Adventure games á la good old Sierra Online & Lucas Arts with titles like Larry, Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis, Monkey Island 1 & 2, Police/Space/Kings Quest, Broken Sword to mention a few legendary gems, are very viable today and healthy on the indie scene where they're mainly at now a days.
There are seldom any new titles released, but check out
Runaway: A road adventure or
Machinarium (Linux as well) and be blown away by what such amazing titles can give you.
Unfortunately the era of this genre has long gone due to the 3d-hype that still holds the new generations of players in it's most often totally unnecessary grip. As an effect the shift in the industry has been towards coolest 3d-effects and highest poly counts and a quest for photorealism instead of on scripts, story, good universe and solid gameplay. Yeah, I'm one of those that would claim that Monkey Island 1 & 2 (the original ones) are way better games than 95% of the shit that the industry spews out, pound for pound.
Creating themBy using
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ (win) you can easily create a game within just a couple of hours and almost zero knowledge. It's the best tool I've seen to date, and I have tried them all.
Beauty is it's free and that you can run the game on Linux as well with a port of it's run time code.
WarningIf you lack an artist of some sort you should probably focus on using
Inform7 instead (wonderful and
amazing tool, I even manged to get my game running online in browser) - adventure games that use graphics must have somewhat viewable art, if not, they're doomed to never be played, no matter how good they are. With viewable I don't mean any specific style, just a consistent one that most people could accept. (E.g. south park style seems to be perfectly fine for most, to just use an example of how low the threshold can be and still work out)