Leigh,

Call me a contrarian, sure. I'll put my hands up and take that bullet square in the chest like a good little dissident. I don't like Jane Jensen or Ragnar Tornquist's work either, but whether I'd be half as resistant to a Gabriel Knight or Longest Journey game were they not talked of in such awed tones, I don't know.

But adventure games are not about talking. They're about reading. In a medium defined by nothing more than its interactivity, the adventure game is about basking before a CRT monitor and the static wit of a distant creator like some pallid starfish. Games are the medium that tell us "Yes," but Adventure Game is the genre that tells us "No." No, you can't do that. No, that doesn't work. No sir!

People often hold up an adventure game, something like Grim Fandango, as the pinnacle of storytelling in games. Of course it is! It's fucking cheating! It's not trying to create a game, but offering riddles that link together its conversations and cutscenes. The point'n'click makes us laugh, it makes us cry, but it casts no shadow in the greater landscape of games.

I'm not a total monster. I understand that in solving problems and picking your own way through conversation trees, you're taking on a sense of agency over the plot. But if we're going to learn from this genre, we need to learn from the right games. The popular "classics," with their glittering writing, are paving over the adventure games we need to pay attention to. Games like 1994's Snatcher.

(This is the part where I prove your point by screaming about a game nobody talks about.)

(This is also the bit where the label of adventure games might start to lose its stick and peel away.)

Famously, Snatcher was what Hideo Kojima created before donning the billion-dollar sneaking suit of the Metal Gear Solid series. It's noteworthy for two things: One, being adored by the eleven people that played it. Two, showcasing Kojima's tendency to be "inspired" by films, before he learned tact.

Snatcher's world is Blade Runner, making it yet another much-loved Blade Runner adventure game. Snatcher's blade runners are "junkers," the replicants "snatchers," but it's all there, down to the future-noir tone and the protagonist's flappy brown trenchcoat.

What's worth noting about Snatcher, though, is how it knitted its plot threads into the game you were playing. The outrageous opening dips your balls into hot bathwater when you arrive at an abandoned factory, your very first day on the job, to discover your company's best junker with his head literally torn off. Your character's as horrified as you are. You can feel the game sidling up to you, gesturing at the corpse with a cigarette, and saying "We're playing for keeps."

Puzzles in Snatcher demand you call back to clues from hours before, or, excellently, what looks like a puzzle is solved by an NPC as you're trying to work it out. Or perhaps it has no solution at all, as in one scene where your car begins accelerating wildly and the game screams "WHAT DO YOU DO?" Conversations routinely snap into gunfights which can and will kill you if you're not quick enough — which is in turn elevated through my favorite-ever use of a peripheral. The Sega CD version of Snatcher lets you draw a lightgun in real life to save yourself QUICKLY QUICKLY SHOOT.

In other words, Snatcher was entertaining because it never let you know what the rules of its game were, but you trusted that if you paid attention, you'd scrape through this shift in one piece. That's something it has in common with the other adventure games I enjoy, like It Came From The Desert or KGB. Adventure games that are actually — wait for it — adventurous.

You could argue that The Walking Dead is trying to do the same thing, and I should be happy. A game trying to hide its fustian puzzles, like an elderly magician sucking in their gut, to instead shock us. It does, in fact, pull the same trick as Snatcher, with that conversation in Episode 2 that's interrupted by a zombie attack.

At which point I sigh, turn up the collar of my junker's trenchcoat against the rain and say that I just don't think The Walking Dead is very good at it. The writing, directing and visuals are all so flat that the game plays like a pinball table. Holding you attention with the fluorescent bumpers and paddles of MORAL CHOICES and SHOCKING TWISTS, but the ball doesn't get anywhere, it just ... stops.

I'm going to remember none of those characters fondly, and you're the same. The most fun I've seen you have with The Walking Dead is selecting protagonist Lee's "..." conversation option as much as possible. The actress in you laughing as you refuse to play along with a dumb script.

I'm glad you chose to become a games writer instead of an actress. I love writing these letters to you.

So much so, I'll be sporting and do what you said. I'll "Ask LEIGH about LOOM."

xox

Quinns