The Witness is highly unconventional but will enchant players who come ready to surrender their imagination to its unusual charms and challenging puzzles.

While not spectacular as a game in and of itself, the gameplay innovations it presents to the adventure genre might make it worth a try.

Explore the enchanting world of Lucy Dreaming; with an impressive storyline, beautiful graphics, and excellent voice acting, it’s a game worth checking out!

With a great cast of characters, Unavowed is a stylish urban supernatural fantasy that is touching, funny, endearing, replayable and above all, fun.

Return to Monkey Island is a fantastic addition to the series and a great game in its own right. If you’re a Guybrush Threepwood fan or want to revisit the high point of adventures past and present, you owe it to yourself to come back to Monkey Island.

Gone Home does only one thing but does it superbly, telling a touching story solely through exploration that makes it well worth experiencing.

Lacuna is a wonderfully tense hard-boiled story set in a gorgeous jazzpunk future. Its mysteries will make you work for the answers, and will even let you fail, but either way the payoff is a sense of accomplishment that few other narrative puzzlers provide.

Her Story’s searchable video database is a unique and compelling way of telling its interactive story, making it worth the fairly short trip to the police station.

This Bed We Made is an enthralling mystery with an unusual protagonist, brought to life by convincingly detailed graphics and excellent voice acting.

Riven is a remake that stays true to the original. While the breathtaking world and visuals adeptly draw you in, the initial obscurity of the story and puzzle complexity may eventually push you away from full engagement. Still, for those who have played and enjoyed the original, this is an excellent dive back into a spectacular world, and an opportunity to see how Cyan Worlds has enriched the original vision.

This isn’t a situation where one forces oneself to slog through Moby Dick because it’s a “classic”; The Secret of Monkey Island is still as fun as any other game you’ll play this year, and probably significantly more so, and everyone who loves adventure games should experience it at least once.

It may not be quite as good as the others, but it's still required gaming for the Layton-obsessed, and a high recommendation for anyone who loves puzzles.

Devotion’s tale of fractured memories and buried secrets provides a dark, compelling look into the depths of human frailty and desperation. It doesn’t quite reach the heights its developer achieved with Detention, but it’s a well-crafted first-person journey to a strange and unexpected place.

Although the quality of immersion is excellent, it is somewhat transient, no doubt leaving many feeling short-changed. In the end, though, the intrigue and originality of the story make it a very important adventure game for all fans of the genre.

Chants of Sennaar meets the highest standards due to its finely crafted, original and addictive language-learning gameplay, and also its beautifully honed graphics and sonics. It’s a distinctively French feast for the eyes, ears and brain.

A quality adventure game even though the restyling of the old locations on Mêlée Island and Monkey Island is a bit of a mixed bag. The ending is long, satisfying and almost as disturbingly weird.

A masterly remastering of the LucasArts classic. If you haven’t yet contended with Earth’s vilest extremity, it’s time to finally embrace the Day of the Tentacle.

Bursting at the seams with challenging puzzles and thought-provoking science fiction, The Talos Principle is a philosophically-minded first-person puzzler that’s well worth your time.

Ultimately, What's New Beelzebub? is an overwhelmingly ambitious game that never stops for a breath, and by the end of the strange journey it nearly collapses under its own comedic weight and the strain of throwing every bizarre scenario and creative re-use of supporting characters at the wall.

Paradigm is a uniquely creative blend of art, music and consistently humorous gameplay. It’s an absurdist adventure like no other, and one that’s earned its place among the classics.

Uniformly excellent writing, acting, and audio-visual presentation of an ancient Roman city and its imminently doomed citizens make The Forgotten City a mystery well worth solving—and the clever time-looping mechanics make your investigation a lot of fun.

If you're the kind of person who enjoys the rush of simulated terror, follow the developer's advice: wait until sundown, put on some headphones, and start up Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Though the inclusion of repetitive mini-games is anything but evolutionary, this game is well worth a look for those who can handle some reflex action in their adventures.

Chariots of the Dogs sucked me in and completely immersed me with the joy that comes from playing a special adventure game.

That aside, this is the best time I've had with an adventure game – 2D or 3D, big or small budget – this year. With an original charm all its own, Machinarium is a real winner and an instant classic.

Hats off to Telltale for not resting on their laurels with The Wolf Among Us, but stepping out and creating a new adventure series that is shaping up to be brilliantly bleak and gritty but joyously fun.

A Space for the Unbound is an example of an adventure story that will have the surprising and far-reaching power to move most people, whether or not they enjoy the ride the gameplay presents. It will particularly appeal to those players who have a fondness for the 16-bit console era, and those who like cats!

While I'm prepared to recommend Professor Layton and the Curious Village wholeheartedly, it does come with a serious caution about expectations. If you're looking for a well-rounded adventure with plenty of exploration and a fully-integrated storyline, you simply won't find it here.