This is a followup to @[email protected] ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
I’m sorry, I got bored playing Outer Wilds. I roam around, find some ancient texts, but fail to see how it leads anywhere. Yet the start is excellent, it hints at some great mystery…
Stick with it. I nearly gave up on it a few hours in but I’m so glad I didn’t. The game doesn’t tell you where to go, you have to figure it out yourself, but the clues are all there if you look.