The 2025 Adventure Game Hotshot Awards

0 Comments

Features by Adventure Game Hotspot staff
Published:
Page 5/6

Best Modern Adventure – Blue Prince

Blue Prince is anything but traditional, from top to bottom. The partly procedurally generated, strategy-oriented gameplay might invite questions about whether it actually even fits the label of an adventure game, but we warmly welcome it. Its deep exploration, evocative storytelling that gets ever richer the further you progress, and incredibly challenging puzzles firmly meet the criteria of what we expect to get out of an adventure game, just in incredibly… well, modern ways that we’ve never seen anything quite like before. It’s a game that rewards experimentation and persistence. Fully “completing” the game is a 100-plus-hour challenge that few players will have the time and patience to see through, but the game offers up an initial main goal of reaching Room 46 (in a 45-room manor, remember) that serves as a terrific early stopping point for those who'd rather not fall too deep into the rabbit hole. Blue Prince is so steeped in enigma that it works rather well to leave many of its mysteries unsolved, but the later puzzles are so massive and cleverly woven into the environment that they're well worth the extra effort to see through. We’ve never played anything like Dogubomb’s debut masterpiece, and we couldn't be happier that it so unexpectedly widened the horizons of what adventure games can be.

Runners-up:

The Séance of Blake Manor
Keeper
Dispatch
The Roottrees Are Dead

Best Classic-styled Adventure – The Drifter

We first heard of The Drifter way back in 2019, so you might wonder why a retro point-and-click adventure game styled to look like the early 1990s VGA era would have such a lengthy development window. The answer smacks you right in the face (or rather, does something even more violent) the moment you start playing, making it instantly clear that Powerhoof put an incredible level of player-centric thought and consideration into every design decision. It’s why The Drifter is so phenomenal: a game that looks and sounds like the best of the beloved classics, while making a seemingly endless number of brilliant refinements all geared toward reducing player friction and maximizing accessibility. Perhaps never has there been a game that proves so conclusively that being traditional in style still allows for evolution of gameplay. The Drifter is a relentlessly propulsive adventure game that never slows down its storytelling throughout its many hours of play time. It is creative in its fiction, disarmingly funny when least expected, and consistently surprising in its narrative development. Its years in the making were very much time well spent to result in something so perfectly traditional-feeling in style and mechanics while playing like something so delightfully fresh in 2025.