Despite being a sequel to Shadow of the Comet, the atmosphere of this game is very different. The monsters are introduced at the very beginning so there is little sense of creeping dread or suspense that the first game had. I found the screeching monsters more annoying than scary. The autosaving before 'critical sequences' in the game also is an early warning that you are about to die, so you just wait for the scene to play out and then try over and over until you get it right (often timing is of essence and such). However it is a nice touch because it saves you trouble of saving manually all the time. The controls are greatly improved over the first game. The puzzles are generally straightforward and mostly can be solved using common sense, not some convoluted game logic, and the only annoying ones are those where you have to pixel-hunt for a near-invisible but essential item. I mostly used a walkthrough to check what I'd missed when I felt like I have clicked on every pixel of the screen and still couldn't find anything. Overall the game is nicely balanced and makes for a relaxing evening, 4-star rating only because it lacks the horror atmosphere of its predecessor.
Great horror game inspired by Lovecraft's "Shadow of Innsmouth". The overall atmosphere is consistently creepy and unsettling throughout the game. For the best effect I recommend playing it in the middle of the night. :) The graphics are mostly very nice if you grew up with and can appreciate the pixellated beauty of '90s games. The game is very hard though, even if you are familiar with the Cthulhu mythos, and its knowledge doesn't really help with solving the various puzzles, so I recommend having a walkthrough handy to save yourself some frustration. Sometimes the in-game clues do not make it clear enough where to go next, sometimes you just miss a tiny detail, and sometimes you feel stuck even if you are doing the right thing but the cursor is off by a few pixels and you wonder why you can't get something working, or why you can't find and object despite you have clicked on every inch of the screen. Also save often, because there are many ways you can die unexpectedly. As I already mentioned the controls are the biggest flaw of the game, takes a while to get used to and up to the very end of the game I wasn't always sure how to use them properly -- sometimes to 'use' an object you have to 'look' at something rather than click the 'use' icon, and so forth... it's not very intuitive, hence only 4 stars.
I finally finished the GK trilogy, and playing it back-to-back meant that my expectations of the latter two games were heavily affected by the first one. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised that the final game was more or less a return to the original gameplay-wise, only in 3D. There are some really nice puzzles, not necessarily hard but enjoyable to play, such as the Red Serpent riddle. My only minor gripe was that sometimes I had no idea what to do next because I missed something in the previous segment and there was no option to replay the conversation like in the previous games. However I can't give this game 5 stars because of all the technical issues I had to deal with (on Win 8.1). First of all, just to access in-game settings I had to change my monitor's resolution before running the game, otherwise all the menus were unusable for some reason. Then I had to change the graphics settings to software renderer to stop the flickering. As a result, the game was running rather slowly, but it actually did run -- until it started randomly crashing during cutscenes on the 2nd day, and I was forced to skip every cutscene after that -- even the whole ending (I had to watch it on youtube instead). The fact I had to quit the game each time to watch the cutscene outside of game was pretty annoying, but I couldn't just skip them and carry on as they tell most of the actual story. Still, the game is worth playing, just expect trouble.
I played this straight after the first Gabriel Knight game, and perhaps that's why I didn't like it nearly as much as the first game, since 'Sins of the Fathers' set the bar pretty high and I was in the mood for 'more of the same'. The drastic visual change from the colorful cartoon style to a bland FMV is really grating, all the charm is lost. Most cutscenes are too long and boring, and I was itching not to skip them; if I did, I would miss half the story. No more global topics, now just click on the next line until you exhausted your options. It's a shame though, because the story itself is quite interesting, it's actually two seemingly separate stories that eventually converge in the final chapter and they are told alternately from Gabriel's and Grace's point of view. I have to say I really hated Gabriel's chapters--I wanted to punch him every time he opened his mouth--plus there were many inconsistencies making it harder to solve some puzzles and follow what's happening. For example, Gabriel complains all the time that he can't even read the German newspapers or talk to random people, but for some mysterious reasons some conversations or correspondence between two Germans are conveniently in English, just because Gabriel has no-one around to translate it for him; other times he has to get someone to translate. So after a while I gave up trying to use my brain and just clicked on everything until something happened. I really miss Gabriel from the first game. Still, I give it 3 stars because it's saving grace is actually... Grace. If it weren't for Grace, I probably would drop the game like a hot potato. Grace's chapters were like an entirely different game, and a very enjoyable one at that. It actually included some wonderful character development for her and overall was much more coherent, logical and easy to follow. She's easily one of the best female characters in games, so it's worth playing once just for that alone.
The first Gabriel Knight game is really worthy of the label 'classic' because it's so well written and executed. The setting is also pretty unique, since it revolves around voodoo in New Orleans. The characters are great, voice acting is great and it really draws you into the story. Not to mention the adorable pixellated art, and the opening theme will be haunting me in my head for weeks. Gameplay-wise, it has a good balance of active gameplay vs. storytelling, just enough not to feel like you're just passively watching a movie, even though most of the clues come from interviews with people rather than objects you pick up. I liked the fact you always had 'global topics' available to ask everyone, even if they weren't relevant but all the characters had at least one response to every topic. It really added a feeling of authenticity to the game when you had to figure out how to ask the 'right question'. Most of the other puzzles are quite logical, though you can easily miss important details, and sometimes things that seem just 'background noise' are actually important for advancing the story. Fortunately you can never get completely stuck because you have to complete certain tasks to end each day, so it can't happen that you find out on day 7 that on day 2 you forgot to do something important and now you gotta redo the whole game. You can get away without obtaining certain clues, but only those that are not vital in solving the task at hand. However, saving often is useful because you can actually die on multiple occasions throughout the game. Overall, definitely a title worth playing at least once.
Beneath a Steel Sky was sitting in my account for years before I got around to playing it--it was added into my account for free and I just forgot about it. It turns out it was a hidden gem sitting there quietly all these years. It's actually a surprisingly relatable dystopian story where corporations rule what's left of human society, people's civil liberties are restricted depending on their social caste or rank and human lives are deemed worth less than whatever the factories are manufacturing. Relatable indeed. Visually the game is pleasantly colorful and yet atmospheric; there is the gloom of the factory floor, the somewhat sterile and fake cheerfulness of the residential areas, and the creepy underground 'lair' of the evil supercomputer. Despite all the doom and gloom, the game doesn't lack sense of humour, primarily but not exclusively in the form of the robot sidekick Joey (I'm a sucker for robot sidekicks). One of my favourite moments in the whole game is when Joey gets a new body and is so excited about it that he starts imitating a Dalek. EX-TER-MI-NATE! EX-TER-MI-NATE. In a perfect Dalek voice, too. I would probably replay the game just to see that scene again. Fun times.
I only ever played the enhanced edition of System Shock, so I don't know what the original was like. Judging from other reviews it had pretty wonky controls and I don't feel masochistic enough to try wrestling with that. In any case, the enhanced version of the game is plain fun, incredibly immersive and addictive. Even the linear story doesn't take away from that, because there are a number of ways of finding crucial piece of information or solving certain tasks. In many ways the game reminds me of Deus Ex, which is one of my favourite games ever. I'm pretty sure I haven't even explored everything on the first try, so I have a few mysteries left for the next run. The game is really well designed and I love the fact that for most of the game you don't have to care much if you die because you don't lose any progress--once you disable cyborg conversion you just get revived automatically upon death. Frequently used elevators between the levels are strategically placed to avoid too much pointless wandering back and forth, and sometimes there's even a teleport available. Charging stations are also usually conveniently placed so you don't have to trek too far when you just quickly need to recharge and move on. The only issue I had was some kind of bug with the maps, when sometimes my notes in the maps disappeared, or I wasn't able to add notes at all, making it a bit harder to navigate. It was supposedly fixed with a patch, but I ran the game for the first time AFTER the patch was introduced, and even after a few re-installations the bug persisted to some extent.
I played this game two or three times in the past, but never managed to finish it. The reason being, the content is so depressing that replaying it over and over feels like being stuck in purgatory or something. The first time was fun, I didn't know what to expect next, and it was fascinating to watch both the good and the bad endings for every character, and making disturbing moral choices just to see what will happen next. But when I finally thought I had all the endings I needed for a good endgame, I found out I can't even finish it, because for some reason some of the characters were missing their 'totems' and this wasn't obvious until it was their turn in the endgame (there is no way to check this). I don't know if it was a bug or if I screwed up their respective stories somehow, but I figured that if I got the ending wrong, they would appear back at the Hate Pillar screen. Whatever the case, I was really annoyed by this, and put off by the fact that I won't know if the same thing won't happen again if I restart the game entirely, so I just gave up. Still, it's a very unique game but requires more patience than I have I guess.
I played this game for the first time in 2020, and speaking as a long-time Blade Runner the movie fan, I was not disappointed. The game captures perfectly everything I loved about the movie. This is what I would imagine a proper Blade Runner sequel should feel like; in fact the story runs parallel to the movie plot, so there are plenty references to it and it's fun to interact with some of the movie characters as well. So thumbs up from me, it's a great game--not a 'great game for a 1990s game', just great game, period.
