It's a 10 year-old game. It's slow, it's peaceful (if you don't count the monsters and the cannibals and the tentacles), it's great. 300 hours in, it's still my go-to for when I got nothing else to play. Hope that now I wrote this down, Galaxy will stop bugging me to leave an effing review.
...said the corporate drone who's been gunning down pixels from the Middle East since he was 12
A Golden Wake is one of the cartload of point'n'click adventures produced by Wadjet Eye in the last decade. The game takes you to a place that very rarely features in games - Florida in the 1920s. You control a certain Alfred "Alfie" Banks, a real estate agent from NYC who goes to boom-town Miami to make his luck. Production values are high: the game environments are gorgeous with (reasonable) attention to details, and the jazz soundtrack is wonderful and very thematic. The story itself is ...ok? If you like Florida and the Roaring '20s, the game will dazzle you. On the other hand, characters are completely one-dimensional, and stay like that even throught. The gameplay itself is the weakest link in the game: as far as adventure games go, it is perfunctory, with most "puzzles" and "solutions" immediately made evident. Several quality of life perks of the genre are missing (skip animations or switch-screen movements). There are a couple of nice puzzles or slightly innovative techniques (like the persuasion system) that just get swept along. The result is that game feels like a slog, pushing forward to get to a resolution for characters you don't really care for. Do you like Florida, the '20s, and/or want to get your hands in every adventure game ever made? Get Golden Wake. PS: Sadly, a complete lack of a Southern drawl.
The Samaritan Paradox is a game produced in the coattails of point and click adventures' resurgence - think Wadjet Eye Games. It's a homage to the classics that, without bringing much new to the genre, retains the player's interest with a solid storyline (and a game within a game) and a novel setting (Sweden in the 80s). At the same time, the Samaritan Paradox carries a lot of buggage from the classic adventures it was inspired from: There are timed sequences, there is a lot of pixel-hunting, there is the good ol' 'use everything on everything' routine (with many prompts missing), and a faulty interface that makes your character hide the objects they're in front off, and has the inventory panel cover possible areas of interest.
