Point and click adventures may have fallen out of favor recently, but these genre-defining classics still hold up surprisingly well despite their age.
The 1990s were hugely important for the video game industry. While console gamers were enjoying the golden age of RPGs and sidescrollers, PC gamers were treated to a host of fantastic point-and-click adventure games. Their influence was wide-reaching and would go on to shape modern-day action-adventure games while also introducing the idea of narrative-driven gameplay.
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What made these games so enjoyable wasn’t cutting-edge graphics or multi-million dollar budgets, but instead the excellent writing, engaging puzzles, colorful characters, and the unique approach to story-telling that many of them featured. It’s for this reason perhaps that so many of them still hold up so well today.
Updated April 9, 2023, by Tom Bowen: With the recent resurgence in the popularity and prevalence of point-and-click video games, plenty of people are now beginning to turn their attention to some of the genre’s earlier offerings. Despite decades having passed, these games still have a surprising amount to offer and can hold their own against many of the genre’s more modern offerings. For as enjoyable as the likes of Thimbleweed Park and Kentucky Route Zero are, they owe much of their success to these amazing adventures, which defined not just a single genre, but, in many ways, an entire era of gaming. These are the best point-and-click games that still hold up well today.
Many people consider Blade Runner to be one of the most important and most influential sci-fi movies ever made. It really is a work of art, and so a video game adaptation was always likely to happen. That it took 15 years after the movie’s release for the game to come out is a tad surprising, but, when it did finally arrive, it did so with an emphatic bang.
The game perfectly captures the cyberpunk aesthetic from the movie and still looks pretty decent today all things considered. The gameplay has held up equally well, and, while the plot isn’t quite as enthralling as the one from the movie, it still offers a vast improvement over the recently released anime series, Blade Runner: Black Lotus.
ToonStruck is a little bit like a reverse Roger Rabbit, with a live-action protagonist placed into a magical world inhabited almost exclusively by cartoon characters. The art style still holds up pretty well today as a result, as too do the voice performances from Christopher Lloyd, who needs no introduction, and Dan Castellaneta of The Simpsons fame.
Sadly, the game sold relatively poorly when it was first released, particularly given its $8 million budget. It has since garnered something of a cult following, however, which, given just how unique it is, is easy to understand. Those hoping to check it out in 2022 can do so quite easily, as ToonStruck is now available on both Steam and GOG.
Visually, Maniac Mansion hasn’t held up quite as well as some of the other great point-and-click games from the eighties and nineties, which, given its age and the limitations of the era, shouldn’t be all that surprising. What it lacks in graphical fidelity and polish though, it more than makes up for in charm and humor and so is still a lot of fun to play even to this day.
Written and directed by Ron Gilbert, who would later go on to create the Monkey Island series, Maniac Mansion is one of the most influential point-and-click games ever made. It is to Gilbert what Day of the Tentacle is to Schafer: a breakthrough release that lays all of the groundwork for future excellence in game design. For that reason alone, it deserves to be experienced by fans of the genre.
Sierra’s King’s Quest series is one of the longest-running in gaming, with its first entry having now arrived more than four decades ago. While there have been plenty of great games to choose from during that time, the pick of the bunch is definitely King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow; which to many marks the high point of the series.
Released in 1992, the game improves upon just about everything that made earlier King’s Quest titles so enjoyable. The voice acting is fantastic, the animation is smoother than ever and there’s much more emphasis placed on player choice than in earlier games. In total, there are more than a dozen different endings; making it one of the most replayable point-and-click games of the era.
With its stunning visuals and wonderful animation, The Neverhood is one of the most memorable point-and-click adventure games to come out of the nineties. It was the first game in which all of the animation was done using claymation and features some of the best and most humorous writing of the era.
Some of the game’s puzzles can at times be a little confusing, but they can typically be figured out with a little bit of trial and error. The story has one or two problems as well, although Klaymen himself is one of the most unique protagonists to ever grace a video game and his personality is just as charming as his appearance. Sadly, the PlayStation port of the game never left Japan, although the game was and continues to be available on Windows in the West.
With games like Clock Tower having already laid much of the groundwork for point-and-click horror games, Sanitarium was far from groundbreaking when it was released back in 1998. That’s not to say that it isn’t still a great game though.
