Best Retro Adventure Games of All Time

Adventure Games: Exploration as the Point

The adventure game genre encompasses exploration-focused titles where movement through space, discovery of story, and puzzle-solving are primary pleasures rather than the combat-reflexes that define action games. The category spans wildly different implementations: Zelda’s item-gated dungeons, Shadowrun’s cyberpunk street exploration, Shenmue’s open-city daily life simulation, Legacy of Kain’s gothic narrative architecture.

What connects them is that the journey through a designed space is the experience — not just the mechanism for reaching a combat encounter. Adventure games trust players to be interested in their worlds, not just their challenges.

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening — The Dream World

Link’s Awakening (1993, 1998 for DX) is simultaneously the most emotionally resonant and most unusual entry in the Zelda series. Set entirely on the island of Koholint, with Link attempting to wake the Wind Fish and return home, the game’s final revelation — that the entire island, including every character Link has met, may exist only within the dream of the Wind Fish — gives the game’s exploration a melancholy that no other Zelda title approaches.

The DX version added a photography minigame, color graphics, and a bonus dungeon, but the core game’s design — dungeons requiring instruments rather than Triforce pieces, a world populated with Nintendo characters from other franchises (Yoshi, Kirby, Wart from Mario 2), and the specific architecture of its 8 dungeons — is complete in its original form.

Shadowrun (SNES) — Cyberpunk Narrative Adventure

Shadowrun (1993) on SNES was an adaptation of FASA’s tabletop RPG that created a genuinely unique game: a cyberpunk action-RPG hybrid where protagonist Jake Armitage woke up in a Seattle morgue with no memory. The game’s conversation system, using keywords extracted from previous conversations to advance dialogue, was an early implementation of what point-and-click adventures would systematize.

The game’s open nature — players could approach Jake’s investigation in varying orders, hire different shadowrunners as companions, and reach the final area through different pathways — gave it more nonlinear freedom than most action-RPGs of the era. Its atmospheric presentation of the cyberpunk genre, building Gibson’s aesthetic through low-resolution environmental design and character portraits, remains one of the SNES’s more distinctive achievements.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver — Gothic Narrative Architecture

Soul Reaver (1999) on PlayStation cast players as Raziel, a vampire executed by his master Kain who was resurrected as a Soul Reaver — an entity that consumed souls rather than blood. The Spectral Realm — a parallel version of the game’s environment populated by spirits — served as both a continuation of gameplay after death (Raziel shifted between the Material and Spectral realms rather than dying permanently) and a narrative layer revealing the environment’s deeper history.

The game’s dual-realm design created puzzles spanning both versions of the same space and made Raziel’s peculiar existence the central narrative device. Amy Hennig’s writing — direct predecessor to her Uncharted work — gave Soul Reaver a literary quality rare in action games.

Klonoa: Door to Phantomile — Platform Adventure

Klonoa: Door to Phantomile (1997) on PlayStation is among the most underplayed excellent games of the PS1 era. The 2.5D platformer — 3D environments navigated on a 2D plane — used its depth to create puzzle-platforming mechanics: grabbing nearby enemies (inflating them as a balloon), throwing them to reach higher platforms or destroy other enemies, required spatial reasoning across the foreground-background axis.

The game’s final hour, revealing Klonoa’s nature and the meaning of his adventure, delivers an emotional resolution that PS1-era platformers almost never attempted. Players who complete it uniformly report the ending as unexpectedly affecting.