Everyone in town used to throw rocks at me and tell me I was annoying.

What, nobody has really anwered?

The scumm games did that really well. Just remember the conversations in Monkey Island with Stan.

Of course scumm was a work of beauty that made games really robust... Oxenfree to me was "Dinner with Andre: the game", or "dinner scene in a Woody Allen film: the game". It irritated me A LOT.

It's tricky because you have to find the best compromise between:

- what the OP describes (click to continue dialogue)
- dialogue moving too fast for the player's preference, or player would like to take a short break but has to listen to the whole conversation first (automatic dialogue without player input)

Both can be equally annoying depending on the case and on your personal preferences.

Personally, I usually prefer clicking for the next line of dialogue when there's only text (so I can read at my own speed), and automatic conversations without player input when there are voiceovers, but in those cases I'd still like to be able to pause the dialogue whenever I want to. Or, unless the dialogue is repeatable, it's even cooler if there's a log on top of it, so I can read up on what was said in case I missed something.

I think some adventure games even offer menu options that let you choose whether dialogue pauses after each line or not.

It is. Look at how Wadjet Eye games intends to handle it with their next game "Unavowed".

https://twitter.com/WadjetEyeGames/status/973144478151270400

It's not perfect by any means, but it does address the problem head on.

Is there a clip of that?

deleted

Actually... there is a better example with the fetuccini bros

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgOMgNgRIZ0

But, it only works with NO voice acting. During many years I thought voice acting actually killed the pace of adventure games.

In Monkey Island 1 and 2 there are many examples of creative use of the conversations: characters chatting without you interacting with them, conversations that breaks the expected pace (the fortune teller guessing your questions and not letting you speak) and interruptions.

Does that work without needing to click to have the next person speak? Hard to tell from the video.

IIRC, Lucasfilm/LucasArts adventures never needed the player to click in order to advance the dialogue (though you could press the period key to advance to the next dialogue line). I seem to remember the dialogue speed could be tuned in the game options in order to adapt it to the player's reading ability.

Have you ever been to Steam? I've been to Steam.

Iconoclasts does interruptions (and dialogue in general) best. It's not a point-and-click game, though.

That's fantastic! Thanks for linking to that!

Faith in humanity restored :D

It's not a very progressive genre, frankly. I really wish we'd get more technically advanced traditional 2/2.5D p&c adventure games, both in graphics as well as mechanics, but that's not happening, is it?

Daedalic is completely off the table right now, what with them having cancelled The Devil's Men, and I was looking forward to that like to no other game. There's basically just Wadjet Eye, and it's a miracle Dave Gilbert is even thinking of innovating. :|

Depends on the game they also played with the speed of the dialogues.

I was just playing Phoenix Wright: Spirit of Justice and it reminded me that this saga is very into playing with the speed of the text and interruptions, and that benefits the games greatly.