I subscribe to Grumpy Gamer's RSS feed and I think this was the article that got me started on this blog. I recently played Milk Maid of the Milkyway. It's a s

I subscribe to Grumpy Gamer's RSS feed and I think this was the article that got me started on this blog. I recently played Milk Maid of the Milkyway. It's a super cute indie title and it's an adventure game. Despite the beautiful dialog and wonderful music, it still had a lot of the issues that Grumpy Gamer touches on that killed the original genre. You end up clicking everything on everything, looking up hints for objects you didn't realize were even clickable, and have stupid puzzles like putting a frog in a random hole and poking it with a needle so a guy oils a gear. By contrast, Red Strings Club is an indie adventure game that gets this totally right. It's story telling with game mechanics and you don't need any hints or need to solve any insanely stupid puzzles to get through it. Night in the Woods is another great Indie adventure game that's more about story. It doesn't have the same level of puzzles as other adventure games, but the puzzles all make sense. The game has a lot of mechanics that keep it going forward so you don't get stuck. Life is Strange is another one that's more story driven. I had trouble with it initially. It's slow and was difficult for me to get into, but I'm glad I stuck with it as the story is really interesting and does some very bold stuff for a game. I haven't tried the 2nd one yet. Telltale got a lot of this gene right I think. People complained how you don't really affect the story in Telltale games and that is true, but it is also very difficult to create those types of games with true multiple outcomes (especially if you have sequels planned. You only want 2 ~ 3 maximum outputs at the end. Mass Effect was good about being more complex; they had to plan for certain characters simply not being in future games -- but Bioware too ultimately collapsed the story down into very few possibilities by the end anyway). Finally, Quantic Dream does a super good job of this (Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, Detroit). They've been PS4/Sony exclusives for a while, but I heard some of these games are making their way to PC. They are slow games you can't run through, but they don't require insane puzzles and keep moving. Detroit does a really good job with totally different narrative paths and endings, and they don't skimp on the writing, even on endings people would rarely get to.