Story, setting, and themes

Adventure games are single-player experiences that are largely story-driven.^[22] More than any other genre, adventure games depend upon their story and setting to create a compelling single-player experience.^[1] They are typically set in an immersive environment, often a fantasy world,^[6][9] and try to vary the setting from chapter to chapter to add novelty and interest to the experience.^[1] Comedy is a common theme, and games often script comedic responses when players attempt actions or combinations that are "ridiculous or impossible".^[1]
Since adventure games are driven by storytelling, character development usually follows literary conventions of personal and emotional growth, rather than new powers or abilities that affect gameplay.^[1] The player often embarks upon a quest,^[10] or is required to unravel a mystery or situation about which little is known.^[8] These types of mysterious stories allow designers to get around what Ernest Adams calls the "Problem of Amnesia", where the player controls the protagonist but must start the game without their knowledge and experience.^[23] Story-events typically unfold as the player completes new challenges or puzzles, but in order to make such storytelling less mechanical new elements in the story may also be triggered by player movement.^[1]

Dialogue and Conversation Trees

Adventure games have strong storylines with significant dialog, and sometimes make effective use of recorded dialog or narration from voice actors.^[1] This genre of game is known for representing dialog as a conversation tree.^[24] Players are able to engage a non-player character by choosing a line of pre-written dialog from a menu, which triggers a response from the game character. These conversations are often designed as a tree structure, with players deciding between each branch of dialog to pursue.^[1] However, there are always a finite number of branches to pursue, and some adventure games devolve into selecting each option one-by-one.^[25] Conversing with characters can reveal clues about how to solve puzzles, including hints about what that character would want before they will cooperate with the player.^[1] Other conversations will have far-reaching consequences, such as deciding to disclose a valuable secret that has been entrusted to the player.^[1] Characters may also be convinced to reveal their own secrets, either through conversation or by giving them something that will benefit them.^{[citation needed]}

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]

Text adventure

Text adventures, also known as Interactive Fiction, convey the game's story through passages of text, revealed to the player in response to typed instructions. Early text adventures, such as Adventure, "Hugo's House of Horrors" and Scott Adams' games, used a simple verb-noun parser to interpret these instructions, allowing the player to interact with objects at a basic level, for example by typing "get key" or "open door". Later text adventures, and modern interactive fiction, can interpret far more complex sentences like "take the key which is on the desk, then open the door".

Graphic adventure

Graphic adventures are adventure games that use graphics to convey the environment to the player. Games under the graphic adventure banner may have a variety of input types, from text parsers to touch screen interfaces.^{[citation needed]} Point-and-click adventures are a common type of graphic adventure in which the player uses a pointer, typically a mouse, to interact with the environment and solve puzzles. This input method remains popular in the genre, and is well-suited to interaction with the environment, as opposed to direct control schemes which emphasize character control.^{[citation needed]}
Graphic adventure games will vary in how they present the avatar. Some games will utilize a first-person or third-person perspective where the camera follows the player's movements, whereas many adventure games use a context-sensitive camera that is positioned to show off each location to the best effect.^[1]

Puzzle adventure

Puzzle adventures are adventure games that put a strong emphasis on puzzle solving, at the expense of elements such as item gathering, item use, character interaction, or plot. Instead, they typically emphasize exploration and deciphering the proper use of complex mechanisms, often resembling Rube Goldberg machines.
The plot of these games can be obscure, and may be conveyed only through interaction with the puzzles. Many puzzle adventures are played from a first person perspective with the player "moving" between still pre-rendered 3D images, sometimes combined with short animations or video. Examples of the genre include Schizm, Atlantis: The Lost Tales, Riddle of the Sphinx, Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, and Myst, which pioneered this game style.
One kind of puzzle adventure is the Escape the room sub-genre, consisting of short games where the sole object is to find a way to escape from a room. These games are typically implemented in a graphic point-and-click style, which (owing to their popularity on the Internet) are often delivered in Adobe Flash format. Examples of the sub-genre include Submachine-series, Mystery of time and space and Crimson room.

Visual novel

A visual novel (ビジュアルノベル, bijuaru noberu^?) is an adventure game featuring mostly static graphics, usually with anime-style art. As the name might suggest, they resemble mixed-media novels or tableau vivant stage plays. Visual novels are especially prevalent in Japan, where they make up nearly 70% of PC games released.^[4] They are rarely produced for video game consoles, but the more popular games are sometimes ported to systems such as the Dreamcast or the PlayStation 2. The market for visual novels outside of East Asia, however, is limited.
Visual novels overlap with Japanese adventure games in many ways, including a menu-based interface for all navigation and interaction, reminiscent of ICOM games. Japanese adventure games very seldom feature on-screen avatars or inventory based puzzles in general, and visual novels have an even further diminished emphasis on puzzles, or indeed gameplay. Instead these titles are driven by narrative, focusing almost exclusively on character interaction, in a structure similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure story.
Visual novels frequently feature romantic storylines in which the main character may end up with one of several possible mates. This premise is similar to dating sims, but they are distinct from them in that they lack stats-based sim elements in which the player builds up his character, instead relying on simple choices of dialog, actions, or navigation.
Visual novels have been a staple of PC software sales in Japan and other East Asian countries for over a decade, so much so that popular titles are open ported to consoles, and some even have famous manga and anime series based upon them; such titles include Kanon (1999), Air (2000) and Clannad (2004) by Key; Rumbling Hearts (2001) and School Days (2005) by Age; Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (2002) by 07th Expansion; and Fate/stay night (2004) by Type-Moon.
Visual novels are sometimes called "dating sims" in the West, because many visual novels track statistics that the player must build in order to advance the plot. This is also because many visual novels permit a variety of endings, allowing more dynamic reactions to the player's actions than a typical linear adventure plot. The cultural differences between Western and Japanese adventure games are closely related to those in role-playing games, such as a heavier emphasis on tightly-scripted storylines and character interactions in the latter.
A popular subgenre of visual novels is the "crying game" (nakige). The main purpose of such a game is to make the player feel for the characters and make them cry due to emotional scenarios which serves to leave a bigger impact on the player after the game is over. These games often follow a similar formula: a comedic first half with a heart-warming romantic middle followed by a tragic separation and finally (though not always) an emotional reunion. This subgenre originated from the companies Leaf, Tactics and Key.^[29] One of the most acclaimed visual novels of this subgenre was Key's Clannad, released in 2005, with a story revolving around the central theme of the value of having a family.^[30] It was voted the best bishōjo game of all time in a poll held by Dengeki G's Magazine.^[31]
Non-linear branching storylines are a common trend in visual novels, which frequently use multiple branching storylines to achieve multiple different endings, allowing non-linear freedom of choice along the way. Decision points within a visual novel often present players with the option of altering the course of events during the game, leading to many different possible outcomes.^[32][33] A recent acclaimed example is 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, where nearly every action and dialogue choice can lead to entirely new branching paths and endings. Each path only reveals certain aspects of the overall storyline and it is only after uncovering all the possible different paths and outcomes through multiple playthroughs that everything comes together to form a coherent well-written story.^[34]