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It’s not quite the 1970s, but I really enjoy The Witness (A tanú), a Hungarian satire of communism from 1969. I’m pleased to see that it’s available on the site and strongly recommend watching it.

Casey's posts on the development of The Witness are all really good reads, I recommend reading them all.

The Witness is possibly my favourite game of last year. A truly wonderful experience. Hugely recommended to anyone who likes puzzle games. (Also in that category: Portal, Portal 2 and Antichamber)

I started playing realMyst recently (for the first time). Must admit I found it a bit unfun. Perhaps I just didn’t get into it enough but I found the puzzles sometimes quite unintuitive. I’ve also started The Witness and enjoying it more.

None of your examples are adventure games, they're just choose-your-path books - there is no logical challenge in them. I'm not sure if it's even possible to fail Heavy Rain not on purpose. I would rather say the modern adventure games are stuff like Obduction and The Witness.

The Witness (by the same person who developed Braid) felt very Myst-like to me as well. Highly recommended, the puzzles are incredibly clever and a lot of fun to solve with a partner.

Sorta OT, but Texas Monthly has so many great long reads like this.

Among my favorites are

Man on Fire http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/man-on-fire/, the story of an East Texas civil rights activist who self-immolated in a parking lot in a town of just a couple thousand.

Sinners in the Hands, which deals with a controversial church also in a tiny town in Eastern TX http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/sinners-in-the-hands/

and The Witness which is a pretty intimate look at one of the employees involved hands-on with capital punishment in Huntsville TX (very high rate of death penalties) http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-witness/.

And really OT, but still interesting I think, Texas Monthly BBQ http://tmbbq.com is one of the best food blogs IMO and basically the only one I will read. It's very well done.

I'm not a big fan of many publications but TM is a winner in my book.

Hype depends on who you interact with, but a few impressions:

I was really impressed with Jonathan Blow's The Witness. Exquisitely designed and thought out.

The animated series Primal by Genndy Tartakovsky. A pulpy cartoon without dialogue unlike anything else animated from the US.

The tv series Doom Patrol. Clever, revels in the absurd but still manages serious drama on what it means to not be completely human any more.

Philosophy in general. I've always seen it as academic wank, but i couldn't have been more wrong. It gives you the ability to step back in a way that pure science cannot. Excellent tool to learn about yourself too.

On a more controversial note, I was initially put off by critical race theory (talking explicitly about race in academia? Putting blame on the prosperous west?), but I must say it makes a lot of sense.