Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure

At the beginning it was great, but the longer I played, the more problems appeared. The amount of times you could look at something at one point was tiresome. Not clicking through all the options had me thinking I could miss an important plot point, but it was not rewarding at all - and after some time the jokes lost their novelty. The plot starts out strong, but arount 2/3rds of the game is all over the place. And the ending is confusing. The writing in general could be better in the late game. And the finak act was just boring. The puzzles were tedious, and I would have preferred the game to be shorter than have me do something that wasn't fun. Ultimately not bad, but gets a bit tedious.

For the most part the game is a nice throwback to games like "Sam & Max" or "Simon the Sorcerer". However, everything pretty much falls apart in the last chapter, as both puzzles and story take a turn for the worse.

Firstly, the good: The visual presentation of this game is great, especially the varied and colourful backgrounds. The characters are less detailed, but still quite expressive. As you progress through the game, there are some short-cuts taken (like not animating some character movements or not having proper scene transitions), but I loved the hand-drawn style, all in all. However, the beginning of the game was genuinely painful. I found myself cringing away from the screen with the endless barrage of references and jokes, all of them falling flat, eliciting a groan at best. I nearly stopped playing, that's how bad it was. Thankfully, they tone it down drastically from the second town onward, and a few of the later jokes and situations actually got a chuckle out of me. Basically, though, this game lacks the kind of timeless humour that adventures like the old Monkey Island games are known for. Still, it got better as it got less obtrusive. But what didn't get better throughout the game was the overall plot and the characters' motivations; it did seem unfinished, and ends on a cliff-hanger. As for the puzzles and inventory management: These were usually relatively simple puzzles. The inventory never grows beyond a handful of items at a time - and if worse comes to worst, just use the time-honoured tradition of combining anything with everything. And while features like asking our Kitteh-companion to do things for us, or of looking into the past with our eldritch ability, weren't used to their full potential, I did appreciate the added variety. Overall: Fairly simple adventure game with a beautiful art style and a disjointed plot. An alright effort, but not great - assuming you can make it through the rocky beginning and jokes.

This steps right into the shues of Monkey Island and the old Lucas Arts adventures

"Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure" is a fun point-and-click adventure game. It has a casual humor and the characters are lovably written. Especially the dialogues between Buzz and his cat are lively and rich. Kitteh still has a sarcastic touch in her statements. The animations are top class. I have rarely seen such beautiful backgrounds and drawn figures. Due to the engine used, even real-time shadows are displayed in the backgrounds. The puzzles are mostly simple to moderately difficult. Only with two or three puzzles I had to think a little longer. Due to the lightness of the puzzles I was in a nice game flow, that was very pleasant. I can only give the game top marks. The German text translation is very close to the English original and is fun. I would have only wished for one thing to make the whole thing even better: a German voice output. Anyway, a great game.