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The stopping certainly hurts more casual audiences, who are in the market in this quantity now because of the low barrier of entry. Back in the day of adventure games though, the personality, mindset and circumstance it took to enjoy a PnC was not far from that needed to bother with the machine that plays them in the first place. Both required patience, curiosity, frustration tolerance and time. Not to mention games were expensive and to have a game that you got stuck on and were able to continue to play in your head while the PC was off, was awesome. Console players and phone players entered the market without needing these things, so the games they enjoy reflect that. PnCs in their classic form cater to a very specific audience who is as small now as it was back then. The market around that audience grew an absurd amount. It's good that a lot more people can find entertainment in video games today. But it makes a lot of sense that these people wouldn't have the same taste as the pioneers in that market, or they would have been there from the start.

I think you can have both good graphics and responsive and “clean” gameplay, just not by taking the path “cinematic” adventure games took. Changing the subject back to Broussard’s original post, I think Broken Age is an example of an adventure game made by one of the classic LucasArts designers that tried to be very forward looking in its content, and (in Part 1 at least) in its design ethos. That game doesn’t feel beholden to the past other than it being a graphic adventure game by Tim Schafer.

Immersion does not equal high end graphics 👍 When you play a game a lot is designed to be filled in by your mind: When Guybrush holds out his hand and a door opens, naturally I don't interpret it as him being a Jedi but as him touching some door handle and turning it. To some of us the Scummbar has a doorknob. To some a doorhandle. To some it's a swingdoor. Some never thought about it at all. (Some might actually think Guybrush IS a Jedi, considering there is at least one other in the game canonically ) People call books immersive and their graphics suck and didn't get better in the past millennia. To be fair, most books don't constantly hint at the Illiad to cater to the fans of the classics but come up with their original stories even if the UI remained largely the same. Maybe this is what the author of the OP article means.

This sounds goofy but I think that the decision to try and make adventure games seem more cinematic (eg: characters turn beautifully, they reach out with a full animation to open the door, they raise their hand then reach into their pocket and rummage around before pulling up an inventory item) had the effect of making them actually feel significantly less cinematic to play. Monkey Island or Fate of Atlantis moved as quickly and responsively as any other game at that time. It’s true they didn’t have a bunch of detailed embellishments as you clicked around, but the story advanced as quickly as it possibly could at the micro-level in response to your actions.

Sometimes even when I'm not stuck on a puzzle, it feels like everything stops! I was playing The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 recently and I think 90% of my time was spent waiting for characters to walk slowly across the screen, do a little turn, do a little side step to position themselves, then playback interaction animation or whatever. It's so infuriatingly slow I wanted to claw my own skin off. And yeah I agree with PnC adventure games not being very cinematic. I might have said that this genre is the best vehicle for storytelling in games at one point. I don't know if I believe that anymore. I'm sure some of it has to do with production values, but traditional PnC games are just tiny figures standing in still dioramas and I can hardly read their facial expression or body language. it's like watching a community theatre from the back row - it asks just too much of me and I've been thoroughly spoiled by more accessible forms that require less imagination on my part.