The game control scheme is awkward. It technically works, but having to constantly drag and rotate objects in a small cut-out window to hunt for interactive points gets old fast. And you have to do it all the time because you must interact with every active point/character and possibly do it multiple times. And some further interactions don't even appear until you click on a specific point, the logic of which is not obvious at all, as you mostly stumble to solutions by combining every single object with every single interactive point. The directions for looking for a solution are not well communicated and there are even many red herrings. This problem manifests right in the first scene. Make sure to click the button to reveal active points multiple times on every screen. Use a walkthrough as soon as you get stuck because you may have missed an object or there is no hint in the game to begin with. Despite this, the fantastic story and the topics the game deals with make it absolutely worth playing. I loved that the game treats you like an adult. The visual style and graphics are beautiful and the voiceacting is good, but the other sounds are nothing to write home about. I had a couple of technical glitches, which were solved with a restart. Overall, I recommend to play the game, but definitely start with the first one.
The story of this game is a silly romp through an office building and encountering obstacles in the form of office politics. The gameplay is very simple - you press spacebar to say "No". It is short, but fun and has a positive message. It is well-made technically and visually, has good voice acting. I definitely recommend buying it.
This short game is like a rough sketch or a pilot episode. It shows promise, but needed more attention to develop it. The story premise that a method of mixing alchemy with torture was devised to reach immortality is interesting, and the outcome of that project is slowly revealed to you as you progress. Yet, the story is very disjointed and jumps all over the place and time leaving you in confusion. You play through a short series of locations, which consist of 2-4 screens. You return to some of these locations, but there are some changes. The story is dark and involves a lot of deaths, yet it is presented as quirky and rather funny. You control three protagonists of the story, with the focus shifting to one of them, but all of them are bad people fighting each other. The puzzles are quite logical and I liked them, but they are not intuitive in the sense that you don't know what is your aim and why you need to do that in the first place, as the game doesn't give you any natural clues. Luckily, there is a help button that gives a vague hint, and usually you immediately know what you need to do. I haven't encountered any bugs and the graphics and the game style are good. Even though there are lots of small objects that you must interact with, due to the style of the game they are easy to spot. Overall, I think the game was entertaining and I would still recommend playing it.
I liked the first game, completing it two times. I generally liked this one as well. It has good puzzles, almost all of them can be solved by yourself. However, this means that you have to exhaustively scan every square of the game grid, possibly multiple times, to find the secrets. And this makes the gameplay really tedious. When you enter a new area, the first thing you do is circle it while staring at the walls in search of hidden buttons. Inventory management is another aspect - you are very much limited on the weight you can carry, but you should not throw anything away and carefully store everything in a place you can return to (such as the Hub). The fighting is difficult with rather awkward controls, especially when you need to juggle movement, drawing magic runes, and access inventory, all almost in real time keeping track of monster movements and dodging their attacks. Because of this complexity I never even used special attacks as it was just not feasible to do while dancing around the enemies. Cheesing and kiting is a must, and you can do that successfully with a few enemies. Unfortunately, the boss fight with the dragon on the roof is too difficult for this tactic as hordes of powerful enemies are spawned around you and they have long distance attacks and easily box you in, wiping your party in a few seconds. I was enjoying the game up to that point. After a few tries, barely scratching the boss's healthbar, I decided not to waste my time any longer and deleted the game without finishing it.
I have not played the original game, and looking at videos of its gameplay I wouldn't want to suffer playing it. In contrast, this remake is quite playable. It has better controls, graphics, and other small quality of life improvements, but they are better only somewhat. I think this remake was too faithful to the original game. The game is still very clunky and buggy. The animations are simplistic and often broken or downright silly, especially in the later part of the game. Combat is terrible, bullet-sponge enemies gang on you in large groups spamming their one attack. AI sometimes shows brilliance, like when NPCs communicate to others about you attacking, but then then get stuck between buildings or run in circles. Killing them is not particularly difficult, it is just a chore. Don't even attempt stealth - it is useless. The environmental design might have been excellent at the time of the original, but it is clear how much modern games are better in this regard. The interface is OK, but halfway through the game I found out that there is a hidden help screen with some much needed explanations, especially regarding some objects in your inventory. The story is passable with lots of voiced dialogues, but the audio quality is terrible. Performance-wise I had no problems after I disabled vsync, which caused heavy stuttering. Overall, it is a game for enthusiasts. If you can play only one game in the series, I recommend choosing Outcast A New Beginning - a much better game in the same setting.
Funny and quirky game, I liked it overall. Nice graphics and setting, great voice acting, easy to control UI. Unfortunately, the puzzles were often illogical (some even deliberately misdirect you), so the game often devolved into mindlessly trying all possible combinations until discovering that you just have to talk to a character one more time. So, my recommendation for new players: talk to each character multiple times exhausting all lines of dialogue, and as soon as you don't know what to do, click on the help button. This will smooth out the gameplay. Also, don't forget to save often. I crashed multiple times losing all my progress. The game has three difficult puzzles, and I somehow managed to solve them without the hints, but for two of them my solution was not at all what was explained by the narrator after solving them, and the last one I solved by clicking randomly and I have no idea what was the trick.
The post AI-pocalyptic setting of a city on a raised platform is original and the twists of the story are gripping. I liked interacting with game characters, even though there were only a few of them available every given story day. Your dialogue choices influence the abilities you will get and add some variability to the story, but it still remains fairly linear and you have to solve puzzles in specific sequence. The puzzles are logical, you always know what needs to be done even if you don't understand how. I recommend to read a guide when you get stuck - some puzzles communicate poorly the mechanics of solving them. Voice acting was good, but the graphics and background drawings were mostly meh.
Puzzle platformer very much inspired by Portal, but in the end adds some Cthulu and monsters chasing you to hurry you up. The story is nothing to write home about, most of the puzzles are artificial, they don't weave with the story or surroundings organically. Lots of annoying and fiddly flying platforms and you constantly dying, especially in Act 3. Will also test your reflexes towards the end.
A bittersweet story about a girl looking for her abducted by a goddess brother. You journey through a magical forest into the realm of a goddess and solve puzzles to progress. The puzzles are quite logical and just right in difficulty, however, you have to look for objects like a hawk. I recommend to spam highlight object button as you run, and even in that case you will still miss some things. At the start of the game I also recommend to open the settings menu and mute the voices because they don't match what is happening on the screen. The story is more enjoyable without them. The default control scheme is awkward and you cannot change it. Still, there are multiple buttons that do the same action, so look carefully at the keymap in settings.
Good adventure story with relatively straightforward puzzles and a variety of location types. Good graphics and animations. It is long, has lots of dialogues, and there are even action scenes. You cannot die, just repeat until you succeed. If you get stuck, remember to click on every available active zone and try every possible item combination.
