After a year-long hiatus, the much-missed narrative gaming convention AdventureX returned to London’s LSBU Hub this weekend, with a fabulous line-up of exhibitors and speakers. This year was one of the strongest to date: over 30 titles were available to play, and the quality and inventiveness on show was simply staggering.
If you think a story can only be told by pointing and clicking, think again. There were some splendid examples of the genre available for sure, but there were also other games which took a very different approach to narrative with excellent effect. Let’s dive into the highlights.
The Séance of Blake Manor (Release: Out Now)
In the shadow of the Irish coastline, The Séance of Blake Manor invites you into the cursed halls of a Victorian-era hotel where myth, mystery and dread collide. It’s 1897, you’re detective Declan Ward, and you’ve been summoned to Blake Manor to unravel the disappearance of Evelyn Deane just days before a spirit-call seance. Every hallway creaks with secret histories; every guest brings grief, magic, or lies. Mixing gothic horror with puzzle-laden investigation, the game leans into time-sensitive detective mechanics: interviews, eavesdropping, environmental clues, and a haunting sense of urgency as the clock ticks toward the ritual.
Gameplay is elegantly layered rather than loud. You’ll explore the manor in first-person view, study suspects’ schedules, connect evidence in your journal, and act before the mysterious event changes everything. The art-style evokes a comic-book elegance (not unlike Blue Prince), the sound design whispers in your ear, and the horror feels like a story you’re uncovering rather than being assaulted by. Spooky Doorway (Darkside Detective) has crafted something more serious than their previous two games: It launched for PC last month and invites multiple play-throughs with branching threads and hidden outcomes. Stand by for our full review!
The Midnight Barber (Release: 2026)
The Midnight Barber is a narrative rhythm-adventure set in a supernatural version of late-70s Barcelona, where a tiny barbershop opens only after the city falls asleep. You play as Clara, the nocturnal barber to society’s supernatural outsiders — vampires, sirens, werewolves, and other enchanted misfits who slip in from the Gothic Quarter’s alleys looking for anonymity, a decent cut, and someone who’ll actually listen. The atmosphere sits somewhere between The Wolf Among Us and a YouTube ASMR channel: intimate, hushed, and thick with rain-on-window ambience and low, velvety sound design. Every appointment is essentially a one-act play in a chair, framed by flickering neon, murmuring city streets, and that liminal, heavy air unique to cities at midnight.
Gameplay blends two pillars: rhythmic hairdressing and branching conversation. Your tools — clippers, scissors, razors — all tap into the heartbeat of each client, asking you to match their “inner rhythm” with timed inputs that slowly build their personal musical motif. Cut on beat and they relax, open up, and share more of their secrets; fumble it and they clam up, nudging their story down different paths. Between trims you navigate dialogue choices that shape both Clara’s relationships and an overarching mystery about power and unrest in a Spain sliding into democracy. It’s pitched as “small in scope, rich in story”: a cosy-but-eerie character piece with a strong audio focus, coming from Spanish indie studio Omaet Games, slated to hit PC, PlayStation and Switch in 2026.
The Dark Queen of Mortholme (Release: Out Now)
The Dark Queen of Mortholme is a short, punchy “anti‑game” that flips the classic RPG script by putting you in the armour of the final boss rather than the plucky hero. You play as the eponymous Dark Queen, canonically the most powerful being in her universe, only to find your throne room repeatedly breached by the same hero who keeps resurrecting, learning your moves, and gradually turning what should be a scripted squash match into a genuine threat.
The vibe is intimate, melancholic, and a bit meta: a roughly 30 minute pixel-art experience that feels like watching a traditional boss fight from the wrong side of the health bar, with dialogue between encounters gradually unpacking themes of inevitability, purpose, and what it means to be designed to lose. As the hero returns stronger each time — new gear, better patterns, sharper reads — you’re locked into the same slow animations and limited toolkit, and the tension comes from how your responses in conversations and your performance in combat nudge you toward different endings, from noble acceptance to bitter defiance. It’s unlike anything you’ll have played before, yet also comfortingly familiar – and it’s out now on Steam.
Sleepytime Village (Release: Q4 2026)
Sleepytime Village is a “nightmare storybook” point‑and‑click adventure about a burnt‑out, workaholic dad who makes one bad decision too many and wakes up trapped inside a children’s TV show that really doesn’t want him to leave. The village looks like something pulled from a retro picture book — bright colours, chunky shapes, oversized props and endlessly cheerful narration — but the longer you stay, the more it curdles into something uncanny: broken toy graveyards, off‑kilter mascots, and a formless narrator whose sing‑song encouragement starts to sound like a threat. The tone walks a tightrope between cosy nostalgia and creeping dread, using that clash — overstressed adult versus forced whimsy — to poke at themes of parenthood, neglect and the loss of childhood imagination. You can play in clean or potty mouth mode, and believe us when we say the language in the second option is very coarse.
It’s a classic third‑person adventure in the Monkey Island / Broken Sword mould, with inventory puzzles, environmental gag chains and an in‑game hint system to stop you getting completely stuck. You’ll explore more than 70 scenes across the Village, from the saccharine town square to underground caves and a “grim broken toy cemetery,” hoovering up crayons, tools and oddities to solve layered puzzles that often involve bending the show’s own logic against it. Dialogue with the puppet‑like residents and the ever‑present narrator nudges the story down different emotional beats, even as you’re just trying to keep your head clear enough to escape. Developed and published by UK indie studio Lightfoot Bros Games, Sleepytime Village is due out late next year for PC, with a free demo already available on Steam and itch.io.
Mind Diver (Release: Out Now)
Mind Diver is a first-person “Mind Ocean” detective game where you literally swim through a woman’s memories to solve a missing-persons case — and untangle a relationship at the same time. You play as a professional Mind Diver working for a mysterious agency, tasked with exploring Lina’s subconscious after her boyfriend Sebastian vanishes and her recollection of the night he disappeared starts to fall apart. Memories appear as floating bubbles suspended in a surreal ocean, each one a frozen vignette — a party kitchen, a bar, a street corner — that you enter, walk around in, and listen to like a three‑dimensional photograph. The tone is melancholic rather than bombastic, leaning into intimate conversations, small visual details, and quiet emotional beats instead of chases and jump scares.
The gameplay revolves around observation and deduction. Each memory has one or more black “holes” where a crucial element is missing — an object, a sound source, sometimes even a person — and your job is to work out what belongs there by combing through Lina’s other memories for clues, listening in on previously private conversations, and noticing background details she herself glossed over. You physically pick up potential candidates from one scene and plug them into another to restore the moment, which in turn unlocks more dialogue, more locations in the Mind Ocean, and new leads in the overarching case. There’s no hand‑holding or explicit quest markers: every solution is logical but rarely obvious, designed in consultation with seasoned puzzle designers to make you feel like an actual detective rather than a checklist worker. Developed by Danish studio Indoor Sunglasses, Mind Diver is well worth your time – and it’s already out.
Duskpunk (Release: Out Now)
Duskpunk is a dice-driven narrative RPG set in Dredgeport, a rotting steampunk city that’s literally burning its war dead for fuel. You play an escaped soldier washed up in the slums, trying to survive gangs, corrupt officials and a city sliding towards either revolution or total collapse. The mechanics and atmosphere feel like a combination of Citizen Sleeper and Dishonored: text-heavy, politically charged, and more about scraping by, picking sides and reading people than about stabbing guards in the neck. Every district you visit — factories belching smog, flooded docks, crammed tenements and makeshift shrines — adds another layer to a world built on exploitation and bad compromises, and the writing leans hard into working‑class anger, industrial horror and the slow grind of living under a regime that sees you as biomass.
Mechanically, it’s a tabletop-inspired day planner. Each in‑game morning you roll a pool of dice representing how much physical, mental and social “capacity” you have left, then slot those dice into actions around the city: finding food, working dangerous shifts, chasing rumours, helping union organisers, paying off criminals or feeding the machines that keep Dredgeport running. Higher dice mean better odds of success or bigger rewards; low dice invite failures, injuries and stress that carry into future days. Built and self‑published on PC by solo dev James Patton under the Clockwork Bird label, Duskpunk released this month – keep an eye out for our review!
Notable mentions
Legends of Castile (Release: 2026) is a comedy folk point-and-click with a lovely hand-drawn art style putting you in the shoes of a sassy 19th century girl looking to become a nun, if she can first tackle the supernatural challenges in her way.
Frieda is Changing (Release: 2026) puts you in the shoes of a pubescent girl, reeling from the loss of her sibling and the grief of her parents. But it’s also pretty funny. Take our word for it.
Expelled! (Release: Out Now) comes to us from veteran indie developer Inkle Studios (Overboard!), a mystery adventure with all of the polish and narrative goodness you can expect from Jon Ingold’s stable.
Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror Reforged (Release: Out Now) is a complete overhaul of George and Nico’s adventure from – holy crap – 28 years ago. It’s got 4K graphics and an improved interface, but crucially, the story remains as gripping now as it did almost three decades earlier. Wow, we feel old.
*****
We aren’t done – check back tomorrow for part 2 of our round up, with another inventory chest full of great games from AdventureX to pick through.
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