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I had really enjoyed season one of The Darkside Detective because, for the most part, the puzzles made sense and were logical. I found that the sequel, A Fumble in the Dark, lacked that to a degree. Many times I found myself combining things for no logical reason, sometimes even with the main character commenting to this fact of how little sense it made. There were also other times where I knew what the game wanted me to do but until I did something specific like go to a certain room I couldn’t proceed. Overall though the cases are still enjoyable and the humour is still as great as ever. It is this that saves it in my eyes as I really do enjoy the characters; the humour and the world of the game. Hopefully they return to more sensible puzzles in future sequels. The art style is what it is, you’ll either enjoy pixel games or you won’t. I played A Fumble in the Dark on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any bugs. Alt-Tab didn’t work. I could manually save at any time (save for certain cut scenes) but there was just the one save file. There is still auto save for those who prefer that. The game ran great performance wise. There were no graphics options but this is a pixel game after all. The game did seem to use Vsync even if there was no option to toggle it. Game Engine: Unity Graphics API: OpenGL Save System: Manual and Auto Game Version Played: 0.10.202.67r GPU Usage: 0-70 % CPU Usage: 2-7 % VRAM Usage: 388-598 MB RAM Usage: 1.8-2.2 GB Frame Rate: 132-144 FPS I paid $13.09 CAD for the game and finished it in 7 hours and 42 minutes which made it more than fair value wise for me. My System: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.0.3 | Manjaro 21.0.3 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.12.1-2-MANJARO | AOC G2460P 1920*1080 @ 144hz
I was a bit hesitant about The Lion’s Song because I don’t always enjoy point and click games. Lucky for me it’s a narrative game not a puzzle game. The difference being that you aren’t spending your time trying to find keys or figure out the order in which to press buttons. Instead you will be advancing the story through dialogue choices with the odd time where you will have to figure out a correct answer to proceed but it is never difficult. The story was fantastic and really tied together nicely by the end. You will follow a different protagonist each chapter and in the final chapter will see how their stories tied together and concluded. Each chapter you usually get to interact with one of the other characters showing you a different perspective of their story. The audio was very well done as well, I could listen to the soundtrack any time. The game doesn’t have any voice acting but I don’t mind that. I would rather no voice acting than bad voice acting. I played the game on Linux. It didn’t crash on my once. I noticed no glitches or bugs. I played version 421_20576. There were no graphics options at all. It is a pixel graphics style game so it was never going to look modern but it would have still been nice to have the option to sharpen it up a bit with AA or something. The game doesn’t support manual saving but luckily the checkpoints aren’t very far apart and are clearly marked. The game never lagged on me at all and didn’t need much horsepower. It used typically 1-2% of my CPU and while playing my system used about 1.5GB of RAM total. Alt-Tab worked fine with the game. I recommend The Lion’s Song to anyone seeking a good story. You owe it to yourself to at least check out he first episode which is free on Steam. Each episode takes about an hour to complete, a bit less or more depending on the player. I paid $13.99 CAD for the complete season but would easily say it is worth $25.
Mosaic is told without any dialogue so you have to figure out the story through context alone. I can only say that this seems to be the story of a depressed man with no joy in his life who is trying to change that. You start each day waking up with messages from work berating you and your progress; then you fix your hair and brush your teeth; then you make your way to work. Along the way to work you encounter various bits of colour in an otherwise grey looking world. You then go to work and have to complete this resource gathering mini game before going home and doing it all over again. I detested this mini game but a part of me feels like I was meant to. I also didn’t like the many frequent camera angle changes while moving around the world. You also can’t move freely, you have to hold down the left mouse button to move in the direction you placed the arrow. If the goal was to make a bleak world the game succeeded. It is filled with ads for ways to increase productivity; a colourless world; and people who look away if you look at them. The backdrops; objects and water were well done. The music was great as well. I in some ways enjoyed the story that unfolded but hated the game play required to advance it. The aforementioned mini game was annoying; there were also a conveyor belt puzzle that was frustrating due to the camera angles. I played Mosaic on Linux. It never crashed on me. I did notice some flickering textures a few times throughout the game. There was also one scene where if I go left instead of right the screen just went black. There was one graphics setting and v-sync. The game ran great aside from a few drops drop to the 60’s. Mosaic uses a checkpoint save system and a terrible one at that. At certain points it actually registers a checkpoint in the menu but any other time it says “saving” it won’t actually bring you back to that point if you exit the game but will bring you back to the last major checkpoint listed which will lose you progress.
Wanderlust is certainly a different flavor of visual novel as what I am used to. You basically steer various stories that a group of tourists tell each other as they explore and interact with each other on vacation. Through this you learn more about them as well as shape certain parts of the stories. With this many different mini stories some are bound to resonate more with you than others. I really enjoyed the “Sea Fever” story about a father and daughter taking separate trips through the Antarctic at the same time as well as a story about a woman travelling through Africa to get to her daughter in time for the birth of her grandchild. I was not a big fan of the story of that same woman taking her grandchild to Coney Island as I felt it tried to hard to shoehorn politics into the story in a way that felt unnatural. I also felt that Tomek’s story about meeting a woman one day in Barcelona had a very sudden end that left to much unexplored. One thing I will say is that regardless of whether I enjoyed the story or not all of the stories in the game had a crazy amount of detail to them about the locations and journeys. The art work featured in game was great but it was only of locations and wildlife. It would have been nice to get some pictures of the characters as well. There were plenty of choices to make in some stories but others had very few. I played Wanderlust on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any glitches. I did notice one grammar mistake where a sentence said “who was lived in Uganda” where it should have been “who has lived in Uganda”. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game saves every time you exit the game. There is only one save game allowed at a time. I finished the game in six hours and twenty one minutes. I paid $5.99 CAD for the game and felt that was a great value for what I got. The normal price of $17.49 CAD is a tougher sell for me. Overall if you enjoy visual novels I feel there is something here for you.
Usually when I try to enjoy point and click games I get frustrated with the nonsensical puzzles that are more about trying to combine any two items out there until you find a match rather than having it be a logical solution that can be guessed using logic and common sense. For the majority of The Darkside Detective it actually surprised me by having well thought out puzzles that I enjoyed. Combine that with a good soundtrack and fantastic humour and I can say it is quite possibly one of the best point and click games I have played. It did start to let me down as some of the later cases do exactly what I was hoping to avoid with puzzles that made little sense as well as having to go talk to people I wouldn’t have thought to before it would let me complete a task I knew I had to do. Luckily this did not ruin my overall enjoyment and wasn’t a major portion of the overall game. There isn’t much over arching story but that really wasn’t needed. The characters themselves made up for it and made each case fun. The game itself had a special charm to it. It didn’t take itself too seriously; had great dialogue and some great references to other media. The graphics themselves won’t win any awards but even the game knew to poke fun at that. It ran better on a potato of a computer than it probably should have so it’s not like it wasn’t optimized. If you can’t wow with visuals then at least run well and it did for the most part. I played the game on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. The game auto saves at various points. A manual save system would have been nice but luckily the cases aren’t long enough and the save points too far apart to cause me any issues. There is just one graphics option. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game for the most part ran at my refresh rate of 75 FPS but could drop down to the 20’s for a few seconds at a time. This wasn’t overly bothersome given the point and click nature of the game and was expected on my system.
I think that Devil’s Kiss is a very interesting way to try to get people into a game series. A short; low cost game that introduces the characters for a more expensive game (Lair of the Clockwork God). It did it’s job here as I now want to go out and buy Lair of the Clockwork God. Devil’s Kiss has some great humour to it and does a good amount of backstory and character introductions for it’s run time. It doesn’t take itself seriously at all and that works for it. There are a good amount of choices to make and while they don’t impact the overall story a great deal they do provide a different path and interactions on your way there. The music is decent but a bit repetitive. The art is well done and has a good style and colour use to it. The dialogue is certainly my brand of wit. I played Devil’s Kiss on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. The game doesn’t allow any saves at all. Apparently they used to but had enough bugs and glitches with it that the developers removed it. While I would normally prefer a manual save system and any save system to none the game does have a short length so it’s not the biggest deal. Alt-Tab doesn’t work. You can adjust resolution and turn the music off but can’t adjust text speed or volume. API: OpenGL Game Version Played: 1_012_36900 Disk Space Used: 483 MB CPU Usage: 2-13 % RAM Usage: 2.0-2.2 GB I enjoyed my time with Devil’s Kiss. It’s refreshing when a game is just pure fun. I paid $2.29 CAD for it and that is more than a fair price given the game quality. I finished the game in thirty six minutes and while that is short the game didn’t feel rushed or stretched but had a great pace to it. There are a couple technical blemishes on the game but that didn’t impact my enjoyment. If you enjoy visual novels or are thinking about buying Lair of the Clockwork God you should give Devil’s Kiss a play. Intel I7-4770 | 16GB DDR3-2133| Intel HD 4600 | Mesa 20.0.8 | Trisquel 9.0 | Kernel 5.10.7-gnu
VVVVVV started off with an interesting twist to platformers where you change gravity instead of jumping and it also included a more interesting story than many platformers have but it got bogged down by what I call trial and error game play. Basically many parts to the game are going to force you to die because you can’t possibly see where the traps are so you are meant to play sections over and over until you memorize it. Now I will give the game credit in that checkpoints are a lot more common than some other platformers but at the same time I despise this mechanic. The soundtrack was decent and the visuals, while simple, were well done and stood out. I played VVVVVV on Linux. It never crashed on me. The game has many checkpoints but these are just temporary saves for this session and are lost when you quit to the menu. Actual full saves only happen at designated teleporters. This can become annoying if you just want a quick session and also isn’t explained very well in game. The game has a 30 FPS lock. Now this isn’t a game that suffers terribly from such a low frame rate but I see no reason to have the lock on any game. I played using the keyboard as well as using an F310 game pad and both worked well. The game pad was the winner for me as I found my hand got tired quicker using the keyboard. Game Engine: C++ Game Version Played: 2.2 Save System: Save Stations (checkpoints for current session) Disk Space Used: 74 MB CPU Usage: 1-9 % RAM Usage: 1.4 GB If it weren’t for the trial and error style game play I think I would have loved VVVVVV but as it stands I didn’t love it, I can’t even say I liked it. If you’re a fan of the style then you’ll probably enjoy it as the rest of the game is well done. My Score: 4/10 My System: Intel I5-4590 | 16GB DDR3-1333 | Intel HD 4600 1536MB | Mesa 20.0.8 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Trisquel 9.0 | Mate 1.20.0 | Kernel 5.4.80-gnu
I wanted to like Papers Please. I liked it’s theme and attention to detail but it went too far. It crossed from having to be attentive to straight up sadism. It quickly became a chore of having to watch out for too many different variables and the punishments stacking up. One could say this is realistic to life in a totalitarian country but in the end games are still supposed to be fun. I liked how you have to pick what to spend what money you have and deal with the consequences. I enjoyed having to check regional maps for cities of issue. I found the buttons to interrogate and to check correlated data a bit clunky which is a bad thing when you’re on the clock. I think the game had a surprising amount of story and different endings based on various criteria. I played Papers Please on Linux. It never crashed on me. It does require version 2.29 or higher of glibc so not every distro will run it. The game crashed on Trisquel due to this but ran on Manjaro. There is no manual save options, it saves at the beginning of each day. Alt-Tab works. There are no graphics options. Game Engine: Unknown Game Version Played: 1.2.69 Save System: Auto Disk Space Used: 80 MB GPU Usage: 5-17 % CPU Usage: 1-2 % RAM Usage: 1.6-1.7 GB I can see how this could have been a game I enjoyed but it was too much thrown at you. It seemed like a Dark Souls or Super Meat Boy of the simulator genre. Something you can’t relax to but need to stay on edge for. This may be fun for some but not for me. My Score: 5.5/10 My System: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | Gigabyte R9 270 2GB | Mesa 20.2.1 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 20.2 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.9-3-MANJARO