The core match-3 gameplay is fine, but there are too many issues with the game for me to recommend: 1. The game is censored unless you manually put an empty file called "huniepop_uncensored_patch.game" in the install directory. This feature is not officially documented anywhere as far as I am aware. 2. The game is a massive grind. You have to constantly do the same thing over and over for several real-life days to farm in-game money, stats items or good RNG for 100% completion. 3. Two of the girls are locked behind absurd requirements that you would never figure out by yourself outside of sheer luck, making the grind unnecessarily worse. 4. The story is non-existant and the dialog is obnoxious. Fortunately you can skip it, but still. 5. Sometimes when you perform a combo, some of the tokens don't disappear even when lined up properly. This rarely occurs, but it's annoying enough to be noticeable. 6. There is a difficulty selector, but as far as I can tell it doesn't do anything except for the times where your score constantly decreases, and you can just spam pause to negate that. 7. There is no in-game option to exit the game. 8. There is an endless mode, but it is completely meaningless as you can just abuse items to bypass the increasing score requirement. There is no high score tracking either to challenge yourself. 9. Many of the game mechanics are not explained at all. For example, I had no idea that the food and drink meters had an effect during a date until after beating the game. 10. The lady pictures aren't even good except for maybe one or two,
It's one of those simple high score games that gets harder and harder as you progress. One life only is brutal, but given the overall game design it's probably the right choice. The side-objectives to unlock gear keeps the game fresh as you master it. My only big complaint is that when you use a controller, you have to press the right stick to prepare a special move, then use the right bumper or trigger to activate one, which feels really awkward since the right stick is not used for anything else in the game. Otherwise, solid game!
I wanted to play this game in VR as it is officially supported according to the store page, but it's bad. First, to even be able to use VR, you have to manually launch the game with the "-vr" command line argument, as the GOG installer does not create an equivalent shortcut, and as launching the game normally will cause Steam VR to boot and fail to detect that a headset is connected. (I can normally use Steam VR just fine and my Quest Pro headset doesn't even need Steam VR to play the game, so I'm not sure what's up with that.) Then, the game will launch with the video display settings set to maximum, causing the menus to be extremely laggy if your GPU is relatively old like mine and you have to change these settings while in this mode to fix this. (Launching the game normally uses a different set of display options.) VR controllers don't work either - you have to use either a mouse+keyboard combo or an Xbox controller, with the recommended option being the former even in VR. If you do use a mouse+keyboard, the only way to confirm a menu option is with the F key, and you can't use your mouse as a substitute as your cursor is invisible in the main menu even though there is one for in-game menus. If you do manage to start a new game despite all of the above, get ready to be disappointed with the VR immersion, as depth is not very noticeable in space. The controls are also terrible, with the HUD hiding what you're trying to aim at, in-game menus being a confusing mess, and the now-visible mouse cursor being extremely inprecise. The frustrating and repetitive gameplay doesn't help either. Get also ready to have the game become suddenly unresponsive during gameplay because of a Windows Defender pop-up you won't see on your monitor asking you if you want to allow the game to connect over the Internet to Epic Games to spy on you without your consent. Oh, and if you press Alt+F4 to quit the game, the game will crash instead.
I've played a lot of adventure games, and it's pretty rare for me to stumble across one that makes me feel apathy because of bad storytelling and gameplay. Maybe this could be a neat movie or novel, but as a game it fails miserably because none of the characters are trustworthy and because the game gives the player no reason to care about anything of what's going on. Also the game crashes when switching windows. I lost all of my progress once due to this, and there doesn't appear to be a way to skip the lengthy cutscenes either. Why did I not save the game sooner? Because I was trying to figure out how to do so when the game crashed...
For anybody that wants to play this game, be aware that the digital manual and novella, which are required reading, are hidden in the installation directory. You're welcome. And now with the actual review... Trying to influence various political figures to change known history, with a healthy dose of sci-fi and conspiracies mixed in, is really fun. What's not so fun is the very long and poor writing, the constant trial and error gameplay full of unpredictable game over traps, constantly trying to figure out what keywords the game wants, the frequent need to manually convert time between time zones using out-of-game geography knowledge, and the constant need to search for useless trivia scattered across hundreds of pages in the provided reference material. So what ends up happening is that you're gonna try to send an agent to meet a random person listed in the manual whose schedule has a chance to occur in the near future, find some historical facts about said person to convince your agent and/or the target to comply, wait, and almost certainly fail to make any progress. And of course, as there is no mission log, you won't remember what you asked your agents to do in the first place when they eventually report back. Oh, and because of the game over traps, you can never save safely unless none of your agents are busy executing a mission... and there is only one save slot. I also encountered some bugs where a character would simply say "Err", and another one not remembering what happened just a few hours ago. The digital manual also has several issues, with text of constantly-varying size and duplicate pages, although you can at least search for text within it unlike the original printing. I can't really blame the original developers for their flawed execution of this game, as its concept is extremely ambitious, let alone in 1988. I think revisiting this game concept nowadays as a sandbox game would have a lot of potential however.
I was expecting a sexy horror adventure game, but instead of any of those things, I got stuck for hours trying to find small objects in huge dark environments, got punished for simply looking at interesting things in said environments, and constantly died for not figuring out what the right path was. The story is also extremely ridiculous, and constantly seemed to contradict my choices. I gave up at Chapter 4 due to all this. It's clear a lot of love and care was put into this game, but I have no idea who would find the end result fun to play. Unfortunate.
Inscryption is a solid single-player deckbuilding game that keeps things fresh with new cards, new rulesets, some innovative storytelling and a quite a few puzzles sprinkled in. I could very well see this game being adapted to a proper multiplayer game with a few tweaks. The reasons why I'm not giving the game a full 5 stars are two-fold. First, there are quite a few tedious sections in the game which, while expected from the genre, are exacerbated by a loss of progress after beating the game if you want to try some of the more difficult challenges or explore previous areas more. Second, there are too many obtuse secrets in the game, some of which being literally impossible to figure out without arcane knowledge from outside of the game, which is extremely frustrating since 100% completion is not possible without a walkthrough due to this. As long as you're OK with the above, and as long as you don't mind the advertised horror and roguelike elements taking a step back a few hours into the game, this is an easy recommendation from me for a playthrough.
As of this writing, this so-called "Complete Pack" is missing Keen Dreams, Aliens Ate My Babysitter, and the Game Boy Color game according to its description. They even used the cover art for Aliens Ate My Babysitter, which again does not appear to be included. Purchase this if you want, but beware the seemingly deceptive marketing..
I'm not sure who this game is for. The cases are simple with obvious solutions and plot twists, with the protagonists constantly taking bad decisions and jumping to conclusions. Meanwhile, the nonograms are generally small, easy and don't look like what they're supposed to once completed mostly due to the extreme close-ups. As such, the game has no challenge nor is satisfying for veterans of either genres. You'd think it would be a game for children then, except that there's a bunch of pop-culture references and serious subject matters here. Add to that a bunch of oversights in the user interface (you can't back out of the save menu, for instance), and the result is a game that I unfortunately can't recommend to anyone. Get Ace Attorney and Picross DS instead.
The original Mafia is a masterpiece easy to overlook because of its GTA/Godfather looks. It's actually a well-structured adventure in a realistic pre-WWII city with an original and gripping story right from the start up until the very end of the credits. The cars are fun to drive (even the bad ones), the action segments are varied and quite challenging (no regenerative health for instance), and managing when to follow traffic regulations and when to break the law is much more fun than crashing into pedestrians. On top of that, beating the game unlocks an insanely-difficult free-roaming mission mode. Too many great moments to list here. The problem with the GOG version is that it's not the original Mafia. As of this writing. all licensed music has been stripped from the game. This means driving around will be lacking a good chunk of its original atmosphere, and the beautifully shocking lyrics from the credits (which were tied perfectly with the story) are now completely missing. It's still a great game despite this issue, but you're going to miss out on a major part of the experience. I highly recommend paying the extra money to hunt down a physical copy, but if you're on a budget you may want to give this version a try as the quality of gameplay is still unmatched by its rivals and even its sequels.
