Genres
What is a genre?
A genre is a categorization of a piece of fiction, art, music literature or film that holds different projects that have a similar theme together. There are a lot of main genres that act as umbrellas for a wider variety of projects such as: Strategy, Sport, Adventure, Action, Simulation, Puzzle, Hybrid and Role-Playing.
Adventure is a popular genre in games as it allows developers the freedom to make the world lusher and make the game more enjoyable to play. The genre can be seen throughout games of many diverse types like Rust (survival/adventure), Skyrim (action/rpg/adventure) and Human: Fall Flat (adventure/puzzle)
Rust
Rust is an adventure survival game as it is open world without quests but has a competitive survival system which causes player versus player conflicts over gear or land. The focus in Rust is to gear yourself up and make a strong base to become the most dominant player in the server. This causes the game to be a hybrid of adventure and survival as you explore to gain resources to build bases and scrap to make weapons along the way. Rust forces you to adventure as to gain loot or find a suitable place for a base you must explore the map. The most profitable way to gear yourself in Rust is to raid other players bases however, to find a player base, you must look for one causing you to adventure/explore making adventure a vital part of the game.
This image shows a base built by a player in rust. This base is most likely a player made shop that allows other players to buy goods from others.
Gameplay:
Rust follows an open world sandbox game style that does not contain a bit of story or limitation based on levels or experience but instead by how well the player can utilize mechanics to succeed. Rust’s main gameplay mechanics are the unusually hard player versus player combat and base building as well as loot collection that make rust stand in its own spotlight which is a good development strategy as it means rust has its own cult like player base and target audience. Rust is also a good replayable game as it has a wipe feature which resets every players progress in the game world every month which completely switches up the game and creates a hostile world where players partake in a more primal version of pvp combat with weapons such as spears or bows in order to progress above the other plays.
Skyrim
Skyrim is an open world RPG in which the world is free for you to explore making giving it the aspect of adventure. Unlike Rust, Skyrim is single player and highly quest driven with the focus being on completing missions for people and getting some sort of reward to make you stronger. The aspect of adventure comes in the exploration, Skyrim has mases of unique dungeons and cities or any other areas that you can explore for loot. Whilst exploring in Skyrim you will meet a vast array of npcs who give the player quests unique to them, in these quests you will be tasked with many different objectives varying from dungeon crawling and killing mini bosses to following a dog around but no matter the quest they will all force you to explore in some way and most of them have fights between the player and bandits or undead zombies making it heavy with both action and adventure.
This image showcases the extent of character customization. This player’s character looks to be an argonian sorcerer. I have also included one of the various expansive skill trees to showcase the progressive features in Skyrim.
Gameplay:
Skyrim also features some very good progression in the way of levels and skills. In the game the player will earn levels by playing quests and doing other exploration type tasks like dungeon crawling and landmark exploration. With every level the player gets they have a choice to upgrade one of three skills, health, stamina or magicka (the games currency for magic casting). Not only this but all abilities, armour and weapons have their own independent skill tree that allows for in depth character builds. Skyrim boasts a massive open world that is busting with life that creates life in the game of Skyrim, this feature creates escapism for the player by throwing them into a different world where they are free to experiment with their fantasies.
Human: Fall Flat
Human Fall Flat is a puzzle game where you are set in a level and must explore and get past various obstacles to find an exit, this is done by using the environment and objects around the character to find solutions to the challenges put in the way of the character. In order to find the problems and the solutions to them you must explore the world and use your own ingenuity to find a way past and get what you need to do so. Unlike Skyrim, H:FF is a non-linear game where there is no forced objective and the game is focused around goofy puzzles and jelly men falling rather than a quest driven action adventure, however similarly to Rust, H:FF has no objective but that is where the comparisons end as H:FF has no competitive player versus player combat or a survival system at all.
Gameplay:
H:FF is a linear level-based game that heavily relies on collaboration and puzzle solving mechanics in order to complete levels. The flow of H:FF comes through the increase in level difficulty as you progress further into the game. An example of how H:FF’s difficulty increases would be through the addition of new puzzles with more complex solutions as progression. H:FF has a unique art style that is bright and childish which makes the game perfect for appealing to young audiences, however, H:FF also requires a good amount of problem solving and decisive thinking which means that the game still creates fun for and older audience as well. H:FF could also be considered a sandbox game as the levels allow the players to experiment freely with the games physics and obstacles to solve problems in creative ways based on how the player figures it out.
Seb Crowhurst Game Development 