Somewhere new to go, one click away

Adventure is the loosest word in games. Publishers attach it to almost anything, which is why searching for adventure games turns up farming simulators, card batches and a great many things that are simply not adventures. We use it more narrowly here, and the narrowness is the point: a game earns a place on QuestHatch if it gives you somewhere to go and something in the way.

In practice that means seven kinds of game. Platformers, where the obstacle is the ground itself and the reward is the next ledge. Exploration games, which hand you a horizon instead of a target. Puzzle adventures, where the locked thing in front of you is the level. Quest-driven RPGs, built on the oldest promise in the genre — that you will be stronger later than you are now. Escape games, one room and one way out. Dungeon crawlers, where the only direction is down and everything you have gained is carried with you. And survival adventures, which start you with nothing and make the first minutes about whether there will be a second.

Getting to those seven meant discarding a great deal. Every game here comes from the GameMonetize catalogue, which licenses HTML5 games from the developers who make them — and which, like any large feed, contains far more than any one site should publish. Our filter drops anything with gambling, adult or graphic content outright. It drops clones built on characters their developers have no rights to, which in an adventure catalogue means a steady stream of knock-offs we screen for by name. It drops whole genres that belong on a different kind of site. And it drops games that only look like adventures because someone tagged them that way. Of roughly thirteen thousand games in the feed, about a thousand clear the filters, and the catalogue you are looking at is the strongest of those — a little under one entry in seventy.

What we do not do is strip anything out of the games themselves. Developers keep their branding and their in-game advertising, because that is the arrangement that pays them to keep making these. The games run in a frame on the page exactly as their makers built them, and they only load once you click — nothing here starts playing at you.

The collection grows as new titles clear the filter. If there is an adventure game you think belongs here, the contact page reaches us, and we will go and look at it. If you would rather just start playing, the full catalogue is the place to begin, and about explains who put it together.