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   Adventure Game of the Year

screenshot
Outcast
Publisher: Infogrames
Developer: Infogrames
Review
Demo

"[Outcast] belongs to that older breed of action-adventure hybrids; while it plays more like Tomb Raider, its spirit is more in line with Adeline's Twinsen games." - Ron Dulin, GameSpot Review

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1999 was a strange year for adventure games. Very few traditional adventure games were released in the United States, and the sole high-profile entry in the genre - Sierra's Gabriel Knight III - was a bit of a disappointment. In truth, it was difficult to even come up with viable nominees for this category, a point made more saddening by the fact that our Game of the Year in 1998 was LucasArts' excellent adventure game Grim Fandango.

Had this scarcity of adventure games not been a problem, Infogrames' Outcast would have remained a strong contender in the category. Outcast was one of those unique action-adventure hybrids. It didn't just throw a few box-pushing puzzles into your path to break up the shooting. And though it did contain a fair amount of gunplay, Outcast was about exploration. When you donned the orange shirt and futuristic shades of Cutter Slade, you needed to make sense of the foreign culture of the planet Adelpha, help the populace with problems both minor and major, and ultimately fulfill your role in helping them overthrow the evil force dominating the world.

In many respects, Outcast most resembled Adeline Software's excellent Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure. It featured a huge world to explore, strange characters to converse with, and the same balance of exciting action and traditional puzzle-solving. And while some readers might bristle at awarding Adventure Game of the Year to a game with such prominent action elements, the fact remains that Outcast is, at its core, a fine example of what makes adventure games great.

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