This is a good adventure game! It’s actually an incredibly clever adventure game doing lots of very subtle smart things! It has its issues, but don’t we all.
It’s going to take a heck of a lot for anything to beat this game to be my favourite of 2019. What a splendid treat.
Photographs is a very novel experience (well, a very short story experience, fnarr), lovingly crafted, if not fully composed. I don’t love it as a puzzle game, but it’s a vignette of vignettes, and I like it for that.
But this is wonderful. Completely wonderful. Original, inspired, challenging, and most importantly of all, that constant sense of “Oh no, how will I ever do this one!” so quickly followed by, “I AM A GENIUS!” It’s a very, very smart game, that has the humility to let you, the player, feel like the clever one
There is just SO much to do, to explore, so many secrets I know I’ve missed, and bits I want to return to. This is completely splendid.
Vignettes is a toy. And that is why it’s completely splendid.
I just kept thinking of so many different ways this could have been a much more ambitious take on a cheerful anachronism from an ancient 16-bit era. Sadly, I appear to have been the only one.
The result is a very decent puzzle game, that occasionally has completely inspired puzzles within it. If it could have focused on the buttoned levels, gosh, it’d have been a real classic. As it is, it’s a calm, gentle game, with intermittent moments of brilliance.
I’m 32 puzzles in, and that’s taken me a good long while. That there are 68 more of these to go, plus another 60 that have been released since the game’s initial release, makes me a very happy little man.
Ultimately, Rainswept has a good story to tell. A sad story, one of grief, loss, murder and small-town cruelty.
It reeks of development hell, as demoralising to play as I imagine it was to make. Yes, clearing a map of its icons can be readily distracting, and it fulfils this role at least.
For less than a couple of quid, this is well worth it. Randomly generated puzzles, so you won’t run out, plenty of options, and that bonkers triangle mode for a real head-scratcher.
A slow, gentle, personal RPG, with neat little stories, characters I remember, and a real sense of having spent time in a special place.
Gosh I was all ready to love going to Art Sqool. But either I or it have failed. Nowhere near as odd or quirky as its trailers suggested it could be, and offering no surprises, its fun is over in the first few minutes. Bums.
I love the presentation, I love the conceit, but ultimately this is just a cleverly disguised badly designed point-and-click adventure.
What a really pleasant time this is. It’s family-friendly, without being a kids’ game.
I’d love to have played a game that tried to explore that rocky landscape, with some nuance, some introspection, and most of all, with some humility. This is not that game.
I love the ideas behind The Pepper Prince. A little queer love story, written in verse, presented in faux-ASCII. Sounds gorgeous. But on the evidence of the first episode, the verse is poor, the story meagre, and the puzzles absent. Which makes it hard to recommend. And yet, had I not winced and winced at the writing, I’d have enjoyed the aimless process of clicking through it all.
I’m really impressed by Sagebrush. It could have been tacky, it definitely could have been gross, but it’s neither. It’s sensitive, well constructed, and harrowing just where I think it should be.
Honestly, this is purist FPS as good as it gets, just a constantly stunning game. Don’t miss this.