The Samaritan Paradox

This is the sort of game I love to like: an independent voice, an unusual story, a step out of corporate gaming into a fresh new territories. New perspectives. Alas; I found the gameplay too often undermined by poor puzzle design and missing information to really score. The story is mostly charming, and there are plenty of good ideas present. A couple of the tent-pole puzzles are ridiculously baroque, in the ornate style of old adventure games - fair enough. That's why the Internet Gods made walkthroughs. But I found myself facing other puzzles without the details I needed to solve them, because of illogic, vague conception, or poorly-described surroundings - in lo-fi AGS graphics, it's often not clear what is what, and some of the important descriptions here leave a lot to be desired. Ultimately, it has the feel of a project play-tested by someone who already knew the answers to all the puzzles. Which is a pity, because there's a lot of meat on these bones, and there's some fun functionality quietly built in. You'll find a jukebox in your travels, for example, and once you've done what you need to do in that scene, you can actually play a handful of tunes on it. Nice! Ord, our hero, is as usual in adventure games a pilfering machine, but he pulls a few stunts that made me really question his morals. And there's a weird Scandinavian plunge into darkness in the last moments of the story that makes the ending strange and jarring. Add to that some puzzles in which active areas are - mistakenly, I hope - not marked, animation cues are misleading, or the avatar must be positioned within a hair's breadth of an arbitrary pixel to escape an automatic reload, and the experience was quite frustrating for me. It wasn't hard, for the most part, so much as unfair. That said, puzzles that are properly presented are unlikely but very satisfying to solve, and the - well, it's interesting, make no mistake. Whether it's pleasant for you is a matter of taste.

Very disappointed. It's hard to trust reviews on point&click adventures these days, because most people don't really remember how good ones should look like. This one is full of riddles, not so much puzzles, and doesn't have a captivating plot. If you like wandering around, not knowing what to do next, this might be the right game for you though.

If you enjoyed retro games like the Blackwell series, you will love The Samaritan Paradox. I had to refer to the walkthrough for some difficult puzzles and the timed sequences.

One of the best point'n'click games that I've ever played. Great story, great characters, perfect length. The difficulty of puzzles is just right, there's only one that's a bit over the top (looking at you, the crossword puzzle) and another one, that requires some general knowledge of history and can't be solved merely through information provided through the game. (looking at you, the calendar riddle).

I was looking for a good and challenging point and click adventure game and got exacly that. Pretty challenging puzzles, voice acting and interesting story, recommend for fans of the genre.