This is a followup to @[email protected] ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
TotK is weird for me because I enjoyed it while playing, but once I finished it I soured on it a lot. I burned out on it way quicker than BotW. Didn’t even bother getting all the shrines. It was really not worth the six year wait.
Also reusing the overworld was insane. The Sky and Depths are way too empty and repetitive to make up for it.