Let me get the good parts out of the way first: the art is beautiful, the comic book-style cutscenes are great, the music is decent, but not memorable, there's decent voice acting, the puzzles are generally intuitive, without moon logic. Now the bad parts. While the quality of drawing itself is great, the art design for a game is abysmal. Each screen has a ton of details, and most of the time interactive objects, especially smaller ones, do not stand out in any way, so you have to scan the screen, while looking at the top of it, because the names of objects appear there, and not near the cursor. Multiple puzzles are designed so, that you have to walk back and forth between locations. That would be fine, but the main character moves very slowly, so a lot of the game is just watching your character stroll leisurely here and there. Voice acting is good, but at times it gets annoying, and the lines sometimes make no sense. Especially, when you try to resort to the old "try using everything with everything" bruteforce way of progressing, only to later learn from a walkthrough, that there is a small item right at the edge of the screen you missed. Writing is littered with corny gaming jokes. Also it seems they ran out of steam by the end. Game starts with an intense chase scene. But ends with what's supposed to be an intense confrontation, but then there are two characters fighting, while the hero leisurery strolls around doing puzzling. Overall, I'd recommend this only to the most hardcore adventure game fans.
A sequel to an older McPixel game, the gameplay consists of a bunch of short situations, in which McPixel has to survive / overcome some obstacle / help his grandma. The situations are generally absurd, with McPixel adding to their absurdity with his crude humor and unconventional approaches. By the latter I mean, that, if you click on some mundane object, and expect the hero to interact with it in a sane manner, he can, say, take off his pants and pee on it instead. If that kind of humor is up your alley, you'll love this. The situations are split into chapters, each chapter contains on average ~10 situations, so you can complete a single chapter in a short amount of time. Even though the goal of the situations is clearly defined, and you may reach it quickly, even if by accident, you can always continue replaying each situation to see every type of craziness, that can happen in it. All it is accompanied by a bombastic soundtrack. And there's even a storyline! All in all, if you like what you've just read, the game is definitely worth its money. If you're looking for some more "serious gaming", that's fine too, but this game ain't it.
This is a very short, 1.5 - 2 hours, complete in one sitting adventure game. Overall it's what you'd expect from a point-and-click game: walk around, gather items, use them on environment or on each other, solve an occasional puzzle. There are no other interactable characters, and, as a result, no dialogues. Instead the game has the main character narrating stuff and textual information, like diaries / letters. In the context of this game it isn't too good, as the main character is annoying at times, and there's no good pacing, when it comes to textual info. What I mean by this, is, that you have 15 minutes of gameplay, where the only information you get is the protagonist saying one-line phrases, and then suddenly you get a page or more worth of text. The item-related puzzles are pretty straightforward, I hardly ever had to stop and think, what to do next. A bit annoying was, that there are always some items, that are never going to get used, but that will be stuck in your inventory. There are some puzzles in the form of minigames, which I found more annoying, than enjoyable. Shoutout to the "assemble stuff from pieces" puzzle and to the ant puzzle. Some positives: the visuals are pretty good, though the devs did take some shortcuts with animations of character's actions. All lines are voice acted, which is nice. There are some nice quality-of-life features, like skipping lines, fast exit from locations with double click, inventory scrolling with mouse wheel. I would recommend to get this on sale to adventure game enthusiasts, who would like to have a short game to do in one sitting and move on.
Right off the bat: the artwork in this game is incredible. The backgrounds are very well drawn, the comic book-style cutscenes are, well, pretty much like reading a cool comic book. There's very little animation, but it doesn't detract much from the experience. The music and SFX are also done pretty well. Thumbs up for the Pink Floyd reference! These aspects are where the game really shines, but, sadly, in others it fails really badly. First of all: writing. I played in English, and the lines were riddled with obnoxious mistakes. For me personally, if I see things like "your" instead of "you're", especially in a commercial product, I become unable to take what is written seriously. Moving past the grammatical mistakes, the writing itself is very weak. It gave me an impression of a fantasy book for youngsters. The characters are one-dimensional, there's no nuance, the dialogues gave me an impression, that a school-grade kid wrote them after reading a few fantasy books. Next is game design. It's all over the place. There are your traditional inventory-based puzzles. They are alright, and mostly obvious. Annoying part with them is that they frequently involve going back and forth between locations multiple times, and each transition has a loading screen for some reason. Multiple puzzles are like minigames. Most of them I did not enjoy at all. Example: in the latter part of the game there's a puzzle, where you have 3 buttons, that you have to press in the correct order. And there are no hints and no indication, what the order should be. So it's just guesswork. No fun at all. There are also some bugs. I have had UI elements not disappear properly at times, and once I managed to softlock the game. Overall, if you want to enjoy incredible art with gameplay and story being in background, I highly recommend this game, 5 stars. If you're a regular adventure game enjoyer, it's worth a playthrough, but I won't be replaying it in the future for sure.
Duck Detective is a cute whodunit story in a world filled with antropomorphic characters, with the main character having a noir detective vibes. This game took a bold approach, and devs came up with a pretty original combination of mechanics. The main one is Deduc(k)tion. You get a sentence about a case with missing keywords, and you select the keywords to fill in the blanks from a list of ones you know. There are multiple ways to learn keywords. One of the more original ones is a mechanic called Investigation, where you move a magnifying glass over a character / object trying to find important things. Other ways are either talking to characters, or asking them about particular clues. Clues are investigatable objects, that you can ask other characters about afterwards. All the mechanics are user-friendly. During investigation you will get notified, when the glass is over something important. During deduc(k)tion the game will give you limited information on how many keywords you got wrong. Also there's a hint system, but I didn't use it. The art totally fits the mood. The backgrounds are 3D with isometric camera. I really liked the detail, where some objects react to you moving near them. For example, if you walk past a rubbish bin, it will fall. The characters look like cardboard cutouts with almost no animation. Paper Mario vibes. Music and SFX were nice too. Not memorable, but fulfilled their background roles well. All the dialogue is voice acted, and it's awesome. Things I didn't like: * The game is a bit heavy technically. That's understandable, given, that it's made in Unity engine * A lot of walking back and forth between small locations, each transition has a loading screen * Most of the deduc(k)tions are short and easy to get. But at the end you suddenly get a huge one, and, if you haven't figured everything out yourself, you'll have a hard time Overall, I'd love to see more like this. I had a blast playing this game.
