There was a commercial that aired constantly on TV in the mid-late-90s for Pure Moods, a compilation album of new-age and world music, featuring artists like Enya and Enigma. The commercials promised not just an album but an experience that transported you to a higher realm of inner peace and pure vibes. It was “the soundtrack for your way of life,” the announcer intoned in a deep, breathy voice. Also, for some reason, it had a rave remix of the X-Files theme song. The Book of Watermarks feels like Pure Moods taking physical form and becoming an entire world. The setting of this 1999 PlayStat ..read more

Let’s end the year with something new and exciting: I’ve published an article in ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories! Over the summer, a reader sent me a rare physical copy of Comer, a spiritualist CD-ROM adventure game that was produced entirely by one person from Hong Kong. Not only did the designer Kyle Choi make it entirely by himself with no prior game development experience, but he manufactured and published it by himself as well. That was no small feat in 1998! Comer is an extraordinarily weird game, and seeing a physical boxed copy of Comer drives home the fact it doesn’t fit in ..read more

There’s no dialogue in L-ZONE, or any words for that matter. To the extent that this game has a narrative, it’s incredibly vague, like an impression of a story without any specific people or places. A city on another planet. An underground lab. Colossal machines and living robots. A nefarious plan. A chance to escape ..read more

If you wanted to cut to the chase, you could say Obsidian is a game where a computer goes rogue and tries to destroy the world. There’s lots of stories like that, and technically, that’s where Obsidian ends up too, but the path it takes to get there is mind-boggling. The longer version is that Obsidian is a game where a computer learns how to imagine, where dreams take on dizzying, literal form, and the end of the world is just a chance to reinvent it. Adventure games have a history of packing complicated puzzles into strange places, and using that same format, Obsidian asks the question ..read more

Beyond the Wall of Stars sends you on a voyage to the far reaches of space. You’ve joined a scientific mission aboard the CSS Starquest to the distant planet Tara, which may hold the key to saving your dying homeworld. Along the way, there’s difficult choices to make. Do you answer an urgent distress call that sends you off your original course? When the crew’s morale collapses, do you instigate a mutiny against the commander? You could think of it like being a choose your own adventure book, in a very literal sense. For one thing, it’s written, directed, and produced by one of the authors of ..read more

Ghosts and Weird: Truth is Stranger than Fiction aren’t exactly educational games. They’re more like those sketchy shows on the History Channel. There’s plenty to learn in Ghosts and Weird, though not anything you’d hear from a more reputable source. Both these games, created by largely the same team led by producer-director Philip Nash, tell stories about alleged encounters with the paranormal – ghosts, ghouls, hauntings, psychic premonitions, alien visitations, and everything else spooky that somebody ever claimed happened to them. They take folklore, and they blow it out into a larger-than ..read more

The Legend of Lotus Spring has more in common with a poem than an adventure game. The big moments are intimate and quiet – feeding a fish, playing a musical instrument, finishing a piece of needlework. There are no puzzles or challenges to overcome. The main action of the game is to remember. In Lotus Spring, you walk through a palatial garden, dreaming about a lost love. The idea was something intentionally outside the expectations of gaming in the early 2000s. It was originally a project by a group of 3D artists to recreate the old imperial gardens of China, and through happenstance, it bec ..read more

When a solar flare hits the space station ICARUS, the entire place shakes. Your screen rattles back and forth. Alarms go off. Over the loudspeakers, a voice dispatches orders for the medical team. This disturbance repeats periodically in the background as the station careens closer to destruction. The crashing noises are a constant reminder: this disaster will continue to unfurl, no matter what else is going on. Something is always happening in Sentient. The ICARUS has a full crew running around doing their jobs, and as part of your mission to save the space station, you can go anywhere in th ..read more

Private eye Jack Slayton kept a file on Charles Winthrop, a philanthropist with something to hide. Winthrop’s prize horse Pegasus died, and Slayton suspected an insurance scam. In his notes, he mused, “I’ve had a few horses die on me too, usually in the stretch.” He has the voice of a stock hardboiled detective, cracking a stereotypical case of corrupt wealth, working on a nondescript street in Los Angeles. As far as Noir: A Shadowy Thriller is concerned, that’s perfect. Like the name implies, the game is a tribute to the noir genre, the idealized version that pop culture remembers ..read more

On its face, Biosys hits all the clichés of a mystery first-person adventure game. You wake up with no memory. Something has gone disastrously wrong. The last survivors left clues and diaries that explain what happened. We’ve heard this story many times before in many similar games. But it’s a template, and Biosys takes the clichés in an unexpected, genre-twisting direction with one hell of a setting. The entire game takes place in a self-contained biosphere experiment. Instead of using that solely as a backdrop, Biosys simulates the artificial environment – temperature, humidity, water level ..read more