#9 Visual Novels

An interactive fiction game with origins from Japan, visual novels are typically PC games featuring static images that you click through to progress through the story, usually with some text at the bottom to display dialogue and character monologue.

At first, the visual novel sounds like a more complicated book with pictures where you have to click, but the thing that makes it so unique is that it has voices, artwork, and decisions. The decisions are the defining characteristic of the genre, where the player will usually be required to make a choice somewhere down the story line, which may or may not affect what "route" or "ending" one might receive.

While not very popular outside of Japan, there are companies (and fan translators) in the U.S. that work on adapting the games into an English audience. Visual novels are a in fact a fun and alternative to your typical video game.

Chaos;Head is a well-known sci-fi thriller novel

Typical gameplay of a visual novel, again from Chaos;Head