Quest and almost all of the LucasArts adventure games, are based on point-and-click principles. games.

Escape the Room games
Room Escape games are a further specialization of point-and-click adventure games; these games tend to be short and limited to a small space to explore, with almost no interaction with non-playable characters. In most games of this type, the player has to figure out how to get out of a room, using the limited resources within it and solving logic puzzles. Other variations include games that require the player to manipulate a complex object to achieve a specific puzzle box style goal. These games often come in Adobe Flash format and are also popular on mobile devices. The genre is known for inspiring challenges from an actual quest room. Examples of the subgenre include MOTAS (Mysteries of Time and Space), The Crimson Room, and The Room.

Logic adventure games
Logic adventure games are adventure games with a strong emphasis on logic puzzles. They usually emphasize self-contained puzzle tasks with puzzle toys or games. Completing each puzzle opens up more of the game world to explore, additional puzzles to solve, and can expand the game’s story. These games often have few or no non-game characters and lack the type of inventory puzzles found in typical point-and-click adventure games.

Adventure puzzles were popularized by Myst and The 7th Guest. Both used a mixed technique consisting of pre-processed images and video clips, but adventure puzzles have since taken advantage of modern game engines to present games in full 3D settings, such as The Talos Principle. Myst itself was recreated in this way in the title realMyst. Other puzzle adventure games are casual adventure games consisting of a series of puzzles used to explore and develop a story, examples of which are The Witness and the Professor Layton series.

Narrative adventure games
Narrative adventure games are those that allow for branching narratives, with choices made by the player affecting events throughout the game. While these choices usually do not change the overall direction and basic plot elements of the game’s story, they help personalize the story as the player desires through the ability to choose these determinants – exceptions include Detroit: Become Human, where player choices can lead to many very different endings and character deaths.

These games favor narrative over traditional gameplay, with gameplay helping to immerse the player in the game’s story: gameplay can involve working through conversation trees, solving puzzles, or using quick events to help the action. sequences to keep the player engaged in the story. While narrative games are similar to interactive movies and visual novels in that they present pre-prepared scenes, the development of computing power allows pre-prepared scenes to be displayed in real time, thus providing for greater depth of gameplay that responds to the player. Most Telltale Games, such as The Walking Dead, are narrative games. Other examples include Sega’s AM2 Shenmue series, Konami’s Shadow of Memories, Quantic Dream. s Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, Dontnod Entertainment’s Life Is Strange series, and Night in the Woods.

Walking Simulators.
The Stanley Parable (2013) is a first-person walking simulator set in an office building.
Walking simulators, or narrative environmental games, are narrative games that generally avoid any type of gameplay other than movement and interaction with the environment, allowing players to experience their story through exploration and discovery. Walking simulations have few or no puzzles, and there may be no win/loss conditions. They allow players to move through the game environment and discover objects such as books, audio recordings, or other clues that develop the story, and can be enhanced by dialogues with non-player characters and cutscenes. These games allow you to explore the game world without any time constraints or other forced restrictions, which is not usually offered in more action-oriented games.

The term “walking simulator” has sometimes been used pejoratively as such games. contain virtually no traditional gameplay elements and require only walking. The term became more common as games of this genre gained critical acclaim in the 2010s; other names such as “narrative environmental games” or “interactive narratives” have been suggested, which emphasize the importance of storytelling and the fact that the story is told through interaction with environmental elements. Examples of walking simulations include Gone Home, Dear Esther, Firewatch, Proteus, Jazzpunk, The Stanley Parable, Thirty Flights of Love, and What Remains of Edith Finch.