"The Secret of Monkey Island" is still one of the finest point-and-click adventure games ever made. While the sequel surpasses it in more or less every way, it remains one of the genre's highest points. The remake is shockingly faithful, updating the graphics and music to modern standards, but basing every bit of it on the original sprite work and songs. Full voice acting has been added, and the voice actors all do a good job. The interface has been re-done to be more accessible to modern players. All of the puzzles remain unchanged, but you no longer need to mess around with tons of verbs that only get used once or twice. There's even a new hint system if you get stuck, but it's completely optional. I can't think of any reason why one wouldn't love this new version, but in case you'd prefer to play this game the way it was originally released, you can do that too! At any time during gameplay, with a single keystroke, you can switch back and forth between the remade version and the original. All in all, "The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition" is the definitive release of a spectacular game.
Astebreed does everything right. The shooting is satisfying, the visuals are gorgeous, the difficulty curve is spot-on, and it has just the right balance of challenge and forgiveness to keep things interesting but not frustrating. The weakest point is actually the story. It's interesting, but pretty cliche, and it while it touches on themes like transhumanism, it doesn't really dive into them much as it could. There's still far more plot here than most shmups, which is both a good and bad thing. Good because it gives more context to the shooting, and bad because it's really hard to read dialogue subtitles while you're dodging bullets. It's a minor annoyance for me that you can't hold down the fire button to continuously fire, but then that was sacrificed so you could have a (quite useful) charging lock-on attack, so it's not such a big deal. The game's central gimmick is a really cool one: the camera angles change constantly, seamlessly shifting the game between vertical-scrolling shmup, side-scrolling shmup, and 3D behind-the-back (like StarFox) shmup. This works surprisingly well, and it makes the stages feel more dynamic. It's especially cool during the boss fights, when the camera shifts multiple times during the fight, depending on how the boss is attacking you. I whole-heartedly recommend Astebreed, as I thoroughly enjoyed it. And if you like this, I also recommend its spiritual predecessor Ether Vapor, which sadly isn't on GOG as of this writing.
I love the idea of Evoland, and after finishing the game I can say that it has a lot of charm to it. And while it borrows elements from and plays homage to The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Diablo, it feels really stiff and awkward doing so, and really just makes me wish that I was playing those games instead.
This game was just added back to the GOG catalog, and while "Dark Fall 2" is a great game, the version that was just added back in after the initial removal is the "Director's Cut" which in my opinion is not even remotely as good. Some minor improvements to the atmosphere have been made, but many puzzles have been unnecessarily changed or removed, several plot holes have been added, and the story is told very differently in a far less interesting way (what was before a great mystery that you had to piece together is now a linear affair where everything is spelled out almost immediately). Ignore this release until they let you download the original version of "Dark Fall 2" as well.
