After having to deal with a decade of recession, adventure games are back!

For a long time, game makers just weren’t making so many adventure games- opting more for shooting RPGs, MMorpgs… I really missed playing games where you never die, and have to pick your way through endless puzzles and put together pieces like solving a crime. It makes you feel intelligent and you get a really good story.

Why are there more adventure games now? I really don’t know. One theory is that it costs less to create a virtual world, so you’re not spending as much money as before on designing the environment. Another theory is that handheld games like the Nintendo DS weren’t really good for shooting games, and the touchscreen made people remember the good old days of point and click games.

Yet another possible theory is that distribution is now taking place online, so you can download the game instead of buying a CD rom. Adventure games (especially the less marketed ones) were very hard to find in neighborhood game stores, but now they are easier to find. Also, even until last year, a lot of the adventure games were not Vista compatible, which has changed since they are available for download (take, for instance, Big Fish or Gog.com). Unfortunately, most of the games offered through these sites are old titles, but good adventure games are timeless

The last theory is that gaming is becoming so mainstream thanks to the Wii, that the demand for game title diversity is bigger, affecting product genre.

I was surprised that Europe makes more adventure games than the U.S. It would be great if more American companies would develop adventure games to expand the market. Adventure games could change the public’s (and parents’) perception of gaming because they have minimal violence and actual require brain activity and creativity to solve the puzzles.