I actually thought this was a bit worse than the first episode. Sure, there are some exciting aspects to the story, but it isn’t developed in enough detail to be really interesting. Many of the characters are largely irrelevant and you almost don’t learn anything about them. There are a few twists and turns leading to a cliffhanger ending. All in all it is an okay story, but the story in the first episode was better developed. In this episode it feels like the designers were trying to make the story more exciting by making some characters rather unique and creepy weirdos, but we are not given nearly enough background information about the characters for this to really work.

Like in the first episode gameplay consists of searching crime scenes for evidence and photographing it, then playing minigames to analyse the evidence and finally linking different piece of evidence to each other.There are a few new minigames but these aren’t any more challenging or otherwise interesting than the minigames in the first episode. The crime scene investigation itself is still mainly a matter of photographing everything you can see, and the only challenge lies in the fact that some objects are hidden and it take some searching to find them. There are not always any hints given to where to look for these objects which makes this searching only barely preferable to pixel hunting. The linking of evidence is probably the most interesting aspect of gameplay but it could have been improved by recording the information that you are given when you first analyse each object so that you don’t have to remember this. Although I suppose needing to take your own notes outside of the game is not all that inappropriate in a crime investigation game.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours

Edna & Harvey: The Breakout

Rating by guildenstern posted on May 26, 2013 | edit | delete

Aura: Fate of the Ages

Rating by guildenstern posted on May 26, 2013 | edit | delete

Myst

Rating by guildenstern posted on May 26, 2013 | edit | delete

Miasmata

Rating by guildenstern posted on May 26, 2013 | edit | delete

Atmospheric and unique but too repetitive

I have somewhat mixed feelings about Miasmata. On one hand it is very atmospheric and the triangulation needed to determine your position and map the island is a unique gameplay mechanic and it is quite fun to do, at first. On the other hand the game is rather amateurish with plenty of spelling and grammatical errors and not so good optimization meaning that the game sometimes runs very slowly even on a fairly good computer and, more importantly, there just isn’t enough variation to the gameplay to support a full length game.

What you do in the game is mainly to map the island that you’re stranded on, to look for plants to be used for making medicine that cures fever, which you suffer from every now and again, as well as a cure for the plague and to ocassionally run away from the beast. The beast I thought didn’t add very much to the game. It shows up every now and again and then you have to run. Looking for plants is really just part of exploring the island. So that is what the game is about, exploration. Central to the exploration is the concept of triangulation, which means that if you see two known landmarks you can determine your current position because you must be where lines drawn from the two landmarks (in the direction your compass tells you the landmark is in) cross. This process is fun at first, and it can be an interesting challenge to find a good place to triangulate your position from, but it isn’t enough to keep the game interesting for its entire length. I also found the triangulation to sometimes involve quite a bit of pixel hunting, a pair of binoculars would have been nice. There is a bit more to the game of course, in particular you can make medicines that improve your abilities to run fast, swim for a long time and sense the presense of the beast. But these things mainly make you die less and doesn’t affect the way the game is played. To sum up, gameplay is mainly about exploration and mapping through triangulation and this is not sufficient to keep the game fun for it’s entire length.

The best thing about the game is the atmosphere, which is supported by the beautiful graphics, and appropriate sound effects. Getting lost at night, and trying to figure out your position with the only light coming from your lighter can be quite an experience. Or perhaps you are more of a morning person and will enjoy climbing a hill at dawn, to look for some landmark or building to head towards.

Had the game only had a bit more varied gameplay, perhaps involving some more survival related tasks such as hunting and making a fire to cook or looking for edible plants and mushrooms it could have been a great game. As it is, it is a good game with some great moments, which frankly is impressive enough for a two man production.

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Time Played: 10-20 hours
Difficulty: Just Right

Reversion: Chapter 1 - The Escape

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 31, 2013 | edit | delete

Vampyre Story, A

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Cameron Files: Secret at Loch Ness, The

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Legend of Crystal Valley, The

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Kaptain Brawe: A Brawe New World

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

NIBIRU: Age of Secrets

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Legend of Kyrandia: The Hand of Fate (Fables & Fiends), The

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Legend of Kyrandia, The (Fables & Fiends)

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Casebook: Episode I - Kidnapped

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Sinking Island

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

SAFECRACKER: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

ECHO: Secrets of the Lost Cavern

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Destination: Treasure Island

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

VOYAGE

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Mystery of the Mummy, The

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Tedious pixel hunting nightmare

First of all the game doesn’t really feel like a detective game. The actual gameplay consists in exploring a house, trying to find ways to get to new sections of the house. Of course you find hints to the solution of the mystery along the way, but you don’t need to care about those to progress in the game.

Instead actual gameplay to a very large extent consists in finding tiny objects that are needed to make progress and which are hidden amongst a large number of other objects many of which seem potentially important but which you can’t interact with. A particularly annoying example of this is a wine cellar where there are a few of the many bottles which you can pick up and the only way of finding out which is to move your mouse cursor over all of them.

Once you have the relevant objects the solutions to puzzles are mostly quite straightforward. It’s the constant pixelhunting that provides most of the challenge. And it’s not just objects you need to search for. I found myself stuck at one point because I hadn’t found that you could click in a certain location to look under a table. The result is that gameplay is tedious rather than fun, I don’t want to be moving the mouse pointer over every little detail in the game to see if a particular object, which you often cannot even recognise what they are because they are so small, is something the developers have decided is going to be important for making progress in the game.

Voice acting is awful, the actor playing Holmes is obviously American with a badly faked British accent. Voice acting for other characters is even worse. The music is also not very good and above all not at all apropriate to the attempted atmosphere in the game. There is no volume control in the game so you cannot turn either the voice acting or the music off without turning sound off completely (from outside the game).

There is not really much story development during the game, you find some clues as to what is going on but Holmes himself doesn’t really have much to say about the case until the big reveal at the very end.

The game also suffers from a major lack of general polish, for examples Holmes comments on attemted actions are sometimes idiotic (e.g. when he comments “this door is locked” when you try to unlock a door with a key) and when you can die in the game there is often no explanation to why you die (e.g. being in a dark room without a light source seems to be sufficient to kill you). The timed sequences also felt very unnecessary, since all that is accomplished is that if you are not fast enough to solve the relevant puzzles (i.e. scan every inch of the room for the relevant items) you have to repeat the sequence more than once until you have found the full solution and can easily complete the sequence within the given time.

All in all this is a badly designed, badly acted, boring and tedious game that I would not at all recommend, and in particular not to fans of detective games since there is no real detective work in the game.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Hard

Return to Mysterious Island 2: Mina's Fate

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete

Return to Mysterious Island

Rating by guildenstern posted on Mar 8, 2013 | edit | delete