[rtrooney]

Well, I'm unfortunately scheduled for another round of eye surgery tomorrow, so my return to the "gaming table" will be somewhat delayed.

However, I did manage to finish off 9: The Dark Side. Quite good, I thought. Not particularly heavy on HO scenes. Inventory puzzles are well-integrated into the game. Other puzzles run the gamut from standard sliders to math puzzles. Just about every type of puzzle you've ever run across is represented. All of them have Skip options. A couple of comments on that topic. One, the in-game description of the puzzle and what you must do to solve it is, I thought, woefully inadequate. Two, there is a walkthru available at the BFG site. You may want to have it open while you are playing the game. It gives a much better description of the puzzles than the game itself does. Otherwise, you'll be using that Skip button with regularity.

Finally, the end-game features an arcade sequence for which there is no Skip option. It was infuriating for me because my normal cursor speed was not set up to match the speed of the arcade sequence. I did finish it, but not without a lot of swearing. The sequence did not fit with the rest of the game, and not allowing the player to bypass it was, to me, a major flaw.

Voice acting wasn't horrible. Music and sound effects were excellent.

With the first Drawn game being five out of five stars, 9: The Dark Side rates a solid three stars.