Adventure Gamers - Forums

Vehelon - 29 December 2018 03:59 AM

Ghost of a Tale Fantastic adventure stealth game. Game of the year 5/5

Never heard of this one but it looks pretty interesting. Gonna have to check it out

Best of the year for me is between unavowed or obra dinn. Obra dinn is an extremely clever well designed engaging puzzle experience… with a very subtle often vague story. Unavowed has a sprawling immersive story that made me care about the characters, but puzzles that do the bare minimum. Still there is something to be said for a game that stays at the minimum in puzzles rather than below. And there are so many slight variations and methods for solving puzzles with different results. So i give the edge to unavowed.

I think I’ve played enough of the major releases to give a top 5
1) Return of the Obra Dinn
2) Pillars of the Earth
3) The Gardens Between
4) Orwell: Ignorance Is Strength
5) Forgotton Anne

I would probably fit Unavowed in there if I had an extra spot but truth is I didn’t find it that memorable. Far: Lone Sails and The Shapeshifting Detective both get an honorable mention. There’s not much else to speak of in this rather forgettable year.

Still yet to play Larry but it’s still a bit pricey considering I’m not a huge fan of the series.

I haven’t played everything there was to play this year but I absolutely loved:
Stonewall Penitentiary
Unforeseen Incidents
Lamplight City
Unavowed
Miazma
Rusty Lake Paradise
Leisure Suit Larry - Wet Dreams Don’t Dry
Football Game
+ I played many more very enjoyable games ......too numerous to mention but included a lot of older games as well as new

I’m a bit late to the party, but these new year threads are a good opportunity to look back on a year of gaming.

My top 3: (no particular order)
- Gorogoa: an original game with gorgeous graphics and an oneiric stance.
- The Darkside Detective: simply hilarious!
- The Infectious Madness of Dr. Dekker: I liked it better than Contradiction and The Shapeshifting Detective, which I both enjoyed. I got completely enthralled in it, often forgetting that my goal was to find out who killed Dr Dekker and not just play shrink to those patients. The acting was deceptively convincing, no comparison with the aforementioned games (which, while clearly above the sub-B-level FMVs of the 90s, still retain a certain corniness to them), here several cast members had me believe they were crazy for a second.

The good:
- The Blackwell 3-5: excellent series with a slightly convoluted and bittersweet ending.
- The Journey Down: Chapter 2: I especially liked the original character art and the upbeat soundtrack.
- Syberia 1: relaxing. Gorgeous backgrounds, lots of backtracking and not that many knotty contraptions.
- The Shapeshifting Detective: solid FMV mystery, with a fun premise (I’ve longed for a game that would let you jump from body to body, this comes close enough), and that lets the player do most of the deducing. Still have to test that high replayability value I’ve read so much about.
- Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry: a very pleasant surprise. I’m not too fond of below-the-belt humour, but I was strangely nostalgic of the old Larry games, and the positive reviews decided me. Despite the many gross jokes and the more-than-occasional disgusting puzzle, I found it to be a sweet game, with a lovable title character and a welcome (if not too subtle) satire of tech-dependency.
- Unavowed: nice atmosphere and interesting party-based mechanics. Game design ensured you could solve every case no matter the composition of your team, that was clever. Didn’t see the twist coming and that made the story much better in my opinion.
- Lamplight City: so any game with detective work and a pseudo-Victorian setting automatically gets extra-points from me. With that out of the way, I honestly still thought it was good and would rate it above its current average. Writing and voice-acting were hit-and-miss though.
- Lost Chronicles of Zerzura: immersive adventure with questionable historical value and bland characters, but a nice inventor approach to puzzles.
- Subsurface Circular: I’m venturing on the outskirts of adventure-game territory here, it’s more of a dialogue-tree-based interactive story I guess? You’re a detective robot riding the subway, interrogating other robots to solve the disappearances of some of your kin. Well, that was pretty nice, and that’s not coming from a sci-fi fan.
- The Low Road: a fun spy comedy with pleasantly stylized graphics. On the easy side, but has several endings.
- Dirty Split: a nice little free-to-play detective game, enjoyable yet forgettable enough that I had to scan through my forum posts to remember playing it. Unusually high quality for a free game.

The mixed:
- Tex Murphy: Tesla Effect: it felt good to have Tex back, it felt good to have everyone back! And then there was that annoying stealth sequence, which actually wasn’t that hard to beat but I hated that there was a much simpler solution right under your nose - you could easily have borrowed the monk robe in the office to walk around unnoticed - that the game blatantly ignored. And then suddenly I was at the Half Life facility and all hell broke loose. I had to download a saved game to get past that part. I felt terrible about it. Now I’m not contesting quality, I just prefer my adventures stress-free. If I wanted to die every five seconds, I could just play The Colonel’s Bequest or LSL2.
- The Lion’s Song: that was… very cliché, especially the segments about the painter and the mathematician (I’m probably more lenient with the musician since it was the first episode and I have no experience of composing). I liked the art style and the fact that you could shape the story in many different little ways, though.
- Alter Ego: felt a bit like a poor man’s Sherlock Holmes, except half the time you’re a servant-wooing petty thief and the other half you’re basically Watson. I enjoyed the setting but never really cared for either character. It could have been much better if the studio hadn’t had to rush through finishing it, leaving us with one of the worst endings in the history of adventure games.
- editing my post to add Detective Gallo. An appreciable traditional P&C, even though something about the graphical choices kept bothering me, I can’t quite put my finger on it, perhaps the colour palette was too strong on yellow…

The bad:
- Mata Hari: completely expendable. Not a waste of money since I got it thrown in the 1$-tier of a bundle, but close to being a waste of time. A long string of mini-games, between which you scour the streets for “inspiration” for your exotic dancing despite it never evolving, and travel hundreds of miles with a throng of spies at your heels just so you can make a phone call. True, you can skip the mini games, but then you’ll collect no “spy points” and have a terrible ending.
- The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit: this kid’s story was heartbreaking, and yet he managed to be so terribly annoying, I just wanted the day to be over.
- Art of Murder: FBI Confidential: terrible plot, atrocious dialogues, horrendously linear puzzles.

The big dissapointment turned out to be Unavowed. I’ve played all of Gilberts earlier games and found them all good, some great. The fault with Unavowed was that it lacked in all his previous humour and wit, maybe a result from the new RPG-ish style.
The big surprise was Martin Ganteföhrs State of Mind. A return to the mood and questions of his earlier Moment of Silence but much more elegant and with AAA production.
Besides that playing Zero Horizon Dawn was a real adventure.