This is a true adventure game. You - as a loyal valet - are dragged into a foolhardy wager that your master made, and in the process you will have to travel the world and make sure your master (and yourself) makes it through in one piece within the 80 day limit. You will meet people and get dragged into the strangest situations: some comical, some sombre. You will win some, you will lose some, you will laugh, you will make a fool of yourself. It's all part of the job :) The game is, at its core, a "choose-your-own-adventure" type game with an incredibly simple interface and a simple goal: you have 80 days to go around the world. Achieving this goal is not hard, especially after you understand how the game works, but that isn't really the "point". The true joy is in exploration and just trying different things. After a few play-throughs you will start challenging yourself "what if I go via south america this time?" or "what if I just don't use trains at all?". You will find an assortment of strange and amusing situations. The writing is excellent and the setting is just so great for this: it is steampunk, in an age where everyone is just experimenting with new technology and wacky concepts in transportation. The game is very low pressure and casual. Even if you miss the deadline, you can just continue the trip as normal until you finish. I think it is possible to die, but in like 20 play-throughs I've only ever come REAL close once (and only because I messed up badly). Even running out of money isn't a huge deal (it will delay you a lot, but it isn't game over). You can just leave your trip and come back - the game autosaves. But even when things look bleak, you can still sometimes snatch victory from defeat. The only real downside is that you will eventually start seeing repeated dialogue (a limitation of the medium, of course: since it is all text, eventually you will get repetition). But that is a small issue. I highly recommend this game.
This is one of the most fun games I've ever played. It is an open-world 3rd person shooter with some interesting mechanics: you have a grappling hook which can be used for travel, but can also be used to tie up vehicles and people. You can also use it to steal enemy helicopters. The other main mechanic is that you have a parachute which you can deploy whenever and use it to travel long distances (or just avoid fall damage). The combination of parachute and grappling hook opens up a lot of possibilities. There is a story, but the story is dumb and not very good. Where the game shines is in just allowing you to cause random chaos all over the island. There are settlements and military bases all over the place (hundreds of sites!) with targets that you have to destroy and things to collect. Each site is its own "mini game" - you get to decide how to approach it and how to deal with the military response. The enemy spawning system is well done. They don't magically spawn around you and they don't have infinite reinforcements. It's challenging, but not unfair or cheaty and you can actually fight somewhat strategically. Combat is fun. Explosions are very satisfying. The setting is a HUGE archipelago and it is gorgeous (the graphics aged very well imho). A lot of effort was evidently put into it: you have some nice nature but also nice, nice beaches, detailed structures and small cities. And it the world feels alive. I love just driving or flying around the islands instead of fast-travelling. Even boats are fun to use (boats are usually an after-thought in these games). You end up finding random little surprises all over the place. The game doesn't artificially limit you - you have total freedom to go anywhere and do anything. The game has some minor issues. For example, the weapon selection is very limited and enemies are dumb (also there are like 4 variations of enemies). I did not encounter any bugs, though. I'm out of characters. The game is awesome. Get it.
People kept bludgeoning me over the head about how great this game was. The best way to describe this game is "generic platformer with delusions of grandeur". Gameplay is extremely shallow, to the point that after about 15 minutes you have experiences pretty much all of what is possible to do in-game. The rest is just minor incremental upgrades. At the best of times, it is an "ok" game, but it is still a platformer at its core, and never improves over that initial first impact (which I admit was exciting). The first hour is fine, then it gets gradually worse and worse until it culminates at the end in one of the most frustrating boss fights I've ever experienced. But what kills me is the Sunday morning cartoon plot we have going on here: bad guys are bad, good guys are good, good guys start winning, but then bad guys strike back and it looks like it is all over, but then good guys win in the end. The game is called "beyond good and evil", but it never goes "beyond" classic tropes and extremely well-defined roles. And the cherry on top is that all the dead (good) characters get revived in the end - just to drive home the point that there were no stakes to begin with because we will just wave a little magic wand and presto, all fixed. This is supposed to be the pinnacle of storytelling? This game was released in 2003, in the same year as, for example, Max Payne 2, Call of Duty, Jedi Academy and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. All of those are much, much better games. 2 stars because it was a complete disappointment. At least it was cheap.
This is a programming puzzle game. You are given programming challenges and you have to write a computer program that solves that task. The game has several problems though. The challenges (in the later levels) are all basically staples of programming 101. They are not particularly challenging for expert programmers, and the puzzles lack imagination and force you to write the same logic over and over again with small variations (in one challenge you literally just swap "add" with "sub"). The game has about 40 puzzles, but more than 50% of the game is basically a tutorial that could have been covered in a help page. This is just lazy from the developers: you are getting actually very little "content" - most of the game is "challenges" where the solution is "take this NEW feature (addition, subtraction, etc) and use it to solve the problem in the obvious way". The programming interface is also atrocious. It kinda works fine for very, very small programs, but once things start getting a bit more complicated it becomes unmanageable - you will have lots of arrows pointing everywhere and you can only see like 7 lines of "code" at a time. This is made worse by the fact that the programming "language" only has a handful of constructs - it's "kind of" assembly, you see? - so writing a "if x == y then foo else bar" is 4-6 extra instructions. Writing this the first time is fine, but writing this the 8th time is just annoying and makes the "code" very hard to read. You might be wondering if this is at least educational. It absolutely is not: you spend more time fighting the interface than you do learning stuff, and the challenges are boring. You are not really learning about programming, you are learning about how to beat a (bad) game. In short: stay away from it.
This game is a casual, low pressure puzzle game, where the goal is to place pieces (buildings, etc) on a procedurally generated island to score points, and try to score as many points as possible before running out of pieces. You start by drawing a few pieces. You can place them freely, and you have to meet a certain amount of score before you can draw more. As long as you keep hitting that score, you can keep drawing more pieces. If you run out of pieces, it's game over. The points you score depend on the synergies with other buildings and features of the island (trees, etc). For example, a lumber mill will score one extra point for each tree nearby, but will lose points if there are other lumber mills nearby. There are dozens of buildings and synergies to explore. After a certain number of points, you can leave the current island and a new empty one will be generated. This game compares well with Dorfromantik (also a great casual game, btw). Islanders is slightly less polished and the graphics are more basic and controls are a little bit clunkier, but that does not detract from the fun. There are only two real downsides to Islanders, IMHO, but these are minor. First, sessions tend to be very, very long, because if you "play to win", you can aggressively leverage placement mechanics to score massive points and stay alive for ages, and then strategically bail out of the island once scoring becomes hard. This resulted in multi-hour sessions for me (thankfully, you can save the game and continue later). The other downside is that your creations are ephemeral. Because they don't persist, so you will probably care less about aesthetics. I found myself making ugly clumps of buildings just for the score, whereas in Dorfromantik I cared (probably way too much) about aesthetics. It is not bad, just different. Islanders is still a solid game on its own merits: a unique and nice casual game that won't wow you, but will put a smile on your face.
Virtuaverse is a standard point-and-click adventure game, set in a cyberpunk future. And it is a mess. The story makes no sense and the plot has holes big enough to drive a truck through. The dialogue is atrocious (so much so that at some point I just started skipping it). The puzzles were nonsense. All of the characters were awful and forgettable. Also the "ending" was non-existent, to the extent that I thought the game had just frozen, but nope, "that" was it. There are some parts that are fun. I liked the parts around the nightclub for example. But mostly the game is boring and just feels weirdly disjointed with a bunch of individually good ideas lacking a coherent direction or a thread that holds them together. However, the visual and audio presentation is amazing. I loved the pixel art. I loved the music. I loved the art direction in general. I can't recommend getting this game as a game (and especially NOT at full price) - it's more of a piece of art that is unfortunately tied to a bad game. If you are considering getting this game, I urge you to just pay it with a guide handy because this game gets frustrating fast.
This game is in the same vein of the previous Rusty Lake games (Hotel and Roots), and keeps the same "bunch of puzzles" format, but in my opinion it is worse than Roots and only borderline better than Hotel. The basic formula didn't change much, but now we have a series of linear chapters (eschewing the branching chapters from Roots). And instead of self-contained "rooms" like in previous games, now in every chapter you have an "overworld" that you travel in to get to places. This could have been interesting if there was actual exploration involved, but in practice this is a major step back because travelling around is incredibly annoying, requiring multiple presses and panning the screen. Pieces required to solve puzzles are scattered everywhere and puzzles have non-obvious and nonsensical solutions and sometimes require you to travel between several screens to solve a puzzle. This sours the experience immensely. Imagine being frustrated that you can't solve a puzzle only to be hampered by the fact that you need 5 clicks and 2 screen pans to go to the other side of the puzzle. As for the puzzles themselves, there is nothing ground-breaking here but this game is even more bizarre and disgusting than the previous two. You have actual people on "Paradise" but they are useless NPCs that blurt out one-liners, act goofy and seemingly are ok with being mutilated (but somehow survive until the end). The plot makes no sense. So, the game had some potential but it was wasted. This game is sometimes good, but often boring and annoying. Roots was better.
