25-02-17

Adventure(1980)

Despite it generally being dismissed as a poorly aged influential piece, I actually really enjoyed my time with Adventure, seeing it as a very well thought out game that actually also holds importance to another unexpected genre.

As the King's square, your objective is to find the Enchanted Chalice, stolen and stowed away in one of the kingdom's castles. For that, you must search for items such as keys to progress through new areas until you can find the Chalice and bring it back to motherbase. Besides the keys, you also have a sword that can kill the dragons, a bridge used to go over walls, and a magnet that pulls items towards you. Your main threats in this journey are three dragons that can kill you, and in difficulties 2 and 3, a really annoying bat that steals your items.

All these elements come together to make the experience a surprisingly tense and strategic one in the higher difficulties, thanks mostly to the bat's presence and the items being randomly placed in difficulty 3. Thanks to Bruce Wayne, it's not enough to uncover the map and take the items to where you need, as you'll constantly get mugged in the most inconvenient of times. Instead, you must think about what items to take, and when and where should you do so, all while dealing with the flying creature. While at first you feel defenseless against its attacks, soon you learn different strategies to counter it, ranging from trading an item you don't need for a key it might be carrying, to actually carrying the foul beast itself alongside the item it stole with you.

Of course, the dragons are also a factor, and one that gets harder to handle as the game goes on. They're often in inconveniently small spaces, making it easy for them to kill you as they have a big sprite and you're a puny square that can hardly outmaneuver them in such spaces. As you go you also develop techniques to deal with this, either by dodging, baiting or killing them. But the truth is that even with a greater knowledge of the game's inner workings, the tension never really leaves, as the bat can show up at any point to ruin your day, making every corner turned a dreadful experience.

And this is where I drop a bombshell. Adventure's influence isn't seen only in the eponymous genre, but also one that seems so distant from it: horror games.

Think about it. Given the elements presented so far, Adventure sounds surprisingly similar to the subgenre spawned by games like Granny and Nun Massacre. In all 3 of these, a stalker character importunates you throughout the whole experience, and you must do your best to avoid it while you manage carrying one item at a time to solve puzzles. Not only that, but you must slowly figure out this evil being's behavior and patterns as you persist in your attempts, dying over and over to it until you finally learn how to go about things. Even the jumpscares are here, as I've screamed while playing Adventure way more than some actual horror games, and at all moments I was terrified of getting my victory robbed in an instant, much akin to the aforementioned games. The most relevant element that isn't shared between these entries is the saving, as Granny limits you to a certain number of lives and Nun Massacre always restarts from the beginning if you die, whereas Adventure saves your every progess, ironically making this decades old game the most merciful of the 3.

It may sound ridiculous that Adventure had such an influence in horror games, and it most likely didn't really affect them directly, but I do think that through pioneering these mechanics it ended up marking its presence in that type of game as well. Either way, playing it was very much worthwhile, and so far in my journey to go through game history, it's also the most enjoyable and noteworthy game.