Recent reviews by Ahm

A fantastic detective story with high quality art, animation, and voice acting across the board. It was longer than I expected it to be, but this in combination with the high production value makes it very easy for me to recommend to others who may be concerned about the price. You will definitely get your money's worth.

Frog Detective does it again with a hard-hitting case involving extortion, pie finding, and deep moral quandaries. A must for any fans of the Amphibian Investigation series.

A Short Hike is a delightful adventure/exploration game with amazing audio and visuals.

This game's locale is designed in a way that gives the player direction and momentum without losing the meandering feel this genre requires. You can explore off the beaten path, ignore the signs pointing to your goal, but it feels like more than procrastinating due to side quest rewards and collectibles that make navigating the world easier. The location also has the added benefit that, even if you've wandered too far, you always know that "up" is probably the direction towards your ultimate goal, making it hard to ever lose your way completely.

You can blow through the game pretty quickly if you beeline to the goal, but this isn't really that sort of game. I reached the summit, but plan on going back and finding treasure locations, playing beachstickball, and collecting fish for a while to come.

Full disclosure: I was a backer for this game.

When I originally saw the KS video for this game, I knew I had to back it, but as time passed I did wonder if it would have enough content ascend past nostalgia bait.

It absolutely does.

First and foremost, I think it's important to emphasize that at its core, this is a detective game. This concept starts fairly lightly, but really ramps up to full speed as the game moves on and you start navigating through unlisted pages requiring passwords and shady applications to access. While I very much enjoyed this, the game throws up some pretty significant barriers pretty early on, some of which feel difficult to parse, especially if you start to dig too deeply down the wrong rabbit hole. The game has a hint system (search 'hint'), which I didn't always feel like was actually helping me too much, but it was certainly enough to get my gears turning.

The game's story is good, but lessened if you haven't taken the time to really analyze the dramatic goings-on of the zones. I found the climax to be extremely strong, helped by the immersion of the fake-OS, but I will admit the ending felt like it could have been more significant for the effort I put in to reach it. I didn't feel like I had much in the way of closure, but such is the internet, I suppose!

The game will be made much easier if you go out of your way to familiarize yourself with your cast of characters, namely the denizens of HypnOS's various insular "zones". The game comes with a fake desktop OS, complete with clock, but there wasn't actually a time limit I could find on any of the tasks I encountered - really take your time to learn about the people you're moderating, and you'll find the answer to a lot of problems pretty quickly. Once I reached the end of the game, I wished I had taken more time to explore the pages rather than trying to brute-force my way through - even if you suspect you can reach the solution quickly.

One of the biggest strengths of the game is its assets - the graphics feel goofy but true to form, the page layouts and template feel just so appropriate, and the music is a fantastic mix of genuinely good tracks with perfectly executed fun-poking (shout out to Chowder Man).

Hypnospace Outlaw is an excellent game for someone willing to sit down and give it the attention it deserves. Sometimes it can feel frustrating, but you'll feel like a cast member of Hackers by the end of it.

Return of the Obra Dinn in a must-play game for those who like murder mysteries and detective stories. Discussing the story is difficult to do without treading too far into spoiler territory, but needless to say it kept me in my seat to beat the game in essentially a single sitting.

The gameplay involves you walking around the Obra Dinn, going from corpse-to-corpse and reliving the scene of their death. From these scenes, you're supposed to determine who they were on the boat and how they met their end. While this sounds simple enough, frequently the answer lies in tracing this person's actions across several scenes, seeing how they dress, how they speak, who they tend to hang around, etc. You're given a list of all 60 passengers on the boat, a series of artist renditions of life on the boat, and a bunch of dead bodies.

The scenes flow from one to another excellently, and the book you use to navigate all this does its best to indicate if/when you have enough clues to guess someone's identity, which can help keep your scope of focus narrowed to a handful of major players in each individual scene. Your guesses get confirmed in sets of 3, which on one hand helps to bar too much brute forcing, while also guiding some of it (i.e. I'm really confident about the fate of person 1 and 2, let's click around and uncover person 3). If you're like me, after you've uncovered all the scenes you'll have about 75% of your guesses confirmed as correct, and then things get weird.

The game is fairly candid that some people require process of elimination to discover, and even goes the extra mile to rate the level of deduction needed to determine each individual person to further hint at who these people may be. Once you get down to your last handful of crew, it seems things can go one of two ways. One, you do as above, following the footsteps of someone and who they keep company with to determine their position on the ship, searching for them in the background of chaotic scenes, and eventually the solution will strike you. It feels extremely satisfying and is part of what makes this game so great. Two, though? You find yourself fiddling between a handful of terms to describe someone's death that all seem to amount to the same thing. Double this up with the fact that a vast majority of the characters do not have their name spoken or occupation made clear, so not only are you fiddling between causes of death but maybe a handful of names. Having beaten the game, the ultimate solutions made sense to me about 90% of the time, but the final 10% left me feeling more exasperated than satisfied.

Regardless, that track record is still very good compared to most deduction-based games I find myself playing, and I think this game is still very much worth your money. The art style is very striking, but someone people have complained about eye strain, so fiddle with the visual settings early on for maximum enjoyment!

Probably the most fun I've had with a game in a long, long time.

The FMV scenes are frankly surprisingly well acted. It veers fairly frequently into the silly, but honestly if this game tok itself 100% seriously all of the time, there would be no charm. The contradiction system is an interesting mechanic, but like all dectective games, sometimes the logic leaps can feel like quite the stretch - if you find yourself stumped, don't feel too bad about looking into a guide.

Scenes are composed well, the conversations feel organic, and the sets translate tone well. Well worth the price of entry.

This game is a charming (if simple) point and click adventure game with excellent art, animation, and voice acting to round it out. There's a murder mystery afoot, but mostly you're playing a down-on-his-luck adventurer trying to make ends meet and avoid the fate of a 9-5 in 1884 England.

The puzzles and progression are simple and very direct, to the point that it didn't really take much thought, which may bore some. By far, the main draw of this game is the character design and smooth animation styles, with a lot of fun dialogue sprinkled throughout. I would wholehearted reccomend this to any point and click fan, but with the stipulation that it's enjoyment factor comes far more from the art direction than any satisfying puzzle solving.

I recieved this game on sale for $3 and felt wholly satisfied. Looking forward to part 2.

To open: This is not a $20 game. Do not get it for $20. You will be disappointed and I wouldn't even blame you.

That out of the way, this is story-driven exploration game with you coming home after a year away in Europe to your house being totally empty, and you simply explore it to find out why through collecting notes. Some give narration from your younger sister, a punky late-teen trying to find her place in a new school without her older sister.

This game is well made overall. The house is put together in a realistic way, the voice acting is genuinely without being cheesy, and the music is pretty good (if 90's grrrl punk is your thing). I think most people would agree on these point. The main issues of contention come from 2 things: price/time, and appeal.

Price per hour of gameplay is pretty poor, unforgivably so at full price. It takes 1.5-2 hours to play - wait for an appropriate sale for that playtime if you're interested. It'll allow for a much more genuine experience.

Appeal is more complicated. This game achieves a certain atmosphere that many simply cannot or do not wish to connect with, and that's fine.

Do you like the mid-90's? Do you like punk music? Do you like stories about high school girls learning about their values and what's important to them? Do you enjoy "showing-not-telling" narrative style and piecing a story together yourself? Do you like teen romance? Do you like exploration games?

If you answered "no" to many of the above, probably give this a pass. I enjoy this game, and I have a lot of affection for the story, but it isn't so good that it'll convert someone who dislikes the concepts it's built upon. That being said, for those who are exploration game fans with an interest in the mid 90's vibe and coming-of-age stories, pick this up if you see if for a good price. It's a neat story with straightforward gameplay.

A cool, quick, psych-thriller adventure game. I got this game on sale - it's a quick one, so the $6 tag might make some flinch, but I found myself having a lot of fun with it. There's a few points worth making, though.

Calling this "3 adventure games in one" is a bit of a stretch for what you get. The game has three chapters which all depend on one another for any sort of coherence, and should be played chronologically ideally. The games are straight adventure, with not a lot of real puzzles persay aside from the typical adventure game "rub all inventory items on all things". It's pretty clearly more a story using the game format as a mode of delivery, but I think it works well overall.

Charnel House Trilogy feels more like a really good prologue than a whole story in and of itself. Everything is very trippy, symbolic, and abstract. Some people, like myself, love that sort of thing. Others don't. A free demo of the second chapter, Sepulchre, is available on Owl Cave's website (and on here) and if you're having doubts, I suggest giving it a go - it will definitely give you enough of the overall tone for you to make a call on.

You can gather most of what's going on generally speaking by reading between the lines of the game, but even then there's several narrative questions that need answering. The good news is, the devs say the sequel is coming of within 2016 (ideally), so honestly I may wait until that comes out to really give this a go.

Technically, the game is sound. Owl Cave and Wadjet Eye share several brains, so if you're a fan of Blackwell or any of the others, you'll definitely be getting vibes of that in the art and music. Voice acting is also relatively clear and of pretty good quality - lots of good actors here. Maybe don't fullscreen it, though. It makes otherwise nice sprite art look like lint on your screen.

Overall, I'd say play the demo and see if you're more enthralled or infuriated. If you like it, purchase it - but maybe wait until the sequel comes out if more solid answers are important to you in a story.

A nice, quick, kids' adventure/puzzle game.

I do emphasize the "kids'" part, because after seeing most of the negative reviews for this game, I think that's where the issue comes up. This game is honestly amazingly high quality, from the art to the animation to the soundtrack and voice acting, but it's pretty clear this is made to be played by elementary school kids. Despite being a murder mystery with lots of secrecy and cryptids at heart, this game is very nongraphic and fairly noncreepy, and the puzzles mostly seem like things I solved in the newspaper when I was younger. This will not challenge you, and it will not trouble you.

That being said, the tone of the game managed to avoid being condescending, which can be hard to find in kids' games. At no point in dialogue with characters did I feel like rolling my eyes because I was being talked down to. I genuinely enjoyed myself, and would gladly purchase more games of this series if they were to come out if only for the flawless design and voice acting. That being said, it is short. At about 3hrs for $7, I would maybe consider waiting for a bundle or sale of somekind.

If you're looking for a game to introduce your child to, I highly recommend this one! You may even enjoy it yourself.