The Shivah

It's a pretty short game, but very well done. Great voice acting and music with an excellent story.

FPS games were supposed to be dead, then they came back with the COD series. Adventure was supposed to have been killed by the tedium of the dreaded "pixel hunt", then someone discovered that point & click adventures are perfect for looking inward, at ourselves and society. Perfect for noir, for old school sci-fi, and in this case playing around with our relationship with faith. The Shivah delivers a short but satisfying tale of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. It allows four possible endings, and you can do a lot worse for a couple of hours of your day. Great game.

The title itself is a reference to the spirit of the game. You'd understand if you'd try. The game has some puzzles that force you to write down the clue pieces you find, or siff-through the information bits at hand, but it's not an overwhelming amount of information that you can't brute-force through. The dialogues are mostly humorous, the story is simple yet interesting, the riddles are fun to solve even if sometimes a bit out of the way. Overall, it's fun, moderately thought-provoking, well paced, and the dialogue options you get sound interesting enough to go back and re-do some conversations differently. There's also some speech about morality along the way. A bit on the short side, but enough to fully pass the intended experience.

A very interesting entry from Wadjet Eye. I dare say I've never even heard of a detective mystery with a rabbi protagonist, so this was a change of pace in terms of setting, and despite the very short length has a lot of extra content (multiple endings, bloopers, commentary) to give you your moneys worth. Especially amusing are the little references to other games (fans of the Blackwell saga will recognize the redhead in the bar seemingly talking to herself) which makes this game a small, but enjoyable gem.

Do not expect this to be a big game in terms of playing hours, or in puzzle depth. It is not. Total playing time might be about 2-3 hours, puzzle depth is more on the beginner side. It makes up for this by the presentation and atmosphere, both are well beyond expectations. Pro Very well executed in terms of catching the player into the story Con Short. 5 Stars, keeping in mind this went for around 1 € and change.