There are a ton of game jams happening online at any point during the year. Many of these jams follow a theme and a timeframe, giving developers the challenge of creating a game within a specific jam’s restrictions. I am able to record loads of these games for each and almost every game jam. As I record them all, I pick out games that stand out to me and games I love from each individual jam. This article contains the games I love from the the Adventure Jam 2018.
The Adventure Jam 2018 was a game jam focused around creating adventure games in just fourteen days. There was no theme for this jam — so developers could make any adventure they wanted. This jam has a panel of judges as well as community voting. I’ve played through each of the submitted games in my compilation video series and below are a few of my favorites, in a random order.
The Child of the Hill House by Marco Giorgini
The Child of the Hill House is a horror point-and-click adventure game where you play an assassin. Your entire life, you have been a trained and good killer with only a few rules — yet you have broken these rules for the massive amount of money you are getting for this job. Not only does it revolve around killing a child, but it also sees you head to a very unfamiliar part of town.
Upon arrival, you need to walk through the woods, getting closer to the child’s home. You start to find some strange things around: rock sculptures that look oddly familiar, dead bodies dressed just like you, their head covered in bags… You aren’t afraid of these things, so you carry on with your job and finding a way to break into the house. This isn’t an ordinary killing. You will soon find out why everything looks so familiar.
The Child of the Hill House is very creepy and quite challenging — all of the puzzles will really make you think.
Aye Fair Lady by The Stairfall Institute for the Study of Phantasms and Simulacra
Aye Fair Lady is a wonderful, funny and well made little point-and-click adventure game. You play Steggy — the character from the game Yorkshire Gubbins (made by the same developer). You have made it out of the house before midday, which is an accomplishment for a lazy lady like yourself. Everything seems to be going your way… until you find out what day it is. As it turns out, it is NATIONAL SIGNING DAY — meaning no one is allowed to talk and must instead sing to communicate.
You do not want to sing. As a matter of fact, you want this whole silly day to be done with. Your BFF happens to love it, but is willing to help you with your master plan, as to stop National Singing Day, you must enter a singing and dancing competition in front of the town and win! As you’re no good at singing or dancing and don’t even have anything to wear… you must figure out a way to get all of those things and avoid singing for the duration of the day.
Aye Fair Lady is beautifully voiceed with a bunch of different songs — sung by both humans and robots! Though it is short, the entire duration of the game will have you smiling and laughing along with the characters and their silly way of getting around the rules.
Some Forest We Remember by Blue_and_Black
Some Forest We Remember is a surprisingly sad little adventure where you play a simple person, walking through a desert. You’re tired. You are a bit sad. And shortly, you start to remember bits of your childhood. You seem to like to hang out by a pond — you made friends with the birds. Talking to the various birds over and over gives you more stories, as well as stones to collect. You even have a lovely dog following you around.
But soon, you break out of the memory and are back in this desert where no one, not even animals, seems to be around. You have to keep moving forward and keep trekking on, despite the memories coming back to you. Some Forest We Remember is a lovely little game — it is quite relaxing to play through and ends at a very interesting point. You’ll have to see what is in this forest that you seem to remember…
Snowspirit by Ice Fall Games
In Snowspirit, you play as a strangely creepy snowman — one that hibernated for a while but woke up to a far less than cold world. Without any ice worms to eat, you will surely die off. This winter seems to have not come around, so you can eat the ice worms you usually live off. To make matters worse, your ice worm totem has also broken — so you can’t go back and sleep until this is all over. You will need to explore your environment and figure out a way to bring back the cold.
Not only can you explore this world, but once you have fixed your ability to sleep, you can even explore various different dreams. These dreams have their own inventory of items you can only use within them. You will need to pay attention to your surroundings and work towards bringing your world back.
In the main world, there is a mysterious cave full of hints on how to bring back the winter, but it will be up to you to find the missing pieces. Snowspirit is a challenge complete with a unique and somewhat strange story.
Nine Survive by Michael Sheail
Nine Survive is a super-funny point-and-click adventure game where you play a person working their first day of a new job! This is a not-so-great office job at a place that takes dead bodies, chops them up and sells them to medical institutions. It’s not your dream job, but you are in sales, so at least you don’t have to see any body parts in person. Your first day is pretty good… until your boss tells you that whoever has performed worst by the end of each day gets killed.
Apparently, that is the motivator for everyone working in the office — so you’d better find some sales leads, and fast. Several people in your office might help you out, though loads of them are just trying to get their own work done and avoid being killed themselves. There seems to be something going on between the manager and the assistant manager — which might lead to some sales if you can take it from under their nose. Maybe that will even force one of them to see the evil ways of killing employees! Who knows? You should probably just try and focus on your own survival…
Alluvium by Powerhoof
Alluvium is a twisted yet colorful point-and-click where you are the single survivor on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. You have been there for a very long time — there isn’t much hope of finding a way off. That is, until a ship is nearby! You might be able to make it out if you can light your fire, but even that is a huge struggle.
Getting the ship to see you is only the start of your adventure. Your rescuers won’t be as kind to you as you’d like to think. There is a lot more to this tiny island — a lot that you won’t see at first. Your crew are… somewhere. You know far more than you think. Once you start figuring out what happened to the rest of the flight that crashed here, you will start to see what strange occurrences have happened around here. Each time you try to escape death, you will see what happens and how the game will play out during your mistakes. Your character is far more intelligent than the decisions you make…
Alluvium is beautifully voiced and takes you along loads of mind-bending twists and turns. It is not a game to miss.
CODE-8 by Liquidream
CODE-8 is a short yet super-impressive point-and-click adventure made in the Pico-8 engine. Your ship has crash landed on an alien planet — it doesn’t seem to have any dangers and you were the only one on your ship, however there must be more to it than meets the eye. You don’t seem to be the first person who has crashed mysteriously on this planet — and unless you do something to fix it, you won’t be the last.
CODE-8 is a very short adventure, but it is brilliant, especially considering the engine it was made in. Not only does it work like a traditional point-and-click adventure game, but there are also full cutscenes and a map to explore. It is up to you to get off this planet and keep the locals from getting any more crashed ships.
Where Others Lie by Hexagon Blue
Where Others Lie is another space adventure, but this time you play a computer system, able to control and work with various members of a space mission. You oversee a large mission to a new planet, with the objective to simply bag and tag anything of interest for further research. It isn’t a challenging mission and the crew don’t seem too happy about having someone watching and working with them, however, they are going to have to deal with that. Each day has a limited number of daylight hours in which to complete various tasks. Once the night comes, your signal gets cut off and you have no view nor control over the crew.
At first, this seems fine. You can carry out some basic tasks and everyone seems to behave. But the entire world changes once you go offline. It seems there was a reason to have you on the mission — a lot more is going on in this strange planet. You will need to really think and help the crew figure out what to do until safety comes. Where Others Lie is a beautiful and wonderfully made adventure game that keeps you wanting more, even after it ends.
The Adventure Jam is a yearly game jam. If you are interested in learning more about the Adventure Jam, follow their Twitter, @AdventureJam!
Thanks for the shout out for Aye Fair Lady!
This has been a great jam, I hope people check out these games AND the others, there’s some great stuff there 🙂
Hi 🙂 – and thank you for including my game in this intriguing list 😛
And well I’m happy to see that your top selection is even similar to mine – with just some difference.
I loved Aye Fair Lady (game’s perfect and the songs are astonishing – I played more than one to make others to listen to them) and voice acting in Alluvium is spectacular (the game is great, I mean, voice acting is jaw-dropping)
Loved also Code-8 and the lot bigger Snowspirit (loved the story and the interaction) – and these four were in my top too.
Nine Survive wasn’t but it was a hard choice (I loved it – from the graphic up to the witty humor and the atmosphere while the others were just outside my favorites ones (“Where others lie” is quite cool and Some forest we remember is a little gem)
I just put in front of them another three/four as Claude and the Phantom Cat (I loved the cartoon design and – well – the Phantom cat idea :-)…), Antenna Dilemma (it got me at first play – I was intrigued by the main character idea – in a gray, tv driven dystopic world) and well Spy Quest (hard at first – but I loved the several references to old-days-Sierra games, the details, and the final)
But there are a lot of other wonderful games – I was really impressed by the overall quality of this jam that (in my little experience) seemed a bit out of the ordinary. I mean – 14 days are of course more than a couple or a week – but yup – most of the participants did a lot of work in this timeframe.
Ah thanks also for your videos about the whole jam – I loved them (and I recheck some games – I played all of them too – after seeing you play them)
And thanks thanks for this post. Did I already say that? I guess so 🙂
Thank you very much for including CODE-8 in your list.
Squeezing enough to make a Point+Click game work “playing” into PICO-8 was more of a challenge than I originally thought it would be. Given more time, it’s definitely possible to get a full-sized adventure game in there.
(But then again, just coz you *COULD* eat a roast dinner with nothing but a cocktail stick, doesn’t mean there isn’t an easier way to do it – guess it’s good that I love the challenge!)
Thanks again 😀
Thank you for featuring Nine Survive. It was a one man labour of love that got me out of doing any housework for two weeks. I don’t think it’s anywhere near the quality of the other games in your list but I’ll happily accept the praise!
as I said – for what it’s worth I’m a fan 🙂
I thought Nine Survive was one of the better ones. Quite an elaborate series of puzzles! And the office environment felt very alive.