Girl Genius: Adventures In Castle Heterodyne

Not enough traps. First off, if you're not already a fan of the Girl Genius comic/graphic novel, then don't bother with the game. It starts off with book *eight* of the comics, at a point in the story where most of the past plot threads and characters come together. The game barely makes any effort to make this cohesive for a newcomer, just giving story synopses periodically as you progress. You'll be left with a confusing and likely unsatisfying plot of "Claim and fix your family's mad scientist castle before the imposter does," and the gameplay isn't good enough by itself to recommend. Instead, go read the excellent story at girlgeniusonline dot com instead, then decide if you want to come back here. Now to those who already like Girl Genius and want to know if this is worth your time, the answer is yes, but you'll also be disappointed. The plot starts off reasonably faithful to the comic, but over time things start getting left out and oversimplified beyond what is needed for game reasons. For example, Lucrezia doesn't make an appearance at all, and Zola's final plan is just to grab something from her secret lab that will give her command of the castle. The game ends after she's driven off. Oddly, more characters show up after the credits as if there were a postgame quest, but there isn't anything besides 100% completion, which I didn't bother doing. I don't have much space left for gameplay, so the short version is that the fighting and controls are janky but tolerable. Expect to die a few times on bosses with normal difficulty. The exploration starts off good, with nicely complex rooms that are harder than the average game, and sending Dingbot off to reach places you cant is usually fun. Unfortuately, much like the plot, the environments get simpler after around the two-thirds mark with more focus on combat, which makes me think it was rushed to finish. To sum up, Girl Genius fans should get it, but maybe on sale.

One thing is a bit odd, as you collect lore for the story, it's for the comic books, it doesn't really match the game. A bit of an odd decision, but there it is. Other than that, the game is 120% pure Girl Genius mayhem! I love it!