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.
Oh hey I do this
(The more it is, the more I hate it)
And if you dare to express that you don't enjoy ponderous and grueling gameplay you're said to be a baby that wants games for babies because the purpose of games is to do ponderous and grueling things competitively to impress other ponderous and grueling
And heaven help you if you say accessiblity or difficulty options should be available.