I played this game and read the related short story. This is a classic style point-and-click adventure, with dialogue puzzles, inventory puzzles, pixel hunting, etc. You take on the role of each of the last 5 humans on Earth after an omnipotent supercomputer destroys all other human life. Each character has their own self-contained scenario. The graphics are older, but pleasant and functional. The music is foreboding and is good at expressing moments of horror and triumph. The story is very immersive, learning bits and pieces of each character's life before the end of the world and also the nature of the supercomputer. There are some very gruesome and violent elements and difficult social subjects. The puzzles are tricky and somewhat unfair, but I was able to figure out solutions for the most part. This is a game where you note a useful object you need, but the game won't let you take it until the character has a motive to. It is good to keep going back to previous screens and trying the same actions after new events, what is available will change. There are also better and worse endings for each of the scenarios, without good clues you were missing something Definitely worth playing, maybe have a walkthrough at hand in case you need it.
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I was excited to try a new version of an old favourite game. I found this game is simply too difficult and is more frustrating than fun. A good example is river crossings, in the classic game as long as you are smart about fording when the river is a certain depth, or caulk/floating when the river is higher, you can typically avoid accidents. In this game, you have to try to plug holes in your wagon with pelts that are hard to come by. The result is a river crossing almost always causes catastrophic damage to your supplies and party. Just play a classic version instead, a 'good old game' indeed!
This is a point-and-click adventure game with inventory and dialogue based puzzles. I felt that the puzzles were fair. I was able to play through the game without consulting a guide. The game provides a lot of hints in observations from the main character about what you need to be doing to achieve the next objective. The graphics, music, and sound effects all seem very well done. The music was enjoyable to listen to for the most part. The story is comical , making fun of a lot of sci-fi, gamer, and other pop culture references. There is a neat sci-fi element in reliving the same day over and over again and seeing how the choices the main character make change the timeline. There are several strong side characters that make multiple appearances. I would say the main negative is some crude and mean-spirited language from the main character, but this doesn't overwhelm the experience.
In this game, a story is told through the use of several video segments that last about 5-10 minutes each. In between the video parts, you can explore the house the characters live in to get more backstory about what is going on at each moment. The exploration is completely optional. There are no puzzles to solve. You are also asked two sets of questions between each video segment: 1. your thoughts about various topics which may or may not relate to the story 2. you are asked to interpret what is going on in a set of images. The story was pretty compelling for the majority of it, but the ending was very tense and disturbing. I guess this sort of feeling is expected in a psychological thriller but I found it unpleasant. I would recommend this game overall though.
This is a point-and-click adventure game embracing an old style and interface, such as the King's Quest games have. The premise of the story is that the main character, a cryptologist, helps a famous author's daughter find the parts of his final last novel he wrote to her before his death. The author has left a series of clues and puzzles to guide them along the way. One interesting dynamic is that each time you get a new chapter of the novel you play out a story within the story, in a medieval fairy-tale kingdom. It felt fun to enter a classic fantasy context for the story as a relief from the darker, more modern main story. I found the puzzles pretty challenging at first. I looked at a walkthrough a few times for Chapter 1. But after that I found my patience or got used to the author's logic and had a rewarding experience. There are classic puzzles of picking up inventory items, combining them, and using that at the right location. There are a few puzzles that have to be timed precisely. This confused me at first, but there are usually good clues about when to time them. There are also a few situations where you can fail and die, but the game reloads again to give you another try with the situation. Overall, I felt like I was reading a good mystery, thriller novel, like something from Dan Brown. I had a hard time putting the game down until it was finished.
Basically this is a simulation game where you are a cadet on a space station. You have a job on the space station, and you also have free time which is divided into actions. You can use the actions to participate in Spacebook activities, or go to events. While you can befriend whoever you wish in Spacebook, it's more convenient to make friends with people in power which you can use to get promotions. You make new friends by taking activities that raise your interests to match those of your 'target' friend. The game has a great feeling of 'just one more turn' that has kept me playing for hours.
The nice thing about the main character and their partner is you get to choose what race, gender, and gender of the partner you like best. So, for example, because I'm a gay guy I chose the main character as male and his partner as male too. That way the whole story was a gay romance. But it could easily be a heterosexual or lesbian romance too if you chose the appropriate characters. It was a great feeling to play a game with gay characters at the center of the story; you just don't see many games like this out there. The main goal of each day is to earn more money so you can continue your journey westward. You can take on some jobs to do that, you can steal money. The jobs are usually tedious points in the gameplay. Every so often the game will present a moral choice for you. If you take an immoral path, it helps you get money faster, or you can be moral, and pass up the opportunity. Some of the choices are pretty humourous because you would have to be a truly evil person to go through with some of them. The best part of the game is the story. I got excited to see if my character would make it to the west coast in time. I especially loved the scenes where the main character reminisces on how wonderful the romance used to be before everything went wrong. There is just a horrible feeling of despair whenever you come out of those memory scenes to the harsh cold reality that you don't have the romance anymore that I thought was well done.