Syberia I & II, The Longest Journey/Dreamfall are a couple of amazing adventure game series. Neither are exactly recent (2004 and 2007 respectively), but they're still full of atmosphere and enjoyable to play.
I continue to hope that Ragnar Tornquist will make another game as brilliant as The Longest Journey. If he can manage to inject some of the creativity of that game into his upcoming Lovecraftian MMO The Secret World, it could be superb.
I've started playing adventure games in late 80's/early 90's with King's Quest and Gobliiins, and I've seen pretty much all of it, but for my money, there's no better adventure game than Longest Journey