I think it's a combination of them getting easier (not as much of absurd sollutions) and we getting better at them (by now a lot of puzzles are variations on things we have already seen).

It's a good thing. When I play old adventure games without having played them before I tend to find them annoying difficult and random. I tried to play Full Throttle for the first time earlier this year and it aggravated me WAY more than it entertained me.

sometime easier ones are more fun to play, espcially if you are really into the storyline, puzzle would break the flow and slows the game down,, for example to the moon was more of a interactive story then adventure game and i loved it that way,

They are not "getting" easier, most of them are extremely easy since 10-15 years, it's nothing new.

If anything I would say the opposite, recently we have seen some adventure games having at least some sort of challenge, like Deponia, Gray Matter, Vampyre Story, etc... not really "hard" but at least not being a straight walk in the part like 99% of the others.

They are getting easier, yes. But that's not a bad thing, many of the old adventure games were terrible. In many cases, you KNEW how to solve the puzzle, but figuring how which actions to do in which order to make the correct solution appear was the aggravating part.

I don't know about you guys, but hearing "I can't use those items together" 5000 times isn't my idea of good gameplay. And don't even get me started on Sierra intentionally making their games unwinnable if you made an incorrect decision 2 hours earlier...

Then again, not all of the new ones are good either. I didn't like Machinarium at all. It didn't have any narrative flow and it seemed more like a minigame simulator than an actual adventure game. In that case I actually would have preferred an older-style adventure game (though not a Sierra one; fuck those guys).

Yea adventure games are getting easier. The old days of pixel hunting without hotspots seem to be no more!

If it helps the genre widen its audience and stay afloat, I'm all for it. The games aren't easy per se, but just a little more streamlined and direct.

Right? I hated all those obscure, illogical puzzles old adventure games threw at us, especially because I just couldn't enjoy the cool, well-written stories because of that. Still, I always loved adventure games, just couldn't play them because I never could wrap my head around their often weird logic. Now I actually can play them. Yay!

i'd really like to reccomend resonance, that game was exiting, not to hard and not to easy(for me, a little on the easy side so far), and the flow is excellent.

I particularly liked the scene with the little girl trying to escape from a monster, she's in her room and the monster is pounding on the door, if you don't move fast enough he will break down the door and everything will rewind in this awsome rewind sequence and you'll have to try again. very innovative and fun.

a mix of modern games getting easier,simplifying/ dumbing things down a bit to appeal to wider age ranges and more casual players
and a result of tehm just coming later than earlier games, things that were innovative you've seen before and because of unintentional recycling so you've already played all the components of the puzzles a few dozen times in slightly different configurations. Look at skyrim. the "puzzles" are short linear nothing worthy of the name(even though es wasn't really known for puzzles anyway and don't measure to zelda(not that those were ever inane difficult more zelda seems like a good example of balance challenge/fun vs headache if a little on the casual side. more of an example of games that haven't lost anything of themselves in this environment) but still) and compared to older games in the series its missing alot.


edit-
Oh....ha, nevermind. I completely misunderstood the question and topic..and genre. also I didn't read alot of replies first..
:)
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starting over:
Some of it is probably just you starting to get the hang of things, at first controls may be in the way and not knowing whats important so you clicked on everything. But now that you've played the beginings your'e getting a feel for how they were thinking when they made it and know what things are just background and what are more likely to be items.
_________ I agree with a mix of these 2. A combination with the death of "nintendo hard" where the game cheated or was cumbersome ti figure out how to get the character to do what you knew had to happen and a general theme of easier and simpler until recently where some developers are starting to correct and add some challenge back in without blocking people with pixelhunting and computer is a cheating bastard stuff. ,,not really challange but more of a fun and point to play instead of click click click click win

It really goes downhill from the openings for each character, sadly. I wish it just alternated like that the whole game and had more of the intense stuff like the scene you describe. I'm over halfway through the game now and rather bored of it.

They are becoming casual, and shorter... it's the new times, I guess.

I don't mind adventures being a bit tough but it must be challenging in a right way. Not those mathematical puzzles or some obscure thing that doesn't make any sense.

I finished couple days ago Lost horizon and it was pretty good, had sensible puzzles mostly and wasn't even short.

Older adventures were tougher partly because I was younger and didn't always understand what some word meant, still don't. =)

A good adventure takes couple days, not an hour like most indie games. No matter how good story it has. Nobody can say it was a good adventure if you don't hear at least 30 times "That doesn't work".

Edit: Broken sword 4 is insanely hard though.

Where have you been during the last two decades? Even most of the LucasArts adventures are easier than Space Quest or King's Quest... ;)

I think it's good if adventures are easier, as long as they still manage to entertain you with their story and puzzles. I'm not sure if there's really such a difference between then and now though. In some regard a good part of modern adventures slightly improved on the gameplay and learned from past mistakes. But others just repeat them. Overall the gameplay and design hasn't changed that much since the 90's. And IMO "hard" often just means "bad puzzle design". It's fun if a game is challenging, but I don't enjoy getting stuck for days in a linear and story-driven game, just because my mind works a little different than that of the developers.

Anyway, I haven't played Resonance but personally I wouldn't consider Machinarium a particularly easy adventure, at least not if you don't use the hint system. Some of the more recent adventures that I found much easier are Botanicula, the Blackwell Trilogy, Puzzle Bots, Gemini Rue and Jolly Rover (I enjoyed all of them, even though the other four were much more original than Jolly Rover).

As a sidenote, to me WadjetEye Games is the small indie "LucasArts" of today. The adventures they publish generally have a high quality standard, tell interesting and original stories instead of just mimicking or parodying the classics, try to avoid illogical puzzle design, and aim at being as fair as possible. Amanita Design and Daedalic are close followers, but I think WEG is still the best.