THE Adventure/Point-and-Click/Puzzle games thread

For fellow adventure, point-and-click, and puzzle gamers, I hope to create a list of high-quality adventure games, deals, etc. Let's start off with my highly-recommended list, please feel free to add your own suggestions (I'll update accordingly), deals and bundles, and criticism.

High-quality, lengthy adventure games (tried and tested for your convenience):

Deponia ( Deponia for download $19.99 - GOG.com)
Loved this game, so funny and exciting! There's also a sequel, also very highly rated, but while I have bought it, I haven't had a chance to play yet. Can't wait!

Monkey Island...Entire Series Recommended ( Monkey Island: Special Edition Bundle on Steam Tales of Monkey Island for download $34.99 - GOG.com)
Played though the entire series, and don't know anybody who hasn't enjoyed it.

Simon the Sorcerer - 1 and 2 ONLY ( Simon the Sorcerer for download $5.99 - GOG.com)
After the sequel, things really went downhill. I wouldn't recommend 4 or 5 to anybody, and I have played them...

Machinarium ( Machinarium: Collector's Edition for download $9.99 - GOG.com)
Highly recommended, cute and quirky characters and art. It's very puzzle heavy, so if you're more into adventure stories than puzzles, I would steer clear. Not nearly as puzzle heavy as Myst though (sorry Myst fans...)

The Walking Dead - LESS THAN $5 ( https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly)
Very heavy on the story, and as somebody who HATES how developers try to implement storytelling in modern games, this is a really refreshing change. Very enjoyable, and fun to re-play!


Other adventure games:

Sam & Max Series ( Sam & Max: Season One on Steam)
This is a cute series, but the small locale leaves puzzle-solvers a bit underwhelmed. It's pretty simple to figure out what you're supposed to use on which screen and with what, not exactly rocket science, but not un-fun.

The Logenst Journey ( Longest Journey, The for download $9.99 - GOG.com)
The title doesn't mince words...it's really long. And so is the dialogue. I couldn't really get into it, as it didn't execute the storytelling aspect as well as the Walking Dead would do...it felt like "The Sims" meets "Myst"...

 

I played the newest Sherlock Holmes game recently, that was fun:
The Testament of Sherlock Holmes/

This one is also a classic:
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis/

I bought this but have not had the chance to play it much yet, what I did play I liked:
The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav

 

I'm currently playing Telltale's Back to the Future series, which I got for a couple bucks on GOG back a while, but it's very light on puzzles and really underwhelming in general. The Walking Dead is on my list and in my Steam library and I'm hopeful after hearing good things about it. I'm still not so sure about Telltale - the first two Sam and Max seasons were great, but it's been a slow downward trend since then.

I've also dabbled with Myst V a bit. With the caveat that I haven't played the other games in a long time, it doesn't impress as much as Myst, Riven, Myst III, Myst IV, or URU. I'm still trying to figure out a couple mechanics, though, and there's some promise for good puzzling once the tablet mechanic comes into fruitition later in the game.

Botanicula is my girlfriend's favorite computer game (not a lot of competition, to be fair). Another one from the developers of Machinarium, it's a step back towards the free flash game style they started off with, but it's beautiful and it's impossible not to be happy when you play it.

The Longest Journey, mentioned above, is indeed a very long adventure game with very long dialogue, but it's definitely rewarding for point and click fans - it's considered one of the greatest for a reason. Its successor, Dreamfall, has much better graphics and a bit more interactivity as you actually run around a 3D world rather than just clicking around. As an adventure game, it's not as good as its predecessor but definitely solid.

Often mentioned in the same breath as those two are Syberia and Syberia 2. Skip them; they offer some nice eye candy ala scenery and cutscenes (much of which looks horrible on modern resolutions, but I digress), but the puzzling is both obnoxiously-easy and horribly frustrating. Easy because it's almost always "get key, put key in lock" or "exhaust dialog options with character X" or a combination of the two. Frustrating because it takes forever to get from one place to another and there's a ton of back-and-forth. If you're not entirely certain where the key is located or which character's dialog needs to be re-exhausted you can spend 45 minutes watching your character walk slowly from screen to screen without making any progress whatsoever. Storywise, they're cute but also very hackneyed.

The toughest thing about remaining excited about point-and-click adventure games is that there's so little innovation in the field. There's only so much you can do with the genre without really pushing boundaries of interactivity, and once those boundaries have been pushed so far (see Penumbra/Amnesia) it's not really a point-and-click anymore. That's not to say that I've given up on the genre - I still play new examples as well as returning to the classics - but I'm far more impressed with a game like Amnesia that takes point-and-click and makes it into something bigger and better than I am with a game like The Whispered World that rehashes old tropes through a dozen or so hours of often-illogical puzzle solving in order to tell a melodramatic and hardly-subtle story.