I’ve recently been playing the Monkey Island games, specifically The Curse Of Monkey Island and Escape From Monkey Island, and I’ve been in a mood to play more point and click adventure games. However, as I mentioned when I spoke about the Monkey Island games, the point and click adventure genre isn’t anywhere near as popular as it once was and it feels rare enough that a modern point and click adventure game like Return to Monkey Island or Thimbleweed Park gets released. I’d heard the name “Daedalic Entertainment” before but it wasn’t until I began looking for more point and click adventure games that I learned that the genre was their specialty. Conveniently, their catalogue was on sale on Steam for steep discounts and I picked up a bunch of them. Now that I’ve had some time with their games, I thought it would be fascinating to take a look at Daedalic Entertainment, their history as a developer and their future in the point and click adventure genre.
Daedalic Entertainment is a German video game developer that was established in 2007 by Carsten Fichtelmann. Over the course of the next several years, they released a wide variety of point and click adventure games such as the Edna & Harvey games, The Whispered World, the Dark Eye games and their Deponia series. In 2014, a German company called Bastei Lübbe bought a 51% majority share in Daedalic Entertainment but ran into financial trouble years later. Earlier this year, it was announced that Nacon, a French video game publisher, was acquiring Daedalic Entertainment for €60 million.
Having spoken about their history as a business, let’s take a look at the history of their games. The first game that Daedalic Entertainment developed and published was Edna & Harvey: The Breakout which originally started life as a university project. The point and click adventure game proved to be very successful in Germany and eventually got an international release. The anniversary edition of this game which improves the graphics and UI was also the first game that I played from Daedalic Entertainment and, barring a few mild criticisms, I ended up REALLY enjoying it to the point where it’s now one of my favourite point and click adventure games.
They soon followed this up with other point and click adventure games such as The Whispered World and A New Beginning but, interestingly, they struggled to get their games onto Steam as it was noted that “They rejected A New Beginning and Edna breaks out after three presentations on the grounds that their target group was not interested in the game“. However, Daedalic Entertainment eventually managed to get onto Steam and ended up having great success on the platform. However, their most notable point and click adventure game series has to be Deponia, a four game series that was released from 2012 to 2016 and ended up selling 2.2 million copies over that time period albeit with many of those copies being in bundles or steep discounts.
However, it’s worth noting that, even though Daedalic Entertainment is generally associated with the point and click adventure genre, they also develop games covering other genres such as their tactical RPG Blackguards series and their upcoming action-adventure game The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. They’ve also published games from many other developers such as Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, Wildcat Gun Machine and The Suicide of Rachel Foster.
I do confess though that I’m a little concerned about the future of Daedalic Entertainment and point and click adventure games. Besides an anniversary edition remaster of Edna & Harvey: The Breakout, Daedalic Entertainment haven’t released a new point and click adventure game since 2017 and they ended up shutting down two of their studios last year. With their recent purchase by Nacon as well as their current focus on The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, I hope that Daedalic Entertainment won’t forget about the game genre which established them in the first place.
Let me know your thoughts on the fascinating point and click developer Daedalic Entertainment, which of their games you’ve played and what you thought of them, what you think about their future when it comes to point and click adventure games, what you think about their recent purchase by Nacon and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.