The biggest problem that I see with adventure gaming is that it is virtual.
It has nothing to do with the real existing world and it's true perceptions.
That might be the wrong thing about gaming in general.
Hey, but I can tell the same about books. They let you live through someone elses stories instead of doing your own. Is not it?
I guess, escapism did not start with videogames.
Trying to speak more in topic, I can only do so from player's perspective, and it came to me recently that except common lack of replayability, there is another thing that makes adventure games special, sometimes in negative way.
I do not know what term to use here, thus I will describe it.
In most games, whether they be action games, puzzles or strategies, you learn game elements and mechanics, which let you to later recognize patterns and rationally find a solution to solve more and more complicated tasks.
In adventure games, however, there is rarely such thing, and when there is - it stands out so much that may became a trademark of a game series
*. Aside from most elementary actions (move mouse here, click, move there, click) there is not often something that repeats itself, preparing players for more difficult situations.
For example, in many action games the common pattern is finding weak spot of the "boss". Once you got it first few times you already know what to look for in the future encounters.
In adventures, instead of learning useful patterns, players learn a lot of boring and uninteresting ones: click through every dialog option, use every item on every other item, and so on.
Often this is a result of the lack of consistency and rationale in the game script. Game authors may be not far-thinking enough, or too lazy to create a gameplay system. Game becomes trial and error, where players, instead of thinking of reasonable ways to solve a puzzle, are trying to guess what was in the authors mind when they created the game
**. Sometimes they may do so instinctively, because they learnt to
not trust author's rationale.
* On example I can think about is MI's swordfights. Also, in the same MI series there was a feature of "reproducing previously met puzzle, but this time using substitute items".
** Of course, I am not talking about every single adventure game out there, but this is the general feeling I have about the genre.