Portal 2 is essentially a demented series of puzzles – like being stuck inside a physics-based logic problem designed by the Python team; LA Noire is a trad adventure game. Adventure games used to be as close as gaming got to fiction. They started out as interactive text-based shaggy dog stories (a prime example being Douglas Adams’s fantastic Hitchhiker’s Guide Infocom adventure), transformed into point-and-click comedies (such as Monkey Island), and then largely went away for a while, as the gaming industry focused on gung-ho shooters aimed at teenage boys. The size, scope, and sheer self-assurance of LA Noire marks a major comeback for adventure games – for interactive fiction – and, potentially, a huge leap forward for wider acceptance of the medium as a whole. —The Shifting Media Landscape: Intelligent Gaming And Dumbed Down Films – PSFK.