Adventure Gamers - Forums

Good to know that brain farts are everywhere!

Nice review.  Would definitely make me want to buy the game. Although I think I would probably need to start with the first game/episode in order to maximize enjoyment. And I just don’t have the time right now. (I guess I shouldn’t call it an episode. Episodes don’t usually take 20+ hours to complete.)

Edit: This refers to the Deponia review

I downloaded the Where Angels Cry - Tears of the Fallen CE demo. I liked it. The puzzle inventory wheels remind me of Depths of Betrayal.

Did you play the CE? I’m thinking of buying it but would like to know if the bonus material is worth the extra cost. If not, I’ll just get the SE.

I played that one as well. I thought it was good, but not as good as Four Horsemen. For lack of a better term, it wasn’t as “tight.” I also felt Maaron’s stature was diminished in this game. I didn’t particularly care for that either.

DefRussian - 15 March 2016 02:10 PM

One of my favorite point and click flash games, The Secret of Grisly Manor .. good balance of music, graphics, puzzles (a little on the easy side), length.

You should try it out. Can be completed in half hour or less

Welcome to the Casual Games thread. The only thing I can say is that most of our players play their casual games on their PCs or Macs. A few play games that are ported to iOs and Android platforms because it fits their needs. E.g. business travel.

I don’t know how many actually play games designed to play only on those platforms, which this game seems to be. There are platform sections here. Perhaps you should post your recommendation in those areas as well as here.

Colpet & Dara100 - Don’t forget to vote/nominate for the next CCPT. We are at day two of no new votes/nominations. Which means that if there are no new votes/nominations tomorrow, the voting is closed. Make sure your voice is heard.

For anyone interested, “Mountain Crime: Requital” is on a deep discount ($0.59 !!) on Steam: Mountain Crime: Requital, on Steam. It’s not bad for a HOG with quite a few HO scenes, many of which you return to several times. The voice acting is adequate, and the story seems interesting so far:

Someone is killing the guests at a mountain resort, and you could be next if you don’t solve the mystery at the heart of this chilling thriller! Take the role of a doctor who’s summoned to a remote hotel to tend to a patient, and hold on to your sanity as you discover the first victim moments upon arriving at the retreat. As you search for clues, crack brain-bending puzzles and read newspaper clippings that reveal the hotel’s horrific past, two questions will take shape in your mind: What ties do you have to the hotel? And why did one of the victims claim you are the killer? The answer will shock you! Play Mountain Crime today to discover the truth!

Kind of hard to pass up for fiddy-nine cents! 

Mike - Don’t forget to take a look at the games nominated for the next CCPT.

Mike the Wino - 17 March 2016 02:32 PM

For anyone interested, “Mountain Crime: Requital” is on a deep discount ($0.59 !!) on Steam: Mountain Crime: Requital, on Steam.

Premise sounds very much inspired by Agatha Christie.

I bought and played Mystery Trackers - Paxton Creek Avenger. Finished it yesterday. It’s hard for me to know whether this is a continuation of a prior story or just another episode in the series.

The backstory indicated that the antagonist was a one-time agent of Mystery Trackers, but was fired for a breech of the rules. Thus, he is on a mission to “avenge” that perceived wrong.

The protagonist characters are all the same, including Elf the wonder dog.

The game is from Elephant Games, but is released under the Big Fish Studios banner. It has been some time since I last played a Mystery Trackers game, so I don’t know if this “outsourcing” is a recent event. Although, of late, it seems that Big Fish Studios has outsourced all of its franchises, and are no longer producing anything in house.

Regardless, it’s an above average game of above average length. I would say it’s a good six hours of game play. The one problem I had with it was the puzzle descriptions. Often I could solve a puzzle because I had seen a similar puzzle before, or I could intuit the objective. But in general, I found the descriptions quite vague. So, if you can’t figure out the objective on your own, you will need either a walkthrough or the Skip button to proceed.

For the above reason I’ll give it a 3.5/5 Stars. It would have been a 4 with clearer instructions.

A few months ago I posted a trilogy of AGSOTDs. It was based on game franchises that I thought had outlived their welcome. That is sequels were being produced that bore little or no relationship the games that started the franchise.

One of those franchises I criticized was the Grim Tales franchise. There is a new game out titled Grim Tales - the Heir. I thought I would download the SE demo and see if my proposition that the franchise was on a downhill slide still had merit.

Unfortunately, it does! Our protagonist is still Anna Gray. Her nephew, Brandon, still needs her assistance. Only now, a year in real time after we rescued his miserable ass as a 20-something-year-old who was accused of murdering his sister, we are trying to save his miserable ass when he is accused of murdering his wife and ten-year-old son.

The demo has many references to prior, and better, games in the series including Wishes and The Stone Queen. In my opinion, it would have been better if the franchise had died after either of those two games. I was critical of The Stone Queen for its unreasonable leap forward in time from the previous game. But it was a long game, short on standard HO scenes and had some reasonably difficult puzzles. So I give it a pass.

This game gets no pass. The mini-review I did right above this post was a game from Elephant Games. As are all of the Grim Tales games. And this one suffers from all the shortcomings I mentioned in the prior review…and then some. While the graphics are nice, and both the music and voice acting are passable, the puzzles are outrageous.

Everything I said about the puzzle objectives being unclear applies here too. There are some puzzles that you are required to solve from a distance. I.e., instead of facing a tile-swap puzzle head on in close up, you are forced to solve it from a distance at an oblique angle. There’s a difference between making a puzzle more difficult and simply making a puzzle harder. In this game at least, Elephant doesn’t know the difference.

I forgot to mention that this is now the tenth game in the franchise. Most franchises seem to give up the ghost when they hit seven games. But some trudge onward! Even if there was a HUGE Buy one, get seven free sale, this game would not make it onto my get list.