Point-and-click adventure

Point-and-click is a type of graphic adventure game that dates back to the early days of PC gaming. The name comes from the control mechanism, where a screen with various points of interest would be presented and the user could 'point' their mouse cursor at any of them and 'click' to have their avatar investigate it or interact with it. These games typically require the player to solve puzzles to progress, either by gathering necessary information from the environment, or by combining items for use to unlock doors, escape rooms, distract guards, or otherwise move from one area to another.

Despite the name, point-and-click games continue to be released to this day not just for the PC, but also for gaming consoles, where they are controlled with gamepads, and smartphones and handheld consoles, where they are controlled with a touchscreen. In console-based examples of the genre, one of the buttons replaces the click, while either an on-screen cursor is controlled with a D-pad or analogue stick, or the player is able to navigate a character around a 3D environment to walk them towards one of the points of interest to interact with it. These games are also considered to be part of the point-and-click genre despite not being controlled with a true point-and-click interface.