I agree! My friend and I have the fondest memories of that game in particular since we played it for months on the Amiga 500 at the time. Meathook was my hero. We both have this inner memory of 4k photorealistic graphics which doesn't match the reality of the 90s game.

I think this was true, but I'll be damned if I wouldn't say The Drifter has taken the crown. It raises the narrative bar so much it's just mind boggling you can even tell a story with that much momentum and tension in an adventure game.

Overall we've been eating very well the last few years when it comes to new adventure games. In most of the 2010s new adventure games tended to not really be very good, but the stuff we've seen the last few years from the likes of Wadjet Eye and Grundislav are absolutely on par if not better than the highlights of the '90s.

I hadn't replayed it all the way through as an adult, not from start to finish.

So I sat down, had a couple beers and played it all the way from the beginning.

It's exquisite, but short. A lot of care went into that journey though.

Yes the first 3 games are really good. But I also have a soft spot for Myst. Maybe it is nostalgia, but I really enjoyed replaying it from the original CD of the Mac release a few years ago (using my original iBook, which is slightly later vintage than the game of course).

I would also add Kings Quest V (and only V!),also Ultima 7, and some others in that ballpark :-)

Grim Fandango is arguably in the running for the title too.

If you mean point and click game, I liked Sam & Max hit the road more

I hope Ron Gilbert has more stories he wants to tell that aren't meta-reflections on adventure games as a form.

Thimbleweed Park was fine—not what I was hoping for, but fine. When I saw Return to Monkey Island was more of that—while I appreciate taking that tack as a way to sort of give closure to the second game and also the rest of the series, sort of—I decided it wasn't for me.

Now a second Thimbleweed Park has been announced, and I expect it to be more of the same sort of thing, which is kind of a bummer? Deconstruction is fun, but it's better when it leads to reconstruction thereafter. I would love to see Gilbert tackle a genuine adventure game again, without all of (or at least, with less of) the navel-gazing postmodernism—just to prove the genre and creator both still have the capacity for genuinely good works that stand on their own. Am I the only one?