The quiet comeback of point-and-click adventures

Point-and-click adventures were supposed to be dead. Then touchscreens arrived, and it turned out that tapping directly on the thing you want to examine is exactly how these games always wanted to be played.

Lantern & Key is a great little example. There's no clumsy cursor, no fighting with a virtual mouse. You touch the door, you open the door. The whole genre feels born again on a phone.

What holds these games back is bad puzzle design, not the platform. The moment a solution stops being logical, players reach for a walkthrough and the spell breaks. The good ones keep every puzzle grounded in the world.

If you gave up on adventures years ago, the mobile versions are worth another look. The genre's slower pace fits handheld play beautifully, and the best of them are short enough to finish in a weekend.