What is a point and click adventure game without puzzles? Somorost 2. The core gameplay loop for this game is find a hotspot on the screen and click on the hotspot, your guy does something and progress is made. There's no puzzles, the most challenging thing about the game is trying to figure out what you can click on, and sometimes what order you should click on those things. Which would make a fine albeit super-casual game experience if some of the clickable spots weren't so frustrating to find. And even that wouldn't be so bad if it were trying to be a hidden object sort of game, but it tries to present itself as an adventure game. On one puzzle I kept interacting with the objects on screen that were doing things trying to get them to work together, but gave up to look at a walkthrough, only to find that I had missed a tiny spot where I had to click to move to another screen where I had to literally harvest farts. All this was made even more frustrating because your dude moves so slowly across the screen, leaving you with a bunch of downtime that ended up making this very short game feel much too long for what it was. There's even a part of the game where your guy backtracks themselves across 4 screens with absolutely no interaction from you. Now, I can appreciate a short, tight game. And I can appreciate some meandering in a long epic game. But when you've got a short game that feels like a lot of it should have been left cut out, then what do you have? A puzzle game without puzzles.
This game has an interesting concept, you're playing as the spirit of a dead family member who has returned to the family manor. You don't know exactly why you're there, but quickly learn that your family is the kind of family that summons demons for kicks, and now everyone is missing. As you wander about the house and surrounding area you uncover more of the story through journal entries you find and puzzles you solve. And solving these puzzles is where we start running into trouble. Now I like adventure games, and I like some hard puzzles, but I'm also not going to let a puzzle leave me stuck for days at a time so I'm not adverse to looking at walkthroughs. And sometimes when I look at walkthroughs I'll say 'I should have thought of that' or 'That's some strange logic they're using to get that solution', but with this game I see the solution, and I see the 'clues' that I have to work with, and I still don't know how the two relate. I'll say that a lot of the puzzles in the game are fine and solvable as they are, but many are not and I don't even know where I went wrong along the way. Also, there is one puzzle that (MINOR SPOILERS) requires you to have the ability to transcribe notes from hearing music, so if you can't do that be warned.
