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It must be a very obscure game, there is no entry here in Adventure Gamers nor in Moby Games.
Currently translating Strangeland into Spanish. Wish me luck, or send me money to my Paypal haha
It must be a very obscure game, there is no entry here in Adventure Gamers nor in Moby Games.
It’s quite new, I posted about it few months ago in the 2023 games thread.
https://adventuregamers.com/forums/viewthread/15945/P30/#191515
But it’s one of those games that just popped out of nowhere, so apparently there was no marketing done to promote it, so it’s not surprising that it’s missing from many sites.
It is listed on Pagoda:
https://www.alofmethbin.com/pagoda/game.php?id=5630
I’ve recently finished The Will of Arthur Flabbington.
All this talk about the Will of Arthur Flabbington made me download the demo to see if it’s as good as the review claims. Absolutely not. Nothing remarkable about it, not even the graphics. Uninteresting dialogues, run of the mill puzzles, awful repetitive music. And then the game made me pick up and use some disgusting stuff in the bathroom (guess what…
). I stopped playing after that. I want to be fair,
I don’t think I played the demo so not sure how representative it is but can’t disagree with some of Karlok’s impressions.
I have said on another thread that I don’t judge whether a game is good or bad & I did enjoy this but I never said I wouldn’t rate a game.
The reviewer here gave the game 5 stars. I give it 3.5 stars.
The game was pleasant enough to play, it was quite challenging which I liked & had an interesting mechanic ghost being able to occupy other bodies but I thought it was underused.
My overall thought was that the developers have a lot of potential but this game was somehow sorely lacking in substance for me & definitely not a classic despite a few good ingredients.
The game was pleasant enough to play, it was quite challenging which I liked & had an interesting mechanic ghost being able to occupy other bodies but I thought it was underused.
My overall thought was that the developers have a lot of potential but this game was somehow sorely lacking in substance for me & definitely not a classic despite a few good ingredients.
Do you know better than the reviewer? they said it’s classic, which is not! 
A1
The game was pleasant enough to play, it was quite challenging which I liked & had an interesting mechanic ghost being able to occupy other bodies but I thought it was underused.
My overall thought was that the developers have a lot of potential but this game was somehow sorely lacking in substance for me & definitely not a classic despite a few good ingredients.
Do you know better than the reviewer? they said it’s classic, which is not!
Hi luckyloser, no, of course I don’t know better than the reviewer! Obviously classics have changed! 
Finally finished Stasis 2: Bone Totem which I started… a month, two ago? Anyway, it was a great experience and a long, solid game, not something you finish casually during holidays. My impressions didn’t change much from what I wrote earlier: where it shines (characters, graphics, puzzles), it shines, where it fails (storytelling, music), it fails.
The story itself is pretty great, chock-full of horror tropes, just what one might expect from a Lovecraft-inspired underwater expedition where everything goes wrong. The trio of protagonists along with several additional “companions” have to live through all kind of dangers, from floodings to breakdowns to monsters, inhuman experiments and mental disorders. Really liked the husband-wife team of ocean explorers, both strong, charismatic and loving characters, as well as their naive anthropomorphic bear-like “smart toy” Moses who is simply charming despite scary looks.
The way they move through levels caring about each other reminds of Lost Vikings/Gobliins/DoTT. Had no problem with them sharing one inventory (it wasn’t just a design choice, the technology of sending objects on molecular level was mentioned somewhere), while Mac’s prosthesis arm and Charlie’s engineering skills made it more interesting to solve puzzles. They is enough variety, they are neither easy nor hard, involve a lot of cool futuristic gadgets and nasty things extracted from dead or living creatures - just how I like it. Wish the controls were bit different so that we could use inventory on every active object, not just special close-up areas, but you can’t have everything.
Isometric presentation combined with cinematic cutscenes also adds to the unique experience. They even referenced Sanitarium at several points, and not only it. But the way they decided to tell the story… Argh. Every time you enter a new location (and there are lots of locations - unlike your normal isometric RPG, this game consists of smaller areas) and move a bit to explore the surroundings, the characters start chatting in the upper panel. Usually something like “Oh my God! What is this place?” “It’s a room!” “What were they doing in this room?” “I don’t fucking know!” “Watch your language, Mac!”
The game either freezes as you listen or lets you read pop-up descriptions of nearby objects while they keep talking on the background — which is not helpful at all — and you still can’t approach usable objects and have to wait until they stop. And this could happen 2-3-4 times per location and becomes very stressing. And after a while new characters are added to the chat, and it becomes so noisy that you just stop caring about what they say, just SHUT THE HELL UP! Even more ridiculous is how we are often told there’s little time/health/something else left (especially during the last two chapters when tension grows and puzzles are almost gone), and yet they keep talking, talking, and talking…
IMHO a poor design choice that seriously hurts the gameplay and atmosphere. Could’ve been easily avoided, for example, if we were allowed to chat through a menu, whenever we felt like. Or by simply cutting out 80% of dialogues. And this was made even worse by the multiple logs full of entries and emails left by the crew members of the abandoned tanker. The game is so rich visually, we could learn the fates of those poor souls just by looking around, why they even bothered to add those cliched diaries of deceased people that have little impact on the story? Despite several hints to several puzzles, they were mostly useless writings which you stop paying attention to at one point.
I was also quite surprised to learn that music was composed by Mark Morgan who wrote some of my most favourite ag soundtracks (Zork Nemesis/Grand Inquisitor), as well as Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1-2 and some other classics. In Stasis music is mostly forgettable, sometimes consisting of distant scratching sounds or even whistling (very irritating when you are trying to read a log and someone starts whistling in your ear). Few actual melodies felt like remixes of themes from Dark Corners of the Earth and the movie Dagon. Not everything Lovecraft-related should sound similar, really.
I know this is an indie game made almost sorely by one man, and as it is it’s fantastic. Many great cinematic cutscenes that exist just to show horrible deaths of protagonists whenever we make a wrong move. This felt cool and oldschool. While I’m not happy with the way the story is told, writing is actually good, and, despite the whole bleakness, there’s enough room for jokes, especially involving Moses. There’s something special about the way the game looks and plays, and I was always happy each time I saw a name of a new chapter instead of “The end”. If only the developer gave us more freedom to explore, without constant interruptions and artificial barriers, it would be a marvel of a game!
PC means personal computer
Completed Meridian 157 series (prologue and chapter 1-3). I was really blown away by the game, but it’s the kind of game for a very specific type of player. The puzzles are very similar to the majority of puzzles in Myst (see a clue and then enter in the answer in the right place) or somewhat like Quern/The Room with a large number of random small unrelated puzzles thrown at you, plus use or combine the object in the right place puzzles. Most puzzles are on the easy side, but there are a few that are a bit difficult and require some very careful observation. The pre-rendered backgrounds and FMV are extremely high quality, which I don’t think I’ve seen in any other modern game. Overall it’s very polished, but I did experience a few crashes which seems likely due to them using a 3rd party game framework.
Just finished Retropolis 2 on Meta Quest 3. It’s been a long time since I was enjoying a game so much. The atmosphere, puzzles, music, graphics… perfection. And I love how it plays like a pure classic point&click; adventure game despite being in VR. If you have a Quest headset and like puzzle adventures, I can’t recommend it enough.
I beat Machinarium today, i found it incredibly charming, especially the animation and music. I liked the puzzles a lot, and i thought some were quite a challenge. I only had to cheat on the very last puzzle. Music puzzles are my kryptonite, which was the last puzzle. Overall a solid lil adventure of about 5 hrs. Id wait for a sale bc of length. I paid 2.50 or so for the game. 7.5/10
I’m just about finished with The Talos Principle 2 - I just have some optional puzzles to do - and I’m finding myself more than a bit conflicted on how to rate the overall game.
I absolutely loved the puzzles. It’s incredible that there are so many and that they use so many repeating elements and yet they constantly bring fresh ideas to the table. There were very few times I thought to myself “here we go again” or found myself bored while doing a puzzle. The level of challenge was just right, and when I was stuck my perseverance was always enough to figure things out without needing a hint. When a new idea was introduced, the puzzles evolved perfectly in complexity and the kind of thinking the player is being asked to do. I would have been perfectly content for the whole game to have just been puzzle after puzzle - which isn’t far from what Talos Principle 1 was.
On the other hand, the story bored me to death. I found it contrived, convoluted and pretentious. It was as if an AI had been asked “what kind of story would intelligent, intellectual people enjoy in a puzzle game?”, and churned out a mix of philosophy, religion and sci-fi with the promise of having something for everyone. Everything was drawn from other sources and most of it didn’t seem relevant at all, just tidbits the game hoped I might find interesting. By the end I’d given up on reading the logs I’d found or understanding what was happening. If it weren’t for the wonderfully drawn characters I might have skipped all plot related material altogether.
Still, I can appreciate that “puzzles good, story bad” is 100% my own evaluation and there most certainly will be others experiencing the opposite. The game has received enormous plaudits which tells me others appreciate the story a lot more than me, and that’s great. It’s also comforting that while the texts and dialogues can be skipped through with a mouse click, the puzzles can’t! So while I don’t think the game is as much of a landmark as Talos 1, I’d still recommend it.
AKA Charo
Finally finished Stasis 2: Bone Totem which I started… a month, two ago? Anyway, it was a great experience and a long, solid game, not something you finish casually during holidays. My impressions didn’t change much from what I wrote earlier: where it shines (characters, graphics, puzzles), it shines, where it fails (storytelling, music), it fails.
The story itself is pretty great, chock-full of horror tropes, just what one might expect from a Lovecraft-inspired underwater expedition where everything goes wrong. The trio of protagonists along with several additional “companions” have to live through all kind of dangers, from floodings to breakdowns to monsters, inhuman experiments and mental disorders. Really liked the husband-wife team of ocean explorers, both strong, charismatic and loving characters, as well as their naive anthropomorphic bear-like “smart toy” Moses who is simply charming despite scary looks.
The way they move through levels caring about each other reminds of Lost Vikings/Gobliins/DoTT. Had no problem with them sharing one inventory (it wasn’t just a design choice, the technology of sending objects on molecular level was mentioned somewhere), while Mac’s prosthesis arm and Charlie’s engineering skills made it more interesting to solve puzzles. They is enough variety, they are neither easy nor hard, involve a lot of cool futuristic gadgets and nasty things extracted from dead or living creatures - just how I like it. Wish the controls were bit different so that we could use inventory on every active object, not just special close-up areas, but you can’t have everything.
Isometric presentation combined with cinematic cutscenes also adds to the unique experience. They even referenced Sanitarium at several points, and not only it. But the way they decided to tell the story… Argh. Every time you enter a new location (and there are lots of locations - unlike your normal isometric RPG, this game consists of smaller areas) and move a bit to explore the surroundings, the characters start chatting in the upper panel. Usually something like “Oh my God! What is this place?” “It’s a room!” “What were they doing in this room?” “I don’t fucking know!” “Watch your language, Mac!”
The game either freezes as you listen or lets you read pop-up descriptions of nearby objects while they keep talking on the background — which is not helpful at all — and you still can’t approach usable objects and have to wait until they stop. And this could happen 2-3-4 times per location and becomes very stressing. And after a while new characters are added to the chat, and it becomes so noisy that you just stop caring about what they say, just SHUT THE HELL UP! Even more ridiculous is how we are often told there’s little time/health/something else left (especially during the last two chapters when tension grows and puzzles are almost gone), and yet they keep talking, talking, and talking…
IMHO a poor design choice that seriously hurts the gameplay and atmosphere. Could’ve been easily avoided, for example, if we were allowed to chat through a menu, whenever we felt like. Or by simply cutting out 80% of dialogues. And this was made even worse by the multiple logs full of entries and emails left by the crew members of the abandoned tanker. The game is so rich visually, we could learn the fates of those poor souls just by looking around, why they even bothered to add those cliched diaries of deceased people that have little impact on the story? Despite several hints to several puzzles, they were mostly useless writings which you stop paying attention to at one point.
I was also quite surprised to learn that music was composed by Mark Morgan who wrote some of my most favourite ag soundtracks (Zork Nemesis/Grand Inquisitor), as well as Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1-2 and some other classics. In Stasis music is mostly forgettable, sometimes consisting of distant scratching sounds or even whistling (very irritating when you are trying to read a log and someone starts whistling in your ear). Few actual melodies felt like remixes of themes from Dark Corners of the Earth and the movie Dagon. Not everything Lovecraft-related should sound similar, really.
I know this is an indie game made almost sorely by one man, and as it is it’s fantastic. Many great cinematic cutscenes that exist just to show horrible deaths of protagonists whenever we make a wrong move. This felt cool and oldschool. While I’m not happy with the way the story is told, writing is actually good, and, despite the whole bleakness, there’s enough room for jokes, especially involving Moses. There’s something special about the way the game looks and plays, and I was always happy each time I saw a name of a new chapter instead of “The end”. If only the developer gave us more freedom to explore, without constant interruptions and artificial barriers, it would be a marvel of a game!
I finished that game within a weekend, couldn’t stop playing, loved it so much. Started with BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION a month ago, it’s from the same team, sadly nowhere as brilliant as Bone Totem, not sure I’ll finish it.
just played thru cyberpunk2077 expansion ‘phantom liberty’ ...not exactly ‘adventure’ i know, i know… but this game has been a moment in time. such a rich in depth story that really hits you. it brought me here to scour for other games i may have forgotten about to try. anyway as far as adventure games go the most recent i played was star trek : resurgence. absolutely loved that one, it was great and the choices you make really have a serious effect on the story. the only gripe i had there was the save feature. it only saves one you are fully through a segment in it’s ‘episodes’ and doesn’t have a manual save feature at all. that was really a bad design decision, but still a great game none-the-less. it felt more like star trek than any of these recent shows, save for maybe strange new worlds.
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