Goals, success and failure

The primary goal in adventure games is the completion of the assigned quest.^[26] Early adventure games often had high scores and some, such as Zork, also assigned the player a rank, a text description based on their score.^[27] High scores provide the player with a secondary goal,^[26] and serve as an indicator of progression.^[27] While high scores are now less common, external reward systems such as Xbox Live's Achievements perform a similar role.^{[citation needed]}
The primary failure condition in adventure games, inherited from more action-oriented games, is player death. Without the clearly identified enemies of other genres, its inclusion in adventure games is controversial, and many developers now either avoid it or take extra steps to foreshadow death.^[1] Some early adventure games trapped the players in unwinnable situations without ending the game. Infocom's text adventure The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been criticized for a scenario where failing to pick up a pile of junk mail at the beginning of the game prevented the player, much later, from completing the game.^[28]