The Best Point-And-Click Adventures Of The 21st Century

Dave Gilbert, as Wadjet Eye, has been at the forefront of the PnC adventure game scene throughout the 21st century. Since his debut short, The Shivah, Gilbert and his frequent collaborator, artist Ben Chandler, have demonstrated a skill for classic adventuring with excellent storytelling. His Blackwell series of ghostly detective games are a huge pleasure, as are so many of the games the company has published over the years. But the standout among a very impressive collection is Unavowed, a deep and involving story of a team who control the demonic activity within New York City.

As well as being just a great adventure game, Unavowed goes a massive step further, embracing the conceit of BioWare’s party-based RPGs, in which the characters you take with you affect how the game is experienced. The result is, depending upon the buddies you choose, puzzles are solved in entirely different ways, and the story is uniquely told. On top of that, your own character can have three different career paths, each with a unique opening chapter, and then determining how you can solve puzzles throughout.

It’s a modern classic, and let it be known that releasing in 2018, it was named before this year’s great action-RPG Avowed was even a twinkle in Obsidian’s eye.

Honestly, my hopes were not high for Return to Monkey Island. Of course the first three games are stone-cold genre classics, but the fourth was disliked, and while Telltale’s Tales of Monkey Island games had their fans, I think looking back most can accept they’re firmly in the territory of “meh.”

Then, there was that whole Kickstarter thing in the early 2010s. Every single retired adventure developer remerged from their caves to make a new game, and god, they were all awful. Jane Jensen’s execrable Moebius: Empire Rising, Al Lowe’s disappointing Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded, and the Space Quest guys taking half a million bucks to spend a decade making the completely broken and still unfinished SpaceVenture.

So when it was announced that original creator Ron Gilbert and original designer Dave Grossman were reuniting for a new Monkey Island, yeah, I worried. But goodness gracious, that’s a lot of build up to tell you it’s completely wonderful.

Rather than rely on nostalgia, Return to Monkey Island makes the stunning choice to not repeat any of the series’ catchphrases (there’s no insult swordfighting, no second biggest anythings), instead coming up with a swathe of new, excellently funny ideas of its own. It looks and sounds gorgeous, is laugh-out-loud funny throughout, and has an ending that’s as poignant as it is divisive.

What a completely marvellous treat.

This Southern Gothic piece of magical realism felt like it sprang from nowhere, with the confidence and talent of a team that had been making games for decades. And yet, it was a first-time project from a tiny team, with the writing and code by one person.

Set in a dystopian Louisiana, Norco casts you as Kay, returning to her childhood town and home after her mother dies of cancer. Her brother is missing, although that’s not especially surprising, and there’s a sentient robot in the backyard that shouldn’t be there.

But, despite that setup, this is a very lowkey, very recognizable world, where the real danger is melancholy. There’s this creeping sense that things are far more wrong than they appear, expertly delivered through its beautiful art and exquisite writing. Norco has some of the best writing I’ve ever seen in a game, absolutely stunning prose in even the most throwaway descriptions.

This is the sort of game that I wish the broader critical industry would play, to get an understanding of how sophisticated a medium gaming can be, to understand its unique abilities in storytelling. You should play it, too!

I’ve recently been replaying the entire Rusty Lake franchise from the start, beginning with the incredible Cube Escape series, and then the larger PC/mobile adventure games, Rusty Lakes Hotel, Roots, and Paradise. I’m right near the end of Paradise right now, looking forward to returning to The White Door, Samsara Room, The Past Within, and Underground Blossom. And yet, despite this incredible run of ten years of fantastic, creepy, near-inexplicable adventure games, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it.

Unashamedly inspired by David Lynch (occasionally going a bit too far, literally quoting from Twin Peaks), these games all focus on the titular lake, and the few buildings that are built on its banks and islands. The games follow multiple generations of a couple of families, each haunted by the same creatures—Mr. Owl and Mr. Crow—who seek to extract memories from the dead, so they can be returned to the lake. Each was originally the patriarch of one of the families, and seemingly responsible for the “corrupted souls” that feature in every game.

I’m writing all that with an unearned confidence, given it’s so incredibly hard to entirely follow—trying to maintain the Rusty Lake narrative is like grabbing at smoke. What we know for sure is not to trust the owls, and that there will be blood.

The Cube Escape games are essentially escape room games, elevated by their surrealism and faintly interconnected storyline. The cubes are a vital part of every game in the series, the black cubes made from painful memories, the white from positive. The very rare blue cubes can travel through time, while the golden cubes are a combination of all three, and despite appearing in three of the games so far, have an unknown purpose. These all appear in the full-length games too, which are more traditional PnC adventures, albeit ones where you might not entirely know who it is you’re playing, when and where you are, and why that man with the stag skull for a head is suddenly staring at you through that window.

What a beautiful piece of art Unforeseen Incidents is. It’s just so fantastically drawn, animated, colored, lit... And then on top of that, it’s a brilliant adventure game, and a very funny one.

That last aspect is more surprising, given this is about the spreading of a deadly new plague that causes people to bleed out of their eyes, nose, and mouth, and one handyman’s attempts to stop it. (It’s worth noting this came out in 2018, a couple of years before new plagues felt like less of a hilarious subject.)

Part of the secret behind Unforeseen Incidents’ brilliance, on top of being a stunningly well-made adventure game packed with great puzzles, is that its  translation from German to English was handled by British comedian Alasdair Beckett-King, with the freedom to rewrite as he saw fit. Beckett-King, as well as being a successful stand-up and television star, is no stranger to adventure games—he made the adorable Nelly Cootalot games, which themselves are hilarious. And the result is perfect.

It’s fair to say that a lot of German adventures lose a lot in translation, often receiving very literal language swaps, which leaves a lot of the humor behind. That problem is eliminated here, with a wealth of wonderful one-liners added to an already very funny story. That’s made even better when you notice that the game’s characters aren’t clumsy stereotypes, and there’s a complete lack of exploiting vulnerable characters to solve puzzles: instead, here you help people who deserve it, in a very progressive tale.

This is a lovely, long game, with excellent voice acting, consistently laugh-out-loud writing, and a sense of wholesomeness that isn’t even vaguely twee.

Amanita Design have been making stunning point-and-click adventures for over 20 years, knocking it out of the park straight away with 2003's surreal, adorable mini-adventure Samorost. The studio’s combination of collage art and adorable animation was immediately enticing, given further life through the frequent use of mouth-made sound effects on top of scores by musician Floex (Tomáš Dvořák).

The developer is responsible for so many fantastic games, including the insect-filled Botanicula; one of the funniest games ever, Chuchel; and peculiar puzzle-cum-adventures like Pilgrims and Creaks. But it’s perhaps Machinarium that cemented the studio’s reputation.

This wordless point-and-click adventure, with a heavy emphasis on puzzles, is about helping a robot called Josef. Dumped on a scrapheap, you help the little tin man to return to the city and attempt to prevent a plot by some evil robots who want to blow up the city tower, all while looking to reunite with his girlfriend Berta.

There’s no dialogue at all here, neither written nor spoken, the game instead using pictograms to communicate. This immediately gives the Czech game an international understanding, and 4 million sales for a self-funded tiny team is proof of just how accessible and adorable it is.

Size Five Games, consisting of Dan Marshall and Ben Ward, have made three Ben and Dan games, but the third—the magnificent Lair of the Clockwork God—doesn’t quite qualify here for its excellent combination of PnC and platforming. But play it too. They’re all wonderful.

Being defiantly British in their humor many years before the arrival of Thank Goodness You’re Here, both games break almost every rule of what’s acceptable in a modern point-and-click adventure. Utterly verboten are LucasArts’ games references and self-aware jokes about being a game, and yet, they’re hilarious.

Based loosely on the developers, the two protagonists make you immediately feel like you’re part of the in-jokes of their deep friendship, as they set off to try to fix the antenna on their TV so they can watch Magnum P.I. This, as you’d expect, causes them to become abducted by aliens, and travel to all manner of universes. That’s the first game, Ben There, Dan That! (the obnoxious exclamation point insisted upon), which was released in 2008 for free. It’s now bundled with Time Gentlemen, Please!, and the two games make a perfect pairing.

In TGP, the pair continue on from the previous adventure, accidentally killing everyone in the world by making them watch a Magnum P.I. marathon. So obviously it’s time for time travel to try to put this right, while also battling the efforts of their evil future selves, and accidentally giving Hitler access to dinosaurs. Yeah, that sort of stuff.

As “wacky” as it all sounds, it’s all extraordinarily funny, the writing piling excellent jokes on top of one another while spoofing the genre, itself, themselves, you, pretty much everything. They’re two of the funniest games you can hope to find.

Don’t get upset, you’re perfectly welcome to substitute any of the Telltale series you prefer into this slot. You can even have the Walking Dead games if you want, even if they’re not really point-and-click adventures, but rather choose-your-own-adventures and actually rather overrated. Or put in The Wolf Among Us given that it’s brilliant. I’ve picked Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People because I’m so incredibly fond of both Homestar Runner and Mike Stemmle.

Telltale’s episodic adventures were always hit-and-miss—the atrocious first couple of Sam & Max games before the developer finally found its feet with the fantastic The Devil’s Playhouse) or the openly dreadful Puzzle Agent representing the nadir—but when everything fell into place, they could be a joy. The five Strong Bad games represent this for me perfectly.

Homestar Runner had pretty much wound down by this point, the Brothers Chaps (Matt Chapman and Mike Chapman) having stopped making weekly cartoons on the site, so seeing them writing for this run of daft adventures set in the cartoon series’ world was already a great pleasure. Then, Telltale brought Mike Stemmle on board, one half of the dream-team of adventure writers that brought us Sam & Max: Hit the Road in 1993. And the results are hilarious, with really decent puzzles.

The five games are just what you could want them to be: like being able to fully interact with a Homestar Runner cartoon, replete with all the running jokes including Teen Girl Squad, Trogdor, 20X6, and the arcade minigames of revered ‘80s developers Videlectrix. (I once was lucky enough to interview them!)

If you’re not already a Strong Bad fan, then yes, admittedly, this is somewhat impenetrable. But then, if you’re not already a Strong Bad fan, that’s a personal failing that you would do well to correct as soon as possible.

We already covered Ron Gilbert’s triumphant return to the Monkey Island franchise, but before that, he was keeping his hand in the industry he helped define with Thimbleweed Park.

Teaming up with fellow LucasArts alumni, artist and animator Gary Winnick, this was one of the few adventure game Kickstarter campaigns that resulted in something wonderful. Thimbleweed Park is a game that deliberately looks like Gilbert and Winnick’s first project, 1987's Maniac Mansion. As such, it used the SCUMM engine games’ verb system, letting you choose words with which to interact with the world from the bottom third of the screen.

In a perhaps belated X-Files spoof, you play as two FBI agents, Angela Ray and Antonio Reyes, along with three other characters as the game goes on. Much as with Maniac Mansion, much of the puzzle solving involved combining the abilities and actions of multiple characters as you investigate a series of murders in the town of Thimbleweed Park.

It’s very funny, as you’d expect. It’s also a huge game! While you might often feel like you’re drowning in nostalgia, it still manages to be a very contemporary game, too, even if it’s a little too self-referential. And remember, there’s nothing wrong with using hints—it’s how we all did it back in the day.

Kathy Rain, by Swedish developers Clifftop Games, is a glorious example of a straightforward, unembellished point-and-click adventure, not needing to add any fancy new bells or whistles but instead delivering a rock-solid storyline with fantastic voice acting and a pile of great puzzles to solve along the way.

Kathy Rain is a college student, dragged back to her hometown after the death of her grandfather in 1995. She had a complicated relationship with him and her surviving grandmother, adopted by them when her own parents proved unable or unwilling to raise her, but always resenting them in the way a mixed-up kid will. Heading back to Conwell Springs and seeing her loving grandmother again for the first time in years obviously dredges this all up—even more so when she learns that the police never properly investigated an accident that had happened to her grandfather, leaving him in a permanent vegetative state many years earlier.

What follows is an untangling of mysteries that might be supernatural, or just very natural, and not knowing which is very much part of enjoying the game.

An awful lot of the games listed in this article are running on the same engine: Adventure Game Studio. There’s a reason for this: the open-source project by Chris Jones is designed to replicate the sorts of adventure games that were popular in the 1990s, while letting developers take any graphical approach they wish. Kathy Rain combines some stunning rendered art with traditional pixel work, but with a level of detail that still blows my mind. That was all boosted even further when the game received a Director’s Cut in 2021 that extended the story, added new puzzles, and made the art even more impressive.

Clifftop also made the excellent Whispers of a Machine which also deserves a place on this list (I recently replayed both, and they are just so good), and are now working on a sequel to Kathy Rain in which the grumpy protagonist is now a failing private detective.

Wow, 2022 was a great year for adventure games! Not only was there the previously mentioned Return to Monkey Island and Norco, but also One Dreamer, Nightmare Frames, and The Plague Doctor of Wippra. And, oh my goodness, the utterly wonderful Perfect Tides.

Meredith Gran’s semi-autobiographical tale of being a teenager at the turn of the millennium, the early days of the home internet, is absolutely spellbinding, and that’s without aliens, spaceships or mysterious hauntings. It’s a game about being on the cusp of maturity, of wanting to be seen as an adult but finding safety in the trappings of childhood. And it’s a game about the fractious nature of teenager and parent relationships throughout this time. Protagonist Mara’s father died a couple of years previously, and her family is living in the wake of this grief.

What makes this so fascinating is we’re assumed to be perceiving Mara’s teenage behavior through adult eyes, able to see the glaring, horrible, heartbreaking bad assumptions she’s making, while being utterly sympathetic with her for making such mistakes. Her inability to recognize her mother’s personal grief, and to instead interpret it through childish self-absorption and solipsism, is the most utterly honest storytelling I can remember.

But, importantly, it’s not a gloomy game! It’s also about taking the first adult steps of rebelling, of first tastes of alcohol and first parties, and the decisions you make are never portrayed puritanically. Mara’s internal tumult is the story here, in beautiful, frustrating, and heartbreaking ways. We see her responses as melodrama, but we also understand that for her, this is her real life, occupying all her emotions.

I cannot express how wonderful this game is, and my subsequent joy that a sequel is being worked on.

A fantastic example of British folklore, where bucolic rural villages hide dark secrets, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow demonstrates how the point-and-click adventure is so ideally suited for telling quiet, subtle stories.

Arriving in the tiny village of Bewlay, Thomasina Bateman is an explorer of ancient burial grounds and intends to excavate Hob’s Barrow. It’s perhaps the late 19th century and Bateman is made to feel unwelcome almost immediately, the locals very against some outsider poking around.

The game has the vibes of the best British ‘70s gentle horror, those Hammer movies that were more about atmosphere than lurching monsters, most especially the vibes of The Wicker Man. There’s a huge emphasis on getting to know the people of the village, exploring their lives and backgrounds, and in turn, Thomasina’s own, while a calm rumble of brooding danger underlies it all.

This is a game published by the aforementioned Wadjet Eye, and Gilbert is responsible for the game’s voice direction (always a welcome credit, shared by Kathy Rain), and does a spectacular job. This is a fantastic cast, and a brilliant ensemble performance.

This is a piece of pastoral perfection, delivering an affecting and meaningful story as only an adventure game can.

When people get nostalgic about adventures games, the focus tends to fall on 1993 onward. Mice were now ubiquitous on PC (it’s very easy to forget they weren’t always the default, and even games like Doom were designed to be played keyboard only!), and even LucasArts dropped the verb system by the release of Sam & Max. At this point, they were games played with a mouse cursor alone, albeit one that switched between many modes for more interesting interaction.

But before even clickable verbs were text parsers. Sierra Online—the publisher that must receive the credit for properly popularizing the genre—originally created adventures in which interaction was performed by typing instructions into a pop-up box. “LOOK AT BOX,” “PICK UP LADDER,” “POO ON FLOOR,” and so on. (The latter got a response weirdly often in Sierra games!) This was an evolution from the same instructions being typed into text adventures, and game series like Police Quest, King’s Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry all started out this way. Today, however, while many of the modern games in this list are designed to hark back to previous decades, almost none return to the parser. Until 2024's The Crimson Diamond.

Set in 1914, it finds Nancy Maple traveling to a small Canadian town called Crimson, sent by her boss to investigate the discovery of a large diamond. However, this soon develops into a full-fledged murder mystery, full of twists and turns, and all controlled not only by pointing and clicking, but also through the extraordinary number of ways the game adapts to what you choose to type in.

This is the work of one developer, Julia Minamata, and it’s an incredible feat. The EGA-style graphics make it feel extremely nostalgic, while the phenomenal parser makes sure you know this is a huge step forward from the games of the 1980s. It’s so splendid that games like this can still be made, and indeed find a wide, enthusiastic audience. You should join them!

Updated: 04/03/2025, 12:29 p.m. ET: Added Unforeseen Incidents, which was the game that originally inspired me to write this entire article.

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