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What game have you just finished?
To me, the ending of Simon the Sorcerer 2 felt very much like the Empire Strikes Back ending…
The truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark: it scares you witless but in time you see things clear and stark. - Elvis Costello
Maybe this time I can be strong, but since I know who I am, I’m probably wrong. Maybe this time I can go far, but thinking about where I’ve been ain’t helping me start. - Michael Kiwanuka
I always thought they mocked Monkey Island 2 with the ending, or tried to outdone it with “the most irritating final ever” (to some, personally I liked both).
Never thought about that, but it’s an interesting theory.
To me, the ending of Simon the Sorcerer 2 felt very much like the Empire Strikes Back ending…
So very true. Remebering watching that movie as a child, and the frustration when the movie ended with such a “cliffhanger”.
Puzzle Gallery: At the Carnival - 2.5/5
Another fun collection of puzzles, but contrary to The Fool’s Errand, this game just has one general theme without the narrative. To compensate, the game makes an attempt at humor (which is very hit-and-miss if you ask me).
It also felt like there was a bit less variety this time around, with more similar type puzzles to complete throughout. The game also lacked the big meta-puzzle concept, sticking to a single final puzzle that uses obvious clues found in several of the previous puzzles (without the extra layer The Fool’s Errand added). But for me that meant that the final puzzle was doable without a walkthrough, so there’s at least that.
It’s not a bad game at all, especially if you like these types of puzzles. It just has the disadvantage of not being able to compare to The Fool’s Errand.
Or to “3 in Three”, from what I’ve seen so far.
I wouldn’t call them light, but they’re often delightful in a brain-bending kind of way. 3 in Three is my favorite of Cliff’s games, followed by both of the Fool’s games. At the Carnival has many of the same elements as his other games, but is more just a collection of puzzles with the carnival theme. Have fun with them, TimovieMan.
I think I’m going to agree with you. I’ve started playing “3 in Three”, and so far it does a lot of things right. Like The Fool’s Errand, there’s an actual narrative, there’s a lot of variety (even compared to the previous two games, making it feel a lot more fresh), it contains the humour already seen in At the Carnival but this time around it works better, etc.
And I’ve already seen glimpses of a more difficult final “meta”-puzzle. Let’s hope it’ll be a doable one.
The truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark: it scares you witless but in time you see things clear and stark. - Elvis Costello
Maybe this time I can be strong, but since I know who I am, I’m probably wrong. Maybe this time I can go far, but thinking about where I’ve been ain’t helping me start. - Michael Kiwanuka
Gabriel Knight 3 Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned: 4.5/5
Gabriel Knight 3 was my most anticipated game when it was finally being released in 1999. I’ve played both The Beast Within and Sins of the Fathers back to back and in that order, as I only became aware of this game series when the Beast Within was released. And it was a long wait to the final sequel with some delays due to production complications.
Then when I was finally able to buy and play it I soon realized that my limited student budget didn’t afford me a computer heavy enough the run this hardware intensive game and though it met the minimum requirements by a small margin, the game was virtually unplayable. I had to put the game down for another 2 years until I was able to get a computer that could run it, but once that moment finally came, it ran very smoothly and it was a great experience.
I haven’t played this game in the last 16 years or so and I was anxious to give it a go, but was worried that my modern computer would have issues with a 3D game from that era in which early 3D hardware wasn’t yet standardized as today. I picked up the game from GOG (thought I wouldn’t bother with my old cd’s anymore) and realized it ran quite fine, though you have to play around with the settings a bit and you can still expect to get quite a low framerate. I ran the game through DGVoodoo and this works like a charm, you can play the game in a smaller window and apply some anti-aliasing to smoothen the edges of the 3D models a bit.
So how is experience 20 years after the initial release?
Well, first of all, it’s a full 3D adventure game. It’s also a 3D game from the early 3D period, when clunky 3D models and sharp edged textures were quite common. That is all fine for an action game in which the camera moves all the time, but it lacks that extra bit that is needed for story and character driven game in which emotions and cut-scenes are important. The 2D presentations from the first two games were far more effective in that department.
Graphics-wise it’s not all bad…..although some of the character models are pretty horrible, at least they found a way to make the faces appear somewhat human. It’s not perfect in the least, but for a 3D game of 1999 it could have turned out far worse. The environments and textures are pretty decent in closed environments like the church and the hotel, but really lack detail in the wide open outdoors area’s.
The story is grand and even exceeds The Beast Within in sheer scope and scale. The now quite cliched story of the Holy Grail, the Priory and the Templars is woven into a masterful tale in which additional elements like vampires, blood cults and ancient brotherhoods are all interconnected. As a detective mystery it’s a bit of a letdown as the real enemy is introduced rather quickly, but you can also follow a number of other suspects around the town and try to figure out how they related to the plot and this is quite fun to explore.
The game play is quite varied and thanks to the 3D presentation you can follow people around the town and eavesdrop on their conversations on a number of occasions. This game contains one of the best and worst puzzles in adventure gaming history (respectively Le Serpent Rouge and the Cat-Hair puzzle), but the overall puzzle design is quite good. There is also a great puzzle that allows you to sneak in other guests hotel rooms to learn more about their motivations.
The music is absolutely fantastic and though I’m a great fan of the score of The Beast Within, I think this score is equally good and in some cases exceeds it, especially during the emotional or action packed sequences and offers the best rendition sofar of the SchattenJager theme.
The voice acting is pretty good overall, though here and there you can hear they are overacting quite a bit. Especially Tim Curry is not as good as in Gabriel Knight 1, but still has his moments. Grace and Mosely are pretty good though and the same goes for most of the suspects and secondary characters.
Gabriel Knight 3 falls just short of the greatness of both Gabriel Knight 1 and 2, primarily because of one ludicrous puzzle and the 3D presentation that can’t reach the right emotional detail and tone for this type of game.
It’s still a very good game and extremely fun to play and re-play as it offers quite a bit of replay value due to all of the optional activities and side plots that can be explored. Sometimes it even feels quite dynamic, even though it’s all based on clever scripting.
Highly recommended
3 in Three - 3.5/5
A huge step up from “At the Carnival”, “3 in Three” is a great puzzle game by the fiendishly clever puzzle master Cliff Johnson. It has a fun and quirky narrative: a number “3” accidentally dropped off a spreadsheet into the inner world of letters inside a computer and needs to fix things to get back. Not only is that a rather novel concept, the game itself feels entirely fresh after “The Fool’s Errand” and “At the Carnival”, despite the similarities. Where “At the Carnival” mainly used the same types of puzzles that “The Fool’s Errand” did, here there are many new types of puzzles (that can be equally frustrating in their difficulty). I particularly enjoyed the “rearrange the grid of letters based on a number of statements” puzzles, those were right up my alley. I was less fond of the puzzles that relied on dexterity (especially the final puzzle), but I managed to overcome them.
The humor and the puns in the game work remarkably well (especially whenever vowels are present), which again is an improvement over Johnson’s previous games.
In other words, this is my favourite Cliff Johnson game of the three I’ve played so far.
Now onto his most recent outing, 2012’s “The Fool and His Money”, the direct sequel to “The Fool’s Errand”.
The truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark: it scares you witless but in time you see things clear and stark. - Elvis Costello
Maybe this time I can be strong, but since I know who I am, I’m probably wrong. Maybe this time I can go far, but thinking about where I’ve been ain’t helping me start. - Michael Kiwanuka
The Detective Game (1986)
A Commodore 64 adventure game.
I don’t usually participate in these “now playing/just finished” threads, but in this case it’s notable enough to make an exception for a few reasons.
First of all, this game has the controversial honour of being the adventure game that has been the longest time not completed for me. The last time I even had a C64 emulator installed was about six years ago, and I didn’t start the game then, was much before that.
Secondly, this game is somewhat obscure title. It is not listed on this site, for instance, even though it can be found on Wikipedia and Mobygames. So some people may know it, but most people probably don’t.
But most importantly the game is unbelievably advanced, which makes it interesting. It was completely point and click back when most games used parser, and NPCs in the game world weren’t fixed in one position, but moved around.
The game was years, in some aspects decades ahead of its time.
Overall it’s not such a great game, because it suffers from what was the problem with most adventure games in the 80s. Everything is too random, and things can be found out by trying out all weird things rather than actually trying to think things through.
Still, as a somewhat forgotten title in the genre, the game is kind of nice. And any game where the murder is committed by dropping a piano on the victim has some quality behind it!
In case anyone is even remotely interested, a more detailed opinion of mine can be found here:
Sounds like a derivative of Clue, which is not a bad thing. I spent many an hour playing Clue with friends. A shame it never made it to a PC version in the 90’s. (Without requiring emulation.) Or, if it did, I missed it.
For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.
Firewatch.
It’s a nice game, i enjoyed it, but a bit disappointing. It has all the pieces to be great, but they are not fit together.
Zim Sala Bim (1984)
Another Commodore 64 adventure game.
This one is so obscure that I wouldn’t be surprised if no one here has ever heard of it.
It is not listed on this site, or any other general adventure game site I’m aware of, you can’t find it on Wikipedia or Mobygames either, and here’s a fun fact: even a couple of the largest abandonware sites don’t seem to have any trace of it!
In its own time it wasn’t that obscure though, I have found computer magazine reviews about it from few countries. History just hasn’t been very kind for this game - or perhaps it has given it as much space as it deserves…
My personal history with the game is that years ago I was with somebody who somehow had this game. Trying to play the game didn’t go much anywhere, as it seemed to make no sense at all. There is only one YouTube video for this that I could find, and whoever did that seemed to be suffering from the same problem, not knowing what to do and just walking around.
Part of the problem is that the character movement in the game is so illogical. You directly move the character sideways, but use GO FORWARD and GO BACK parser commands to move in those directions.
The parser is actually very interesting in the game, as you can abbreviate commands to two characters. Like GO FO for GO FORWARD and OP DO for OPEN DOOR. Actually the last mentioned has a glitch that you can type only OP D and it opens the door anyway…
I coincidentally found two other games that use the very same engine and even seem to have the same glitches in the parser. I can report more about those when I go through them.
Zim Sala Bim is not a very good game no matter how you look at it, but it’s interesting to play something that is almost completely forgotten by the history and decades that followed it.
Oh yeah, the plot is about stealing gold from the Sultan’s palace and giving it to poor villagers.
A more detailed review is available here:
I recently finished Night in the Woods, now on my second playtrough.
Made me laugh, made me sad; loved it. Beautiful writing.
I just finished The Shapeshifting Detective. What a great game. I want more endings so I am doing additional play throughs.
I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.
Bad Mojo was amazing. I had heard about it many years ago but I recently remembered of it after seeing it mentioned in a list of good old games. The video cutscenes are silly (and very low quality) but they are funny but the gameplay is impeccable. It surprised me that while it was traditionally harder than newer games, it wasn’t that bad and I think the balance of its difficulty even for 2019 was excellent. It did not hand hold you and a puzzle or two could have better controls to make more sense, but it always gave hints. Only minor gripe I have with it is that the symbol that denotes there’s a guide nearby could be more explicitly explained at the start as an existence in the game because resolution was too low to notice it at the start.
Anyway, 9/10. It could easily be remade or turn HD.
PS. It would likely digust you at first. I nearly stopped playing the game entirely because of it. But it’s part of its character.
Bad Mojo was amazing.
Yep. Forever in my pre-2000 top ten. And I’m not the only Bad Mojo fan here.
Only minor gripe I have with it is that the symbol that denotes there’s a guide nearby could be more explicitly explained at the start as an existence in the game because resolution was too low to notice it at the start.
You mean this one? I don’t remember having any problems noticing the eye symbol. First time the game makes you walk over it, so you can’t miss Mum’s advice.
Anyway, 9/10. It could easily be remade or turn HD.
If you got it from Steam or GOG you must have played Bad Mojo Redux, which was remastered in 2004 with already better cut scenes than the 1996 game.
I’m not the only Bad Mojo fan here.
True.
9/10
False.
It deserves 9.9 out of 10. I subtract 0.1 for its lack of subtitles, one of the greatest flaws an adventure game can have. IMHO.
the gameplay is impeccable
True.
Oh, so true.
138 out of 10, in my opinion.
Bad Mojo was amazing.
True.
Check the crawlthrough for the stuff you might have missed.
It could always be worse, remember that.
mjp
Haunted. I was positively surprised by its size and the gameplay was fine with me, but I felt the game never could quite decide whether it wanted to be a stupid comedy - with the bumbling antagonist and ridiculous ghosts - or actually serious about itself - with the heroine’s angst about her sister and a few such things.
Its humor rarely worked for me. Banter between the ghosts is basically them just insulting each other on a kindergardener’s level - “You are stupid!” “No, you are more stupid!” Wasn’t funny. The only time I did laugh was when the heroine comments on the “Nymphomaniac Cock” that she’s quite the animal lover ... and I’m not sure that one was in there on purpose ^^;
Anyway, it was okay. As the retail version isn’t just a Steam key either you can get it very cheap and it’s certainly worth that.
Perils of Man. Like the idea and it starts fine but ... was it cut short or something? The ending makes zero sense and there’s basically no more gameplay after a certain point. Now, time travel stories basically never make sense, but usually they do have some sort of internal logic at least. Here it’s just ... “what, that’s it?!” Seems to tease a lot more connections than are revealed. Left me overall somewhat dissatisfied.
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