Full disclosure: I did not finish this game, because a major late-game bug caused my game to lock up and prevented saving. There had been minor bugs throughout the game as well, but this bug in particular impeded progress; apparently many other players have experienced this as well, so it's not a rare occurrence. I don't remember running into any bugs at all when I played Shadowrun Returns, so it's surprising that Dragonfall has so many issues. Aside from that, Dragonfall is a really uneven game. There are occasional flashes of brilliance in the writing (strong and mature storytelling, well-written characters that are flesh-out and believable), but just as often, the writing can be extremely unsubtle, contrived, and rely on leaps of logic. One moment, Dragonfall will give you a lot of freedom in roleplaying your character and how you approach dialogue or problems, but then in the next, it'll comically fail to acknowledge important decisions you make or changes to the plot. The unevenness also extends to the combat. Combat encounters and missions can swing wildly from fights that are cakewalks, to brutal encounters where you face successive waves of enemies with no breaks in between, and back again to easy fights. In the end, I may have been able to overlook the game's unevenness, if it wasn't for the bugs. As it is, I cannot in good conscience recommend this game.
On the positive side: The Ages/worlds in this game is a big step up visually from the first game. The art design for each Age (including the hub world) is beautiful, serene, yet visually distinct. I loved exploring each Age and just taking it all in. On the negative side: - A number of the puzzles were frustrating and rather obtuse (I haven't played Riven yet though; I've heard it also has hard puzzles). The original Myst game, IMHO, managed to strike the perfect balance in puzzles that were mentally challenging, yet logical and fair. In Myst I, you usually had a good idea what the end goal of a given puzzle was, even if you hadn't figured out specifically how to solve it. In Myst III though, frequently you have no idea what you're even trying to accomplish with any given puzzle. This is compounded by the annoying backtracking and easily-missed clues that are often required to solve many puzzles. - Fiddling around with each step in a puzzle often involves a long and unskippable cutscene that you have to sit through before you can move on to the next step. - "Zip" function seems a lot more restricted and difficult to use than in the original game. - Edanna Age was too large and easy to become lost in. Bottom line: in Myst I, I enjoyed my time throughout the whole game. In Myst III, a number of the puzzles had me searching online for a walkthrough out of frustration, just to get the puzzle over with.
As a big fan of stealth games, Thief Simulator was a bit of a disappointment for me. While it has some neat ideas (for example, I liked that you can scope out a house before entering to learn its owners' daily routine), none of it feels well-executed. The game is ROUGH - honestly, it seems to be more like the beta version of a game rather than a polished final product. I ended up dropping it after about 4 hours. The gameworld does not feel believable or immersive at all. Throughout my playtime, I was acutely aware that I was playing in an artificially-constructed toybox rather than a world that could possibly actually exist, so I had a really hard time suspending my disbelief. Part of the reason for this is how small the gameworld is: in order to make the most of the game's assets, each house is reused for multiple missions (e.g. one mission will have you stealing a painting from a house, then the next mission will ask you to go back to that house and vandalize it by breaking a window - and yet all the loot in that house will have magically respawned!). This all just makes the gameplay incredibly repetitive. Still, you'll end up doing these repeat missions nonetheless and re-looting the same objects, because equipment upgrades in this game are expensive, and things like lockpicks can break on you, forcing you to repurchase them again. All in all, playing the game feels more like going through a checklist of tasks, than simulating being a sneaky master burglar. Also, the controls for the getaway car that you drive to exit each mission are also extremely finicky, and I dreaded each time I had to get in the car. I wish the game devs luck on their next game though; hopefully they are able to take the lessons learned from this game and make a better one.
Vaporum is - much much like the Legend of Grimrock series - a modern-day throwback to the dungeon crawler RPGs of old. This is most noticeable in how unwaveringly hardcore Vaporum is throughout its game design. Combat is grid-based and real-time, and most enemies' usual attack speed is FAST, so be prepared to do the "side-step dance" to avoid enemy attacks. Personally, I found the pace of combat to be a little too fast for me, so I had to rely on the “stop time” function to get through a number of battles - but this then made the fights too easy (but then again, I’m an old-time gamer, so my twitch reflexes aren't as good as they used to be). Secondly, while I love hidden secrets and puzzles in games, I found many of the secrets in this game to be a little TOO well-hidden: a lot of the secret buttons are so small, and their colour palette blends in so well with their surroundings, that you really have to pixel-hunt to find many of them. Many times I searched the same wall repeatedly before I noticed the button, and this level of pixel-hunting was just not enjoyable for me. All this being said, I did love the game and the style of gameplay it presents. Solving puzzles and clearing out levels was fun. The game is also just dripping with atmosphere; since most dungeon crawlers typically take place in medieval fantasy settings, it was refreshing to have a creepy, abandoned industrial tower as the game’s setting, and the graphics really sell this. I also appreciated that the game devs included some environmental reactivity into Vaporum, as in a few instances, you could use the game’s traps and hazards to your advantage by luring enemies into them. Overall, this was a great game; if they had toned down the combat speed just a bit to make it more accessible, it’d be perfect.
Wow, what an amazing game. As someone who: (a) loves puzzle games, and (b) loves games with novel/innovative mechanics or that try to do something different, this game definitely hit the spot. While a few of the puzzles were somewhat tricky, the solutions to them always made sense, and the game makes you feel clever when you realize what you need to do to solve a given puzzle. I only wish there were MORE puzzles; a few of the levels consisted of too many empty corridors for my taste (I get that the corridors functioned to add to the atmosphere/story of the game, but I wish they had found a way to incorporate more puzzles into those sections). And the ending...OMG I was not expecting that in a puzzle game. I won't spoil it; I'll just say that it definitely gave me "the feels". :-)
When researching this game before I bought it, I kept hearing that it was an "emotional" experience. As a result, in all honesty I may have built up my expectations too high for this game. While there definitely were emotional moments, I kept expecting to be brought to tears throughout the game, which never happened (there was one story that really got to me, but even then I never got teary-eyed). Instead, what I felt throughout the game was a sense of melancholy and sympathy for these characters - which to be fair, the game was REALLY good at conveying. I guess the game just never managed to personally connect with me: it was more like hearing a sad story being told to you second-hand. One thing that did get in the way of my suspension of disbelief - and therefore might've affected my emotional investment in the game - was that I never believed this house could be a real place. It felt more like a funhouse that was very obviously built to be a video game environment (unlike a game such as Gone Home, for example, which to me seemed much more believable as a real house that people would live in). Still, I support developers like these who try to do something different from your standard shooty video game.
