Amanita and Rusty Lake open a showcase for point-and-clicks

The point-and-click adventure has survived two full decades of being declared dead without ever getting an institution of its own. That changes this fall: Amanita Design and Rusty Lake—the Czech studio behind Machinarium and Samorost, and the Dutch team behind the Cube Escape series—are co-hosting the first-ever Point-and-Click Showcase, announced September 9. The near thing first: developer applications for the showcase and its Steam sale close September 27, so if you are making one of these games, you have until the end of next week.

The format is the now-familiar indie showcase kit—a block of new trailers, a dedicated Steam sale, "more to be revealed"—aimed at a genre that has mostly been carried by individual studios' stubbornness rather than any shared infrastructure. What interests me is who is building it. When Wholesome Games or Day of the Devs assemble a showcase, they are curators borrowing authority from the platform. Here the two most distinctive living practitioners of the form are formalizing the scene themselves, which is closer to a guild forming than a marketing beat.

Both hosts have been in our pages a long time. We called Samorost 3 the best adventure game in years back in 2016, and just last month we looked at how Amanita built Phonopolis out of real cardboard before digitizing it. A genre that handmade deserves its own stage, and it says something that the makers had to build the stage too.