Hi,
did anyone test Wintermute engine?
It's a free software to create adventure games.
I am testing it, and i think it's great.
You can make sprites and control them on top of backgrounds, it can check object collisions,
it has a save game feature and also inventory objects.
In the end it saves a .EXE game.

It looks easy, you have to program a bit, but major stuff is allready done.
I did some tests with sprite and it works very nice, transparencies work good.
Maybe i will do a simple game on it.

http://dead-code.org/home/