Cleo - a pirate's tale

Excellent little adventure game, clearly made with love and care. I adored the art style, especially for the character portraits. Cleo herself is an enjoyable protagonist, swept up in a fun treasure hunt with pirate characters. This is all very light-hearted but it has some effective moments of character and emotion, although they are very much background elements. The voice acting (English version) is simply fantastic and has a very professional quality. It took me a little while to get used to playing an adventure game with WASD controls, I would have preferred traditional point-&-click. But the control scheme does allow for the game to have its own unique personality and allows you to engage with the game world in a different way. Puzzle design is largely very good and I was able to work my way through most of the game unaided. There was some more confusing stuff in chapter 3 which I spent a while on but couldn't work out. Fortunately, the solutions weren't stupid and it was more about me missing clues. The one part I really struggled with was the Kraken Fodder minigame, which seemed to be impossible to win for me. I had to go through at least a dozen rounds of losses before the random element of it finally went my way. This stopped the game being fun for a while. The story loses focus a bit at the end, revolving around a few characters that we've not properly met and I wasn't quite keeping track of who they all were. But the game is short and absolutely gorgeous, genuinely feeling like a throwback to the games I loved in the '90s but updating the elements beautifully.

Nice and sweet. Fairly easy. The Kraken Fodder took a while though.

Such a shame for the quite nice pixel art and cozy animations.. The dialogues are horrendously boring and last SO LONG ! There is zero logic in the few puzzles - nothing makes sense. I cannot believe this "game" was financed by around one thousand people on kickstarter..