WHAT TO PLAY
Adventure games
323 games in the catalog
An adventure game is one where you move through a world built in advance, pick up objects, talk to characters and work out what to do with what so the story can move on. Quick fingers matter far less than attention and judgement. The genre began in the mid-1970s as pure text: Colossal Cave Adventure guided players through a cave with typed commands, and a few years later Zork, born at MIT, showed that a computer could understand whole sentences.
Pictures, animation, the mouse, voice acting and eventually a three-dimensional scene were added bit by bit. What stayed was the deal between author and player: the world is carefully designed, the player looks for a way through, and the reward is discovery and the next chapter of the story. That is why adventures survived even when publishers all but wrote them off around the turn of the millennium. The genre moved to handhelds with touch screens, to the browser, to phones and to independent developers, and today it also gives rise to games that have hardly any puzzles and rest on storytelling.
Today (2015 onwards)
93 games in the catalogToday's adventure is often shorter, built around a single idea and light on puzzles. What Remains of Edith Finch (2017) lets you walk through a house and uncover its stories piece by piece. Her Story (2015) rests on searching a database of police interview footage. Outer Wilds (2019) hands you no new items, only knowledge: how to get further is something you have to work out. Classics return as remasters and through crowdfunding, such as Day of the Tentacle Remastered (2016). Phones brought the Rusty Lake series, VR hand-based interaction. Telltale closed in 2018, but others carry on with episodic stories, such as Life is Strange.
PS5 Dave the Diver
An unusual mix: diving into a blue hole by day, running a sushi restaurant by night.
Series Alan Wake 2
A return after 13 years; a survival horror blending light and gunplay with two interwoven storylines.
Series Bramble: The Mountain King
A dark fairy tale from Norse mythology; no combat, just quiet stealth and fleeing from trolls.
Mobil Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars – Reforged
An adventure for fans of a slower pace: rich dialogue and logic puzzles.
PS5 Cocoon
A minimalist puzzle adventure from the designer of Limbo — worlds nested one inside another.
Series Dredge
A fishing adventure with horror elements; fatigue at night warps both the map and the player's perception.
PS5 Chants of Sennaar
A language puzzle without a single word: you decipher the pictograms of the Tower of Babel's levels.
PS5 Jusant
Contemplative climbing up a giant tower; each of the character's hands has its own controller button.
PSVR2 Moss
A charming platformer where you tilt dioramas as a ghostly presence while the mouse Quill solves puzzles.
PSVR2 Moss: Book II
The sequel starring the mouse Quill; now you can also pilot old guardian robots and solve puzzles.
PSVR2 No Man's Sky
The entire No Man's Sky universe in VR; scanning plants by hand and a cockpit view while flying.
PS5 Tchia
An open world inspired by New Caledonia; the Soul-Jump ability links her to the soul of nature.
The HD generation (2005–2014)
63 games in the catalogAfter the slump, the genre came back by three routes. The touch screen of the Nintendo DS suited tapping through a scene: Professor Layton (2007), Hotel Dusk and Ghost Trick all tied puzzles to a story. Flash and the browser let small teams publish without a publisher, and Amanita Design of Brno delivered Samorost and Machinarium (2009), where characters talk only in picture bubbles. The third route was episodic games: Telltale released chapters lasting a few hours and, from The Walking Dead (2012), built on the player's decisions rather than on combining objects. Digital stores and phones also gave old games a second life.
Mobil 80 Days
A steampunk adaptation of Jules Verne with thousands of branching routes around the world.
Mobil Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse
A classic point-and-click adventure with hand-drawn graphics and dialogue-based puzzles.
PC Polda 6
A return to the older, more popular entries after a weaker fifth installment; once again with Luděk Sobota.
3DS Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy
Wraps up Layton's second trilogy and the search for the frozen tombs of the Azran civilization.
Wii U The Swapper
Atmospheric sci-fi puzzle adventure; cloning and consciousness transfer between copies.
Web A Dark Room
A minimalist text survival game that grows into an extensive adventure.
Mobil Device 6
Text winds around images and maps; you read the story while walking through it at the same time.
3DS Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon
A trembling Luigi with the Poltergust vacuum hunts ghosts; the return of a long-awaited hit.
3DS Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies
The darkest and most dramatic chapter in the series about attorney Phoenix Wright. Objection!
Wii U The Cave
Puzzle adventure from Ron Gilbert, creator of Maniac Mansion; the cave knows your desires.
PC The Walking Dead: Season Two
An episodic adventure from Telltale where Clementine becomes the main heroine.
X360 The Wolf Among Us
A noir detective story among fairy-tale creatures; a loose prequel to the Fables comic.
The arrival of 3D (1995–2004)
60 games in the catalogThe CD-ROM made room for spoken dialogue, pre-rendered backdrops and video. Myst (1993) offered photorealistic scenes and mechanical puzzles with no inventory or conversations, and spawned many imitators. LucasArts and Revolution stayed with hand-drawn worlds, but Grim Fandango (1998) put three-dimensional characters on pre-rendered sets and was steered from the keyboard. Clock Tower (1995) turned puzzle-solving into running from a stalker, a forerunner of survival horror. Around 2000 classic point-and-click sales dropped and publishers turned to action. In Japan, Phoenix Wright (2001) built its game around cross-examining witnesses.
Java ME Runaway: A Road Adventure
A stylized Spanish adventure about a student in trouble; the humor survived even on a small display.
Xbox Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon
The fourth installment of the classic adventure series abandons 2D drawing for 3D environments and a free camera.
GCN Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X
The first fully 3D Resident Evil without fixed cameras; the Redfields against the Ashford twins.
GCN Resident Evil 2
A careful port of the 1998 classic; Raccoon City full of zombies and two intertwined scenarios.
GCN Resident Evil 3: Nemesis
A tenser sequel with the tireless Nemesis on your heels, one that can also transform.
Web Samorost
A school project by Jakub Dvorský that became one of the most famous Czech games of all.
PC The Black Mirror
A horror adventure from Future Games; one of the most successful Czech games ever.
Win9x Brány Skeldalu 2
The sequel took a different path – an adventure game with turn-based combat instead of step-by-step corridor crawling.
PC Polda 4
The most seriously toned entry in the Pankrác series; a case about a professor and his time machine.
GCN Resident Evil 0
An exclusive prequel with no item chests - things can be dropped anywhere along the way.
Win9x Syberia
Benoît Sokal's melancholic adventure game about forgotten mechanical wonders.
Xbox ToeJam & Earl III: Mission to Earth
The return of the cult duo from the Sega Genesis in a reworked 3D form after years of silence.
8- and 16-bit (1986–1994)
67 games in the catalogThe mouse and better graphics changed the genre. Lucasfilm Games' Maniac Mansion (1987) replaced typed commands with verbs picked from a menu, so a game no longer hinged on guessing the right word. Sierra, meanwhile, moved King's Quest IV (1988) to an engine that supported sound cards. The two companies differed in attitude: the LucasArts designers protected players from dead ends and death, while Sierra counted on both. One branch became comedy built on combining objects (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle); another stayed with darker detective stories and horror. CDs then brought voice acting and video, for example on the Mega-CD.
CD-i Burn:Cycle
A sci-fi adventure about a data thief with a virus in his head and a two-hour countdown to brain destruction.
PC-98 Desire
A mysterious visual novel on an island where memory experiments uncover a dark conspiracy.
MCD Heart of the Alien: Out of This World Parts I and II
A compilation of both Another World installments on one disc, including Buddy's perspective.
DOS King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride
A fairy-tale point-and-click adventure with hand-drawn graphics and puzzles, with no parser.
3DO Myst
A lonely island without words or an inventory; a showcase of what CD-ROM could do with sharp graphics.
PC-98 Policenauts
Konami's sci-fi detective story about a policeman out of hibernation; the investigation leads to an organ trade.
CD32 Simon the Sorcerer
Adventure Soft cheekily pokes fun at every cliché about chosen-one heroes.
MD Star Trek: The Next Generation – Echoes from the Past
An adventure and strategy game from the Enterprise's bridge at the height of the show's popularity.
SNES Star Trek: The Next Generation – Future's Past
Brings the world of The Next Generation to SNES; diplomacy, exploration, and tactics from the Enterprise's bridge.
DOS Tajemství Oslího ostrova
One of the first Czech adventure games comparable to foreign productions; a comedy about pirates.
3DO The 7th Guest
A horror adventure in toymaker Stauf's house; one of the first titles built purely for CD.
DOS Day of the Tentacle
A direct sequel to Maniac Mansion; three heroes each get stuck in a different time period.
The beginnings (until 1985)
31 games in the catalogIt started with text. The player typed short commands on a keyboard, the game answered with a description of the room, and the picture was left to the imagination. For Zork, Infocom built a virtual machine, so the same story could be moved to most home computers of the day. Mystery House (1980) added the first pictures to the text, and Beam Software's The Hobbit (1982) understood whole sentences and had characters who acted on their own. Alongside the text games, consoles got action adventures in which you hunted for keys, gates and hiding places across a few screens, as on the Atari 2600.
ZX Alien 8
Isometric puzzle adventure built on the Knight Lore engine; puzzles demand an exact sequence of steps.
Win9x King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne
King Graham rescues Valanice in a new fairy-tale adventure through a magic portal.
ZX Poklad 2
A reworked version of Fuk's Poklad, released only later in the Fuxoft uvádí collection.
C64 Skool Daze
A classic of school simulations; steal your report card before someone catches you.
ZX Sorcery+
A text adventure based on the Sorcery! book series; spells gave the game strategic depth.
ZX The Lord of the Rings: Game One
The Hobbit's successor leads a party of hobbits that can be controlled individually thanks to advanced AI.
A800 Below the Root
An adventure based on the books by Zilpha Snyder; children with the shan levitation ability explore Green-sky.
ZX Lords of Midnight
A vast fantasy world rendered with a unique landscaping technique; it was ahead of its time.
A800 Montezuma's Revenge
A challenging exploration platformer; the forefather of the genre.
2600 Pitfall II: Lost Caverns
The first game with its own chip for multichannel music; a far larger world.
ZX Poklad
The debut work of a sixteen-year-old Fuxoft, one of the oldest surviving Czechoslovak games.
A800 SunDog: Frozen Legacy
A space trading simulation with an inherited ship, where the wrong route means bankruptcy.