Are there any good active online forums for similar types of games - graphical adventure games, visual novels, …?
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forum.choiceofgames.com is an active site that is much larger than this one, and focuses on games written in Choicescript and sold/marketed by Choice of Games.
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Of course! Go to the Lemma Soft Forums for visual novels; it’s an old, established community.
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yea; actually I teach them the secrets of how to build a solid niche gaming community, so I consider lemmasoft forum the VN equivalent of this forum (and r.a.i.f), also because of my posts and PM (esp. to the author of Ren’Py…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Adventure Game Studio has a dedicated forum that has been active for a long time and, in my opinion, is the place to keep up with indie point and click adventures: Index | Adventure Game Studio
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You can also check out the specific forums for Quest and Adrift. Both have sub- forums for general IF if I remember correctly.
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Ok, a couple follow up questions…
Are visual novels primarily a Japanese manga style thing? Does it include things like digital comic books? Are there indie visual novels?
There seem to be a ton of narrative games that don’t fall into any of the categories so far - Sorcery!, Citizen Sleeper, etc. The IGF narrative award category always has a bunch of these. Are there not any dedicated sites where fans of these kinds of games get together?
They started there but the field has become large. The style of manga illustration has continued as a common genre convention, but there’s plenty of exceptions.
Not sure.
Lots. I’d say the field is dominated by indies (as are text games and point-and-click adventures). Although I don’t know the Japanese market at all; there may be big players there which wouldn’t count as “indie”.
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They have roots in manga and are much more common in Asian game/literature space.
They have slowly been becoming more prominent with increasing American fanbases, and crossing a bit to the mainstream especially with the ones that are formally translated to English.
I kind of got hooked on Danganronpa which is a hyper-stylized visual novel series of high school “murder games” which has ridiculously complicated lore and a killer music soundtrack that I still listen to.
And there’s also Doki Doki Literature Club which you’re probably aware of. It was actually created by an American author Dan Salvato and is just a happy game about hanging out with classmates and reading books and not a psychologically traumatizing meta horror game…[1]
There are many indie visual novels! (Just be aware it’s also a popular medium for erotica and flat out porn, so if you’ve got “show adult content” enabled on itch you will encounter those also.)
NARRATOR: It is a psychologically traumatizing horror game. ↩︎
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Oh, and puzzle games. There has to be a forum for puzzle game fans I would think.
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There are some very successful Western indie visual novels like Slay the Princess, which has sold more than 200 000 copies, I believe
The Argentinian Pixel Pulps are other examples of indie visual novels that seem to have done quite well. They have very striking artwork in a ZX Spectrum style.
Yes, there are lots of narrative games outside the standard categories. My favourite narrative game this year is the South Korean No Case Should Remain Unsolved. It’s mostly text, but gameplay-wise it is much closer to The Case of The Golden Idol and Sam Barlow’s FMV-games than to traditional Interactive Fiction.
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The puzzle communities I’m in contact with are mostly on Discord rather than forums.
https://thinkygames.com has links to follow.
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Not puzzle games per se, but the Twisty Puzzles Forum:
https://twistypuzzles.com/forum/index.php
Is full of puzzle enthusiasts and has a section for non-Twisty puzzles. And while discussion there is mostly about mechanical puzzles, puzzle simulators and puzzle games do come up from time to time.
Sadly, forums and other retro social media are a dying breed and it seems like everything is a Facebook Group, Discord Server, or Subreddit these days.
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I am interested in other types of groups too. I didn’t mention Discord because I haven’t yet used it and don’t know how it works. I use Reddit periodically for non-gaming topics, though it usually isn’t a very good or enlightening experience, so I have been using it less and less. I have gotten some helpful book recommendations on it.
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I used to read the subbreddits Twinegames, Textventures, Gamebooks, and Interactivefiction, but except the Twine one, there is so little activity that I don’t bother nowadays.
There might be new ones I am not aware of though.
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There are some lurkers on the Thimbleweed Park forums. Might be worth diggin’ around there. It’s not all about Thimbleweed. Definitely a niche forum for classic adventure games.
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You might also consider the forums on Adventure Gamers . While I can’t speak to the quality of discussions there, I regularly check the site for reviews when a new point-and-click adventure game catches my interest.
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The CRPG Addict: Long-form, ultra detailed analysis of classical CRPGs, with a busy comment section
The Adventurers Guild: the equivalent thing, but for text and graphical adventures
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