Posted on: November 11, 2018

Bauzi514

Games: 120 Reviews: 1

Shows signs of it's age

The game is rough in it's controls. Some aspects are fine, like how you automatically use equipped items on the right parts. However most interactable spots are not highlighted well. The game gets confusing towards the end. Vital inforamtion on the puzzles don't get written down in your journal. That's bad. You are confronted with the solutions only once and at first they only confuse you. There is no way to remember them at the right time. The atmosphere of the game is pretty nice. I liked most parts of the game. It is sometimes a hazzle to die suddenly. You can't forsee most of your deaths, so save often! Sometimes they come out of the blue. The end of the game is cringeworthy as an H.P. Lovecraft fan. Was that Goodbye-scene really necessary? That was for sure no Lovecraftian ending to a story. I would be happy about an 8bit remake with less clunky controls. That would be great!

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Posted on: July 17, 2023

fmlatghor

Verified owner

Games: 22 Reviews: 2

Immersive Atmosphere and Wonderful Style

I've had to look up walkthroughs / strategy guides to comfortably get through parts of this game, but overall I think this is a very intriguing and rare type of game you run into. This is the only Lovecraft game I know of that deserves praise. The developers nailed the atmosphere, characters, setting. You really get a lot of playtime for 6$. This will be remembered by me as one of my favorite games. The music isn't the most impressive, but it fits for this game and there were limitations with the technology. As the plot unfolds the more suspenseful it gets and you become a bit more used to the controls and puzzles. Others mainly complain about the controls because it's an old DOS game... most of those games back then had control schemes that were non-standard or a lot different from today, I found it intuitive enough to understand once I learned it. The game might come with a manual. Wasn't the biggest fan of the dungeon crawling, but it wasn't too bad.

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Posted on: July 29, 2023

Prah

Verified owner

Games: 1214 Reviews: 97

Great story but the game itself is not

Shadow of the Comet has a great story and atmosphere to it, but unfortunately that's where the good things with it stop. You play as Parker, sent to check out Halley's Comet in a small New England town and to investigate claims of what occured there 75 years earlier. Instead you uncover something more dark and sinister in the perfect fashion of H.P. Lovecraft. The gameplay is right out bad, even compared to other point n click games at its time. I don't know if the CD version made it worse, but controls are unresponsive and hard to figure out. The writing is... mostly serious but oddly comedic at times. The voice acting might not be the best, but it was also the early 90s so it can be excused. I don't recommend this game unless you're a hardcore Lovecraft fan or a point n click veteran. Definitely not something for newcomers of the genre.

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Posted on: September 17, 2023

Mogan

Verified owner

Games: 141 Reviews: 1

Starts well enough, goes wrong quickly

Shadow of the Comet starts off as a promising Lovecraft adventure game, but around the halfway point really loses its way. The biggest issue is puzzles which the player isn't given enough information to solve. In the early game, the main character can "look" at many of the objects and areas in the game world and will provide a description of what he sees. A lot of these details are important for solving puzzles and allow attentive players to progress using logic and memory. In the second of three in-game days, there are suddenly far fewer opportunities to "look" at the environment, and consequently very little information about what the next steps should be. This is also the point at which the game begins peppering puzzles with lots of fail-states which require a reload. The end result is the player having to brute force most puzzles and being punished for not saving constantly, which isn't satisfying gameplay even when the solution is guessed quickly. Shadow of the Comet is clearly made by developers familiar with Lovecraft, and the Cthulhu Mythos is mostly well used ... except when it comes to the non-player characters. There are numerous NPCs in the game which get little introduction (some introductions can even be missed) and most of those are frontloaded early in the game. Later in the game, conversations will start referring to these characters the play has met only briefly, if at all, and it's really impossible to remember who the game is talking about. Worse, remembering who 's who becomes important the gameplay, resulting again in the feeling that the only way forward is trial and error. Not to mention making it difficult to follow the plot. Overall, Shadow of the Comet is pretty weak. What starts as a classic feeling 90s point-and-click adventure game devolves into a rushed feeling mess in the back half of the game. It's a shame, because the first third or so is quite promising.

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Posted on: January 5, 2025

drk84x

Verified owner

Games: 352 Reviews: 65

I tried hard to like this one...

Graphics is nice and there is a proper "atmosphere", interface is not that bad you will get used to it fairly quickly. There is fast movement, a journal and you can change animation speed. Problems are the puzzle design, some weird "escape from monsters" encounters, some deads end and bugs. My verdict if you really like Lovecraft buy it at discount and don't feel guilty to use a walkthrough when you need to. Really one of the puzzle you need the help of an external source for solving it (chatGpt in 2024, in 1993 no idea? A Library?)

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