The graphics style is solid, with fitting music too. The game plays smooth and fast. The levels are not too hard, but are clever enough that they provide some challenge. You play two cats, both with slightly different abilities, so you have to make them work together to finish the level. If you play solo, you just switch cats like in Lost Vikings, but you can also play co-op, each player playing one of the cats. When you finish a level, you get a picture of a real life cat the fans from around the world sent to the developers. Also, there are bonus levels where you can win a costume for your cats. The game has casual and hard mode, but I'm not sure what the hard mode does exactly, I didn't check the difference in levels in hard mode, I finished the casual mode. It took me like 3 hours. The game was both relaxing and puzzle entertaining. The only thing this game needs is a level editor. That could get you a ton more levels and more challenge for hardcore sokoban fans lol :D. Otherwise the game has everything, particularly the cats, and it actually explains why cats love boxes! Best sokoban game on GOG (although, probably the only one)
The game has all the standards of the hidden object games + you do little puzzles regularly, all different so the game has enough variety to keep it entertaining and you can up the challenge by playing harder difficulty. What is also entertaining is the sort of hilarious story. I mean the story isn't comedic, although there are some jokes here and there, but it's the delivery of the lines and the somewhat silly plot. The game is apparently a sequel to Dracula: Origins but I guess you don't really need to know that game to play this. There are different endings based on what you do with the adversary ladies. However, the information that this GOG release doesn't include the bonus chapter is true. You should be able to access the bonus chapter through the main menu, but the button is not there. The bonus chapter follows up on the ending of the main game, slightly differently depending on what that ending was, and then there is another variety in the ending to the bonus chapter depending how you played it. But you can't get it with this release. There were two releases of this game. The original and the "collector's edition" that included the bonus chapter. That one has "collector's edition" written in the main menu too, GOG's release doesn't, so it's no mistake or a bug and GOG's releas is just that standard original release. That's sort of a shame, but you get enough game with the main game too, for that 1 money definitely. On easy difficulty it's like 4 or so hours on one playthrough. If you're a die hard Dracula fan and really want that extra chapter then you have to look elsewhere though.
What I mean is that it has the vibe of the recent horror movies with retrosynth soundtrack and funky colours like Mandy or Color out of space. That's good, because it allows for weird and kinda fresh story/monster content. And this game has that. It has weird stuff and weird monsters, extradimensional plants/bugs/jellyfish in this case and odd fleshy growth. It switches between normal world and funky world kinda like Silent Hill. And it's a game like that, like Silent Hill or Resident Evil. Not particularly elaborate, you mostly just go to a different part of the island to pick something up and/or fight something while you pick up some background info on the cult and the game doesn't throw any particularly complicated tale at you. What's different between games like Resident evil etc. and this is mainly the combat and I wasn't feeling it. It's kinda clunky, you need to dodge but it works weird sometimes, and the worst thing is the weapons. You don't have weapons, you have to craft some esoteric items you use as melee weapons but they're limited use and you have to craft them over and over. What happens if you run out of items? Well, you don't have any default weapon. Your only option is one of the attack "spells" which consumes spirit energy, or shove move that's used to push enemies out of the way (in the intro, you don't need to push anyone after that) and that does only minimal damage. Which is pretty frustrating on high difficulty. You get an achievement for the highest difficulty, but it's a pain and IMHO not worth it. The game is way harder, you can die easily, your limited use weapons run out faster etc. and you're constantly lacking crafting items or healing items. Play on easy if you want to just enjoy a funky horror movie, I mean game. The performance of the game was kinda weird, it's Unreal 4 but somehow it squeezes the hardware to the max without looking any better than any other Unreal 4 game. Anyway, the game's alright, especially at 80% off.
!The PC release is missing some music in the levels the playstation release had! So basically ODT is an third person action game but with a couple of easy puzzles, a little bit of character upgrades (you get XPs you then put into guns, armor, or spirit so you could use weapon/spell upgrades) and a ton of secrets and optional jumping. Yes, jumping. And it's a weird clumsy jumping too. Fortunately only optional stuff is hidden behind some insane jump sections, but sometimes the game requires it for progress and that's where it gets infuriating. Why? The game has an oldschool playstation system. Limited lives, single use savepoints, checkpoints, and deathpits everywhere. So if a game requires you to go through a lengthy jumping section to progress, gives you only a checkpoint somewhere far behind, and puts a ton of deathtraps in the way then it can get really frustrating (yes, that's what happens in the very last section of the game before the final fight) But otherwise the game is kinda fun and it's somewhat interesting in its wackiness too. The story is very simple and weird, the environments of the game don't make much sense (I mean there's an abbatoir level followed up by a spa level lol), and you're constantly on edge because of the traps and enemies, but it plays good and feels kinda rewarding when you finally get to another level. What you really need to know about the game is that secrets are not that optional, sometimes a crucial item needed for progress or a button opening door to the next level is hidden in a secret room. To go down the ladder or down the ledge where hidden items often are you need to turn your back to the ledge/ladder and press space+down at the same time. And spells are you friend, especially the healing and mana spell. Without those the game gets insanely difficult. And shield spell is also your friend because contrary to what the name suggests it's an attack spell lol and you really need it against some enemies.
The game is like Baldur's gate combined with Diablo and filled with an incredible amount of fluff. You have your main guy, who is paladin, then you can pick up more characters with 4 other classes, but you can only have a party of 5. And with these characters you have to avenge your father's death. Through an incredibly aimless series of chores. The game has sidequests too but the quest log is often weird, lacking necessary information, or containing wrong information (like when they tell you to go west but it's actually to the east). And most of the time it's not even worth the time doing the sidequests, but if you decide to do just the main quest, it's about as cryptic and unrewarding. The game has magic, and wizards, but forget about fighting Chinese mythical beasts. Most of the time you fight soldiers, wolves, and monkeys. Over and over. There is no actual variety to anything in the game. So what you end up with is endless chores that eventually lead to the end of the game but the longer you play the more of a hassle it becomes. Especially since the enemies also scale with you, so by the end of the game you can hit a weird difficulty wall when you become super leveled up but suddenly everyone is hardcore and can wreck you, particularly your weaker magician characters. So I recommend playing on easy if you really want to put the 30 something hours into fighting them soldiers and monkeys. The combat is diablo. You get a ton of skills and spells but you only really use two or three with each character. The elements system doesn't really matter to anything if you just brute force the fights. The game starts as sort of entertaining and coming with the novelty of the setting, but it soon reveals all the fluff with pointless dialogues and quests that are both boring and unrewarding and they just don't stop because the game has no real aim and to compensate for that it uses stalling techniques that are essentially "princess is in another castle".
I didn't exactly hate it. I even thought it was interesting for a Myst-like game. Some of the puzzles were weird but even when I had to resort to looking up the solution to the Myst style vague nonsense I wasn't mad about it. I wasn't even particularly bored. I mean it's a solo adventure where nothing much happens and you only run around solving nonsensical puzzles, but exploring the admittedly nice looking environments was interesting enough. But then the reason why I abandoned the game came up. I'm pretty tolerant to game nonsense, even when it's sort of annoying, but the puzzle that made me quit was simply intentionally made to annoy people and waste their time. You have to operate a machine that controls this little maze and you have to figure out how to configure the maze machine so you could pass through. But it's a time wasting nonsense that has you running around half the entire game area to solve this. I was told by someone who played the game that even if you know the exact solution right from the start, it would still take about an hour to get through. Figuring it out on your own would take even more time, because you can't see what you did unless you go back and see from a different area of the game. I don't want to play games that are deliberately stalling the gameplay only for the sake of wasting time. Whoever came up with that puzzle (and potentially other similarly bad puzzles after this) really needs to get a grip. I thought 2/5 stars might be more fair, because it's not like effort was not put into this game. It looks good and it has some interesting bits. But the performance is not great at times and then the whole thing with the time waster puzzle. Pointless stalling, extreme level stalling even, is reason enough to rate this game just 1/5. It's worse than a game that's sort of boring but at least it's going forward and not completely stopping just to waste the player's time.
This game really draws attention to its great visuals and music. The landscapes look beautiful, the paper animals look pretty imaginative, all sorts of animals from "dogs" to turtles and elephants, the visual effects of weather and all kinds of events look very impressive. Paper animals also apparently like to listen to Japanese punk rock music. All very enjoyable to observe and listen to. For the audio and visuals alone it's in my opinion worth it, especially when the game is discounted. But it's not exactly a walking simulator. You have to solve puzzles that usually involve game physics or paper animal behaviour. Either it's luring the animals somewhere, trying to prevent animals from eating other animals, or manipulating the environment to create paths for the animals or for yourself. It's not very difficult, but it's still enjoyable to figure out, or to cheese it somehow. The game has no dialogue or an obvious story, I guess it's for the audience to figure out what their experience was when taking the full journey of the paper animals up until the end. I liked it and I thought it was a worthwhile audiovisual experience. Also, the game has a sandbox mode where you can play with the environments and physics and animals. You can create lakes and freeze them with weather, or cause a sandstorm and so on and so forth, you have a good amount of options. The engine and physics is pretty good. If the developers decided to make a god game like Populous or Black & White with it, it could be great.
The best part of the game is the graphics. It has some nice backgrounds and animations. Now for the complaints lol :D The game's kinda alright, like Quest for Glory, but it feels like it's only trying to copy that game in a weird way. I don't know how different the puzzles are if you play a different mage (you select your element at the start of the game) but it seemed like there's only one solution to every puzzle and the element only matters for your combat spells. And the combat was weird. An odd real time clicker with pause when you select spells. There's an option to turn the combat off except for bossfights though, so I didn't have to bother with it and you don't have to either if you don't want to :D. If you really want to though, the game has 2 large maps with nothing but combat in them. Kinda like in Quest for Glory games but there are no other kinds of encounters in those maps, it's only combat maps where they send you to find a thing for the main quest, which wasn't very interesting for me, but with the combat off you can just rush through them (they're kind of a maze though) You also level up and add points to your stats, but those stats only matter for combat. There's nothing like stat related solutions to puzzles or actions you can do in this game like it was in Quest for Glory. So what you're left with in the end, if you turn the combat off, is a point and click adventure with fairly obvious puzzles and a story that's a bit silly tbh, but I guess as a whole it works if you want a fantasy fairytale adventure game. There are better choices for that though, because this game always feels like it's only halfway there in every aspect, from story to combat to puzzles. Aside from the graphics, it's full way there because the graphics are nice :D
I haven't played the original release of this, but I have played the first three games and the first thing you notice is that the controls and interface has been clearly remade for touch screens. You can't just move your mouse to look around, you have to click and drag which is kinda annoying. With it come the intrusive interaction icons for moving to another place or interacting with stuff. They're always on screen, so there's a weird blue arrow popping out of the environment. Again because of touch screens. Touch screen adjustments also came to the dialogue options menu, which is now a big selection screen instead of the small box with icons. This is all "only" annoying as heck, but it gets worse. The puzzles of this game have been pretty much completely removed. All you do is move around, pick up items sometimes, and use the items on something obvious. And that's it. If you expect anything else, or if you remember doing actual puzzles in the original, those are simply not there. Late in the game you are looking for five discs, there were puzzles involved including a dialogue based puzzle. Those puzzles are gone and so are the dialogues. The cuts didn't end there. You could interact with inconsequential characters as well, they didn't tell you anything useful, but you could talk to them. You can't in this release, and neither can you inspect items that aren't directly used for progress. The story of the game is also a significant departure of the weird scifi mysticism of the first two games especially. It's pretty much a Jules Verne-like like journey to the centre of the earth but kinda uninspired. The first half of the game is escaping the guards in the jungle, but thanks to no puzzles it's kinda lame. Second half is less action, but since the game has no puzzles it's just about going back and forth a few times until the end of the game. Microids really made a mess of this release.
This game seems like a regular point & click adventure, but it actually requires a bit more effort from the player. You're a detective investigating the case of a dead rich guy and there are twists and turns in the investigation, but the main difference from most games of this kind is that you actually have to figure out what happened yourself. What I mean is that you gather a ton of witness statements, clues, and documents, and then to progress there is this mini-puzzle where you have to put the right pieces of evidence to make a conclusion regarding the events that led to the victim's death. And you really do get a lot of statements in particular, so you have to sort of pay more attention a bit more than in games where the game makes the conclusion for you just from gathering select evidence. Also, it's a Benoit Sokal game, so the environmental themes are present here as well, and actually relate to the story of the game too, which is also interesting. What's not great about the game is that it somehow hogs processing power. I mean it had my CPU fans spinning for no good reason and I had to use a tool to limit this game's resources usage. No reason to put unnecessary wear on my hardware over a retro adventure game. Another not so great thing is that in a couple of instances you have to backtrack for no good reason because a clue spawned somewhere you already visited, or an item appears only after you do specific dialogues. Also, at least once instance of an item that is very hard to see, so it's easy to get stuck on that.
