Defining graphic adventure games: Puzzles

In my attempt to give you a better understanding of this specific game genre I need to list one more time the main components of the graphic adventure game: Puzzles, Exploration and Narration. It doesn’t mean that all these component should be equally proportioned to produce the core of the game, but it does mean that at least all of them should participate in this production.

Let`s take a closer look at all of these important components. 

Puzzles

Solving puzzles is mainly the most popular challenge and interaction in the graphic adventure games. Without this element the genre will give a feeling of watching a not-very-interactive movie, e.g., «Gone Home». Puzzles are stopping the players from a quick run through the game story. There a doz­ens of different puzzles, some are suited well to the story of the game, some are not. We could classify them in for big categories.

Inventory puzzles: Collecting items and using them to solve puzzle is one of the most famous puzzle methods, not only in the graphic adventure games, but also in some other game genres, such as platformers, action games and others. They could be as simple as using the item on another game object in the environment, or complex that forces you to collect multiple items and combine them before use.

Dialogue-based puzzles: Such puzzles use the interaction between the char­acters to accumulate clues about how to solve puzzles. Often the player needs to find the right way of getting this information, that´s why interroga­tion is a frequent guest in the graphic adventure games.

Environmental puzzles: Analyzing the information from the game environ­ment is also used in many graphic adventure games, especially point’n’click adventures. Usually this puzzle method leads to a “pixel hunting” (a process of clicking with mouse cursor all over the screen with the purpose to find the unnoticed objects).

Non-contextual logic puzzles: This method is usually not connected to the game story, serving mainly as a cerebral interlude. It could be a chess or Tic-Tac-Toe game. There are a lot of casual graphic adventure games that use this method as the basis for its gameplay.

Sometimes the puzzles are too unique to group them into those categories. «Loom» uses sound to produce clues for the players.