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Most AAA games are so linear nowadays that I'd rather replay old adventure games than recent titles.

These were very linear too though. Sure: some like Monkey Island had a map that gave you the illusion of having a whole world to explore, but there still was a fixed sequence of events that couldn't be broken.

None of the decisions you made had any effect for the future or could just flat-out prevent you from finishing the game. Some (Sierra) called that a feature, others (Lucas Arts) a bug.

Maniac Mansion 1 and The Fate of Atlantis are the only two Lucas Arts games that provided a little bit of nonlinearity. Maniac Mansion with its different ways to solve the game based on character selection and Indiana Jones with its selection of one of three quite different paths through the game.

Yeah, gameplay wise they're like manually solving a makefile's dependencies. Of course we know the whole point is not in the structure of the solution but in the written content of the story. It's in the way the game world starts living inside the player's head, where all of the action is. I remember thinking about some FOTA puzzle during a bus trip for several hours without even having the game available.

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