10 Adventure Games You Should Definitely Avoid

Adventure games are all about spurring wonder in us as we sprawl through every corner of their elaborate world, looking to uncover new items, lore, and encounters to further deepen our connection to it. However, there are some adventure games where the more you unpack, the uglier it gets.

From classic point-and-click adventure games to the now sprawling, fully realized worlds of modern action titles, the genre has grown beyond what was thought possible at the time. Naturally, this has meant there have been several stinkers that stick out like a sore thumb, making you question the behind-the-scenes decisions that went into making the game, and why you even started playing it to begin with.

That's why, for today, we'll be taking a look at some of the worst adventure games out there that will take you on journeys that leave you worse than you were starting them.

10 The Mystery of the Druids

An Infamous "So-Bad-It's-Good" That Isn't Worth The Pain

The Mystery of the Druids is a cult favorite "So-Bad-It's-Good" point-and-click adventure game that sees you play a disgraced cop as he tries to uncover the truth behind mysterious murders. It has a lot of elements that sound appealing: A simple murder mystery that evolves into a cosmic horror, solid voice acting, and absurd leaps of logic you have to see to believe.

That said, it's not at all enjoyable to play. For many years, the game was borderline unplayable and would frequently crash if you exhaled too loudly near it. Even with later releases fixing these issues, the game is awfully clunky and feels as though it's doing its best to fight against your every command.

I'd say just chuck on the Mandalore Gaming video if this sparks your interest, and spare yourself the headache of actually playing it.

9 Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust

No Leisure to Be Had With This One

Before LucasArts would go on to create classics like Star Wars: Dark Forces or The Force Unleashed, LucasArts made its start with narrative-driven point-and-click adventure games. Some of these would go on to be iconic, like Escape From Monkey Island, which would define the genre and influence classics like Wolf Among Us years later. However, not all were wins, like in the case of the absurd Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust.

This crude adventure game saw players take control of Larry Laffer as he embarked on a quest filled with awful jokes that'll leave you feeling embarrassed for whoever wrote them. Bad writing aside, the gameplay on offer here is just atrocious. In many cases, the camera will work against you, often prompting you to unintentionally hurl Larry off a ledge to his death. However, after spending no more than 10 minutes playing the game, you'll secretly enjoy seeing the obnoxious character meet a tragic fate.

8 Assassin's Creed: Odyssey

You Either Love It or You Hate It (Guess Which One I'm Picking)

Open-world action-adventure games receive mixed reception, and none encapsulate the genre's problems quite like Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.

To me, the game is both over-bloated with missions to do, yet too much empty space in between to really make it worth doing. It turns exploration on such a vibrant and bustling continent, clearly made to be as faithful as it can to its setting, into a grating chore. What's worse is that the overall narrative is so milquetoast, it's hard to ever truly feel invested in the characters or the dialogue to appreciate these quieter moments.

If you're someone who's antsy about open-world games, I think loading up Odyssey will hurt your relationships with future open-world games and scare you off genuinely great titles in the genre.

7 Cabela's North American Adventures

A Botched Hunt

Cabela's North American Adventures is an attempt to cater to that traditional hunter lifestyle, but hilariously comes up short. You'll spend your game glassing for deer to shoot across 20 of North America's prime hunting locations. But as we all know by now, quantity doesn't always make for a good adventure game, and as a result, it remains a fundamentally unpolished game.

A core part of an adventure game is how it makes movement satisfying. If we're exploring, let it be good, right? Well, Cabela's North American Adventures turns movement into a sluggish, tedious motion where you'll need to sprint to get anywhere. This is counterintuitive, though, as this will alert your targets. Aiming is also fundamentally broken, and aim assist tech wasn't as good back then as it is now. You'll almost never be able to hit a smaller target, as it'll dash faster than your controller can track.

6 The Lord of the Rings: Gollum

As Ugly As Its Main Character

The Lord of the Rings IP is host to some of the best video games of all time. However, this Gollum-focused entry is so bad, it casts such a dark shadow across the franchise that even Sauron would shudder.

There's no other word to describe The Lord of the Rings: Gollum besides "ugly". The graphics are beyond outdated, the audio is nauseating, and the game is riddled with so many bugs that it's nearly impossible to play. It's like a PS1 game quickly made to rip off Crash Bandicoot your parents buy for you by accident (like Bubsy or Gex), except made in a modern era. Unlike Bubsy or Gex, this one has little to no charming qualities to redeem it.

If that's not enough for you, the The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum's reception on launch was so bad that developers Daedalic Entertainment had to close their Hamburg, Germany, locations and scrap their second planned Lord of the Rings game.

5 Mafia III

A Constant Tease of Greatness

The only thing worse than a bad game is a bad game that threatens to be great, and that's exactly what Mafia III brings to the table.

Despite this open-world action-adventure game's engrossing story, its gameplay loop really brings it down. The missions on offer here are frustratingly repetitive, having you run the same busywork of clearing districts to climb the mob food chain. Which doesn't sound bad in theory, but the missions themselves offer little variety.

The open world set in 1968 New Bordeaux is emptier than a theater showing The Mandalorian & Grogu, leaving the game feeling like an empty simulation, rather than an experience you can truly immerse yourself in.

Had the game had a bit more time to cook in the oven, it could have become something truly great. However, experiencing these brief flashes of greatness before fluttering into mediocrity makes the frustration of playing it not worth engaging with. Sometimes, it's better to protect your peace.

4 Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League

An Infamous Miss From Rocksteady Games

After years of building a reputation for delivering phenomenal Batman games with faithful adaptations of iconic locations like Arkham Asylum and Gotham City, Rocksteady sadly threw it to the wind with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Transitioning out of their usual action-adventure format, this entry instead chose to capitalize on the open-world live-service grind with an almost mean-spirited, zany tone that comes far out of left field.

While there's more of the world to explore and a higher-stakes plot at hand, a series of questionable design choices turns the game into overstimulating visual noise. Rocksteady's first foray into the Justice League and Metropolis should have been a home run for fans, but instead, we're left wondering where it all went wrong in the first place.

3 Starfield

A Bethesda Game That Forgot the Adventure

Bethesda's Starfield was a labor of love from the studio, hoping to break from its esteemed franchises to carve out something new. Unfortunately, the final product ended up being the sum of the studio's worst parts, offering up a buggy, narratively weak, and fairly bland experience.

Up until the studio released its Free Lanes DLC this year, space travel was limited to menus and fast-travel points, neutering the studio's strongest feat: the sense of stumbling upon a tucked-away location and realizing how much depth it actually offers. The story is also non-existent, and nothing you do matters remotely, as, after a certain point, you'll be offered the choice to essentially restart the game while inheriting your skills, level, and powers.

In essence, this makes role-playing and immersion redundant, as nothing you do in a playthrough ever really has meaning. To add a rotten cherry on top of a very bad sundae, a significant number of the 1000 worlds you can visit end up being procedurally generated. For me, this kills all incentive to adventure and explore off the beaten path, because why should I care about it if the developers didn't actually craft the environment?

2 Codename: ICEMAN

An Iceberg of Suck

No, sadly, this is not a Top Gun video game spin-off. Codename: ICEMAN is a submarine adventure game that sought to tell a gripping political thriller, but ends up stringing you along with boring puzzles, dead ends, and no-win situations. Challenging point-and-click adventure games can absolutely exist, if they reveal information and solutions to you in a manner that makes you understand the developer's logic. In this game, you're left feeling as though the solutions were deliberately made to be as obtuse and borderline unsolvable as possible.

There's no underselling how easy it is to end up reaching dead ends in a playthrough, forcing you to either start an entirely new game or load a save file from hours beforehand because you forgot one crucial item. This could be forgiven if the story and characters were endearing in some way, but they're as plain and bland as a protein-maxxers dinner, offering nothing in the way of a defining characteristic worth remembering.

1 Limbo of the Lost

Iconic for All the Wrong Reasons

Limbo of the Lost may just be one of the most unhinged pieces of legacy media we've ever been graced with. But in no way can anyone recommend playing this in good conscience.

This peculiar point-and-click adventure game took 20 years to make and was finally released in 2008. A fact so incongruent with the actual game itself. You see, Limbo of the Lost would be quickly pulled from shelves following its release due to egregious plagiarism. It doesn't take long to discover entire assets lifted from other games, or even an entire sequence from the 1997 Spawn movie. The most egregious example of this is, at one point, your character will play the Indiana Jones theme song on a flute, shortly before fleeing from a gigantic boulder.

Beyond the plagiarism issues, the game itself is an absolute fever dream of incongruous decisions. The story is borderline nonsensical, the voice acting and overall sound design are ear-splittingly terrible, and the game's appearance is so dated it's borderline painful to look at.

It's a game that has rightly earned a negative reception and is definitely not worth playing to satisfy any curiosity about the final product.

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