Innovation in Adventure Games

Over the years I have grown tired of this thing called an adventure game, this thing where you control a character, walk around, pick up items, trade items, and solve quests. I grow tired of the standard, overused, generic adventure game model, with generic settings, and generic puzzles.

Generic Adventure Game Settings: Pirates, Detectives, Average Joes who get thrown into crazy adventures, Police Men, generic space stories, or stuff like that.

Generic Adventure Game Screenplay: Start the player out with a goal to open a door. To open this door he must solve a series of convoluted puzzles in a group of locations by doing inane things that could only happen in an adventure game. He will talk to random people by saying "Hello," "Can I have item?", or "Bye." He will trade items with characters, use locks on keys, and then finally get the one inventory item that will open the door. He will open the door only to face another arena.

Adventure games need innovation. Adventure games need new design mechanics, new features, new settings, new problems, and new screenplays that don't involving talking to random strangers and then trading items with them.

That's what I tried to do in La Croix Pan. I tried to add a new element to the standard "Walk," "Interact," "Look," "Talk," bit. I added a new verb "kick" to that sequence. I tried to incorprate a new setting into adventure games, one I had never seen before, one in World War II. I tried to change the adventure formula by adding in a sniper action sequence, which I haven't really seen in any recent adventure games. I tried to prevent myself from adding a whole sequence of unncessary puzzles just to solve one puzzle.
For example: I didn't add a whole 20 minutes of gameplay just to open one door. That would never happen in real life. You don't walk around an abandoned French village picking up random items in random rooms, and then combine them together to create a lock pick just to open this one door.

I don't want to play another game where I control a character who can walk around a town, talk to other characters, and then trade items in a seemingly adventure-game-esque world. There are so many other settings that could be explored in adventure games instead of this generic screenplay that seems to be recycled ever since the first Monky Island game was released.

Give the player new and interesting goals, and new ways to acheive them, in new and different settings. I'm tired of adventure games; I want something "innovative."