The Great Game Guide

Sean J. Jordan

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There are thousands of awesome video games you probably never knew existed! Here are some of them. greatestgames.substack.com

1d ago

Season 1, Episode 19 – Why We're Stuck on Platformers, Part 2

In this episode, we’re going to look at early platform games and how they evolved the ideas from Space Panic and Donkey Kong! -------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 19: Why We’re Stuck on Platformers, Part 2 Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review. You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com) And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown! -------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode. Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/) Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you! -------------------------------------------------- Coming up in this episode – We’re going to talk about early arcade platformers from the early 1980s like Jungle Hunt, Pitfall!, Popeye, Mr. Do!’s Castle, Congo Bongo, Bagman, Beauty and the Beast, Frankenstein’s Monster, Roc ‘N Rope, The Glob, Ben Bero Beh, Chack’n Pop, Pig Newton, Mappy, H.E.R.O. and Spike! I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for our look at many of the great platform games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! I’m a qualitative researcher by training and profession and so my natural instinct is to try to categorize things when I start studying them. In our last episode, I offered three hallmarks of platform gaming – storytelling, physics and well-defined objectives – and I also mentioned that there are five core objectives that platformers tend to have in common – enemy elimination, collection, rescue, survival and speed. Now, of course, you could argue that there are other genres that share these traits, because these are also hallmarks of genres like the run and gun shooter, hack and slash action games, first and third person shooters and even action RPGs to some extent. I don’t disagree. Platformers are the mighty tree from which all of these genres ultimately either branched off or produced hybrid genres with other plants. One could argue that most action games are just Super Mario Bros. with variations to the formula. I don’t like to be that reductive, but I could see some logical basis for saying that, because Super Mario Bros., more than perhaps any game in existence, taught entire generations of game designers how to make a really, really solid action game. But in my upcoming book series, The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played, I went pretty deep in trying to categorize platformers in the 1980s because I realized pretty quickly that there’s a world of difference between a game like Donkey Kong, a game like Pitfall! and a game like Bubble Bobble. Superficially, they’re all running and jumping games with items to collect, enemies or hazards to avoid and a story driving you forward, but mechanically, they’re amazingly different. In Donkey Kong, you’re trying to figure out how to progress upwards on a single screen to rescue a damsel in distress while you navigate dangers and potentially complete tasks that change from screen to screen. The story repeats over time with more challenging stages. This is what I’d call a pure platformer, because the emphasis is on the platform jumping itself. A popular variant of these pure platformers would be the action platformer, which might involve a stronger action focus like running and gunning or hacking and slashing – two subgenres that are pretty well-established on their own with popular standards like Mega Man and Contra for run and guns and Castlevania and Strider for hack and slash. In Pitfall!, you have a series of 256 screens connected in a gigantic loop and you have two planes to explore – aboveground and underground. You have to optimize how you’ll explore this vast world and collect all 32 treasures within a 20 minute time limit. This is what I’d call an action adventure platformer, because the emphasis is on the theme. In Bubble Bobble, you have 100 screens to clear and your focus is on figuring out how to not only eliminate the enemies, but also trigger the game’s secret rooms and true ending. This is what I would call a puzzle platformer because the emphasis is on figuring out how to optimize your playthrough. But in Japan, a lot of these games are also sometimes known as comical action games due to their cartoony graphics and emphasis on all-ages appeal. There’s one other major branch that often involves running, but not necessarily jumping, and that’s the maze and chase platformer which evolved from the Space Panic template. One of the most obvious popular examples is Burger Time, a game in which you can’t jump but can make use of ladders. Namco’s cat and mouse game Mappy would be another, and of course Lode Runner provided a hugely popular computer game version of this concept. These games tend to focus on enemies that are constantly pursuing you and who you can only escape through utilizing traps, setting up barricades or changing to a different platform. As we discussed in our last episode, Space Panic is perhaps the first true platform game and it owes a lot of its inspiration to the top-down trap maze game Heiankyo Alien. You can also see where games like Pac-Man and Dig Dug and Rally-X all evolved from the trap maze concept, though they also owe some inspiration to an arcade game about driving in a maze and picking up tiles called Head-On. But the platformer version of a maze and chase game still has the three hallmarks we discussed – storytelling, physics and well-defined objectives – and thus has a different look and feel to a game like Pac-Man. To offer a different comparison, Mr. Do! is a maze and chase game very much like Dig Dug, but Mr. Do!’s Castle is a maze and chase platformer in the vein of Space Panic. So, now that we have these different types of platformers defined, it’s time to dig into them a bit. And we’ll start with the Donkey Kong-inspired pure platformers by looking at the console and arcade games that were more or less just outright copies of it. (We’ll talk about PC games in the next episode.) One of the most obvious clones is King Kong, a 1982 game from Tigervision for the Atari 2600. Your job is to climb the Empire State Building’s ladders and jump over gaps while a really ugly-looking gorilla tosses colorful striped bombs at you. A blond-haired lady in a blue dress runs around at the top of the screen with her arms flailing. Even the jumping sound effect sounds like a knock-off of Mario’s jumps. It’s a very dull game with little variety beyond speeding up the bombs. Beauty and the Beast came out the same year on the Intellivision, and while it looks like a Donkey Kong clone with a little bit of Crazy Climber’s building scaling added in, the graphics are far better and the gameplay moves surprisingly fast. That’s probably because it was made by Imagic, a developer who actually knew how to make a good game. As the hero Bashful Buford, you climb up a skyscraper four floors at a time and collect hearts being flung by your lady love Tiny Mabel while you chase the gorilla Horrible Hank up to the top floor of the building. Hank also tosses barrels to impede you, and the building is of course being bombarded by bats, birds and rodents, but the game’s controls allow you to move Buford around them much more capably than Mario can. My only real complaint is that the game doesn’t offer any real variety beyond its very repetitive gameplay loop. The higher-up floors aren’t as long as the lower ones, but this doesn’t do much to change the game itself. Frankenstein’s Monster for the Atari 2600 came out in 1983 and was developed by Data Age, and it’s a surprisingly creative take on the Donkey Kong formula, eliminating the rescue aspect entirely and instead focusing on stopping Dr. Frankenstein from bringing his monster to life. I’ll give the game credit for getting the title correct – this is about the monster, not the man – and also for breaking up its gameplay into three horizontal areas that each have some variety. Your character has to climb down from the castle at the top, leap through a pit-filled floor patrolled by tarantulas, head down into a subterranean cave and ride a log across a spider-infested acid lake to retrieve a stone. Yes, this game has two different types of spiders. Don’t overthink it. It totally makes sense. Then, you climb back up, reach the monster, dodge some ghosts and traverse a quick bat-filled room to place your stone in the wall you’re building to close the monster in. And all the while, lightning is striking above on the top third of the screen and the monster will come to life if you take too long. It’s a tense, exciting game that makes great use of its theme. Less impressive is the Atari 2600 game I Want My Mommy, which was also reskinned as Open Sesame with some undecipherable digitized speech added in for good measure. Both of these play like really slow Donkey Kong style games where your goal is to dodge brain dead foes who shuffle back and forth on each stage and reach the top using ladders you built by walking over flickering dots. In I Want My Mommy, you’ll either find an apple or your mother, and in Open Sesame, you reach a cave filled with treasure. Both games are incredibly lazy and barely engaging. The Magnavox Odyssey 2 got its own Donkey Kong clone with Pick Axe Pete! in 1982, and while it looks terrible

46 min
May 28

Season 1, Episode 18 – Why We're Stuck on Platformers, Part 1

In this episode, we’re going to start our discussion about one of the most enduring genres of gaming: the platformer! -------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 18: Why We’re Stuck on Platformers, Part 1 Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review. You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com) And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown! -------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode. Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/) Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you! -------------------------------------------------- SOURCES: https://rhombical.medium.com/to-a-or-not-to-a-the-ontology-of-the-platformer-cb4e1b314066 ------------------------------------------------- EPISODE 18Coming up in this episode – We’re going to begin our look at platform games and try to understand how they evolved into the concept we know and love today. I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for our look at many of the great platform games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! I’m going to start with a simple question: what is a platform game? Because when I was growing up as a young gamer in the 1980s, the term “platformer” wasn’t in common use, at least not right away. The terms appears to have originated in the UK and, according to a well-researched piece on Medium by Davy R. Howard, the earliest mention is probably from the debut issue of Crash Magazine in February, 1984, where it’s used to describe the genre of “Kong games” in the mold of Donkey Kong or Manic Miner where players move between platforms suspended in empty space by either jumping or using ladders. Before we get too excited, that same issue concocted a bunch of other subgenres like “Ghost Gobbling” and “Creepie-Crawlies” that weren’t nearly as prescient. And it took awhile for the “platform games” moniker to catch on as well – you didn’t see it used very commonly in the UK magazines until later in the 1980s. I don’t think I came across the term “platform game” myself until probably the mid-1990s when the genre was in decline, and I at first assumed it was referring to another use of the word platform – the console systems themselves. Since platform games were at that point heavily associated with mascots and with being exclusive to various platforms – Nintendo had Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Country, Sega had Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Sonic the Hedgehog, the TurboGrafx-16 had Bonk’s Adventure, the PlayStation had Crash Bandicoot and the 3DO, at least initially, had Gex – it wasn’t too much of a stretch to presume that the idea of a “platformer” was to represent a console platform and that the other games that were in the same vein earned the title because of what they were imitating. In fact, when you look at the gaming magazines of the 1980s and 90s – and since I grew up in the US, those would have been magazines like Nintendo Power, GamePro, EGM and Diehard GameFan – what you often see these games referred to runs the gamut of terms like action games, jumping games, climbing games, hop and bop games or simply some reference to the game they most resemble – Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. or Sonic the Hedgehog being some of the most popular comparisons for pure platformers and Mega Man, Metroid, Castlevania, Zelda II: Link’s Adventure and Contra being common points of comparison for more action-focused games. Shigeru Miyamoto himself referred to the genre he pretty much created as being a “jump game,” and this makes sense given the fact that all of the Mario games, going back to Donkey Kong itself, are largely about using Mario’s jumping abilities to progress. Super Mario Bros. obviously tuned up Mario’s stiff and predictable jump from his earlier outings so that Mario had a stronger sense of vertical reach, momentum and control whenever he was in the air, but every mainline Mario game, all the way up to Odyssey and Wonder, is built around jumps, and even the Mario sports games and party games and RPGs and tactical strategy games and other offshoots tend to allow Mario to hop around at the very least if he’s a playable character. Of course, we shouldn’t assume things had to be this way. Mario evolved as a character and a concept because that’s what made sense at the time. It’s interesting to think that if Miyamoto had been given the go-ahead to make his planned Popeye game first that platform games might have involved a lot more of a combat focus from the get-go. The basic ideas behind platform games were probably inevitable to some degree, but their distinctive emphasis on running and jumping instead of shooting or stabbing was not a foregone conclusion. In the 1980s and 90s, the terms we use for games today weren’t in any way solidified and many of the more established formats we now recognize arose from either marketing terminology trying to describe games that were going to be available for sale or from the enthusiast gaming press trying to describe games they were previewing or reviewing. Describing something new to someone is much easier if you can evoke a sense of the comparable qualities it has to something else. If you describe Galaga as “Space Invaders, but in space and without shields”, that’s a pretty good explanation of the gameplay if you’re already familiar with Space Invaders. If you describe Dig Dug as “Pac-Man, but with underground digging,” the description misses a lot of the distinctive qualities of Dig Dug and also ignores the fact that you progress by killing enemies, not munching dots, but it’s still a decent enough way of describing a game where you move up, down, left or right in a grid-like world that has the qualities of a maze. And if you describe Super Pitfall as being “Super Mario Bros., but way less polished,” you don’t even need to explain the connection to previous Pitfall games or how the game takes place in a giant cavern instead of interconnected levels. You’ve captured the essential mechanics of the game as well as the quality, and that’s all most people would need to know in order to decide if they want to give it a try. This is one of the reasons why so many of the early descriptions for action games tended to center on the mechanics of what you’re doing. We have maze chase games, we have run and gun games and hack and slash games and beat ‘em up games and fighting games. Scrolling shooters would later receive the shoot ‘em up and cute ‘em up monikers to differentiate them from shooting gallery games and the far more popular Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake-style 3D shooting games, which would eventually become known as first person shooters once people got tired of comparing every new 3D shooter to one of id Software’s standards. Platform games are a little different from other action games in that they tend to be defined not by what you do, but by what you see, and in the 1980s and 90s, comparing single-screen platformers like Donkey Kong, Space Panic or Bubble Bobble to a scrolling screen platformer like Super Mario Bros. or Disney’s DuckTales would have seemed to be a bit of a stretch because these sorts of games felt so different not just mechanically, but also in terms of theme. The simpler games had a very basic story and were largely about clearing screens to progress, but the more complex scrolling titles had worlds to explore, hidden passages to locate, a wider range of actions available and a more compelling adventure to offer. And that word – adventure! – is a really important idea because at their heart, platformers almost always have a theme or a storyline that’s guiding you along. You can play a game like Pac-Man or Dig Dug or Rally-X and never really need to know why you’re doing any of the things you’re doing. Even scrolling shooters in the mold of Scramble or River Raid tended to have only the most basic of justifications for why you needed to destroy your enemies. But if it’s Donkey Kong, you’re Mario the carpenter trying to make your way through a construction site to save Pauline from an escaped gorilla. If it’s Super Mario Bros., you’re Mario the plumber traversing the Mushroom Kingdom to save the Princess from the evil King of the Koopas. And if it’s Donkey Kong Country, you’re Donkey Kong and his friend Diddy Kong trying to reclaim a banana stash from the villainous King K. Rool and his army of Kremlings. This is one of the three hallmarks of a platform game – storytelling! But unlike the adventure games we just spent weeks and weeks talking about, platformers traditionally didn’t use much in-game speech or text to explain what was happening. The story of these 1980s and early 90s games would unfold as you played through the game via visual cues, background occurrences and occasional quick cutscenes, and whether you were Sonic the Hedgehog running towards the increasingly mechanical region where Dr. Robotnik’s lair could be found, Sparkster the Rocket Knight blasting off towards the Devotindos Empire to rescue Princess Sherry and stop the rise of the Pig Star, Bubsy the sarcastic cat setting out to stop the Woolies from stealing all the Earth’s yarn balls, or Kirby the cream puff traversing Dream Land to retrieve the

33 min
May 21

Season 1, Episode 17 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 15

In this episode, we’re going to wind down our discussion of adventure games and talk about where things go from here! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Season 1, Episode 17: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 15 Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review. You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode. Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/) Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you! -------------------------------------------------- EPISODE 17 Coming up in this episode – We’re going to wind down our talk about adventure gaming and discuss where it can go from here and why it’s so important for game developers to continue preserving the legacy of one of gaming’s greatest genres. I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for our final survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! We’ve spent a lot of time talking about adventure games since The Great Game Guide launched at the beginning of this year, and I could definitely keep going for another dozen episodes about all the nooks and crannies of the genre that we’ve missed. But rather than try to be comprehensive, I want to talk about a few more hard-to-define games that are definitely worth your time to check out. Even so, I’m going to keep my descriptions short. And as with some of our previous episodes, I’m also making a list of all the games we won’t get to, which is available in the show notes and the script for this episode at greatestgames.substack.com. Check it out! One that definitely is worthy of starting with is Innersloth’s Henry Stickmin, which began as a series of flash games on Newgrounds but which provided six different adventures with choose-your-own way branching storytelling, often going in wildly different directions. Instead of presenting puzzles, these games present items or options that allow players to determine how the story will proceed or if it will hilariously result in failure. A series in a similar vein is Sos Sosowski’s McPixel, which has more of an 8-bit aesthetic, but forces you to think quickly in a variety of crises to try to find the correct resolution to a problem. Dropsy is another pixel art-style point and click adventure that was created by Jay Tholen under the studio name Tendershoot. Dropsy is an extremely interesting game where you play as a grotesque clown who is trying to cheer people up with hugs and assistance. He’d love nothing more than to just make people smile. The game’s notable for having no words, but a lot of heart. There’s a lot of darkness in the background, but the tone is surprisingly positive, and I cannot recommend this game strongly enough. Similarly, Tendershoot’s later game Hypnospace Outlaw is a love letter to the old Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod home pages of the 1990s, and its adventure involves getting to know its cast of characters through their published online personas. I’ve recommended it before, and I hope you try it out as well! Speaking of the pixel art aesthetic, Ron Gilbert’s Thimbleweed Park, published through his studio Terrible Toybox, is a really great point and click adventure in the style of Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, but with more of an X-Files sort of storyline and a Twin Peaks style of messing with the audience with a really meta undercurrent. There’s also a spin-off freeware game called Delores that offers a different take on the story, but it’s definitely best to save it as an epilogue. Ron Gilbert also made a puzzle-platformer and adventure game called The Cave that is sort of like Trine or The Lost Vikings meets Maniac Mansion with a little bit of Legacy of the Wizard tossed in because you have to switch between characters to solve puzzles, but there are seven total characters in this game and multiple paths and endings to explore. It’s a unique game well worth your time. Dave Lloyd and Powerhoof’s The Drifter is another pixel art-style game you should check out, this time using the story of a murder and a time loop to force you to work through a detailed and interesting conspiracy-filled mystery that really grabs your attention and includes some great characters, puzzles and music. The game also uses an interesting control scheme that allows you to cycle through the hotspots rather than click all over the place. I’m afraid to spoil any more for you; please be sure to try it! Freebird Games’s To the Moon is another adventure that uses a pixel art aesthetic, but it’s rendered in the overhead style of a classic JRPG built in the RPG Maker game engine. There’s no fighting, you don’t have a party and you don’t pick up loot; you simply explore the life of a research subject through memories to understand why he desperately wants to travel to the moon but is feeling held back from his goal. To say more would be to spoil a great story, and the standalone sequel, Finding Paradise, is also excellent. I also recommend A Bird Story and Imposter Factory if you enjoy these, as they’re also connected in what’s more broadly known as the Sigmund Corp. series. A similar game in the same style is Laura Shigihara’s Rakuen, which I’ve recommended before along with its spin-off, Mr. Saito, both of which involve a fantasy world that exists parallel to a real world tragedy. And the darker themes of illness and loss are definitely felt in Numinous Games’s autobiographical adventure game That Dragon, Cancer, one of the most emotionally difficult games I’ve ever come across due to its subject matter of losing a young child to cancer. Those needing a happier game might want to try out Venba, an adventure by Visai Games set in the late 1980s about an Indian family that’s immig rated to Toronto. Venba is the wife in the family and she’s trying to recreate old recipes from her mother’s cookbook, often through trial and error. But the game’s more deeply about family and building connections with those closest to you. I absolutely love how upbeat and fun it is, and the soundtrack’s wonderful! Consume Me is another game about eating, but this one, by developers Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson along with some other collaborators, is a semi-autobiographical story about being an Asian-American teenager and trying to consume a healthy diet in a world full of junk food, calorie counting and an oppressive weight loss goal. It’s actually about more than that, too – a romantic relationship eventually becomes consuming as well, and there are a lot of fun family dynamics. Don’t miss this one. Another game about consuming things, but from a different point of view, is VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action from Sukeban Games, and I’m honestly not sure if we should call it “Valhalla” or just roll with the stylized name. Whatever the case, you play as a bartender named Jill mixing drinks for a lot of different types of people, including some who won’t tell you exactly what they want, requiring you to figure it out for them. The bar’s a bright spot in the midst of a dark and cynical world, and it’s a really interesting experience to play through. Kentucky Route Zero is a very interesting adventure game from Cardboard Computer that was released in five acts between 2013 and 2020. While playing it during that time was a bit of a tease since the content drip took so long between episodes, the current release has the entire story. The game involves a truck driver named Conway who is traveling along Route 65 in Kentucky, but he finds himself on a strange journey full of magical realism. Part of the game also takes place around Mammoth Cave National Park, which is of course the birthplace of adventure gaming. This game’s won tons of awards and deserves to be played, and there are several free interludes and a TV edition of the game that has everything in one place. One other developer I really should have talked about in our last episode is Inkle Studios, which started out in the 2010s making mobile games like Sorcery! and 80 Days before moving into larger titles like Heaven’s Vault, which is a 3D adventure game about archaeology, and A Highland Song, which is an adventure platformer about a Scottish teenager running away from home to visit her uncle and which is of course set to music. Inkle is also known for the games Overboard! and Expelled!, two visual novels done in the style of murder mysteries. In Overboard!, you’re trying to keep people from discovering that your character, the starlet Veronica Villensey, murdered her husband aboard a cruise ship. Before you judge her too harshly, he is a total jerk, but Veronica’s also really bad at covering her tracks, which means the game is more often than not about trial and error. Expelled! is very much in the same vein, except this time, you’re a student in 1922 at a boarding school called Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Young Girls who’s being framed for murder… well, attempted murder, anyhow. How you respond to those charges is up to you! Both of these games are hysterical and really great adventure games. Check them out! One final studio I want to menti

50 min
May 9

Season 1, Episode 16 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 14

In this episode, we’re going to talk about attempts to grow and evolve the genre of adventure gaming in the 21st century through who brought the point and click adventure back to life thanks to an indie game boom, digital distribution platforms and a project originally known as the Double Fine Adventure! -------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 16: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 14 Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com) And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown! -------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/) Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you! -------------------------------------------------- SOURCES: Shardlight mini-adventures: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/1704/ https://indiegamebundle.fandom.com/wiki/Humble_Bundle#2021 The Double Fine Adventure Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVwg-9WL3dE Cressup interview with Jakub Dvorsky of Amanita Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7RAcmLn5N4 https://web.archive.org/web/20101208183108/http://machinarium.net/blog/2010/08/05/machinarium-pirate-amnesty/ Dave Gilbert reviews 5 Days a Stranger: https://web.archive.org/web/20061210235634/http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id%2C699/ https://crystalshard.net/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/80310/discussions/0/3800527029416506681/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120606195617/http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17627 http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/games.htm ------------------------------------------------- EPISODE 16 Coming up in this episode – We’re going to talk about how point and click adventure games made a resurgence in the 2010s thanks in part to the interest in a Kickstarter campaign for Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Adventure. But Double Fine Productions wasn’t the only one making adventure games, and we have folks like AGD Interactive, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and others to thank for keeping the genre going! We’re going to talk about all of them, and many more, today! I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! If you ask an adventure game fan who the greatest adventure game creators of all time are, you’re very likely to hear a handful of names including Roberta Williams, Jane Jensen, Al Lowe, Josh Mandel, the Two Guys from Andromeda Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, Lori and Corey Cole, Muriel Tramis, Steve Meretzky, Brian Moriarty, Dave Grossman and Ron Gilbert. But if you ask the average gamer, you’re likely to hear another name adventure gamers will also be likely to mention – Tim Schafer. And this is really interesting because Tim Schafer is one of the few adventure game creators who is not only associated with some of the greatest adventure games of the 1990s – namely, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle as well as the incredible Grim Fandango – but also a game developer who’s managed to stay current in his role as the founder and studio head at Double Fine Productions, a game developer and publisher he founded over 25 years ago that’s now owned by Xbox Game Studios. Double Fine is not an adventure game company, and aside from a few notable titles like the action adventure series Psychonauts and Ron Gilbert’s 2013 action platformer puzzler The Cave, they’re mostly known for wildly experimental ideas that tend to be classified as “indie games” due to their scope, size and low prices. The two most recent games, 2025’s Keeper and 2026’s Kiln, are both tremendously original; Keeper has you playing as a lighthouse walking around a desolate 3D world, and Kiln is a 3D arena brawling game where you create your own pottery and smash other players. Double Fine is also known for the heavy metal album cover-themed action brawler and strategy game Brutal Legend, the trick or treating RPG series known as Costume Quest, the fascinating alternate reality mobile trench warfare game Iron Brigade and the lovely and completely original matryoshka doll 3D action adventure Stacking. And though Tim Schafer played more of a studio advisor role than a creator role for most of these titles, it’s clear that one of the reasons he’s so well known is because he’s transcended what a game developer is – he’s become something of a father figure in gaming, using his foundation as one of the great game creators of the 1990s to bring out the creativity in his younger teams and really champion making video games feel fresh and new. All of this context might help explain why it was Double Fine Productions who helped to bring point and click adventure gaming back into the mainstream, and they accomplished it with a Kickstarter campaign in 2012 that was initially supposed to result in a small digital indie game known as “The Double Fine Adventure” but which was so popular and successful in concept that it was eventually released as a two-part adventure game in 2014 and 2015 called Broken Age starring Elijah Wood, Masasa Moyo, Pendelton Ward, Wil Wheaton, Jack Black, Richard Horvitz, Jennifer Hale, Nick Jameson and Nicki Rapp among many other talented voice actors. We know more about the development of Broken Age than probably any other adventure game ever created because part of the Kickstarter pitch to backers was that a documentary film studio called 2 Player Productions would chronicle the entire development cycle. This makes a little more sense when you understand that the documentary Indie Game: The Movie debuted in 2012 and game developers Edmund McMillen, Tommy Refenes, Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow became minor celebrities because of it – though Phil Fish, sadly, was probably harmed more than helped by the exposure when a corner of the internet gaming community turned on him. Tim Schafer clearly felt it was a good idea to give his own development team a shot at fame, and 2 Player Productions wound up releasing a 12 and half hour documentary series you can watch in its entirety on YouTube to see, warts and all, how the game was actually made. And I should be clear in saying that Broken Age was not really deserving of this amount of scrutiny, because it’s a really average adventure game that was quite disappointing to many of the game’s backers, myself included. It’s not a game you’ll see referenced much today despite its extremely high profile a decade ago, and that’s primarily because its longer-lasting influence is more about what it did for adventure gaming and the Kickstarter ecosystem – bringing in over 60,000 new users and establishing a very engaged community willing to back other well-known adventure game creators who were bringing back classic genres or franchises – than what it accomplished as a game itself. The premise of Broken Age is that you play as two teenagers who are living very different lives but who share a similar ambition to break free of the fates that have been assigned to them. One of them is Shay Volta, the sole human on an AI-powered starship that has two personalities – the sun-shaped MOM system, which is active during the ship’s daytime hours and which smothers Shay like a helicopter parent, and the moon-shaped DAD system, which is active during the ship’s nighttime hours and who’s distant and doesn’t provide much guidance. MOM has made the place so pitifully safe that everything’s made of yarn and Shay’s activities are always situations where he succeeds and is treated like a hero and given ice cream as a reward. But he’s also really bored, and so Shay gets excited when he discovers a stowaway named Marek that looks like a wolf and who convinces him that his AI parents have been lying to him. Instead of the Superman-like journey he believes he’s on to find a new world after his old one was destroyed, he’s actually aboard a ship capable of saving cute, oppressed space aliens in need of his help if he acts outside the supervision of the computer. And yet it becomes clear to Shay that Marek is also not trustworthy when Shay’s repeated attempts to save a particular alien creature result in Marek growing increasing desperate for him to stop… and the ship is damaged in the process. The other is Vella Tartine, who lives in a place called the Badlands where she’s being prepared, along with other fourteen-year-old girls, to be a sacrifice for the vicious giant brain-like creature Mog Chothra, which will destroy the town’s dam if it’s not appeased with a steady supply of maidens. Vella survives her fate and resolves to kill Mog Chothra, and part of her quest involves meeting an adult man character named Alex who looks a lot like Shay and who’s living on a crashed starship that looks a lot like Shay’s. He pledges to help her by blasting the beast with his ship’s laser. So, you’d expect that we’re going to discover that these two characters’ stories take place in different times and that Alex is Shay, but nope – the twist ending to Act I is when Shay emerges from the wreckage of Mog Chothra and meets Vella on the beach… and as she takes a swing at him, she falls into Shay’s computer-contr

57 min
Apr 27

Season 1, Episode 15 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 13

In this episode, we’re going to talk about attempts to grow and evolve the genre of adventure gaming in the 21st century through publishers such as Telltale Games and genres like walking simulators! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Season 1, Episode 15: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 13 Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com) And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode. Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/) Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you! -------------------------------------------------- SOURCES: https://www.ign.com/articles/how-hidden-nazi-symbols-were-the-tip-of-a-toxic-iceberg-at-life-is-strange-developer-deck-nine https://www.eurogamer.net/tales-from-the-borderlands-sales-werent-great ------------------------------------------------- Coming up in this episode – We’re going to focus our attention on Telltale Games and also at the first-person genre of adventure games we now know as Walking Simulators as we look at how 21st century game developers attempted to use more modern game development philosophies to grow and evolve the adventure game genre! I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! In our previous episode, we talked about many of the efforts in Europe to keep adventure gaming going by either moving into 3D or continuing on with point and click development. But Telltale Games was one of the few standard-bearers in North America in the 2010s willing to try to not just bring the genre back, but make it relevant again, and it’s not surprising that they had a huge influence on adventure gaming despite ultimately having to close their doors a decade and a half after they started. The studio was founded by Kevin Bruner, Dan Connors and Troy Molander, all of whom had worked at LucasArts and seen the hand writing on the wall after the cancellation of Full Throttle 2 and Sam & Max: Freelance Police, two sequels that had been in production following the release of Escape From Monkey Island but which certainly weren’t going to pull in the Star Wars-style sales figures LucasArts had grown accustomed to. And that sort of fulfilled an old prophecy George Lucas supposedly had offered to the LucasFilm Games staff back in the 1980s when he’d held back the Star Wars license for precisely that reason – back then, he’d wanted his studio to create new things, not become the house of Star Wars games. Once LucasArts turned to the Dark Side and started making more money on their crummiest Star Wars games than they could have with their best adventure games, it was too late. And so Telltale Games embarked on a mission to do something LucasArts wouldn’t – make a new Sam & Max game. Creator Steve Purcell was onboard, but the license LucasArts owned to Purcell’s intellectual property had to expire first. While Telltale waited, they built a 3D adventure game engine called the Telltale Tool and start honing their craft on the casual game Telltale Texas Hold’em, several CSI games created for Ubisoft, and two episodic mini-adventures based on Jeff Smith’s Bone comics: Out From Boneville and The Great Cow Race. Both Bone games were point and click adventures rendered in 3D, and both also included voice acting and reasonably close adaptations of the source material, though I’m not the biggest fan of every choice they made for the character voices. Gran’ma Ben in particular just doesn’t sound right. Telltale also established a formula with these games that would become synonymous with their style – offering small environments and fairly easy puzzles so the games could instead focus on storytelling and progression. Each Telltale adventure includes dialogue that gives the illusion of choice but doesn’t really change that much based on the actions you take or the decisions you make. In later Telltale adventures, the game would sometimes tell you, “This character will remember that,” but often, the impact on the story would be very small. In the Bone games, choice is even less of a factor because the game sticks so closely to the comics; what you have instead are some selectable dialogue exchanges that put everything into a question and answer format and then minigames that pad the gameplay and interactivity out a bit. It’s fine, but it also makes them even less replayable than most adventure games because there’s really nothing new to see once you’re done. And that was a major criticism of both Bone games – they were short, expensive and not exactly a revolution in adventure gaming. Now, I’d like to pause here and say if you’ve never read the Bone comics series, it’s one of the all-time great independent black & white comics and it’s absolutely worth your time and trouble to track down, especially in the colorized Scholastic editions. It’s sort of like the newspaper comics page by way of J.R.R. Tolkien, but it’s truly an original story with fantastic characters, a really gripping overarching plot and plenty of moments of comic relief. My biggest disappointment in Telltale’s adaptation of the Bone series is that they didn’t stick with it. The initial plan was to release five chapters over a season, but with middling reviews, poor sales, limited awareness of the license and the urge to get things going on Sam & Max, Telltale didn’t have much reason to continue. So, here’s what happened instead. Telltale Games recruited several ex-LucasArts developers who’d been working on the Sam & Max sequel there and began adapting the IP to a six-episode format known as Sam & Max: Season One designed and written by Brendan Q. Ferguson, Dave Grossman, Jeff Lester, Chuck Jordan, Heather Logas and, of course, the series creator Steve Purcell himself. Everything had to be distinct from the cancelled LucasArts sequel, so entirely new characters and plots had to be created. But Telltale needed funding for the game, and so they turned to the subscription service GameTap, which provided funding and promotion in exchange for launching each episode of the game on its service before general release. The first two episodes launched in late 2006 for Windows, with the other five coming during the first four months of 2007. Eventually, it also made it to the Wii and Xbox 360 and was retitled Sam & Max Save the World. Telltale also released fifteen machinima shorts built in the game engine featuring Sam and Max getting up to mischief between episodes. This was back before YouTube was a big thing, by the way, so online video shorts featuring game characters were still something of a novelty, especially when they were made by the publisher. Steve Purcell additionally released a series of twelve comic strips called Sam & Max: The Big Sleep that were so well received he won an Eisner Award for them in 2007 for Best Digital Comic. While Sam & Max was a hit among the fanbase, the game was more of a slow burn among the general public, in part because PC gaming was going through a weird transition during that time and in part because Telltale self-published the game digitally and was primarily relying on word of mouth and GameTap to promote the game. Though Sam & Max Season One was available on Steam in mid-2007, that platform still hadn’t taken off yet as a popular way to buy games, and while the game got a collector’s edition physical release through Telltale and a retail release through The Adventure Company, that didn’t mean much during a time when PC gaming was largely seen as dying and many retailers were shrinking their PC gaming sections down to bestsellers or dropping PC games altogether. Another problem with Sam & Max Season One is that Telltale Games hadn’t quite figured out how to make their episodic format feel substantial. The first three chapters, “Culture Shock,” “Situation: Comedy” and “The Mole, the Mob and the Meatball” are wildly uneven, and the third one in particular is probably the worst chapter in the entire series. On the other hand, “Abe Lincoln Must Die!” is tremendously funny and was even released as a solo standalone free download for those wanting to try the series out, and “Reality 2.0” evokes the original Sam & Max: Hit the Road’s VR sequence and also introduces the support group for outdated electronics known as the Computer Obsolescence Prevention Society, or C.O.P.S., who even have a great motivational song about how they aren’t useless despite the fact that yeah, they kind are. Well, maybe not the arcade game Bluster Blaster, but he still comes on a bit strong. The final chapter, “Bright Side of the Moon” not only references one of the great Sam & Max comics but also feels like a fitting end as the duo takes on the season’s big bad, the ultra-annoying Emetics founder Hugh Bliss. Oh, and did I mention Max becomes president of the United States along the way and that the duo’s famous DeSoto becomes a presidential car for the final two episodes? Or that there’s a text adventure game to play through at one point? Or that there’s a mecha-Abraham Lincoln who goes on a rampage? Or that there’s a

54 min
Apr 20

Season 1, Episode 14 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 12

In this episode, we’re going to talk about adventure gaming in the 2000s as European game development studios and licensed games based on television shows and IPs aimed at girls largely took over the genre and kept the flames burning! Join us on this journey through games you’ve may have loved, some you may have heard of and some you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Season 1, Episode 13: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 11 Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review. You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com) And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode. Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/) Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you! -------------------------------------------------- Season 1, Episode 14: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 12Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!-------------------------------------------------- SOURCES: https://lilura1.blogspot.com/2024/03/German-Computer-Games-Late-1980s-Early-1990s.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160527110729/http://www.gamona.de/games/the-whispered-world,vieles-im-adventuregenre-laeuft-falsch-der-edna-entwickler:article,1499346.html ------------------------------------------------- EPISODE 14Coming up in this episode – We’re going to talk about adventure gaming in the 2000s during those dark ages when the genre supposedly died and yet adventure games kept appearing on the shelves somehow thanks to a number of European developers and publishers and licensed games. We’re going to talk about Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, the Syberia games, Post Mortem, Still Life, Nancy Drew, Gray Matter, Ankh , the Black Mirror Trilogy, Runaway: A Twist of Fate, Index+’s Dracula: Resurrection series, Daedalic Entertainment and more! I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! So, adventure gaming died in 2005, or so you might have thought if you were there at the time, because many gaming publications were not only decrying the end of one of PC gaming’s biggest showcase genres, but also PC gaming in general as MMORPGs looked like they were going to take over everything that console gaming hadn’t already. Granted, there were still new adventure games coming out pretty consistently throughout the aughties, that period between 2000-2009, but you know how the games industry is – if it’s not a major title with a AAA marketing budget or some runaway sales success, no one really thinks that much about it. And that was very much the case for some of the games we’re going to talk about in this episode, many of which were far from obscure and some of which even received console ports! But most of these games have one big thing in common – they came from developers and publishers in Europe rather than North America, and even when they did have a big name attached like Sierra’s Jane Jensen, they tended not to attract a lot of attention. One of those games that flew under the radar in North America, but was quite popular in Europe, was Microids and Virtual Studio’s Amerzone: The Explorer's Legacy. And if you’re thinking, “Hey, didn’t that just come out last year?” the answer is yes, the from the ground-up remake of it did. But the original debuted in 1999 and the reason you probably wouldn’t have heard of it then if you were in North America is because it didn’t make it out until 2001 here through DreamCatcher Interactive, a Canadian publisher that served a very specific niche of adventure gamers in the late 1990s and early 2000s before it got acquired by the European publisher JoWooD Entertainment in 2007. DreamCatcher also founded an imprint called The Adventure Company in 2002, and it was through this it released the far more famous series that followed Amerzone, Syberia, which we’ll cover in a moment. Both Amerzone and Syberia were written, directed and designed by the comic book artist Benoit Sokal, by the way, and Amerzone is specifically based on a story in a series he authored in the 1980s called Inspector Canardo. The fifth volume, L’Amerzone, debuted in 1986, and the English translation for the title is The Kingdom of White Birds. I honestly didn’t know any of that before researching this game, and I certainly never would have known it from the game, because Inspector Canardo is a duck with a giant yellow bill who hangs around with non-human characters. But the game itself only involves human characters and portrays the world in a mixture of FMV and 360 degree pre-rendered Myst-style first person exploration sequences, some of which include some light animation. It’s a good-looking game for its time, but it’s a bit of a slow burn that didn’t appeal to those beyond the Myst lovers. I’m not sure if the remake fixes this problem, but based on what I’ve seen, it’s a pretty faithful recreation, and the bulk of the effort seems to be on bringing the graphics into a full 3D world. The Syberia games are also by Benoit Sokal and are set in the same universe as Amerzone, but they’re point and click 3D adventure games that star Kate Walker, a lawyer from America who’s involved in overseeing a corporate acquisition that goes awry when the owner of the company, Anna Voralberg, dies and reveals just before she passes that her estranged brother Hans is still alive and will inherit the company. A good chunk of the first game involves Kate’s journeys across Europe with her animatronic ally Oscar, who drives a clockwork locomotive. After a bunch of things happen, Kate finds Hans Voralberg and decides to abandon her old life to help him on his quest to venture into the realm of Syberia – that’s spelled with a Y, by the way – on his quest to find the last living prehistoric mammoths and a lost civilization called the Youkols. Honestly, I sort of hate this ending because it suggests that everything you’ve done up to this point is largely unimportant. Kate’s abandonment of her life in New York feels low-stakes and the game’s gone out of its way to suggest everyone she knows back at home is a jerk anyway. Clearly, this game’s about the feels through its gorgeous artwork and neat designs, but the sense of wonder the first game tries to inspire in the adventure ahead also falls sort of flat with me because I’m not as fascinated by mammoths as the game wants me to be, and this is coming from someone who’s taken his family to see actual mammoth and mastodon skeletons at several museums, including the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. The second game, released in 2004, finishes Hans’s story and is worth playing if you enjoy the first game. But the third one, released fifteen years later in 2017, is the very definition of inessential and is generally considered a major misstep due to a plodding story, grating voice acting, lousy controls and a poor release state that made reviewers all too aware of the game’s many flaws. It also has a really aggravating cliffhanger ending. The 2022 follow-up Syberia: The World Before tries to reconcile this by being both a prequel and provide a resolution to Kate Waller’s storyline, and while it’s a far better game than Syberia 3, it also is hopefully the last one since Benoit Sokal passed away during its development and, quite honestly, the story doesn’t have anywhere to go from here. If I sound like I’m not a huge fan of the series… well, I’m really not. The Syberia games are very pretty and emotional, but they’re also really slow and kind of dull, benefitting more from the fact that they were some of the only adventure games available during the 2000s rather than the fact that they were particularly good at providing an adventure worth experiencing. I feel like their popularity had a lot to do with the fact that the first two were also eventually available on console systems, mobile devices and handhelds. Play them if you love beautiful graphics and steampunkish qualities, but I really don’t recommend them to people who don’t have a lot of patience and a desire to see the slow-moving story through. And I’m at odds with some genre fans in saying this – a lot of people regard the original Syberia as being one of the all-time great ad

1h 8m
Apr 13

Season 1, Episode 13 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 11

In this episode, we’re going to talk about visual novels, that particularly Japanese style of adventure game that also led to dating sims, murder mysteries and more! Join us on this journey through games you’ve may have loved, some you may have heard of and some you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Season 1, Episode 13: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 11 Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review. You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com) And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode. Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/) Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you! -------------------------------------------------- SOURCES: “What is a Visual Novel?” academic paper - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3474712 https://danganronpa.fandom.com/wiki/DISTRUST https://otomekitten.com/glossary/ https://princessmaker.fandom.com/wiki/Father_Marriage_Ending_(PM2) https://www.eurogamer.net/unfinished-symphony-castlevanias-keeper-speaks https://www.famitsu.com/news/201506/29081240.html https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/projectbook/koei/3 ------------------------------------------------- Coming up in this episode – We’re going to talk about console and handheld visual novel-style adventure games and the shaping influence they had on the adventure gaming genre as they also evolved into other types of games such as murder mysteries, dating sims and more! I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! In our last episode, I talked a little bit about the visual novel genre as we discussed Capcom’s Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, which debuted outside of Japan in 2005 on the Nintendo DS. I know it was the first game I ever really played in that style, and it honestly took me by surprise because I had no idea it was part of a much longer tradition of visual novels in Japan. And I want to say right off the bat that the term visual novel is loaded because it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. The purest definition of a visual novel is a game in which the story is being told to the player with little deviation beyond perhaps some choice mechanics that have a bearing on where the story goes or how characters respond. Some visual novels are pure stories. Some allow you to choose your own path through branching stories. Some involve romance which are also known as nakige or “crying games”, and some are adult eroge that have sex and nudity in them. Some are detective stories. Some include other styles of gameplay that might be part of a visual novel include role-playing, horror, strategy, puzzle-solving or minigames. An academic article from 2021 titled “What is a Visual Novel?” by Janelynn Camingue, Elin Carstensdottir, & Edward F. Melcer examined 30 different definitions and 54 visual novels and attempted to craft a unified definition. Here it is: A Visual Novel (VN) is a digital narrative focused game that requires interactions where the player must be able to impact the story world or the story’s progression. The story and interactions are most commonly presented through a text box and often employ additional forms of interaction including menu choices—which often contain sets of actions that the player character can perform—or dialogue options representing the player character’s speech or thoughts. Crucially, VNs have On-Click Progression, where the player clicks, taps or presses a button to see the next part of the story. The aesthetics of VNs are most often conveyed through static images of characters, background art, sound effects (SFX) feedback, and soundtracks. Whew! That’s a mouthful. So for our purposes, we’re going to look at visual novels in three particular styles: storyline adventures, detective adventures and dating simulators. And if a game or series hasn’t received a major release outside of Japan, I’m not going to provide much detail beyond a quick namecheck. There’s another problem, too – I really can’t tell you what the first visual novel is. Some of the earliest proto-visual novels include Enix’s 1987 science fiction game Jesus, Hideo Kojima’s 1988 game Snatcher and System Sacom’s 1988 game DOME, which was part of its Novel Ware series. What most people seem to agree established the format more or less the way we see to it today is Chunsoft’s Sound Novel series, which began in 1992 with studio founder Koichi Nakamura’s Otogirisō. Chunsoft, if you are not aware, has long been the co-developer the Dragon Quest games along with Enix, so this completely tracks. Chunsoft’s 1994 murder mystery game Banshee’s Last Cry and 1998 day in the life of eight characters game Machi followed in the same vein. But remember how I mentioned before that many Japanese publishers tended to make adult-oriented eroge adventure games? Well, another studio named Leaf formed in 1995 and created a four-part “Leaf Visual Novel Series” starting in 1996 that included Shizuku, Kizuato, To Heart and the later Routes. Each of these was definitely geared towards a mature audience and Kizuato in particular is shockingly dark and violent. To Heart became the foundation for a popular series that spun off into anime, manga and audio dramas. Also in 1996, a studio called ELF, best known for eroge adventure games like the Dragon Knight series and the Dōkyūsei dating sims, released a landmark science fiction visual novel called YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World that apparently featured such a compelling story that it was ported to the Saturn and Windows without the sex. I have not played it myself, but it was localized by Spike Chunsoft in 2019 for Windows and modern consoles, and it’s also been adapted as a manga and anime OVA. Yet another eroge studio released a visual novel in 1997, and this one, a horror game this time, was called Moon – not to be confused with the game Moon: Remix RPG Adventure that we just discussed! While the name of the developer was Tactics, the team behind it jumped ship the next year to create the developer known as Key, which would go on to create 1999’s romantic games Kanon and 2000’s Air, both of which received sanitized releases after their initial adult versions shipped. Key went on to create the all-ages 2004 game Clannad, and it’s for this game we should pause and take a closer look, because Clannad is widely considered to be one of the best visual novels ever created. The word Clannad is derived from the name of an Irish band that performed as a family known as the Clann of Dore, or Clannad for short, which caused the game’s writer to think the word meant “family.” And family is a major theme in the game’s story. The game tells the story of a high school student named Tomoya Okazaki who begins the game in a toxic relationship with his abusive father following the passing of his mother. He meets a sickly girl named Nagisa Furukawa who is quite socially awkward and who is trying to restart the school’s drama club. Tomoya helps her and meets the four other girls who star in the game. This is the meat of the game, where you can pick different paths and explore the first half of the game, the School Arc, a fairly well-written social sim with some good character stories. If you enjoyed the social links in the Persona games, you’ll enjoy Clannad’s first half. One of the main objectives involves collecting items called “Orbs of Light,” and as you do so, you can unlock the second part of the game, the “After Story.” And here’s the twist – the game shifts into the future where Tomoya and Nagisa are married, and what occurs in that future is one of the most emotionally affecting stories you’ll ever experience in a video game. Beyond the events that occur, you keep seeing glimpses of this place called the Illusory World, a realm Tomoya sees in visions that is inhabited by a lone girl and where he is a wandering spirit. This world has a spiritual and psychological connection to his story in the real one, and in order to see the game’s true ending, Tomoya has to come to understand its significance and collect the remaining Orbs of Light. Clannad is a very long game – easily 40-50 hours long due to the need to complete every facet of the School Arc and then made longer by the need to replay the After Story to achieve the true ending. If you don’t want to bother with that sort of commitment, there’s an anime TV series from 2007-2009 that covers both arcs over 47 episodes and two OVAs. It’s well-regarded and worth watching even if you like the game, though some folks really seem to hate the particularly large and widely spaced eyes Nagisa and the other female characters have. Key went on to create a long series of visual novels after Clannad, and their most recent one, the all-ages adventure Anemoi, actually comes out this month in Japan and centers around a man and his sister returning to their childhood home in rural Japan for the reopening of a time capsule buried ten years ago. Another studio known for visual novels was KID, a video game develo

47 min
Apr 6

Season 1, Episode 12 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 10

In this episode, we’re going to talk about console and handheld adventure games from the 1980s, 90s and 2000s that often offered players a different style of gameplay, but still had those puzzle-solving story-driven sensibilities. Join us on this journey through games you’ve may have loved, some you may have heard of and some you’ve probably never played with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Season 1, Episode 12: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 10 Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review. You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com) And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode. Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/) Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you! -------------------------------------------------- SOURCES: https://www.avclub.com/easter-eggs-the-hidden-secrets-of-videogames https://www.pcgamer.com/80s-adventure-game-onry-senki-took-horror-gaming-in-a-slower-spookier-direction/ http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/d/ https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/917844-d/80392231 (Archive of http://www.1up.com/features/kenji-eno-breaks-silence.html) “What is a Visual Novel?” academic paper - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3474712 ------------------------------------------------- EPISODE 12Coming up in this episode – We’re going to talk about console and handheld adventure games from the 1980s, 90s and 2000s including a deeper look at a few great titles and an overview of how the genre was shaped by the Japanese adventure game scene! I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed! In 1980, Atari released a game for its Virtual Console System, later known as the Atari 2600, called Adventure. The game was originally intended to be a graphical adaptation of the mainframe Adventure that took place in the Colossal Cave by Will Crowther and Don Woods, but designer Warren Robinett ran into a few problems as he was designing the game. First of all, the console system didn’t have anywhere near the memory that a mainframe computer had, which meant that the game needed to be designed using some very clever techniques designed to maximize the limited available space. Second, the game’s graphical output was very limited in terms of how it displayed environments, items, characters and enemies. And finally, the game had to be designed to work with a single-button joystick rather than a keyboard that could accept more sophisticated text input. Robinett worked on the game for a year while a disbelieving management team tried to discourage him from continuing the project. It went on to be a million-seller for Atari, providing a surprisingly sophisticated fantasy gaming experience for the era and allowing players to explore a thirty-room kingdom, locate items within castles and battle dragons. Oh, and get pestered by a very annoying bat. It was a groundbreaking game in 1980, but today, Adventure is more famous for something else – being the first game to contain an “Easter Egg” due to a secret room Robinett hid in the game with a simple credit of himself as the game’s author. The reason he had to hide it at all was because Atari’s President, Ray Kassar, believed programmers were prima donnas and he didn’t want them to receive public credit for their work, both because they were not paid well and because it would make it easier for competitors to poach them. But the hidden room made it in to the final build, and Atari didn’t even know it existed until players started writing in inquiring about it. According to Steve Wright, who was the manager of the Atari Home video game department at the time, Atari’s management wanted to remove the code for future printings of the game, but he persuaded them that not only would it cost too much to do so, but that gamers would love finding “Easter eggs” like this in their games. It was a metaphor that stuck, and Wright started insisting that every game include something like this, leading to several games at least including the developers’ initials. Adventure is now famous not just for being one of the great Atari 2600 games, but also for establishing the idea of a game developer receiving credit in a home console game. But by the time the game had shipped, Warren Robinett had moved on to co-found The Learning Company, and the basic ideas and mechanics he’d developed for Adventure went on to shape some of their graphical edutainment computer games including Rocky’s Boots, Think Quick! and the surprisingly sophisticated programming adventure Robot Odyssey. His ideas also shaped a few Atari 2600 games like the Swordquest series and Haunted House, and also 1979’s Superman, which shipped before Adventure and which was built by John Dunn using some of Robinett’s ideas. But in the wake of the 1983 market crash and the death of the second-generation consoles, adventure gaming on console games transitioned away from Robinett’s style and largely began either adapting the Japanese style popularized by Yuji Horii’s 1983 game The Portopia Serial Murder Case, the Filmation style popularized by Ultimate Play the Game’s 1983 isometric adventure Knight Lore or the point and click style of computer adventure games like Uninvited, Shadowgate and Déjà Vu as well as Maniac Mansion and King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!, all of which, by the way, got actual ports to the NES. So did Princess Tomato and the Salad Kingdom, a Hudson Soft adventure originally released for home computers in Japan, and also a remake of a 1986 Nihon Falcom computer adventure role-playing game called Taiyo no Shinden: Asteka II that was localized for the NES in North America as 1988’s Tombs & Treasure. But the NES also got a few original adventure games of its own. One of these is Beam Software’s Nightshade, a 1992 release that’s an honest to goodness point and click adventure with some light combat. Like a lot of adventure games, it’s lighthearted, and the premise is that Metro City’s superhero has been dispatched and a supervillain named Sutekh unites all the criminal gangs under his banner. A trenchcoat and trilby hat-wearing vigilante in sunglasses named Mark who prefers to go by the name Nightshade (but is sometimes called “Lampshade” or “Nightcart” by the denizens of Metro City) decides to take on Sutekh and the four criminal gangs under his control, but he has to solve a number of puzzles to do so. It’s a fascinating game that definitely has become a cult classic over time, but which was almost entirely ignored when it first debuted. Today, it’s far easier to play since you can use save states; the original game had to be completed in a single sitting. The 1989 NES game Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is also an adventure game, though not a very good one. As Eddie Valiant and Roger Rabbit, you search around Hollywood, Toontown and the surrounding areas for pieces of Marvin Acme’s will. You also have to talk to characters you run into on the street or in buildings and search for items and joke punchlines, the latter of which Roger uses to get out of trouble when Judge Doom’s weasels catch up with him. The game looks great – it was made by Rare for publisher LJN Toys, and it honestly has a lot of good ideas in it, but as an adventure game, it’s boring and repetitive and doesn’t make enough use of the movie’s incredible ideas. I also consider David Crane’s 1989 NES game A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia an adventure game because it involves exploring a Pitfall II-style world and making use of your blob pal Blobert, who can transform into different things when you feed him various flavors of jellybeans. There’s a puzzle solving aspect to this because you have to deduce the right transformations needed to overcome different challenges that you face and also do a little bit of lateral thinking to understand how the jellybean flavors correspond to Blobert’s powers. The punch jellybean, for example, turns Blobert into a hole because it plays into the phrase “hole punch.” The ketchup-flavored jellybean will make Blobert catch up with you. And the Licorice jellybean turns Blobert into a ladder because… um, they both start with L? Codemasters also released a 1992 game for its Aladdin modular cartridge system on the NES called Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade, and while it’s a point and click adventure and platformer hybrid, I can’t recommend it as more than a curiosity. Beyond all of these, a couple of action games infused the Japanese menu-driven style of adventure gaming in some interesting ways. One of those games is Dr. Chaos, which is part Castlevania-style platformer in a haunted house and which turns into a point and click first-person adventure game when you enter rooms. And on the Sega Master System, there’s Spellcaster, a localized port of a game based on the Peacock King manga that starts out as an action sidescroller set in Japanese mythology but turns into a first-person adventure game halfway through. You might get the sense that adventure games just weren’t very popular on console systems,

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Sean J. Jordan
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The Great Game Guide

The Great Game Guide

Season 1, Episode 19 – Why We're Stuck on Platformers, Part 2

Season 1, Episode 18 – Why We're Stuck on Platformers, Part 1

Season 1, Episode 17 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 15

Season 1, Episode 16 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 14

Season 1, Episode 15 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 13

Season 1, Episode 14 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 12

Season 1, Episode 13 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 11

Season 1, Episode 12 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 10

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The Great Game Guide

Episodes

Season 1, Episode 19 – Why We're Stuck on Platformers, Part 2

Season 1, Episode 18 – Why We're Stuck on Platformers, Part 1

Season 1, Episode 17 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 15

Season 1, Episode 16 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 14

Season 1, Episode 15 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 13

Season 1, Episode 14 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 12

Season 1, Episode 13 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 11

Season 1, Episode 12 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 10

About

Information