Adventure Games Are Ten Times More Fun When Playing With A Friend

Troels, better known as Space Quest Historian online, has been an avid adventure game player since the 80s and early 90s when he’d swap floppy disks with buddies at school. He found Parsec one day when he posted on Twitter that he was looking for a way to play an adventure game with a friend. A random person on Twitter suggested trying Parsec to turn his offline adventure game into an online session.

Adventure games have this reputation for being solitary games. They’re pretty much the definition of single-player games, so people have this idea that playing adventure games is a lonesome activity. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Playing an adventure game is ten times more fun when you’re playing with a friend.

With Parsec, Troels has been able to play a bunch of games with fellow adventure game enthusiasts on YouTube (they call themselves the YouTuber Adventure Roundtable). He recently did a stream of The 7th Guest using Parsec, and he said “it worked wonders” for him and his guests. They solve the puzzles together and really get into the story. They used to do this with screen sharing, but inevitably he had to remain in the driver’s seat since there was no way to hand over the controls to the other participants. With Parsec, he or any of his guests can take over, making the session much more interactive and fun!

Troels has been playing a lot of games with his friends on Parsec. He’s based in Denmark while the other players he’s played with so far are from the United States. He’s planning to bring in members of his audience from around the world into the streams as well because for him, streaming is all about the community. He wants to engage with others who are really into adventure games. With other people, “adventure games become a shared experience, like watching a movie with a bunch of friends.” He doesn’t just want his audience to passively watch, that’s certainly okay for most people, but for some people, he really wants them to get involved and actively participate in the stream.

Troels believes that Parsec can help eliminate some of the stigma about adventure games being a solitary experience. They can be really fun to play alone, but there’s so much more to them. He wants the rest of the world to recognize that and Parsec enables these games to be played together, like the old days after school with his friends.

The world isn’t the same as it was back when we were kids in the 80s and 90s. Nowadays we don’t have friends over to play games; our friendships are in the online space.

Troels is excited about the future of the adventure gaming community. He feels like the major studios basically gave up on the adventure game community in the 90s and 2000s, but they’re making a big comeback.

Now, thanks to the magic of self-publishing and user-friendly tools like Adventure Game Studio and Unity, adventure games are making a comeback (although very much still a niche market). We’re already making plans in the YouTuber Adventure Roundtable to do more collaborative Let’s Plays using Parsec.

Space Quest Historian has a great YouTube channel, which I suggest you follow if you love adventure games. He also livestreams on YouTube and Twitch every Tuesday and Sunday. Right now, he’s livestreaming The 7th Guest every Tuesday at 11pm CEST.

I will continue to use Parsec a lot more in the future. It’s like a new world has opened up to me, except it’s an old world from my childhood that just grew up and became a virtual thing. And, thanks to the wonders of the virtual world, I don’t even have to wear pants when I’m playing games with friends now, which is always a plus.