Grim Fandango got a rerelease not too long ago. If you want to go further back, I know the Monkey Island games also got rereleases, and a new one came out last year.
We always liked the Syberia series alot. Aside from all the Lucas Arts classics, we also (very) enjoyed playing the following 90/2000 (style) adventures:
Historic
Fantasy, fairy tales
SciFi
Wow, this is really detailed. Thanks, I'm bookmarking this.
If you want to step just a bit further back in gaming history, the old Sierra games were absolutely fantastic for their time. My personal favorite series will always be Quest for Glory. And I still go back and play through the series about once a year or so. For more even more of a puzzle focus, the King's Quest series or Space Quest series were both very good. Most of these games were DOS based and so run well with DOSBox. The Steam version on Quest for Glory literally just auto-runs the game in DOSBox. If you enjoy any of them, I'd also recommend looking into ScummVM which tends to make running those older games really smooth, at the cost of a tiny bit of setup work.
I'll always have a soft spot for the old Sierra games because they were the first adventure games I played, but I think I'd recommend the old LucasArts games to new players nowadays. The LucasArts games were just better designed - they don't have fail states and you can't unexpectedly die so you are more free to explore.
My recommendation would be to check out "Day of the Tentacle". In my opinion it is the best example of point and click games. I don't know about Linux compatibility but it recently had a re release so I think it should work.
Indigo Prophecy was definitely a fun experience, but it has more quick time events than actual puzzles. Still worth a look if you are looking for a good story (although it got rushed in the end so the finale isn't great)
Yeah, I was in love with it for the first half, then it really dropped the ball story-wise. But it was still a positive and memorable experience for me. Very immersive, at least at the time.
If I remember correctly, it was originally intended to be an episodic game, but plans changed late in development. As a result, the first half of the game is a really good bit of moody character-driven slow burn storytelling, and then suddenly it's like the entire corkboard full of plot ideas gets vomited out at once.
(SPOILER?) All I remember is some shiny man appearing and then it all stopped making any sense.
Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis and The longest journey come to mind
Check out full Wadjet Eye Games catalog
Check out the Delphine games Future Wars - Time Travelers and Operation Stealth
Gemini Rue.
Myst series
!adventuregames@lemm.ee
and use ScummVM for every game it supports (even for you Windows gamers out there)
The Nancy Drew adventure game series is in the vein of what you are looking for.
The community on the place that shall not be named is(was?) very active and full of people sharing point-and-click game suggestions.
There's even a spreadsheet!
Day of the Tentacle
Sub for any gaming related content!
Rules: