Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine is one of those classic games people look upon fondly because of nostalgia and little else. Back in the day, it was Indy's attempt at "taking back what was rightfully his" from Tomb Raider's Lara Croft, and it kind of did. In some ways, this game is less clunky than the classic CORE Design Tomb Raider titles, especially when it comes to the movement fluidity (still featuring the dreaded tank controls of the genre, but somehow more responsive), it added some cool mechanics using Indy's trademark whip that made sense for an Indiana Jones games -- and that later Tomb Raider titles would end up emulating, too. But it's still "just a Tomb Raider clone", no matter how you put it, despite the fact Tomb Raider "copied Indiana Jones to begin with" (it obviously drew inspiration from the movies, but there's only so much you can "copy-paste" when you were going from movie to game in the mid-90s. Indy and the Infernal Machine has decent graphics, for its time, it certainly won't hurt anyone's eyes, that's for sure -- there were way uglier games made during this time, and no one's expecting Witcher 3 quality graphics, anyway. It's hard to recommend to anyone who isn't an oldschool action-adventure fan. It's a very hard, very cryptic game; the level design isn't nearly as interesting or clever as the brilliant ones in any classic Tomb Raider game, so you'll end up getting lost and confused more often than you'd like. Not to mention the appalling combat. That first snake you find? Yeah, it'll likely kill you very fast, because Infernal Machine features no auto-aim (like the classic Tom Raider games do) and no easy way to aim weapons on your own, so you just slowly and painfully position yourself in a way that your bullets or your whip (hopefully) hit the enemy. This is not a minor grip, as there's a decent amount of combat in this game. Hard to recommend, but a good title if you're interested in the evolution of action-adventures.
This is probably one of the best horror games available on GOG, right now. It does have some flaws: the game was a dream of Italian Chris Darril, and it was developed in Italian, so the English script and voice acting, while not BAD, clearly show it wasn't the primary language the game was written and voiced in. There's a late part in the game that feels hastily done, and it gets aggravating, especially because of the difficulty spike it presents players with. Some people found the plot convoluted and confusing, and couldn't make it very far because they thought the first antagonist to be ridiculous and not scary. These are all legitimate points, and if you are one of the people who thinks one or more of these issues to be a deal-breaker, all I can say is that I understand why, and you're absolutely entitled to your opinion. With that out of the way, here is why I love this game: Darril had been meaning to do a spiritual sequel to Clock Tower since late 2007, and this is the culmination of that dream. He grew up watching the great Italian giallo and horror classics, so he wanted his game to be "giallo Clock Tower with logical puzzles". As far as I'm concerned, he succeeded. While 2016's NightCry failed to meet expectations for a "modern Clock Tower", Remothered nailed it. With the added bonus of a great giallo scrip, cinematic presentation, superb sound design, excellent atmosphere, surreal plot that evolves into a nice "Profondo Rosso"-twist close to the end. There are some jump scares, but they're extremely well done, never felt cheap to me. Some answers are left unanswered, but this is just part one out of three. Also, if you watched any classic Italian horror films, you're used to not having everything explained to you by the end of the movie. The game looks and plays great, and you can get around 8 hours of play time out of it. For part of a trilogy, that's pretty good. If you like Clock Tower, if you enjoy giallo cinema, then grab this game. It's superb.
This is a good game. I didn't have any control issues, it runs fine, the puzzles are OK. It's an OK game, overall, maybe A BIT better than just OK, except I'm taking it down one star, out of the four I think it deserved, because the market is getting extremely saturated by "lovecraftian" games. Lovecraftian has stopped being a niche genre ever since the late 90s, early 2000s. Don't get me wrong, I love me some lovecraftian horror, every once in a while, but when EVERYTHING has to be lovecraftian, I start to get annoyed. Apparently, it's the only thing that sells horror games, these days. "Hey, buy our horror game, it's pretty standard and bland, but -- do you know what? -- it's LOVECRAFTIAN! It has tentacles and Cthulhu and Hydra and Dagon! Or creatures that are based on everyone's rendition of the the Great Old Ones!" We get it. It's cool. It's fashionable. But it's starting to be a bit too much. (There's also the fact that this was a very unfortunate choice of game title, since I'm Portuguese, and in European Portuguese "Conarium" just reminds us of an aquarium of... "a real nasty word for female genitalia")
