This week on Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee takes a deeper look at detective games, including particularly good ones like Return of the Obra Dinn and Pentiment, and why letting you fail miserably is all part of the fun.

Extra Punctuation Transcript

I’ve bullied point and click adventure games in this space a few times and partly that’s because I think they’re a bit primitive, design-wise, a bit underevolved. Picking up stuff and sticking it in stuff. But I acknowledge them as an important part of the DNA of more advanced game design, the same way I can appreciate that mankind evolved from apes without wanting to meet one in a zoo and try to get a conversation going. If one were inclined to map out a family tree for video game genres, point and click adventure would be pretty high up and have a bunch of lines linking to action-adventure, survival horror, walking sim, basically anything with dialog trees… and there’d also be a link to one specific offshoot that I’m particularly fond of, and that’s detective games.

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