Want to keep testing your knowledge of gaming trivia? We've got loads more PC Gamer quizzes, on everything from healthbars to weird currencies to absurd patch notes.
In the 1980s and early 1990s if you wanted a videogame with a decently written story, adventure games were the only place to find them. Back then RPGs were mostly dungeon crawls, or full of olde worlde thee-and-thou guff. Immersive sims didn't exist. Visual novels were rarely translated into English. Other genres would give you a paragraph of text and a pat on the back, then send you on your way.
Because point-and-click adventures evolved out of text adventures they brought some of text's wordiness with them. When you wanted to adapt a book to a videogame, whether it was The Hobbit or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, adventure games were the way to do it.
Studios like Infocom, LucasArts, and Sierra valued characters, settings, and themes more than anyone else. Of course to talk to those characters, explore those settings, and understand those themes first you'd have to solve the puzzles. Adventure games were infamous for gating progress with puzzles that made sense to their creators, but could only be solved by a hivemind of players bashing their heads against them or a call to the help line. Fortunately those times are largely behind us, and instead you can relive the days when we broke our brains on the Discworld adventure game in the more convenient form of a multiple-choice quiz.
