Another Lost Phone is a classical example of the "more of the same" approach, you won't find anything new here that wasn't already in A Normal Lost Phone. So again, the music's nice, the story's okay-ish and the gameplay is nonexistent.
I wouldn't call A Normal Lost Phone a game, as there is no gameplay involved; all you do is read messages and occasionally look for a password to unlock more messages. The story's okay-ish, nothing terribly interesting, and it gets too preachy at times. The music's nice, though (for the most part), and there were even a few subtle nods to DONTNOD's Life is Strange. Overall, though, it's not something I'll remember in a couple of days.
Inside starts off rather intriguing, dropping the player in a rather drab, atmospheric and dystopian environment where everything tries to kill you. The gameplay's rather simple, consisting mostly of running and platforming, with some not-too-difficult puzzles thrown in (some of which are pretty creative). The movement is very smooth, though, with nice and fluid animations. The checkpoint system is pretty well-thought-out so that you never lose much progress when you die. On the other hand, you move through the locations so quickly that you can't really take a good look at them, they come and go at a rather rapid pace. Also, the environments tend to look pretty same-y, largely due to nearly monochromatic colour palette. Combine that with too many underwater levels and the game starts feeling longer than it actually is. It is also rather odd, never explaining who you are, why are you running and who you're running from. It worked in Canabalt, but I'd expect a little more from a bigger game like this. Oh, and towards the end it just gets weird. On the technical level, Inside tended to crash on me when I Alt-Tabbed too much. Not a huge deal thanks to the aforementioned checkpoint system, but still a big annoying. Overall, not a bad game, but not really something I feel the need to play again any time soon.
The Wolf Among Us has a very unique art style, but that's by far the most unique element of the game. The music's nice if not very memorable and the story's decent enough if somewhat underwhelming and not terribly original (yet another murder mystery). The biggest drawback, however, is the games over-reliance on QTE sequences, which get quite tiresome after a while; by far the worst offender is a certain fight with multiple enemies in episode 5 which just drags on and on. Also, there's a sudden plot twist at the very end that comes out of nowhere, doesn't really change anything about the story and serves no purpose other than to perhaps set up a sequel. Overall not a bad game but if it wasn't for the lovely graphics it wouldn't be very memorable either. Still worth checking out if you find it on sale, but I wouldn't pick it up for the full price.
Samorost 1 is a very short, but a pretty unique adventure game. The puzzles aren't difficult, but their solutions aren't always obvious and even after playing the game a few times I wasn't immediately sure how to solve some of them. The remaster looks a little better than the original Flash release, but the graphics aren't noticeably different without a side-by-side comparison. The music and sound effects, however, are - they're pretty good in their own right, but being quite fond of the original audio, I found the new one to stick out. Not a problem to anyone who's never played this game before, but an option to have the original music and sounds would've been nice.
