This is probably one of the best deduction games you'll find out there. You get all of the information you need to figure out what happened in each era as you go through a series of vignettes concerning the titular Golden Idol. The interface cleverly lets you fill in the details as you deduce new information, by building sentences. I really hope we eventually get the sequel, which is currently only available on Steam.
Disclaimer: I've only played through the first story so far. Will update this as I play more. This is a cute little game where you play a robot reporter investigating stories. There's a bit of customization of your robot's identity and appearance, and then off you go to introduce yourself to your coworkers and take on your first story. The nature of newspaper stories is that they are inherently political, so set your expectations accordingly. The sci-fi setting seems to work quite well at abstracting most of these concepts, so you can tackle these situations and individuals on their own terms. You're not railroaded into filing a specific story; you can file a story that leans in any direction you want it to, as long as you've found facts in your research to support it. This means you could just as easily file a story with a singular perspective as one that includes multiple conflicting perspectives. Build-a-Story is where you put together the info you've found, and get a preview of how many points each option will rate with your readership. Options are plentiful but may require a bit of careful planning in your investigation to uncover the 'spicier' ones that deliver more points. One of the bits of this game I really like is that you can only talk to everyone in a story once. This forces you to come up with a game plan ahead of time for what order you'll investigate in, rather than the traditional adventure structure of just talking to everyone multiple times to fully exhaust their dialogue trees. It's an interesting limitation that gives researching a story a more strategic element. Overall, I'm quite impressed, and looking forward to playing more.
It's an immersive experience, and the sound and visuals really make you feel like you're using a classic personal computer for the first time. The puzzles games are great, as per Zachtronics' usual high standards. And there are a few weird artsy games thrown in, like you'd see in shareware or freeware distributed in that time period. That having been said, most of my time has been spent playing the solitaire game.
As others have mentioned, this is not really 'complete', it's missing 2 PC games and 1 Gameboy game. All of the included games are great, though. 1-3 were the games that established ID's "smooth scrolling" tech for PC, and they originally pitched that tech to Nintendo believe it or not for a PC Mario game. 4-5 have improved graphics, a tweaked control scheme, and better music. Also, there's a pong minigame in the menus which is worth switching to if the game itself gets to be too much. Honestly I'm underselling it.. there were early memes from this game before the word 'meme' was a thing; google 'dopefish' as an example. Recommended if you like 2D platformers. It's a real shame they left out 'Aliens At My Babysitter' though; that was the swan song of ID's 2D days, and hinted at a sequel that never came..
Look, most of my time with this game was spent doing 'practice' with the cipher minigame. For that alone, it's quite a lot of fun. The phone tapping minigame is also a bit of fun to figure out, though less engaging. As for the 'full' actual game.. I've only played it once or twice on the easy setting. Some of the activities are tricky, particularly movement while infiltrating a location. If you're on a laptop without a numpad, you might be out of luck since that's where the movement keys are. The closest game I can think of is Carmen Sandiego, but that might just be skin deep, since both of them are investigation games that have an elevator sequence bridging their core loop. Fundamentally, you're finding and following clues, snooping on people involved in a scheme, building up a dossier until you have enough info to apprehend the ringleader. It's the kind of game I'd love to see redone with more refined and modern controls, but it fundamentally works as a 2D game and probably wouldn't as a 3D game, so.. any indies paying attention? Should you buy it? If you like ciphers and you don't mind playing something that, to modern tastes, feels more like an alpha or tech demo, then give it a shot if it's on sale.
This has been my go-to game since I bought it, and I'll fire it up when I need a break and don't want to think too hard. It's a chill roguelike with lots of variety and a unique traversal mechanic. If you ever played the old shareware game Jetpack, you'll feel right at home. The core traversal mechanic in this game (besides walking) is levitation. The levitation ability recharges quickly after you stop using it, so you're often judging distances between platforms to see if you can make it to a higher platform, or tapping levitation a bit at a time to traverse horizontally, or using it at the last possible minute when falling to avoid a major impact. The floatiness of levitation makes traversal a lot more fun than most platformers, and requires some real skill to get where you want to go. Add onto that a programmable wand system, where you can change out a wand's glyphs to program different projectiles, effects or spread, plus additional modifiers to your person (including some nutty ones like bleeding oil). Did I mention the per-pixel physics simulation? Wood, coal and oil burn, as does the flesh of some of the creatures you'll encounter. Water flows, as do other interesting fluids that I won't spoil. Deaths in this game are often a chain-reaction of hubris, monsters and pixel physics. Each game is different; there's a large variety of monsters that get rotated in/out based on your random seed. Your starting wands and potion will differ. The entire map changes; the levels your descending through have specific themes, but placement of items, and the modifiers and stores change. I still haven't seen everything after 13 hours. It's a fun game, I recommend it.
I bought this game back in the day, but never finished it. Compared to most JRPGs, battles just seemed to take forever due to all the slow animations. If you can get past that, you may find something you like, but I just didn't have the patience.
