I would have voted for historical settings if I had more votes.

For example a detective/crime/mystery setting can absolutely "happen" in a historical setting. There are enough real stories that could be realized as a point & click adventure game.

It could have been separate polls, one for "where" does it happen, one for "when", and one for "which Genre", and even another one for "visual style".

About historical settings in other games: I loved Assassin's Creed Odyssey, situated in ancient Greece, even though I didn't play other AC games and only played it because it was more like an RPG.

I put my hat in the surreal ring. I love stuff like alternate dimensions and mindfuckery stuff. We need to bring back some of that unhinged creativity from the early days like DarkSeed and Tass Times in Tonetown, minus the egregious gameplay flaws.

Personally, I tend towards the thriller, horror, and dark fantasy stuff. Which usually happens in a modern(or relatively modern) setting. Some great examples are Still Life, The Last Door, Barrow Hill, Dark Fall, and Gabriel Knight.

But I also really enjoy pure fantasy and scifi games. I'm generally more of a fantasy nerd in my life, but strangely I often find myself preferring the scifi set adventure games a little bit more than the fantasy ones.

And while I also really do like surrealism, I find it to not always be done that well. Definitely something I feel like devs were better with back in the day. I feel like modern surrealism in games is often either shoving the intended meaning in your face, or just utter nonsense with a meaning slapped on in hindsight. In other words: Either not respecting the player's intelligence, or pure incompetence.

I was trying to figure out which games I have enjoyed the most from a pure setting perspective, and I think I narrowed to two games/franchise

Leisure Suit Larry series
Thimbleweed Park

 So I guess "Realistic - Semi Realistic" is my choice.

I think I generally tend to gravitate towards a realistic/semi-realistic and down to earth setting, but with one extraordinary element that drives the story: a mystery, something supernatural or a sci-fi macguffin. Gabriel Knight is the classic example, I guess, but it could be anything from Life is Strange to The Dream Machine or the Blackwell series. I don't mind a pure sci-fi setting either, especially if it's cyberpunk-adjacent.

Fantasy settings are probably my least favourite, at least if they go down the serious route. I don't mind comedic fantasy á la Discworld, though.

Weirdly enough, I've almost stopped playing the cartoony/purely comedy based games, which used to be one of my favorite styles growing up. But I think that has a lot to do with how a lot of modern comedic adventure games seems to be more concerned with emulating a certain nostalgic "adventure game humor" of the past than actually writing good jokes. (Thankfully, that seems to be changing a bit - Loco Motive was a great example of adventure game comedy writing done right!)