Story/Narrative.
Telltale is the most prolific developer of these kinds of games.
Japan has had elements similar to this in visual novels for a long time. Snatcher, Policenauts, YU-NO, etc. feature the same type of gameplay but without the parts in Life is Strange where you explore in a 3d environment.
Man. I miss Telltale
CYOA - Choose Your Own Adventure. It's a genre for interactive stories where you get to make decisions that affects the story. It's also a tag on Steam
I have found "Choices Matter" also produces good results.
They're basically an evolution of the point and click adventure. This variation is often just called a narrative game or other similar sounding names. Searching for "games like telltale" should give you a good list.
Telltale were the ones that evolved the point and click into the form it takes now just so you know. Supermassive (until dawn) made their take on the genre feel more cinematic and more like watching a movie with choices but they're ultimately still using the formula that telltale pioneered.
I'm fairly sure years ago that there was a game called alone in the dark that was very similar to this but that was long before telltale. Anything I can remember about it is that it had had fire physics and that every time you started a new level it would load up and say "last time on a loan in the dark" and then give you a tv show style rundown of what you previously done
That was more of a survival horror game
They're effectively visual novels with light gameplay mechanics for navigation or making some narrative path choices. At least, that's how I felt about Until Dawn.
When a Visual Novel and a Point & Click Adventure game love each other very much they have a special hug and a baby genre is born.
Visual Novels basically involves reading as a requirement.
It depends. There are visual novels in which you can set them on auto and just let voice acting play out. I think there's strong similarities there, though I don't think anyone could get away with calling a Telltale style narrative game a visual novel, flat out.
But I do think they are doing similar things, they may scratch similar itches.
Although certainly similar, the fact that these games have every scene fully animated does add to it in a way that simply reading descriptions about what's going on doesn't.
It’s called a branching narrative. Most common related Steam tag for finding similar games would probably be ‘choices matter’.
Like the a character will remember that type of thing and thus might actually bring it up or hold it against another character. Like Until Dawn there's a part where the gun has blanks and if you don't sacrifice the character the character the character tried to shoot won't open the door when he needs it. Which yeah that whole scene was unrealistic because blanks can still kill.
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