Adventure Gamers - Forums

Jdawg445 - 17 February 2024 11:36 PM

Baron_Blubba - 17 February 2024 11:20 PM

It reminds me of Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard, insofar as it could have easily been plucked right out of ‘93.

Is it fun, i was pretty pumped. Maybe i will play beyond first

Just updated that post with a little more info.

I wrote a review of Beyond, spoiler free, for Adventuregamehotspot.com a while ago if you’d like to read my thoughts on that one.

I haven’t done all that much in the game yet but already I agree with most of the Baron’s criticism. Too longwinded for me. The grammar is weird sometimes, like “this bottle looks quite better”. What does that even mean? The graphics are okay, I guess. I’m no fan of the faux retro look.

In my opinion, anybody looking for a classic indie adventure with inventory-based puzzles should go for Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard. Also developed by one person and much better in every aspect - except the pixel hunting.

Jdawg445 - 18 February 2024 11:49 AM

Thanks, then that might be my next purchase, once it goes on sale. I do think the developer overpriced beyond at $24.99. I also think that game has an easier mode where it will highlight the hot spots, which if that’s all it does I would be glad to use it, as long as it doesn’t spoil any of the puzzles.

The first 2/3 of that game are almost as good as it gets, and if I thought the remaining 33.33% were even half as good, I’d say it’s 100% worth $24.99.

Alas, no, wait for a sale.

Black Hawk is only $13-15. It’s currently a 5/10 that is saturated in 9/10 potential.

This game just received a 4/5 stars on this website, so I’m going to offer a counter opinion.

Adventures of the Black Hawk reminds me of a certain Mark Twain story in which, short story even shorter, a guy asks the devil to make him happy, and the devil turns him into a grinning idiot. He’s mentally handicapped, to put it mildly, but at least he’s happy.

It seems like the author of this game made a similar deal, asking for his game to be a combination of The Longest Journey and Monkey Island, two of the “greatest games ever.”

Well, his game has the long winded dialogue of the Longest Journey (people just don’t shut up, never have I played a game where the author is so in love with his own “wit” and voice), and the puzzle design is basically a Greatest Hits of 90’s moon logic, with none of the humor to buoy it up or the good stuff to water it down.

The adventure starts promising, but doesn’t go much of anywhere locationally, limiting us to a small provincial area and a couple of indoor environments.

The story doesn’t develop in any compelling way either, but it’s not bad—had there been a game with enjoyable puzzles and an enjoyable script to back it up, it would have been very serviceable.

As a player, many of the actions I was taking did not seem natural, but rather I was doing what the author of the story needed me to do in order to move the story along.

Pixel hunting absolutely abounds.

Your character(s) often act cruelly, quite out of character, to a degree that is not funny, toward innocent NPC’s, for the sake of accomplishing an arbitrary task. Example: Causing a stranger to fall off the top of a Ferris wheel.

NPC’s make nonsensical requests for the sake of the developer giving us another ‘puzzle’ to solve.

Certain perfectly useful objects cannot be picked up or used; instead, we must use the specific version of that item that the developer wants us to use, for the sake of solving a puzzle.

Sudden deaths exist, forcing reloads and backtracking. I understand that we are told to Save Early, Save Often, but why? Because that’s how the old games did it? There are lots of great traditions of those old games worth keeping alive in 2024, but surprise sudden deaths are not one of them.

The sword fighting is not good.

The Monkey Island references ripened 20 years ago.

The entire script is *littered and I mean LITTERED* with typos, grammatical errors, screwed up idioms, misused and misspelled words, and what I would call an utterly botched translation.

I could go on and on. This is not a 4/5 game. It’s a 1.5/5 game in my book. That 1.5 is for the charming graphics and the obvious potential that this developer has. He could totally make a good game, but I think he needs an editor and a lot more playtesting from a wider pool of playtesters.

Despite all of my complaints (and these are just a relative few),I enjoyed some of my time with Black Hawk. It’s charming, the idea has potential, the graphics and music are pretty darn good, and I miss this type of game. But hoo boy, so disappointing.