Shivers is a very decent puzzle game. The puzzles are a bit harder on average, which sure is a breath of fresh air. It's also very atmospheric, with generally very good campy acting and voice acting. The soundtrack is extremely memorable due to some rather experimental choices. You probably won't want any of it in your playlist, but it IS effective. Having a health bar in a game like this just shows how wild the 1990s were in gaming and how many experiments were made. I don't think this was a good idea, since it's completely useless. There are also a big flaw that keep it from being a great game: Most of the puzzles can be solved in any order and most of the game is non-linear - but you often have no clear indication what an action does. Often, you have execute a special action that causes something completely unrelated to happen somwhere else. You can only progress by searching every nook and cranny to see what has changed. You are basically constantly running around. If you like Myst-clones and puzzlers, I think this one is a must play - and don't let the dreary graphics of the first section scare you off. It gets much better. Just be prepared to run in circles for the whole game.
I really appreciate that someone has boiled down puzzle games to their essence while not making it abstract and providing a background story. In this game you basically only sit at your desk and have to figure out how different alien artifacts work. That's really a good idea. The only flaws of this game are that it's a bit too easy, too short and that there is not much of an ending. I thought we would get to have a grand opening of the museum, but instead we get - something. Something that also looks like it was cobbled together in half an hour in 2003. Really, the graphics of the ending sequence are much worse than the rest of the game. The German translation is also horrible. Sometimes the original French pops up for several lines, some screens are in Chinese. Also, the makers really, really want you to subscribe to their newsletter.
To me it feels like the devs are trying to cater to a more specific audience than with Hollow Kinght. The game seems to be mainly filled with bosses and arena gauntlets, while the areas themselves feel rather small and a bit dull to me. Don't get me wrong. The scenery is nicely crafted, but there seems to be much less effort put into the terrain, the interactable environment: There are very large areas without many enemies or interesting things that you have to cross again and again. A good example is the stretch between the bench and the crow's hill in Greymoor. You need two or three minutes just to run from one end to the other to restart the challenge again. There are even streches of water that slow you down! And this is true almost everywhere. It looks like the devs tried to create a consistent map much more than a fun map. A good part of the game is spent running through empty rooms or climbing streches of terrain that are not even meant to be difficult. Much has been said about the precise movement. Well it's great - and so it's even more jarring when it's not that precise once. For example when trying to bounce on the white flowers. And three of the are strategically placed as the _only_ obstacle in front of a boss room you just spent two minutes running to. Combined with the harsh difficulty, this makes the game rather frustrating to me.
It's a shooter. That's about it. The shooting mechanics are fine, the guns have a lot of oomph and the enemies spill their guts nicely. Vivisector became a great game on that basis alone, so why isn't this one? I have no idea honestly. Maybe it's the arena-like levels that get repeated over and over again. Maybe it's the lack of enemie variety. Maybe it's the lackluster story. Maybe it's the general feel of the mechanics. I played it for some hours and thought I could enjoy it, since I'm really a fan of medicore shooters. It turns out it was just too medicore for me.
I wanted to wait with writing a review until I finished the game - but I have to face the truth: I'll never finish it. It's not worth my time. Maybe it would be a better game if it were shorter, but it just goes on and on. It has enough plot for the lenght, but not enough varied gameplay. The basic premise is solid and I didn't notice that many bugs. My main problem is the reverse difficulty curve that occures in every single chapter: Every time you start weak guns, few resources and few party members. That means you have to carefully position yourself, plan a stealthy attack an maneuver yourself into favourable positions. The first mission in each chapter is the hardest - sometimes infuriatingly so, since you can't save during missions. Then it all goes downhill: You can quickly buy better weapons, you find additional party members, level up, but the missions don't seem to get harder. By the last mission you can just methodically gun down one enemy after another without much effort. It goes from infuriating to boring. There are some new enemy types on special occaisions, but they hardly have much of an effect, I didn't really care for the overworld map gameplay too. You get to make a lot of choices, but you can't really make estimates about the final results, so it's more or less guesswork. I wonder if they really do have an effect on the story, or if the game just fools you into thinking they do. All in all, it's not a bad game, but a rather dry one. It does nothing particularly well and doesn't know where to stop.
This is really a good old-fashioned puzzle game, without trying to be a retro game. It's old fashioned in the sense that it works the same as first-person puzzle games worked since the 1990s, but the presentation is more modern. It's nice to see a game of this type without free roaming, but point and click movement instead. The story is servicable and told in an interesting way. However it might be a bit off-putting for most that you are guided that much at the beginning - much like an overly long tutorial for techniques you never use again. There are story reasons for this, but I think it could have been solved better. The puzzles range from easy to medium difficulty in my opinion, depending on how well you remember where you've seen things before. After the disappointing Lost Souls, this is really a good revival to the series. But I really have to mention one thing: This is absolutely NOT how you make Goulash!
I think this is as good as inventory-based first-person puzzle games get. The pinnacle of the Genre at the end of it's traditional lifespan. Atmosphere and graphics are very nice. At this point in time, games of this genre usually fell into the trap of either using 3D or experimenting with transition animations between the screen. This made many of these games unbearably sluggish to play. That's not the case here. You get the bare screens - no 360° shenanigans, no transition videos. This makes crossing the map a breeze, which is important, since you are going to run back and forth quiet a bit - as it is traditional in games like this. If you have played any of the Dark Fall games, the structure might be very familiar to you. (There's even a reference to Dark Fall II, so I assume some of the developers worked both at Darkling Room and Shadow Tor.) You have a very limited area, with most of it accessible from the start. There is one central puzzle that you will be adding pieces to during the game. The puzzles themselves are straightforward and not too challenging. If your read carefully, you can find most of the solutions. The tricky part is that some obstacles aren't puzzles, but really just events that need to be triggered by progressing elsewhere. You can look an hour for a key, only to find that there is none, because the door gets torn down later as the story progresses. That's not too bad though. You just have to go with it. In exchange you get a nicely presented story, rich atmosphere and the scariest giant rock that has ever murdered people. I want to see a found footage movie about that!
Overall: It feels much more competently made than the first game, but shares the proble of the resetting puzzles. While it looks and feels better, however, story and puzzles are worse than in Dark Fall. The puzzles: Often, this feels more like a hidden object game than a puzzle game. There are much more screens in this game than in Dark Fall. For example: There were almost no screens for stairs in Dark Fall, here there are several for each set of stairs. This doesn't really add to the game, just increases the clicks you need to go from here to there. At the same time, this is extensively used to hide items, notes or hints in dark corners, in shoes, behind paintings and so on... The puzzles that are there almost all have a completely spelled out solution that you just need to find. The story: It starts strong, gets even more interesting in the middle and the falls flat on its face in the last quater. All in all: I think it's as good/bad as the first one, just with strengths and weaknesses in different places. Worth a play for the atmosphere, but not for the puzzles.
There's nothing wrong with the story itself, it's completely serviceable for a puzzle game. Also, it's always nice to have a game based on actual folklore. The game is just bad at telling it. It basically shoves a heap of paper into your hands right at the start. If you don't read the rather dry 50 pages on Welsh folklore, your won't know what is going on. And this just keeps going! Every document seems three times as long as in other games. You have to read through the journal of a teenage game and it really just is pages of pages of teenage girl journal. And you know you can't skip anything, because you might miss a clue. The other problem are the puzzles theselves. It's an inventory-based puzzle game in a limited environment. This is rather strange, since these games are usually linear. So the designers had to find a way to prevent you from filling your inventory right from the start and then try everything on everything. They did this by making you unable to pick objects up that you don't need at the moment - and recommend you write down where everything is you migh need later. You see where this is going? Yes, you mainly run around looking for things you allready found earlier. And sometimes you can't pick things up you're absolutely sure you'd need right now. Other puzzles are also horribly designed. There is a translation puzzle with dozens of words that RESETS evey time you make one wrong click, just to name an example. All in all, I can say I wasn't that angry at a puzzle game since Quern.
I generally enjoyed this game. It has a really great atmosphere and can even be really creepy at some points. I also liked the setup. Other games of this style usually have sprawling world that are unlocked bit by bit. This game sets you into a hotel where you can access almost all rooms at once. It leaves you a lot of freedom on which puzzle to tackle first. The puzzles are generally good, if a bit easy. It has an inventory system, but places where you can use items are clearly marked, so there's no try-everything-on-everything-hell. The items are also sorted by when in the game you should pick them up. This makes it clear when you have missed something. I only got stuck once, when I overlooked a passage. However, I can understand why the game wasn't that well revcieved when it came out. It's not very well made. There are some minor bugs, like sounds not playing when they should. This didn't happen often to me, but confused me in some puzzles, when buttons suddenly didn't make noises anymore. The worst part is however, that puzzles reset after you solved them. If you didn't take notes or want to have another look, you have to do them again. Since some are trial and error, this is infuriating. Even doors keep locking themselves. There's a ingame reason for that, but it only covers up bad programming. Still, by todays standards it's definitely worth playing, since we don't get games like this anymore.
