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.
Bioshock Infinite is one of the worst games I've ever played in comparison to how well it was received. The gameplay was shit. The enemies are all bullet sponges. The plot is about how Ken Levine doesn't understand the sci-fi concept of parallel universes at all and when slaves violently rebel they are as bad as the people who enslaved them. You can upgrade your weapons but you will use whichever one happens to be nearby since ammo is so scarce except when Elizabeth magically manifests some to throw to you. Songbird is a creature that screams WE WILL HAVE A BIG BOSS FIGHT and it never comes. It's awful.
I thought it was notably disliked by most fans of the previous games.
It was super popular and many flaws overlooked for as long as the theorycrafting went on but eventually people figured out it's just a nonsensical mess and the opinion reversed
I think it was only popular because of the porn
As I recall there were several huge breakthroughs in animation pipelining in SFM or something directly related to Elizabeth SFM porn
That entire game was such a huge disappointment, the gameplay trailers completely misrepresented what they were able to finally put out
I'll go you one further and say that it started back in Bioshock 1, which was a shit successor to the legacy of Looking Glass. Infinite was just the final insult.
At least the system shock remake is good.