expected something more in-depth. still, what I hate in 'modern' p&c games is they often won't let you save manually over multiple slot, something I could do 30 years ago. no manual saving at all is even worse.

voiceovers aren't mandatory, but if there's none, don't ruin your game with annoying gibberish or text display sounds that can't even be turned off. and definitely don't make the slow typewriter effect mandatory. believe it or not, some people can read faster than one letter at a time.

pixel hunting is the third prong of the fork. it was never fun and just because some classics had them doesn't mean they should still exist. but even if they do, providing a hotspot indicator should be a must. it's always optional, if you want to waste 30 minutes finding a pixel in the corner, don't use it, win-win. encodya put this basic quality of life feature behind 'easy mode', which is not only player shaming (both parties, actually, assuming 'hardcore' players don't have the willpower not to use it, which is incidentally true in many cases), but doesn't even make sense, they just confused difficult with tedious.

Point and click games? What about Pajama Saaaaaam... :P (And the missing Humongous games of course...)

(also it's not a point and click but it'd be nice if Double Finally brought The Cave here.)

Ooh, yeah I hate that. Auto saves are a great idea if they're in addition to manual saves, but awful by themselves. I have mixed feelings about hotspot highlighting. I don't like pixel hunting at all, but I feel like the best way to avoid that is improving game and art design. I don't have anything against hotspot highlighting, but I think when a game is designed with highlighting in mind it can be a crutch which allows poor design choices. If they expect the player to use hotspot highlighting at every turn then they have no incentive to eliminate pixel hunting from their design practices. Wasn't The Cave published by Sega? I guess since we just got a bunch of Sega games there might now be a chance for them to bring it here.

not disagreeing with your point about highlighting, but ideally games would be designed to work properly in the first place, so quality of life wouldn't be necessary even though they're technically optional. but that's clearly too much to ask for, devs are failing on more basic levels all the time, so a simple and optional highlighter works for me, but they're also failing on inclding quality of life.

Oh, that's good news! Hopefully they bring it here at some point, I was always interested in playing it. Oh, I agree with you. I think having hotspot highlighting is definitely a good thing, I've just played many games that I would consider unplayable without hotspot highlighting. :)

Yep.

Basically the opening post just lists two completely random games, which aren't the best games ever made, not even the best games made in their own release years, really.

And I'm wondering why choose 1994 and 2014, which seem completely random years without any binding context.

You could go almost ten years further in both directions, if the span of time is the key here.
Presumably there's some point in having those games 20 years apart, but I don't really see why.

Anyway, I think it's great to see GOG returning more to their original point & click friendly roots, by releasing new adventure games and even making an attempt to write about them in a promo text.

Yeah, Kyrandia Book 1 is definitely not the best point and click from 1994 (in fact it's not even from 1994), and although I haven't played Broken Age yet I don't think it was critically acclaimed or anything (possibly a victim of its own hype though).

I think they should have highlighted Beneath a Steel Sky for 1994 (or at least got the year right for the game they picked).

And The Legend of Kyrandia (Book One) is not even the best game of the trilogy. In fact, the game is terrible. Mazes. Mazes everywhere. The second one is pretty good. The third one I started several times and always abandoned it 10 minutes into the game.

The list could very well have been Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Gibbous.

I have the Humongous collection on steam. I am assuming that the problem is the broken games like Putt-Putt Pep's Birthday Surprise and Pajama Sam 4 (i.e. the ones without scummvm).

Well, or maybe throw some titles per span, like, i dont know, 5 point and click from the 90's to 95's and then 5 more, from 2015 to 2020, so there is a bit more of range..

they are both so and so games with nice graphics
worst offenders in Kyrandia are

[spoiler]

the damn labyrinth, and that boring random stones puzzle.

[/spoiler]

I think it would have been fun to compare it to Blade Runner as a later game from the same house.

Deleted

for y in (1994, 2014):
random.choice([g for g in games where g.year = y and g.subgenre = 'point_and_click'])