This is a followup to @[email protected] ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
To be fair to the game that’s only the bait and switch at the very start with Toriel, designed to make the player reload and introduce the save meta-fuckery with Flowey. From then on the only incentive to do violence is getting stuck at a puzzle or completionism (which is at the heart of the meta-narrative).
The commentary on violence by itself is naive though (even the game points it out at one point) and if you don’t like the characters or roll your eyes at 4th wall stuff the whole thing falls apart pretty quick.