Best Adventure Games on the Game Boy

The adventure games worth playing on the Nintendo Game Boy start with Pokemon Red and Blue, The Legend of Zelda Links Awakening, Metroid II Return of Samus.

The Game Boy and Adventure Games

Four shades of grey and ten years of battery life. The Game Boy's constraints produced a library built around short sessions and pure ideas, and one of them ate the world.

Adventure Games are a solid rather than a defining part of this library — worth knowing, but not the reason anybody owns the machine.

Filtering to adventure means the place and the story are what you want back, not the challenge. It is the right filter when the thing you remember is where you were rather than what you did.

The Adventure Games Worth Playing

  1. 1. Pokemon Red and Blue

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  2. 2. The Legend of Zelda Links Awakening

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  3. 3. Metroid II Return of Samus

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  4. 4. Gargoyle's Quest

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  5. 5. Final Fantasy Adventure

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  6. 6. Pokemon Gold and Silver

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  7. 7. Dragon Warrior Monsters

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  8. 8. Shantae

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  9. 9. Pokemon Crystal

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  10. 10. Kid Icarus Of Myths and Monsters

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

What Makes a Good Adventure Game

A world with a reason to wander it, and writing that survives being read rather than skipped.

Mechanical depth. Several of the best adventure games have combat that is deliberately unsatisfying, because they want your attention somewhere else.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best adventure game on the Game Boy?

Pokemon Red and Blue is the usual first answer, and there are 10 in the library we cover.

Was the Game Boy good at adventure games?

It is a solid rather than a defining part of the library.

What counts as an adventure game?

Anywhere the story and the place matter more than the skill ceiling — point-and-click, walking sims, narrative thrillers and most open worlds. The label alone tells you very little, which is why each pick here says what it actually is.

Are adventure games long?

They split hard. Open-world adventures run to a hundred hours; the narrative ones are often finishable in an evening, and the short ones are usually the better written.

How is this list put together?

From the games this site covers on the Nintendo Game Boy, matched against hand-mapped gameplay categories rather than a storefront's genre tag. A page only exists where there are at least four, which is why some console and genre combinations have no page at all.

Adventure Games on Other Consoles

More From the Game Boy

Or browse the whole Nintendo Game Boy library.