Return of the Obra Dinn is a particular kind of Murder Mystery. A merchant ship that went missing 5 years before returns to harbor with a few corpses on board and a lot of missing crew members. You play an Insurance Investigator(Don't get too excited now) who is sent figure out what happened. Aiding you is a map of the ship, a crew roster, sketches of the crew and a logbook....as well as pocket watch which allows you to see the last few moment of a dead persons life. With these tools, you will explore the ship and use the corpses to reconstruct the series of extremely unfortunate events that comprised the last voyage of the obra dinn, and more importantly(and with some difficultly), determine the fates of all 60 passengers and crew. While you see faces clearly in the flashbacks and fates are often obvious, names are much harder to connect and often must be gleaned by inference and intuition(uniforms, what jobs they're shown doing, what language they speak, etc). For the very most part, the game doesn't try to throw curve balls at you. Everyone will be wearing their proper uniform and doing their proper job and using their real names(no aliases or name changes). A tip to get the best ending: Don't leave the ship until you see a screen telling you that there is nothing more to do on the ship. You're not under any time pressure and your job is to correctly determine everyone's fate. The game is about 8-9 hours long but a fascinating reconstruction of a doomed voyage through a unique mechanic(Cryostasis did something like this years ago but this isn't quite the same thing). It's certainly not a game everyone is going to like but if the idea of watching a tragedy unfold piece by piece and trying to make sense of it all appeals to you, this is worth a play.
So this game was made by the people who made Gone Home. It's probably a bit better then gone home, or it was more interesting. Basically, a space station near the moon has suffered an accident and you've been sent in to retreieve any available data regarding what happened. The station had a holographic recording system so there are video/audio recordings all over the place to get a feel for the characters and what happened on the station. Essentially you're exploring and listening to audiologs, but it's reasonably wel done and it works well for it's 2 hour-ish length. If you don't mind walking sims/atmospheric storytelling type games, it might be worth a try for you, but it's certaintly not gonna be for everyone.
KRZ is a beautiful, haunting experience that has an amazing sense of atmosphere to it. What seems like a simple task of finding an address to make a delivery becomes a wierd, surreal journey through the kentucky backwoods and the interesting folks who live there. It feels both like a David Lynch film and a look at some of the more remote parts of the country still mired in the great recession and it somehow works. The only problem, aside from maybe it's length(each episode is maybe 2 hours if you explore everywhere) is that it's still not complete. Act IV came out in 2017 and Act V was intially set to be released "Early 2018" which then became "2018" and as of December 2018(when this is written) there's still no word of when to expect Act V). Considering the game is best experienced as a whole and not waiting a year between Acts, wait until the game is finished(Hopefully early 2019) before playing it.
The first Evoland was pretty much a proof of concept, interesting and fun but ultimately really short and lacking in real substance. Evoland 2, OTOH, does a wonderful job of turning an interesting idea into a full, satisfying game. The game looks and feels like the Legend of Zelda crossed with the plot and travel travel mechanic of Chrono Trigger. There are several time periods you can visit to explore the game world, and each one is rendered as a different console game era(8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit) where the graphics get better or worse as you travel back and forth through time. The game is fairly linear for the first half but opens up around the 8/9 hour mark where you can freely travel the world and through time as you wish. Where the game owes a lot to the previous Evoland is that the game-play type changes. A battle against lots of pirates turns into an isometric double dragon beat-em up mode, an invitation for single combat starts a Street-Fighter fighting game and so on. What's more surprising then the novelty of this is that it actually works a vast majority of the time and that none of the game-play changes feel forced(well, the guitar hero and bejeweled modes were stretching it a little) .The developers clearly tried to capture the feel and gameplay of the different genres and while not perfect, the result is fairly engaging. The worst issue I had is that some of the modes, particularly the Street Fighter match felt really difficult and my thumbs were in pain long before I won. So because of these different modes, the difficulty curve might feel schizophrenic, especially depending on your comfort level and knowledge of the game type you are playing. The designers at least had the foresight to allow you to adjust the difficulty level on the fly(you will use it, trust me) and provided plenty of checkpoints, as well as some other ways to make the game easier. Also, you will need a controller for certain parts of this game if you wish to stay sane.
Primordia is yet another good, solid adventure game from Wadjet Games, which is shaping up to be the new Lucasarts. Set in the future after an unseen apocolypse, the world is a desolate wasteland, inhabited by Man's Children, sentient machines. The game follows the adventure of Horatio, a particularly human looking robot and his assistant robot, Crispin. While they are working on restoring a crashed aircraft to working condition, a large, threatening robot steals their power core and takes off with it, towards Metropol, one for the few remaining cities left. The pair follow in hopes of recovering their power core, exploring the wasteland and the decaying city of metropol during their quest. The plot isn't amazing but it's solid and somewhat interesting and is supported by some good, if occasionally obtuse, puzzles. The characters are varied and diverse, helped by some good dialogue and voice acting. The concept of a world run by machines after humanity is gone is well realized and adds some good atmosphere, especially since the the almost mythical status of humans to the machines makes some question if they ever existed at all(There is a religion that worships Man as a race of Gods). Notable among point and click adventure games is the possibility of several different endings, depending on how many and how you solved the puzzles over the course of the game. At least one puzzle, done the wrong way, can lock you out of some of the endings but it''s generally pretty forgiving otherwise. If you like adventure games, especially of the Lucasarts/Sierra vein or like dystopian sci-fi, you'll probably enjoy Primordia. If you've played and enjoyed the other games made by Wadjet, you'll like this.
POI has some interesting ideas, but unfortunatly very few of them are done well. The story is lackluster and feels incomplete, the puzzles are ok(though pixel hunting shows up a lot) and you'll die a lot from timed puzzles. The voice acting isn't stellar either. It's very light on the Lovecraftian side, with some allusions to the mythos but it doesn't really fit with his stories very well and precious little "horror" to be found. Shadow of the comet is a better Lovecraft game even if it's got it's own issues. There's not a lot of reasons to play this other then you need to play every Lovecraft related or adventure game. Or if you liked Shadow of the Comet and you really want to see what a sequel would look like.
