GUI agents powered by LLMs show promise in interacting with diverse digital environments. Among these, video games offer a valuable testbed due to their varied interfaces, with adventure games posing additional challenges through complex, narrative-driven interactions. Existing game benchmarks, however, lack diversity and rarely evaluate agents on completing entire storylines. To address this, we introduce FlashAdventure, a benchmark of 34 Flash-based adventure games designed to test full story arc completion and tackle the observation-behavior gap: the challenge of remembering and acting on earlier gameplay information. We also propose CUA-as-a-Judge, an automated gameplay evaluator, and COAST, an agentic framework leveraging long-term clue memory to better plan and solve sequential tasks. Experiments show current GUI agents struggle with full story arcs, while COAST improves milestone completion by bridging the observation-behavior gap. Nonetheless, a marked discrepancy between humans and best-performing agents warrants continued research efforts to narrow this divide.

GenQuest is a generative text adventure game that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to facilitate second language learning through immersive, interactive storytelling. The system engages English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in a collaborative "choose-your-own-adventure" style narrative, dynamically generated in response to learner choices. Game mechanics such as branching decision points and story milestones are incorporated to maintain narrative coherence while allowing learner-driven plot development. Key pedagogical features include content generation tailored to each learner's proficiency level, and a vocabulary assistant that provides in-context explanations of learner-queried text strings, ranging from words and phrases to sentences. Findings from a pilot study with university EFL students in China indicate promising vocabulary gains and positive user perceptions. Also discussed are suggestions from participants regarding the narrative length and quality, and the request for multi-modal content such as illustrations.

What does it mean to play a video game as an ensemble rather than a single character? How would it change your experience of people and plot? What if there was no single hero, or perhaps no heroes at all? As Hannah Nicklin, a creative director at independent studio Die Gute Fabrik explains, these are questions that narrative adventure Saltsea Chronicles is attempting to answer, all while telling its own charming story of misfit sailors voyaging across a flooded archipelago to uncover a conspiracy. It's a lofty pitch, and one Nicklin brings back down to earth with a comparison: "Star Trek: The Next Generation without the manifest destiny" – a description that hints at the game's politics and its structure.

Games have always been a part of writer Gabrielle Zevin's life. Her first experience, she recalls, was playing Pac-Man at the Honolulu hotel where her grandmother ran a jewellery store. "I was about three years old at the time and I remember thinking, wouldn't it just be perfect if I wasn't limited to a single quarter … if I could just keep playing this game for ever and ever?" Now 44, the veteran author has written her first novel about games. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the story of two programmers, Sam and Sadie, who set up a studio in the mid-1990s and over the course of a decade, make interesting games while their lives and relationships entwine in complex, often heartbreaking ways.

Playing The Medium, a new horror game on Xbox and PC from developer Bloober Team, is like watching The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix. The Medium has some fun ideas that it executes well, but the overall experience is bland and forgettable. Like Sabrina and a thousand other shows on Netflix, The Medium is inoffensive. It's a pleasant way to pass the time, but you probably won't finish it and you won't remember it a month after you put it down. It's the perfect game for Xbox's Game Pass, the service that seeks to be Netflix but for video games.

Certain things blur the boundaries of reality. Like a phone that can only connect to one number. Like the number that phone dials, which is also listed as the phone number on the TripAdvisor page for Echo River in Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park. Like the prerecorded message that plays when you dial that number, which says, "If you don't remember dialing this number at all, press 5," before launching into facts that all sound like thinly veiled urban legends. Like a retrospective for an artist who seems to have never existed, or a community television broadcast that seems to end with a ghost in the machine. This web of ephemera, which extends from the world we live in to the one on the other side of the screen, would seem to be the work of a major company, like the alternate reality game that accompanied the release of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight and sent 11 million people all over the world in search of the Joker.

Summer and fall are often the worst time to be a video game fan. Publishers often hold their best stuff til the end of the year, and it's worse this year, because Microsoft and Sony are hanging on to their biggest games until the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 are out this holiday season. Still, 2020 has already offered an embarrassment of riches for gamers. Here are the best video games of 2020 so far, to tide you over til year's end: Doom Eternal ripped and tore its way into our hearts at the beginning of the year and hasn't been topped since. What makes Doom Eternal so remarkable is that it managed to improve on its predecessor, and in so doing proved the almost 30-year-old franchise is still as vibrant and vital as it was in 1993.

Wait, did I say doubleheader earlier? I know, it's hard to keep track of them all. The PC Gaming Show is our personal favorite, given its relevance to our platform of choice, but we rolled straight from that into the Future Games Show. More console-centric, it nevertheless featured trailers for a bunch more games including Red Thread's Dustborn, Sherlock: Chapter One, Call of the Sea, and more. You'll find the most notable trailers of games coming to the PC below, along with the best commentary I could muster after like...six hours of trailers.

In a bygone era, when our attention spans could outlast a TikTok video, point-and-click adventure games from developers such as Sierra Online and LucasArts brought intrigue, excitement and daft jokes to our new beige personal computers. These were mentally taxing, longform experiences that often provided the sharpest wit, the most endearing characters, and tales that endured endured long after the credits scrolled. Lair of the Clockwork God was always going to need to find a new take on an old and marginalised genre. But it succeeds in doing so, by cross-pollinating with platforming – and a particularly demanding type of platforming at that. If that sounds like a recipe for seething at your screen through a clenched jaw, it's testament to writer-designers Dan Marshall and Ben Ward that far more often it's a vessel for inventive puzzles and a distinctive brand of wry observational humour about game design.

When I read Ender's Game, one of the parts that most stuck with me was the delightfully creepy Mind Game–a game designed to probe the player's subconcious. In the book, we learn that the Mind Game isn't actually programmed–it's powered by an AI that makes up the gameplay as it goes, reacting to the player's decisions and getting progressively more surreal. Ender's Game was written in 1985, and since then AI has actually gotten pretty good at creative tasks since then. The real-time graphics of something like the Mind Game are probably still out of reach, but what about something simpler like a text adventure? I decided to try writing a game like this by training GPT-2, a state-of-the-art predictive text model, on some transcripts of classic text advetnures.