Jack Orlando is a detective adventure game with a 1930s US backdrop. The game has good visuals and fantastic music that stuck in my ears for the last 20 years (which is why I bought the game on GOG), but it is severely let down by everything else. The controls are clunky with superfluous clicks everywhere. There are dozens of junk items to collect. Dialogs are often meaningless and important dialog options are hidden in repetitive trees. Death is just around the corner and you can die without warning. Riddles are pointless and often lack hints on what to do, especially if giving stuff to people is the solution. Worst of all is the dialog. It is racist and misogynous, disgusting at times, and cannot be excused by the historic backdrop. I cannot recommend this game at all. Stay clear, but it is worth listening to the soundtrack.
Kathy Rain 2 puts us in the shoes of Kathy Rain, private investigator with an attitude, but little success. When her old mentor mentions a high bounty for solving the case of a serial killer, Kathy immediately jumps on the case. In classic point and click fashion, she explores a variety of beautifully pixeled and animated scenes, talks to various interesting and excelllently voiced characters, and solves a few challenging, but not overly complicated puzzles. Some puzzles, such as hacking a computer, decyphering a code, or going on stage exceed the realm of basic inventory or dialog-based puzzles and make the game feel fresh. I had a great time finishing the game, but much like its predecessor, I feel that Kathy Rain is best when she is grounded in reality rather than confronted with the supernatural. But this is complaining on a high level. I wholeheartedly recommend this game for its story, riddles - and pixel graphics that are better than any I have seen.
The Crimson Diamond is reminiscent of vintage adventure games that actually predate my personal experience by a few years. It comes with EGA-like graphics in glorious pixels and sparingly used music that has been created using a Roland MT-32, professional music gear that was an adventure gamers wet dream in the late 80s because it sounded miles better than PC speaker or even Adlib cards. So, artistically, it is very much in line with the classic Sierra games that I remember my dad playing in the early 90s. The setting of the game is quite similar to The Colonel's Bequest that I have followed through Let's Play videos, and I was intrigued how The Crimson Diamond would hold up in that comparison. But first things first. The plot revolves a around Nancy, a museum clerk that has herself sent to a remote lodge in Canada to find geological evidence for diamonds in the early 20th century. Unfortunately Nancy's luggage gets stolen and the lodge no longer hosts guests, but due to the remoteness of the place she gets to stay one night among an illustrious cast that all seem to hold their own mysteries. In contrast to The Colonel's Bequest, The Crimson Diamond is very much a guided game. A helpful tutorial introduces new players to parser games. A notebook keeps track of what to do and how to advance the game. The story starts slow and picks up later, but there is always suspense. There are many conversations to be overheard, containers to search, and items to discover, but the riddles are sparse and remain fair. The game can be easily solved in a single play-through which lets me experience the story without repetitive toil. I might still go for a second one, though, because at the end the game provides some hints about what you might have misses. I also appreciate that, while you can die, there is usually ample warning that you are about to do something dangerous and an autosave is often at hand. I deeply enjoyed the game and its resolution, despite minor logic gaps.
