Kholat has you wandering around a largely monotone level, hunting for locations listed on your map. None of the locations are very interesting, and none convey a story. You get snippets of a story from pieces of paper strewn throughout the level, which you can either stumble across, or stumble across co-ordinates scribbled on rocks, which lead to them. There are also camps that serve as both save points and fast travel points, saving you the aggravation of walking the entire map. There's also an attempt at horror by introducing a monster that can chase you down and kill you, but you only encounter it a few times, and being hard to avoid, most of the time it's an insta-death, making the experience less horrifying and more annoying. There is the story to keep you going, but it isn't very good, and you don't need to uncover all of it to finish the game. Which is a shame, since the game is so awkward, it requires a distraction to make it bearable. In the first level you're tasked with reaching the least interesting part of the level in order to advance, and it leads you to a level that's almost completely white, where you stumble around looking for any points of reference. Not being able to interact with the environment and not knowing if I missed some controls, I looked up a walkthrough just to get past the first level. Having reached the second and wandering around it aimlessly for several minutes, I used that walkthrough again, and decided to restart the level. Only then did I advance to the actual game. The ending is awkward as well, since you need to reach a previously reached location to trigger it. Add to that the performance issues, which seem to spring out of nowhere, and Kholat is a fairly frustrating experience. The game seemed to run smoothly most of the time, but on occasion I would experience slowdowns, freezes and several crashes, almost causing me to rage-quit, since I had to redo large sections due to the game only saving at checkpoints. Zero stars.
A puzzle game where you can turn words into objects, and use them to solve puzzles, has a lot of potential. Sadly, there are only a few words you can turn into objects, and many of them are fairly obvious - torch, knife, crossbow. Which turns this from a game one ought to solve with his or her imagination, into a game of guess how you're expected to solve the puzzle. There are also only a handful of puzzle types, so solving them becomes easier the more you advance, making the game more predictable than it ought to be. After all, in each segment there are only a handful of nouns you can turn into objects, so you can quickly scour the screen for them, without reading the text presented. Not that the text is any good. For a game revolving around stories and words, Haimrik has a fairly boring plot, and the lines you can interact with seem hastily written - for example "Walking over a BRIDGE of words, Haimrik grabbed a SWORD for protection. He had to carefully avoid GAPS..." The game is also fairly linear, but the segments between puzzles only serve as fodder, so it doesn't make much of a difference. But my biggest gripe with the game is that it suffers from a bad case of xtreme, where a game that could appeal to every age group tries very hard to prove it's not a game for kids. In Haimrik that means lots of gratuitous gore. Frankly, I would have much preferred that creativity going towards more animations, and towards improving existing animations, making the game feel less cheap.
GNOG is yet another puzzle game whose main focus is its visual style. A visual style so unique and quirky, it made me think the puzzles were more difficult than they actually are. Early on you solve puzzles by trial and error, until you figure out how the puzzles work. From then on you go through a checklist of "what can I interact with", mess around with the simpler puzzles, and keep an eye out for solutions to the more complex puzzles you'll encounter. If a puzzle seems only solvable by trial and error/brute force, there's a solution to it pasted somewhere on screen. It does become more annoying and challenging once you can no longer jump between puzzles, but attention to detail and some trial and error will get you through it. It took me three hours and change to finish the game, with some puzzles being a breeze while others were more difficult. Regardless, the ending seems to have come out of nowhere, since I didn't track how many puzzles I had left Frankly, I could have played a dozen more. The main gripe I have with this game is that it never gave me a sense of achievement. Most puzzles are either solved by trial and error or by spotting the solution on screen, and the few that aren't, are too quirky for the outcome to actually bring me any enjoyment, or a sense of achievement.
Toren seems to be a game stuck at alpha that lost its funding, and used whatever money it had left to polish a few edges, and release it as alpha plus. The main characters look like stand-ins for the final animation, and their movement is jarring, much like the first or second iteration of characters from a computer animated movie. Their environment isn't very well defined either, and they can go from clipping through it, to standing on it after a couple of steps, over and over again. The game is fairly short, and there are only two areas to play in, regardless of how many levels there are. Those areas are a tower you go up in, and the other is a fairly linear path you need to go down. Both areas are very small and surrounded by an abyss, so you can't do anything much beyond going down the path chosen for you. You can try and explore, which is what I tried doing early on, but the camera is so bad, it'll cause you to fall into the abyss many times. Controls are simple, yet somehow feel unresponsive, as if the game only registers part of my key presses, or has some lag in responding to them. Again, leading to unnecessary death. Luckily progress is saved even if you die, so you just get respawned at the nearest checkpoint, and need to simply get back to where you've been. A lot of the deaths are caused by the awkward camera, but a lot are the result of the weird platforming mechanic, where you feel more like you're floating than jumping, so you can easily overshoot a platform. Jumping to a platform, I rarely knew where I was going to land. The story is fairly boring, despite trying to be profound and impactful. Mainly due to the game telling instead of showing - the plot is conveyed to you via inanimate objects delivering dialogue. Not very exciting. It doesn't help that dubbing is almost non-existent in the game. There is music to add atmosphere, but it seems plopped down, regardless of what's on screen - as if an album is played in the background in its entirety.
Nemesis is one of the more interesting games in the series, but also one of the more clunky it has to offer. On paper it's a fairly interesting concept - Holmes has to battle a foe of equal wit, rather than a run-of-the-mill investigation, and due to the foe being a master thief with a penchant for theatrics, you get a lot of riddles and puzzles to solve throughout. Sadly, the puzzles are either incredibly obscure, or so easy that the wording to the puzzles has to compensate, and makes them sometimes more obscure than a tough but solvable riddle. Frankly, a lot of the riddles point to an item or location where you get another riddle, rinse and repeat. There are some interactable puzzles thrown in between, but their difficulty varies greatly, and they usually require a lot of trial and error. There is an attempt to break the monotonous puzzle solving and riddle hunting by having Watson perform unimportant tasks in between, but it comes off as cheap - such as a segment where you need to search your Baker street apartment for loose change. Which diverts attention from riddles that ask you to measure a stack of books, measure another stack of books, subtract one number from the other, and insert the result into the library's catalog system. Frankly, if you couldn't highlight hotspots by using the space key, this game would be intolerable. Levels are large, empty and full of invisible walls. I found the best way to move around the levels is in first person, where you're a floating camera that can get into almost every nook and cranny, and move really fast. In fact, many puzzles require you to use that perspective, otherwise you'll miss a lot of the level. Watson is still the imbecile he is in the series, but weirdly enough, Holmes seems to be sleep walking throughout the entire game. The one bright spot about this game is that we finally get to escape Baker street and its vicinity. Makes it feel like a proper game, and not a recycling of assets, like previous games.
Having tried to play Syberia and finding it fairly boring, the only reason I played Syberia 2 was because I got it for free. So maybe I'm biased from the get go, but from experiencing the two games, they always seemed like the budget titles that somehow stuck with people, against all odds. Largely due to the weird story behind it, I imagine. A story that Syberia 2 doesn't really advance very much. Rather a companion of yours gets sick, so you need to abandon the journey temporarily so that you can treat him. It doesn't make for a very interesting game, and although interesting locations present themselves - ones you might find in an adventure novel, they get so underutilized, they don't really leave any lasting impression. The first great location you come across is a small town at the edge of livable conditions, which somehow has an old train track reaching it, and in fact, surpassing it. There's nothing ahead but snow, yet the tracks keep going. You'd think it would make for a very interesting town with quaint characters, but you only ever get to interact with a handful of the residents, and they all seem as normal as can be. It's the same in every location you come across - you get to interact with only a handful of people, none of them very memorable. There are the puzzles you need to solve, but most of the time they are fairly straight forward, involving going from screen to screen looking for items on the ground. There are plenty of screens, but most of them empty, and only serve to lengthen the game, since puzzles require you to move back and forth a lot. The main character could have been a draw, but she is devoid of a personality, possibly in order to allow the players to put themselves in her shoes more easily. There are other more unique characters, but a lot of them are fairly stereotypical - the quirky shaman of a tribe, the hunched over bad guy with a dumb sidekick, the religious guy who's secretly evil, etc.
