The first Goetia game, while not very long, was very compelling with it's story and dripping with athmosphere. I played it in one sitting because I just had to find out what happened. You will be sad to notice that nothing of that is retained in the sequel. You still play as a spirit, and have to deal with demons but this is where similarities end. And really apart from the artstyle it doesn't have any good point either. It is so unpolished that not knowing the first game I would have guessed that this one is the original and the first game it's much much improved sequel. When it comes to the story and gameplay we are oscilating between boring at best and frustrating at worst. Many puzzles need to be solved by bruteforcing, and many interactable objects are placed in such a way as to confuse you as to how thay are to be used (like a pickaxe in a room with a broken window, that it turns out is NOT there to bust that window open - even though there is no reason why it shouldn't work). Also there are several puzzles that require you to translate letters into numbers using phone keypads, but clearly someone who designed those never had to write on a old nokia keypad - because it doesn't work like the game presents it to. The game is also very buggy still. Near the end I lost ability to interact with objects several times and had to restart the whole game each time to fix it. The story is also not very compeling - it has potential, you have been thrown out of your body and need to find elements for the ritual to get back, but it is written in a way that it seems like someone took the finished script of the game and scatered it about and then only picked about the half of the pages worth and made game out of that. You never know where to go next and why, and it is qute obvious that the game was not beta tested because I was constantly sequence breaking hearing dialogue out of order that the devs thought out. All in all a boring, unpolished and seemingly unfinished game.
Interesting Where is waldo like game that tasks you to find paradoxes in several time periods as a detective in a time police. Each time period has 10 intervals in which it can be viewed. The art style is really cute and the decision to have everything in black and white lineart style, and have your "notes" during the case appear in colour on the map is really clever. There is a lot happening in each interval and you can see a lot of clever and funny pop references. Now the game is not without issues - often it expects you to find someone without showing you how they look, just telling you a name, or tells you to look in a specific place while using in game terminology that was never explained to you (eg. look in the tower of leasure or in the runner district). Also the minigames you encounter from time to time are not explained - which would not be an issue if they were not timed as well. It may take sb less used to puzzles several attempts to figure out what to do in each one. Additionally during what can be called "bossbattles" the gamne expects you to play an association game, but for the life of me I cannot figure the logic behind the last sets of associations, again would have been great if it was explained. The most frustrating are the side tasks - a "freemode" where there is no case, but you are tasked with following several individals in a time period throughout all 10 intervals. They are intoduced at the beginning of the game, however the game doesn't tell you that to complete all 10 intervals of one or two characters you need an ability you will get later in the game which is frustrating. There is also no reaction from the game when you finish all characters - you have to quit the stage to continue and it makes it seem as if you forgot something. The long animations showing you all intervals of the given character after you finish them all are also getting old pretty fast. All in all a good game, but needs polishing espectially in the optional mode.
Hoa is a short but mostly satysfying game. However it made me feel like there was something missing. From the audio and the visual perspectives the game is great. From the gameplay however... Well the game is very simple. That is not a minus in my mind, we need easy games as much as we need hard ones. Still gue to simplicity and consciously going for achievements it will take no longer than 3 hours which is a little short, especially since we don't really get the conclusion? Not spoiling the story too much - we move through the levels discovering our backstory and at the end get the nicely animated story of our character. Which should answer all the questions we may have had but it omits one character that is a driving force of the story and while it explains what started the story of the game there is no conclusion to the game itself and the current stories of the characters. It left me quite disappointed. From the gameplay perspective - there is a cutscene of a chase that begs to be a playable level, but I guess that would defeat the purpose of the game being casual. Still it reminded me of Ori chase sequences and I think it would work nicely here. Also if I never again have to play anything with the inverted controls it will be too soon. In conclusion, a simple and easy little game that is VERY pretty but from the soryteling perspective lacks a conclusion and from the gameplay perspective a bit of polish. It is still a good game and I enjoyed those 3 hours I spend on it.
I love it, I love it. I was hoping that it would be rereleased for years. I played the hell out of this as a child to the point that almost 15 years later I can still quote certain scenes from memory. I love the story, I love the characters, I love the ridiculous humour. And while some puzzles can get convoluted I'm still having fun because the dialogues are just so funny and sarcasting and cutting. The plot plays perfectly with the legends and fantasy tropes, diverting the expectations on every turn. I cannpt recomend this enough.
This is a good hidden object game. Not to difficult but not too easy - it took me about 3 hours to complete which is normal for me with this kind of games. It has interesting puzzles and quite suprising "powers" mechanic. Which is where we arrrive at the issue. The game presents the hound of baskervilles as a reals paranormal beast, we are travelling through time and performing magical rituals. All of this while playing as Sherlock Holmes who believes in nothing but logic, but here he takes to existance of ghosts and magic as if it was the most natural and logical part of his life. It is really starnge and clashes horibbly with who Holmes is. Never the less if we ignore that this was supposed to be Holmes game, it is ok. A nice little diversion to kill a few hours on a lazy evening. Although I believe that it would be much better received if it was telling a story about a random investigator trying to undo a random family curse then as a subpar adaptation of a The Hound of The Baskervilles that doesn't seem to understand it's source material.
It's a nice little game with a athmosphere that can be called oppresive in some places. Puzzles are interesting and imaginative but unfortunatelly the story told in the clues and other materials you find isn't really coherent? At least for me it seems that we have been provided with less info on the story that is normal in this type of games. I wouldn't even call it barebone - it's more of a sketch of an interesting idea. But as I said the game has it's moments especially when it plays with light and darkness. HOWEVER there is one puzzle that may make this game unpleyable for some and Very difficult for others. It's a music puzzle where you hear a tune and have to recreate it on the keypad. You have 3 tries and the tune changes. AND IT'S TOTALLY RANDOM. If you don't have an ear for music or if you have trouble with hearing you won't be able to complete this game. Which is a shame - there should be a patch adding a setting for hard of hearing in the options that would replace this puzzle with sth else. Or just remove ramdomisation of that puzzle.
The game is not too long but it grips you in a way that you want to play untill the plot resolves itself. It's not too hard but it has one or two puzzles that stumped me to the point of looking at wolkthrough (they deal with reading sheet musing and than playing a melody based on that and to me sheet music may as well be black magic so I had no way of solving those).
