Disclaimer: I have yet to finish the game. I felt compelled to write a review, however, because the game is a joy to play. Edit: I have since finished the game. While the puzzles get tough if you are playing the hardest difficulty, it remains a very good game from beginning to end. At its core, Bilkins' Folly is an adventure game, themed around treasure hunts. Everything is tied together by the protagonist's search for his missing family members, taking him to explore the game's world bit by bit as he tries to follow their trails. The plot isn't very serious at all in the moment to moment scenes, instead providing humour through most interactions. You'll be solving puzzles and riddles of all kinds, while also dealing with a plethora of mini-games (fishing, lockpicking and more). Checking maps while walking around with your loyal dog is just so much fun, and the wacky comedy of the world and its characters makes for a great backdrop to your adventures. There is no combat, but you still have an ever-expanding arsenal of tools to open new routes around the islands you'll visit. Your dog companion also learns new tricks along the way, and you'll need to backtrack to unearth every secret on each island (it's surprising how much you can find by simply exploring, with very little in plain sight). The music is very fitting, and generally I find the sounds to work really well in creating a fun-loving atmosphere. Completionists could find the game slightly frustrating, as there are a lot of small things to find, and some of the puzzles can get challenging, but overall, the game is not hard. The game might not be perfect, but it's really well-designed, which I find a bit of a rarity these days. If you like treasure hunts and puzzle, you owe yourself to give this one a go.
Blood Omen is a top-down action-adventure game, where you'll play Kain, a wrongly kiled noble turned vampire. On your quest for vengeance, you'll visith various areas of Nosgoth, unlocking transformations, spells and weapons granting you access to previously inaccessible areas and secrets. The gameplay is clunky, and the design of various maps feels a bit of a chore to go through (long death gauntlets if you don't use the correct magic, a breeze if you are prepared). No matter what, however, several areas are a slog, so I'd recommend using the wolf speed to avoid combat when possible. The game has a lot of great ideas in the gameplay, but the execution is stiff. You'll have to constantly visit and re-visit menus to tweak your gear and magic selection every few minutes or waste utility items to avoid combat and speed up exploration. What redeems the game is that the ideas ARE interesting, and it's nice to unleash destruction upon your enemies when you can splurge (I recommend to be liberal with consumables, especially if you explore outside the main path). Some magic is particularly effective against certain enemies (for example, exploding the body of monsters which can come back when normally killed), and it's nice to explore those combinations. Melee is mostly awful, though (wonky hitboxes and possible stunlocks). The puzzles range from clever (rare) to busywork (often). The biggest draws are the story and the atmosphere. The plot starts straightforward, but it takes a few turns along the way. Our protagonist is a mostly evil, yet somehow charming vampire. His disdain managed to amuse me several times, and his voice acting is suitably theatrical for the drama that unfolds. The music gives off a desolate vibe, fitting the world you'll traverse. The world's lore is also fairly unique and interesting. The game can wear your patience, but if you learn to embrace it, it will reward you with a solid story and surprisingly clever ideas, while offering a unique mood.
The game has a unique artstyle which I personally liked, and the soundscape is also good (I particularly appreciated how the aliens sound when they speak). The music is good (not exactly memorable, but appropriate) and generally the background noises have good production values, helping with the mood. As a point-and-click, the tone is relatively serious, but there are some bits of humour here and there, and the setting seems generally interesting. The gameplay is pretty standard, and the puzzles were logical. I wish the game didn't restrict some objects to just being examinable OR interactive, but it's probably to avoid writing and voicing non-essential lines (the game uses the standard left-click to interact, right-click to examine, with the mouse wheel bringing up the inventory). The demo is pretty short, so it's hard to form a proper opinion on the game, but overall the protagonist seems to be a good design choice, personality-wise (he is smart and cracks jokes, but he doesn't overdo it, which I believe helps set the tone for the game), and the setting seems intriguing. I'll be paying attention to this project, as I believe it has the potential to be a good adventure.
The formula is similar to other games in the same genre : you pick a starting deck, you select the path to pick on the map, which is disseminated with fights, random events, shops and so on. The setting is a Mad Max kind of apocalyptic future, where the wasteland is filled with cars repurposed to be death machines, and you are competing in an event to gain access to the one city where civilization is still standing. The game has a lot of personality to it, thanks to how well it's themed: the deck is created by choosing a driver and a car (the driver provides 3 cards which are available every turn, the car decides starting "mana", armor, HP and a starting set of cards). Every encounter provides some scrap to spend at shops and you can select 1 out of 3 parts for your car (which swaps out a sub-group of cards for another, and might also provide extra bonuses to your stats). You have to unlock most options, though, so you have no choices to make in the beginning. In a game about vehicular combat, movement is very important, and you'll have to manage your gear (high gear grants bonuses to certain cards, but will cause you bigger penalties if you run out of mana), and position, before you can attack your opponents. Different weapons will have different ranges and areas they cover (although you can always ram into your opponents, if you have movement cards), and everything comes together to create tense fights along the road. Difficulty is a bit uneven (and can be unforgiving when you are new to the game), but with some practice, you'll learn how to navigate around the enemies and get your opportunity to strike, possibly draining their mana with your attacks just enough that they won't be able to do anything on their turn, while avoiding the same fate. Some weapons the enemies can sport are a bit unfair, but such encounters are very rare. Presentation is good (but not great) across audio and visuals. Overall, I had great fun with it for several hours, recommended!
Disclaimer: I haven't finished the game. Intravenous should be right up my alley: I love stealth games like Metal Gear Solid, Splinter Cell, Hitman and so on, and I thought a pure top-down version would be great. Sadly, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The story is a weak revenge tale, with morally questionable characters. After the intro I honestly just started skipping, it's not worthwhile in any way. The gameplay, however, is worse. First, the map design feels messy: buildings are haphazardly thrown around, enemy patrols are impossible to follow since they all move way beyond your current screen, buildings have often bizarre layouts, with tons of windows and other openings just to make things more annoying for you. You rarely ever have a good hiding spot from which to study the situation, so you are always moving. Often, you only have vague objectives and directions, which doesn't help. The game does a bad job at showing how dark any given spot of the map really is (other than your current one, since you have a "light meter" to tell you how exposed you are). It's also made harder by the fact that you have a cone of view, making it unable to know how dark what's behind you is. This is a huge issue, since: A) As mentioned above, hiding spots are rare in certain areas; B) Patrols move fast, so if they do a sudden turn toward you, it can be too late to change position, and you can't even be sure it will hide you; C) The terrain can be hard to read for obstacles, getting you stuck in the enemy's way; D) Some of the controls are awkward, so you need to know you are well hidden when starting some actions. That isn't to say the game is difficult: you have a limited amount of saves per level, but you can do so anywhere, it's just that the gameplay is super stiff this way. The AI is also stupid, prone to overreacting, and generally uninteresting to handle. It's often easier to not engage with it. There are other issues, but I have hit the 2000 letters mark.
Disclaimer: I didn't finish the game. In fact, I couldn't be bothered playing it for more than 40 minutes (the game should be finished within 2 hours anyway). There isn't really much to say here. As a 3D FMV horror-adventure game (played from a first person POV), this game commits all the sins its genre allows: slow, unskippable transitions whenever you walk, turn or pretty much do anything; story presentation is barely intelligible; cheap, pseudo "jump-scares" (if we want to call "slowly panning the camera to a corpse or a ghost hand from a mirror" scary); puzzles that barely require any intellect; a time limit; no save feature; devoid of interactivity; overuse of musical cues for its scary moments and so on. But the biggest problems is that it's dull, which kills any attempts at building a mood. There is barely any context to the events at hand. In the intro, you are told your father suddenly went on a murderous rampage, and you try to go talk to him to understand what is going on, only to get sucked into a portal to a gothic castle. In the first few minutes, an apparition of your father explains to you that the castle is something akin to a realm in his mind, and that you should leave. You can also see weird, cryptic flashbacks when exploring, and that's all the story you get, until very close to the end, pretty much. Having checked a playthrough, I'll only say the twist is so stupid, I'd accuse it of being written by an AI, if it had come out recently. Thanks to the fact that the characters are barely explored, it also feels totally undeserved (we know nothing of them so why should we care? More than a twist, this feels like the first introduction to one of the characters' traits). The game is effectively the amount of gameplay and story you'd exepect for an intro, stretched over 2 hours, and it's clumsily delivered. All the praise I can give it is that it accomplishes what it sets out to do, even if it's an ill-conceived idea. Nostalgia is mandatory.
Noctropolis is a point-and-click adventure with an intriguing premise. Our protagonist ends up in a comics book world he loves, and he has to take the mantle of its previous (now retired) super-hero, Darksheer. The game features 2 actual in-game comics near the beginning, giving you a taste of the over the top setting of this world. Sadly, that's the peak of the game. Those are the only two comics you'll see (so no clever meta-narrative, nor eye-candy). The most heroic-feeling part of the adventure is accomplished when the protagonist is still a regular human, and once he turns super-hero, we'll rarely ever use his power or get acknowledged as a caped hero, and we'll deal with a LOT of run-of-the-mill puzzles for an adventure. It's not all doom and gloom: the visual style of the game is great (even if the mix of 2D and live-action characters and cutscenes feels unusual, they make it work), the soundtrack has some fine tunes, the world seems to have an interesting story to it, and the villains have interesting designs/gimmicks... But they never amount to much. You face multiple of them, but very often the conclusion is incredibly weak, and you don't feel like you did much. Characters you'd expect to be important disappear, the lore of the world never gets explored (you get two info-dumps), some of the puzzles grow finnicky, where actions you tried before lead to different outcomes later on. The controls are a bit stiff. You right-click to show your verbs, and the selection is akward: goto, move (an object), get, open, talk, use (inventory item). The plot also ends with a whimper, and character development between the protagonist and his sidekick is basically absent. You go through tedious tasks for minor items/progress, and it just feels wrong when you are playing a super-hero. The idea has a spark of imagination to it, and it barely manages to carry the game to the finish line once the game has no thrust left. Hard to recommend, however.
WOH is a turn-based rogue-like, themed around classic horror mangas, with a pinch of Eldritch horrors in it. Visuals are great, although the style isn't for all (the "1-bit" graphics are exceptional in capturing the feeling of an ancient PC game of sorts, as well as the manga inspiration). The design of the grotesque enemies you encounter is also great, and even the sound and music feel very "appropriate", for lack of a better word. The gameplay, at its core, is just a series of random encounters, triggered by exploring the locations you have available (each location has its own set of encounters, although I assume some are universal). The encounter might then expect you to make a choice (and usually test your stats) or to have an item available to automatically get a good outcome. Items can be found during certain events or bought in stores (but the selection is random, and funds can be scarce). Almost all actions increase your "doom counter" and if it reaches 100%, it's over (you can also die by losing all stamina and/or reason). The other type of encounters are fights. They are simple, but with some elegant choices, like focusing to increase your chance to hit (even up to guaranteed hits), dodging and so on, while managing the equivalent of your "action points" bar each turn to survive. Fights also have custom systems for specific enemies and for ghosts, at times unlocked by learning more during the exploration phase. The gameplay works together with the themes (it really feels like a twisted horror manga), as you investigate weird events to stop armageddon. Survive 5 mysteries (each with several endings), and you'll be able to tackle the final challenge. The one flaw is that once you know a mystery, replaying it is much easier, but there are a lot of them, and there is lot of variety in general. Development has also been historically slow (more updates are planned after 1.0). I strongly recommend this game if you like this type of rogue-like.
Let me shout it from the rooftops: this game's story is BAD. What starts off as an intriguing sci-fi adventure, which gets weaker with a few stumbles through the middle, turns into a banal story of someone who's made it all up to cope with their own traumas, born from being too selfish toward their friends and family, after a car incident. There is no point in discussing gameplay, presentation or plot (although I'll remark how everything gets worse after the twist). There is barely a character arc in here, shoved near the end, and there are no consequences (either from the "dream plot" or to the fact that the protagonist was absent in important times for her family all to chase her "secret" writing career). You perform some apologies (mostly in your head) and everything is fine and dandy. Wouldn't you know it? Your friend didn't even die in the car accident! It's all weak and perfunctionary. I always had a soft spot for the old adventures by Animation Arts. They might not be perfect, but they had personality, and understood how to put together good set-pieces to keep you interested to the story, even if they might have been a bit silly or otherwise flawed at times. I was looking forward to a return to form, but instead this might be when I stop caring about the company. The puzzles were nice (only a couple of negative outliers, but nothing actually bad), and the production values good enough for such a game, but what good does it all do if they pull off the "it was all a dream" in such a lazy way? The way it's handled is terrible (while it's obvious that something is "off", there is no good foreshadowing), and doing it so close to the end meant there was simply no way to actually develop a plot with the time left. Instead you get some cringy cliches about regrets and making amends (mostly in her mind so far, I can't stress this enough). Don't buy this. If it was even slightly worse I'd ask for a refund after finishing it.
