Point-and-Click Adventures for PC

Start with Thimbleweed Park if you want point and click adventure games built around an odd town, a bag of objects and several people with unfinished business. Its five playable characters and Casual or Hard modes make it the first choice here for a puzzle-led evening. The compromise is a sprawling, comic mystery when you might prefer one person's darker story.

Choose Unavowed if assembling supernatural company sounds more appealing than switching between a town's troubled residents. Choose The Excavation of Hob's Barrow if you want an antiquarian's visit to an English village to become increasingly unsettling. These three adventures share a taste for strange places; the useful difference is whose company you want while working through them.

Choose point and click adventure games by the company you keep

If you enjoy keeping several characters' problems in mind, choose Thimbleweed Park first. Its town gives you room to explore at your own pace, but that breadth asks you to care about more than one personal story. Unavowed makes companions part of the attraction; Hob's Barrow keeps Thomasina Bateman's expedition at the center.

For story puzzle games, tone matters as much as the presence of puzzles. A haunted hotel and a foul-mouthed clown invite a different mood from suspicious villagers and strange dreams. Choose the story you want to inhabit before treating all three as interchangeable tests of logic.

Thimbleweed Park: start with a town full of unfinished business

Pick Thimbleweed Park when you want a broad mystery with multiple playable perspectives. A dead body brings you into a town with a haunted hotel, an abandoned circus and an old factory fire hanging over its residents. The attraction is following the connections between five people while exploring the town; the cost is sharing your attention across that cast.

The Casual and Hard modes give you a concrete choice before the first puzzle. Choose Casual if the story is your priority, or Hard if you want more resistance from the puzzles. The official description lists both modes with varied difficulty. Unavowed's origin and companion choices serve a different preference: shaping the company around your protagonist.

Those large verbs are a useful buying clue if you are returning to point-and-click games on PC. You are choosing actions such as looking, talking and using objects as you move the story forward. The humor also carries a content caveat: the base game's listing includes crude humor, occasional swearing and rare scary situations. The separate Ransome swearing DLC has its own stronger-language notice.

Unavowed: choose a supernatural circle to belong to

Choose Unavowed when the people beside your protagonist matter more than managing several separate playable lives. You begin after a demon has used your body for a year of violence in New York. Joining the Unavowed offers a way into a new life, but the premise makes this a dark supernatural story from the outset.

The Steam description gives each companion their own talents and abilities. That is the reason to choose this branch: you are interested in what different people bring to the adventure. Keep the point-and-click structure in mind: the party is a reason to choose this adventure if you enjoy character talents and dialogue, rather than a reason to expect a combat-heavy RPG.

Move Unavowed ahead of Thimbleweed Park if choosing an origin and getting to know that company is the hook. Keep Thimbleweed Park first if you mainly want several playable characters and an explicit choice of puzzle difficulty. Both offer strange stories, but those are different reasons to spend an evening clicking through one.

Hob's Barrow: follow the excavation into folk horror

Pick The Excavation of Hob's Barrow if you want one expedition to hold the story together. Thomasina Bateman arrives in Bewlay to investigate a barrow, only to find her contact missing, her assistant absent and access blocked. Choose it for the village's resistance and the folklore surrounding the dig; give up the broader playable cast that makes Thimbleweed Park the default.

The official description promises traditional puzzles and interactions through a modern interface. Its distinctive pull is the setting: villagers, clergy and landowners have their own motives, while Thomasina's dreams turn strange. Choose it because you want to follow that disturbance, rather than assuming an archaeological premise will make for a gentle historical outing.

Hob's Barrow is the clearest choice here when you want the atmosphere to stay tied to an unsettling place. The village and excavation supply that focus. Unavowed is the better branch if supernatural trouble makes you want a circle of companions; Thomasina's isolation is part of this game's premise.

The wrong default: buying a mystery when you want freeform deduction

If you want to progress through authored puzzles and conversations, start with Thimbleweed Park. If your main wish is to form and submit your own explanation of a crime, pause before choosing any of these by its mystery premise alone. Modern point and click games can tell intricate stories while asking you to participate through objects, dialogue and character interactions.

A corpse, a missing contact or a supernatural secret tells you what the story concerns. Look at the controls and described activities to decide what you will actually do. Thimbleweed Park's visible verbs, Unavowed's companion talents and Hob's Barrow's traditional puzzle interactions are more useful clues than the word "mystery." Choose this trio for authored interactions; an open-ended detective sandbox is a different purchase.

Pick the story to open first

Open Thimbleweed Park if you want several playable perspectives and are still weighing all three. Its cast, town and difficulty modes give you a clear starting point, at the cost of splitting your attention across five lives. Choose Unavowed for supernatural companions, or Hob's Barrow for a focused expedition into folk horror.

All three are paid, single-player games with Windows versions. The choices here concern the base games; Thimbleweed Park's swearing DLC is a separate purchase.

Open Thimbleweed Park and look at the bridge scene with the verb panel. If choosing what to examine, whom to talk to and which object to use sounds like the evening you want, begin there.