Adventure Gamers - Forums

I just finished Brownie’s Adventure. Interesting how such a haphazardly made adventure game can be so much more enjoyable than most of the more polished ones I’ve played in the last few years.

What I liked:

- Pretty good writing. Entertaining and clever dialogue. Minimal typos, grammatical errors, botched idioms, etc. This last sentence shouldn’t NEED to be mentioned as a positive, but unfortunately almost every adventure game I play these days reads like it was written by a sixth grader.
- Expansive! Your adventure takes you to lots of different places and feels like an actual adventure.
- Fun characters. A few were underused, occupying just one screen or puzzle, but most of the characters were fun to meet and chat with.
- Good puzzles. Nothing very challenging here, but tough enough to make me feel like I’m playing a game and not an interactive story book.
- Genuinely funny. This kind of humor, over-the-top adult potty humor I guess, is typically not my thing, but there were many times while playing Brownie’s Adventure that I laughed out loud at someone farting or having their crotch impaled by a sword.
- Perfect length. Long enough not to be a short game, short enough not to drag. The game unfolds at a good clip and then rolls up just as smoothly.

What I didn’t like:

- While Brownie’s Adventure bleeds rough charm, it’s sometimes a little too rough. Some of the hot spots, particularly for exit points on the screen, are difficult to find. In one instance, so difficult that I reached out to the developer for help.
- Sometimes dialogue doesn’t provide enough information. For example: I gave someone some loot, and she gave me a key, but the dialogue made no note of her giving me the key, so for a while I was stuck until I noticed ‘Oh look, a key!’ in my inventory.
- Certain hotspots, once used, elicit zero response to anything you try to do with them. It would have been nice to at least have a few default ‘I can’t do that’ replies programmed in so the player knows that the game registered that they tried to do something, instead of the player thinking ‘maybe I missed the hotspot when I clicked on it, let’s try again.’
- There is a segment where you have to locate certain very un-obvious location hotspots on the world map by comparing the world map with another map. Those invisible locations have teeny tiny hotspots, which makes this puzzle a pain in the bottom. Also, the dialogue cluing the player in on what to do is very vague, making one wonder if they are barking up the wrong tree, even if the player is trying the correct thing, just striking out because of those aforementioned teeny tiny hotspots.
- Can only fast forward through dialogue lines by clicking the ‘.’ key on your keyboard, would have been nice to be able to click the right mouse button instead.

Anyway, that’s it. All in all an excellent game, highly recommended. It’s like $5, it’ll make you laugh, and if you like point and click adventure games (you’re here, right?), you’ll like the gameplay well enough.

Finished The Legend of Skye and my Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within replay. I was hoping that after so many years maybe I would appreciate it more, but, alas, I found the indie pixel game more enjoyable than the all-time FMV classic. Everything that bothered me in GK2 before is still there: hammy acting, unexciting story, overly long dialogues with very little gameplay. Such a step back compared to the rich interactive world of GK1 full of mysteries (and GK3 as well). FMV itself also didn’t age well, many locations look like a blurry mess and many scenes lasted longer than they should (like Gabriel climbing the rooftop or almost every action performed by Grace).

It was interesting as an experiment, in the sense of “what if they were real persons”, I just wish Jensen chose a different series for that. Still the 5th chapter played better than the rest for me and at least resembled an old horror movie, plus it gathered all the best actors at one place. If only it lasted longer, maybe even used as the main location instead of all the Munich-based scenes which I didn’t like all that much.

The Legend of Skye, on the other hand, was a very enjoyable LucasArts-inspired adventure with a very cute protagonist. Plenty of great puzzles and comic moments that put Ron Gilbert and Return to Monkey Island to shame — I particularly enjoyed the shooting and smoking competitions. All characters are sympathetic and never annoying, there are nice touches here and there, like how the island and its fauna slowly extend without turning into an overcrowded bazaar, or inventory items used in different ways. The last chapter kinda looses steam and feels a bit forced (that music puzzle was particularly annoying). I’m also not a fan of the ending, but all in all the game is arguably one of the best of its kind, I can easily imagine playing it back during the 1990s and enjoying it all the same. Thumbs up!