Ratings by Antrax

It’s a very well-designed puzzle game, teeming with secrets upon secrets and many challenging optional conundrums. I have some minor nitpicks, but they’re too petty to list and all have to do with either things that could be more challenging, or some overly difficult secrets.

All in all, if you like puzzle games at all and can manage 3D FPS controls, this game is an absolute must.

The only good thing I have to say about it is that acting during the cut-scenes is just unbelievably bad, to the point it’s actually enjoyable to watch. You owe it to yourself to look up one of the cut-scenes in YouTube, and as a bonus, watching it as just as fun as “playing” this excuse for a game.

Roehm is a rather ill-defined protagonist. He’s supposed to be some sort of rogueish anti-hero, but the game doesn’t present him in such a way, or makes you play him that way - instead he’s just a straight up hero that keeps saying “oh wow, I’m so villainous”. The acts for which you gain “infamy” are for most part just simple hero stuff, rescuing the poor and protecting the innocent.
That being said, he’s still the most defined character in a world of cardboard. The game is chock-full of characters, but they’re all incredibly thin, serving their role in the plot before moving on. It’s impossible to care or be interested in any of them, in part because of the strange dialogue system.

Unlike games from the era it mimics, dialogue trees are reset every time you leave a conversation. This is both tedious, and immersion-breaking. In some cases, you find yourself introducing to people over and over and over again. In others, you feel like their response to a query should’ve changed, but annoyingly, it hasn’t.
This is a deliberate choice rather than some engine limitation, since other characters do preserve the state of the dialogue tree. It’s also a poor choice that goes a long way towards alienating you to Roehm and the supporting cast.

Gameplay is severely lacking. Puzzles are okay, but are sometimes implemented poorly. For instance, I was stuck on the rune puzzle for a while, before realizing the game just hadn’t registered the position of the rune - you have to wait for it to sort of snap into place, which calls into question giving you the option to freely rearranging runes to begin with. Similar design issues plague other sequences. There are cases where you inexplicably can’t use equivalent objects (in one memorable occasion, the game actually mocked me for trying), sometimes the game is incredibly obtuse (I had to click furiously all over the screen before it recognized the damned fireflies hotspot). It’s all very, very annoying.

The game is also riddled with bugs. Without really trying, I was able to make the controls disappear several times, get Roehm stuck in an infinite loop, get into a location I wasn’t supposed to be able to. I also got stuck in several screens, forcing me to switch to direct control to leave, which complemented nicely the screens where I was stuck using direct control, requiring me to use point and click to exit them.

Besides bugs, the game is just designed poorly. One example is the quick travel map, which has no locations added to it, ever, isn’t in any logical scale, and contains locations you haven’t visited yet. You can’t advance the clock at will, but as a corollary time never passes unless you wish it to, and you can always heal to the max at the cost of one third of the day cycle. The inn cost 50 coins a week, and then never requested another payment as my quest took considerably longer. There are many, many such instances, that make you appreciate just how many small details go into good game design.

To summarize, at a considerably lower price, this game may have met people’s expectations. As it is, they compete in the top tier of indie titles, and come nowhere near them in the level of finish.

The graphics were glitchy on my computer, but it’s probably something I could fix by tweaking the settings. Even so, it’s clear the game is pretty. Voice acting is also well done.

The story is well written, though some sections really test your ability to suspend disbelief. The puzzles are okay, for most part very straightforward and having multiple paths to completing your objectives adds a very nice touch.

The basic interface design is a good variation of point and click. It’s a bit awkward selecting the inventory item first and the object to use it on second, but it’s just a matter of habit.
There are subtle problems with the interface, though. For one, there’s an inconsistency about skipping dialogue. Sometime it works (and characters fast-forward through their animation) and sometimes clicking does nothing. For the most part you can’t skip ahead, which can be quite exhausting if you accidentally ask someone something a second time. The worst of it was when I had to listen to some taped evidence and scour the evidence for detail, with the evidence running for 30-45 seconds or so each time. That was immensely frustrating, and also unnecessary as I found out later, since you could just ask someone the relevant detail.
There are too many logical interactions that don’t work, throwing you off the track. Probably due to its episodic nature, very little thought was given to things off the main path, which can be immensely confusing. Everyone mentions the bum and I’ll join the bandwagon: he asks for something to eat. You try to use a clearly edible item on him. Erica says “I don’t need to do this now”, consistently. So naturally you expect there’s some interrogation technique you need to implement here, like showing him the food or whatever - except not, she says that because on ANOTHER puzzle-path, at some point the bum would want the food she’s carrying now.
Variations of this exist throughout the game. The developers tried to be clever by forcing you to only pick up items when you know you’ll need them, but combined with the multiple paths and Erica’s somewhat dull wit at times, this turns into an exercise in frustration that could rival a text parser adventure. You constantly have to try and get into the developer’s mind, especially on the more ridiculous obstacles such as obtaining fairly commonplace items.

That also adds backtracking which breaks immersion and suspense. During an emotional moment, you find yourself zipping back and forth on ridiculous fetch quests. The tension of breaking into a superior’s office is lost the third time you walk in because you need yet another thing from there.

The cognitive powers are underused to the point it feels almost like QTE. There’s a plot prompt to suggest you can use a power, then you use it, then continue playing without powers since nothing can be cognitioned except very small bits. Contrast with The Devil’s Playhouse to get a feeling of how you’d expect such powers to work - and that game was also episodic.

To summarize, the plot is good enough to excuse all the ridiculous moments and puzzles are so easy you’ll get past them even despite the contrivances, which lands this in 3 star category. It could have been much more.

First of all, the game suffers from serious pacing issues. It’s divided into “days” which aren’t days, and which length differs wildly, up to a “day” where you do almost nothing.
This is not just a nitpick, as the plot also advances in a confusing, uneven manner. While dialogues are decently written, the overall plot design is poor. Instead of gradually learning new details and incorporating them into the picture of the plot you’re forming in your head, characters just puke out a random twist at you. It’s less like filling in a crossword puzzle and more like reading one of those stories where different people tack on more and more sentences to see what comes out.

Gameplay is severely lacking. The points mechanism is poorly implemented and seems tacked on. Most characters don’t really have much to say about anything, so you end up interrogating them mechanically just to rack up points. Some characters you can’t re-visit, and most you don’t really have a reason to.

There is constant hand-holding. The game keeps telling you what to do, and forces you to do it in the right order. For instance, you start out with several questions to investigate. Tex suggested I tackle one, but I wanted to investigate the other. Alas, some obstacle was in my way, which arbitrarily disappeared later on once I did what Tex wanted.
The inventory puzzles are trivial, and the stand-alone ones are usually just copied from elsewhere, such as yet another river crossing puzzle. No insight is required to solve any of them - if you need a code, it’s a matter of finding where the code is.
There are several sections that feel like a hidden-object game, and are clearly thrown in as padding. Even the game’s version of hotspot highlighting was powerless against those damned baseball cards. Heck, there’s even a maze in there.
There are some poorly-implemented stealth sections. Previous games had them, but you had line-of-sight advantage over the guards/drones, so they had some logic to them. This time, a guard rounds the corner, you lose, try over.
The final puzzle is panned in every review of this game, and rightfully so. It requires dexterity, and is in itself just anti-climactic. It’s ridiculous to imagine the hard-boiled detective rapidly fidgeting with dials to save the world.

All in all, the game is very disappointing. It plays like it was designed by a checklist, so they threw in everything a fan would want, without giving any consideration to how the parts mesh together. The technical excellence can’t make up for all of the gameplay and writing flaws.

The writing is so-so. The game starts out very interesting, but the dialogue is just awful. Voice acting lacks emotion and the lines themselves are awkward and stiff. Then the plot itself becomes retarded, with many convenient holes through which to fit the glaringly obvious twist. It’s ridiculous because as you play you have to wonder why nobody stops to ponder some things, then you realize it’s because otherwise they’d realize what was going on before the last climatic scene.

Gameplay also starts out decently with some interesting locations to explore, plenty of interactivity and some pleasant puzzling. However, roughly midway it becomes pixel hunt after pixel hunt, seasoned with some magically-appearing objects, reappearing hotspots and instances where your own character lies to you. “This is just a dustbin there’s nothing there”. Right click. “Oh look a necessary object!”.

At some points, it really seems like the game deliberately screws with you. There are several instances where you have to wait. Normally in adventure games, this means leave and re-enter the screen. Sometimes that works, but other times you need to go somewhere far and come back. Other times still, a completely unrelated hotspot suddenly lit up, and “waiting” is going to look at it. The most infuriating time, though, is when you have to wait for 10 real-world minutes to pass. Yes, the game makes you sit and wait. This isn’t a puzzle, because you can’t fail. No matter what you try, eventually ten minutes will pass. It serves no purpose, since by that point you’ve exhausted all hotspots in all locations, so there’s literally nothing to do but let the game idle while reading and book and wondering what the hell they were thinking when designing this idiocy.

The game also features some ridiculously cheap deaths, where you intend to look at an object only to have Samuel chop off his own head with it. Smart cursors have never been more punishing.
Of course there are dead ends, and not all are clearly signposted. There are plenty of save slots, but the interface isn’t well thought out, so you’ll find yourself only using eight, since any more require scrolling each and every time you want to save or load the game.

Puzzles are often illogical, and there’s no feedback why things won’t work. In one memorable instance, Samuel had to mix two liquids in a container, but insisted to put one of them first. When I tried the other, nothing happened, leading me to think the solution was something else. Also, if anyone knows what the game means by “the rope is too bendy”, drop me a line. Even after “solving” the puzzle I don’t understand what was wrong with my original idea.

To top off the annoyances, beyond dead ends, pixel hunts, illogical puzzles, cheap deaths and having to wait, there’s also hand-holding. Often you know what to do but Samuel refuses to do it until you talk to two people back and forth and they spell it out for you. There’s plenty of backtracking, at one point clearly deliberate since the game makes you travel between two locations repeatedly, and you have to take the long way around every time.

To summarize: the graphics are adequate, and the game starts out strong. However, it quickly degenerates into a series of frustrations, and what’s worse, it looks like malice, rather than incompetence. At least it’s a unique experience, so that’s the silver lining I guess.

From the demo, I expected a lot of code cracking. That was optimistic. Besides applying a simple substitution code, there aren’t really any more “code cracking” moments. There are some nice riddles to solve, but some ridiculous ones as well.
The game has frequent timed sections, rewinding upon failure. Often, they’re of the trial-and-error variety, i.e. you need to fail several times to even learn what obstacles you should anticipate after rewinding. Those sections are really bad, and feel a lot like padding. They’re poorly clued (you don’t always know what your ultimate goal is) and one of them features a double interface screw (an area of the screen is interactive despite not being shown as a hotspot, and you can control Ord during an animation, despite the cursor disappearing). In short, it feels like those sections were added because just featuring the good riddles would’ve made for an even shorter game.

The interface is atrocious. Every action requires multiple mouse clicks. This is actually used as some twisted puzzle mechanic at some point.
A good illustration of this issue is the dialogue mechanic. You have to scroll the list of topics (by clicking on arrows, not using the keyboard), then click on the topic of interest, then move the cursor over to the “ask” button. It’s not unplayable, but it’s just unwieldy, and after a while those small issues really get to you.
There is no hotspot highlighting, and there’s some pixel hunting. Ord is also a hotspot so after clicking on anything, he obscures the object and you have to click to make him move before you can interact with anything in the vicinity again.

The plot starts out strong but becomes silly in the end. All plot threads are abruptly tied together with a ridiculous twist and some off-screen narration promising us all has ended well. It’s difficult to describe just how jarring this is, it’s one of the worst pacing failures I’ve had the misfortune to encounter, and it really feels as though they just ran out of money and had to ship.

To summarize, a couple of good riddles can’t make up for the multitude of flaws. My advice would be to play this with a walkthrough for all but the riddle parts - then it’s worth the price of admission (about $2 currently).

In summary, this is an average title that doesn’t justify the price.

The atmosphere is excellent. Music, presentation and the graphical style do a great job of conveying a “Soviet” atmosphere.
The game play, however, is lacking. In part this is deliberate, since you can later spend money to somewhat improve the cumbersome interface. Still, the decision to limit the player’s interaction to pointing out discrepancies and stamping passports is somewhat odd. You’re supposed to care about your family, but they have neither names, nor faces, nor personalities.
There are several interactions where you wish you could choose the character’s reply, instead of standing there and waiting for the dialogue to be over.
You can’t refuse bribes, sometimes people just drop money and go.
You can’t discard objects, so people can burden you with items there’s no way to get rid of.
All in all, it looks like a deliberate choice to limit interactivity so much, but I personally felt the game would’ve been better served with an occasional player-controlled dialogue, and maybe some sections before/after working days.

Gameplay itself is tiring. This is again deliberate but it wears thin very quickly. The game heaps on requirements, and very soon you need a deft mouse hand to be able to process enough people to make your daily (?) rent payment. There’s an “easy” mode that may mitigate some of that - being a decent arcade player I just weathered, adopting some heuristics to ignore some of the lower ROI checks.

The plot is rather threadbare, which ties back to the lack of interaction. You’re not given any real reason to choose one side or the other, and the game ultimately has three real endings, the other 17 being slight variations on failure. So, while offering some replay value (getting the endings where you side with on faction requires different choices early on), the endings are rather humdrum and I felt justified in picking mine and then watching the rest on YouTube.

All in all it’s an interesting experiment and very atmospheric game, but the game play is lacking and the fact it’s deliberately so doesn’t make it any more fun.

Its main strength is also a caveat: the game plays like a game from the 90s, which means the game expects the player to conform to it and not vice-versa. There are no dead ends but you will die a lot and some puzzles are quite difficult. Moreover, the game will force you to replay sections until you figure them out.
You can also forget about modern conveniences like a hotspot highlighter or fast travel. As Aurvandel, a well-written quirky wizard, presents it: “you’re a traveling heroine, so you should expect to do some traveling”.
One modern innovation that made it into the game is a virtual theater system, meaning non-player character follow a schedule and it’s entirely possible for the shop you want to be closed or the guy you want to be asleep, making you wait (in-game) for them.

The story is pretty standard hero fare. You reach a town beset by a large problem, fix smaller problems along the way, then battle the big bad and save the world. There are some twists relating to side-quests and minor characters, but in general the game is fairly straightforward.

The combat system at the default difficulty setting felt more like a puzzle. Enemies telegraph their attacks and no real reflexes are required for most part. Then you get a leisurely several seconds to choose your attack, rinse and repeat until the baddie is dead.

Puzzles, as mentioned before, can be quite hard. The good news is there are several paths to each objective. However, if you want to do everything heroically you will need to pay careful attention to your surroundings, remember a lot of Norse mythology and unfortunately occasionally wrestle with the “one true object” issue where only one item will work despite others sharing the relevant characteristics. It’s also possible to irrevocably screw up these more heroic paths, so save early and often. Oh, and the game occasionally throws red herrings your way, just to keep things interesting.

The writing in general is very good. Voice acting was a bit too dramatic for my taste so I frequently skipped ahead. The game is also chock-full of references to nerd culture and other games - you will meet Cedric the Owl as well as some men of definite low moral fiber, characters spout Monty Python references and there’s even an odd reference to the developers’ previous game.

It’s not a perfect game. There’s an arbitrary 50 save limit that’s really unnecessary. Some logical puzzle solutions don’t work. There are some puzzles that cross into the “unfair”. The pacing is somewhat uneven. Still, the game took around 25 hours to complete in a single class, most of which were enjoyable. If you can stomach (or miss) the old style of computer games, this is a definite recommendations.

The graphics are crisp and serviceable, it’s easy to know what you’re looking at and hotspots are easy to identify.
Voice acting is okay and most of the plot is inferred from scattered pieces of paper and is irrelevant to the game. If you want a good story, this isn’t the place to look.

Movement is node-based with free panning at nodes. This is bundled with the usual node issues, objects you can only approach from a specific angle and view hunting. Luckily the locales are rather small, so a typical room only has 2-4 nodes, so you don’t find yourself running around the room looking for the magical angle to get you where you want to be.

The game excels at the puzzling aspects. They’re of the “organic obstacle” style, where the game tries to give convincing reasons as to why you need to rewire this mechanism or operate that piece of machinery.
Unlike Myst, you have an inventory, which lends itself to the simpler puzzles in the game. It’s not cluttered, and yet the game makers saw fit to include some red herrings, which ratchet up the difficulty somewhat.
The puzzles themselves are also “hardened”. For instance, you often get no feedback upon success - you need to trust yourself, so to speak, and then go out and find out what changed about the world. It’s somewhat more realistic, but since some outcomes aren’t entirely logical (why did this button open this door and not that door?) it’s not entirely fair. Still, the game world is small so navigation doesn’t take long.
Other situations are just as difficult and less justifiably so. For instance, you can see wires coming out of a certain device, but the game won’t let you trace them to see what it operates.
For me the worst curveball was a lock that was governed by two separate mechanisms, neither indicating success if only that one is solved. Your mileage may vary.

Overall, I’m a very experienced adventurer, including puzzle games. This one managed to stump me several times, and one time I even resorted to a walkthrough. You can probably rush through the game in 15 minutes or so, but if you need to actually solve the puzzles, it should take about 3 hours + “getting stumped” time.
Beyond just being difficult, the puzzles do make sense and can be figured out, so overall this game is highly recommended to puzzle gamers who are looking for a challenge.

Graphics are deliberately crude and voice non-existent.
Puzzles are pretty straightforward and the game isn’t very long, but the writing is hilarious throughout and the various parallel dimensions are extremely imaginative.

There’s not much to add beyond that - the game is free and is highly recommended at that price. And if you like it, the sequel is even better. Go out and try it.

The game is insultingly short - it took 54 minutes to complete according to Steam, and it would’ve taken half that if the game implemented hotspot highlighting.
Graphics don’t scale to the screen size, which means on my completely standard full HD resolution I had to stick my face into the screen to be able to “solve” the many pixel hunts.
Puzzle clues are non-existent. You often have no clue what you’re trying to achieve. Some puzzles require keys that can’t be found in-game, instead the player is expected to figure out one set of gear orientations is more aesthetically pleasing than others, in another the player is expected to assume alien biology is identical to human.

In short, this is an awful game, but only because I haven’t liked any game from this genre.

Puzzles are still quite straightforward - if you need a spade, you go out there and find a spade. They’re 100% inventory. There’s one potential dialogue puzzle but in the sake of dumbing down, the game has the solution spelled out for you and it’s impossible to work it out yourself.
The biggest issue is in the mega-location near the end, since things change arbitrarily, so puzzles are often “go to that screen, leave, re-enter, take what suddenly appeared, go somewhere else” etc. It seems like poor design.

The game is still rather confined, but an attempt is made to create one mega-location for the last bit of the game. It falls a bit flat, though, due to a relative sparseness of hotspots, combined with script issues if you try to interact with the wrong thing too early. For instance, your action might read as “mess with X” and instead Hector engages in conversation with someone standing nearby, leaving you to wonder whether your mouse slipped or it’s a genuine issue with the game.

Voice acting is still good but the script isn’t as funny as the last two installments. Graphics are adequate though for the first time I’ve had to “pixel hunt”, though the object wasn’t small, it was lost in the graphical clutter and was surrounded by other hotspots.

All in all, it’s not a bad game. It’s slightly longer, clocking at about three hours. If you’ve enjoyed any of the previous two episodes, this one is definitely for you.

There are more locations to visit but each location is smaller, and the game is still unnecessarily linear. Some obstacles make no sense, and the main challenge is in figuring out what the obstacle is to begin with.

All in all it’s not a bad game, but you’d expect more from a non-pilot episode.

The game is absolutely hilarious. Dialogue is top notch throughout. Moreover, there’s a lot of attention to detail - there are almost no stock responses. Once I figured that out I spent 10 minutes using everything on everything just to see what jokes were hidden there.
The game is also packed with references to the classics, including a great running gag about Fate of Atlantis’ multiple paths, where Ben and Dan continuously try to figure out which path they’re on.

Graphics are deliberately crude but are quite serviceable. With very few exceptions, hotspots stand out so there is no pixel hunting despite the lack of highlighting.

Puzzles are harder than modern adventures, which I found very welcome. The programmers did a great job of including subtle hints in many failed attempts, so there’s always a sense of progression. At worst if you’re stuck you can just wander around and talk to everyone again, very often you’ll suddenly notice a clue. However, for most part the game has its own brand of cartoon logic which you can adapt to, which lets you breeze through while enjoying the multiple times the characters try to excuse the illogical solutions, breaking the fourth wall.

The game could use less linearity though - you’d expect a game modeled after the classics to turn into a series of three-part quests, but instead it remains linear throughout. That also lends itself to a point that’s slightly unfair, as very late in the game you’re meant to tackle an obstacle you’re likely to have forgotten about by then, especially since the quick travel map ensures you never have to visit that location again. I do strongly disagree with the AG review though - there is no “scan everything again to see what arbitrarily changes” anywhere - the one time you influence things in the future the game shows it via a cutscene.

The game ramps up considerably in difficulty for the last couple of puzzles, which I found unwelcome. The “boss fight” of sorts was somewhat poorly clued (in fact, confusingly clued) and relied on an unremarkable hotspot.
However, that and the linearity are the only flaws in what is otherwise an awesome game. Highly recommended to fans of the genre.

Story-wise, the game is great. Hector is a fun character to play, and his voice acting is top notch. Voice acting is pretty good throughout, and the one case where it slips (the ravers) it may have been intentional.
Graphics are nice and clean. While there’s no hotspot highlighting, objects and exits are easy to locate.

The writing is pretty good, and the game is funny throughout, if you’re into foul British humour.
The interface is a pretty standard affair. There are some rough spots where it’s unclear why double click and single click do the same thing and you can’t get Hector to understand what you’d like to do, but in general it works well.

The game does suffer from some glitches. Occasionally the mouse cursor disappear and you have forcibly shut down the game to continue playing. Animation and sounds keep playing, but it’s impossible to do anything and the Esc key doesn’t bring up the menu.
Some hotspots do nothing. Some objects re-appear after you’ve taken them. Luckily this doesn’t break the game, as the autosave-only approach means you’d have to restart from scratch if that were to happen. Not that that would be such a terrible ordeal - episode one takes between 2 and 3 hours without using hints and without rushing to complete it (i.e. deliberately choosing the silly dialogue options).

Puzzles are a bit on the easy side, but there’s enough creative ones to keep you from going bored. Sometimes they’re a bit contrived, but you could say that about most cartoon adventure games.
One problem is the game design. Hector sometimes makes comments that make no sense in the context, because the developers expected you to go in a different order about things. It’s nothing game-breaking, but it’s weird to have Hector say “oh, this item is perfect for that” and you had no idea you even had to do “that” since you didn’t visit that location yet.

All in all, those were a fun couple of hours. While not the best game by any means, episode 1 has high enough production values to keep you entertained throughout, mostly thanks to the excellent dialogue and voice work.

The video quality still holds up - videos are blocky but clear and the production values are high. Most actors are good to okay, with the exception of the female cast, who for most part are just awful. I often looked away from the screen when Grace was trying to display emotion because it was just embarrassing.
I particularly enjoyed Komissar Leber, who was obviously enjoying choking and sputtering with rage to a comical degree.

The plot is exceptional, as you’d expect from a Jane Jensen game. This might be a drawback to some, as at some point you have to tour an entire museum (though you can probably just click through it, as a player you don’t HAVE to know all those small details).
The dialogue, however, is often terrible. The plot doesn’t seem to be driven forward by humans. The attempts at emotion are pathetic, in part due to the terrible acting and in part because it looks like character interactions were written by a robot. Character motivations range from completely vague to having one dominant emotion, with one exception.

The plot also seems a bit rushed - at some point the story cuts ahead to “two months later” with nothing to tell the player what happened during those two months. For some reason the player is expected to piece together what the characters should have reasonably known, having come up with their plan themselves. I’m guessing originally there was supposed to be more content there, or at least another movie, but they probably ran over time or budget.
This issue actually occurs several times - you find yourself in a scene with no clear idea of what goals you’re trying to accomplish. Sometimes it’s reasonable (you should be investigating, it’s normal not to sure how to find more leads) but when you’re stuck simply because you the player don’t know what the character should’ve known it feels unfair.

The gameplay is a bit too streamlined. There’s a single cursor for everything, which means you don’t even get to look at hotspots. Moreover, hotspots don’t have titles and at some points you’re expected to find small areas on objects, with the entire object being interactive, which is a new and annoying kind of pixel hunt.
There’s a bit too much backtracking - the largest area in the game isn’t broken down so you often find yourself walking up and down it, and there’s no “double click to exit” shortcut.

There was an attempt made to reduce deaths and dead ends to a minimum. As is common, that results in several contrivances, with objects suddenly appearing only when an unrelated task was complete for no in-game reason. What’s worse, the whole thing is designed at some points to cause you to backtrack, i.e. you have to observe hotspot A in location A to be able to take an action in location B which allows you to finally do what you need to do in location A, with no real world reason for it to be like that.

Puzzles are often poorly clued, though they do make sense. The biggest issue is that you just don’t know when to tackle obstacles. Do I go after this tempting locked door now? Am I finally allowed to pick those flowers? It feels like reverse-engineering the game. Having some signposts, even in a voiceover (“I’m really curious what’s behind this door”) would’ve helped.
The game is also fairly puzzle light, with one or two “true” puzzles in every chapter. However, despite being a puzzly kind of guy, I haven’t felt cheated in that regard - the plot is captivating enough to be reward on its own.

I’ve gone too long about the negatives. In the end this game tells a really good story and does it well. It breaks down a bit in the final act, probably due to budget or time concerns, but by then you really won’t care.

I’ve played the DOS version, which had limited saves (always annoying) and panning was too fast even on the slowest setting.
The graphics were okay for most of the game but pretty blocky and dated, combined with a lot of “node hunting” and the lack of hotspot titles it contributed to a fairly unpleasant experience of scanning the ugly environment repeatedly.
One puzzle was borderline impossible due to being incredibly dark - I’ve had to work around it by manually increasing the gamma setting in my graphics driver to an unreasonably high value just so I can tell what I’m pointing at. The game has no real graphics settings.

The game is paced strangely. There are nine “tasks” to accomplish but the first four take 5-10 minutes each and are pretty disappointing. I was sure the game would be over in two hours flat, but the next four tasks were quite deep and considerably longer. Then the ninth is again trivial and the game is over. Go figure.

The main part of the game is quite good. There are four “ages” with themes of their own, they’re large enough to be interesting to explore but small enough that you don’t get lost. Progression is usually linear and the puzzles are shallower than Myst, which can be considered an advantage or not, based on your preference.
Basically, clues are usually found together instead of having to collect them from several places, many clues appear in several different forms and they’re more obviously clues - there aren’t any “this sketch in the margin of the page is actually hugely important” moments. Ages are self-contained and can be played in any order, which is a bit strange seeing as each contains clues to a different part of the plot, some more revealing than others.

The plot itself is adequate. Acting is fair and the FMV quality isn’t an embarrassment.

It’s possible to die (but you’ll see it coming) and there are some dead ends (they’re usually obvious - an item disappears and you just go “huh, now why did I do that”).

Overall, it’s not a bad game. I wish I’d played it when it came out but even today it’s worth the time. I’ve seen much worse Myst clones come out a lot later.

There are three clashing graphic styles used throughout the game. The character portraits don’t look like the character sprites don’t look anything like the characters during the cut-scenes.
Characters are again over the top, and the ethnic stereotypes are out of control. Indians are portrayed as being subhuman, like some sort of apes. It’s just not funny.

The writing is off - it’s not funny and it’s fairly boring. There’s nothing of the first game’s wit.

Gameplay itself is also problematic. Many sequences just make absolutely no sense. You find yourself in some screen with no idea how you got there or what you should be doing, your only clue being the fact there’s no hotspot to leave so there must be something to accomplish. One example is after the boat sequence, George finds himself in the jungle, and as the player you just have no clue what he’s supposed to be doing. After you figure it out you find out that you need to help Nico, something the character knows but the player isn’t brought in on the picture.
Puzzles are stupid and often illogical. An example from early on: you need to keep elevator doors from closing. Here’s what doesn’t work:
- Smearing lipstick on the sensor
- Smearing coal on the sensor
- Using any object to physically stop the doors from closing
- Asking Nico to stand there and block the sensor
- Stacking anything to block the sensor
Instead, there’s one particular item George agrees to block the sensor with. It’s worse than portrayed because the reason for blocking the sensor is silly to begin with - that whole exercise could’ve been solved in a more reasonable way.
Similar conundrums exist throughout the game. You don’t know what you should be doing, and you don’t understand why George won’t just do what you want him to. He just shrugs and gives no logical reason why he won’t climb into the cave or why he won’t talk to that man.

The game also suffers several bugs that cause it to crash / get stuck, and the autosave feature (“continue” on the main menu) doesn’t work well, so save often.
The best thing about this game is that even with the padding they threw in (the jungle sequence comes to mind - why on earth wouldn’t he step over a bush?), it still takes only five hours if you insist on avoiding the hint system. So that’s something I guess.

Overall, it’s not a bad game. The graphics are pretty, voice acting is adequate and there are some good jokes. However, the game confuses obscurity with challenge. As a very experienced adventurer, I feel comfortable in asserting some of the puzzles in this game make absolutely no sense. A good example is a costume-making puzzle, which is a pretty neat reference to a classic game, but there’s really no way of predicting what your actions are going to result in. In many cases, you do things because they’re thematically “right” - the game clearly expects you to. It would’ve been much better to have character explain their difficulties more clearly, since often they just shrug and you have no idea why they’re not doing what you want them to.
The co-op puzzles are also problematic. You sometimes have to walk the game by the hand, and sometimes instead of letting you do what you want, you need to get the characters to figure it out, instead of acting out your intent by controlling the characters.

Critter is a pretty awful character, like in the first game. He speaks in stupid gibberish, and on several occasions you have to exhaust a nonsense conversation for something to happen. It’s like a dialogue puzzle, except without making any sense whatsoever. He’s also used as an excuse to get away with blatant asset reuse, since he has several noises and animations he uses over and over again.

The interface is not well thought out. If you’re controlling Nate and need something Critter has, you need to switch to Critter, give Nate the item, then switch back. That’s way too many clicks and unskippable animation for something as simple as using an item another character is holding.
There is one sequence which is like an expanded version of the alchemist’s maze from TLJ. However, its bizarre geometry confused the game engine, and forced me to replay a section when Nate’s position got de-synched and he started clipping through screens and his inventory became inaccessible. It was also pretty ill-designed, with one obstacle having no organic cause whatsoever, just to prevent Nate from reaching a certain screen.

All in all, at its core it’s a good game. However it has far too many issues to get a higher mark. It’s also rather short, clocking at a little under 6 hours including the time wasted on exhausting the same four screens over and over again. I estimate about five hours of pure gameplay, which is not enough for the price.

The main problem with Richard and Alice is that it doesn’t really engage the player. It tells a fairly bleak and potentially emotionally involving story, but the poor graphics and lack of voice acting counter any immersion, and inability to make meaningful choices distances the player from the story. A better team might’ve made the player act out some of the more difficult actions the characters have to face, and might’ve given you at least an illusory choice to draw you in. Instead, you just click through a lot of text-only dialogue, and unless you got the alternative ending (which involves getting an optional item), the whole thing is ultimately pointless.

The worst issue is the controls. The developers were too lazy to implement any form of path-finding, so instead of point and click you get an awkward “hold right mouse button and move character around”. This is extra inconvenient because the game is implemented with an isometric view, so you can’t move in the four cardinal directions. Moreover, the lack of path finding means you often click on something that’s right next to you and get a stock “I can’t go there”. Really annoying.
To compound this, there are parts where you have to navigate a maze, sometimes quickly. The stiffness of the controls and the slow movement of the character make this an unnecessarily trying ordeal - and those sections really have no room in an adventure game anyway.

The isometric perspective causes other issues. You sometimes have to go behind things you can’t know have a path behind them. This is the most arbitrary form of difficulty imaginable, with the player view being obscured for no in-game reason. There’s also a maze where the perspective makes it impossible to tell which level your character is on - this is most likely deliberate, but it’s really annoying, and a very far cry from an “enjoyable maze” as promised in the AG review.

The interface is also sorely lacking. If you stand near the edge of the screen, you can’t access some of your inventory items. Once you’ve looked at something, you often can’t look again. There’s no hotspot highlighting, which at some points is a serious pain in the ass - I was stuck on a puzzle for a very long time until I found out a part of the background was, in fact, a button. This also leads to several pixel hunts, which are manageable (most screens are relatively small) but not a lot of fun nonetheless.

There are two action sequences which are downright retarded, but at least they’re very easy so there’s nothing to complain about. They also don’t reset when you die, so you can practically brute force your way past all the fighting.

Puzzles are either inventory or operating various machines. The mechanical puzzles where you operate machinery aren’t bad, but most of them are way too easy, with all the difficulty derived from not being able to identify all the interactive parts. The inventory puzzles are all trivial fetch quests.

Voice acting is hit and miss. Some lines are read with way too much drama - your character sometimes exclaims things like “This is a pipe!” or “A HIGH WINDOW” without any real reason to. The stock “I can’t do that” responses are also problematic in that regard, and also they tend to be very confusing. One of them is “this would hurt”, which sounds like an actual clue as to why you can’t accomplish what you’re trying to do, which threw me off until I realized it was just a random canned response.

The most disappointing aspect is the plot. This game has a LOT of style. It’s intriguing. The various worlds you visit are varied and interesting. You’re dying to see how the story is going to tie all the stylistic elements together. Then you finish the game and find out it doesn’t. The game has no clue what to do with the atmosphere it built and the motives it used, so it just ends with a “and now you won and everything is good. Hurray!”. This is an “a winner is you” ending if I’ve ever seen one, and it caps the overall disappointment that this game was.

The game is paced very, very slowly. It’s so bad, in fact, the game often gives you a cue to let you know the cutscene FINALLY ended. I get that to tell a deep, meaningful story you want to slow people down, but taking away my ability to skip dialogue is going a bit too far, I think.
Moreover, what interactivity the developers threw in is very mechanical and tacked on. During the first “act” (which is over 50% of the game) you just solve the same slider-type puzzle over and over again. The picture changes, but the way to solve (even if you’re aiming for “ideal”) is always the same. The other piece of interaction is clicking randomly on scenery, but the game usually robs you of that as well, painting huge arrows to let you know where to go before you’ve had a chance to do much of anything.

The story itself I won’t spoil here, but beyond the gimmick of being told backwards, it really is fairly bland. The framing world is poorly conceived (the mechanics of how memory works change to suit what’s convenient), the characters are one-dimensional and key points and motives are just never explained.
Moreover, the developers spurned the chance to actually say something meaningful, resolving the dilemma in the end in a cowardly and unsatisfying manner.

There are other, minor, issues: control and path-finding are pretty awful, but screens are small so it’s not really a huge issue. There’s one terrible arcade sequence near the end, but it’s ultimately easy enough that you forget about it 20 seconds after completing it.

I really wanted to like this game, but innovation is not enough - and the game doesn’t hold value much beyond “oh wow, this is atypical”. Glad to be able I’ve played it, but I wouldn’t recommend it for anything beyond novelty value. Despite the “open” end, I don’t intend to play other chapters in the series - it’s just not worth the time, even at a mere 3 hours of play.

The interface and control are much better. Menus pop up when you move the mouse to any edge of the screen, so everything is readily accessible. There’s finally a strafe button, so while you can’t really control Tex like an FPS, movement is much more convenient. The notion of switching between roaming and a point and click mode has been dropped. Instead, you’re always in point and click mode, and can move freely. This also means the graphics are considerably more crisp in all scenes, at the expense of reduced roaming area (there’s no longer an option to wander the street)
Hotspot interaction is now done with a contextual menu which pops up, showing all possible actions. That makes it slightly more difficult to find the “interesting” crate (unlike Pandora Directive where you could scan the mouse and look for actions to light up) but that wasn’t a problem in practice.
Finally, like Pandora and unlike Moon, you don’t need to position yourself awkwardly or search all the trash cans to find clues. Objects are located in reasonable places, which is a blessing because some scenes are very detailed.

Graphics are considerably better than the previous installments. The movies are higher resolution, the scenes are more detailed and look more crisp and the acting’s considerably improved (except for Chelsea, but her main role is to look pretty anyway).

The story is good, in an absolute sense, though it doesn’t stand up to the standard of the previous titles. I felt the atmosphere was somewhat lacking due to the very sparse use of music and due to the less structured storytelling. Days weren’t clearly cued, and the framing story really served no purpose in the end - the game interleaved it during cutscenes in a way that seemed haphazard and pointless.
Characters’ motivations are often vague. The game casts some doubt about whose intentions are pure, but because it’s ultimately not resolved and has no real effect on the story, it just ends up being confusing instead of adding depth to the characters.

The puzzles are the most problematic part of the game. Like previous games, you find evidence, talk to people, reconstruct damaged evidence and solve all manner of standalone puzzles. However, despite playing at the “Gamer” setting (which in Pandora was punishingly difficult), this time it was very easy to solve puzzles under the time limit on the first try. Don’t get me wrong, save-scumming is not fun, but there’s something off about a “hardcore” mode where you can figure out the rules AND find the solution quickly enough to get the maximum score on the first try, every time.
In case the puzzles themselves weren’t easy enough, the game downright solves things for you often. Sometimes Tex’ narration tells you what to do (“I should try X on Y now”) as soon as you face a challenge. Other times, instead of giving you means to figure something out, you just find a note that has a solution spelled out. For instance, a part of the game is figuring out passwords to computer systems. At some point the game just thrusts a piece of paper with all the passwords at you, and that’s it.
Moreover, inventory items disappear when they’re no longer needed (which threw me off at first, I thought it was a bug). That makes the game a lot easier, as you have very few “live” inventory items at any given moment.
To offset this, unlike Pandora, the game won’t let you overlay the clue to a puzzle over the puzzle itself. For some reason, as a player you have to copy down text from an item in your inventory, then approach the puzzle and refer to your own note. What this adds beyond annoyance, I don’t know. It’s especially infuriating near the end, where if you attempt to exit the puzzle to view your inventory (not expecting to need to refer to it), you die and have to reload a saved game.
Puzzles themselves, when not too easy, are often annoying. There’s one maze-like puzzle that could serve as the definition of unfun - beyond the maze aspect it requires some reflexes and good mouse precision. Another puzzle near the end actually astonished me by being a worse chess-based puzzle than the one in Broken Sword - it’s a proper chess puzzle, except it plays like a dialogue puzzle. You have to choose moves from a list that never changes, and the “solution” has the computer responding stupidly to one of the moves. In other words, chess skill actually works against you - if you find a side solution or try to figure it out reasonably, you’re doomed to fail.

Like the others, this game has some stealth sequences. Most of them are pretty easy, except for one where you’re sneaking around when someone’s in the shower - the idea is good but you often get killed without really understanding what you did wrong (and to be honest, even after finishing it I’m not sure what the problem was).
There are a couple of dead ends of sorts, but they require replaying about 30 seconds, and the game warns you that you should search the area well.

The game suffers from some technical issues. To run it I’ve had to work around a bug in the game’s loader. Then, late in the game there was a game-crashing bug where you had to run around staring at the floor, lest the view of the wall crash the game. There were other cases where the game got stuck or crashed. The good news is there’s some sort of autosave for those cases, so you don’t lose a lot of progress.

All in all, it’s a fine game. I might’ve liked it even more had its predecessors not proved a Tex Murphy game can be a lot more than what it was. Still, a very solid game.

The plot aspires to be Jane Jensen quality, with the protagonist following a trail to unravel secrets lost in history. However, the comparison only holds on the surface level. Most of the historical details lack depth. There are some random facts strewn about, but links between them aren’t always explained and at times seem quite loose. The trail itself is fairly ridiculous, including huge leaps and very free association, ending up more like one of the “national treasure” movies than anything remotely convincing. What’s worse, it’s all delivered to you on a platter - there’s a character that just explains everything you come across. In other words, don’t expect a “Serpent Rouge” here.

Beyond the presumptuous plot, there’s the issue of the writing. Technically the game is very well-written. There are very few embarrassing lines and there are a couple of well-written chuckles. However, there’s an issue with the content. The game uses some terrible contrivances to ensure you can’t get stuck. They range from “I knew I couldn’t leave yet” when you try to exit a location, to simply removing the hotspot for leaving (so you’re not sure if you’re meant to stay there or just can’t find the exit) and end with things like having someone polish silverware for two straight days, or drink coffee for an entire week, just to keep you out of locations. I usually don’t worry about this, but this game went to such absurd length toward forcing you to use adventure game logic, it just broke the suspension of disbelief.
The final issue with the plot is that there’s no real ending. You end up defeating the bad guys but never learn what they were actually on about, all of your historical discoveries have no bearing on anything in the end, and what’s worst, Nico’s plot is simply unfinished. She finds something out, then the game shifts to George and you never see her again. It looks as though they simply forgot about that part of the game.

Gameplay is extremely linear, much beyond what is reasonable. At times you have to walk George by the hand until he realizes what you’ve known for the past several minutes. This makes for some infuriating moments, like the section with the juggler, where the game actively confuses you using misleading signposts. It’s not a good puzzle if you abuse your own poor mechanics, game. Just so we’re clear.

Puzzles are, for most part, very easy. This is mostly due to the overly linear nature of the game - it often locks you up in one locale so you’re forced to think of trying things that wouldn’t occur to you if you could wander freely about the game world.
Puzzles are mostly inventory, with some really tiring “exhaust the dialogue” moments, where you have to talk to someone forever, then look at something, then talk to them again, then look, then talk, all the while knowing exactly what you’d like to do. Pretty tiring.
When puzzles are not easy, it’s usually because they’re unfair. For example, try to force the wrong door open and George just shrugs stupidly, not giving any indication that you’re on the right track. Why force this one and not that one? Plot convenience. However, there’s no way for the player to know that, so the “puzzle” is quite arbitrary.
The game also features what has to be one of the worst chess-based puzzles in gaming history. I could write an entire essay about how poorly thought out that puzzle was, but I don’t want to “spoil” it.
To offset the unfair puzzles, the game offers a gradual contextual hint system. Often the first hint just tells you “oh, don’t worry about it, you should be looking elsewhere” which is enough to save most of the frustration.

Voice acting is also hit and miss. The casting for Nico makes her sound 40+ when she’s clearly supposed to be younger, but beyond that both main characters are voiced well. The problem starts with the over-the-top accents for non-French characters. I think it was supposed to be a joke, but I may be wrong, as the Arabic in the game is way off, for instance, so it could just be ignorance.

All in all, I can’t really recommend this game. It’s not completely broken so it’s not a waste of time, but it often felt like busy-work. Some of the dialogue was amusing, but not to a point where it’s worth going through seven hours of trying to browbeat George into doing the right thing.

As the graphics would suggest, Primordia is a game in the spirit of the old classics. In particular, an instance of the “straight man and comic sidekick” a-la Sam and Max. The game pulls it off wonderfully. Both Horatio and Crispin’s dialogue is very well written, Crispin delivering witty comebacks and sarcastic observations with perfect comic timing.
The plot itself is also quite good, though it’s easy to predict from early on. This is handled well in-game though, so there are no instances of Horatio acting too stupid to live in order to justify the “twist” ending.
The game offers multiple endings, but all can be experienced in a single play-though, meaning there is one divergence point at the end from which you’re free to choose your ending. Some puzzles have more than one solution, but that only affects achievements and not the story path, as far as I can tell.
I normally don’t comment on the sound department, but voice acting for this game is above and beyond. This is one of the few games where I didn’t find myself skipping ahead in dialogue when I was done reading the subtitles, simply because the delivery and the voices themselves (modulated human voices, of course) were so uniformly excellent.

Beyond multiple solutions, the puzzles are for most part well-made. Being a builder, Horatio spends his time building and/or repairing machines, which implies puzzles around finding pieces and putting them together, i.e. inventory.
There are also some dialogue puzzles (where there’s probably an alternate solution, because refreshingly, you don’t get to try over and over again until you pick the right answer), and some environmental puzzles.
Puzzles are well-integrated and are usually quite satisfying. They’re slightly more difficult than is common today due to the inclusion of red herrings and doing away with some conventions for signposting. One particular puzzle, a virtual scavenger hunt of sorts, seems to divide reviewers - I personally found it challenging and fun.
The big issue about the puzzles is an over-reliance on pixel hunting and some arbitrary item appearances. The latter is what took me the longest to overcome, but it only happens twice that I’ve noticed, once in an optional puzzle. The pixel hunts, however, occur often. This time it’s not about finding a small area colored slightly different - inside a junkyard, you have a continuous area labelled “junk”. Turns out some areas of that junk are worth looking into. It’s slightly alleviated when it comes again later (the interesting hotspot has a very slightly different name), but in all instances, it’s just not fair. There’s nothing fun about clicking around the screen over and over again, and there’s no in-game reason to expect to even find anything there.

The other issue is the game length, though this is as much a compliment as it is a point of criticism. The game is very good, and when it ends rather abruptly, you wish it’d have gone on for longer. It still took around 4 hours, so there’s value for your money, but it just seems they could’ve done so much more with that setting. I truly wish we’ll see another game in the same universe some day, expanding on the same plot outline and characters.

Puzzles are completely trivial and there are about 10 screens in the game, so it took me about half an hour from start to finish. However, it was a very enjoyable half an hour, telling a tightly-written little tale of horror and leaving you with a taste for more.

The graphics are very impressive. Movement is unfortunately node-based, but scenes are relatively small so it’s difficult to miss a node, and most objects are clickable if you see them on-screen, without having to hunt for the right angle.
The plot is fairly standard horror fare - it features a mysterious guide, penance for past transgressions and some dementia. Background details and various notes and scattered pages are responsible for the atmosphere and guiding you towards solving the mystery.
Dialogue is sparse, but the quality of the writing is quite high. The various documents you encounter are convincing and the characters well portrayed.

This game stands out when it comes to the puzzles. Despite the claustrophobic setting, puzzles manage to challenge your environmental perception and deduction ability, without resorting to cheap tricks like pixel hunts.
One sequence near the endgame could’ve been much better implemented. It’s very well-clued, but the interface is unresponsive, so you might end up giving up on a correct solution, thinking the move you’re attempting is illegal.
Overall, though, that’s my only gripe with the puzzles: there could’ve been more, and they could’ve been better. I often regretted discovering I’d already figured out how to move to the next locale, because it felt like there’s more to do. There are some optional actions, but no dead ends until the very end.

To summarize, the marionette excels in both production and content. Despite its brief length (though still longer than an average freebie), it manages to tell a story well and challenge you along the way. Definitely recommended.

The art and interface have been revamped. The new look for Larry is a matter of taste, I personally had no issue with it. The interface is now standard point and click.
The major problem with the look of the game is an unbelievable amount of asset reuse. The limo, airplane, and airport repeat over and over again. There is almost no music and very few sound effects. The whole thing looks like it could fit on a couple of floppies. It would be acceptable for a fan game, but this is supposed to be a production-quality game, and it’s really not.
The writing is still up to par but the game is so short and there are so few locations it doesn’t make up for the lack of content.

Unlike previous games, it’s impossible to die (or at least, I was unable to). You can again reach a dead end but due to the game structure, these don’t require a lot of backtracking and are quite obvious when hit.
The game is divided into several short segments. Unlike previous games, “getting the girl” is trivial. The Larry segments consist of a puzzle to get to the right place (always the same puzzle), the girls are usually quite willing, so the only challenge is in maxing your score, since there are sometimes two or three ways to go about things, some worth more than others.
This is not a fair challenge, though, as often you would have to know what’s about to happen to figure out the better approach - it’s impossible to know how many times the “speech” icon can be used before you’re moved to the next scene, unless you’ve just reloaded a saved game.
There are no puzzles - some obstacles, but they’re all extremely localized (no object re-use between segments) and your inventory usually has one or two items to try with the one or two interesting hotspots in the screen.
The Patti segments are better designed. Your motivation is clearer and there’s at least some feeling of accomplishment beyond “remember to turn on the camera at the right time”.
Still, the game is unreasonably short, with the longest section being a video poker sequence that was clearly thrown in as padding. There is no sexy twist like the “liar dice” game in LSL 7 - this is more reminiscent of playing blackjack to earn money in LSL 1. You have to save-scum and the interface is awkward, and the whole thing is boring and silly. Also the payouts are ridiculously wrong: you get 3 on 1 for making a set, for instance.

Overall, there’s no real reason to play this game. It’s not challenging, it’s not interesting, the “cut scenes” are awkward paced and the few good jokes just aren’t worth the hassle. Since the series doesn’t really have a plot arch to speak of, you can as easily skip this as you probably skipped part 4.

The interface is similar to the second game in the series, which is a bit clunky (most everything takes two clicks, changing your mind takes three) but serviceable.
The “two worlds” motif is used a lot more sparingly, so you don’t have to play an entire game listening to a loop of whispers. Nevertheless, the game is no less atmospheric than the previous ones.

Obstacles are organic, which lends itself to not many puzzles, all solvable either by exhausting dialog or by a single inventory use. Thus, the game is not very challenging, and similar to its predecessors, some days take one or two minutes of play to complete.
There are again some “avoid the killer” moments, but they’re handled much better than in the previous three games. Instead of random appearances and a reflex test, this time it’s a sort of puzzle, not requiring dexterity to complete.

I encountered only one technical issue, though it’s an annoying one - pressing Alt+Enter returns the game to the main menu. Seeing as I’d expected it to switch from full screen to window, that was a nasty surprise. Lucky I saved not long before that.

All in all, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the previous three games are worth it just to play this one, but if you happened to catch any of them and liked it, this one is highly recommended.

For some reason, the studio is quite proud of the actors’ terribly fake French accent and the standard-quality writing. So, you can’t skip dialogue ahead. The game also doesn’t auto-save. Both on their own are minor annoyances, but when combined with the fact any loss of focus causes the game to crash, it means you have to listen to long, pompous dialog a second time whenever you switch wireless networks or a new Adobe update is available. Basically anything that pops up a window causes the game to crash, and then you have to replay form the last manual save. You can work around it by saving after each lengthy batch of dialogue, but it’s very annoying.

Plot-wise, the game doesn’t really do a good job explaining what’s going on. It’s possible I wasn’t paying close enough attention, or that I accidentally glitched ahead, but to me it seemed like things changed pretty arbitrarily. Suddenly a woman appears, I’ve never seen her before and couldn’t understand what’s she’s doing and why we’re so chummy. A location which I previously entered with no problem was suddenly guarded with a maze. Characters that I’ve just spoken to suddenly became hostile for no apparent reason. My dialogue options stopped making sense. All of those are either an artistic choice or a design limitation, and they made it very difficult to follow the story or figure out what I needed to do next. The reuse of character models was also problematic in that regard, as you can’t really tell one reception clerk from another, even though they have different roles in the story.

The terrible dialogue system doesn’t help. First of all, its visual design is silly. You have several tabs marked with question marks, each containing a single possible response. This means that whenever you want to talk to anyone, you have to click all the tabs to see what your options are, instead of just having them listed and picking one. You’d think maybe the tabs would have some order, but they don’t, and in fact sometimes the order changes, so the leftmost is something different than it was before, and what was leftmost is now second on the left, etc.
But that’s just cumbersome. The real issue is the dialogue itself. Basically, your options branch for absolutely no reason. A typical example has you interrogating a witness. You can choose to ask him precisely one question - either “has that person made a phone call” or “who approached whom”. Then, for no in-game reason (at least not one you can infer from the dialogue), the other question disappears. It’s not that the character refuses to answer—Gus refuses to even ask. That happens all the time. In the interest of multiple paths, or arbitrary difficulty, or bugginess (I honestly don’t know which), in most conversations you have you’re restricted to asking only about one thing. Since you can’t save in the middle of dialogue, that makes every dialogue a risky affair - not that you can get stuck, but you’re missing out on parts of the plot simply because you chose to ask about the least informative thing, without any clues as to how to choose. Neither the phrasing nor the physical clues give any indication to how a line of questioning is going to develop.
Because you can’t skip dialogue, and dialogue is lengthy, restoring to the beginning of a dialogue is a tiresome affair, so instead you find yourself often confused and/or frustrated.

To add to the above, there are a number of related bugs. At one point I couldn’t read a document I’d found, since the game kept popping up another document instead. Another journal didn’t appear in my documents, and “using” it didn’t read it. Apparently I’m supposed to give it to someone, but it sure would help if I knew what was written in there.
You can’t look at inventory items. Hovering the mouse over them gives them a name, but no description. And of course, movement is node-based so even a simple task like looking around a room becomes an exercise in frustration as you look for the right angle where your pixel-hunt for a “zoom” cursor would be successful - there is no hotspot highlighting.

What few puzzles I encountered were bad. There was a maze, some standard inventory combinations and fetch quests, and a sketch-the-bad-guy puzzle which was just terrible. You’re supposed to create a profile based on witness statements, but the statements are incredibly vague and are split between an easy-to-read section in your notebook and the impossible-to-wade-through “conversations” tab. Moreover, if anyone can explain to me how those particular eyes are the “small” ones or why that nose is a “boxer’s nose”, I’m willing to take back what I said about the puzzle - but both walkthroughs I read gave up on trying to explain the puzzle logic and just told you how many times to click on each feature. It could’ve been less atrocious if characters at least gave you some hints upon being shown the profile - “right nose, but his hair was much straighter” or whatever, but they don’t.
There was another poor puzzle I inflicted upon myself by missing a hotspot. The game features a remarkably original puzzle where you push a key through a keyhole, and I couldn’t find the single object that’s long and narrow to push the key with. As a result, I was reduced to looking for a set of lockpicks from a person I’ve never seen before but whom Gus apparently knew was the go-to guy for these things. In exchange, I had to play “spot the differences” between two pictures - which I couldn’t see side by side. Instead, you stare at one, click on the “switch” button, the game shows you an animation and you get the other one. Why I couldn’t lay them out side by side, beyond arbitrary difficulty, is anybody’s guess. Moreover, until you find all the differences, Mr. Lockpick just tells you “you barely found any differences!” which makes no in-game sense because theoretically you’re helping detect a forgery—and if he already knows how many differences there are, why on earth does he need me?

Overall, after several hours of play (difficult to say how far ahead I am, since the game gives no indication of days or chapters or whatever—despite clearly having discrete sections after which the environment changes considerably), I realized I’m really not having any fun. The plot began to take shape and it seems like it could be a good one, but the game just obfuscates it so much that I couldn’t find the patience to keep at unraveling it. It might be more enjoyable with a walkthrough to ensure you go through locations and dialogue in the order the game intended. If you try it, let me know.

The foremost issue is the interface. The game uses text-based input and direct control. Both suffer from the typical issues with such interfaces.
Moving about with the arrow keys is not inherently broken, but the hotel you spend most of the game in has several flights of stairs. You can’t go “under” the stairs, as this is still a 2D game underneath, so you have to squeeze yourself down just to get to the other side. Moreover, the stairs are slightly diagonal, so pressing down only goes half the distance, then you have to press right, then down again. It’s a minor issue but seeing as most of the game is just running around like a headless chicken, not having any path-finding becomes annoying quickly.

The parser is, well, a parser. You will get to play “guess the verb” with it and it will reject plausible attempts with confusing reasons because it latches onto a word in the wrong way. Some commands work only part of the time for some reason. I didn’t have the issue mentioned in the AG review, though—being a veteran of these games, it’s always “talk man about woman” for me, so there was no need to remember the name of anything, and I never used the word “shingle”.
The game suffers from a mortal sin, when it comes to text-based adventures: some items are never mentioned in the description. Because you can’t click on objects, text adventures absolutely must, at some point, mention every object you could interact with in the scene descriptions. It doesn’t have to be in “look room”, but in Trilby’s Notes, some items are just never mentioned, neither by “look” nor by “look table”, etc. You have to figure out what they are based on the graphics - and I’m sorry, but the graphics are not that good.

Beyond the crippled interface, the game itself is also sub-par. The plot is actually quite good, but the mechanics are unbearable.
For some reason the game constantly shifts you back to the dark world even after giving you means to shift between worlds at will. It’s not scary because by that time you’ve already seen everything there is to see in both hotels, so it’s just annoying, forcing you to leave and re-enter screens. It’s also a bit confusing at first, I thought it meant some places can’t be accessed in the light world, where in fact the pills just wear off really fast.

There is one ridiculous point where Trilby refuses to take an obviously-useful item because if he did it would ruin a part of the plot.

There are several sections where you just have to walk around and look for people. There is no way to deduce where they are, you just have to use the awkward interface to move about the entire hotel, looking for them, occasionally being randomly shifted to the other hotel. It’s not challenging and it’s not interesting, it’s just a chore.

The puzzles are almost all completely trivial. Off the top of my head, there are two interactions I would call “puzzles” until the very end of the game.
The end itself is ridiculous. It could’ve been clever but it’s implemented poorly, the sequence is just way too overdrawn. It’s difficult to explain without spoiling, so suffice to say it’s a “convention breaker” type of puzzle, and those always need to be handled with care.

To summarize: Trilby’s Notes is longer than its predecessors, but the extra length is mostly just padding. It takes longer to move between rooms and you often need to do a brute-force search for items or characters. The actual game-play portions total to about as long as the previous games.
The plot ties things nicely together and prepares the scene for the next game, but you could just look it up online and save yourself the aggravation.

The plot is similar to the first game, but is worse. The title of the game has nothing to do with anything, the length is arbitrary (this game also features one action days, which could’ve been cut out altogether) and there’s one “tomato in the mirror” twist in the end that makes no sense - perhaps intended as a parody on horror game twist endings.
The protagonist is considerably dumber this time around. This is reflected both in his boring observations (none of Trilby’s dry wit) and in his refusal to do things which are obviously required. It’s one of those games when you see a body peeking out of the box but can’t open the box until you’ve trekked to the other end of the game for someone to tell you “hey, maybe you should look in that box over there” - quite frustrating.
Another frustrating feature is the necessity of being careful when operating outside the spaceship. It adds no challenge and is never used in an interesting way, so it ends up just being padding, requiring several extra clicks for no real reason.
Finally, towards the end the game introduces some timed sections and some random encounters which are every bit as annoying as you’d expect them to be. They’re not very difficult, but the first one of which took me a while because I had an alternate solution in mind, which the game refused to acknowledge.

All in all, it’s a passable game - roughly as long as the first one, worse plot and increased challenge of the wrong variety.

The first day is mostly spent running around the mansion rounding everyone up and picking up loose inventory items. Not so much about puzzling as it is about learning the layout of the mansion. The second day is a bit more puzzling. The third day is the meatiest, where the entire mansion is unlocked and most of the deductions are made. The fourth day is mostly there so the game can be called “five days”, and the fifth day is the grand finale.

Puzzles are okay - logical within the context (no standalone puzzles) and fair for most part. The fifth day is considerably worse in that regard. It has a magically appearing inventory item you need to notice, as well as staunch refusal to use some perfectly logical items in lieu of other, functionally equivalent, items.
Other than that, I’ve seen no issues with the game. It’s not particularly horrifying, but it still creates an atmosphere using some nice subtle touches.

By far the worst problem is Simon himself. He’s simply an insufferable prick. Where in the first game he offered sarcastic quips, in this one he’s just plain mean. There’s not much to add beyond that, it’s just not fun watching him do some of the things he does.
Like the previous game, the puzzles in this one are almost all inventory. Unlike the last one, there are some downright illogical puzzles. Getting the perfume, for instance, should rank up there with the infamous “pose as Mosely” part in GK3. Fortunately, the poor puzzles are grouped near the end of the game.
There are no “filler” screens this time around, which detracts from the exploration, but also somewhat mitigates the problem with hotspot highlighting not containing exits and saves a lot of time.
Puzzles clues are hit and miss. It’s now a lot more obvious what you’ll get if you help people out, but the game does a poor job of guiding the player. The very first objective you’re given can only be accomplished after over half the game is complete, so until then you sort of wander around, noting who has what and who needs what so you can start figuring out ways to “progress” by making an impact on the world. In other words, you’ll be doing a lot of things that have nothing to do with winning a magic contest until the point where you actually win said contest.

The other characters in the game are as one-dimensional as in the first one, and still are boring to talk to. The plot is likewise idiotic - Simon chases a McGuffin, things come between him and it, obstacles are overcome and both are whisked to the next act. Like the first game, there’s actually no interaction (and thus no tension) between the bad guy and Simon until the very last minutes of the game.

The game is also less humurous. It certainly tries to be funny, but the comic timing is off on many of the lines, there is an overabundance of slapstick and reliance on “accents are funny”, and there is one tribute to Benny Hill in the end that you just wish would end already. There are some amusing minor characters, but most exist to trade poor jokes with Simon.

In summary, the charm is gone. The game isn’t funny, the puzzles are often lacking and hearing Simon blather on and on is simply painful at times. Since the game’s terrible ending sets up the scene for Simon 3D, one of the worst adventure games you might be forced to play, there is simply no reason to play it.

The graphics are black and white, which was a bit off-putting at first, but it can be thought of as a matter of style and gotten used to fairly fast. I never had a problem recognizing what was in front of me or finding objects (despite the lack of hotspot highlighting), so they are definitely serviceable.
Sound in the game is sparse. There are a few recurring background tunes and some sound effects. There is no speech, which I don’t consider to be a problem.

The puzzles are mostly inventory, with some “figure out the combination” type thrown in and one “dialogue puzzle”. In addition to that, Donna has a set of vampiric abilities she can use, which can be thought of as extra inventory items.
The puzzles are very good. They are well integrated, some of them are quite clever, and the solutions are logical. This is not a game for elaborate item combinations - almost all items are used for their intended purposes, so the inventory puzzles mostly revolve around figuring out what you need and then getting it.

There are several timed sections and death is very possible, but the game allows undo so there is no need to worry about getting stuck or to save excessively. You never have to replay more than a few seconds even if you managed to get “too far” ahead.

The game introduces a mechanic where Donna has to manage her peace of mind and her “blood” level. Blood allows use of vampiric powers, and peace of mind is required to steel yourself before unpleasant sections. The problem with this is that to increase both, you just mechanically repeat a set of actions. Pretty quickly your nights start out by sending Donna to the bathroom, then to sit on the chair, then bathroom, then chair, until the meter fills up. It sounds like scumming but really, it’s what the game intends you to do - there are almost no “organic” ways to increase that bar.
Blood is even worse - you get it by prowling on humans in a designated screen. There is no challenge, you just go to the same spot, then bite, then repeat.
These meters are later used to bar you from using powers when it would be inconvenient plot-wise, but that’s not justification enough for making the player go through these motions every time.
Another problem is that inventory items, when picked up, are placed randomly in the inventory, and since there are many notes and notebooks in the game, it’s difficult to remember which is which - and you lose peace of mind by looking at some of them. This was never a problem, but it was a mild annoyance.

Back to the good, the story is convincing even if it’s difficult to identify with a vampire. The background characters are portrayed adequately, and the ultimate choices you make do carry some weight. In addition, the story is original, which is a rare quality these days, and it does a very good job explaining how Donna is sucked into the save-the-world role.

To offset that, the game is a bit unfair at times. At one point the game didn’t let me use a vampiric power in a situation, explaining why it wouldn’t work. Later, in an identical situation, that power does work - but obviously I hadn’t tried it until a very late stage.
Some puzzles don’t let you overlay the key when working on them. For instance, there is a play-the-piano puzzle which is properly clued even for people who know nothing about it, but the note sheet itself is in your inventory and you can’t access it while playing, so you have to memorize the notes before playing, an extra level of unnecessary difficulty beyond figuring out the notes themselves.

Finally, the game features gratuitous nudity. To be honest, it seems as though the game creator managed to convince the actresses to take their clothes off, and was a bit too happy about it. It’s not a huge issue, but it did mean I didn’t want to play it in public on my laptop.

To summarize: I would still say Donna is a good game even if I had to pay for it. It’s amazing how much content (~7 hours, no padding) is offered for free. If you can live with a black and white game with no speech that features gratuitous nudity, this is a definite recommendation.

The puzzles are good. I do think the theme of magic spells could’ve been used more. Puzzles around spells are usually “where can I use this incredibly specific spell”, instead of “how can I creatively use this spell’s effect”. There are some exceptions (that make for good puzzles IMO), but for most part it’s about running around looking for a body of water to cast the create-bridge-over-body-of-water spell on. Unfortunately one of the best spell-related puzzles is marred by requiring a “view hunt” (the node-based equivalent of a pixel hunt) so it’s possible many players will have read a walkthrough by then.
Puzzle design is also somewhat problematic. There are some “rearrange the soup cans” moments, when you do something because it’s obvious you can do it, but the character doesn’t have a clear motivation. The most egregious example is making a cup of cocoa. The game clues about it in three different ways, as well as suddenly starting to supply inventory items towards that goal. However, until after you do it, you don’t really know why you’d want to make that cup of cocoa, you just do because it’s there and it’s obviously something you’ll need to do at some point in the game, so why not now.
The flow of the game is sometimes constricted by choke points that seem arbitrary. Moreover, the game is often linearized by it. At some point the plot becomes a standard three part fetch quest, but its parts have to be tackled in a specific order. Even then, the game is relatively short - might’ve even been less than five hours.

However, those issues only serve to keep the game from a five-star rating. Between the constantly amusing humour, wonderful voice acting, oodles of style and generally good puzzles, ZGI is still a clear recommendation for comedy-loving adventurers.

The closest analogue I’ve played is “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”. TCL also features some gore, people in extreme situations and real-world interaction with metaphors come to life. However, there is more to TCL beyond mature subject matter and a lot of blood. Throughout the game, you make many choices. Not always obvious and not necessarily big ones - one of the first choices you make is choosing which of five identical candles to blow out. All of these choices have consequences which defy standard “game solving” logic. You can’t try to keep the high road when choices are so arbitrary. This technique goes a long way towards breaking the player out of the standard gaming mindset and forcing them to experience the story.
Obviously, this works best if you resist the temptation of saving constantly and reloading to see which choices are meaningful and which ultimately do nothing - there is a lot more suspense when you can’t help but second-guess yourself.

In other sections you are asked questions the protagonist would know the answer to, but you, the player, don’t. In a sense, the game lets you write Susan’s history however you see fit. This type of storytelling is fairly innovative and again served to draw me into the game.

Play-wise, the game might be a bit off-putting. It includes a lot of lengthy dialogue and cut scenes, and sometimes you can go as long as 20 minutes without any player interaction.
Interaction varies greatly. In some parts it’s standard adventure fare of using dialogue and inventory to overcome obstacles. In other parts it’s adventuring under heavy narcosis, within dream worlds that have their own sense. Other sections are about navigating a dialogue tree or even just participating in on-screen action by clicking on the keyboard.

The best part is the story. Not the plot itself, but its delivery. The game is directed very, very well. The use of lighting, music, sound and visuals is extremely effective. The horror sections had me clutching my laptop literally scared to further advance the plot. The creepy parts will feature in my nightmares in days to come. The game is sad or scary or exhilarating when it wants to, and it works. I don’t remember the last time I experienced a game so fully.

My only gripe is that you can’t save the game during dialogue or cut scenes. It’s inconvenient if your play sessions might end abruptly.

I don’t want to mince words. This is the type of game the less you know about, the better. Don’t read on the plot, don’t try to reverse engineer what’s going on as you play it and you’re guaranteed a strong experience. The game is not very long (around 5 hours) but it has a lot of replay value - I definitely want to explore what other choices might have led to.

Before diving into the details, I chose to play in the “Game Player” setting, the more difficult of the two. It’s possible some of the sequences I found frustrating are bypassed in the easier setting.

Starting with the good: The game is much longer than its predecessor, UaKM. While still some days are slightly shorter than others, most game days took me several hours to complete - there was a lot to do, see and find.
The puzzles are more varied. There is still a lot of focus on PI work - asking the right person the right question, collecting evidence, breaking into locations and even some mild sneaking around. However, the game includes less pixel hunting (most items are at eye level and don’t require positioning the character in awkward places) and in their place we get some stand-alone puzzles beyond recreating destroyed pieces of evidence. I found most of these puzzles quite good - some were even very challenging, which is rare in games these days. A few were “unfair” in requiring trial-and-error (though there is no penalty for failure, even if you discount the obvious save-before-you-start technique), but that’s probably my fault for playing in the higher setting - the game recommends it to people who already completed the game. Most puzzles are properly clued but many include an extra twist - the first puzzle box is such an example, where you could brute force it, but figuring it out resulted in that “aha” moment which signifies a puzzle well designed.
The plot is quite engrossing. Like many mysteries, it makes no sense in hindsight, but the road there is a lot of fun. It takes much longer to get down to the heart of the matter, and until then, the game spends about seven days teasing you with various glimpses into what’s going on.
Finally, the multiple paths in the game seem like more than just a gimmick. I’ve only played it once so far, and I won’t replay soon (it took around 25 hours!), but I’ve read online and things can get quite different if you make other choices - and choices are not always obvious.

However, the game has some sections that are downright atrocious. There’s a section where you’re being chased by something. Tex apparently has a sixth sense, because the player is told about this in cutscenes that happen in places Tex can’t see, yet Tex knows to comment about the urgency of the situation. Moreover, in this section you’re in a huge area, and you somehow have to figure out on the go just where to go and what to do to stop the chase, and then you can properly explore. This is poor design. The game should somehow limit you to only those rooms or areas that are important to your immediate survival - otherwise it’s just one big crap shoot where you’ll either figure it out immediately by accidentally going to the right rooms, or repeatedly play a boring 10 minute section over and over again, frantically trying to figure out which rooms are important for defeating your attacker.
This is not the only timed sequence, but it’s clearly the worst one of a bad lot.
Another very poor section is an action sequence which actually emphasizes the poor control scheme. You have to rapidly dodge flying objects while traversing a maze. If you step off the ledges, you die instantly. This might have made sense if you could strafe or otherwise control your character decently, but it meshes very poorly with the control the game does offer.
There are other weird design choices. You can get a map to the maze, but then you find out there are objects randomly strewn about in the dead ends, so you end up having to traverse the entire maze anyway. There’s a long section that takes pixel hunting, already annoying, and makes it even more difficult and unfun by distorting your view AND making it difficult to pick items even if you see them. For some reason the game re-introduces the “limited cash” style. I’m pretty sure there are dead ends aplenty.

So, with all the issues above, it’s difficult to justify a high rating, but it certainly feels like a game that deserves to be highly rated. What can I say, despite all those frustrations, I would still recommend the game to others. I would also recommend a walkthrough for some sections, but the overall experience was definitely positive.

The graphics are dated but functional. Most environments look bad up-close, but the video sequence and the pre-rendered screens still look okay. Voice acting is very good, and the plot is as captivating as ever.
The most dated aspect are the roaming controls. Instead of using WASD-style naviation, the keyboard lets you move your viewpoint up and down, and tilt your head up and down. Everything else is done with the mouse, so to move forward you have to move your mouse forward, and to turn you have to move your mouse left or right. This is usually quite inconvenient - even with the walk speed controls available in-game, I found it difficult not to spin all over the place when attempting to comb a room for clues.

There are some red flags, but almost none of them really hurt my enjoyment. There’s one trial and error puzzle (but when you fail the game basically undoes it), you can die (but not often and you typically see it coming) there’s a stealth sequence (but it’s quite easy) and I think you can even reach a dead end of sorts (but I’m not sure about it, and you’ll discover it pretty quickly).
The only gameplay issue that I found annoying are the many pixel hunts. The game utilizes the capability to roam freely and hides objects in every difficult-to-look-in angle. After a couple of hours of playing, my MO became to crawl all over every new room, then raise the viewpoint as high as it goes while looking down, then circle every object. It’s a bit of an immersion-breaker, and the hint system doesn’t really help as often the hint just tells you which object you’re looking for, but not where it is (neither room, nor place within a room).

Beyond the pixel hunts, the game suffers from a slight pacing issue - some days in Tex’ week are quite short, much shorter than the first day. That was a bit disappointing, as the grand finale felt somewhat rushed - I was sure I had more game ahead of me.

As for the actual gameplay, there are some (logical) inventory puzzles here and there, but the majority of brainpower in this game is required to piece together the mystery - choosing who to talk to and about what. That makes for a very detective-y experience, and since you usually can’t go wrong, it also provides for a lot of amusement. Overall the game is fairly easy - objects are used once and often disappear when not needed, and most inventory uses are fairly straightforward.

To summarize, UaKM is an enjoyable detective experience that provides a light challenge and some pixel hunting frustration. Not something you can’t afford to miss, but certainly recommended.

Everything in Syberia takes forever. Screen transitions often take 10 seconds of real time, not because the PC is weak but because there is no way to skip the meticulous “going up stairs” or “climbing down ladder” animations. They are well-made, but as the game involves a lot of backtracking, often forced, it might’ve been nice to be able to just skip to the next screen instead of seeing a young woman slowly ascend a staircase yet again.

The forced backtracking deserves a paragraph on its own. It is often necessary to talk to a person at one end of the playable area to randomly unlock something in the opposite end. There is no rhyme or reason to it - only after trying a code that doesn’t work does suddenly someone leave a door open, or only after talking to someone can you interact with something you knew you needed to interact with, before. The game railroads you completely, which again increases play time without adding any enjoyment.

The puzzles are almost non-existent. You use items only for their intended purpose, and about 80% of the puzzles are literally “use key on lock”. The game is filled with “automatons” and other sorts of mechanical devices. However, experimentation with these wondrous creations is actively discouraged by the protagonist - instead of letting you click buttons and flip levers to figure out what would happen, Kate just flatly states “this doesn’t seem to work” without any other feedback to the player. Often you discover you just need to find a missing part somewhere, use it on automaton, press button, puzzle solved.
The “that doesn’t seem to work” approach becomes even more problematic when you factor in the fact the game doesn’t allow examination of hotspots and they have no description. The cursor becomes highlighted, but you don’t really know whether it’s an exit or an object, and there’s no way to know what objects are except based on the graphics. Experimentation of any sort is simply non-existent.
Another padding method is the lack of a hotspot highlighter. Combined with multiple screens with absolutely nothing interactive in them, a lot of the play time is spent playing a game of “hotspot hunt” - not precisely pixel-hunting, but roughly the same amount of fun. After about an hour of playing I’ve started referring to a walk-through quite often, as it became apparent that whenever it’s not 100% obvious how to proceed, it means I’ve missed a hotspot or an area, and I really didn’t feel like spending a couple of minutes of real time trudging slowly between screens and sweeping my cursor around, looking for that telltale highlight.

To give an example just how bad the above issues are, I’m going to spoil a “puzzle”, if you can call it that: within a dense area, full with non-interactive stairs, ladders and crates, there is one particular ladder that’s not a hotspot. However, there is a small area on the ladder which IS a hotspot, which when clicked zooms on some old sign. If you remove the sign from the ladder, suddenly the ladder becomes a hotspot and you can climb it to a new area. Lesser minds might question this choice - might not it have been better to have the ladder as a hotspot and have Kate say “hey, I can’t climb this, the sign is in the way”? But look, the game is so full of whimsy and wonder! Automatons! Nice graphics! Surely only people who don’t appreciate these things care about such trivialities as “being able to figure out what impedes the heroine’s progress”.
Another example, for those who lauded how “realistic” Kate’s approach to obstacles is: early in the game, you need to find the Notary in an unfamiliar village. When I find myself in such a situation, I ask people “excuse me, where’s the Notary office?”. Not Kate. She has to walk through the village, click on doors eliciting the response “there’s no need to go down there” until you find the right one - which is not marked with a sign saying “Notary” or anything, though it IS distinct from the other doors in the village. This refusal to ask simple questions leads to many hurdles that simply would not exist in real life.
Oh, and at one point she (puzzle!) refuses to get her hands dirty and at another point (puzzle!) refuses to cross a 20cm puddle. And she’s afraid of birds apparently. And the birds never move. Total puzzle realism, not to mention the enjoyment derived from walking her through these challenges.
There, I think that’s all I had in my system.

Artificially padded, hotspot hunting, no puzzles to speak of. In case that’s not enough, it’s time to dissect the plot. Kate Walker is not a person. She has no personality of her own. She doesn’t express opinions, she doesn’t offer observations, she just reacts as blandly as possible. This is probably the only way to survive in her world, which is filled with caricatures, from her ridiculously micro-managing boss, who calls her more than once an hour to yell at her constantly, to the rectors of the university, who someone manage to hold their esteemed position despite having the mentality of toddlers. Every single character in the game has idiosyncrasies bordering on serious personality disorders, and they mostly exist just as ways to impede Kate’s progress.
The plot itself is basically Kate retracing the life and work of one noble retard - based on the ending I think she was supposed to be falling in love with his simple life and mechanical designs, but it’s hard to say as she never offers any commentary to suggest as such.

The game does some things right: the graphics are quite pretty, voice acting is okay and the Russian in the game is accurate instead of being gibberish. Gameplay-wise, you can’t die and you can’t get stuck, though the latter is forced using some awful, awful writing: “this train was designed to go with two specific objects in the trophy case, go fetch the objects which coincidentally you’re going to need later on”.

So, I give the game two stars: for pretty graphics, for technical stability (no crashes or other bugs, which is good because no autosave) and for no dead ends. But there is nothing beyond that - particularly, not a game.

So, while it’s certainly a triumph for original design and indie developers and all that jazz, it’s just not that fun of a game. The puzzles aren’t very satisfying*, the plot is confusing and far from engrossing, and I don’t have a third item because honestly that’s all there is to the game.

* to be honest, I found the shape-moving puzzle quite awesome, original and a lot of fun. But it’s one “minigame” in an entire lousy game.

The most annoying issue is the frequent technical glitches. The game often crashes or gets stuck at startup. Some animations and item graphics are missing. There are some poorly-translated sentences. The game occasionally crashes in the middle. There are no subtitles to the movies. Some of these issues are solved if you set your operating system’s locale to “US”, but most aren’t.
The interface is simple, for most part, but it’s sometimes too simple. Whenever the game tries to do something clever, like changing the cursor to a hand to let you interact directly with the environment, it falls on its face, for instance by getting stuck with the hand cursor and not being able to do anything else until you right click somewhere neutral. This deselects the item you were carrying, which in one very late section becomes quite annoying, as the puzzle turns into “navigate this oversized item representation to the hotspot without accidentally having the cursor change”. Not fun.

More integral to the game are the puzzles, which wildly vary in range and style. You can’t get stuck and you can’t die, which is a good start, but you can’t get Sadwick to give you any useful input, either. Basically an icon is missing from the interface - in addition to “hand/eye/mouth”, there needs to be an icon of “just describe what this item is”. The game uses the eye icon to have Sadwick give his strange commentary, but this means that often you’re carrying an item without understanding what it is. Combined with the invisible items bug from before, this is a huge pain, forcing you to rely on a walkthrough or try out combinations at random. Most of the “difficult” puzzles in the game would’ve been much, much easier if you had any idea whatsoever what it is you’re looking at. Instead, Sadwick often says something stupid or even starts talking to someone about the item you’re just trying to get a description of.
In addition to those infuriating cases, the game takes a lot of liberties with Sadwick’s skills. At one point I recognized a popular culture reference and tried it out just to see what joke they hid - only to find out that it was the actual puzzle solution, even though Sadwick is supposedly clumsy, and the act portrayed requires superhuman dextrity. This happens often - sometimes Sadwick is so incompetent he can’t climb a waist-high fence, other times he’s suddenly quite adept, physically.
Finally, if you try something out too soon, Sadwick might refuse to do it, giving no hint that this will be useful later, and with no in-game reason why not do it right now.
The game is quite linear, needlessly. You’re presented with multiple goals, but it turns out that you need an item produced as a by-product of goal A to get to goal B.

The game is not without its charm. While Sadwick’s nasal voice and constant whining are extremely annoying at times, I agree they’re masterfully done and are an important part of portraying the character. Of course, it’s not much fun to play such an annoying character, but given that design choice, the voice is perfect. The graphics are excellent throughout the game, with the exception of the so-so cutscenes. The plot is paced nicely, though the ending is the classic “bleh, we can’t figure out how to end this” ending and a poorly conceived one at that - none of the plot threads come together in the end, instead there’s just some resolution of the main conflict and hurray, you’re done playing.

All in all the game could be good, but it’s not. Not a complete waste of time, but it shouldn’t be anyone’s first choice.

Since expounding on the positive is dull, here are all the minor annoyances I’ve encountered:
- Some screens have a slight problem with hotspot highlighting, where a hotspot is missed and instead another area is shown. Except for one screen, leaving and re-entering fixes this issue.
- I was unable to complete one of the early mini games due to a bug in the game. Decreasing the graphics quality fixed this problem, but this is not a workaround that would occur to a non-programmer.
- Some features of the game, such as the multi-character puzzles and having multiple paths, are underused. There is one short section where you can choose who to use (and it barely matters), and the multi-character sections are usually also short and feature one “main” character instead of several working together. This doesn’t detract from the game, but it hints at things that could’ve been even better.
- Finally, the last act is a bit rushed and the ending is abrupt. I expected some mega-puzzle involving all characters or something, instead it was 90% cutscene and some very light puzzling.

The above are not enough to lose even half a star, though. The game does everything important right: You can’t die, you can’t get to an unwinnable state, the autosave works even if the game crashes, no unfair puzzles, no padding. In other words, every minute of playing the game is spent saving the world in an enjoyable matter. I can’t ask for more in a game.

The interface was re-done and seems much prettier. The graphics were changed to be more cartoonish, which might not be to everyone’s taste. Most importantly, the game play has been streamlined, so while it took about 1.5 hours to complete, there’s more game than the previous installment. There is very little running around in this game, as the computer has been turned into a “myPhone” and is available in all the locations. Moreover, Rosa agrees to talk to Joey in most places, so there’s no more need to interrupt the flow by going home intermittently.

The plot gripped me much more than the last installments, but a word of warning: the series has somewhat jumped the shark. After three games that followed (more or less) a set of rules, the fourth breaks many of the rules. I found it enjoyable, but it might piss off other fans.
Game play is much improved. Control of Joey is a lot more meaningful this time around, as his tie and his ability to blow can be controlled by the player. There are more and better puzzles requiring Rosa and Joey cooperating. Convincing spooks they’re dead has never been more involved.

My only gripes are the game length and the fact the plot arch didn’t really go anywhere. I’m not sure how many installments the developer is planning on, but it might be a good idea to advance the major plot now and then. This episode just strews a bunch of hints without explaining anything in the end. Nevertheless, the game was enjoyable, interesting and the puzzles were fun if not too challenging. After playing all four, this is the only one I can wholeheartedly recommend.

Game play is similar to the previous installments. The plot is slightly less rigidly structured, but the general type of puzzle is the same. The ability to combine notes is gone, which IMO is a shame as it was a nice mechanic that was poorly used, and the solution should’ve been to use it properly instead of ditching it altogether. You again have to type names into a search engine instead of being able to select them from your notes.

Other than that it’s same old, same old. The plot is not to everyone’s taste - I found the game breaking the rules it previous established to be a cop-out in an attempt to tie all the games together, but other people might care less about the lack of consistency and instead enjoy the “arch”, such as it may be.

Overall there is not much to add about this one beyond the previous two. At 1.5 hours (I have no clue how it could possibly take 10 hours, as some reviewers say - you could brute force the game in half that time) it’s slightly longer and I enjoyed playing it more than the previous two installments.

Other aspects of the game have also deteriorated since the last game. You can now use inventory items on the environment, but there’s no way to un-select them besides right clicking on a hotspot. You still get to research leads, but because we’re in the 70s now, you use a phone book. Reasonable enough, except for some inexplicable reason, you have to type names yourself into the phone book, even if they appear quite plainly in your notes. I can see why the developer would want to add easter eggs, or extra challenge or whatever, but why not allow you to EITHER type OR use the notes is beyond me. As it is, because I play without pen and paper next to me, I had to memorize the spelling of several names during the course of the game.

Other than these new flaws, the old ones are still around: the game crashes frequently, Loraine is unable to make very simple deductions without the player combining notes for her and you have to move between locations just so you can use a phonebook. Not that these transitions are very slow, but it seems inconvenient to have to return home every time just to look someone up.

Unlike the previous game, this time I had to use a walkthrough for a “puzzle” where for some reason Loraine wouldn’t look at something in plain sight and refused to ask about it. There were similar incidents in other puzzles, such as the puzzle where you have to understand that suddenly the talking interface with characters has changed (so repeating questions gives different answers for some of the characters). Barring these poorly thought out sequences, the game is even easier than the last one, and again takes under an hour to complete.

The plot is still engrossing despite the wooden protagonist, though the ending is something of a cheat - presumably to keep some questions open for the next parts. I would recommend just reading a summary of the game, as its only value seems to be in setting the ground for the next installments - the game itself is just frustrating, far more than the last one.

The story is well-written and is interesting, but the protagonist is insufferable. Rosa is a very difficult character to sympathize with, and the short length of the game leaves no time for building her as a plausible character.

The puzzles are pretty simple, with an over-reliance on note combinations. Often Rosa refuses to try the obvious until you spoon-feed her, which is okay for inexperienced gamers, but if you’ve played several games in the past, you’d naturally expect the character to figure these things out “on her own”. Again, this is not too bad because the game gives subtle hints that you’re on the right track and Rosa’s just being obtuse.

Overall this game is right down the middle. There are issues, but most have mitigating factors.
Its main problem is that it’s not really a game, but more like a tutorial into the Blackwell series. Even as an episode it’s too short - definitely not worth $15. However, by now it’s sold as a bundle with all other games for $5 or so, which is a more accurate estimate of its worth.

This game has no redeeming qualities. I don’t know how the AG reviewer could avoid noticing all the glaring flaws I’m about to detail, but I strongly urge readers to steer clear of this game.

Feeble’s in-game voice acting is done well and he has some good lines. With this out of the way, let’s discuss the rest of the game.

I bought this game because the review promised hard puzzles. I’m an old-school adventure gamer, and I miss the challenge in the classics. This game is not difficult. It’s annoying, unfair at times, poorly designed and frustrating, but the puzzles themselves are not challenging.
There are many sections that would take a long time to “solve”. Overwhelmingly, these are either due to terrible game design or due to unfair mechanics. One of the examples you will no doubt read about if you Google for reviews is the in-game arcade sequence. Feeble needs to win some inventory as prizes in an arcade. To do that, you accumulate tokens, playing “Sordid’s Puzzle Castle”, six minigames of varying difficulty. Unlike any arcade machine in existence, after winning a round you may cash out or continue playing (risking everything accumulated so far). Prizes increase considerably as the risk of failure grows. However, instead of making the mini games more challenging, you just get a shorter time limit, because we all know the reason for playing adventure games is so we can solve things under time pressure. Heaped on this generally frustrating exercise you get the general bad design of the game. It takes tokens to activate the machine. So, to use it you need to go to the inventory screen, select the tokens, and use them on the machine, instead of just clicking on “use” and having the character automatically use tokens. That’s 3-4 wasted seconds. Then the game logo comes up, with an annoying announcement that never changes and you can’t skip. That’s an extra 5 seconds. Then you get to play a game - luckily you can skip having the rules explained to you over and over again. Then you have to manipulate the game’s unresponsive controls while solving it, and then you get a “win” or “lose” screen, each stealing several precious seconds. You need at least 240 coins, which mean winning four in a row, three in a row twice, or three in a row once and then two in a row twice. And, since some of the mini games are difficult (Swamp Stew, which is a mastermind with six elements, unlimited repetitions and ten guesses), you are going to botch some attempts. So, prepare to spend several hours at the arcade, about 25% of which spent due to poor interface and unskippable, repetitive animations.
In case that wasn’t disheartening enough, some of the tokens go in one of those crane machines where you try to pick up prizes. The viewing angle is odd and the locations where the crane has to be stopped make absolutely no sense. In fact, and I hope this isn’t a spoiler, when you do manage to pick up an object the motion of the crane changes, instead of grabbing it gently pinches. This means any attempt to try and figure out where to place the crane is doomed to failure, since the failure animation actively misleads you - trying to position the hand so the failure animation would grab something simply doesn’t work. What I eventually did was cheat to get 1000 tokens or so, and just dropped it in a grid everywhere, until I got the objects I wanted. Fun!

This isn’t an early section of the game, but it wonderfully demonstrates everything wrong with it. The game has no respect for the player, sticking you in an unfun distraction with no easy way to win and wastes your time with poor interface and annoying animations. The exact same problem nearly had me quit the game earlier, when you escape from a penal colony. The colony is divided into several screens, and you uncontrollably move between them, accompanied by an annoying shriek. Often the trigger is clicking something you’re not supposed to. To complete the experience, once in every shrieking cycle you are forced to watch a ten-second unskippable animation. Thus, you need to figure out what you can do, but there is only one relevant screen in the colony, you have limited time to complete everything, whenever you don’t do everything perfectly the game resets everything, and you listen to annoying shrieks followed by watching boring unskippable animation, over and over and over again. Just in case this wasn’t intolerable enough, there’s a random element in the escape, so you need to save and reload to avoid the guard - but reloading the game constitutes an action, so you can’t do it right away - you again have to listen to 4-5 shrieks and watch the animation. This is a GREAT way to make the player feel like he’s in a penal colony, so great it may have been deliberate, but it’s just not fun. As mentioned above, I felt the game disrespects my time. I understand the desire to want to create tension, but making the player want to quit the game because some internal coin toss didn’t go their way is not the way to go about it.

I promised more. So, beyond the incredibly inconvenient interface (one trivial “puzzle” requires 21 clicks to complete, since you need to cycle to the appropriate icon five times), there are also unfair sections. Suddenly, you’re supposed to guess that an object, not marked as a hotspot, is clickable. In another section, the solution to a puzzle is to JUST WAIT, with absolutely no in-game reason to assume waiting would be useful. Other times you need to repeat an action over and over again despite there being no cue that anything changes - after six times, suddenly something happens.

Structure-wise, the game is stupidly linear. Most of the time you have no clear direction, just a very vague objective. However, the game is completely linear, with objects appearing only after you complete unrelated actions in other parts of the game. Coupled with slow walking and no in-game clues, you find yourself slowly sweeping across the locations, repeatedly trying to get into places you have no logical reason to want to enter, just because you know you’re playing a game and eventually something has to give.

The game world has no internal sense. You can’t pick up certain objects because they’re “too large to fit in Oracle” but you can pick up clearly larger objects. Characters change their attitude based on what’s convenient. The rebel organization has money up the wazoo, then suddenly can’t spare a single credit. The level of acceptable treachery varies wildly. In short, the game world is a container for poorly thought out impediments to progress, rather than feeling like a real world.

I’m not done about the interface. Having “Oracle” (inventory + menu) as something that Feeble carries is remarkably annoying. Beyond the previously-mentioned section in the penal colony, it also means when you control a secondary character, you can’t save or load the game (or quit, in fact, unless you know Alt+X does it) until you walk back to where you left Feeble. This character also moves slowly, and of course there’s a game-breaking bug right in that section, causing the secondary character to get stuck in place. So you switch to the secondary character, slowly trudge across several screens, get stuck, end the game’s process, start again and again you have to walk all the way, etc. Also, moving the mouse to the side of the screen exits oracle, but also exits any close up you may be in. So, whenever you need to use items on anything in close-up, you need to remember to first “use” the target, and then bring up the inventory.

About the puzzles, the game has the standard adventure game fare of inventory fetch, inventory combinations, “dialogue puzzles” (occasionally you need to exhaust the dialogue to get somewhere), and also standalone puzzles with a dedicated interface. The latter ones are what’s considered difficult in this game - I haven’t gotten to all of them, but the ones I saw (walking the pattern and the chemistry puzzle) were not particularly difficult. In fact, I think those were the best parts of the game, since they didn’t suffer from the awkward interface (they have their own dedicated interface), there were properly clued and you had clear direction. This is more than can be said about the inventory puzzles, which are completely nonsensical at times, especially since you have absolutely no clue what some of the objects you’re carrying are. For instance, by looking at the “Space Hopper” Feeble points out that it is, in fact, a “space hopper”. The graphics don’t help much in figuring out what it is, so you have to rely on contextual clues to understand what it is. Maybe this was deliberate. I don’t know.

Technically, the graphics are incredibly dated, which doesn’t stop the game from hurling terribly-directed, ugly 3D scenes at the player repeatedly. It’s also a wonder how terrible the voice acting becomes in those scenes, whereas delivery of the lines is done much better during the rest of the game. Of course there are no subtitles during the cut-scenes, but most of the sub-titles are missing from the game as well - there’s a bug so you only see the first line for each character, sometimes there’s no text at all and often what’s being said and what’s being written are two different things. Similar, but still. If you’re hearing impaired, tough luck. Also, it’s impossible to review anything people told you or re-watch any of the cut-scenes, so I hope you’re never distracted while playing, as you can’t pause the game either.

The puzzle that made me quit the game isn’t the worst of the bunch. It’s an illogical item combination, made more difficult by having to apply the items in the right order (and if you try something out of order, there is absolutely no indication the combination is legal but too early, of course), an order which makes no more sense to me than any other order. You also have to do this combination in a specific location, and while it’s in progress there is no way to know how much further along you have to go, since until it’s complete the whole thing is referred to as “stuff” and looking at it provides no indication of what, if anything, is missing. And to top it all off, there is absolutely no reason for constructing this decoy - you want to distract someone at another locale, but you could do it just the same without the decoy - there is absolutely no logical reason why it matters whether or not he arrives to find a decoy or just nothing. I can think of several ways to fix this puzzle, but it’s clear whoever created the game just doesn’t care. They confuse obtuseness with challenge and waste of time with game length - I’m pretty sure if I continued playing I’d also find a maze (maybe even a shifting maze!), it would fit the general strategy of annoying the player and wasting his time.

This was long winded, but it’s important for me to make the message: The AG review is misleading, this game is terrible in every way. It’s not fun, it’s buggy, and it’s challenging the same way a game that randomly deletes your saves would be challenging. Stay away.

Simon breaks several commonplace conventions. The most important one is that throughout the game, you have no idea what your actions will result in. Helping people out in exchange for inventory items is an adventure staple, but normally either the reward is spelled out, or can be logically deduced. In Simon, you first help people out, then you see what you got from it. What this means it that it’s impossible to try and figure out what comes before what. This adds challenge to the game, but I think it would be poorly received by many players.
To add to that, the game does away with the “gradual unlocking of the game world” that’s pretty common today. From the get-go, most of the game is available for exploration, which adds to the difficulty of “solving” the game, in exchange for adding an impressive degree of non-linearity. Puzzle-wise, the game is comprised of a series of “chains” - there are very few items that help advance along more than one front, so there are no “choke points” where you’re stuck, right until the very end.
The final convention sacrificed in the name of difficulty is a lack of feedback from the game. Normally when you attempt to achieve something, the game gives you a hint as to why you’ve failed. Not in Simon - what doesn’t work, doesn’t, and it’s up to you to figure out how it can be fixed.

The puzzles themselves are 100% inventory, items are never used more than once and rarely in a creative manner. However, as the items themselves are rather varied, the game isn’t boring. Puzzle solutions usually make sense, and some of the ones that don’t are clued in-game, so very few puzzles are “unfair”. The only puzzle I would consider problematic can be solved by realizing you can’t get to a dead end in this game, which greatly cuts down on the item combinations to try.

Characters are colorful but functional. Simon is annoyingly inhuman in refusing to ask anyone abut things he discovers or hears about. Ignoring that, though, most dialogue is quite amusing, one of the strong points of the game.

One final problem is that the hotspot highlighting in the game doesn’t show exits, so it’s entirely possible to miss entire screens, as some exits are difficult to spot.

Overall, to gamers who don’t mind a lot of legwork, this is a charming game with an abundance of humor and a fair amount of challenge. However, for people who don’t suffer from excessive amounts of leisure, I would suggest investing time in other games first.

Movement is extremely disorienting. Neither slide “shifts” (Windows Movie Maker-style effects) or “zap"s allow the player to accurately gauge just how many degrees the character turned, making navigation needlessly annoying. This is greatly alleviated by realMYST, which allows free 3D roaming, and is highly recommended.

The rest of the game’s issues, however, can’t be solved by adapting it to modern technology. The game consists of four ages which can be played in any order. However, all four are unlocked practically simultaneously - while each requires a puzzle solution, the clues to the puzzles are all revealed in the same place in the same way, and the puzzles themselves are trivial given those keys. So, you can spend hours bumbling around not getting anywhere, and then you instantly unlock 95% of the game.
To add to this poor design, you have to complete each of the ages twice, since what stands for an inventory system in the game won’t allow you to carry the two objects you need to obtain in each age simultaneously. However, there is no difference in the process to complete the age a second time - the objects are right next to each other, except you have to carry them back one at a time.

The plot again unravels in leaps and bounds. At first you get a ton of information from an abandoned library, then you get absolutely nothing for most of the game, which instead focuses on giving useless tidbits around the ages and after the completion of each age, and then suddenly you everything that was missing once you complete the fourth age.

The puzzles themselves are decent, but not nearly as challenging as misty-eyed fans would have you believe. One of the ages has no puzzles at all, for instance, and the rest mostly require careful observation of how your actions affect the age. The good ones require an extra step beyond that, but most of them don’t. A Myst-style puzzle would be something like giving you a watch with two buttons. Then you’d have to wander around until you find somewhere a random page showing that watch showing a specific time. Then you have to figure out that one button adds exactly 118 minutes and the other adds 57 seconds and then figure out how to click the buttons to set the watch to that time. It’s not unfun, but it’s a far cry from being ingenious or extraordinarily challenging.

The bottom line is, don’t expect too much. It was revolutionary in its day, but today it’s a poorly-paced game with some okay puzzles. Worth the time if you’re into history or are a completionist wanting to tackle the later games.

However, that is the only point that lacks polish in the entire game. The game is incredibly tight - pretty much everything is well thought out and nothing happens for no reason. Playing through the game again, you discover a multitude of subtle clues, showing just how rich a tapestry the game weaves.
The plot is intriguing and very well written, despite the characters being mostly plot-advancing tools. That stands to reason, though - to further flesh out characters at the meticulous level of details of everything else in the game would quadruple the game in length, not a bad prospect, except it would mean we’d have to wait for 15 more years until it came out.
The strongest point, for me, was the puzzles. Unlike so many modern adventure games, this one doesn’t shy away from introducing challenging sections, without coddling the player via intrusive sidekicks spouting hints or many of the other tricks developers use these days so us poor gamers wouldn’t have to feel any frustration. Many puzzles are difficult but none are unreasonable, and they all share that “aha” moment when you solve them, meaning the solution is logical and satisfying, rather than arbitrary. Logical item interactions work or don’t work in a way the game explains. In short, this game is a heaven for those of us who miss the days where adventure games were more of a mental obstacle course.

The game has no dead ends (an unforgivable sin in my opinion). I was able to accidentally bypass a section of the game without acquiring an inventory item, so the game made sure I could get it in another place, without it feeling shoehorned in. There are no “uh, let’s just wait a bit before advancing, I think we may be missing something” or “let me just pick up this object while we’re moving to the next area” crutches that are sometimes present in order to prevent this - instead the game is just well-designed.
You CAN die (at some points, needlessly, I felt) but the game immediately rewinds time to before death, and I could see no ill effect, point-wise or achievement-wise, to this happening, so the game does reward experimentation and exploration.
I even forgive the inclusion of two mazes, seeing as the sections are short and make sense within the context of the story, and no mapping was required - just keep your right hand on the wall and you’ll be out of them in no time.

To balance this sparkling review, the only things I would change are:
- Add a pause feature. There are some (easy) timed sequences and sometimes real life intervenes in the middle of a play session.
- Lose the achievements and scoring system. While they’re mandatory new and old-school respectively, the achievements are minor spoilers and don’t really contribute much, and the points give you a progress bar that somewhat ruins the “wait, there’s more to be done” moment late in the game.

Other than those minor issues, the game is spotless. If you like challenging games with a compelling plot and functional characters, this is a great buy. I’ve played it through twice already and recommended it to some friends, and have yet to hear someone disappointed with it.

The game is severely limited. It stands out the most when you query terms into the database and get zero results, unless you query for the exact bits that are needed to move the plot forward. The world just feels like a prop, where all conversations, newspapers and database queries are limited to tiny peeps into the background, only allowed if they advance the plot. There is no small talk, no close attempts, it’s all either “let me advance the plot for you” or “I don’t know anything about that”.

The gun battles aren’t hard, but they’re also not fun. They don’t require reflexes or planning or tactics, and as such are just dull - no skill of any sort is required to progress, so it’s unclear why they were even included.
This also applies to the “box” sections of the game, where suddenly control switches to keyboard-based as you shove or pull a box to the right place. It’s not challenging to figure out where the box goes, and it’s not challenging to put it where it belongs. It just is, and adds nothing to the game beyond having to switch control schemes in the middle.

The game annoys the player often. At some point the ability to not have to endure the walking animation is taken away and is never returned, some sequences you can’t skip (instead you see a menu) and some sequences you accidentally skip, intending to save - there is no clear indication what the escape key will do at any given point. To give an example of how arbitrary this is, you can skip the “door closing” and “door opening” animations of an elevator, but not actual display of floors changing. How is that anything but confusing and annoying, I don’t know.

The inventory system is also inconvenient - the only way to see the inventory is to right click a hotspot. So if I want to read a newspaper, I must find something unrelated on the screen that I can click on.

To complete the scavenger hunt of annoyances, we have pixel hunting. Tiny notes appear unexpectedly in already-visited locations, and in one particularly insufferable sequence, I had to scan the cursor four times until finally I gave up and used a graphical walkthrough to find the tiny hiding object I knew had to be there.

To summarize, Gemini Rue had a lot of potential. Much of it is unrealized. It’s playable, you’re unlikely to be stumped, but you are very likely to be frustrated by multiple minor issues that just seem like design errors. The same game without the gun battles, box sequences and with a hotspot highlighter might’ve taken less time to complete, but would’ve been just as good a game - most likely much better.

The interface is awkward. To exhaust a dialogue tree, you have to repeatedly click the character, each time selecting another option. Coupled with the fact characters often have beginning-of-conversation and end-of-conversation animation, this is a time waster.
There’s an inconsistency regarding object combination, and some spots have both mouse buttons do the same thing, which robs the player of a description.

Puzzles are sometimes problematic, with reasonable interactions sometimes rejected with no explanation. Locations open up with no logical relation to the actions that triggered their opening up. Characters are somewhat inhuman, i.e. Foster often doesn’t bring up very relevant points when conversing with people, and most NPCs have absolutely no personality traits.
Some puzzles require dexterity. This is surmountable by slowing down the game (available in an in-game menu), but is really uncalled for, as it doesn’t add any challenge to the game, only annoyance.

Characters wander around which can be annoying and hardly livens up the game universe given the above. Moreover, they can get in your way, and you always have to wait for Joey when moving between floors, for some reason.

All in all, the best way to describe BASS is “functional”. It provides a story and some puzzles, I’ve encountered no bugs, game-breaking or otherwise, and usually you can figure out what to do next (at worst, wander around all screens again to see if anything’s changed). Some pixel hunting (one particularly mean instance near the end of the game), some timed sequences and some silly solutions are still present, but overall a typical adventurer will find this game manageable.
Hence my rating - there’s nothing particularly bad about this game, just a list of minor annoyances, and on the other hand nothing really stands out about it, either.