"The Tragedy at Deer Creek", my Adventure Game Hotspot review!

Read my full review on Adventure Game Hotspot!

Excerpt: "Even without every question answered, the story behind The Tragedy at Deer Creek will compel you to keep slowly uncovering new layers by solving puzzles and finding documents and diaries left by the vanished nineteenth-century settlers. While the user interface feels a bit old-fashioned, and the challenge level might leave some gamers wishing for more, the presentation is beautifully bleak and pulls you immediately into the sadness of the story. I very much enjoyed my few hours spent in this ghost town, and my heart fell when I had to leave, wanting to find out more about its history and the people who once lived there, and the events that followed the tragedy that befell them. But my job there was done, and I guess some mysteries are better left buried in the past."

Unexpectedly gunned down during the "Swan Song" puzzles...

Swan Hunt...

After my first introduction with Swan Song, I completed chapter one and continued on with chapters two and three. After one hour of play, I've reached chapter four, where I have a feeling the story will take a turn.

I hate medicine that makes you feel worse...

The story of Amber, Edith and Tristan is not only told through voice recordings, but also letters and other documents and sometimes even items, like this medicine bottle. Quite peculiar are the photo frames displaying a room: there's a three-dimensional effect to them, with which you can see different corners of the room as you tilt the frame around.

A screenshot doesn't capture the beauty of this...

The puzzles themselves have become more interesting as well. They no longer limit themselves to sliding platforms. Now there are also rotating platforms, and hunters who will shoot down the wee swan whenever their color is activated. There's also a greater variety in the musical notes you can apply. I'm no musician so I don't know the correct terms, but there are beamed notes, slanted beamed notes, and tied notes where two tones are played simultaneously.

Success!!!

What I love is how you can sometimes get it right immediately, and then you feel great for having such a great sense of spatial and four-dimensional awareness, yet other times you can be convinced you got it right but fail miserably, and then need to try over and over because you just don't see it. And the beauty of it is, it never gets frustrating!

I'm very curious where the coming chapters will take me, and what kind of added difficulties I can still expect...

You can find the Swan Song on Steam and on itch.io!

Shout out for my least viewed review posts

Once in a while I check the popularity of the games I have reviewed on this blog. Here are a couple of games I feel deserve a bit more attention.

The Legend of Skye (2024 - Point & Pixel Adventures)

The SCUMM-style interface and some poorly clued objectives might not appeal to modern players used to easier games, but for old-school genre fans, The Legend of Skye provides a wonderful dose of nostalgia, transporting you back to the golden days of point-and-click classics. 

Enypnion Redreamed (2023 - Sinking Sheep)

Experienced adventurers can probably cruise through Enypnion ReDreamed in their sleep, though some of the logic puzzles might be responsible for a few nightmares. Overall, though, it’s a short but charming little journey through the subconscious that may just remind you of your own childhood nighttime fantasies.
 

This Bed We Made (2023 - Lowbirth Games)

This Bed We Made sacrifices some snooping freedom and player challenge for a more linear narrative, but there are plenty of thrilling discoveries to unpack in this compelling Hitchcockian mystery.   

INDIKA (2024 - Odd Meter)

INDIKA is an eclectic mix of graphic styles and gameplay about a young nineteenth-century Russian nun that will keep you glued to your seat with its challenging but mature reflection on faith and human morality. 

Sanya (2024 - helpnode) 

Sanya’s very simple gameplay won’t challenge anyone over the age of its young protagonist, but even for adults, this quaint, lovely side-scrolling adventure is like a nostalgic trip back to childhood.  

Twilight Oracle (2024 - Cosmic Void) 

Twilight Oracle is a nostalgic ride through a zany fantasy world, though even its witty banter can’t hide the fact it’s a short story with a simple plot only good for a single afternoon’s fun.

New game: "Swan Song" playthrough!

New game!

Swan Song is a very different game than what I usually play. It's not actually adventurey. It does have a narrative, but its focus lies primarily on the puzzle element. Now, I'm not that big on puzzle games, but there's a very good reason for me playing this one. The developer, Business Goose Studios, are Belgian, and their offices are only a half hour drive from my home. There aren't many game developers I can say that of! Their previous game, the Persian art based 30 Birds, was more of an adventure game, so I should really check that one out as well.

Help the swan cross the box.

In Swan Song, the objective is to help a little swan cross a music box. There are platforms it can jump on, but it's your job to make sure that the platforms are actually there when the cute little birdie makes it move. By placing musical notes on the music sheet, you can move the platforms around in time with the music's beat. Of course, at the start these puzzles are quite simply, though my swan did plummet to its death occassionally when I placed the notes one beat too early or too late on the sheet. Don't know if that says more about my puzzling skills, or about my sense of rhythm... The puzzles do get a lot trickier over time, though!

What's this? A story?

But it's not all puzzling in Swan Song. The gameplay truly limits itself to that, but in between the puzzles, a story unfolds as well, in several different ways. This music box, a gift from a father to a daughter is kind of magic. It already rearranges itself into a new puzzle every time it closes. But sometimes you will also find storytelling items inside. I haven't gotten all that far yet, but so far I discovered a letter from that father to his daughter, a cassette tape of a girl crying in her room when her father finds her, and I'm sure there's lots of other stuff to find.

Tristan has some explaining to do...

Swan Song is fully voiced when it comes to these narrative scenes, but there's where my one note of criticism lies. I didn't like how the text is immediately fully readable, with the voices seemingly having to catch up. This kind of spoils the effect of the scenes, and the emotional performances of the actors. In other games, text might appear in sync with the voices, and I'm missing that here. The devs have assured me they're working on it, though, but since the game supports multiple languages, it's trickier than it sounds...

With lots of levels to go, I better get back to helping my small swan across the box, and further discover the story of Tristan and Edith!

You can find the Swan Song on Steam and on itch.io!

"Cult Vacui", my Adventure Game Hotspot review!

Read my full review on Adventure Game Hotspot!

Excerpt: "Cult Vacui is a valiant effort to present a point-and-click survival adventure with a time management system, but I must admit I was expecting more. All the puzzles are very straightforward, it’s obvious what you have to do to prepare yourself for an optimal defense against the attack of the cult, and it’s hard to miss anything important. Hard, but not impossible, because the fairly strict time restriction doesn’t allow for much leeway in your sequence of events. Thanks to the manual save system, though, you can easily go back a few steps and do things differently, resulting in a game that takes less time to finish than I took writing this review. It still lacks some polish, but the pixel art graphics are a joy to behold, the haunting music will keep you on the edge of your seat, and the story is suspenseful enough to keep you going. You’d think that defeating an evil cult might require a little more time and effort, but all in all, it’s a tidy bit of business for a couple hours of work."

Classic playthrough: "Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer's Appliance"!

Classic time!

Ernie Eaglebeak is back in Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer's Appliance, a new adventure after he saved the world in his first game. Ernie has returned to Sorcerer's University where professor Otto Tickingclock instructs him to research that mysterious McGuffin Ernie had been chasing in his previous adventure, the Sorcerer's Appliance, and find out about its origins.

Same old Legend Entertainment interface style...

It's basically a text adventure, only with added pictures to show the scenes. You have a list of all possible verbs you can use, a list of all objects both in sight as well as in your inventory, and a description of what's going on. You can click on the verbs and items to select them, but I found it quicker to just type them into the text parser. Once again there's a time element, so you have to make sure to do what needs to be done before time runs out and you reach a dead-end or game-over. So, once again as well, saving and restoring are two of the most used verbs in the Spellcasting series...

The women are still scantily dressed...

Trouble is, there is so much to see and do, and every time you type a command, time progresses five minutes, so in the end it's basically a question of discovering the perfect run. Written by Steve Meretzky, there's truly a comedic fantasy novel's worth of descriptions and dialogues in this game. The sheer amount of information is overwhelming when compared to the modern, more succinct adventure games with more obvious goals and clues.

Crazy students...

Matters are complicated even more by the university's hazing rituals. To be accepted in the fraternity, you need to perform specific tasks each day. Not only that, you also have to attend your classes. As a form of copy protection, your schedule is included in the game's documentation, as well as a blueprint of the sewage system; not looking forward to exploring that one, to be honest...

So, after one hour of playing, now I need to attach a fake moustache on a roof statue, investigate the appliance, and attend three magic classes today... What can go wrong?

You can find the Spellcasting games on Steam and on GOG!

New game: "Uncle Lee's Cookbook: Five Recipes For Disaster" playthrough!

New game!

Time to dine! Uncle Lee's Cookbook: Five Recipes For Disaster by Relatively Painless Games is the commercially released collection of all Uncle Lee games still available on Apicici's itch.io page. They have been revised and fully voiced, and the collection has been published by Dionous Games.

Something's cookin'...

In a prologue tutorial, the game teaches you the ropes of its point 'n click interface. Standard fare for most of us, but what I very much enjoyed was that hovering over hotspots already gives a description of the item in question. Only too bad that many times when you click on an item, it doesn't do anything else. Hovering an inventory item over the hotspots also shows where it can be used and where it can't. This prevents the annoying "This doesn't work" reply, though it does make the game a lot easier. 

Meet Ines, the actual protagonist!

The next five episodes are stand-alone stories, kind of like episodes of a television sitcom where one family or other finds itself in a pickle due to several misunderstandings. I finished the prologue and first three episodes in a total of one hour and a half, but I needed a bit more than an extra two hours to complete episodes four and five.

I never owned a Gameboy...

For some reason the second episode looks completely different than the others, giving it the appearance of a Gameboy title with monochrome colors. While in the first game the main character Ines is 15 years old, in this prequel episode she is only 10, and in a subsequent episode you'll celebrate her 20th birthday.

You made a time machine out of a VW van?

Ines is the one who always has to solve the problems created by her Uncle Lee's crazy inventions. You will face both time-travelling and reality-changing puzzles, very well integrated both into the storyline as well as gameplay elements. The game has great voice acting, and there's great chemistry between the characters.

Very gothic...

These bite-size adventures are not so challenging, but do require some creative thinking now and then. Dialogue options will change depending on what you have already achieved, information you have discovered, or what you have changed in the environment, and the only time I didn't immediately know how to progress was when I had to talk to a character a second time without realizing it. If you're really stuck, there's an in-game hint system where you can check your goals, then ask further questions about what you need to do exactly, divided into small and big hints.

Don't ask...

I didn't know anything about this game when I started it, so I didn't realize the title meant it was divided into separate episodes. I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't one long, continuous story, but I quite enjoyed these short bursts of adventuring. Just the thing when you have an hour to kill!

You can find Uncle Lee's Cookbook: Five Recipes For Disaster on Steam and on itch.io!

It's been a while with so many new games being released, but for my next playthrough I'm finally going to return to the past for another classic Legend Entertainment game, the second one in the series of a young sorcerer...

New game: "School Quest" playthrough!

New game!

When I first got into adventure games, back in the early 90s, they were already making them in VGA 256 colors. Over the years I did go back to play some older, text parser ones, like Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest 2, Gold Rush and the King's Quest series. I'm a sucker for more realistic graphics, but you just have the play the classics, right?

Welcome to East Geauga High School in Ohio!

Anthony Anselmo of Pretty Bird Games seems to love those classics as well. He has developed School Quest, very much in the style of those early Sierra titles but with a point 'n click interface that just makes it a tad easier than finding the correct words in a text parser. The simplified graphics strike the nostalgic chord, and the game captures that typical 80s adventure game vibe.

The computer class.

You play as Tony, who has noticed that lots of kids in school have gone missing. He feels something's off with the faculty staff as well. So he goes about trying to find an answer to this mystery. You go round and round the school, through the hallways and into the classrooms, following one lead or other with the hope of ultimately discovering what happened to your missing friend Erik. You mostly do this through fetch quests, doing favors for your fellow students, and talking to them to learn information that will help you figure out what to do and where to go next.

When in doubt...

Beware of typical Sierra-style death scenes, however! The hallways are dangerous, with slippery wet spots and bullies ready to beat you up. If you don't have a hall pass, you'll be thrown into detention. And if the staff catches you doing something that's not right, it's game-over as well. The story-relevant deaths were okay, but I could have gone without the random bullies showing up and having to walk around the hallway obstacles, sometimes miscalculating a pixel breadth and still tripping over them. It seemed to me they were only there to prolong the gaming experience.

Oh no! Sports!

I finished School Quest in a little under 4 hours. I put in a lot of time at the start of the game exploring the school and all the class rooms, talking to all the other students. Turns out I didn't really have to; you wind up visiting every corner of the building anyway, and the game is so linear that the characters that can help you out will only appear when you have reached that point in the story, and all the "fixed" characters are only there for filling, though some do give you some useful pointers. So you end up searching the school over and over again for the next important student each time you're finished with the previous one. It's a bit funny, though, because in the end it can feel like everybody in school already knows what's going on exactly, leading you from one informant to the next, slowly pushing you in the right direction.

Victory!

But I loved the detailed writing, even though sometimes the dialogues go on a bit too long with the back and forth banter - and they could have done with one extra proofread as well. But the way all these characters are brought to life, and how they insult each other, or simply talk about everyday experiences, it felt a bit like I was playing an older cousin of Perfect Tides; the Sierra version, that is...

The developer is already working on his next game, College Quest, which will take Tony from the 80s into the 90s. School Quest is fun, but has some flaws, so I hope College Quest will be more streamlined. I really wonder how the developer's skills will have evolved!


You can find School Quest on Steam and on itch.io! 

"Whirlight: No Time To Trip", my Adventure Game Hotspot review!

Read my full review on Adventure Game Hotspot!

Excerpt: "If you love point-and-click adventures with loads of stunning locations, interesting characters and many hours of engaging gameplay, you’ll find Whirlight: No Time To Trip a joy to play. Its unique graphical style, combining almost photorealistic backgrounds with slanted architecture and more cartoonish characters, depicts many gorgeous settings in various time periods to explore at your heart’s desire. Hector and Margaret’s antics in the past, present and future provide both fun gameplay and a captivating story, reminding me how much fun time-traveling adventures can be. I would have preferred some better signposting at particular times, and it’s a shame that shortcuts were taken with inventory animation. But ultimately these are minor blemishes in a game that will delightfully suck you into its thoroughly entertaining time-hopping vortex."  

New game: "Midnight Saturn" playthrough!

New game!

Prolific game developer Cosmic Void delivered a new title once again! In his signature style, Midnight Saturn looks, sounds and feels very similar to his previous detective puzzler, Neon Hearts City, but I'm happy to see it's very much its own thing. I have to admit, I was a little bit afraid it would be too much of a clone... 

Yeah, I'd hang out here...

This time you play as Simm, a PI put on a murder case by the victim's sister. She wants you to find her niece Lucy, the victim's daughter, certain she has to know something more about her father's murder. And of course, as is often the case in Cosmic Void games, there's a medium named Zora who can communicate with the dead. Just bring her something of their belongings, and she can make them speak and deliver cryptic clues as to what to do next.

Yep. Map. Thanks.

You travel all across town to a handful of locations, with very helpful people in each one. Simm seems to know them all already, and addresses them by their first name. And I hadn't been playing for fifteen minutes or three different women had already hit on him, as well.  You also visit the nearby forest and lake. The lake is home to crocodiles, but interesting items may be found in the bellies of these creatures, so it's your job to find a way for them to, well, spill their guts, I guess...

These crocs will wish they never met me...

Midnight Saturn if fully voiced, and done so excellently. The performances make the detective noir writing shine, which is getting better and better in these Cosmic Void games. Rowdy York once more takes on the lead, though, which makes it difficult to distinguish this detective from the one in Neon Hearts City. Perhaps it would have been better to have completely gone with the same character, and create a franchise?

Meet Zo and Ra. They go by Zora.

I finished the game in two hours and fifteen minutes, which gives Midnight Saturn a similar length as Neon Hearts City. There were a couple of "break the code" puzzles, but they were far easier to figure out than similar puzzles in previous Cosmic Void games, so they were fun diversions. Only one inventory puzzle I had to solve by using everything on everything. The problem was that when I picked up the item to use in question, it looked far too big to fit in the place where I was supposed to put it, so that sent me astray for a while.

A "pick the right color" code...

I had fun playing this game. It was easy yet interesting, perfect if you have just a couple of hours to spare, or to take a breather between more bulky games. Cosmic Void writes cool sci-fi stories. This one wasn't all too sci-fi-ish, with not that many (an)droids or technological gadgets. There are aliens, of course, and the typical paranormal stuff with the psychic. I do keep hoping for a longer experience, but these short games are very much his signature style, so I'm very curious to see what else he has up his sleeve.

You can find Midnight Saturn on Steam and on itch.io!

Curtain drops on "As Dusk Falls"...

Quite the aftermath...

My wife and I finished the last two chapters of As Dusk Falls, after having a great time with the first four. This game is entirely about story, so it's hard to talk about it without spoiling the whole thing. I had a feeling all character storylines wrapped up too quickly, too easy. Most characters didn't even return in the final chapter, except in reference (non-playable). Perhaps they would have if we had made different decisions, but I doubt it. The story just focuses on the same two characters...

Hey look, a mini-game!

We mostly played it to keep everyone as safe as possible. Usually we agreed on the decisions. Sometimes I overruled my wife, when I felt a very strong dislike towards one of the other characters, and I didn't want my lead to take any crap from them. My wife was very upset when I angrily turned away someone handing me a religious flyer, for instance, saying you should at least thank them politely... Sometimes I went with my wife's decisions, even when I would have done the exact opposite had I been playing on my own. I wanted to take another character with me, but she insisted I leave them behind, thinking they would die otherwise... It's give and take when you're together!

Wow, payphones, how 90s...

When it comes to the community results, our decision-making style was pretty much all over the place. Mostly we either joined a 2/3 majority, but I liked it better when we were with the 1/3 minority. I didn't like it when it turned out almost everyone made the same decision as us, but I marveled at the decisions only 10% of the people made. I always like it when it turns out I played a game differently than most. 

In any case, we had a blast playing this! It's something different than watching a movie or TV show together, and my wife really likes being able to steer the story a bit. Though she often expects different results from the chosen dialogue options, because sometimes it's not only what you say, but how you say it, and that wasn't really incorporated into the game, so sometimes things "came out wrong", you might say, and some what she thought were positive decisions, backfired.

I'll be playing on my own again next. A new, short, sci-fi, detective story by a very prolific developer. But if anyone has any suggestions on other games like As Dusk Falls I could play with my wife again, we'll be very much obliged! 

You can find As Dusk Falls on Steam and on GOG! There are also Playstation and X-Box editions.