Is it true that Germans love adventure (point-and-click) games?

I’ve never heard of that tbh…I’d say our favorite genre is simulators. Job simulators, to be precise.

We come home from our job driving a subway train only to unwind by driving a fictional subway train 😭

I’d agree that today simulators are bigger, but Germans do have a soft spot PaC games. Generally speaking, everything with a puzzle component does well here. Strategy games also do rather well.

Some of the most iconic German games are point-and-clicks. First thing that comes to mind when I think German cult classic is the Deponia series.

It never was like a HUGE thing and is especially not nowadays but i would say that point and click games were generally more popular here than in most other countries.
Daedelic entertainment, a decently big german developer was known for their point and click games, from them alone there are quite a few point and click adventures that are a lot more popular in Germany than they are in the rest of the world.

I would say most germans interested in video games above the age of 25 have at least heard of games like Edna bricht aus or the Deponia series.

At least my mom does^^

Yes. Monkey Island is my childhood. 🥲

We used to, its mostly the millenial and gen x that love those. Gen Z and Gen Alpha doesnt really play them anymore except for the popular ones like tell tales the walking dead etc. Its sadly a dying genre.

I mean… just look at the quality of the graphics. Notice the functional telephone kiosk and the CRT monitors in the office. Notice how the whole game is about 1 MB in size. Notice also how it doesn’t even run on Windows: it’s a DOS game.

This is a site for retro games, and this one goes back to the 1990s, when people were still using Windows 3.11. Back then computers would boot into MS-DOS, and you’d have to type in a command to start Windows; to play this game you’d have to exit Windows and go back to MS-DOS. The game would have been sold (or, since this was a promotional game, given out) on [a 3½-inch diskette](https://cdn.t3n.de/magazin/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Diskette.jpg?class=hero-small) which had the truly astounding capacity of 1.44 MB. The game wasn’t installed: you had to insert the diskette into the drive and start it from the command line. (In case you ever wondered what the [“Save” icon](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:690/1*phH-lRzxGj61qOygGjlbtA.png) on many applications’ user interfaces is supposed to represent, it’s a diskette.)

Back then, computers were much slower and way, way less powerful than they are today. As a result, games were also far less sophisticated. Point-and-click adventure games were a thing not because they were somehow trendy, but because on the clunky machines of the day, there were limits to what you could do.

Point-and-click games were relatively easy to program and to fit on a diskette, and the focus was not on action but on puzzle-solving. The evolved from even earlier text-based adventure games, where you would have to type in something like “Open the red door,” and it would respond with something like “The door opens to reveal a fire-breathing dragon.”

And of course point-and-click games were easy and cheap enough to produce that they could be made for promotional purposes. That didn’t mean they were much good, though. I once played through a “game” produced by a church that had a moral message (as I recall, it was a basic anti-drug message) and there was literally only one path you could take to the inexorably happy end, your character having learned to say “No” to drugs.

So it’s not that Germans love these games *now*, it’s that in the past (and not just in Germany) they were one of the genres it was possible to play. About this time first-person shooter games had just started to become possible, but otherwise it was mainly adaptations of arcade games like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, or these adventure games.