Adventure Gamers - Forums

Vegetable Party - 24 December 2021 09:20 AM

I finished Bad Dream: Fever.

Good game, I really enjoyed it. I liked the first part Bad Dream: Coma even better. Same style/atmosphere but a bit more wholesome experience. It was the one that brought Desert Fox all the accolades.
They have made a new creepy game rather recently - Darkness Under My Bed. Conceptually very interesting and, I’ve heard, rather challenging, but I haven’t played it yet. They have free snippets of it available on Steam - A Game for Anna and DUMB: Treasure.

I just finished Paradise Killer. I enjoyed my time with this non-traditional, exploration-heavy detective adventure. I love it when developers are coming up with a whole unique world - and here they created original lore with gods and demons and collapsing islands… Bizarre and wacky, but very cool.
Loved the exploration element,it’s been awhile since I played an adventure where I can go around (and up and down) a huge map, looking for secrets and evidence. Enjoyed the weird character set, along with the most badass names I came across in a while - Lady Love Dies, Crimson Acid, Sam Daybreak, Carmelina Silence… Apparently, when you add a random noun or verb to a first name, you get pure awesomeness.

I like the story where everyone is trying to out-deceit each other. It’s much more about the journey here than about destination though - the clues and evidence you collect and interviews you conduct go more in a visual novel manner than an active deduction, BUT the game lets you explore at your own pace, so you can easily go to trial never having found huge piece of shocking evidence (as I randomly discovered by going through Steam forums were people finished the game without seeing major plot twists), so that was very neat.

The ending itself was maybe a tad anticlimactic and the story won’t hold up to some serious questioning, but the entire process of getting there was really fun.This one is all about exploration of a very kooky world. Oh, the music is fantastic - that was a well-deserved Aggie last year.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (Switch) 4.5/5

Damn, words can’t describe how much I enjoyed this game, masterpiece. Art style, Story, Dialogues, Characters, Audio, all best in class (Visual Novel). Gameplay could need some tweaking here and there, otherwise absolutely perfect experience.

Just for reference I also have the Ace Attorney ​Trilogy on the Switch, tried it already 2 times from the beginning, every time only got to the third case or so of the first game and did not feel like playing further because I was bored. Most importantly I didn’t care about the characters of the Phoenix Wright game at all, neither the protagonists nor the antagonists in the cases. In Danganronpa I was afraid to enter rooms at times because I feared I’d encounter a new corpse and was afraid it would be one of my favorite characters that I didn’t want to lose. Also during the investigations I found myself actually biased multiple times because I favored some characters and didn’t want them to be responsible. This is the first game I played where you are really able to also investigate the emotional component of the murders because you actually get to know all suspects over a very long time and can therefore analyse/anticipate their mental, emotional and personality characteristics, which is one of the most important parts of a murder investigation. Brings me to the idea, maybe I should create my own Ace Profiler game.

Will start with part 2 next week, part 1 took me just about 3 days to finish, couldn’t stop playing. Had two crashes on the Switch during my playthrough, no other glitches, so the Switch port is acceptably good, saving is recommended from time to time. The amount of unlockable extra content with the in-game-currency is excellent, like for example the extensive Audio gallery, Image gallery and concept art. Highly recommend this game for people who are into Japanese visual novels and haven’t already played it in the last decade, lol.

Didn’t play much of the games released in 2021, so this is definitely my game of the year. The Danganronpa Decadence collection for the Switch with all 4 Danganronpa games launched in december, so I guess this counts as “released this year”, part 1 (Trigger Happy Havoc) is from 2010 though. Have to get my hands on the Anime now.

I (somewhat) recently finished Hercule Poirot: The First Cases, and frankly I found it pretty underwhelming. There were some good elements in the game, but I thought the deduction mechanics was quite picky, focusing on minor deductions and drowing the important ones into a myriad of details, I found myself going by trial and error when it’s supposed to be logical. The fact that it starref a younger version of Poirot didn’t help also, although I liked the idea, I just didn’t connect to the character like I usually do.

Vegetable Party - 08 January 2022 04:34 PM

@NickyLarson: that’s the vibe I got from the game, might give it a try, might give it a pass.

I just finished The Painscreek Killings. Or did it finish me? I talked about it in a overly elaborate manner in the currently playing thread, so I’ll try to keep this brief. Strong recommendation.

It comes with a couple of warnings: this game is about murder and features disturbed thoughts, feelings and some related imagery. It’s not as casual as it might look: it doesn’t tell you where you are on a map, or your current objectives. It demands a lot of backtracking and even more reading. And there’s one timed action sequence at the end of the game.

It’s generally pretty calm, though: it’s mostly a written narrative experience. But it’s anything but bland, the game is very evocative and the characters are consistently very well written. This game got to me.

My completion rate was 97%, that kind of kills me as well.

The Painscreek Killings is one of my favorite games of recent years. It’s really special. Challenging without having artificial puzzles thrown at you. Absolutely loved it!

Oh, I got a 100 percent completion rate. Thought I’d rub it in.😉

Vegetable Party - 09 January 2022 06:22 AM

It looks really good, but I wonder if you know any deduction games, similar to this, that are less about.. murder?

I love finding clues, testing theories and finding threads in overlapping stories, but the clinical/macabre consequences of violence are more of a drawback than a draw for me.

It was a few years since I played these games, but I think maybe Ether One could fit the bill. Like The Painscreek Killings it’s kind of a walking sim (not used in a derogatory sense) but it’s just as challenging to get through the story, at least if you want to get as much of it as possible. All about exploration and piecing together information. No murders that I can recall. https://www.gog.com/game/ether_one

Also I would suggest checking out INFRA if you haven’t already. All about exploration, photographing/fixing broken things and finding clues to what is causing the town of Stalsburg to kind of structurally falling apart. https://store.steampowered.com/app/251110/INFRA/

Just finished Call of the Sea. I liked it a lot. The review here at AG is pretty much spot on, even though it took me almost double the time to get through it compared with what is stated in the review. Great graphics, a working premise/story and very well crafted puzzles. Not much bad to say about it really. A solid 4/5 star game and highly recommended, especially if you enjoy story-driven first person adventures with lots of good puzzles.