Excellent horror game! One of the best newer titles on GOG, that are not just great because of nostalgia.
Legend of Grimrock 1 was good, this game is just amazing. They did exactly what I wished for, ie move away from having just dungeons. Legend of Grimrock 2 adds plenty of different outdoor scenes, with stunning graphics and animations. It's pure magic! The game starts with an easy-to-moderate difficulty level, but becomes rather tough after a while. While the opponents are never really much of a problem (in Normal level), the puzzles are not always easy to solve. As far as I recall, I could finish the first part with no or very few hints, but not this time...expect that you won't be able to solve everything, at least not all the hidden stuff. The game world is large and will keep you busy for many hours. Only negative thing about this game is that you don't want to ever go back to old dungeon crawlers once you played this. Hoping for Legend of Grimrock 3!
Outlast is a first-person 3D game. Your goal is to escape from some creepy Asylum, where some experiments on patients have gone very wrong... You cannot fight in this game, you only have a camcorder with nightvision. The gameplay is thus about running and hiding from opponents, most of the time. Occassionally you need to solve simple puzzles like picking up keys etc. Graphics and sound are excellent, all in all it really makes you feel completely helpless in most situations, an effect that works particularly well at the beginning. The game overall runs stable and the ending has a nice surprise, in that regard reminding me of many horror movies. After the praise I should mention the game has some major downsides, however. The first and probably biggest problem is that the gameplay is too repetitive. Just running away from opponents is too little, I miss sophisticated puzzles or RPG elements, as in old classics like Waxworks- this mixes up the gameplay a little. The second minor issue is that the game lacks some obvious improvements, e.g. there could be more characters along the way, especially female characters seem entirely amiss.
Nice 3D horror/puzzle game, there should be more games like this! In contrast to the common action games you have to solve puzzles here, and dodge opponents rather than fight them. The story, graphics, music and sound effects help create a creepy athmosphere. Unfortunately you can't save where you want and accessing inventory doesnt pause the gameplay. In some later parts of the games you get attacked and don't know what to do. Those parts become a huge PITA to play, you start over and over again from the last save spot desperately trying to find a way to dodge opponents (seems you can't kill them). This ruins the gameplay for me. Due to those limitations I still prefer older games like WAXWORKS, which offered more puzzles, some RPG elements and a better fighting system, just lacking the freedom of movement which Penumbra offers.
If you liked the Elvira series, you'll love this one too. A classic, unique mix of first-person RPG and Adventure with lots of gore, great graphics and sound. The difficulty of the adventure elements is very hard, but compared to previous Horrorsoft titles, Waxworks consists of 4 separate parts- each playing in a different epoch and environment. The inventory is different in each part, so the difficulty and thus frustration factor is substantially reduced compared to previous games. If you're stuck in one part, you can try a different one. The easiest section is the Graveyard, which can be completed without any hints. Sadly games like this are no longer produced, the closest is probably the Penumbra series and Outlast.
Having finished JA1+expansions several times in all difficulty levels, I tried hard to like JA2. Graphics and sound are certainly much better, they also added many new features. But in contrast to JA1, neither the story nor gameplay work for me, it's a tedious and boring experience. To give an example, JA2 allows you to save anytime now during combat. Great idea, except that it makes a turn-based game trivial. Unless the difficulty level is adjusted too, and that's what they did. Now you need to save/reload every move due to the much stronger enemies, which is frustrating and kinda ruins the gameplay. As others have pointed out, the game also has stability issues on Windows.
The Police Quest series is one of the great Sierra classics. You play Sonny Bonds, a police officer in the fictional town Lytton. The main task is to bust some big shot criminal, however part of the game is also to bust others and learn police routine. This collection includes PQ 1-4, note that contrary to what some write here, both the VGA remake and original PQ1 is included (perhaps it was added later?),. This is important, as the VGA remake of PQ1 is quite bad in my mind. The transition from a parser towards point-and-click ruins most of the gameplay, they went as far as to completely remove the free driving.
Legend of Grimrock brings back the old Dungeon crawlers from the 80s, like Dungeon Master and many others. Where this game excels is the way it does this. The gameplay and feel of the old classics is fully preserved, while the graphics, sound and animations are up to today's standards. To my knowledge, this has never been done before, not to this level of perfection anyway. My only gripes with this game is that it doesn't seem to be inspired by the best titles of the genre. Some games offer a lot more variation than DM, for example Lands of Lore or Waxworks.Hopefully the developer has huge success with this title, so we get more of such great remakes.
