Not exactly a game, more like a slideshow, but an extremely well-written and fascinating story of an alien whale calf growing up on an Earth-like planet, presented like a nature documentary. Very imaginative and engaging, with a few clickable detours that fill in a bit of background on Earth and humans in this sci-fi setting. Most of it remains focused on the whale and his interactions with the many fascinating species of this other world, though. I very much hope there are more parts to this story in the future.
A simple little 10 minute point and click with a quirky and fun style. There's not much here, but seeing as it's free and short, I certainly can't complain. It's worth playing.
The first Amnesia is a horror classic and the second was deeply atmospheric, though very short and lacking in actual gameplay. Rebirth marks a welcome return to having some gameplay mechanics beyond just being a walking simulator, while at the same time being the first in the series that is immersive and unrelenting enough to truly feel terrifying. The story, personalities and environments are all better developed than previous titles, and the environment of Algerian caves and ruins (as well as the mysterious other world) has more character and variety than the castle and factory of the previous titles, which were filled with reused assets that gave them a low-budget feel despite the games' quality. The ability to see your own body in this game adds to the immersion a lot, as well as being vital to the plot, and the monsters, while not quite as gruesome as the abominations from Dark Descent, are much smarter and scarier. I remember crouching on the other side of a wall from one of them, hearing it sniffing at the air as though seeking me out. When it moved a little further along I tried to sneak down the corridor it had just come from, only for my foot to accidentally knock against a stone lid on the floor, making a slight clunk. Immediately the sniffing stopped. I broke into a full-on, desperate run, the monster snarling and howling behind me in hot pursuit, and I just barely made it out alive. This wasn't a scripted event, this was just normal game play, and it felt like a scene straight out of an actual horror movie. This level of vulnerability, combined with the grueling, merciless journey that continually throws you from a bad situation into an even worse one, really made me feel the protagonist's trauma. Things felt a little contrived and less scary near the end, and the bleak endings, while not unusual for the series, felt unfairly tragic for a woman that really hadn't done anything to earn all this misery. But overall, an intense, worthwhile experience.
This game, like the first, did an effective job of telling a story- as you progress, the pieces begin to fall into place and everything starts to make sense as you gather the clues and begin to discover your past and your place in the scheme of things. Unfortunately, the story isn't particularly compelling, the setting of a steamship is less effective and interesting than the spooky house from the first game, and the scares aren't particularly scary, unless you're absolutely terrified of fairly benign-looking wooden mannequins. It's not outright bad, but it's disappointing compared to the first game. The New Game+ mode offers a bit of replay value, and was handled a lot better than in the first game, but even going through to collect everything and get the different endings, there's not a lot on offer here. Probably the most interesting part of the game are the numerous visual homages to films like A Trip to the Moon, The Wizard of Oz, Metropolis, The Shining, Alien, and even Fight Club. If you're a film buff it can be fun to try to spot these, and they're a creative way of expanding on the theme of the main character being an actor, but they're not quite enough to make this sequel live up to the original.
This is a great game for GOG to offer as a free bonus, because it pretty much encapsulates the spirit of Good Old Games. Yeah, it's obviously old and the graphics are dated, but the gameplay still holds up and it would be a shame for this game to just disappear and never be played by anyone again. The controls are tight, the graphics are charming and nostalgia-inducing, and the game is challenging and even sometimes frustrating without being unfairly impossible. You'll have to tread carefully, seek out extra lives and secret levels, and make good use of your reflexes and strategy, but the game is just forgiving enough to keep you wanting to play through to the end. And best of all, our hero is absolutely rocking that math teacher mustache. It's easy to overlook the games that come free with a GOG account, or to assume they're bottom-of-the-barrel junk not worth playing, but there are some gems in there, and this is one of them.
The conclusion to the trilogy succeeds in outdoing the second installment (which had combat so tedious I couldn't even finish the game), but doesn't quite live up to the first game's charm and adventure, even if the camera is a bit less finicky and the combat is slightly (emphasis on slightly) less frustrating. It's still very awkward by modern standards to have to constantly be manually re-centering the camera behind your character, and the limited field of view makes it tricky to see around you sometimes when trying to navigate the complex environments. The combat is repetitive and slow, though if you're careful some of it can be quickened by taking out enemies using stealth, and by the end you have some decent abilities that can end a fight quite quickly. The acrobatics are still fun, but a bit frustrating, especially when you're the Dark Prince and on a timer, giving you little time to plan where to go next, and at a few points the game just seemed broken- the Prince would refuse to run up a wall 9 times out of 10, or springboards that are supposed to launch you diagonally would fail to work. One of them was supposed to launch me towards a point I could cling to using the dagger but consistently sent me just to the right of it instead, forcing me to get lucky and glitch over to the next ledge after several tries just to progress. Combine this with monotonous boss fights full of attacks it's impossible to block or avoid and a few glitches that freeze the game, and what should be fun becomes merely tolerable. This game might be worth a nostalgia replay if you were around when it first came out- at the time, it was pretty impressive, and it brought back some good memories when I played it. But gaming has advanced a lot since then and it lacks the staying power of true timeless classics. Modern players can find equivalent danger and spectacle without the headache of cumbersome camera angles, dull combat and annoying glitches.
This was a fairly decent title for a low-budget H game. The graphics are bright and appealing, the story was fairly shallow but had some hints at interesting lore (especially Vise's descriptions of the various weapons you find), and the gameplay is fun and satisfying, if not particularly challenging. The game is fairly short but has decent replay value, as you can challenge the dungeons again after beating them to find more loot and level up your weapons, of which there are an incredible variety- I was taking my time and being very thorough about maxing out everything, but still discovering brand new weapons I hadn't encountered yet, in the last couple hours of the game. The sex scenes look good visually but are very repetitive in terms of their writing, and you can unlock a gallery of them simply by progressing in the game, so you're not forced to play to lose in order to see the adult content. The main strengths are this replay value and the strong bond between Quem and her partner Vise, which is reinforced through lots of lovable dialogue between the two. The game does have some unfortunate flaws, like text that runs off the ends of the windows and gets clipped off, dialog that repeats unintentionally, and very rarely, the controls locking up. The sex scenes also don't fit in well at all with the rest of the story and feel really tacked on, with the whole horny curse Quem is saddled with not making much sense in the larger context that's revealed. Still, if you're going to play a porn game, this one is at least fun and has some decent character interactions.
This game seems to fix just about every issue I had with Shadowrun Returns. Instead of a short story, we get a decently long quest. Instead of hiring generic mercenaries as partners, we get a team full of interesting people with backstories and skills of their own, plenty of interactions and even personal missions full of hard choices (and if for some reason you're nuts and don't want that, the mercs are even still an option). You can now actually use a decker in your partner that isn't the player character to jack into the Matrix. The game runs properly on a modern high resolution monitor, the graphics seem a little nicer, and the combat seems to be streamlined a little. More care has been taken with the writing, with very few typos compared to the first game. All in all, this is the refined end result of mastering the first game's toolbox, with all the flaws filtered out and a more engaging plot with deeper characters and higher stakes, making full use of the game's format. The only reason I'm not giving a full five stars is because of a really annoying bug (possibly the same one other reviews refer to as game-breaking, though I was able to get past it) that came up several times, where after ending an action in cyberspace, the game just locks up and won't let you take any more actions. I have no idea what causes this or exactly how I managed to break free of it- sometimes after waiting a long time (like, seriously, four straight minutes) I'd find that I could suddenly act again, and other times even waiting wouldn't fix it and I'd have to wait just to get to where I could manually end my entire turn and waste those actions to progress to the next round. Just terrible, and an unfortunate flaw in an otherwise great game. Still, if you're prepared to deal with that, it's a very engaging story and the combat is fun and has decent variety. If you like Shadowrun's setting but found the first game lacking, this might be what you were hoping for.
This sequel improves on the original in a few ways- the controls are more responsive, the quick time events are more forgiving and less numerous, the boss battles aren't locked into a weird camera angle that makes it nearly impossible to fight, and the enemies can't cheaply stunlock you. Even the voice acting is much better. Unfortunately, this is balanced out by the game being quite short, with only a handful of levels, one of which barely contains any gameplay and another of which is a retread of the same location from the very first level, giving the game a very limited scope. What there is is decent, with some memorable action-packed scenes, but it all feels a bit small and cheap, especially since this version doesn't include the extra non-canon dark side Endor content, which, frankly, sounds like it would have been a blast. Instead we get tedious, excessively difficult optional challenge levels that reward you with extra lightsaber crystals, costumes and experience that the game is too short to justify earning, since there's barely any content to actually use them in. It's also brimming with bugs and glitches, such as quick time prompts so tiny you need a microscope to spot them if you're using a modern resolution, cutscenes with bizarre inverted colors that make everyone have blue skin, jagged, weird-looking shadows, and the more-than-occasional crash to desktop. If you can put up with the bugs it's worth playing once, but unfortunately this one is too flawed to considered a classic.
While a bit clunkier than Pegasus Prime (which had the benefit of being a streamlined remastering), this game is still fun, engaging and challenging. The world still feels very well put together and immersive, and the plot is a great continuation of the first, with Earth now part of a coalition of various species as a direct result of your victory in the first game. Naturally, after the attempted time terrorism in the previous game, the issue of whether time travel is too dangerous to be allowed to exist is a topic of hot debate, and drives the plot as you're falsely accused of using your position as a temporal researcher for personal gain and recruited by your future self to clear your name behind the scenes while future-you goes to prison to cover for you. That sentence might sound a little more confusing than it is- the game manages to keep all the time-travel shenanigans easy to follow, while still lightly touching on the issue of paradoxes and the like. Of course, the most notable change is the addition of a sentient AI partner who keeps you company through your adventure and has humorous or helpful quips to offer at various points. This keeps the game from having the stark loneliness of Myst, while also serving as a built-in hint system. The puzzles are mostly logical and easy to piece together if you're paying close attention, but I confess to having to use a couple hints (mostly for a sequence where going through a door means instant death without any good explanation of why, and the solution involves revisiting a button with hard-to-read text that has to be used in a very specific way). A few of the deaths are unfair this time- opening one door leads to you being killed with no warning of the danger behind it- but if you save often it's not a big deal, and I don't think you can get stuck except for perhaps one puzzle at the very end. Still, all in all this is a fun sequel and well worth playing if you enjoyed the first game.
