What happened to inventory-based puzzle games?

Posted by Robert Janelle Aug 21, 2006

"Take survival kit"

"Use hamster with microwave"

These commands will sound familiar to anyone who remembers the older style adventure games, which mostly consisted of gathering items and using them to solve puzzles to get more items, eventually leading to some big puzzle to solve, then ending.

I guess that description might not sound most appealing, but games like Maniac Mansion and the entire Space Quest series kept me going for ages when they were around. I couldn't get enough of them.

So, what happened? The genre seems to have dissapeared. In 2001, Lucas Arts released another installment of the Monkey Island series for the PlayStation 2, but there hasn't been much since, aside from a few short web games. (The humour site Homestar Runner has some great ones in its games section.)

Sierra and Lucas Arts were the leaders but these days Sierra is just another label used by a larger publisher and Lucas Arts is focussed on Star Wars games that don't revolve around solving puzzles with items.

It would be interesting to know just when and why demand for these games died down, it seemed like there was a non-stop flow of them at one point. While I enjoy finding a few flash games that run like this, they're usually over in half an hour at the most.

Game developers! Bring back the inventory game...and while you're at it, bring back the text parser...but that's another rant altogether.

In the meantime, I guess I'll search eBay for a copy of Willy Beamish and then hope it actually runs on Windows XP.