A ship lost at sea, now found again, void of life. You're an insurance agent who's job is to investigate what happened to every single crew member and passenger on the ship. To help you on your way, your employer has given you a magical pocketwatch that allows you to see the moment of a person's death. And so you explore a number of scenes trying to figure out, who is who and what happened to them. The gameplay involves mainly looking around and making connections (in your head) and looking at your little book and making more connections. You need to fill out the victim's name and the way they died, and - if they were murdered - who killed them. Wild guesses won't get you too far, since the game only confirms correct answers after every three correct guesses. It does help a bit, though, since that means all your other guesses at the time must be incorrect. I took about 5 hours to find all scenes and I got about half the crew correct. After you unlock all scenes, you have the option to leave and end the game, but you can rewind the save and come back to complete your book. The story of the ship has huge gaps, but that's by design. The game *is* filling out those gaps with deduction, intuition and imagination. You start from the final chapter (of the ship) and it's pretty straight forward since there's just a handful of people left on the ship. As you continue, the scenes become more complex with ten or more characters in almost every chapter. Each chapter is a short story or a scene and you get to investigate the 3D image of each death that happens in that time. I recommend this game if you enjoy gathering information and making deductions. And you'll need a bit of patience if you want to fully compete it.
Lovely little comedy adventure. Occasionally you'll need to rub things against other things until they gel. Better played with German voice acting, in my opinion.
I've always loved the style of Tomorrow Corporation's games, especially in Little Inferno, and this one continues the trend. Human Resource Machine is a fun little puzzle game where you use a limited amount of programming tools to complete simple tasks. Even though the tasks remain relatively simple, the toolkit provided makes them pretty complex - and that's where the fun comes in. While I liked the game's style and the puzzles tickled my brain, some things could have been handled better. The window for the program gets progressively harder to read as the jump commands and their destinations end up taking most of the space. You can copy and paste code, but you can only copy the entire program and paste over the entire program, so it's often easier to rewrite it. Here are two tips so you don't have to be frustrated like me: use comments for easier program navigation; and start each complex puzzle by using a simpler program as a base. Apart from those minor complaints and the unpolished story presentation, I still had a fun 5 hours with this game (as someone with minor programming experience) and recommend it to anyone looking for some casual fun .
