I agree!Yopaz said:Using that definition visual novels that you have dismissed are adventure games. Also Portal 2 could also be classified as an adventure game since it contains few puzzles where you need to use reflexes.Blood Brain Barrier said:I gave a definition on the last page: A story based game in which you play as a protagonist, with progress based on success in solving puzzles, and with little or no reflex-based actions required from the player.Yopaz said:It's funny how you complain about that people don't understand adventure games yet you're unable to provide a definition for it yourself. Give us the list of 1 adventure game released for each month of 2011 since you claim there are so many.
2011 adventure game releases
Jan: Carol Reed: Blue Madonna
Feb: Stacking
Mar: Aspectus: Rinascimento Chronicles
Apr: The Next Big Thing
May: Last Half of Darkness: Society of the Serpent Moon
June: A New Beginning
Jul: Back To The Future: Episode 5
Aug: Hector Badge of Carnage: Episode 2
Sep: Relics
Oct: Book of Unwritten Tales
Nov: Jurassic Park: The Game
Dec: Dark Star: The Interactive Movie
Amnesia The Dark Descent is also an adventure game seeing there is no combat and the whole thing is about solving puzzles and hiding.
Again, I agree! But we have to look at why they aren't discussed on sites like The Escapist. Look at a game like Hard Reset - an indie FPS which was reviewed by dozens of generalist websites and Zero Punctuation even reviewed it, despite it having zero advertising. The Escapist could easily have drawn some attention to Gray Matter, Black Mirror 3 or Book of Unwritten Tales this year. So is it that The Escapist doesn't mention them because it doesn't think they're popular enough?Now that I have a list of adventure games and a proper definition I am able to voice my hypothesis for the decline in popularity and ammount of games.
The titles you mentioned have not been marketed a whole lot, I have only noticed a few of them before this so they have managed to slip completely under my radar. Same thing happened to the newest Tony Hawk game. No-one heard about it before it was announced to be the worst selling Tony Hawk game ever. Duke Nukem Forever is hardly a good game, yet everyone has at least heard about it.
Adventure games also don't have a lot of replay value since when you have solved the puzzles once and experienced the story once there's little new the game can throw at you.
Edit: there's also the Ace Attorney games and Professor Layton games.