The jokes are better than Leisure Suit Larry (who gets a call-out), but "better" is relative, and a lot of the dialogue is "Max hasn't said something in a while so here's a quip!" There are a few good lines, and it's fun trying to figure out how many characters Bill Farmer is voicing, but it's a tough ask for that to carry what is otherwise an obtuse and illogical puzzle adventure game with 40-ish items you have to figure out how to use. The 1993 interface doesn't help at all with "how was I supposed to know I could even touch that" levels of pixel hunting, or characters' hitboxes almost entirely overlapping things you must use, so you keep interacting with the wrong thing. Or, scenes that straight up hide that you can walk to one of the edges and there's extremely important things over there you couldn't see, which nothing in the scene mentions. I appreciate that LucasArts' design relied on never killing or softlocking the players, but they miss that frequently saving and trying things that might kill you, was also a form of player feedback, and in some cases definitely a better one than just not knowing if you can pick up that champagne bottle (you can) or that there's an elevator to another area behind the wall (there is) or that you need a lightbulb from a closet offscreen (you do). The plot itself seems to forget that it was important, and you fully resolve the case you started out with midway through the game, but just sort of ... keep going anyway, because there's more puzzles and jokes, but you don't have any further imperative or motive to do this other than "maybe there'll be more funny lines somewhere". GOG's release comes with the hint book, which is enough to get you through without spoiling things, but, Jesus Christ
This first-person dungeon crawler, from 1992, predates A LOT of games in this exact sprite-and-vector style that I know and love - Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire*, etc. The control scheme ... is bad. Patently bad. You're frequently switching modes from attack to pick-up and back, so I'm constantly entering "tilde function F5 right-click-drag function F5 tilde" just to pick up an item and then re-equip after a fight. You will also want to go to the hassle to patch the game file to allow mouse-look, a quality of life upgrade that definitely saves the experience at large from an otherwise System Shock level of "why am I using so many keys to try to look at this doorway". Honestly the controls being so, so antiquated are the only thing keeping this game from a perfect 10/10, everything else stacks so nicely and the design and exploration are so tight. There are eight floors of the dungeon and you travel back and forth between them, more frequently as you progress deeper, and it's appreciated that NOTHING RESETS, all enemies slain stay dead AND anything you leave on the floor remains persistent, which is a huge relief since carrying stuff gets very very heavy once you've collected some good gear. The in-game map is extremely handy, in that not only does it reveal where you go, but you can click anywhere on it to leave notes for yourself - including a sizeable empty space to the side of each floor, where you can write up about the puzzles and clues you find. I also appreciate that GOG includes the game's official clue book, because while a fair few in-game hints are provided, some things aren't very clear and thank goodness it isn't 1992 with no internet to talk about solutions. I had the most fun just after arriving at each new floor, exploring the unknown and getting my bearings, encountering new monsters and new NPCs and seeing what the story had to offer up next. Very excited now to try the sequel and the 2018 follow-up.
Played on Normal difficulty with FarCry Addon Mod version 1.99. I have to say, as much as I enjoy seeing where a long running series came from, this game surprised me. It holds up - it's fun, and lengthy, but consistently gives you new things to do which doesn't wear out its welcome. The vehicle sections don't suck, the escort missions don't suck, the guns are fun and have multiple modes of fire and the pacing is really, REALLY consistent. I know this series continues but it's sort of baffling to me that we so reverently remember Halo, but people tend to think that Far Cry starts with FC 3. That being said. The story is utterly BONKERS and I don't think I'll be surprised at all to see all of this plot completely thrown out in the next entries, holy moly. It doesn't take itself seriously, at least. It has shades of Just Cause, Half-Life, Goldeneye, and while it certainly isn't better than those titles, it holds its own. Recommended
Unfortunately for me, the first game in the series that I played was its second remake, so it had a LOT of the wrinkles smoothed out, making this one feel like a MASSIVE step backwards in many areas. The movement in the first game was awkward, in this game it is just abysmally bad. You have a set of arrows which you CLICK ON, NO ARROW KEYS!! and they are used both to look AND to move, BUT you need to look TO move. In one era I got stuck because, while there was clearly a door across a large room, if I faced it out in the open I couldn't walk that way. I had to go to the side of the room next to some obstacles, then turn 90 degrees away from the door, then step forward, then turn back towards the door, THEN walk that way. A MAZE IN THE MIDDLE OF AN EMPTY SPACE. This game also is frustrating in other ways, like, giving you zero indication whether or not there's something interesting you might want to pick up that is of absolutely vital use later. Which means you can't just enjoy wandering around, you're spending a lot of time taking exactly one step forward and then swooping your head around by clicking on the arrows and sweeping the mouse across the screen to see if there's something you might be able to touch, and then taking exactly one more step forward and repeating, over and over. The puzzles are okay, although the game does NOT tell you when you're stuck and need things from other eras. Or well, actually, maybe it does? You're given an AI partner fairly early on and you can ask it for hints, ALTHOUGH the hints are related to what's immediately in front of you so you can't ask generically "what to do next", AND asking for a hint at any time DOCKS YOUR FINAL SCORE. The real shame here is, the story and the trappings are FANTASTIC, and well acted and just tongue in cheek enough to be fun, truly carrying the game. But the design is one of the very worst point and click UIs I have ever played.
Sequel to The Silver Case with plenty of references to Flower, Sun, & Rain, this toes the line of "is this a game" a bit better than both while still being firmly a visual novel. It is still very much "on rails" but there are a good amount of puzzles throughout, and three intertwining stories (that can be played in almost any order but tie together roughly by chapter). It doesn't seem to end as satisfactorily as either, with a goofballs final choice that I wound up looking up endings for on youtube. I laughed a lot, I gasped a lot, I scratched my head a few times. It definitely feels like the series isn't done telling tales, but what form it takes next is anyone's guess.
I had The Journeyman Project Turbo! as a kid and didn't get very far but enjoyed the concept. Some parts aged better than others. The movement is awkward throughout the entire game, and it's unclear what exactly you can interact with, or how - the controls are a bizarre subset of keys involving Backspace and Tilde (unless you have a keyboard with a separate built in number pad I guess). There is a lot of backtracking, and while I appreciate the concept that you're time travelling to the exact same points so it follows that events repeat themselves, it does suck to, for instance, guide a mine cart past obstacles every time you want to proceed past the room after the carts. The puzzles are decent, but for every puzzle that they force into the story, there's another one that just feels like a slog. Sometimes it shines, and the inventory puzzles are really good once you find the things you need, and graciously there's not a lot of pixel hunting. What the game lacks in modern sensibilities it makes up for with charmingly cheesy full-motion video cutscenes, all of which are juuuust campy enough to keep me smiling. And kudos for this particular version allowing you an instant-undeath button if you mess up, so while you probably want to maintain a couple of saves, it doesn't seem possible to softlock or become unwinnable. I think the settings they made are interesting but for a game about time travel it sends you to the era of dinosaurs, once, in the very beginning, and then everything else is already in the distant future, so the time travel is more related to the story than it is a hook for giving the player cool looks into history. It's a different take. It works, but it's not what I expected. Looking forward to the rest of the series, hopefully they're a bit more interesting.
I had never heard of this game before, and it was a pleasant surprise, but I can't help but wonder "where was this game and how has it escaped notice for so long?" This game is BEAUTIFUL, possibly the best looking 256-color pixel art I've ever seen, every screen a painting, and animation truly smooth. I'll also say that the story has a magnificent heel-turn with just the right amount of red herrings to keep its twist hidden until you get there. I'm not crazy about the interface, and your character has one walking speed - painfully slow. There are items you can use to warp around to preset locations, but their usefulness is limited otherwise. You have an on-screen list of keywords you must click to do various interactions and none of them are "use" and most of them have singular actual uses, like "throw" and "put" and "push" and "pull", so their real job is just taking up screen real estate to save the art team from making the gorgeous paintings bigger. Also it seems that well over half the items you find in the game have no use whatsoever other than giving you points. Be aware of the totally bizarre copy protection that happens RIGHT AT THE MIDPOINT OF THE ADVENTURE, so you get about 2-3 hours in and wham here come some questions from the manual, BUT, you're asked three questions. One of them is clearly found. One of them you can sort of suss out via context clues. And one of them is a wild guess because it's not mentioned ANYWHERE, I read through the material five times sure that I'd just missed it, but no. Get ready to look that one up on the GOG forums because this has been a problem since it came out 25+ years ago. So Microprose developed a beautiful, twisting adventure, with pretty decent puzzles and great lore that ties into the gameplay, but with some baffling design decisions sprinkled among them. I enjoyed it, I'd probably recommend it but it's just not quite King's Quest 6 (two years prior) or Secret of Monkey Island (four years prior).
This game is FUN, and ENGAGING, but it is NOT GOOD. Imagine if they had released Dragon Age: Origins a year before it was finished, and you've got Risen. Risen is around 50 hours doing everything there is to do. I noticed at hour 35 I got a screen indicating that I was now in CHAPTER TWO. So I wrote that down because dang, if chapter 1 is 35 hours then what can I expect from the rest? Well I'll tell you: Chapter 2 is 7 hours, Chapter 3 is 3 hours, and Chapter 4, the last chapter, is 4 hours, completing everything available as it becomes available. Most of that time in the later chapters is exclusively finishing up the story content, which I thought was pretty good. Leveling up is annoying; when you gain enough EXP to level up, your health increases, and you get 10 Training Points. You must then locate the person who has the skill you want to train, and pay them not only with those training points but also with gold (that scales to the ability level you want). So you pay for stat boosts THREE TIMES. Experience, training points, AND gold. In the beginning of the game this is utterly ridiculous, you'll make it to level 5 or 6 before you have enough money to put it into stats that are of actual use or allow you to do more than flail wildly in battle or actually flesh out abilities. And then, suddenly, you'll have more money than god and nothing to spend it on. Every single time you need to climb onto a ledge, knee height or higher, save in advance, because the game has a 99% chance of dropping you inside of the level geometry and breaking. This is such a problem that the game implemented a spell/scroll system JUST for every character to be able to cast "levitate" to get around the broken cutscene of climbing a ledge and disappearing into space. RATHER THAN FIX THE CLIMB ANIMATION, IT IS EASIER TO CAST A SPELL TO FLOAT OVER SMALL LEDGES. So get ready to look up how to give yourself 99 Levitate scrolls via console command. Other than that the game is pretty fun
This is a remaster-slash-remake of Suda51's first game for the PS1, translated for the first time to hype up a sequel that came out more recently. As a long time Suda fan, this game started out quite strong for me and I was way into it's bizarre approach and cool mystery. But the further you get, the less of a game it is and more of a visual novel it becomes. Which isn't to say it's not enjoyable as a visual novel, but, it doesn't start that way and it becomes something else from the outset, and the outset is much more interesting, both to play and to experience. There are puzzles to solve and spooky mysteries to encounter, but then it quickly becomes an on-rails story with hardly anything for the player to do but press X to continue. I thought that the A-side/B-side approach was interesting conceptually; after each chapter where you encounter/deal with a crime, there's a side chapter where you play as an investigative reporter figuring out more of the motives and details to the events you've just seen. Unfortunately most of those side chapters are even less on the gameplay side, with the player being able to 1. walk to the computer 2. check email 3. check phone 4. check pet turtle 5. end of list. Granted that this was Grasshopper Manufacture's first game ever, and the PS1 era had some oddball ideas and experiments, but it just doesn't really hold up as a game. The story is good enough to hold me over, and I'm definitely going to check out the other games in the series (one direct sequel and a spin-off), and hopefully those improve and iterate on the ideas presented here.
