i recently played Syberia, Resonance, The Samaritan Paradox and Lamplight City. I’m looking for games along the same direction: 90s/2000s style adventure games. It could be really old games or also retro ones that have been released recently.
Do you have any recommendations on games you particularly enjoyed?
Any information on Linux compatibility would be a plus. But these days almost everything works anyway, so it’s not a big deal.
Grim Fandango got a rerelease not too long ago. If you want to go further back, I know the Monkey Island games also got rereleases, and a new one came out last year.
We always liked the Syberia series alot. Aside from all the Lucas Arts classics, we also (very) enjoyed playing the following 90/2000 (style) adventures:
- The Broken Sword series
- Broken Sword 2.5: The Return of the Templars | Download free version
- Runaway: A Road Adventure
- Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle
- Thimbleweed Park
- Edna & Harvey: The Breakout
- Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes
Historic
- Flight of the Amazon Queen | Free at GOG
- Touché: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer
- Nelly Cootalot: The Fowl Fleet
- Ankh | Ankh: Heart of Osiris | Ankh: Battle of the Gods
Fantasy, fairy tales
- Discworld
- Discworld 2: Missing Presumed…!?
- Inherit the Earth
- The Simon the Sorcerer series - mainly part 1 and 2
- The Legend of Kyrandia
- The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate
- The Legend of Kyrandia: Malcolm’s Revenge
- The Book of Unwritten Tales
- The Book of Unwritten Tales 2
- The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles
- The Whispered World
SciFi
If you want to step just a bit further back in gaming history, the old Sierra games were absolutely fantastic for their time. My personal favorite series will always be Quest for Glory. And I still go back and play through the series about once a year or so. For more even more of a puzzle focus, the King’s Quest series or Space Quest series were both very good. Most of these games were DOS based and so run well with DOSBox. The Steam version on Quest for Glory literally just auto-runs the game in DOSBox. If you enjoy any of them, I’d also recommend looking into ScummVM which tends to make running those older games really smooth, at the cost of a tiny bit of setup work.
I’ll always have a soft spot for the old Sierra games because they were the first adventure games I played, but I think I’d recommend the old LucasArts games to new players nowadays. The LucasArts games were just better designed - they don’t have fail states and you can’t unexpectedly die so you are more free to explore.
My recommendation would be to check out “Day of the Tentacle”. In my opinion it is the best example of point and click games. I don’t know about Linux compatibility but it recently had a re release so I think it should work.
Indigo Prophecy was definitely a fun experience, but it has more quick time events than actual puzzles. Still worth a look if you are looking for a good story (although it got rushed in the end so the finale isn’t great)
Yeah, I was in love with it for the first half, then it really dropped the ball story-wise. But it was still a positive and memorable experience for me. Very immersive, at least at the time.
If I remember correctly, it was originally intended to be an episodic game, but plans changed late in development. As a result, the first half of the game is a really good bit of moody character-driven slow burn storytelling, and then suddenly it’s like the entire corkboard full of plot ideas gets vomited out at once.
Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis and The longest journey come to mind
