Adventure Gamers - Forums
You are here: Home → Forum Home → Gaming → Adventure → Thread
New posts
No new postsJune Casual Games
It’s time for the June Casual Games slugfest. First, a few quick notes:
I’m having yet another eye surgery on Thursday. If all goes well, I will be back on the following Monday. Let’s hope all goes well.
Two, in general I never buy Collector’s Editions. With very few exceptions, they offer nothing of additional value that justifies the inflated price. (I am not ever going to use a Joyville screenshot as my wallpaper, and the blog walkthrough, should you need it is as good or better than the Strategy Guide supplied with the CE games. So most of the games I review will be about 4 weeks behind the CE release date.
Third, I almost exclusively play games that are available on Big Fish Games.
And finally, I play lots of demos. The current four on my June to-do list are Dark Dimensions: Wax Beauty. Tesla’s Tower, Malice: Two Sisters and Shiver: Poltergheist.
Since we’re all starting this thing anew, I thought I would lay out what I’m thinking. Feel free to disagree.
Regarding the above, if you are writing a review of a Collector’s Edition game, specify that. There are occasional differences between a CE and SE.
If you are writing a review based on a demo, state that. It’s perfectly acceptable to say that, “Based on the demo, the game is %#@*&&.” But you shouldn’t base an entire review on the demo alone.
So, let’s have at it! Still no definitive word from BFG re: sample games to Casual Game participants, but I am working on it.
When I’m done with my four demo games, I will report in. If somebody has something to report….go for it. It’s not my thread, it’s yours.
For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.
Not really relevant to the June thread, but Final Cut: Death on the Silver Screen had a lot of extras, a lot more than I’ve seen in any other CE.
Besides the usual screen saver, wallpapers and extra bonus game, it had concept art, sound track, extra HOGs and puzzles, deleted scenes, pictures from the filming and uniquely a making off feature.
It’s the first game where I’ve gone “wow, you get a lot of value for the CE here”.
I play story-heavy games, watch animation, anime, B-movies, disaster movies, sci-fi movies and crime shows and try to write about it all on my blog: Snark, pedantry and random geekery
I did buy the CE edition because of the sale. I have yet to play the bonus game, so I will reserve judgment. As for the other items, they don’t interest me that much as they do others. I do agree that this was a great game. Reminds me very much of Maze, which is one of my favorites.
Am currently playing the demo of Malice: Two Sisters.
Entertaining, but not terribly enjoyable, if that makes any sense.
For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.
Going by my own rules, I just finished playing the demo of Malice:Two Sisters. I will not be buying it. The game, as far as the demo is concerned, is straightforward. The graphics are a bit dated, but certainly not ugly. The puzzles are not terribly difficult, although, I will admit that the one slider puzzle I encountered gave me fits, and I consider myself to be quite good at sliders. The HOG scenes are just OK. There are several scenes such as the one I ran across where the “lantern” looked like no lantern I ever saw before.
The thing that disappointed me most, and, again, this is just the demo, is that you, the protagonist are on this island to save your sister, yet there is no suspense. Your sister could be dying, but your only current motive is to find the next HOG scene.
This is totally unlike some of the games mentioned in the Casual Games thread where there was a tangible fear that if something wasn’t done soon the “mission” would be lost. I don’t see any of that here.
I recommend a “Pass” on this one.
For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.
Some more updates on the demo games I’ve played:
Dark Dimensions: Wax Beauty: Nothing really to report here as the game would not play on my system. The maximum screen resolution is less than 1440 x 900 I use on my widescreen monitor. When I attempted to play the game, I was booted to a windowed version of the CE game, which was not the one I had loaded. Seeing as I was not going to buy the CE version in any case, as was not going to change resolution just to play the demo, I have no Pros to report. The Cons are the above.
Tesla’s Tower: The premise of the game is that you, as protagonist, are the great-granddaughter of Nikola Tesla. You are tasked with going back in time to correct an electrical experiment that went horribly wrong. Despite the preposterous nature of the story, I found the game mildly amusing. Thr graphics are excellent, and the voice acting is faily good. There are two drawbacks, but remember this is only based on the demo. One is that Tesla, himself, is in the game as your spiritual advisor/co-conspiritor. He frequently interrupts the flow of the game. This is not something I think will go away during the post-demo portion of the game. The second problem is that the demo consists, according to the WT, almost one-third of the game. I finished the demo, (without using the WT,) in 40 minutes. I have no idea how long the unplayed two-thirds of the game takes to finish. But if the “scale” is correct, that’s a two-hour game. I think it’s worth a buy, but maybe not until there’s a sale.
For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.
I’ve not been gaming much lately, but I have been playing Phantasmat on and off. The game has a lot of locations and the puzzles are run-of-the-mill, but I’m really enjoying the match 3 mini-game option instead of searching for hidden objects. There’s something very satisfying hearing all the sound effects when you find 3 in a row or power up. 
The final demo I played was Shiver: Poltergeist. It’s apparently the second or third game in a series, but I never played anything but this one.
The graphics are excellent. The background music and sound effects are excellent. The voice acting is fair which should not be a real problem seeing as there is very little of it.
You, the protagonist, arrive at an English manor after the disappearance of several people including your brother, Richard. The only person remaining on the property is the butler. I don’t know how big a part he plays in the game. I only interacted with him twice during the opening sequence.
The HOG scenes are fair. More importantly, they seem to be period appropriate. That is, you won’t find scenes cluttered with objects that hadn’t been invented yet.
If there is one thing this game could have used, it’s an interactive map! Heck, I would have settled for any kind of map. Although, there is an interesting feature: a camera with which you can photograph all the locations. The photos are kept in your journal. So, if you ever find yourself wondering which room had the balcony, just look through the photo album. It saved me a fair amount of backtracking.
I did not check a WT to determine how much of the game is included in the demo. I finished the demo with 12 minutes to spare.
Regardless, I liked Shiver: Poltergeist enough to make the purchase.
For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.
i haven’t had a chance to play any Casual games yet this month as i’ve been creating my new website and putting the finishing touches to a vb app i wrote, but now they’re both live i might start another game.
I’m the opposite to you, i tend to go for the CE because it’s really annoying when the regular edition ends on a cliffhanger which is only resolved in the CE. It doesn’t happen that often i suppose, but it does happen..
I agree with your review of Malice, i played it all the way through and it never really got going. The story was semi interesting and i liked the way your nemesis kept popping up and doing stuff to mess with you, but it just felt soul-less and bland.
I liked Shiver: Poltergeist. It wasn’t as good as Vanishing Hitchhiker, but it was still fun. The camera has another use by the way. At certain points you can take photos and a ghost will appear in them. Not that there’s any point to doing that.
I also played Spirits of Mystery 2 - Song of the Phoenix CE, off the back of a pretty much perfect review at Gamezebo. While it was a very polished game, with decent graphics and voice acting, i didn’t find it that interesting plot-wise, and it had a really annoying gameplay mechanic where every few scenes you’d have to kill some poison plants by finding hidden symbols on the scene to power your plant zapper, but the symbols aren’t “hidden object” style hidden, they’re invisible and just appear if you hover the zapper over them. Tedious in the extreme and you have to do it about 10 times during the game. It was a decent length game though, and the extra CE gameplay wasn’t bad either. With my attentions being split more than usual, it took me three or four days to finish it. Overall i’d say it’s better than average but i would only give it 7.5/10.
My next game will be one of the following: Dark Dimension 2 - Wax Beauty CE, Theatre of the Absurd CE or Dark Dimensions City of Fog CE
I’m not in shape to write out reviews at the moments, but these are the games I liked so far:
Bought:
Snark Busters: High Society - enjoyable, a bit easier than previous games, shallow story
Fabled Legends: The dark piper CE - good quality, good HOGs this time (hated the search for tiny part of item the previous games in the series had), okay story, really obvious reveal, stupid bonus game. Worth playing, not worth the CE
Dark Strokes: Sins of the Fathers CE - loved this one. So seldom I find demos where I just have to buy the whole game because I want to continue the story. A lot of backtracking, but good story, beautiful scenes, some difficult puzzles, and the bonus story was exactly what I wanted it to be. Recommended!
Demos I’ve enjoyed and consider buying:
Rite of Passage: The perfect Show CE - planning to buy this one now. Good quality, beautiful scenes, and some really difficult puzzles. One of very few demos I didn’t complete within the 1 hour time limit. First you had 8 gears connected to each other you had to turn them all upwards, where some gears turned 33 degrees while others turned 45 degrees. Then there was a image turning puzzle where not one of the four parts could turn individually.
The story is good and it is really high quality, so recommended if you like hard puzzles.
Tesla’s Tower: The Wardenclyffe mystery - Exiting and different story, not often we get pure sci-fi stories, and the quality is good. Not up there with the highest quality games, but well done and good puzzles.
Spirits of Mystery: The song of the Phoenix CE - I like the series, it always has high quality production and is quite difficult, but like marc I didn’t find the story that interesting.
Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart CE - not very surprising twists in this story, but the quality and puzzles are interesting, and the voice acting is atrocious..
Dark Alleys: Penumbra Hotel CE - Meh, this one is in my “if I have nothing else” pile
Dark Heritage: Guardians of Hope CE - I liked this enough to consider buying it, but I can’t remember what it’s about.. 
Edit: I should note that I’ve tried about 5-10 demos more, but I uninstall and delete the ones I don’t like enough to consider buying, so I don’t know their names.
I play story-heavy games, watch animation, anime, B-movies, disaster movies, sci-fi movies and crime shows and try to write about it all on my blog: Snark, pedantry and random geekery
Theatre of the Absurd CE
That game pissed me off! Besides the story making no sense I thought the backgrounds and game design was so ugly! The game is new and made in 2012, but it looks like it was made 15 years ago..
This is the most used animation in the game, it is a vital part of the game mechanic and cut scenes, and they couldn’t be bothered to make sure it didn’t clip?
(And yes, it is like that every time). I managed 15 minutes of the demo before I rage quit it.. 
I play story-heavy games, watch animation, anime, B-movies, disaster movies, sci-fi movies and crime shows and try to write about it all on my blog: Snark, pedantry and random geekery
Hard to compete with all the Kickstarter threads.
Anyway, I finished Shiver: Poltergeist. I absolutely loved it. The ending was typical, in that it hinted that a new episode might be in the offing. That did not detract. Think the game plays at a solid five hours, which is an excellent value for the $6.99 I paid.
For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.
Quick note: Big Fish Games is have a “Buy one, get one free” sale. It doesn’t include CE’s, and is only good through the end of the day today. I liked the “Tesla’s Tower” demo, and got Dark Strokes: Sins of the Fathers based on Panthera’s recommendation. If there are a few games you wan’t, but are running a little short, cash-wise, this might be the time get two games for the price of one.
For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.
I just bought Shivers: Poltergeist and Mystery Trackers Black Isle. I’ve got these games lined up to play.
Mystery Trackers the Void
Mystery Trackers Black Isle
3 Cards to Midnight
3 Days-Amulet Secret
Enigmatis: Ghosts of Maple Creek
Eternasl Night Realm of Souls
Shiver: Poltergeist
Surface Mystery of Another World
Of the games you mentioned, I’ve played Void, Poltergeist,Enigmatis and 3 Cards to Midnight. The latter is a little unusual. Not quite casual game. Not quite adventure. I know you will enjoy the first three. Report back on what you think of 3 Cards.
For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.
just finished Dark Dimensions - City of Fog CE
The graphics were very nice, and the voice acting/sound were good too. It had that run down, abandoned look that i like so much, even if it is a very common theme in these games.
Some of the scenes seemed a bit empty though, maybe only 1 or 2 hotspots and one of them is just a pointless photo that has no bearing on the game, so it does feel sometimes like the game has been padded out with locations more than it needs to be, and as a result i found myself finding an object i know i needed (like bird food) then spending the next 20 minutes trying to remember which screen the bird table was in. Constantly getting lost probably gave this game an extra hours game time.
The story wasn’t particularly good, and the game didn’t really make much attempt to push the story during the game apart from a few fairly randomly placed cutscenes so it did just feel like puzzles for puzzles sake a lot of the time, and having finished the game i still don’t really know what it was all about and the revelation that a certain person was behind it all just bemused me as i’d never heard them being talked about before, or just don’t remember it.
So it’s lucky that the puzzles themselves were actually really good. They weren’t too easy, infact a few of them i almost gave up but then just managed to solve them. I’m sort of glad the skip button takes so long to charge! I actually found myself having to stop and plan out the puzzles in my head rather than blindly clicking. There aren’t really any of those puzzles where you know how to solve it but it’s going to take ages to do it so you skip to save time.
The HOGs were both good and bad. Good because they utilized puzzles, like you might have to find matches and a lit candle as part of your object list. When you find the matches they go in your inventory, and to find the lit candle you have to use the matches to light an unlit candle.
Bad because on numerous occasions the game did not register my clicks on items. It seems that items behind other items have tiny hit zones sometimes and you might click right on them and yet the game won’t register it, and you’ll spend ages looking for something else that could be a “helmet” for instance and it’ll turn out when you finally give up and click Hint that the thing you clicked on before was infact correct. If it’d only happened once or twice i’d blame my clicking but it happened to me 7 or 8 times during the game.
The CE content was short but sweet, it just added a more definitive ending to the game, and did have a few decent puzzles, and unlike a lot of CEs you see these days, the HOGs followed the same “puzzle” format as the ones in the main game and weren’t just rush jobs.
Overall i think it’s worth 7.5/10 - if the story had been more engaging and navigation less confusing then i would have given it 8.5
I’m playing Mystery Trackers the Void. So far, very routine. What I find boring is how similar these games all are. Dark mansions and hotels, graveyards and abandoned streets - one game feels very much like the other. This is especially true since I always skip the cut scenes. I got tired of the stories all having similar themes, so I pay no attention to them. I play these games for the puzzles and to pass the time, while waiting for Myst-like games to become popular once again.
You are here: Home → Forum Home → Gaming → Adventure → Thread
