What makes a great adventure game?

I mean Spider Man from 2019 uses it, I would not think of that as going on an adventure - he’s an athlete police, doing his job. It seems like any game where you move between various locations or do something that’s not mundane could use this word. Which is basically everything.

Uncharted fits the aesthetics of an adventure, but it doesn’t capture the feelings of one. To me Uncharted is more like running through corridors, a movie with playable action scenes and puzzles. A Mission Impossible game would probably be identical, and it would be pretty strange to slap an adventure tag on that.

When I was younger I used to go adventuring a lot. I followed an abandoned railway alone in the middle of the night (and freaked out and called mom). I explored Thief Mountain countless times with my friends, partially inspired by rumors about some boys from my school who had found a flintlock pistol there, but we were mostly there to skim along the cliffs and to look for caves.

According to my extensive thinking, there are a couple key aspects that add up to make what I consider to be a great adventure game. Where it really feels as if I’m going on an adventure.

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