What's that one adventure game you can just boot up and have a great chill time with? Mine would probably be Day of the Tentacle. It's such a wonderful, colorful world to inhabit, and all the characters are lively and oozing with personality (no Sludge-o-Matic pun intended). I could spend hours just walking around talking to characters and not even think about solving any puzzles.
What's the one game you'd boot up to just relax with?
To make this reply more interesting, I guess I will also add Hypnospace Outlaw. There's so many bonus pages that aren't required for completing the game that I can just spend plenty of time hopping around an alternate 90s internet and having fun
I spent a lot of time in my childhood with no money for games. I had a computer that could old roms, which is how I played Deus Ex around 2010. But when I wasn't playing Half-Life, or emulating ps1 or n64 games, I played those point-and-click escape-the-room puzzle flash games. My favorites are the ones by Neutral. I replay them all every year at Christmas, now with Flashpoint. 10/10, would recommend. I also like the Homestar Runner flash adventure games. Finally, those crappy find the hidden object games with names like Amazing Tales 2: the Secrets of Stony Brook, or Ghost Story 8: This One's the Same as the Previous 7. Whenever I've had a bad day, I make myself a drink and bust one of those out, put on a podcast, and enjoy the awful story, art, and voice acting while I solve really simple puzzles.
Probably the Quest for Glory series for me. Played them so many times that I can just pick up any one them with any character and get sucked right back in to the game. I've had an itch lately to do a full playthrough of all 5 games after not touching them for a long time but I have little free time and too much backlog...
I sometimes boot up Curse of Monkey Island. It was my first proper adventure game. The voice acting, dialogue, music and art is still charming to this day.
The combination of some of the most beautiful EGA graphics I have ever seen with the wonderful Tchaikovsky soundtrack still mesmerizes me to this day. 🥰
The Sam and Max games scratch that itch for me. If I'm in a funk and don't have the energy to play a new thing, I can fire up one of those games and have a laugh for a while without even thinking about whether I'm going to finish this particular playthrough. They're the very best kind of absurd in everything from the art to the dialog to the puzzle solutions!