The freedom in a point&click is in the actions you perform. In a point&click there is no limit to your actions, as the actions are a combination of the verbs yo

The freedom in a point&click is in the actions you perform. In a point&click there is no limit to your actions, as the actions are a combination of the verbs you have, the environment and the items you collect along the way. Which leaves endless possibilities. The restrictions are just in how crazy the narrative wants to get, but not in the interface. Other genres limit you to run, jump, shoot and a few other core mechanics, that they than run on repeat. You might get bigger guns along the way, but you aren't going to steal a pot from a cook to use it as helmet while joining the circus as you would in a point&click. When other genres want the player character to perform actions outside the core mechanics they often have to fall back to non-interactive cutscenes. In a point&click in contrast it's all part of the core gameplay, cutscenes are reserved to non-player scenes. Another thing to take into account here is the year, we are talking about early 90s here, back when most games were side scrollers that allowed you to just walk left and right. Point&click adventures were some of the first games with a movie-like presentation, you had real 3d scenes you could interact with, close ups, cutscenes, etc, not just abstract flat side-scrolling worlds. In times of GTAV, a point&click might not look all that impressive, but compared to the other stuff you had back then they were quite impressive.