This is a followup to @[email protected] ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
HZD. Got it as people were raving about how great it was and I thought the dinos seemed neat. Then got to the point where the game open up and how much of an arrow sponge the bigger ones are, tried to see if I was doing something wrong and then realised that it was actually intended. The combat is way too clunky for that to work for me.
The rest of the game also didn’t make up for it, so I just dropped it after I went to the big city to see if there was anything there which would hook me.
Also played FF7 on the PC back in the day and it bores the shit out of me.