The Samaritan Paradox

I really liked the game, as I'm admirer of classic point and click adventures, especially in this pixel art style. The story was really good and interesting, many surprises and unexpected things happens during the game, the puzzles where logical and hard most of the time, and some of them were really hard, had to consult the walkthrough, but these games you expect and want the challenge. Sometimes you have to thing out of the box. All in all really enjoyed playing this game, it is really cheap buy it and enjoy classic adventure.

This review does not discuss the plot because I do not wish to spoil anything. For a plot overview, please read the game description on the gog store page. The story is great and in line with many scandinavian mystery stories. One of my favorite things about this game is that it does not shy away from real-life issues, like corrupted institutions and unethical trading. The gameplay is mostly good, but i find that some of the puzzles are made too difficult due to some key items blending in the pixelated background and being difficult to identify. At times, one must engage in the dreaded pixel hunting in order to progress. I had to consult a walkthrough after being stuck for a long while and i found out i needed to use an item I had missed in an area i had visited 2 or 3 hours earlier. I was not amused. That being said, the puzzles are overall smart and entertaining and the pixel art is very beautiful. It is very nice to play an adventure game set in a country that is not the US or featuring American characters. Not that there is anything wrong with the US, but its nice to play a game in a different cityscape where the characters reason in a different way and follow different social codes. Its a refreshing change. Like many of the other reviewers, I found the ending disappointing. Not because of any plot-twists, but because of an abrupt change in tone that feels jarring and inconsistent with the way the story has been developing thus far. You will know what I mean when you get there. In conclusion, I can say although The Samaritan Paradox is not quite on par with Wadjet Eye releases, it is a great effort nonetheless and I can easily recommend it to point-and-click fans.

Lots of bugs, as others have mentioned. I only encountered two, luckily. Both times, the game just crashed. Once I had to reboot the game, the other time it just eventually kicked back to life again. But the bugs are a small problem. The main problem is how extremely clunky and crappy everything is. Examples: - By the end of the game, your inventory will be full of complete garbage gathered during previous puzzles. Every time you have to use an item you have to browse browse browse and then at the bottom of the long list, you'll find the items most recently picked up. - What is even worse is that in one important puzzle you suddenly have to go back and use one of these old "ghost items" that just linger around. Since all of the others are just dead items, many will expect this one to be too. - No text for interactions. Mostly if you try something out it just says you can't do that in a very generic way. Often it doesn't even say that but the game doesn't even react when you do something. No jokes, no interesting comments or dialogues, no nothing. Just generic "I can't do that" 90% of the time. - Pixel hunting. - Very ugly graphics. - Voice actors sound bored. - characters are completely hollow - dialogue system is horrible + good music + interesting setting + nice but not amazing story +some nice puzzles I would not recommend it. Sure it has it's nice parts but the bad ones outwheigh them by far.

For a game released in 2014 this title seems extremely dated. It might be that I'm used to more finalized adventure games (namely from Wadjet Eye) and haven't played any of the more basic Adventure Game Studio releases in a while. The biggest downside of the game were the bugs. On two occasions I ended up having a bug that required me to reload and earlier save as I was in an unwinnable state. Once the game stopped rendering the graphics after a screen transition during a cutscene, leaving the game screen completely black until I restarted the game. The path-finding has a few quirks, and sometimes the wrong animations played when walking around. The story of the game, like in most adventure games, is one of the better aspects. For many adventure titles the story is made too complex and the ending arrives hurried. In this case I felt the story might have been a bit on the simpler side and wasn't deep or long enough. The characters were enjoyable enough, the protagonist being my favorite. Voice acting was passable, but a few characters had voices that were simply bad. Puzzles were refreshing difficult - even too much so. It's rare, but in this case I had to resort to a walkthrough to finish the game. A few of the puzzles required some knowledge that to my understanding cannot be found inside the game world. A die-hard adventure game player will probably solve all the puzzles with determination, though. Music was good.

I like that it is possible to do some things out of order (or at least that the game makes it feel like it is), but I also heavily dislike how, as events happen and the story unfold, the dialogue is nearly never updated. This was really inimical to my enjoyment of an otherwise good story and is my main reason for not giving this game at least one more star. If you like point and click games in general then there really is little (objective) reason why you shouldn't also like this one. A couple of annoyances experienced during my playthrough (with nano spoilers about something you will need to during the game - gameplay related): At two times duing my playthrough I had to look up a walkthrough only to discover that I hadn't clicked exactly the right pixels to hide or, in the second case, hid in the wrong spot. It also had annoyances like text saying something akin to "I don't need to do this with that" at points where you really could do that, only you had to click on the thing first and then do the other thing :) That being said, overall, I liked many of the puzzles.