Ok, I won't say that Flashback is a masterpiece or old memories blah blah... well, I will: it was one of my favourite games for long, kept me awake with red eyes until I beat it, its second level is still amazing, but from the fourth onwards it gets insanely unfair. It is a 1993 platformer with some design decisions that now would be changed, but as I played this one to death (as well as Another World or Heart of Darkness just to name two) I decided to buy it. Hey Paul Cuisset, good work here. Of course I know the original as if I was dancing a choreography, so I expected a few upgrades and options in this rerelease. The remastered music and FX are here and they are very welcome (the original Flashback sounds were sampled in a awful rate probably for performance reasons) but the original had a very weird resolution, 240x128 and upscaling the graphics just does not work. They could have resample them carefully, but Microids just threw some filters. The only music options are the PC OPL3 (Sound Blaster, Adlib) and the remastered one, with no option for the Amiga or SNES one (which makes this version not better than Reminiscence). And the filters, the upscaling, make this game as ugly as porn in 4k. I still love this game: it was a take on Prince of Persia through the Total Recall kind of sci fi that has a lot of atmosphere. But I am not sure this is the better way to pay homage to it. Anyway, better than the remake of a few years ago, and still better than the holy amount of bad games Cuisset has released since the 00s.
Like I said in the title; I love pinball games, I played Epic Pinball, Adventure Pinball, Pinball Fantasies, Psycho Pinball and even Pinbo back in the day until my eyes hurt, so I always adored the computer takes on the genre. But this game is awful because that simple thing: the camera. It never gives you a proper general view. It is never useful. It is always doing some weird angles as if you were an ant playing. Who beta tested this?
What a disappointment. Given the credentials and the very Soma premise I expected the typical adventure tropes of unravelling a mistery reading old diaries while you examine the world and try to fit the pieces, but instead of that, ok, you get the diaries, but the exploration is minimal and the puzzles are the worst kind of mechanical puzzles. It looks like something that was thought to me used with touch controls, which makes it awful to control with the mouse. And the puzzles? Doing 7th Guest kind of stuff to advance the plot? Only worked back then because of the novelty factor. And there are too many sliders, and I already disliked sliders. Play it only if you already have finished the Kingart, Daedalic, Wadjet Eye, Future Games, Cranberry, Telltale (etc) adventures before.
Take this 5 stars as "I really really liked it". Paradigm reminds me of those times where I played a game that I did not know from anywhere and it turned out to be a pretty brilliant adventure. Jacob Janerka knows about adventure game design, he knows how to write, he knows how to make fun of things, he knows how to make fun of himself. Paradigm is never too difficult and that is not a bad thing (though some clues are not as conveniently repeated as others), and Paradigm hits everywhere with its humor, so when you are not laughing out hard you are at least in awe of the level of madness behind it. I loved it. It's beautiful to see, beautiful to hear and a pleasure to play. I hope to see more games from Jacob.
Jonathan Blow's take on the Myst likes is, I think, a not very satisfying game. His way to design puzzles is "repeat this puzzle a lot of times, in increasing difficulty", instead of showing variety. More than the 7th Guest, more than in Professor Layton games, and much more than in Myst games and clones, you feel like you are doing crosswords. There are definitely some good Myst like touches in here, and aesthetically is something lovely, but as a game it relies so much on repetition that I cannot say I recommend it.
I completely disagree on other reviewers that say that Legend adventures were more serious than Sierra ones (even their most "serious" game, Mission Critical, takes itself much less seriously than The Dig). The thing with their games is that they took the "one action is one unit of time" design philosophy of the text based games when they moved to a graphic interface, so you will find a different kind of game here. They wrote really well, they adapted whatever franchise like no one could do, and they mastered the adventure game puzzle design, not too difficult, not too unforgiving, just challenging enough. Be ready to have a great time with this very fun adaptation of the well known fantasy saga.
Sierra, looking at the interviews from people that worked there, seemed to be a very collaborative environment where a programmer/designer usually had a small credited piece in an adventure before jumping onto a personal project. Josh Mandel had already been working on a number of Sierra games, most famously the great edutainment title Pepper's Adventures in Time (that one co designed by Gabriel Knight's Jane Jensen, Eco Quest's Gano Haine and Puzzle of Flesh's Lorelei Shannon), and he would jump to the problematic Space Quest 6 and the wonderful Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, but for this one he joined with one of the better and, after all, most overlooked of the puzzle designers in adventures, Al Lowe. Both have a similar sense of humour, both love bad jokes, both love their settings and their characters, and both are generous with the descriptions. That is what makes Freddy Pharkas so charming. Not only it is one of the few western adventure games out there (to me, the better one), but it has a team that really love what they are doing and are overflowing with ideas, jokes and pure love. The very western tropes are everywhere (though mostly it is a kind of adventure remake of, yes, Blazing Saddles, including toilet humour), and when you get to the expected High Noon finale you are completely engaged with what you have been told. The puzzle design is excellent, except a couple of situations that depend on the copy protection, the music is wonderful, everything looks great, and everything, just everything, has a description. It's a game where you try everything with everything just to get the unique response from the narrator (who is probably Al Lowe himself). It's like what Gaiman and Pratchett did in "Good Omens", but in a game. It is one of my favourites. Just another advice: play the floppy version. The CD one lacks a lot of the very well written text.
