7. Syberia
Fast forward to 2002 and the adventure game was still going strong. Syberia showed just how far the genre had come since Maniac Mansion while still harkening back to the style established by those earlier titles. Syberia made use of the technology of the time to create a sometimes beautiful 3D world. These great graphics, its inventive setting and a highly engrossing story made it a great addition to the already impressive list of adventure games. For those unfamiliar, you take control of Kate, an associate lawyer who is trying to secure a major business deal to acquire a toy company. Sounds boring, right? Well luckily her quest takes her all over a somewhat steampunk Europe made up of static but great looking backgrounds with fully animated characters inhabiting them. It made use of a context sensitive clicking system with the cursor changing to let you know how each hot spot could be interacted with. This and the games inventory were very easy to use making everything all the more enjoyable. One of the games most impressive features was the dialogue, with it being written intelligently and grown up rather than the usual comedy that point and click games favoured for the most part. It was a fresh approach and the quality of the voice acting in its main characters only served to showcase how well written the game was. Some side characters were the usual fun of the mill type, but it's to be expected with most games. The story came across as slightly deeper than most point and clicks, particularly in the fleshing out of Kate's back story which was told through her personal phone calls to her friends and family back home. Syberia was deliberately slow paced and really allowed you take everything in. Added to that, the puzzles were never over the top frustratingly tough and usually very believably related to the story unfolding rather than just included for the sake of having a puzzle. Two years later, it got the sequel it deserved and in August of this year a third installment finally went into production for a 2014/15 release. Plenty of time to play through the first two in time for that.