[PC] Beneath a Steel Sky (1994)

How:
Played the Amiga demo as a kid, finally got it for free on GOG.
Pros:
- Excellent graphics and animations
- The Virtual Teathre engine retains all the good points from Lure of the Temptress and hugely improves upon them
- Voiceovers are so good and enriching that this is probably the first time I leave them on when given the option
- Amazing, compelling story with a great pace
- Very good and moderately challenging puzzles with some well placed red herrings
- Memorable characters and lines
- Some very humorous parts (e.g. the trial)
Cons:
- People tend to get in the way (especially Joey)
- Music quality could be better
- Some bugs and crashes

[PC] Teenagent (1995)

How:
Got for free automatically in my GOG account when signing up.
Pros:
- Nice and moderately challenging puzzles
- Some good red herrings
- Very nice animations and pleasant graphics
- Very good sense of humor
- Fun setting and immediate gameplay
Cons:
- A couple of illogical puzzles (e.g. using a pinecone to create a dart, using a ribbon to straighten up fork prongs)
- The inventory tends to clutter up

[PC] Dragonsphere (1994)

How:
Promoted on Gog.com as a freeware game, got it without knowing anything about it. Played it after reading hg101 review.
Additional comment:
Not quite as short as most reviews mention (I think I needed around 10-11 hours from start to finish). The slow movements might have contributed.
Pros:
- Very good graphics and excellent in-game animations
- Very good (sometimes creepy) music
- The game has a very immersing, serious atmosphere differentiating it from most other adventures in similar fantasy settings
- Great dialogues and overall very likable characters
- A very deep and intriguing story with cool ideas thrown everywhere and a dramatic turn of events
- There are some rather challenging (but fair) puzzles
- Some puzzles can be solved in multiple ways
- Death is automatically undone, with no need to reload
- Lots of interactive elements, with long text descriptions
Cons:
- Movements are rather slow and unskippable (e.g. when climbing the mountain)
- Mediocre voice acting, thankfully it can be turned off
- Perhaps too many red herrings (both useless inventory items and misleading puzzle solutions, e.g. the poems)
- The story can be "broken" in a couple of ways (e.g. by going to the Spirit Plane without knowing about the Soul Egg)
- The interface can be confusing as some objects have item-specific default actions, e.g. a hidden button on the wall has "Activate" as default action, and "directions" can also be examined (this is especially important towards the end of the game when a door must be examined to reveal the symbol of a crown)

[PC] Falling Skywards (2011)

How:
Got with the AGS Bake Sale.
Pros:
- Very nice, atmospheric setting and good background story
- Good puzzles
- Very good graphics and animations
Cons:
- Games by the same author always feel too much sparse

[PC] Prime Minister's Questions (2011)

How:
Read about it on Indigames.com.
Pros:
- Very nice pixel art
- Fun voiceovers recorded from real sittings
- Fun and well balanced dialogue puzzles

[PC] Escape the Barn (2012)

How:
Got with the AGS Bake sale.
Pros:
- Nice country mood
Cons:
- Very short and trivial

[PC] RAM Ghost (2012)

How:
Got with the AGS Bake Sale.
Quiz:
Where is the ghost in the picture above?
Pros:
- Rather addictive
- Couldn't find any use for the treasure chest in the attic
- Decorating the house with wallpapers and new furniture is naively fun
- Nice pixel graphics
Cons:
- Becomes repetitive pretty soon
- Starts difficult, ends easy
- The spook minigame is not a game at all
- Some items (e.g. the cow) feel a bit out of place
- No music

[PC] Retina (2012)

How:
Got with the AGS Bake Sale.
Pros:
- Nice roguelike graphical choice
Cons:
- The game feels not fully realized, it is not clear whether the player is actually supposed to do something or not
- Even if the purpose is purely atmospheric, it lasts too long

[PC] Fragment (2011)

How:
Got with the AGS Bake Sale.
Pros:
- Very good character design and animations, as usual
- Suggestive and emotional
- Longer than previous games from the same developer
Cons:
- Backgrounds tend to be too simple and abstract
- Puzzles are trivially easy (except perhaps one)
- Starts rather slow
- Sometimes too much philosophical

[PC] Entrapment (2012)

How:
Got it with the AGS Bake Sale.
Pros:
- Very good, consistent graphics and animations
- Nice puzzles
- A cool cutscene
- Compelling (if clichéd) murder setting
Cons:
- Many typos
- The second half of the game is all dialogues with little interaction

[PC] Abner the Amazing (2011)

How:
Got with the AGS Bake Sale.
Pros:
- Fun dialogues
- Nice story idea
Cons:
- Music style is out of place
- Very poor to no animations at all
- Some very simplistic puzzles
- Very unpolished graphics

[PC] The Rail (2012)

How:
Got with the AGS Bake Sale.
Pros:
- Excellent graphics and animations
- Nice setting
- Good puzzles
Cons:
- Music and sound effects are barely audible
- A couple of graphical glitches
- Too bad it's so short

[PC] King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder (1990)

How:
Bought the King's Quest 4+5+6 collection from GOG after playing King's Quest II.
Additional comment:
Not nearly as unbeatable as it is usually depicted.
Pros:
- Excellent graphics and animations
- Very nice music all throughout
- A cool adventure with lots of travel and a compelling story
- Nice, challenging puzzles
- Some puzzles are solvable in more than one way
- Connections with previous games of the series (e.g. Manannan cat) is rewarding for fans
- Fun and slick gameplay
- Nice graphical choice for the windowed interiors
Cons:
- Packed full of dead ends
- Cedric the owl has no use except at the very end
- Voice acting is generally mediocre
- The final part is very frustrating
- Must resort to save scumming in order to finish the game
- A couple of illogical puzzles (e.g. the moldy cheese to activate the machine)
- Some graphical and sound glitches
- The game annoyingly interrupts with a warning message every time a cutscene is going to start
- The desert maze is uncalled for

[Amiga] Dungeon Master (Psygnosis release) (1992)

How:
Had the game on Amiga as a kid but never figured out how to play it. Finally decided to give it a go after reading CRPGAddict's posts on the game.
Pros:
- Favors exploration and discovery
- Immersive and suspenseful
- Nice balance between strategic and real-time elements
- Concocting potions is a cool idea
- Excellent pacing near the end
- Combat can be challenging and rewarding
- Cool magic system, memorizing and using spells makes the difference between a good wizard player and a bad one
- Some cool spells (e.g. see through walls, invisibility)
Cons:
- Throwable weapons (arrows, shurikens) must be picked back up one by one after usage, and the space allotted for them in the inventory is limited to 5
- No music, few sound effects
- Very repetitive graphics
- Slow movements due to overloaded inventories are a real pain
- Items, weapons and armor do not have any description, except for their name and weight
- No NPCs whatsoever. Would have been nice to meet somebody at some point
- The game gets very repetitive after a while, the elements added in each dungeon are not enough to motivate progress
- Probably one or two dungeon levels too many

My winning party:

Bad ending:

Good ending:

[Amiga] Arazok's Tomb (1987)

How:
Found while randomly browsing my Gamebase Amiga collection.
Pros:
- Very good graphics
- Moderately challenging puzzles with lots of red herrings and limited inventory
- Cool fantasy/sci-fi hybrid setting
Cons:
- Rather short
- Many showstopping bugs (crashes, glitches)
- Many typos
- No dialogue
- The few speaking characters can be heard only via the optional synthesized speech, otherwise what they say is not reported on screen
- Confusing descriptions
- Weak parser
- Some annoying time-based puzzles (eating, drinking, fighting)
- Very weak and abrupt ending

[PC] Back to the Future: The Game - Episodes 1-5 (2010)

How:
Read about it on Adventuregamers.com, bought the series during a Steam sale.
Pros:
- Very nice in-game animations
- Excellent voice acting
- Great writing, dialogue and characters
- Well-balanced puzzles overall, with some fun semi-arcade parts
- Some very good humour
- Compelling story and nice setting
Cons:
- Occasional graphics, sound, gameplay and camera glitches break the game flow
- Facial animations are of alternating quality
- Music, sound effects and voice overs are out of balance
- The movement mechanism is sometimes annoying and rather buggy
- Feels a bit isolating at times
- The built-in hint system gets too much in the way (can be disabled though)