Loom may not exactly be obscure by any standard, but I don’t see it being mentioned nearly as much as, say, Day of the Tentacle or Monkey Island. But it was a truly revolutionary way of reimagining the adventure game genre, and in a very early age of point-and-click. No inventory, single mouse click interaction, using spells to interact with the environment…
Of course, you’ll want to play the original floppy version to get the full story; the CD-ROM version had its dialogue heavily truncated to fit onto the CD.
What’s your pick?
Wadjet Eye Games’s The Shivah (old enough to be a classic at this point! But still pretty obscure and underrated.)
- YU-NO (has some lapses in taste, but is overall truly epic and impressive, and still way better written than most other VNs/VN-style games)
- Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood (among the best implementations of story branching and multiple solutions)
- Death Gate (strong in all areas, the 2D artwork in particular is amazing)
- Frederik Pohl’s Gateway (perhaps the best parser-driven game I’ve played)
I think a lot of adventure game fans have heard of it but Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon is pretty great and it’s my favorite game designed by Josh Mandel. I really wish it could get a digital rerelease.
A lot of people really hold this one in very high regard. Unfortunately, with regards to a rerelease, the rights situation is a tangled spiderweb of immense proportions.
