I mean this game has a pretty legendary status among atari games, and that's with good reason. So like, the hardware of the 2600 has made it so it's library is known primarily for either overly simple games or games that are overly obtuse due to the atari graphics making things hard to parse at first glance. Either way, given the channel-like nature of selecting your gamemode and understanding what each gamemode even is, reading through the manual is practically mandatory if you want to play your atari today. Adventure is a really cool game in that it's basically a solid balance between being simple enough where you don't need to study the manual much to understand what to do while still having some meat on its bones.
Things are in threes here. There are three castles on the map (though one is really just a safe space/start/goal point), each that needs one of three keys to open the doors to, there are three mazes to wander through to find whatever it is you might need, and there are three dragons that will fuck your day up if they touch you. There's a sword that can be used to kill any dragon for the remainder of your life, a magnet to collect items that might be stuck in walls, and a bridge that can be used to pass through walls either to progress through certain mazes or just to have a shortcut to where you need to go. If you die from a dragon or get stuck, you basically have to hit the reset switch, which keeps the item placement/unlocked castles in tact from your current session but resets your characters position while resurrecting all the dragons. If you can find the chalice in the black castle and bring it back to the yellow castle, you win!!!!!
The biggest enemy isn't really the dragons as killing all three with the sword basically makes your run entirely harmless. The real villain is the stupidass bat that wanders around randomly and just shuffles items around to whatever place it happens to bumblefuck off to. The thing can even pick up dragons or their corpses, which actually can fuck up your day if you are just trying to get somewhere when the mfin bat just decides to drop that shit right on you. The bats existence emphasizes remembering the world layout, where items that the bat dropped could be, what rooms are safe that can be used as item stashes, etc.
It's impressive how borderline unorthodox and forward-thinking this game is compared to other games released in 1979. Usually atari and arcade games are numerically score-based, where the point is primarily to play an endless assortment of looping challenges to see how long you can last, and get ranked by how high of a score you were able to accomplish, or competitions to see who can earn the highest set amount of points over the other to win that way. Having a game where the point isn't any form of score but rather a singular linear(ish) quest that just ends as its own established goal rather than having something in the manual be like "if you can get X points or reach the goal in X time, you are a real turbo atari master super power gamer player!!!" is certainly subvertive for the times. Adventure marks one of the first instances of a game where the fun in the play isn't necessarily building a skill, but rather it's just the fun of getting familiar with a coherent interactive world through exploring and interacting with it, which is crazy when over time even within one decade of this games release games would pretty much ditch the latter skill-based arcade approach to focus on the former world-buildy approach, and that's nuts. The fact that this game also happens to have the first instance of a secret "easter egg" hidden within its code that's accessible to players is just icing on the cake, as I'm sure whoever might have taken the time to learn or find out about it back in its time must have had their entire perception of video games altered as they wondered what other secrets or tricks could be hidden in their other games (whether said secrets actually existed or not). I guess I can't really say for sure how impactful this game was to the playerbase at the time as I wasn't around for it, but given its legacy in the atari playing circle it had to have been a literal game-changer for people to some degree. Video games are fucking cool, dude
Things are in threes here. There are three castles on the map (though one is really just a safe space/start/goal point), each that needs one of three keys to open the doors to, there are three mazes to wander through to find whatever it is you might need, and there are three dragons that will fuck your day up if they touch you. There's a sword that can be used to kill any dragon for the remainder of your life, a magnet to collect items that might be stuck in walls, and a bridge that can be used to pass through walls either to progress through certain mazes or just to have a shortcut to where you need to go. If you die from a dragon or get stuck, you basically have to hit the reset switch, which keeps the item placement/unlocked castles in tact from your current session but resets your characters position while resurrecting all the dragons. If you can find the chalice in the black castle and bring it back to the yellow castle, you win!!!!!
The biggest enemy isn't really the dragons as killing all three with the sword basically makes your run entirely harmless. The real villain is the stupidass bat that wanders around randomly and just shuffles items around to whatever place it happens to bumblefuck off to. The thing can even pick up dragons or their corpses, which actually can fuck up your day if you are just trying to get somewhere when the mfin bat just decides to drop that shit right on you. The bats existence emphasizes remembering the world layout, where items that the bat dropped could be, what rooms are safe that can be used as item stashes, etc.
It's impressive how borderline unorthodox and forward-thinking this game is compared to other games released in 1979. Usually atari and arcade games are numerically score-based, where the point is primarily to play an endless assortment of looping challenges to see how long you can last, and get ranked by how high of a score you were able to accomplish, or competitions to see who can earn the highest set amount of points over the other to win that way. Having a game where the point isn't any form of score but rather a singular linear(ish) quest that just ends as its own established goal rather than having something in the manual be like "if you can get X points or reach the goal in X time, you are a real turbo atari master super power gamer player!!!" is certainly subvertive for the times. Adventure marks one of the first instances of a game where the fun in the play isn't necessarily building a skill, but rather it's just the fun of getting familiar with a coherent interactive world through exploring and interacting with it, which is crazy when over time even within one decade of this games release games would pretty much ditch the latter skill-based arcade approach to focus on the former world-buildy approach, and that's nuts. The fact that this game also happens to have the first instance of a secret "easter egg" hidden within its code that's accessible to players is just icing on the cake, as I'm sure whoever might have taken the time to learn or find out about it back in its time must have had their entire perception of video games altered as they wondered what other secrets or tricks could be hidden in their other games (whether said secrets actually existed or not). I guess I can't really say for sure how impactful this game was to the playerbase at the time as I wasn't around for it, but given its legacy in the atari playing circle it had to have been a literal game-changer for people to some degree. Video games are fucking cool, dude