Monkey Island is the best adventure game.

I agree! My friend and I have the fondest memories of that game in particular since we played it for months on the Amiga 500 at the time. Meathook was my hero. We both have this inner memory of 4k photorealistic graphics which doesn't match the reality of the 90s game.

I would also add Kings Quest V (and only V!),also Ultima 7, and some others in that ballpark :-)

After first playing Ultima 7 in middle school in the 1990s, I finally finished the whole game a few months back, and was astounded by how good it is. I would love to see a modern take on it with expanded crafting mechanics. the way crafting works is amazingly fun and immersive, there is just a very limited amount of it. the same for the way NPCs actually live out their lives and work. better than most (all?) modern games.

Grim Fandango is arguably in the running for the title too.

Those tank controls are not great, and going to 3D made the graphics noticeably worse. It would have been a better game had it stayed 2D but with the same story. A lot of early 3D has aged poorly.

Yes the first 3 games are really good. But I also have a soft spot for Myst. Maybe it is nostalgia, but I really enjoyed replaying it from the original CD of the Mac release a few years ago (using my original iBook, which is slightly later vintage than the game of course).

But I also have a soft spot for Myst.

Riven is even better. :-)

I hope Ron Gilbert has more stories he wants to tell that aren't meta-reflections on adventure games as a form.

Thimbleweed Park was fine—not what I was hoping for, but fine. When I saw Return to Monkey Island was more of that—while I appreciate taking that tack as a way to sort of give closure to the second game and also the rest of the series, sort of—I decided it wasn't for me.

Now a second Thimbleweed Park has been announced, and I expect it to be more of the same sort of thing, which is kind of a bummer? Deconstruction is fun, but it's better when it leads to reconstruction thereafter. I would love to see Gilbert tackle a genuine adventure game again, without all of (or at least, with less of) the navel-gazing postmodernism—just to prove the genre and creator both still have the capacity for genuinely good works that stand on their own. Am I the only one?

Thimbleweed Park was a fine game with a very disappointing ending, as was RTMI sadly. I was also fine with Return's more "streamlined" game approach, but I would've liked the games to have a real storyline with a real ending instead of some kind of meta story where the journey is more important or whatever. I just lose interest almost immediately... I wanted to play Thimbleweed Park's free "mini-game" that he released during Covid, but just couldn't make myself play it due to the ending of Thimbleweed Park.

Sadly, I had a somewhat similar disappointing experience with Dreamfall: Chapters (although it was a worse game than Gilbert's games), as The Longest Journey is, IMO, one of the best adventure games ever. I played it as the episodes were released, and wanted to get back to it as they improved many things post-completion, but the could never force myself to do it.

There are still adventure games that are great that are released today by other people though.

If you mean point and click game, I liked Sam & Max hit the road more

Adventure games are games that are spiritual ancestors to the game Colossal Cave Adventure (often just called Adventure), which includes most point and clicks, but also the likes of Zork and Myst.

It's very often misused though, I think from people confusing the label as referring to games being about an adventure, rather than being like the game Adventure.

I never heard that the Adventure term came from Colossal Cave Adventure, really ? It's true that it is/was the other term commonly used for this kind of games, anyhow.

Myst was better categorized as a puzzle game, you wouldn't recommend it to someone looking for games similar to Monkey Island

It's a well established term, and puzzle games like Myst are generally considered a subgrenre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game

Oh, you're Marginalia's developer, congratulations :)

I think this was true, but I'll be damned if I wouldn't say The Drifter has taken the crown. It raises the narrative bar so much it's just mind boggling you can even tell a story with that much momentum and tension in an adventure game.

Overall we've been eating very well the last few years when it comes to new adventure games. In most of the 2010s new adventure games tended to not really be very good, but the stuff we've seen the last few years from the likes of Wadjet Eye and Grundislav are absolutely on par if not better than the highlights of the '90s.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, what color is the tree?

Uhh... How appropriate... you fight like a cow.

If the grog contained enough mercury, it would dissolve the pewter mug. Mercury also eats thru solid aluminum pretty quickly.

True, but mercury does not dissolve the iron of the lock. For that, the sulfuric acid is necessary.

If grog would contain both mercury and acid, they would not mix, but there will be a mercury layer at the bottom and the acid solution would stay at the top. So the mercury could dissolve the bottom of the mug, while pouring some acid from the top could dissolve the iron lock.

The fact that iron is among the few metals which are not dissolved by mercury had been widely used in the past, when the use of mercury was less restricted. For example, ignitrons and mercury arc rectifiers, which were used in high power converters before the invention of thyristors, contained a pool of liquid mercury, so for them iron vessels were preferred instead of fragile glass vessels, like those used in smaller vacuum tubes.

In the Roman and Greek Antiquity, the most important use of mercury was for the dissolution of gold and silver, which was used for their purification and in the fabrication of jewelry.

In MI1, the only annoying part was that "wood forest path" thingy in the beginning (when being in the village), and later on the world wasnt pretty anymore when being on Le Chucks Island