This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
Have you tried Bloodstained: Ritual of The Night?
It’s a spiritual successor to Castlevania and thus plays incredibly similar to those games.
How linear is it? All the metroidvanias I’ve been encountering are super linear but just have a ton of backtracking
It starts linear but widens out quite early on, (it’s been a while since I’ve played it but I kinda recall it opening up after the first non-tutorial boss).
