Excellent little adventure game, clearly made with love and care. I adored the art style, especially for the character portraits. Cleo herself is an enjoyable protagonist, swept up in a fun treasure hunt with pirate characters. This is all very light-hearted but it has some effective moments of character and emotion, although they are very much background elements. The voice acting (English version) is simply fantastic and has a very professional quality. It took me a little while to get used to playing an adventure game with WASD controls, I would have preferred traditional point-&-click. But the control scheme does allow for the game to have its own unique personality and allows you to engage with the game world in a different way. Puzzle design is largely very good and I was able to work my way through most of the game unaided. There was some more confusing stuff in chapter 3 which I spent a while on but couldn't work out. Fortunately, the solutions weren't stupid and it was more about me missing clues. The one part I really struggled with was the Kraken Fodder minigame, which seemed to be impossible to win for me. I had to go through at least a dozen rounds of losses before the random element of it finally went my way. This stopped the game being fun for a while. The story loses focus a bit at the end, revolving around a few characters that we've not properly met and I wasn't quite keeping track of who they all were. But the game is short and absolutely gorgeous, genuinely feeling like a throwback to the games I loved in the '90s but updating the elements beautifully.
Enjoyable for what it is, but difficult to really love this. The story is very bland but the action is implemented well with a good variety of weapons and enemies. I appreciated the peaceful sections in between missions where you can chat to the crew, even if they were the bare minimum of interaction. The early 3D graphics really don't provide good character models or animation, but they are a decent enough attempt for the time. The level designs are quite nice. The biggest flaw is down to my own personal feelings, and that is that I just don't really want to go around shooting in a Star Trek game. It all culminates with a really awful boss battle which, besides being awkward to play through thanks to its design, really bugged me as the final solution to all the events.
[2.5/5] Although it's more refined than The Awakened (2008), I found this adventure harder to enjoy. It uses the exact same engine and art assets as that game and feels very similar to it, but the story here goes in quite a different direction. Setting the entire game in London is quite fun as well as the recreations of the famous buildings. But this game is just incredibly hard. Having now played three of these games, I'm starting to see patterns in what makes them this way. I have to assume these games have been translated into English and important details are getting lost in the process. Throughout the game I was met with puzzles and clues that didn't make sense or didn't have proper context. Holmes will mention something that I haven't discovered, or will say too little as if I should know what comes next. After spending time trying to work out what was required, I would eventually check a hint and discover answers that were nothing like what I had expected. It always felt as if the game expected me to know more than I did. It's all very convoluted (inventory puzzles are especially awkward, as you rarely know when you're supposed to use items to move things along) and by the end I just wasn't having that much fun. But there are things I appreciated here. Once again, Holmes and Watson are enjoyable to spend time with and this game in particular did a good job in including some real humour that made me laugh.
Essentially an expanded version of Her Story, so if you enjoyed that game you should find lots to like about this too. But while the narrative is intriguing, I enjoyed this less. Instead of following one character we now explore four, with a number of side characters too. The central mechanic works because of the enticing mystery, but it has some flaws. All you need to do here is watch videos and use them find keywords which you can use to search for more videos. Eventually this does outstay its welcome. Fortunately the acting is fantastic and as you uncover more of the plot it's genuinely involving. But your enjoyment really relies on you being able to find the right videos to piece things together. By the end of my playthrough, I didn't have enough to fully understand things and the ending left me unsatisfied. Watching the videos can be a chore. A video will start playing at the point the keyword you searched for appears - this might be right at the end of a clip. A massive flaw is that you can't jump to the start of them, instead you have to rewind. Some videos are up to 10 minutes long and this process is draining. I lost a lot of enthusiasm for the game thanks to this. Most videos also on show one side of a conversation, so you need to try and find the accompanying other half to make proper sense of things. That means you're watching long conversations twice, if you can even find them. And some long videos are so completely empty of anything eventful (a character sleeping). I expected more of an evolution from Her Story, which this isn't (for that, look at Sam Barlow's next game, Immortality). Great narrative with a mix of colourful characters, but a little difficult to fully recommend.
While it's a technical improvement over The Silver Earring, I think I enjoyed the story here a bit less. The Lovecraft inspired tale actually takes quite a backseat for most of the game's time, and when it does pop up it's not all that enthralling. But this is a better game to play through even with the janky 3D. This 2008 remastered version defaults to a new third person perspective instead of the game's original first-person and I much prefer playing in a more traditional 3rd person adventure view. I'm glad it was implemented, but it's not perfect. The option to switch between 3rd and 1st-person is there, and in several places it's essential to use both move around the environment. Again, the plot isn't told all that well and there's a lot that doesn't make sense (I assume due to the translation into English). Things happen without much explanation and the game seems to expect you to make huge leaps of deduction along with Holmes. I was fairly lost on what was going on and who was doing it by the end sections. Throw in some bafflingly difficult puzzles, made more difficult by an awkward interface, and you have a game that requires some dedication to get through. Yet the spirit of Sherlock Holmes is there and there's absolutely some fun to be had. I'm glad the game had a built in hint system because I sure needed it, even if it didn't provide quite enough help at times. I also encountered a horrible bug where the game wouldn't let me save in the final 2 hours which soured the experience.
One of the few classic LucasArts adventure games that I really don't like. While the art and animation is spectacular, the whole mood of the game feels unpleasant to me. Everyone in this world is bizarrely aggressive and unlikeable and I don't click with the zany humour. The plot is a mess. But the game is completely ruined by the awful interface design introduced here. No verbs anymore, just awkward icons that you have to cycle through. No text hotspots or descriptions for things in the environment, making the world feel small and empty. No dialogue options, just unintuitive images with no indication of what they will make you say (rubber duck?), and unhelpful dialogue at that. Too many hidden exits to other areas that easy to miss. Incomprehensible puzzle logic because things have to be wacky here. I guess I just hold LucasArts to a higher standard than this. There's some nostalgia from playing it as a kid, but even back then I didn't entirely get on with it.
Despite how janky it is, this is a surprisingly enjoyable game for the most part. I found myself getting into the gameplay loop and the mystery. Still, it's a difficult one to recommend and it has some serious issues working against it. This list may seem harsh, but... - The 3D characters are difficult to move around the environment, often not responding to mouse clicks until you manoeuvre them just right. - Awful pixel hunting for clues and hotspots that are very obscured. - Terrible voice acting for most of the characters. - No subtitles during cutscenes. - A lot of translation issues for the English version making some things difficult to understand, possibly unsolvable. - The interface can be unintuitive, especially when you are randomly expected to use items together with nothing to indicate that's needed. - Difficult to read documents due to the handwriting fonts used. - A couple of very difficult puzzles that defied reasonable explanation. - A very unenjoyable "quiz" needed to complete each day, which requires you to match up clues to statements. And you can't progress until you get everything exactly right. - A maze puzzle combined with a time limit. No, thank you! - Dialogue text font is Comic Sans 😮 You'd think with all that the game would be irredeemable, and yet I found an authentic Sherlock Holmes experience in here that I got caught up in. I enjoyed finding the clues and piecing things together. The game flows well enough and doesn't last too long, and personally I also feel some nostalgia for this era of PC gaming so I kind of warmed to it all. The game ends with a long (very long) cutscene that puts everything together, and it's very complicated. I don't think I followed it all that well, but the journey there was fun.
When this was released, it was highly ambitious. The core game allows you to perform stunts as if you were making a movie. Each stunt is presented as a mission with win/fail conditions, and you need to do things like fly through a barn or land a parachute correctly. It's pretty tricky and requires some practice. At the end, you see your performance presented as a dynamic film sequence. At the heart of the game is a flight simulator, and you have a large amount of craft to fly about with. Each respond differently, and a joystick will allow you to get the most out of it. However, the real depth of the game comes when you try to make your own stunts and films. The world is pretty much your oyster here if you take the time to learn the complex systems. You can set up cameras and program objects to move however you like. It's not simple, but I managed to work it all out when I was 10 years old so I'm sure you can too! I remember clearly recreating scenes from The Fugitive (I got a man to jump off a school bus as a train crashed into it) and Terminator 2 (the aqueduct bike/truck chase). You have a large assortment of vehicles and objects available to create scenes. The graphics were a little dated even at the time of release, but still colourful and fun. If you really want to delve into this stuff, this isn't a casual experience. There's no physics system to speak of and you have to program collision detection and movement in yourself. I have so many fond memories of this, and the 200+ page manual is a glorious beast.
