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Adventure Games that didn’t get Great Reviews and Awards that you think are way underrated.

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On the subject of scores, I will just as readily try a game that this site gives a 3/5 on which receives a 5/5.
Reviews are not infallible words bestowed from on high by a league of point-and-clicking magistral demigods. Almost every thread in this forum demonstrates that we all appreciate different things in our adventure games. I love using the reviews to discover new games; and reading them helps me get an idea of whether or not the game is the type that *I* would appreciate, even if the reviewer does not.

Anyway, even with a niche genre like adventure games, there are usually at least five different ‘pro’ reviews and another dozen or more user reviews on GOG and Steam that one can refer to for alternate opinions. One or two 3/5 or even 2/5 reviews in a sea of several several shouldn’t dissuade the canny gamer from trying a game.

     

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the reviews rating issue will never be reliable and objective until we get back to the old ways of game’s rating as with the old computer magazine like PcGamer & Computer Gaming World when most of the games were rated upon five aspects; Story/Narrative, Gameplay/GameDesign, Graphics/Animation/Artwork, Puzzles, Sound/Music.

and please don’t ask that inevitable question; what do we do in case one of those aspects aren’t available, bc any kid who has finished elementary school can answer it.

     
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chrissie - 14 March 2021 10:52 AM
cyfoyjvx - 14 March 2021 10:06 AM
chrissie - 14 March 2021 09:48 AM

I think the qualities of each game should be judged separately in its own right but…..

Luhr28 - 13 March 2021 01:12 AM

Shrugs. I just looked at the thread title. But even still, I don’t think E&H even got any great professional reviews. Can anyone find any?

I think that statement is a little insulting to the professional reviewers here.

So 3.5/5 is a ‘great’ score?

I think you need to define first of all what you mean by a Great Review. Every game mentioned here could potentially be an insult to the reviewer, otherwise.

Where was it mentioned that 3.5 was a great score? Great reviews are the ones where the games get 4 - 5 stars. Please don’t confuse disagreement with insult as I for one appreciate the reviews but sometimes there’s an anomaly between what a player experiences & what a reviewer perceives.

I’m confused. Were you not implying that saying there were no great professional reviews for Edna & Harvey was an insult to the review on this site? (presumably because it would be ignoring it?)

     
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giom - 14 March 2021 12:22 PM

Unfortunately, with the existence of aggregators like metacritic and the fact that most professional reviewers give inflated scores, it means that Adventure gamer’s reviews tend to consistently drag down the score of point and click adventure games, which is a bit sad given that it’s a niche. So in an ideal world, I’d be more than happy with the current scoring from adventure gamers which I consider harsh but fair (a bit too harsh in some cases like dreamfall chapters though) but we don’t live in that world.

This is precisely why most review sites are rubbish.
Aggregators like Metacritic have become so powerful that they’re the only thing publishers care about, to the point that several professional review sites simply get bribed pressured by PR to get those inflated scores, rendering them meaningless. Not to mention that a lot of those sites actually have poor reviewers.

I’ll take the word of a site like AdventureGamers over “bigger” game review sites any day of the week. And for my part, Metacritic can go die in a grease fire.

     

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

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You know what is less consequential in life than games? Games reviews. I think they are overthunk by everyone, both the players and the reviewers themselves. Does a game look good to you? Try it. If you don’t like it, quit and try another one. If it’s a matter of money spent, you can wait til the game in question goes down in price; in the meantime there are sure to be hundreds of cheap games you haven’t tried yet which also look good, and which can be had for $10 or less.

Reviews are essential ammunition for middle school console warriors, but for the rest of us…while they are enjoyable and moderately useful, how seriously do we really need to take them? I read them more because I enjoy reading other people’s opinions about games than I do because I need other people to tell me what I should and shouldn’t be playing.

     

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cyfoyjvx - 14 March 2021 07:37 PM
chrissie - 14 March 2021 10:52 AM
cyfoyjvx - 14 March 2021 10:06 AM
chrissie - 14 March 2021 09:48 AM

I think the qualities of each game should be judged separately in its own right but…..

Luhr28 - 13 March 2021 01:12 AM

Shrugs. I just looked at the thread title. But even still, I don’t think E&H even got any great professional reviews. Can anyone find any?

I think that statement is a little insulting to the professional reviewers here.

So 3.5/5 is a ‘great’ score?

I think you need to define first of all what you mean by a Great Review. Every game mentioned here could potentially be an insult to the reviewer, otherwise.

Where was it mentioned that 3.5 was a great score? Great reviews are the ones where the games get 4 - 5 stars. Please don’t confuse disagreement with insult as I for one appreciate the reviews but sometimes there’s an anomaly between what a player experiences & what a reviewer perceives.

I’m confused. Were you not implying that saying there were no great professional reviews for Edna & Harvey was an insult to the review on this site? (presumably because it would be ignoring it?)

Sorry. I completely misunderstood the comment - no insults anywhere.

     
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Baron_Blubba - 14 March 2021 02:31 PM

Anyway, even with a niche genre like adventure games, there are usually at least five different ‘pro’ reviews and another dozen or more user reviews on GOG and Steam that one can refer to for alternate opinions.

User reviews are the worst.
In some cases they can be nice read for entertainment purposes, like when the “reviewer” didn’t even understand what kind of game he was supposedly playing.

But other times they are just bad and ignorant, unless they are those blind and overwhelming fanboy reviews which get posted few minutes after the game has been released.

And these days it’s all about review bombing. And it’s not about the game itself, it’s some disappointed fans ranting about how evil Sega is because Shenmue 3 was a time exclusive on Epic (obviously Sega didn’t even publish the game, but who cares).

TimovieMan - 14 March 2021 07:54 PM

Aggregators like Metacritic have become so powerful that they’re the only thing publishers care about, to the point that several professional review sites simply get bribed pressured by PR to get those inflated scores, rendering them meaningless. Not to mention that a lot of those sites actually have poor reviewers.

It’s not only bribing, but these days it has developed into systematic lying. After Cyberpunk 2077 scandal there shouldn’t be any doubts about that.
They picked certain review sites who were likely to publish favourable reviews, but they also lied about the content and made all reviewers play PC version which had the least amount of problems, but to ensure that even those wouldn’t show up, review videos could only use video clips provided by the publisher.

The development team bonuses were on a condition of some average review score, so instead of that pushing the team to make a better game, it made the entire system to eliminate unfavourable reviews. A very sick model, that one was.

     
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GateKeeper - 15 March 2021 03:33 AM


User reviews are the worst.
In some cases they can be nice read for entertainment purposes, like when the “reviewer” didn’t even understand what kind of game he was supposedly playing.

But other times they are just bad and ignorant, unless they are those blind and overwhelming fanboy reviews which get posted few minutes after the game has been released.

It’s very sad that you think so little of the opinions of players of a game i.e. the users. For sure there are ‘bad and ignorant’ reviews but like with conflicting views on anything you have to sort the chiff from the chaff.
I value our professional reviewers & think that they do a great job of wading through many games to give us the good & bad.
For the most part I’ve found professional reviews to give a fair assessment of a game even if I haven’t agreed with their score. But I have read one where the reviewer clearly didn’t understand aspects of the game & another where the game was scored down based on ‘bugs & technical difficulties’ which I myself didn’t experience.  These faux pas are rare but I think user reviews are a valuable contribution & shouldn’t be fobbed off. 

     
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GateKeeper - 15 March 2021 03:33 AM

User reviews are the worst.
In some cases they can be nice read for entertainment purposes, like when the “reviewer” didn’t even understand what kind of game he was supposedly playing.

But other times they are just bad and ignorant, unless they are those blind and overwhelming fanboy reviews which get posted few minutes after the game has been released.

And these days it’s all about review bombing. And it’s not about the game itself, it’s some disappointed fans ranting about how evil Sega is because Shenmue 3 was a time exclusive on Epic (obviously Sega didn’t even publish the game, but who cares).

 

I will also disagree. User reviews often help me understand whether the game will have features I like/dislike. It doesn’t have to be love letter/hate letter to a game, but simple mentioning of game length, type of gameplay, what is the game centered on (puzzles? story? exploration?), genre of narration etc. helps me a lot. I write reviews for others with the same goal in mind - to show people what I got of the game and maybe help them make or not make a purchase and spend precious time on something. Sometimes, it even works the opposite - somebody will write that the game had, say, too many puzzles for their liking, and I might think - “Oh, that looks like a game I want to look into”.

I always browse user reviews - both positive and negative. It is usually clear whether someone is a fanboy or a hater, but majority will be just from the people who played the game saying “I played it, and this is what I thought”. Lots of threads in this forum are, in a way, user reviews - when people recommend something. Plenty of time one can find that their tastes align, and it’s even better - you can trust the recommendation more.

If anything, I trust regular people who simply bought and played the game more than professional reviewers.

     
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My problem with user reviews, perhaps with the exception of those at enthusiast sites like AG, is the inflation/devaluation of scores that’s going on. Look at GOG.com for example. The general mindset seems to be that any game that the reviewer doesn’t hate automatically should get four or five stars. When a game recieves less than fours stars it’s too often motivated with something like “the game didn’t start” or “Steam got the patch from the developer one day before GOG” and such nonsense.

On topic; Two games that I think I don’t hear about much but that I think are great are Ether One and INFRA. Both the perfect mix between walking simulator and first person puzzle adventure game.

     
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DCast - 15 March 2021 10:39 AM

I will also disagree. User reviews often help me understand whether the game will have features I like/dislike. It doesn’t have to be love letter/hate letter to a game, but simple mentioning of game length, type of gameplay, what is the game centered on (puzzles? story? exploration?), genre of narration etc. helps me a lot. I write reviews for others with the same goal in mind - to show people what I got of the game and maybe help them make or not make a purchase and spend precious time on something. Sometimes, it even works the opposite - somebody will write that the game had, say, too many puzzles for their liking, and I might think - “Oh, that looks like a game I want to look into”.

I always browse user reviews - both positive and negative. It is usually clear whether someone is a fanboy or a hater, but majority will be just from the people who played the game saying “I played it, and this is what I thought”. Lots of threads in this forum are, in a way, user reviews - when people recommend something. Plenty of time one can find that their tastes align, and it’s even better - you can trust the recommendation more.

If anything, I trust regular people who simply bought and played the game more than professional reviewers.

My name is Baron Blubba and I endorse this message.

Really well said, friend.

Yes, many user reviews are just people venting their spleen over something that has nothing to do with the actual game (ie. ‘Crunch ethics’ or being dissatisfied with a Kickstarter promise unkept, etc), but it’s easy enough to identify the ones that are not like that.

And yes, someone made a good point about each user having a different standard by which they will numerically/starrily score a game, but if you read the review itself you should be able to glean plenty of useful information. The score is the most impenetrably subjective part of any review. The rest can be very useful, for all the reasons stated by my fellow Dreamcast fan in the above quote.

     

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And now to make a contribution to the intended subject matter of this thread!

Has anyone ever played Inca, by Coktel Vision?
I got this for $9.99 in a jewel case from Staples waaaay back when they had a great PC game selection in the early/mid 90’s. At the time, I didn’t care if a game was ‘pure adventure’ or adventure spliced with other genres. In fact, I thought it was great that this game gave me a not only a point ‘n click puzzler, but also a ‘light gun’ style shooter, AND an arcade space shooter! I still remember trying to fend off the enemy ships as the my destination planet sloooowly grew larger and larger until I finally arrived. In hindsight, the game, rife with FMV and digitized live actors, is probably incredibly corny and poorly acted (would LOVE to play it again and find out), but again, back then I didn’t know the difference. My whole family played this game for ages and worked our way through it together. It was great teamwork, since mom would help with many of the puzzles, while us kids would do the arcade sequences (and plenty of the puzzles, too).
I don’t think it got very good reviews, just average to slightly-below-average, and it is rarely spoken of today. But it’s a legend in my mind and one of the most enjoyable and memorable gaming experiences of my youth.

     

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Pyoro-2 - 14 March 2021 10:58 AM
chrissie - 13 March 2021 09:56 AM

So if you don’t like a feature in a game it’s a hang-up?  Laughing

When people go “oh no, combat in my puzzle game!” without even realizing that it’s just a rock-paper-scissors puzzle ... yeah. I’d call that a hang-up.

Eh, in Girl of Glass, it’s less that it’s just “combat in an adventure game,” it’s that the combat is long, back-to-back, unbalanced, and boring. I feel like labelling any criticism of combat in an adventure game as a “hang-up” is an excuse not to look critically at combat systems in adventure games. If it was a good combat system, it wouldn’t have upset people so much…

The being said, it got a 4.5/5 on this site, so *shrug*

     
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Baron_Blubba - 14 March 2021 08:46 PM

You know what is less consequential in life than games? Games reviews. I think they are overthunk by everyone, both the players and the reviewers themselves. Does a game look good to you? Try it. If you don’t like it, quit and try another one. If it’s a matter of money spent, you can wait til the game in question goes down in price; in the meantime there are sure to be hundreds of cheap games you haven’t tried yet which also look good, and which can be had for $10 or less.

Reviews are essential ammunition for middle school console warriors, but for the rest of us…while they are enjoyable and moderately useful, how seriously do we really need to take them? I read them more because I enjoy reading other people’s opinions about games than I do because I need other people to tell me what I should and shouldn’t be playing.

I disagree completely (shocking, I know, that a reviewer for this site might say that.) Sure, plenty of people have the capital to spend money on games without regard to cost, but most people don’t. Finding reviewers who’s opinions you trust can introduce you to games you might not otherwise have tried and steer you away from games that might look better in screenshots and trailers than in actual gameplay. I think the problem is when people view “critics” as a monolith, or just glibly search “(game) reviews.” You should really find sites and individuals who’s opinions align with yours, rather than just looking at scores and “averages.” Honestly, I think something like Metacritic or star rankings on Steam (or Amazon or wherever) do more harm than good in that respect. Removes nuance and individual tastes from the equation.

Also (and I think you touch on this at the end of your post) Art exists to be examined and viewed critically. A big part of critique of all kinds is pulling apart the work and examining all the pieces. Of course, that dredges up some problems that the average player might not have noticed or cared about, but it also pulls out pieces of brilliance which might not be readily apparent either. For me, at least, reading critique of ANY art gives me a better appreciation for the works.

     
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mattaukamp - 15 March 2021 12:40 PM

You should really find sites and individuals who’s opinions align with yours, rather than just looking at scores and “averages.”

^ This.

Which is precisely why I get most of my adventure game recommendations on both the main site here and from certain users on the forums.


As for other genres, I tend to look for middling reviews as they tend to give a more complete picture than the raving reviews or the full-on bashing reviews. And when reviews are overwhelmingly positive, then I tend to search for a couple of worse scores to see what they have to say.

     

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

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