my blog

Adventure games may struggle with many aspects of static fiction -- plot, characterization, pacing -- but they nail setting. The place is, after all, right there for the player to explore, with all its atmosphere and complexity, and a half-decent designer can set in layer on layer of subtle clues about how this strange world works. Not every player will be equally interested in all of it, but the mechanisms of exploration serve to dole out exposition in tolerably-sized pieces, and let players discover the aspects of the game world that they're most interested in.