Adventure
Game genre concept
Informal group for finding adventure game sub-genres.
Alternate name: Quest
See also: adventure elements
Note that action-adventure is not sub-genre of adventure despite the name.
Note that action-adventure is not sub-genre of adventure despite the name.
Parent group
This is a container group; its children are:
| Point-and-click adventure | Adventure games mainly played via pointer device driven user interface. The player clicks to move their character around, interact and examine. | 1984 / 2024 | 1522 games |
| Escape the room | Adventure sub-genre where the goal is to "escape the room". Most commonly seen as online Flash games and made popular by MOTAS which is one of them. | 1983 / 2024 | 40 games |
| Exploration game | An adventure sub-genre where exploring the environments is the primary activity, usually with extremely non-linear levels or even metroidvania-ish progression. Likely to have little to no combat and some even lack a way to finish them (no ending). | 1979 / 2020 | 29 games |
| Gamebook | "A gamebook is a book that allows the reader to participate in the story by making choices that affect the course of the narrative, which branches down various paths through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages." --Wikipedia | 1980 / 2021 | 119 games |
| Interactive fiction | A type of adventure game where the game world and player input is described using text. Such as "You are in a hallway. There is a key on the floor", ">get key", ">use silver key on door", ">turn valve", ">say hello", etc.. | 1971 / 2022 | 4553 games |
| Puzzle-Adventure | A sub-genre of adventure games that often plays more like series of puzzles than an adventure with puzzles. | 1991 / 2017 | 13 games |
| Visual novel | Sug-genre of adventure games. Easily confusable with dating sims with which visual novels share their outward appearance, but the emphasis is on non-gamelike elements and the lack of use of statistics or other numerical data. | 1973 / 2023 | 3845 games |