It took me three tries to even start this game, but I've finally played it enough for a review. I believe this is the developer's first venture outside the world of idle/mobile games (although they were making them back when they were Twitter games). This has the same pacing. In a mobile game, you can take one or two actions, then you must wait (or pay). In this game the wait-or-pay period is replaced with steering your ship. You go to a location, click a few times, go to another island...repeat, repeat, repeat. The game is somewhat linear in that if you want to just sail around selling goods, you can make just enough to not run out of food and fuel. There are a strictly limited number of high-earning opportunities that come up that you will eventually locate and then feel compelled to pursue, as otherwise the grind is 100x as long (not an exaggeration). The game is set up to require several attempts at getting started because the budget is so tight without knowing about these opportunities and combat so deadly that your character will most likely die. This makes it difficult to connect to your character because you have to make so many to restart with. There is some attempt to make each character a "successor" of the other, but that doesn't quite work because the timeline resets, and all events proceed in exactly the same way with a slightly randomized map. The writing is good, but to be honest, it feels way more 1700s than 1800-early 1900.
This game has a long list of extremely specific "quirks" it uses; I'm not sure who it is for (see title). It gets a bonus star for art (sketchy and busy, but imaginative), but there really isn't anything to this except "erotic?" content. The rest is bare-bones. Seems to be a demo or game-jam product.
The blondest woman puts on her whitest sweater and goes crawling through a dingy derelict house looking for jump scares. She finds and discards multiple weapons and abuses pliers as nail removers (why does this happen in every HOG). The game is nearly in English.
This game was from Telltale's pre-walking sim days when they were making really quite good niche point-and-clicks. This is a very cute game that exactly matches the feel of the original animated shorts that it is based on. You alternate playing a "claymation" dog, who is the smarter of the pair, and his human, who he has to constantly rescue from silly situations. Gameplay is very easy point-and-click suitable for children (except for one scene that inexplicably requires both hand-eye-coordination and the navigation of terrible controls--I really did not like that part!). The humor lands well, and the stories are enjoyable. The voice actors are not the main voice actors, but they are "official," being voiced by the official backup actors. I really recommend this one for the cartoon's fans and families that want to game together. It's also fun for humor game fans. If you are a big fan of classic point-and-clicks, it is far easier and simpler than those, so avoid this if you want to be challenged. Note: I don't own this game on GOG (yet?); I have an original disc. I'm very glad to see this available for sale again; I was afraid it was trapped in licensing limbo, and of course, there's the whole Telltale Games dissolution, etc. etc.
This is a review of the Steam version. This game is loosely based on the life of Certified RealDoctor (TM) Simon Forman, who was an astrologer in the 1500s. Gameplay consists of hearing a little choir-sung song about a client's problems, listening to a vague description from them (fully voiced), and then selecting a fortune and seeing what happens. Your goal is to get letters of recommendation from satisfied clients (or just select the funniest option). I really liked this game. This was a fascinating time in history, and the game has lots of hints of what was going on then--grand ship exploration, Catholics vs Protestants, *cough* "science" *cough*. The music is madrigal-style with a little choir singing funny lyrics in a roughly 1500s style. Visually, the game looks like a pop-up book, and the effect is really well done. The conversations with clients have frequent dialogue choices, so it's not like a visual novel where you just have nothing to do but read. Only downside is the game is fairly linear; you might be able to replay it once to see other outcomes, but I think it would get tedious after that. I think you will like it if you have an interest in history and are in the mood for light comedy with curiosity-focused gameplay. People seeking challenges, strategy, etc. will be disappointed. Just a note: this game doesn't have fantasy elements, just a historical setting. By the way, the game designers worked with the Simon Forman Casebooks project at Cambridge University, and their site is linked from within the game. You can see actual notes from the doctor himself online (his penmanship is really bad, as is traditional), which are apparently the first documented examples of what went on in medicine in history!
This game is a series of puzzles with a thin veneer of a game wrapped over it. If you like the puzzle type, there are a lot (hours and hours), and the difficulty is clearly well-curated to give a nice progression. It could use some interface improvements. There is no way to make notes or undo a series of clicks, and it took me forever to find the clear-all button, although it does exist (it's in the main menu, not on screen with the puzzle...for some reason). There is no way to save puzzles in progress, and if there is a way to back out of a puzzle, I haven't found it yet. You have to click to advance lines most of the time, except when you don't, and this can make you miss dialogue. There is no way to scroll back. It is possible to miss finding some item by accidentally finding a plot item first and lock yourself out of seeing the robot's memories, which are the reward for the best score. There are a few timed puzzles which I could barely pass which have no difficulty options that I could find; your ability to pass these is dependent on how fast you are with a mouse. The story is really, really silly. It's got 90s fashion (sortof; no one actually dressed like this), catty in-fighting, random robot sidekicks, drag queens, and grumpy mentors. The sound effects are extremely, and I mean EXTREMELY, annoying. There are some very, very light adventure elements (apply inventory item to person to hear new dialogue), and there is no branching story. It's not a terrible story, but if the thing that interests you about this game is the theme, you are going to be disappointed. This "game" is an unlockable puzzle book.
The two nice things about the game are its coherent cute look and its caring developer. Instead of hexes or squares, all map areas are impossibly-tall circular pedestals arising out of the clouds, and loads of units run around like ants. It's cute! The developer can be found answering questions here and on Steam, seemingly dedicated to maintain his/her audience. Now for the mediocre and bad elements. For a strategy game, there just aren't a lot of mechanics. There isn't much choice in upgrades; they will always be the same. There isn't much choice in army composition; you just want as many units as possible. For a game about moving armies around, there is very little UI support for, e.g., selecting specific units, seeing their statuses, or directing units along a route. Also, the balance doesn't seem great. Units with absolute overwhelming strength are only slightly more expensive than useless units. Most units are useless as most mechanics, such as healing, barely work in proportion to the cost. The procedural generation doesn't work well. A map may be virtually impossible or winnable in a few seconds at the same difficulty. (For example, you may spawn in a corner with few resources and a powerful rival blocking all exits.) Circle Empires just isn't complex enough to hold my attention. I've turned it on a few times and played one of the short games, and it played almost the same way each time. There isn't a campaign, so you will have seen everything after a game or two.
