This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 's recent thread for completeness' sake.
I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
Honestly the more I learned about that game the less interested I was in it, the idea of a sequel to BOTW was so cool and it looked like a kinda spooky new direction, but then it turned out to be pretty boilerplate with a weird game mechanic that was misplaced when Banjo Kazooie tried it back in like 2007.