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Adventure Games

  In an Adventure Game, your progression through the game is much more involved than in most other genres. Instead of distinct levels, you have interconnected areas to explore. Map-making is often encouraged, and you frequently have an open world where you can backtrack to any previous area. Sometimes an Adventure Game will be divided into chapters, allowing you to freely explore whatever interconnected areas exist in that chapter.
  These interconnected areas mean that Adventure Games are not exit-based the way Scrollers are with their distinct levels. Instead Adventure Games are objective-based, asking the player to complete certain objectives to proceed, rather than simply finding an exit. Generally the player cannot make progress until he or she acquires new skills, items or information.

Adventure Games		vs.		Scrollers
Interconnected areas		≠	Distinct levels
Objective-based		≠	Exit-based

  Another aspect of Adventure Games is the mechanic of upgrading your character. This is typically done by finding and earning items, or by spending currency to purchase these limited upgrades. These sorts of upgrades are more simplistic and less extensive than the process of developing your character's dynamic statistics in an RPG by leveling up.
  In Zelda II (1987) Link can purchase a maximum of 8 upgrades to his Attack, Magic or Life. In Super Metroid (1994) Samus can collect 2 suit upgrades, and 6 beam upgrades, along with capacity upgrades for Energy, Missiles, etc. Compare these two examples to an RPG like Pokémon (1996) where a creature will gain stats in HP, Attack, Defense, Speed and Special categories every time they gain a level, gradually progressing up to level 99 over the course of the entire game, clearly a much more involved process.

Adventure Games		vs.		Role-Playing Games
Upgrades		≠	Dynamic statistics

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