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Whither The 7th Guest-Style Puzzle Adventure?
Deunan writes "While poking around on the Internet, I discovered a DirectX front end for the classic The 7th Guest CD-ROM puzzle adventure. After some further searching, I stumbled across a more recent pitch for 7th Guest III: The Collector [apparently the game was in development in 2002/3, and there's an interview with designer Rob Landeros about it, but it seems to be stalled.] I was wondering what killed interest in it - are 'thinking' games just not popular anymore?"
...but only if you're 'thinking' about picking hookers and killing people while playing.
Another popular (but horrid) game in this genre was Phantasmagoria. Horror movie inspired hackishness.
The Myst games were great, but Riven was silly hard. The marble puzzle at the end haunted my very dreams. Uru seems to be much easier, so maybe Cyan got complaints about Riven's difficulty.
Cliff Johnson is still working on his excellent puzzle-driven games. He has always (intelligently, in my opinion) kept the graphics and sound simple and out of the way of the real, fiendish puzzles and metapuzzles. You can download the old games, like The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three, from his website; he's even updated them to work on Mac OS X and modern Windows. The second in the Arcanum series (The Fool and His Money) is due out this fall.