If you’re a fan of point-and-click adventures, you’ve been eating good in 2025. In the past few months alone, the well-received Rosewater, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elroy and the Aliens, and Old Skies have kept the '90s favorite genre alive and well in classic fashion. Last year's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Rise of the Golden Idol, an excellent modern evolution of the point-and-click, is still receiving DLC drops in 2025, too. And that’s not even counting off-the-wall puzzlers like The Roottrees are Dead and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Blue Prince. Or hybrids like Expelled! which mashes the point-and-click up with ♉the visual novel.
In short, players who prefer chewing on a tough puzzle to mowing down enemies are living in very chewy times indeed. But it's worth noting that while many of these games are great, none of them are expensive to make. That doesn't take away from their greatness — if anything, it makes their achievements more impressive — but it's disappointing that major funds aren't being devoted to figuring out what the triple-A point-and-click could look like in 2025. Especially since most point-and-clicks made today harken back to the last time they had that kind of commercial prominenಞce: the genre's heyday in the 1990s.
The Point-And-Click Hasn't Always Been An Indie-Only Genre
At the time, point-and-clicks were some of the biggest games being made. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:LucasArts, which (alongside Sierra On-Line) defined the look and mechanics we tend to think of when we think ꦜof 'point-and-clicks', developed tie-ins for one of the biggest IPs on the planet, Indiana Jones, within the point-and-click framework.
And they sold well, too. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网𓆉:Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was a big hit. Outside LucasArts, the commercial success was even more impressive as, with six million copies sold, Myst became the best-selling PC game eܫver at the time. Its sequel, Riven, was the best-selling game of 1997.
Day of the Tentacle and the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Monkey Island games are beloved, but were never huge hits.
But by the time Myst 3: Exile launched in 2001, the tides had turned. Despite selling and reviewing well, the sequel didn't match the phenomenon status of its predecessors, and the genre has been in ahem exile ever since.
That isn't to say point-and-clicks stopped being made. They're a fixture of the indie scene, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Double Fine's Broken Age was the most successful crowdfunding campaign ever for a video game at the time, and old hands Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman returned to the series that helped define the genre with 2022's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Return to Monkey Island. But these games are obviously not being made at the budgetary level of, say, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 2 or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Doom: The Dark Ages. Action games supplanted po💞int-and-click games, and point-and-click games have never had a 🗹shot at the crown since.
Modernization Leaves Too Much Behind
There have been attempts to modernize the adventure game genre, though, and I enjoy a lot of them. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is one of my favorite games of 2025 so far, and it's the direct result of Don't Nod reimagining the adventure game with 2015's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Life is Strange. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Until Dawn, all of Telltale's games, and the work of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Quantic Dream are♔ all attempting to answer the♉ same question. How do you bring the genre forward?
But they've tended to bring the genre forward by leaving key elements in the past. Most of these games don't have puzzles and, if they do, they're much simpler than the 'combine X with Y at Z location' brain-twisters of classic point-and-clicks. None of those games maintain the quirky humor that many of the point-and-clicks of the '90s had — though Telltale games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tales from the Borderlands come the closest. And none of these games are presented 🙈in the classic side-scrolling style, which allowed developeꩵrs to frame gorgeous, memorable tableaus.
I wouldn't say that any of those elements are non-negotiables. Myst had the puzzles and the beautiful shots, but not the zany humor of Day of the Tentacle. And, if a great point-and-click adventure came along that was presented from a third-person perspective, I certainly wouldn't say no. In fact, the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 2 remake sort of captures that energy in moments. But I want to see something 🎉that is actively attempting to bring the point-and-click into the 2020s withouওt leaving essential aspects of its identity behind.
Give me a 2D adventure game with tough puzzles… and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted-level character models. Bring in a 30 Rock-level writers' room to pen jokes you only see if you talk to the same NPC 100 times in a row. Bring Persona-style aesthetics for the main character's inventory. Give me a p♍oint-and-click with the same resources devoted to presenting fixed camera angle locations th🅺at Ubisoft devotes to its open-worlds. Let me see what happens when point-and-clicks gets way more money than it actually needs because it being the best it can be trumps necessity. Why is a third-person action game inherently more deserving of those resources?
The Rise Of The Golden✱ Idol Offers More T🌳op-Tier Puzzling With Better Storytelling
The sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol has chap�🦩�ter puzzles that make figuring out the series’ conspiracy so much sweeter.
