You claim to like adventure games, but are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? Tim Schafer and Double Fine have started a Kickstarter campaign to allow fans a chance to show they are willing to pony up the dough to have a new, original point-and-click style adventure game made.

Not content to take their fans’ money and lock themselves away at their Top Secret San Francisco based headquarters while they crunch away on those video game bits and bytes, they have hired 2 Player Productions to create a documentary about the experience. They’ll be covering the entire process, from start to finish. That way we can see their meteoric rise to the top, or alternatively their crash and burn culminating in a close up on Schafer with a single tear rolling down his cheek.

Either way, they promise it will be quite entertaining. Click past the break for their video intro to the project. Also, go donate. For reals.

Hot off the heels of their Back to the Future game, Telltale is back with another license close to the heart of my youth: Jurassic Park. It takes risks, leaving behind the traditional point and click interface of their past games for something a little different.

The first of the two demos I played was exclusively an action scene. Several of the game’s protagonists were stuck on a roller coaster and I had to prevent them from being eaten by a pack of dinosaurs. The solution? Successfully complete a lot of quick time events including button presses and quick flips of the analogue stick. You could sum up the entire action demo simply by saying “Space Ace”.

But there was a weird layer of detachment added to this scene. The character whose actions were affected by my inputs constantly changed. This made me feel less involved with what was happening on screen since no singular character represented the player. Occasionally I’d fail and watch a death scene before snapping back to the last checkpoint. I watched my cart go on the wrong track into a pack of dinosaurs, a young girl falling out of the car to her death and more, all while my death counter rose.

If this was all the game was, I’d be pretty sad. Thankfully the second demo I played was far more interesting, though still different than Telltale’s previous games.

The adventure demo had me in control of a mercenary woman named Nima accompanied by Miles Chadwick. Nima was clearly ignorant of the island, not knowing that it was full of dinosaurs, but Chadwick seemed to know everything going on. These were Dodgeson’s people that Dennis Nedry intended to hand off the shaving cream can full of dinosaur embryos to (before being killed by a dilophosaurus in his jeep). It’s this tie-in to the original story that makes the plot of Telltale’s game so intriguing. Making it so closely linked to the first novel and film without retelling it is a smart idea.

I found myself in the delightfully familiar locale of where Nedry’s jeep was stuck. Despite not seeing the can in the jeep, Chadwick insists on checking it more while sending Nima to accomplish the far more dangerous task of searching the surrounding area.

Nima has tracking skills. By holding buttons corresponding to different areas, I could have Nima closely examine various elements of the environment such as footprints. Strangely, I had to hold the corresponding button down until my search was complete. The whole thing gave me some serious Heavy Rain vibes.

Never did I find myself walking around as any character. Instead, I could bring up a shortcut menu to move to different areas of the environment. While in each environment, I could use the analogue stick to move the camera around a bit allowing me to examine more things.

In fact, examining things was the name of the game here. The closest I came to encountering a puzzle was when certain areas I attempted to examine were too dark. I had to move up to the jeep and adjust the lights mounted on top to aim at different areas to aid my search. I also occasionally conversed with Chadwick, but my dialogue choices seemed of little consequence. I either chose the right answer, or something else then the right answer. Hopefully the puzzle and dialogue aspects will get more complex further into the final game.

Eventually, several dinosaurs showed up and I transitioned into another quick time event driven action scene, complete with checkpoints and a few failures on my part. It at least felt more interesting transitioning from a calm scene to an action one, but it’s still hard to get too excited about quick time events in 2011.

I left a little torn about Jurassic Park: The Game. On one hand, the setup for the story has grabbed my attention. But on the other hand, the action gameplay is not particularly enjoyable. It’s definitely feeling more “interactive fiction” than game so far, even moreso than a traditional point-and-click adventure game. But if the adventure parts introduce more actual puzzles instead of the “look here, now look here” execution I’ve seen thus far, I could forgive the action scenes.

“Friday Old Games” is a series of articles in which we review a game from the older generations of consoles, share why we picked it, and whether or not it holds up with time.

In 1992, when adventure games still reigned supreme with PC gaming nerds, LucasArts released one of their most beloved titles, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. It had everything a fan of both the adventure genre and the Indiana Jones movies could want.

You get to play as Indiana, traveling the world, fighting Nazis and solving the mystery of a lost civilization. What more could a fan ask for?

Fate of Atlantis is another in the long line of SCUMM adventure games. It uses the now famous point and click interface where the bottom half of the screen is used to make sentences wherein you “use kerosene on spiral design”. As you would expect, the bulk of the game consists of talking to the NPC’s, collecting various items and using those items to solve puzzles.

Being Indiana Jones, you also have to do a little archeological research. To keep things interesting, Fate of Atlantis has a set of solutions found in Plato’s Lost Dialog (a book within the game you have to retrieve) that are randomized. There are also three different paths you can choose which even more drastically change how to solve the game’s puzzles.

It’s up to you whether or not you want to head out into the world on your own, with your former colleague Sophia Hapgood, or with fists a’blazing. On the wits path, Indiana goes out on the adventure solo, relying on his wits and charm to solve the puzzles. The team path allows you to defer to Sophia, who will help you get on the good side of otherwise unfriendly characters. And of course the fists path requires lots of keyboard based fisticuffs.

No matter which path you choose, your mission is to figure out what happened to Atlantis and stop the Nazi’s from acquiring it’s rumored hidden power. All in a days work for everyone’s favorite globe trotting, beefy guy punching, whip wielding archaeologist.

Why did I pick this game?

As a fan of both adventure games and the real Indiana Jones films (you know Crystal Skull doesn’t count), I am amazed I didn’t play this game sooner. This is a recurring theme when it comes to the LucasArts series of adventure games. Outside of Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, I mostly played the Sierra adventure games, like Space Quest.

That isn’t a knock against the LucasArts games in the least. I just personally didn’t have access to their games back then. That’s the real reason I chose Fate of Atlantis. I had always heard good things about it, but never had a chance to play it for myself.

How does it hold up with time?

There are two big factors that go into an old adventure game holding up. First, is the story entertaining? In most games, story isn’t really all that important, but what always drew me to adventure games was that feeling that you were playing through a Saturday Morning Cartoon.

Despite the fact that the voice actor for Indiana Jones sounds nothing like Harrison Ford, the voice work and story are both well executed. It’s a little on the cheesy side, but the quirky sense of humor associated with the LucasArts games is definitely intact.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, do the puzzles hold up? This is the tricky one. Now that the answer to any puzzle can be looked up in a few seconds on GameFaqs, it’s a lot tougher to determine. Was a puzzle just too confusing or poorly designed, or would you have eventually solved it? Having finished several classic adventure games back in the day as a collaboration with friends, I think Fate of Atlantis would be one that we wouldn’t have spent too much time getting completely stuck in.

When I did find myself getting stuck and referring to a guide, none of the solutions were so obtuse that I had a “I never would have thought of that” moment. I do condone looking up the answers if you are so stuck in the game that it is sapping your enjoyment.

The biggest thing that didn’t hold up for me was the combat. Thankfully, it is completely optional in both the Wits and Team paths.

All in all, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis still holds up as a great example of the adventure genre. If you haven’t played it yourself, you should really give it a shot.

You read that right.

The are assuring everyone that this is no April Fool’s prank and that there is no expiration or cut off date. So if you’ve been on the fence about trying their latest episodic adventure, you are officially out of excuses.

You can head over to the Telltale games website right now and download Back to the Future The Game: Episode 1: It’s About Time. If you like what you play, the complete five episode series is only $24.99.

In fact, Phoenix Online Studios just launched the third episode of The Silver Lining, titled My Only Love Sprung From My Only Hate, which can be downloaded for free from their website.

The Silver Lining tells the tale of King Graham once again fighting the forces of evil, this time to save his now cursed family. In case you missed them the first time around, all the episodes can be found here.

As a device, the iPhone’s touch screen lends itself well to many games that would normally use mouse clicks for interaction. It is sort of a no-brainer that many adventure games are being brought over to the device. Largely, these are ports of older, “classic” games in the genre.

While it’s nice to be able to whip out The Secret of Monkey Island whenever you want, I was curious when we were finally going to see some new games in the genre show up on the iDevices.

Launching Pad Games thought the same thing, which leads us to a completely original iPhone Adventure Game, specifically designed for iPhone, Scarlett and the Spark of Life: Episode 1.

Scarlett and the Spark of Life tells the story of a kidnapped princess that must be rescued. Unlike most games that use this trope, you play as the princess in question. As Scarlett, the quick-witted and sometimes Tomboyish heroin of the story, you must escape your kidnappers, find a horse, and move on to rescuing your younger, more traditional “damsel-in-distress” sister.

As you would expect in a point-and-click game, you must find and use items to solve various puzzles. In many adventure games, you inevitably get to a point where you end up having to click on everything in every room you currently have access to just to makes sure you haven’t missed any useful items. In Scarlett, there is a very helpful button built in that will highlight everything currently on screen that can be interacted with.

This is sort of a double edged sword. Since it shows you everything that can be clicked on to pick up (or to get a funny comment from Scarlett), it’s easy to fall into the habit of relying heavily on the feature. This can make some of the puzzles a little too easy to solve. On the plus side, nothing kills the fun of an adventure game more than getting stuck on a puzzle for hours. Because I like being thorough, I found myself using this highlight system often to make sure I grabbed everything, found all the exits in a room, and had a chance to read all the games dialog. I enjoyed Scarlett’s sense of humor and wanted to make sure I fully explored the game.

Since this is the first episode in a series, you aren’t getting the full story here. This episode sets up the character of Scarlett and her quest to rescue her sister. In Episode 1, your goal is to find a horse and get out of town before your kidnappers can track you down. The episode ends once you’ve done so.

Scarlett and the Spark of Life: Episode 1 is a fun game. The writing is funny and the hand drawn look really appeals to me. However, seasoned adventure gamers will likely find it too easy. It is also fairly short. I didn’t keep track of my exact playtime, but I it  took me roughly an hour and a half to complete. At the $2.99 price point, that still isn’t a bad deal. It’s still cheaper than a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

If you are a fan of playing adventure games on your iPhone, you should definitely pick it up. If you’ve never played an adventure game before, the relatively easy puzzles in Scarlett and the Spark of Life are  great way to ease into the genre.

Dr. Hugo’s Factory for Making Robots might be the strangest factory on Earth. First off, the entire factory seems to employ only five people, and each of them seems to be responsible for making a single adorable robot. Dr. Hugo is hoping to get all the robots ready for the upcoming Christmas holiday, and is pushing his tiny crew to finish up with their tiny robots.

You will run each robot through a series of tests to familiarize yourself with their abilities, but the real adventure begins when the Hero convinces the other robots to go exploring. You’ll unlock a plot of sinister proportions as you explore the factory.

Puzzle Bots is a light-hearted adventure game that reminded me of The Lost Vikings in that each of the five robots has a unique skill that can be used to progress. Hero can pick up and throw objects, Kelvin can light things on fire, Ultrabot can push heavy objects, Ibi can swim, and Bomchelle can throw bombs. You’ll need to figure out how to utilize each of their skills to progress through the levels. For example, you might need Bomchelle to throw a bomb to open up a stream of water so Ibi can swim down to pull a lever, so Hero can take a key to unlock the door.

My main gripe with adventure games has always been the puzzles that rely on trial and error rather than logic and problem solving. There were only a couple of times that I found myself clicking all over the screen rather than applying logic. Most of the puzzles make sense immediately or will make sense after you figure out how they work. As long as you can program your brain to think like an adventure gamer, you’ll do fine. There is no, “Oh, I was supposed to use the fish on the door to get the key to drop from the ceiling,” moments. There were only one or two puzzles where I found myself clicking on the helpful hint button, and only one time when the hint didn’t help overcome my own lack of adventure game skills.

Lead designer, Erin Robinson, comes from the world of comics and it shows in the slightly offbeat and witty dialog. There are also numerous little jokes that are strewn about the background. The story is delightful and filled with just enough geeky romance to melt even the coldest heart.

I haven’t been this captivated by tiny robots since 1987′s *Batteries Not Included, and if that reference is too old or obscure for you, then you are reading the wrong article my friend. Even as a non-adventure gamer, I enjoyed myself immensely. If you are a fan of tiny robots, quirky light hearted humor, or adventure games, you should try Puzzle Bots. You can find the game on Steam or here if you want to enjoy one of my favorite indie games. Besides, who doesn’t like tiny robots?

This review is based on a copy provided to us by Wadjet Eye Games.

Snakes of Avalon is a new indie point-and-click adventure game in the classic Sierra/LucasArts style. You may have noticed the word “indie” in the previous sentence. This means that the game was produced as a labor of love by a small team for no money.

As is typical for this type of production, its artistic ambitions are much loftier than most commercially produced fare. It takes place in a nuanced world with a rich atmosphere, and it’s about something larger than its plot. As is not typical of this type of production, the technical aspects are very slick.

Let’s start with those technical aspects. The stand-out feature here, without a doubt, is the sound. Sound is the most important, but perhaps least valued, aspect of any medium that includes it. Most people don’t notice if a movie or a video game has good sound, but bad sound can distract the viewer and ruin the entire experience. It’s a relief then that the sound in Snakes of Avalon is crisp and clear. The voice acting is about what you’d expect from a video game, which is to say it’s not perfect, but for a game of this pedigree it’s fantastic.

The sound design is brilliant, taking cues from classic film thrillers to create a feeling of paranoia throughout. But best of all is the music. It’s composed by Thomas Reign, who has some substantial indie game credits on his resume (most notably, to me, is his work for Wadjet Eye Games). Here he provides a jazzy, boozy score that has a hint of intrigue, which enhances and is perfectly in line with the world of the game.

Snakes takes place in one room, a dive bar. The aesthetic is built to reflect this. The bar is a dirty mess of a painting, and its patrons are crudely drawn cartoons. I’m a bit of a design snob and I have to admit that I was turned off by the character designs. This may be an instance where Snakes‘ artistic integrity works against it. There is a reason the characters look unappealing; they’re unappealing characters. But whether that choice was intended to be a reflection of the protagonist’s view of his surroundings or a comment on the sort of folk that frequent dives like the titular Avalon, I worry that the casual viewer wouldn’t stick with the game long enough to realize it. The presentation of the artwork however, like the music, is pristine.

These elements, the sound, and the visuals are used to set up a unique and surprisingly deep world. There’s a sense of dread permeating throughout Snakes. The dirty bar, the dangerous patrons, and the sleazy music all make you uneasy enough, but then the game’s surreal sense of humor and reality challenging plot instill you with a sense of straight up dread. For example, when you look at a particularly ruthless looking woman at the end of the bar, the protagonist remarks “I think it’s a species of mantis.”

Something evil is happening in Snakes, and you’re not completely certain that it’s from our world. I was thrilled then the game went straight up psychological horror, Kafka-style, in its third act, but I found the ending to be a bit too light and silly. The game’s creators cite Hitchcock and “trippy” films as inspiration. That’s easy to believe as the tense atmosphere that it sustains feels more based around the story that’s being told than the gameplay.

The gameplay isn’t forgotten, however. The puzzles have a unique, surreal logic to them. Many of them only make sense if you turn off your brain, which is appropriate for a game that takes place in a world of drunks. I have to admit, however, that this style of puzzle left me wandering aimlessly a number of times. When I finally figured out how to proceed, I was frustrated by the fact that there would have been no way for me to arrive at that solution other than blindly clicking on objects. Again, I understand the artistic reason for this, but I can easily see many players being turned off by it.

My concerns about players not giving Snakes the patience and thought it deserves probably speaks more to the artistic merit of the video game medium than to gamers themselves. Adventure games are often hailed as the best genre for storytelling, but I have often found the stories told, while enjoyable, to be light to a fault. Grim Fandango is probably the only time that I’ve found the story of an adventure game to transcend its gameplay; to be a story worth telling in any medium. So I was very pleased to find that Snakes of Avalon has a rich story with layered themes, and would recommend it to any gamer who might enjoy the same.

You can download Snakes of Avalon for free here

You can view the Snake of Avalon blog here

Sometimes, a mystery is surrounded by a puzzle; sometimes dozens of small, intricate puzzles that would confound and befuddle your average government agent.

Hidden away in the depths of FBI headquarters is the office of Nelson Tethers. Tethers is the top (and only) agent in the bureau’s Department of Puzzle Research. When a conundrum is too discombobulating for the rest of the FBI, it is up to Agent Tethers to elucidate the situation in Telltale’s latest, Puzzle Agent.

The first thing you’ll notice with Puzzle Agent is a departure from Telltale’s usual style of point and click adventure gaming. Sure, those elements are there in a small way, but the main focus of the game is on brain teasers. It is no secret that Puzzle Agent was heavily inspired by Level-5′s popular Professor Layton series on the Nintendo DS. They come right out and say as much in the game’s description on their website.

Set in the snowy town of Scoggins, MN, it is your job to find out why the town’s eraser factory has shut down. The factory provides erasers to the White House, and is Scoggin’s main source of income; which is why it’s sudden closure is so suspicious.

Much like the Layton series that inspired it, Puzzle Agent has you wandering the town, finding and solving logic puzzles to continue the storyline. The puzzles are worked into the plot a little smoother than they are in Layton, and are handled in mostly humorous ways. The puzzles themselves vary quite a bit in difficulty. As with all logic puzzles, once you “get” the answer, you’ll wonder how you didn’t see it in the first place.

If you do get stumped, Puzzle Agent has a really good hint system built in. There are three levels of hints, which start as a nudge in the right direction and end with more or less giving you the answer. Once the puzzle is solved, you are given a rating based on how many guesses it took you to solve and how many hints used. This made me try my hardest to not use any hints and only make a guess once I was absolutely sure I had the answer correct.

But they don’t give you an infinite number of hints either. As it turns out, chewing gum helps Agent Tethers think, but the town is all out of gum! As you traverse the town, you will find ABC gum stuck to things around the city which you can collect. These are what you spend to take a hint on puzzles. I’m happy to say I didn’t end up needing to use too many pieces of the gum that I collected on my adventure, but even if you do, there seems to be plenty of the stuff hidden around the city. Running out was never a concern.

I had fun playing through Puzzle Agent. The art by Graham Annable added a humorous edge to the games strange atmosphere. The writing will appeal to those that enjoy X-Files or Twilight Zone story types, as long as you don’t mind them being on the wacky side of things. The gameplay is casual enough that it should appeal to gamers of all levels. Puzzle Agent is an easy recommendation for the puzzle lover in your life.

This review is based on review code of the PC version of Puzzle Agent provided to us by Telltale Games.

"The next evolution of the Trauma Center series."

I’ve always really enjoyed the concept behind the Trauma Center series. Performing surgeries, whether it be with a stylus or a Wii remote (depending on which game), felt fresh and satisfying. Still, I never saw any of the games through to the end until Trauma Team came along.

While previous games attempted to keep things interesting with each surgery, I would inevitably lose interest after extended playing. This is where Trauma Team excels. Rather than have you perform surgery after surgery, Trauma Team‘s missions are divided between six different characters; only one of which is a general surgeon. Thanks to the great sense of variety this provides, I never found myself getting bored.

Until the final portions of the game, you can play as much or as little of each character’s story as you like before switching characters. They are, however, spread across a narrative timeline. Since the doctors’ stories often overlap, I found it most enjoyable to switch characters in the order the timeline wanted me to. Sometimes you’ll work on the same patient with different doctors at different points on the timeline.

The only disadvantage to the free-form order is that it results in a few seemingly redundant tutorials in the earlier missions. Fortunately, many of the tutorials in Trauma Team are just textual pop-ups that can be easily skipped.

Surgery missions are exactly what you’d expect from the series. The Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) is a much more interesting variation of that. While controlling the game’s EMT, you’ll have to keep multiple patients alive. Things are really fast paced and hectic, especially considering additional patients can be brought in at any moment.

Endoscopy is a strange hybrid of surgery and exploration. While moving the endoscope, you have a radar that tells you where affected areas can be found. While intestines will have you moving down a winding tunnel, missions involving more complex areas, such as the bronchi, can become quite maze-like. While feeding the endoscope into the body can occasionally get a bit tiresome, the endoscopy missions are pretty enjoyable overall.

The doctor I found to be the least interesting, both in story and in gameplay, was the Orthopedic Surgeon. Sure, you’ll perform a lot of different actions such as cutting and drilling though bones, hammering in pins, and screwing on metal plates, but it lacks the sense of urgency that the other operations provide.

"I was surprised by how much I enjoyed being away from the operating table."

Strangely, I had the most enjoyment playing as the two non-surgical doctors. The first of these is a diagnostician. The objective is to find as many symptoms as you can, compare them with diseases in a database, and diagnose the patient’s condition. You can find symptoms by questioning the patient and pointing them out in the dialogue, examining them, checking all the numbers in their charts, comparing various scans such as x-rays and MRIs with those of a healthy person, and more. It really put me in the mindset of being a doctor and the result was quite satisfying.

My favorite of the six, though, are the Forensics missions with returning character Naomi Kimishima. These play out somewhat like a point-and-click adventure game. You must gather clues from crime scenes, corpses, and witness testimony. You’ll then analyze clues, combine them, and answer logic questions.

While the voice acting throughout the game is generally good, the voices of Naomi and “Little Guy” (the FBI agent that assists you during investigations) is fantastic. It really brings the two characters to life as they banter back and forth. The cases are also written pretty intelligently with some truly bizarre situations.

"The Forensics missions' stories are brought to life by really great voice acting."

Each investigation is considerably longer than any of the operations. Thankfully, you can save and quit at almost any time during them. In spite of their length, I always looked forward to them. I’d be perfectly happy seeing Atlus give Naomi her own investigation spin-off series.

Though it can be a bit melodramatic at times, Trauma Team actually has a very engaging story once it gets going. There are a few odd choices that don’t seem to fit with the rest of the game such as the Orthopedic Surgeon secretly fighting crime in tights and Naomi’s magic cell phone that can hear the victims’ last words (but doesn’t actually contribute to solving cases in any meaningful way). However, these are minor gripes in an otherwise enjoyable medical drama.

Co-op has been revamped since the last game. It isn’t an available feature for every doctor, but each one that has it works differently. One of the most interesting takes on it is in surgery. The surgical tools are divided between the two players. You can give as little or as many tools to the second player as you want at the start of the mission.

Trauma Team manages to make the series jump from good to great. The variety in gameplay keeps you drawn in, the story gets really interesting over the game’s twenty-something hours, and the more “sci-fi” elements of the later operations are much less cheesy than past iterations. If you ever had interest in the Trauma Center series, Trauma Team trumps previous games in practically every regard.

This review is based on a copy of Trauma Team provided to us by Atlus.