[francoisblavoet]

Some gems of adventure games are among my all time favorite games and I revisit them once every couple of years but I still have to admit that the genre is almost always broken.

Adventure games very often rely on puzzles based on lateral thinking, it makes a lot of sense on paper in order to entertain the player and make him feel smart but I can't remember how many times I thought up a good lateral thinking solution, just to be thwarted by the game. It was just not the solution the designers expected, and the game does not even bother explaining why and push the player in the right direction.

Not to mention frantic pixel hunting & obscure death conditions forcing you to check a walkthrough.

Having a player die in an action game usually means that he will need to replay the last segment. It is a bit bothering if it happens too often, but these action sequences are why the player is here and with good emergent gameplay playing twice the same sequence can turn out very differently and be extremely entertaining.

In an adventure game, it just means that you will have to listen again to the same dialogues, and make the exact same actions, with just a slightly different step somewhere along the way.