Ratings by Little Writer

Yakir Israel has just released the first chapter of “Plot of the Druid”. The prologue was already available as a demo. I took me 3 hours to play both as Jase, an apprentice druid trying to pass his final exams and looking for a backdoor. He gets caught and is expelled from school, only to be recruited by an archdruid in a crisis to help make a healing potion. Three chapters will follow but you can already play the first part of the game now.
And what a game it is! It uses some special game mechanics. There are some mini-games that take some getting used to but are still enjoyable since you won’t have to try to beat them long enough for them to get frustrating. You need them to learn magic spells and basically mean clicking your mouse in the right place and at the right time. Another game mechanic is Jase’s transformation into different animals, each with their own special characteristics to help solve the puzzles.
Then the puzzles, they are of a good difficulty level, at least for me. The game actually comes with two difficulty levels; I played the hardest one. They are your basic inventory puzzles and dialogue trees every weathered adventurer will love. But they are very much part of the fantasy world and they all make perfect sense.
The fantasy world is very detailed and truly alive. This world is inhabited by interesting characters, cool backgrounds, lively music, decent voice actors, funny dialogues and situations, and I for one can’t wait to see where the game will take us next, since there’s bound to be happening a lot more in future!

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Time Played: 2-5 hours
Difficulty: Just Right

Part I of “The Silent Sky” has been released! I got the chance to beta test this first chapter of this mystery/sci-fi story.

The game opens very mysteriously, on a silent, starry sky. The camera pans down on a farmhouse. The cursor appears. It takes a while, but as you hover over certain sections of the farm, you realize this is a creatively designed menu screen.

The game starts with main character is Siim, a twelve year old boy, startled one night by a peculiar thunder/lightning show outside his house. His dog Terri is startled and Siim wants to go comfort her. That’s where the first obstacles and puzzles appear: finding Terri’s toy and leaving the house without being seen by Siim’s dad.

“The Silent Sky” has beautiful backgrounds filled with subtle animations. The biggest part of the game takes place in the woods, which makes you feel like you’re searching for the Black Lodge in “Twin Peaks” or something. The character designs can be compared to those in the animated TV-series “King of the Hill”.

The interface is pretty straightforward: right clicks investigate hotspots, left clicks uses them. Sometimes you need to look at something first before Siim will realize it’s important enough to pick up. The cursor automatically changes into the default action: an eye/magnifying glass to look at something, a hand to pick it up, but you can still choose which mouse button to click. Two legs walking indicate an exit. Early in the game you find a carrier bag, which Siim will hang over his shoulder. You enter and exit the inventory by clicking on it.

There’s not much music in the game while exploring, adding to the silent and mysterious atmosphere. Music arises only during important scenes. There are only a couple of characters, and thus you’ll mostly hear the voicework of Vincent Holmes as Siim. He has an appropriately young, gentle voice, easy to listen to. He’s certainly not an annoying kid. Sounds and voices have this 3D-effect on them, and even some sort of echo when in wide open spaces, lower in volume when they’re in the distance. There’s an incredible amount of detail in this game. Not only in game-building elements but also in storytelling.

“The Trust” is only the first part of “The Silent Sky” but you can tell that Kaspar-Hardi Raave, its creator, has a much bigger story in stock for us. I for one am very interested to find out what will happen to Siim next.

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Time Played: 2-5 hours
Difficulty: Just Right

This game took me 9 hours to complete. The puzzles were just right for me. I was mistaken in thinking this was one of those game with logical puzzles, so I was glad to see a classic point ‘n click adventure game with inventory puzzles.

The only thing that bothered me were the dialogue options, where you never really could tell what your character would actually say, and I often had to go through all three options before finding the correct one.

I liked the revolving technique with examining objects, which I thought was a bit underused; they could have done more with this.

The music was okay, the voices however left something to be desired. I didn’t connect with the characters. Also, their weird gestures and walking paces made them obviously animations instead of believable real people.

As far as the story goes, I’m a bit let down. I just had a hard time accepting what was really going on and thought it all a bit too much to be plausible, even for a game.

Still it gets a good score because of the easy and intuitive playability. Even some of the harder puzzles never took me long enough to figure out so I would have turned to a walkthrough. They never broke the pace of the story.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Just Right

I played Sam Peters right after Secret Files 3.I really love these games. They are classic adventures, where the main character allows you to pick up and use items immediately as you find them, even though you don’t know yet why, how or where you would use them. It’s often trying everything with everything in order to progress, but most things are very intuitive. I love the voice actress of Nina Kalenkov, and Sam Peters as well. I love “playing” with these women. I read that other reviewers had a problem with the swearing, but that’s what I actually liked about Sam! She would be an interesting person to meet in real life. And the music is awesome too, worthy of movie soundtracks. Sure, Sam Peters is a short game, but to be honest I had more fun playing this than Secret Files 3!

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Time Played: 2-5 hours

I loved this game, simply because I love playing with Nina Kalenkov. Luckily this time she had a better voice actress than with Puritas Cordis (I was so disappointed with that game because it wasn’t voiced by the same actress as Tunguska).

What I loved most was the music. Perfect for this kind of adventure game.

The puzzles were just right for me, except in a few cases where I missed some objects and thus was aimlessly looking around trying everything on everything countless times.

Playing time was 6 hours, but I really would have liked it be longer. I was surprised to get an ending after some arbitrary task; didn’t expect that and was rather disappointed. I wanted more closure of the events themselves, before the “what happened to” segment.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Just Right

The game crashed on me 12 hours in, so I had to do that last hour or so again, though this time in ten minutes max since now I already knew where to go and I fast-forwarded the dialogue. And I rushed through the ending as well since I’d been playing all day, it was way past dinner time, and I didn’t want to search through the entire island yet again to see what had changed so I cheated and looked up at least WHERE I was supposed to go, but I still saw what to do there on my own if that redeems me

And that’s exactly the difficulty with the “So Blonde” adventure game: after every little progress you make, the characters might change location, new objects might show up, so you keep revisiting every place on the island trying to find what has changed where, and how you can interact with it so you can make the next step in your progress, only to do it all over again after that. It’s kinda tedious. Good thing it’s a fun game otherwise ...

I really enjoyed the voice-actors, loved the graphics though not so much the in-game movies. The mini-games were a fun reprieve from traipsing around the island all the time and the only one I didn’t like was catching the fireflies; that mouse work to move Sunny just annoyed me because it was so easy to move her too far, or not far enough.

I didn’t like the ending either, it just stops without knowing what happens to the island, or if Sunny gets back home or not. I did some research and there are multiple or bonus endings? Well I just didn’t get one, lol!

Total game time was about 18 hours I think.

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Time Played: 10-20 hours