Text and Point and Click Adventure Games

Text adventures were a staple of the gaming environment during the the 80's on the Commodore 64 and Spectrum systems. Text adventures told stories that placed the player at the centre of the narrative, with their choices affecting the outcome. Some of the most popular games of this type during this era were The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and The Hobbit, which cast the player into the roles of Arthur Dent and Bilbo Baggins respectively and told the stories of these novels in an interesting (and quite humorous, in the case of the former) way and Zork. Text adventures are known for their systems of control as being a command prompt in which the player gets a brief description of their surroundings and directions they can travel in, as well as  any important items in the location they are in, the player then types in basic commands such as "go north", "pick up x item", "use x item", "talk to x character" etc. These games featured the same kind of intricate mapping as a Choose Your Own Adventure book in their design and had sometimes had several different ways to reach the goal, although most of the time, they were somewhat a more linear experience.

Text adventures were notorious for their command prompt system, which caused their players no end of frustration due to the limited amount of commands the game understood.

Certain text adventures, like H2G2 were known for their devilish difficulty level or even the expectation that the player had prior knowledge of the narrative before playing the text adventure, as sometimes the information the player needed to finish the game was within the novel the game was based upon. Often, text adventures would have the player picking up all sorts of items and then trying (often in vain) to combine the item with something else to unlock the next area of the game.

A typical screen from a point and click, we can see the common commands that were synonymous with the text adventure here represented as buttons on the left of the user interface and an inventory panel to the right.

With advances in computer technology and what computer games were capable of, text adventures sort of evolved into point and click adventures (if not evolved then they were at least the spiritual successor) which worked in a similar way, but instead of text descriptions of the players surroundings, the game had complete a complete (animated) visual image of the game world. They had some similar mechanics as the text adventure, as players would need to collect all sorts of junk from around the game world to see if it worked when combined with any other object in the environment. Point and Click adventures had their golden age during the early years of PC gaming and were amongst some of the best games of their era, Lucasarts was famed during this time for producing the very best of the point and click adventures in the form of the Monkey Island Series, Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max, which all featured expansive game worlds and fully voiced dialogue.

So, the text adventure and point and click kind of died a death in the late 90's with the birth of modern games consoles and the endless first person shooters that today's gaming market is known for. Although, there may be some light at the end of the tunnel with this, as Telltale Studios' The Walking Dead, which is, at it's core, a point and click adventure, has received great accolades from critics and players alike receiving both an 82% from critics and an 8/10 from players on the Metacritic website.

Having played through each episode of the Walking Dead i can safely say that it is one of the better narrative's of the current game generation, it features believable characters who go through all sorts of development over the five episode plot arc and you really grow attached to the protagonist and his friends by the end of it all. It has a vast array of player choice, with at least one important event in each chapter which affects the outcome of the game, and it manages to do this without seeming clunky, each time you play, you are playing through the same linear story, but subtle differences occur depending on the decisions your character makes. This game has the classic point and click style as well as the morality systems modern RPG's are famed for, and it doesn't make you feel like a bad person with your decisions like the "black and white" morality of most games as each decision seems to take on a more greyish hue than the simplistic "good" or "bad" decisions one can make in other RPGs. Maybe I'm heaping the praise onto this game too much, but I really think that is is just that good.