The most popular abandonware adventure games

Knight Orc (1987, DOS/Mac) flips the fantasy script: you’re not the hero, you’re the orc. Tired of being slaughtered by noble knights, you decide it’s payback tim...

Guilty from 1995 is a moody point-and-click adventure that seems to have majored in brooding. You step into a murder investigation drenched in rain-soaked atmosphere and existentia...

Space Quest 4: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers takes the series into the wonderfully chaotic territory of time travel. Released in 1991, it gleefully tosses Roger across multiple ...

Don’t let the cartoony name fool you: Skullduggery: Adventures in Horror wants to unsettle you, and it’s surprisingly good at it. This early horror adventure mixes clas...

In Scapeghost (1989), you’re not just dead—you’re also on the clock. As police officer Alan Chance, recently murdered and newly spectral, you’ve got one las...

Cirque de Zale is a point-and-click adventure game released in 2004, developed by Rebecca Clements as a freeware title. Created using the Adventure Game Studio (AGS) engine, the ga...

Based on the hit TV series, LA Law: The Computer Game (1992) lets you live out legal drama without needing a law degree—though it certainly helps. You manage cases, interview...

Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe Edition is an educational computer game released in 1992 by Broderbund Software. It's part of the popular Carmen Sandiego franchise, des...

James Clavell's Shogun, a text adventure game developed by Infocom and released in 1989. Infocom was known for its interactive fiction games, and "James Clavell's Shogun" was one o...

Yes, it’s called Fish!, and yes, it’s as quirky as the exclamation mark suggests. This is a puzzle-platformer with personality, placing you in surreal environments that...

Released in 1988, Dream Zone was a surreal adventure where you explore your own subconscious after being sucked into a dream machine. It’s colorful, strange, and often unsett...

Dark, moody, and surprisingly creepy, Zork Nemesis is what happens when the whimsical world of Zork goes goth. The text adventures are gone—now it’s full-motion video, ...

Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in The Spinal Frontier is the most ambitious—and arguably strangest—entry in the series. Released in 1995, it blends traditional adventure ga...

Superhero League of Hoboken is a humorous role-playing game (RPG) released in 1994, developed by Legend Entertainment. It's a quirky mix of a traditional RPG and an adventure game,...

Come one, come all, to the saddest circus ever pixelated. In Ballyhoo, you're stuck in a depressing carnival trying to solve a kidnapping while dealing with clowns, carnies, and th...

Guy Spy and the Crystals of Armageddon is gloriously over-the-top, starring a hero who looks like he walked out of a Saturday morning cartoon and into a global conspiracy. The digi...

The sequel to Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch, Return to Ringworld throws you back into Larry Niven’s vast sci-fi universe—except this time, the puzzles are tougher...

Omnicron Conspiracy (1989, DOS) is a detective adventure wrapped in a cozy sci-fi blanket. You play as a Galactic Patrol agent solving crimes across alien worlds, all rendered in c...

Follow the Reader (1992, DOS) is an educational oddity that feels like a kindly librarian discovered the power of DOS and decided to make literacy a competitive sport. You guide wo...

The Twilight Zone is an abandoned sci-fi themed adventure game based on the popular TV series of the same name. The Twilight zone released in 1988 by First Row Software Publishing ...

Sci-Mutant Priestess (1989) is French, weird, and proud of it. You play as a rebellious mutant in a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi world ruled by bio-psychic cults. Obviously. It’s...