More importantly, do you have items you can rub on things or each other?

Monkey Island, Blade Runner, Loom, Syberia, are example of adventure games AKA point and click.
I haven't read this page but it's a google result for adventure game.
https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17547

Action adventure is not an adventure game in fact, it's an action adventure ;) For me that's games like the Castlevania and Legacy of Kain, Oddworld series. Tons of traditionally console stuff, while adventure games were something you wanted a pc for. you are mistaking settings/themes with game mechanics. You can make a horror rpg, FPS, adventure game, visual novel.
A urban fantasy rpg, FPS, adventure game, visual novel. Horror is not a kind of videogame like "match-3" but a setting/theme/esthetic, like sci-fi. In fact, you could take the same game, let's say a RTS and re-skin it as fantasy, sci-fi, modern setting.
If I make a tetris-like game and give it an Indiana Jones theme/skin, that doesn't make it an adventure game. It's an Indiana Jones tetris clone. A Monkey Island flipper (pinball machine for some here) would not be an "adventure game flipper", but a MI themed flipper.

What you both describe are IMO point & click adventure games rather than only "adventure" games. Even without going on how the moniker evolved over the years and is very different from that it meant 30 years ago, I still consider that VN definitely qualify as "adventure" games even with the most strict original definition.

Let's not forget that adventure games existed before King's quest (which was not point and click on it's original version) and are not limited to point and click; Zork was one first and most well known adventure game, be it a text adventure game and not a point and click one, and then we have all Infocom games that are the ancestor and have a lot more in common with VNs than they have with Monkey Island.

if zou just proceed but clicking to advance text, can't explore locations, there's no puzzle solving, nope. Yes, old text adventures were adventure games. Not just the point and click ones.

I disagree that puzzle solving is mandatory for a game to be called "adventure" or not, you have several text adventure games where there is no puzzle solving at all, that are very close to "chose your own adventure" books where you succeed or fail based on choices; you have several kid-aimed point & click adventure games where the only "puzzles" consist clicking on everything on the screen, watch funny animation, and then move to the next screen.

Also what is a puzzle ? does solving a riddle count as a "puzzle", or choosing the right answer between multiple possibilities,
I don't know about this one specifically (but it is said to have multiple ending so I guess it's the case), but a lot of VNs have branching choices where a wrong choice result in an untimely death, a totally different ending, isn't it enough to match your definition of an adventure game ?

I would say it depends of your definition of kinetic novel, you seem to consider them as having no "gameplay" involved while I have seen others consider every visual novel with a linear story where there is no branching path as being a kinetic novel, even if there are other sort of gameplay/interactivity involved (e.g. combat, puzzles, etc... )

If it's the former then there is always the huge debate as to whenever or not they are even considered as "games" or not, for example we have the recently released Dagon which is more a 20 minute audio book than really a "game", and of course we have Higurashi and plenty of others released on Gog that fall into that category.

So to answer your question my main trouble is more whenever they are "games" or not, rather to whenever they are "adventure games", personally I don't consider them games, it doesn't mean that I don't enjoy them, just that for me they are stories and not games (which requires some sort of gameplay, even basic one). But IF I was considering them as being games, then I would probably included into the "adventure games" moniker.

For the sake of this discussion, what do you consider To the Moon and other games by Freebird Games to be? I personally consider them books with extra steps or movies were you have to kick the narcoleptic projectionist.

Yep, and nowadays stuff is multiplatform. But yeah, when I was a kid and I had a NES the only adventure game out there I knew of was Maniac Mansion, I didn't even know about Shadowgate, never seen in a shop or magazine. Also Shadowgate has a timelimit and so it's too arcade to be a proper adventure game. I was able to play my first adventure game, MI, when I could finally ask for an Amiga. Back then the distinction in genres avaibility for computers and consoles was stricter.
A bird story is an unpausable slideshow.
I can stop reading a book and go back to it, I can re-read a previous page, I can read at my pace, I can skip what i want.
A bird story just goes on by itself for dozens of minutes. You can't pause it. You can leave it going and it will have progressed by itself in your abscence. You must actively read a book.

Due to the amount of confusion here, I will explain this as it was explained to me.

When you think of an adventure game, you may think of something like King's Quest. This is an example of a western adventure game. However, in Japan there was no King's Quest on DOS. They had something different, the ADV game. You will notice that many of what we call "visual novels" here in the west use the term ADV a lot. This is because in Japan, an ADV game is an adventure game. This goes all of the way back to the eighties and you'll find several non-erotic as well as adult titles. Japan handled sex differently though, so perhaps the Japanese player gets Yu-No instead of King's Quest. And even the DOS version of Yu-No did have the typical point and click interface. There were just visual novel and dating sections in addition, as they were are very common in Japanese ADV.

It is easy for us to tell the difference between western RPG's and Japanese RPG's, so we should apply this same mentality towards choice factored and decision making visual novels in the form of an ADV or adventure game and something like King's Quest here in the west.

Once again, the Japanese player did not have King's Quest, so their experience with the adventure genre is different and like the JRPG, will not be like the western version. We call these visual novels or even eroGE (ero game) but in all honesty, the Japanese refer to them as adventure titles.

I hope that clears things up a bit.

Even back then, there was the occasional console port or adaptation of a game in a genre normally associated with PCs. For example, you see some of the early WRPGs, like Ultima, Wizardry, and Might & Magic, on the NES and SNES. (Not all the ports are good; stay away from Ultima 5 NES and the European Might and Magic 2 SNES at all costs. Other versions are generally worth playing, though MM3 SNES isn't the best version either.) There's also, on the SNES, Sim City and Sim Earth; I believe even SimAnt appeared there. (I could also mention Mario Paint; it's the sort of application you'd expect on a computer (and it has the issue of not being able to easily get content out of the game), but isn't a game in the usual sense (even if it does have a minigame).)

This is less true if you look at earlier games. For example, the early Wizardry games had combat very much like you're more likely to see in a JRPG these days, while not having the interactivity that WRPGs developed later on. The first Dragon Quest is an open-world game with dark dungeons (that you need a torch or spell to light up) and locked doors that require consumable keys to open, a description that early Ultima games happen to also fit.

(There's also the Romancing SaGa series, which is sort of its own thing, but can feel structurally more like a WRPG, complete with an open world and a bunch of sidequests to complete. RS1 is basically just sidequests, with only a couple mandatory endgame quests and the character's intro being mandatory; otherwise the game, if you take out the sidequests, boils down to "kill a lot of enemies and then the endgame opens up".)

Generally. Not that similarities aren't there, but one can usually tell the difference between something like The Witcher and Ys, even down to the art style.

The Ys games I don't consider to be RPGs.

If anything, the Ys games are, perhaps, more closely related to the bullet hell SHMUPs that have appeared in Japan. If you take a look at Ys boss fights, in many cases you find that there's a large number of bullets on the screen, and you need to avoid them all or you take damage.

Also worth noting that both Ys and bullet hell (in particular Touhou) got their starts on Japanese PCs, not on consoles. In fact, many of the Ys games are still PC first (though note that pre-Windows games were typically first made for some Japan-only computer).