Adventure Gamers - Forums

Phantasmagoria 2, was forced to finally play it when the Retronauts episode released (with Curtis and Therese on the episode): https://retronauts.com/article/2114/retronauts-episode-552-phantasmagoria-2-a-puzzle-of-flesh

Not bad, and as with most FMV games it’s probably “better” now than it was in 1996, because of the extreme ‘90s nostalgic charm. The story is decent, unexpected, and kept me guessing even though I had long been partially spoiled. I felt like it really opened up at the first therapy sequence on Day 2, and was surprised at how well it handled queerness.

The main problem with the gameplay is that there is very little indication of what you need to do to finish a chapter, and I spent a lot of time on puzzles that it turns out I could not solve until a future chapter. The core gameplay is really just clicking on everything you can and exhausting all options, and then backtracking to do the same thing to see if anything changed or the invisible game clock advanced. Still, as long as you’re thorough you hopefully won’t get too frustrated.

The “real” puzzles aren’t bad; some were “hard” enough that I needed to stop playing until the next day to come back fresh, but didn’t need any hints. (I did actually see one hint by accident and got a general guideline of how to proceed on Day 1 when I thought there might be a game bug.) The final Myst-like puzzle was cool.

Ken Williams, acknowledging the game’s bad reviews and FMV backlash, used to recommend playing one chapter per night as a good way to experience it, and I’d agree.

Stasis Bone Totem- 8/10

The game is really good, the devs put the stress on the (imo) most important aspects of an adventure game: story (awesome, I’m a sucker for that setting), characters (the artificial ones are the best imo, bear and numen ftw), puzzles (challenging but still fair, no need for the hints), immersion (world building is awesome here, you completely get lost in this strange alternate reality).

What I didn’t like:

- not a fan of this isometric top down view, you always have the feeling you are way too far away from the action, which drags on the immersion. Especially on the small screen of the Steam Deck you always feel like you are missing out on the beautiful scenes they designed.
- inventory controls with gamepad (Steam Deck) are clunky and movement pretty weird, sometimes you press in one direction with the analogue stick and the character moves in the opposite direction. you get used to it though over time, probably better experience with mouse input.
- the item sharing system between characters just doesn’t make sense. characters operate separate from each throughout the game but even though far away each character can swap items with the other characters at all times. the system is fun in regards to the puzzles but also takes away a bit of the immersion.
- the gore was a bit too much for me although fits nicely in the setting/story, very brutal game.

Was my first game from these devs, might check out their other titles. As mentioned not a fan of their isometric top down technicals but they seem to know how to tell a great story, which is rare nowadays.

Nancy Drew and the Case of the Silent Spy
... my first Nancy Drew game and it’ll almost certainly also be the last

Having had no previous contact with the series I just decided to go with the most recent entry that didn’t seem to be too awful. Obviously, for each game in the series there’s people swearing up and down that this one is definitely the worst, but whatever.

Finding out what’s up with the death of her mother at least sounds more interesting than the more YA-ish/whimsical mysteries.

Except ... this game just fails bizarrely spectacularly in being any sort of mystery. What’s a “mystery”? A question you want answers to. And how does that work? By figuring out piece by piece what that answer is. So for example, somebody died. Then you learn they were murdered. Then you learn possible suspects. Maybe possible murder methods. Possible motivations. Possibly, there’s some twists - some old information appearing in a new light. And in the end you figure out who did it, how, why. Classic murder mystery!

It does take a bit of planning in writing but it’s not exactly rocket science. So what does this game do? “I always thought my mother died in an accident but it turns out she was involved in this terrorist attack by a secret organization and ended up getting murdered for preventing it! It wasn’t a car accident at all!” That’s what you are told right at the start. And the rest of the game is ... nothing. You end the game knowing exactly that and nothing else. Weirdly, characters occasionally pretend you’ve learned something new. But you don’t. There is no mystery. Everything’s been answered right away and that’s all you’ll ever know in this game; there’s no additional background, nothing about the organization, any sort of motivations, maybe at least how precisely it happened (though why’d you want to know that…). You get the solution to the case right away and then just stick around being the worst spy in the history of anyone every doing spy stuff.

So weird.

Especially since the writing otherwise is good fun. Everyone’s so sassy all the time! ... and they are completely convinced Nancy is going to get herself killed, which, honestly, if she wasn’t the heroine of her own series she’d be dead 17 times over with all the carelessness she repeatedly displays in the face of a global conspiracy. “Oh people plan this huge terrorist attack ... well, that doesn’t mean I should take ANY precautions at all.”

Puzzles were just right for me. It all seemed very logical; so long as you advance while being thorough the game gives you a pretty good flow. There were 2-3 moments that were a bit odd to me - where I had overlooked something so I wasn’t quite pointed in the right direction - and here or there I just kinda had to brute force stuff. But eh, I played on the difficult difficulty and thought it’d turn out to be a nightmare (I’m not good at this stuff; but I wanted to challenge myself) but it actually wasn’t. All fairly solvable.

But, yeah. Game in principle was fairly okay, but it’s not something I need more of

Sir Beardalot - 26 March 2017 08:36 PM

Well, the last game I finished was The Legend of Zelda. I was never able to beat it as a kid. A buddy at work got the Nintendo Classic and was talking about playing Zelda, so I decided to give it a go and finally after 30 yrs I beat it! lol.

Now I’m going to soon be completing Oneshot. After 3 months of waiting for the Solstice update that will finally be arriving come midnight

I’ve also played it a while ago… it’s very good. I didn’t know it was still available, I’ll try to get it to refresh my memory…

HAUMA.
It’s Oktoberfest right now, so ... but it’s a very short game, ~3-4h, the puzzles are unfortunately not very good, and the story isn’t either. Art is fine and there’s “some”, but there’s also bits that basically don’t have anything.

dunno, can’t recommend or say it was great. Maybe not completely awful or anything, but pretty bad nonetheless.

Yep. This was a fun experience. A number of enjoyable puzzles, high-resolution and a clean approach. It took me some time to get my last cube.

Also just finished Underground Blossom. Sweet and short classic Rusty Lake installment - everything that I thought it would be, it was. I like that they stick to their roots and style instead of constantly innovating - some things just work better that way. They also teased the next one, so I’ll be waiting for that one now.

Onto I Doesn’t Exist - a horror text (but also graphic!) adventure, Midnight Girl - a game from the developers of Silent Age that I really enjoyed, and of course our current community playthrough The Night of The Rabbit!

Just played through “slay the princess”, and its…fine? I start to feel like with philosophical 4th wall games like this, theyr designed so that you cant argue with the end because its’ pretzel logic has a scope that feels all encompassing and infused with great importance. And sure… Its fine. And it has a strong clever voice acting performance. So.. trying to weigh how much i liked it exactly, but its not a bad little VN experience.

I’ve recently finished Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit. IMO not worthy of the four star score here at AG, but a pretty ok game nevertheless. I overall enjoyed it, despite the pretty average writing and the too “chirpy” tone for a game of this kind. The game is at its worst when it attempts to be funny imo. But it has some good scenes. A 3/5 from me.

Even more recently I finished The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow. A great game! 4/5 stars.

I have possibly also just finished The Isle Tide Hotel. There are things left to discover in the “game” but I’m not sure I’m up for starting over for the tenth time and rewatch familiar scenes just to get to them. But I probably will. Still haven’t found an ending that has felt completely satisfying. Not sure there even is one completely satisfying ending though. An absurd story told in an abstract and deliberately confusing way. I haven’t decided yet what to make of this one.

Broken Sword: The Angel of Death

Jesus christ, by far the worst game in the series. Took me almost 2 months to finish. This game feels like a chore, don’t think you can play this through in one sitting if you want to stay sane, had to take week long pauses between sessions.

What I didn’t like:

- first game I played that needed manual configuration and driver installations to even run on the steam deck. after that it ran smoothly though, no bugs/crashes encountered.

- horrible locations: you start out in New York and explore an empty abandoned demolished building, a boring hotel, and a meat packing factory, like wtf. Then you visit the Vatican, sounds nice right, nope, you explore an bland wafer factory there. Then Phoenix, you guessed it, an old abandoned facility, like 90% of the game takes place in boring empty warehouses/industrial buildings with nothing else than rubble, machines and crates, guess the industrial asset pack was on discount at that time.

- nico is missing for 95% of the game, yes there’s a new new female lead, blonde one, Maria, and she’s boring af. I liked the blonde in part 3 way more (Petra) even though she was evil, at least not boring, think that’s where they got the idea from

- bad gamepad controls: they ditched the nice gamepad controls from part 3, instead you now have a mixture of mouse and keyboard controls which plays horrible on the Steam deck, for PC players probably better than part 3 though

- bad puzzles: majority of the puzzles in this game are really bad. either they don’t make sense or aren’t fun to solve. You like pixel hunting? Great news, you can now do it in 3D, many of the hotspots in this game are tiny and there’s no hotspot highlighting, so have fun searching the whole scene for tiny valves and shit in these huge industrial buildings.

- horrible story and dialogue: story wise they didn’t even try here. had to check on YouTube after finishing the game if that was the actual ending or I did something wrong and hit an alternative ending, but yeah was really that bad. I hope they didn’t pay anyone to write that nonsense. Dialogue is better than the story but as mentioned the new female lead is not a great counterpart for George, there’s not much going on while strolling around with her, some of the side characters are enjoyable though.

- visuals: somehow they managed (although much higher resolution than part 3) to make everything look bland and ugly, makes you really appreciate the beautiful and colorful look in part 3. character design of George and Nico also isn’t my cup of tea in this part.

All in all, wouldn’t recommend playing this game to anyone, maybe interesting for game developers though as a case study on how not to build an adventure game.

Karlok - 06 November 2023 10:32 PM

Veovis - 06 November 2023 08:33 AM

I have possibly also just finished The Isle Tide Hotel. There are things left to discover in the “game” but I’m not sure I’m up for starting over for the tenth time and rewatch familiar scenes just to get to them. But I probably will. Still haven’t found an ending that has felt completely satisfying. Not sure there even is one completely satisfying ending though. An absurd story told in an abstract and deliberately confusing way. I haven’t decided yet what to make of this one.

I agree, it’s a weird game and at first very confusing. I played it twice, had no idea what was going on in this creepy hotel and decided I would uninstall the game if it didn’t get any better the third time. And then I got seriously hooked. I still think it’s far from perfect. The acting is fine, but the pace is incredibly slow. Long pauses you have to sit through every single time and it takes the main character ages to move from one location to the next. I liked the story, or should I say stories. But I’m left with so many unanswered questions!

The 8 endings I’ve seen were either bad/sad or half good half bad. Imo that’s in keeping with the basic premise of the game. Desperate people who go to such lengths can’t expect a happy ending.

I did another playhrough last night just to find out what happened if I made another choice close to the end of the name scenario. Got new scenes but the same ending(s). Satisfying but not at all rewarding when it comes to understanding the details of what’s going on! There are things that to me just don’t make sense, even within the absurdness of the basic premise. I want answers!:) Maybe this game would be a good candidate for a CPT or at least a seperate discussion thread if more people here decide to play it.

Manifold Garden 9/10.  Brilliant game.