I finished the game just before starting to write this review. As I said in the title, it's a nice classic point-and-click adventure game in the style of Monkey Island or the first two Discworld games. The story was interesting, and I feel like I even learned a bit about the Voodoo religion along the way. However, a few things bugged me about it: - The one-button interaction. This is probably due to the game also getting a release on mobile platforms, but I'm used to having distinct "Look at" and "Use/pick up" commands assigned to different mouse buttons. The user interface here felt a bit barebones. - Overuse of default "I can't use these things together" lines. I appreciate that having a lot of inventory items quickly leads to a combinatorial explosion if your goal is to write and record a unique line for each item used on each individual other item, but it's not necessary to go that far. I noticed that in the first half of the story, there seems to have been a good effort on behalf of the writers to have at least a unique line when attempting to use any item on Voodoo Detective himself, so I was looking forward to more of that. Somewhere in the early part of the second half this seems to have fallen by the wayside though, and I lost count of the times I heard "I can't use that here" when attempting to use something on VD. I guess their voice acting budget ran out, and they had to cut whatever wasn't important to the plot. - The character design wasn't quite my thing. While the game has some very good background scenery and a few great animations that stood out, the characters somehow all tend to look very static. Especially the titular Voodoo Detective seemed to have basically the same facial expression throughout the game. - Most of the puzzles felt borderline too easy, while three of them instead had me looking up a walkthrough. Almost every time a puzzle was first introduced, Voodoo Detective would make a comment whose wording already hinted at the solution.
The review title sums up the dev's original vision for this game during the initial crowdfunding campaign. I haven't played Rimworld myself, but I've watched plenty of people playing it, so I think I have a rough idea of what he meant. I've been playing this game on and off for almost two years now, and while the pace of updates can feel a little slow at times, it is both stable and noticeably in active development. Every new alpha release adds some extensive new features. Off the top of my hat, some of the major additions since I first started playing include: - a whole new race of robot enemies that can infest both derelicts and your own ships - new weapons for your crew, and the addition of under-barrel addons for alternative fire modes - pilotable fighter craft (and flying enemies to combat with them, alongside the hazard of random asteroids) - a black market trading system - a new quest mechanic to transport cargo containers or prisoners, build a new starbase, free a slave or eradicate hostile factions from a star system - the wider world map no longer being as static as it used to be. Now NPC factions can battle their enemies and expand their sphere of influence without the player needing to be present in the same area. And while not directly related to the game, I've come to love the community in its Discord server, where the dev often pops up himself to answer some questions and/or give enigmatic hints about upcoming features. I have noticed a few bugs during my ~400 hours of gametime at the time of writing, but nothing game-breaking and only one abrupt crash to desktop that I can remember. The vast majority were minor glitches that disappeared after simply saving and reloading the game.
