What makes a great adventure game?
Lots of games use the adventure label, but it’s quite rare that they make me feel adventurous.
I mean Spider Man from 2019 uses it, I would not think of that as going on an adventure - he’s an athlete police, doing his job. It seems like any game where you move between various locations or do something that’s not mundane could use this word. Which is basically everything.
I’m mostly disappointed when I look for actual adventure games.
Uncharted fits the aesthetics of an adventure, but it doesn’t capture the feelings of one. To me Uncharted is more like running through corridors, a movie with playable action scenes and puzzles. A Mission Impossible game would probably be identical, and it would be pretty strange to slap an adventure tag on that.
When I was younger I used to go adventuring a lot. I followed an abandoned railway alone in the middle of the night (and freaked out and called mom). I explored Thief Mountain countless times with my friends, partially inspired by rumors about some boys from my school who had found a flintlock pistol there, but we were mostly there to skim along the cliffs and to look for caves.
Few games feel like that.
According to my extensive thinking, there are a couple key aspects that add up to make what I consider to be a great adventure game. Where it really feels as if I’m going on an adventure.
They can be divided into two categories.
Inhabiting the space, and 2. Being thrown into stuff.
Let’s explore them.
1. Inhabiting the space
You wouldn’t feel like you are somewhere unless the world actually breaths a bit. This can be done by tossing in animals and giving the world a sense of believability (world building). Those are important, but I’m not gonna go into that here.
I prefer to focus on the tinier things, the stuff that’s easy to overlook.
Tall grass and wet mush
When I walk I mostly look at the ground. The ground holds everything together, so it shouldn’t be overlooked.
You know what really makes you feel like an adventurer? To walk in tall grass. The way the grass and the feet of the adventurer meet is key to a great adventure feeling. Bonus points if the grass bends.
Running across a grassy field is a very different type of fun compared to trudging through deep mud. Show the contrast between areas. Every game probably has ground, yet we rarely notice it.
Carrying something
We’re X-foragers, our instincts are always trying to find something useful when we’re in a game. You don’t want your game to feel empty like a parking lot. There’s nothing to find there. Except for coins, but they are so rare.
I need to be able to collect stuff. Fish, bugs, minerals.
Food is very important, in fantasy stories the main character always has a loaf of bread and a piece of cheese wrapped in a cloth. I want that too. A bag is the home of an adventurer. It’s the only constant source of safety during the adventure. Bonus points if there are frying pans hanging from it.
The bigger the bag is, the better.
But it doesn’t always have to be a bag, it could also be a sword on the back. Or the weight of the world on your shoulders. As long as you’re carrying something.
2. Being thrown into stuff
Situations, it’s all about situations.
Life constantly throws stuff at us, in games it’s important to try to make sure the things that are thrown at us doesn’t always kill us, there are way more memorable things that could happen.
Here are a couple different types of situations.
Unfortunate events
I will always remember when I played Red Dead Redemption 2 and I accidentally smashed my horse into a rock in the middle of the desert. The horse was suffering on the ground, I didn’t know how to save it. So I decided to put it out of its misery. I took the saddle off it and slowly wandered with it through the desert. I felt like a struggling, lonesome cowboy in that moment. (like a Lord Huron song)
I think of unfortunate events as the opposite of death in video games. Death is just the final resort that you go to when you can’t think of any other way to make the chain of events more exciting.
The way the systems in that scenario overlapped made the magic of adventure happen. Here are a couple different parts at play in adventure games.
Animals
Weather
Enemies
Terrain
Time
Distance
There are probably more. But just take a moment to reflect on how these parts could interact with each other in fun ways…
Down-time
Imagine if you could just teleport from island to island in Wind Waker. It would be a pretty lame game if you removed the travel between the islands. It makes the world real and ties everything together.
Most games start to lose their sense of believability once you’ve come far enough to fast travel around the whole map. You spend more time looking at loading screens and ticking off quests than letting your curiosity guide you. The chances of getting into situations drastically decrease.
Good downtime makes the world feel real.
Conclusion
It’s quite unclear what exactly defines an adventure in real life. If you ask me, the stuff I described above gets pretty close to the feeling. But there’s a final piece, and that’s the feeling of treading into the unknown. I don’t feel like that in any Spiderman game, it’s the middle of New York. There’s nothing unknown about it.
Up until this point you could have said that I was maybe just talking about open world games. But I’m not. An open world doesn’t automatically = adventure. Maybe there could be a sub-genre within adventure games called “true adventure.”
To round this off, here’s a couple games I consider to be true adventure games. Feel free to send me recommendations if you have any! My email is indianajonas42@gmail.com.
True Adventure Games
Zelda: Breath Of The Wild
Zelda: Wind Waker
Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
Death Stranding
Red Dead Redemption 2
Outward
Sable
Sludge Life
No Man’s Sky
Minecraft
Skyrim
