Voyage: Journey to the Moon

Voyage is a point and click adventure (of the 3D, 360 degrees rotation from fixed points variety). The game is really heavy on puzzles, but if you don't mind that, or the retro-futurism inspired by Verne's writing, you are in for a treat. The game allows you to complete several puzzles in multiple ways and orders, there are completely optional objectives and the presentation really carries the mood of a surreal "sci-fi" adventure written in the past. While you might need some note taking, the game does a terrific job of recording important stuff in your diary and documents. Dying is but a minor inconvenience, as you restart right where you left off, so I guess it's more of a personal challenge, instead. The variety of difficulty and types of puzzles is pretty good as well, and rarely you hit really tough walls, if ever (there also easier solutions to grasp at your disposal, thanks to the multiple solutions available). The game was clearly a labor of love, with all sort of nice touches (opening the game menu will present us with the protagonist goofing around, or knocking on the glass of our display, almost breaking the fourth wall, or maybe an alien creature will show up). The atmosphere of a Journey to an alien world is truly captured by the game, the in-game artwork which shows as you accomplish a big goal and the narrator kicks in to give everything that extra "spice". The story is solid, but since it's so limited in its presence overall, it probably wouldn't move the needle much, even if it was bad. Thankfully, it's style really does carry it, and makes it easier to forgive any minor flaws. The ending both resolves the main plot, while also hinting at a possible sequel (which never happened), but it's far from unsatisfying (if anything, you'll feel a smart guy like the protagonist, as you finally get everything ready for the finale). The music seemed to carry the mood well for me, but I wouldn't say it struck me. All in all, I had a blast! Recommended!

Overall this game is probably a solid 3, maybe 3+ I took off a star because while I never had any crashes it's very hard to get the game to start to the point that I was not able to finish the game because the game just CTD on startup. That said (assuming you have better luck running the game) the puzzles and world are fairly unique, the game uses panoramic point and click (like myst 3/4) and still looks pretty good. The voice acting works well and overall has some definite positives. It does have a few big negatives though: - The game starts with a harsh time limit, just as you want to look around basically you're about to die. fortunately that goes away after the the intro. - There's some "Action" based operations which are pretty clunky - Tons of inventory items, so-so UI. Wish that multiples stacked and there were better sorting options. - Sound based puzzles. If you're "tone deaf" so-to-speak you will have a very hard time and need to brute force some puzzles. - Inventory based: as with many inventory based puzzle games sometimes you know the answer you're just wandering around looking for the thing you know you need.

The best in its genre i.e. XIX-th century simulator. Keep in mind that in this game everything is nineteenth-century-ish. Not only story and graphics but also mechanics, controls, inventory etc., etc. It took me almost 20hrs to complete, all logical puzzles. If you read novels by Jules Verne as a kid - you will love it. If you didn't read Jules Verne and don't quit the game in first half an hour - you will love it too. I must warn that game lacks horror, depression, hopelessness and all other contemporary attributes. In fact it is so nineteenth-century-ish that I have a suspicion that it was actually made in XIX century and just released under disguise of contemporary production.

I liked the story behind this game. Kept you interested in moving forward. However, some of the logic of where to go or what to do next seemed to me to be nonexistent. This is true of their other game I played - Return to Mysterious Island 2. I had to use a walkthrough throughout most of the game. With the walkthrough you could see some of the logic, but to come up with it during the game, I could not.