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What game have you just finished?

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Vegetable Party - 13 May 2021 03:37 PM

Looking forward to your treatment of the next installments! You definitely didn’t disappoint in either of the threads, talking about this game.

Oh, one more thing: what do you think of the soundtrack?

The soundtrack was fun, in a tinkly jaunty sort of way. I can’t hum a single line of it anymore, but I did stop and think ‘this is lo-fi but very pleasant.’ It eventually became a bit repetitive and annoying…but that was probably my annoyance with the gameplay bleeding into the rest of the game’s elements. By the time I was done, I hated all of it. Much in the same way dictators have ruined mustaches. Okay, not *much* in the same way. A little teensy drop in the same way.

     

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I just completed a replay of the short but sweet and rather silly Gomo.  The main character is a lumpy guy with mismatched eyes and stick limbs who goes on a quest to find a crystal to exchange for his kidnapped dog.  The game, by FishCow Studios, is hand drawn in a simple but pleasing style, and I found the puzzles easy but fun.  Near the end of the game, there’s a little tribute to Botanicula’s ending that made me smile.

     

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Baron_Blubba - 13 May 2021 11:40 AM

Just finished Legend of Kyrandia Book 1.

This is a game which, in current times, trades on the nostalgic currency of its superior contemporaries in order to evoke the same wonderful feelings of childhood days-gone-by magic. Unfortunately, the farce is exposed after the first hour or so of playing, and the game falls flat on its face. There are a couple of decent scenes (watching Brandon trollomp-a-rump up the castle stairs is precious), but most of the best parts are merely average, and the worst parts are pretty darn bad. Some of the notorious trial and error puzzles (putting gems and flowers into the cauldron to make potions) wouldn’t be so bad—they’d be totally gettable—if the game didn’t specifically tell you that there might be a non-random way to solve them, But there isn’t. So you end up spending hours traversing this big world, looking for a legitimate clue or solution…and then realize (thanks to a walkthrough) that there isn’t one. I don’t know about you, but I *assume* that, obtuse as a puzzle might be, no developer would leave it up to absolute brute force, or even want you to start guessing the solution and eventually stumble onto it, rather than searching for clues and figuring it out. If there’s a clue as to the order you have to play the chimes in in the queen’s bedroom in order to open the secret compartment, please let me know.
There is also a stupid maze and a stupid iron key. And last but not least: If ever a game could benefit from quick-travel, it’s this one.

Not going to waste more time on this. I’d give Legend of Kyrandia Book 1 a 2.1/10. The point-one is to distinguish it from A New Beginning, of course.
Have moved on to the sequel, and so far it’s much better.

You definitely mirror my feelings about the game! I don’t think there’s a game where my opinion shifted from anticipation to borderline hatred so quickly.

Luckily, I also don’t think there’s a sequel which makes amends as much as Hand of Fate does.

 

     
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Finished Mutropolis. What an adorable game, the best traditional adventure I’ve played in a long time, so much love was put into making. And turns out it was made by just TWO people from Madrid! Incredible. Two indie devs easily outbested the whole Double Fine team (somehow I kept thinking of Broken Age while playing due to the similar art style, despite the genres are different).

Writing and puzzle design are very solid, very oldschool and yet accessible, though I read complaints of “there is no built-in hint system and I get stuck!!” sort. The futuristic world where archeologists are digging into our times is believable and fun to explore, the addition of Egyptian mythology feels appropriate as it introduces one of the most charming characters. The game oozes with that “easy to get into and lots to discover” atmosphere of LucasArts games. There are only 3 chapters, with the first basically consisting of one screen and the other 2 - of maybe 10-12 screens each, but the devs made such good use of them that the game never feels claustrophobic or tedious.

In fact it feels very open, there are so many fresh ideas and inventive puzzles on the way. Nothing looks dull or forced even when we are exploring a huge map for the 5th time, or figuring a safe combination, or navigating a little retro robot. Humour is presented in every tiny detail, both text and visual, yet, again, it never feels forced like in most modern comedies. The protagonist plays a lot like modern Guybrush with brains. The game is also very beautiful as long as you accept this art style (I needed some time to be honest, but it quickly grew on me), the work with light and colours is truly outstanding. Voiceovers are of high quality. All in all, I 100% agree with the adventuregamers’ review here, play it!

     

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Doom - 18 May 2021 07:28 PM

Finished Mutropolis. What an adorable game, the best traditional adventure I’ve played in a long time, so much love was put into making. And turns out it was made by just TWO people from Madrid! Incredible. Two indie devs easily outbested the whole Double Fine team (somehow I kept thinking of Broken Age while playing due to the similar art style, despite the genres are different).

Writing and puzzle design are very solid, very oldschool and yet accessible, though I read complaints of “there is no built-in hint system and I get stuck!!” sort. The futuristic world where archeologists are digging into our times is believable and fun to explore, the addition of Egyptian mythology feels appropriate as it introduces one of the most charming characters. The game oozes with that “easy to get into and lots to discover” atmosphere of LucasArts games. There are only 3 chapters, with the first basically consisting of one screen and the other 2 - of maybe 10-12 screens each, but the devs made such good use of them that the game never feels claustrophobic or tedious.

In fact it feels very open, there are so many fresh ideas and inventive puzzles on the way. Nothing looks dull or forced even when we are exploring a huge map for the 5th time, or figuring a safe combination, or navigating a little retro robot. Humour is presented in every tiny detail, both text and visual, yet, again, it never feels forced like in most modern comedies. The protagonist plays a lot like modern Guybrush with brains. The game is also very beautiful as long as you accept this art style (I needed some time to be honest, but it quickly grew on me), the work with light and colours is truly outstanding. Voiceovers are of high quality. All in all, I 100% agree with the adventuregamers’ review here, play it!

I am always happy when people say an Spanish adventure game is good, we make so few… Let’s hope this is a great year, with 3 Minutes to Midnight and The Season of the Warlock lined-up…

     

Currently translating Strangeland into Spanish. Wish me luck, or send me money to my Paypal haha

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I just finished Legend of Kyrandia Book 2: Hand of Fate.
I don’t get what the fuss is about. Is it better than the first one by leaps and bounds? It sure is. Is it a good adventure game? I don’t think so. It sits in a very unpleasant valley between Pajama Sam ease and old timey adventure game stupidity.
Other than a couple of sound/color puzzles and that really lousy Tower of Hanoi at the very end, none of the puzzles were really puzzles; they were time wasters. How any game with a section like that volcano planet section in it where the game undisguisedly has you walking around in circles picking up randomly generated objects en masse in order to pay the planet’s denizens for things they may or may not provide you (it’s up to trial and error and a whole lot of wasted time to find out)...how any game that does this can achieve classic status is beyond me. Not many of the other puzzles were much better. Go around finding objects, put them in your cauldron, do the obvious thing with them. Not a lot of brain power needed. If you can’t figure something out, you probably haven’t pixel hunted hard enough.
The character templates have potential but there’s maybe 1/10th of the exposition needed to actually give them any…character. As it is, they remain templates. Zanthia is obviously the best of the lot—I didn’t find her as ‘legendarily good’ an adventure game protagonist as I think others have, but she was passable and generally likable.
The writing was so stilted and the dialogue was so stitched together and points that if I didn’t no better I would have figured this to be a European-made game with a poor English translation. That’s not the case, which leaves the lack of quality in the script a little baffling.
The story never stays anywhere long enough for me to care. First it’s one thing I have to do to save the world, then, oh no, it’s something else entirely, off you go! and then it’s something else. I just didn’t get invested. The arch villain’s story is really clever, and had a ton of potential, but is explained with a few small lines of exposition by two characters who only appear in one screen in the whole game. You don’t really know who they are…just that they are two guys chasing a foot around because it is part of an evil wizard who must remain unwholly.
That huge reveal is delivered with all the oomph zeal zest drama and impact of the most naturalistic moment from Ingmar Bergman’s most naturalistic movie.
I usually love it when games take me to all different places, making the adventure really feel like an adventure, but I didn’t feel anything from the places Hand of Fate took me to. There was a great variety of locations, but I think that the imagination and execution in each one was just lacking. I never wanted to superimpose myself into a scene, and not a single location made me stop to appreciate it before moving on. There was no immersion.
Actually, in the very first world, in Zanthia’s forest home area, there was…then it lost me.

I wish I had played this game as a kid. I might have been oblivious to so much of what I wrote about so far, and the ludicrousness of the plot, the characters, and the worlds would have created a warm nostalgic place in my heart for Zanthia and her friends and foes to nest in. Maybe this would be another King’s Quest V for me.
As it is, and with apologies to those who hold Hand of Fate near and dear, I really didn’t like it.

I’d give Legend of Kyrandia Book 2: Hand of Fate a 4.2 out of 10. It is twice as good as the original, and it had a few nice moments, but I didn’t enjoy it much. This classic series has disappointed me thus far.

Should I play Malcom’s Revenge, do ya think?

     

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Isn’t it all nostalgia though? Any of the KQ games would struggle to reach a 5/10 if I’m the one rating them, except V which I played as a youngster. And with that game I wasn’t sitting there assessing the puzzle difficulty, it was just what I had in front of me at the time, so it was fun.

We can grumble about it if we want, but show a teenager any of these “classic” games and most likely all you’ll get back is a shrug and a return to whatever’s the popular thing with their age group today.

     
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Luhr28 - 19 May 2021 03:30 PM

Isn’t it all nostalgia though? Any of the KQ games would struggle to reach a 5/10 if I’m the one rating them, except V which I played as a youngster. And with that game I wasn’t sitting there assessing the puzzle difficulty, it was just what I had in front of me at the time, so it was fun.

We can grumble about it if we want, but show a teenager any of these “classic” games and most likely all you’ll get back is a shrug and a return to whatever’s the popular thing with their age group today.

I see your point, and it’s probably quite true for some, but I don’t think it is entirely true for me. Maybe more like half true.
Over the past 15 months or so I have played quite a few classics for the first time and was very impressed. Monkey Island 2. Toonstruck. The Dig. The Colonel’s Bequest. The Dagger of Amon Ra. Flight of the Amazon Queen. Gabriel Knight 3 (not the biggest fan, but a good game). Fate of Atlantis. Loom. Return of the Phantom. Under A Killing Moon. The Pandora Directive. (That’s a quick flip through my ‘installed’ tab on GOG Galaxy, there were others. I played a lot of PC games this year.)

I’m pretty sure I would have enjoyed KQ V even if played for the first time today. Not nearly as much, but enough to recommend it. Certainly the KQ II and III Redux editions and KQ IV. I reckon I just have an affinity and tolerance for the older era of adventure games. Some of the poor design habits in those games I actually enjoy, and others I don’t. Hand of Fate had a lot of stuff that I did not enjoy. The art, for one—which is a main attraction in these old point and clickers for me; and that so many of the puzzles weren’t puzzles so much as time-wasters. I’d rather throw a boot at a cat and a pie at a yeti and serenade a snake any day before wasting an hour mindlessly gathering a gajillion sand dollars, star fish, and sea shells to give to smarmy volcano insurance tour guide Stan-rip-off salespeople.

 

     

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Baron_Blubba - 19 May 2021 06:00 PM

I’d rather throw a boot at a cat and a pie at a yeti and serenade a snake any day before wasting an hour mindlessly gathering a gajillion sand dollars, star fish, and sea shells to give to smarmy volcano insurance tour guide Stan-rip-off salespeople.

I’d say you are definitely not gonna enjoy Kyrandia 3, at least some parts of it - and since you didn’t like puzzle design in previous entries, you’ll probably end up hating it. That said, I’m also not a big fan of the third entry, but for different reasons, the game is just too awkward. Kyrandias 1-2 though are great adventures in my book, the way they are conceived - logically, graphically (this is honestly the first time I’ve ever heard someone didn’t like graphics in those games), through interface - is one of the main attractions for me. They play differently, they look differently, they make you think differently. A strange and original world with its own rules, just what I expect to see in a fantasy.

     

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Just finished a narrative-driven “Hitchhiker – A Mystery Game”. I’m not huge on narrative-driven adventures, but this has top-notch storytelling and fantastic visuals to support it, definitely a worthy game if you like to ponder on some meta stuff.

I picked it up because it has two of the things I enjoy – surreal world and story (ala Norwood Suite) and a road trip adventure. It turned out to be a quite memorable Dali-esque ride with lots of philosophical musings and thought-provoking questions, not the heavy kind, but rather “kick your feet up on the dashboard, stare at the sky and wonder” kind. There’s also a mystery of “who am I and why am I here” (that gets a bit dangerous at some point), but it’s as much about you solving it (almost entirely from the front seat of the car) as about interesting, odd and very different stories of your companions (with a distinct visuals – from black and white sketches, to chalk-like slides, to watercolor renderings) and how they make you contemplate about different concepts. I like the fact that it didn’t preach or tried to teach me anything, just merely pointed in a direction and let me reflect.

Many things are open to interpretation here, including the resolution, so no neatly tied bows (and I like those too), but it works within the universe of the game nicely.
The puzzles are story-centric and mean to immerse, not to challenge. This is much more of “an experience” rather than a full of interactions game, but it is very well done.

Highly recommended for anyone who likes off-kilter, dreamlike journeys into a bit bizarre, yet seemingly normal worlds with plenty of metaphysical stuff to think about. Really good writing, brilliant voice-over and amazing visuals on the backdrop of the cross-country drive through the great US of A.

EDIT: Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the game that about sums up the whole mood:

- “You pick up a lot of hitchhikers?”

- “Yeah, a fair number. But after a while, you start seeing the same few archetypes over and over: you got the numbnuts Kerouac fans. You got your autodidact blowhards, they’ll talk your ears off. You got a lot of people from Cincinnati, for some reason. You got your Deadheads, trying to get to some concert some place. And then, there’s the water bottle person, always worrying that they’re going to run out of water before they get where they’re going. Still, you’re the first hitcher I’ve ever picked up who doesn’t have a destination…”

     
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Doom - 19 May 2021 07:27 PM
Baron_Blubba - 19 May 2021 06:00 PM

I’d rather throw a boot at a cat and a pie at a yeti and serenade a snake any day before wasting an hour mindlessly gathering a gajillion sand dollars, star fish, and sea shells to give to smarmy volcano insurance tour guide Stan-rip-off salespeople.

I’d say you are definitely not gonna enjoy Kyrandia 3, at least some parts of it - and since you didn’t like puzzle design in previous entries, you’ll probably end up hating it. That said, I’m also not a big fan of the third entry, but for different reasons, the game is just too awkward. Kyrandias 1-2 though are great adventures in my book, the way they are conceived - logically, graphically (this is honestly the first time I’ve ever heard someone didn’t like graphics in those games), through interface - is one of the main attractions for me. They play differently, they look differently, they make you think differently. A strange and original world with its own rules, just what I expect to see in a fantasy.

The graphics weren’t bad at all, it’s more the art design that didn’t do it for me. I never felt like I was really exploring a place, or certainly like I was eager to explore a place. After leaving the first area, which I did enjoy, I was just going from screen to screen looking for objects to use in other screens. The environments were window dressing, like the adventure game equivalent of a fighting game color pallet swap.
Okay, to be fair, the second world, the farm area and town, were a little better than the rest of the game, too, but it was a steep downhill from there.
As for the different-kind-of-thinking element of the game, I might agree, but not in a good way. More like ‘less thinking’. Can someone please write a defense of the volcano planet, where you have to collect all the debris to give to the different scammers scattered around the area? Perhaps the time waster design was an intentional statement on…something…but it was horrible game design.

     

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I just finished The Blackwell Deception.
This was my second time playing through the game (The first time was earlier this year), to jog my memory before I moved on to The Blackwell Epiphany, which I am playing right now.

Enjoyed it. Dave Gilbert is a really good writer who knows how to use dialogue and exposition economically and effectively, which I appreciate. He doesn’t need to use tons of words to build a good story, develop his characters, and create satisfying drama. It helps that the voice acting is uniformly excellent.
The puzzles are all logical and feel good to solve. My only criticism would be that the solving window is often a little narrow. By this I mean that often times I would try to solve a puzzle by using X on Y, when the game wants you to use Y on X. Or you already solved the puzzle in your head, but have to figure out how to let the game know that you solved it: Maybe it’s through talking about a specific topic with another character, maybe it’s by cross-referencing notes, and maybe it is by showing someone an object or doing a search on your phone. I knew exactly what information I was looking for, but had to try several equally valid methods in order for the game to know that I knew it. Also, some of the solving methods are getting repetitive at this point in the story. Blowing on things. Joey peeking into tight locked places. Note cross referencing. I would have loved for there to be some more challenging search engine puzzles to navigate instead, involving the player’s observation of clues from all over the game world—both on the phone and in the environment and conversations.


The plot is excellent, and the storytelling is even better. It’s not enough to have a good yarn, you also how to know how to spin it. Dave Gilbert does, and that one of the main reasons why I play his games. 

This is the best Blackwell game up to this point. It is very close to perfect, in the sense that it seems to accomplish exactly what it sets out to do. Only some of the by now contrived puzzling lets it down a bit. Absolutely worth playing the entire series. I give it a 6.5/10 as a point and click adventure, subject to my own slightly retro tastes, and an 8/10 as a more modern narrative-driven adventure game. The latter is what Dave Gilbert himself says he intends his games to be, so he totally accomplished his objective in my opinion.

     

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Baron_Blubba - 22 May 2021 11:56 AM

Can someone please write a defense of the volcano planet, where you have to collect all the debris to give to the different scammers scattered around the area? Perhaps the time waster design was an intentional statement on…something…but it was horrible game design.

You called? Innocent

At the risk of being the worst, I will defend one of the worst sections in classic AG history.

Whether it was statement or not, I remember being stuck here way too long when I was a kid. I also remember breezing through this section later on. This whole area is made up of faux-fetch quests that can easily be avoided if you don’t get caught up in these arbitrary demands. It struck me as a parody of the genre.

It’s obviously an exaggerated version of the bread and butter of many adventure games: you go around picking stuff up, because people tell you to and you expect something in return. But more than that, it shows how absurd this mechanic can get, easily becoming filler, a way to keep the player occupied. It suggests involvement in the game world, but it’s little more than a dangling carrot until the designer replaces the carrot with a bigger carrot, that definitely is more orange. The suggestion of progress in the form of busywork, camouflaged as a challenge.

(I had three more points, but I probably shouldn’t turn everything into a half-baked essay)

Is it bad design? Is it intentional? Sure and maybe. It could also be a way to make a point in a fashion that is as blunt as it is oblique. There is a way to avoid it altogether, I think that speaks for the game, at least.

Not sure if I’d defend the whole of Kyrandia 2, or any part of the series, with as much heart as you put into your reverence for King’s Quest V. I like how the characters are, in some way, a subversion of the characters in the King’s Quest games, but that’s personal. I love the music, not just the way it sounds, but the way it’s composed.

King’s Quest is an epic by a prog band. It’s technical, it wants to do a lot and it achieves, but it’s also a bit stiff in places, rather caught up in it’s own thinking. A work of art, but not very free.

Kyrandia is like an math-rock/emo band, people in their final year of college. They love jazz, but don’t know how to play it. They did pick up on a couple of ideas, some they can copy, some they can play around with, while others fall flat due to lack of technical skill or understanding. But there’s something free about it: it’s not as constrained as the LucasArts and Sierra school of AG design. And it’s clever, here and there. In other places, it’s.. not King’s Quest.

I do hope you’ll discuss the third installment, you putting a game through the wringer = comedy gold.

     
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As a defense, that was pretty poor…but also fair.
“Yes, your honor, my client is guilty of murder, but he did it to make a point.”

So wait, is that section skippable entirely, or is it able to be abbreviated? You need one thing from each of the three groups, I think, and 2 or 3 things from one of them (the old woman and her husband). No matter what, you have to go around gathering tons of stuff. And the worst part is, that the stuff seemed to grow scarcer as I grew closer to the goal. At first, the shells, sand dollars, and starfish were everywhere. Then I had to traverse ten screens just to find one.

Your college math rock analogy is spot on, which makes me wonder, again: Why is this game considered a classic? It has its charms, and would probably have greater charms if I had played it as a munchkin, but there’s no way I’d ever consider it up there with the other golden age games, KQ and otherwise.

     

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I think you can skip the collection of junk, take the few items you actually need and take a leap. You don’t need to talk to any of the characters on the outside of the volcano.

Not sure if the developers actually tried to make a point. It’s quite possible the section is a joke. Maybe they were out of inspiration; I really liked the first puzzles, with the word associations, some thought went into that design. That seems to fade and the game slides back into Kyrandia 1 territory. It could be they were rushing to finish a game (deadline, new and more compelling project, developers leaving the team?).

I think the Golden Age is a bit of a construct, mostly based on the adoration people have for that particular era and mostly based on the succes of Sierra and LucasArts as AG developers. The Kyrandia games came out around that time, but they were overshadowed by bigger titles in the genre. Kyrandia 2 was a bit of a (commercial) flop. It’s a miracle the third installment was developed at all. Since the Monkey Island and King’s Quest games sold millions even before digital distribution and the whole of Kyrandia didn’t do even near half was well, the games got this hidden gem-status when they could be found online. People started to look for old school p&c adventure games after taking the nostalgia train to Sierra town and LA city and Kyrandia offers a bit of both.

I like what you said about “The Blackwell Deception”. I hope you enjoy “The Blackwell Epiphany”, of all the games in the series, I’d guess it’s the one most up your alley.

     

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