My personal standings:
- MI1
- Indy3
- MI2
- DOTT
- MI3
- Indy4
- Grim Fandango
- The Dig
I keep Zak and MM out of this standings, because the two games were too difficult for me… anyway they stand both, like, 5th place…
TWP is out of it too, but I liked it as much as Indy3, for different reasons.
Monkey Island is almost perfect. It has a fantastic story and background, great music, incredible atmospheres, and the right amount of mystery. The only point I never liked, compared to other adventures, is its extreme linearity.
Well, actually I loved this aspect back then, but when (some years later) I managed to finish Indy3 (what an effort!) I realized that feeling so lost, having so many different possibilities gives you really the impression of living your adventure, and not merely solving a fixed series of puzzles linked together by cutscenes.
TWP is a very mature game, I liked very much the fact it’s less linear than MI. But, to my personal view, I’d have preferred it even less linear.
That is the reason why I like Indy3 so much: it’s a quite an old game, and its design reveals it. But -if I recall correctly- there are NO dead-ends.
I mean, you can die, but that’s not such a problem if you know it. But I think that you are never required to reload a past save just because you need something you didn’t pickup.