Top 20 Adventure Games of All-Time!!1!

#20: The Dark Half

Capstone Software – 1992

If there’s one thing that’s true, it’s that there are too many original ideas for adventure games out there. I shudder to think how many hours are wasted by developers sitting around, drinking coffee or green tea or Cherry Coke, or whatever developers drink when they’re sitting around drinking and thinking of stuff…what was I saying…oh yeah, anyhoo, developers spend far too much time thinking of new ideas. And as a result, we get stuff like Syberia, Grim Fandango, and Space Quest. All original ideas. Who cares about that crap when there are SO MANY GOOD BOOKS WHOSE PLOTS ARE RIPE FOR STEALING?

And here’s a perfect example. The guys at Capstone, who almost certainly don’t drink no freaking green tea, decided that their own ideas were far too silly to become adventure games, and thus turned to one of the finest fiction authors of our time: Stephen King, and his horror classic The Dark Half.

As intellectually stimulating as any novel adaptation adventure, The Dark Half poses some of the most challenging puzzles we’ve seen. Almost as if Stephen King (or “The Man” as I like to call him) wrote them himself! Among my favorites is that you have to smoke every day before you can write anything, and you have to write every day in order to proceed, and there’s no way to know this without someone telling you, and there’s paper at every crime scene to write with…and, uh…what was I saying…

The Dark Half is good. The book and the game. Book games rule.

Gingerale.

(E.D.)