Adventure game or quest is one of the main genres of computer games, which is an interactive story with the main character controlled by the player. The most important elements of the game in the quest genre are the actual narrative and exploration of the world, and the key role in the gameplay is played by solving puzzles and tasks that require mental effort from the player. Such elements characteristic of other genres of computer games, such as battles, economic planning and tasks that require the player’s reaction speed and quick responses, in quests are minimized or absent. Games that combine the characteristic features of quests and action genre, allocated in a separate genre – action-adventure.
The first adventure games – Colossal Cave Adventure, Hunt the Wumpus and commercial Zork – were text-based and used parsers (interpreters of text input by the player) based on control verbs. With the development of computer technology and graphics subsystems, text-based games were superseded by the more visual and easy to control (but also much more limiting to the player) graphical quests.
Later, fans of text games revived the genre of interactive fiction (sometimes called “text quest”) by creating virtual machines to work with the files of various games. An example of such a game is the browser game Tale. Nowadays, text quests are most often found as mini-games as part of large games being released.
Graphic quests
The first graphical quests appeared for 8-bit home computers in the early 1980s. However, they only became truly “graphical” when the text-based interface was abandoned and the so-called point-and-click (i.e. pointer control via keyboard arrows, joystick or mouse) was introduced in 1985. Some of the popular games in this subgenre are the Monkey Island and Space Quest series.
Puzzle quests
In puzzle adventure games, the main focus is on solving any logical problems, puzzles, for example, in the form of various mechanisms available for examination by the player; in this case, the number of puzzles is very large, and the narrative may be schematic or absent at all. A prominent representative of the subgenre is the game Myst (1993), and later puzzle quests imitating it have been described by game reviewers as “Myst-like” quests.
One subgenre of the puzzle quest subgenre is the “room escape” quest, in which the player is tasked with leading a character out of a locked room using some items in the room.
Visual novels
Visual novel is a text-based quest characteristic of Japan, in which a story unfolding in the form of text is accompanied by static, rarely animated images. The degree of interactivity in such games is usually low, and the viewer is only occasionally required to make certain choices with the help of menus, in particular, to choose an answer option in the dialog. Visual novels are extremely popular in Japan, occupying a significant portion of the Japanese PC game market. Popular visual novels often become the basis for screen adaptations in the form of anime or manga releases.
Walking Simulators
In The Stanley Parable (2013), the player is only allowed to move around and interact with a small number of objects.
The term “walking simulator” describes narrative games with intentionally simplistic gameplay where setting, atmosphere, and story are prioritized. The expression “walking simulator” was originally used as a pejorative, emphasizing the primitive gameplay of such games, but over time has become neutral and acceptable. Such games may not be classified as quests – they often lack puzzles and other elements characteristic of the genre[7]. Often such games are not even possible to lose – they offer the player to simply move around the game world and look for interesting objects like books, audio recordings and the like, allowing to move further in the narrative.
