Recent reviews by GJ

9 minutes to 100% the game. nice for a freebie

A game with lots of background development history. The dedication for quality and continuous improvement by a tiny team shows. Not only does the game feel already nicely polished and mostly bug-free in early access, it comes with lots of power to the players: you can essentially customize your whole game experience from difficulty and limitations to essentially giving shortcuts to skip gameplay elements some might find boring but others enjoy doing. And of course there's the creative mode where you have unlimited ways to play around the spaceship design, and run simulated A.I. battles with your ship designs. And one more testament to the power-to-the-players mentality is the built-in mod and Steam Workshop support.

If I had to say something negative, it would be the music variety. And there are always some parts where the game play, controlling, user interface, etc. could be improved, but those are all very functional already.

A labor of love.

A couple of years old game and still getting regular updates, improving the game mechanics, adding new maps, and even complete graphics overhauls. It has its flaws, but thanks to enough customization with the difficulty sliders one is able to enjoy it and forgive some of the more silly bugs and features.

More of the Pixel Puzzles goodness (and badness).

Basically the same engine as Pixel Puzzles Traditional Jigsaws, but has more varied puzzle outlines (akin Pixel Puzzles Ultimate) and the puzzles are all themed towards illustrations, both from Western and Japanese culture. Comes with fair amount of free puzzles with ~monthly free flash puzzle challenge.

The gameplay and game engine has the same flaws as all other Pixel Puzzles games. There may be framerate problems requiring manual fixing through editing .ini settings file (thanks community for figuring it out), and you cannot for instance combine multiple puzzle pieces into groups to move/rotate together.

A short but slow game. Abha has low resolution graphics, but I don't mind that, especially when technically it's done correctly: the game uses the monitor's native resolution and does proper pixel-scaling of the graphics to preserve the intended aesthetics. The puzzles are mostly very easy. There are some hints available but at least for me I usually figured out a future puzzle and its solution before I even knew of the hint's existence.

Sounds effects are scarce, but it fits the overall experience of the game. Music is okay.

The biggest problem of this game is the slowness. Not only does the slow pace become obvious right from the start with the walking speed, but when you get to have character interactions, you find out that you cannot skip through or in any way acknowledge the speech bubbles. What takes you a second or two to read, the game keeps on for 10 times that time before moving on to the next line in the conversation. This becomes quite a misleading experience even, when the character says something that you need to do next, but you have no idea how to do that. The correct way to do it is... wait for 20 seconds for the speech bubble to go away. Then you can finally have control back and can go do the task that would take a few seconds.

So, this artificial way of making the game timewise longer than it actually is, is the biggest negative. It took me less than 3 hours to go through the game twice. I guess it could easily be done in less than half an hour if the action speeds weren't deliberately made slow and some scenes unskippable.

While the game itself isn't very long, the parts that are in the game are very well done with sufficient detail considering the whole game is basically a works of a one-man army. During the first time playing the game through, the atmosphere really does captivate you and makes you do many (in actuality useless) things to survive forward as you don't really know what the game will actually throw at you. That's all thanks to the audio-visual cues immersing you to the intended mood and scenario.

The gameplay is mostly walking forward through semi-linear path, blocked by moderately easy puzzles, usually being of type "bring an item nearby to other location" or "break through the obstacle". As you go deeper into the game, there start to be threats that require the use of a firearm. As you have the role of a fisherman, they aren't supposedly very efficient in using guns, but you'll do fine for the most part.

The scenery is varied and the story locale ranges from a cozy cottage through caves, offices, and research labs to forest, urban region, nice sunset beach, on the sea and to even beyond the civilized lands. All these different places have equally beautiful, matching, and varying lighting. The adventure spans sunny days, stormy evenings, starry nights, and... you get the idea. There is variance in the scenery and it is all very nicely done with beautiful light effects.

Speaking of which, the music in the game really also plays an important role in matching to the scenery and bringing in the correct atmosphere, building up from a calm relaxing hobby stroll to life-threatening dangerous situations. I hope there will be soundtrack available soon.

Technically the game plays very well. I didn't face any crashes or other major issues through playing the game all the way from very early stages of Early Access to new updates after the final release.

Graphics options allow windowed and borderless full screen modes with adjustable resolutions with many advanced detail settings to tune if needed to adjust quality/performance based on the hardware capabilities of one's computer. Another great thing is that controls can be customized, supporting keyboard, mouse and gamepads, even including axis reversion options. From sound side different sound categories have unique volume level adjustments, and thankfully the game comes with support for subtitles and closed captions, a very important detail for accessibility! And these captions come in plenty of different languages thanks to the active community around the game doing volunteer translations. (disclaimer: I helped with Finnish translation of the game)

The game is by far not perfect. There are some minor bugs, most of you won't probably even notice. Yet, the game is still getting updates, striving to perfection even after the release. The shooting mechanics could be better, and gun handling should be a bit more realistic considering this is a fisherman and I doubt they should be able to reload a new clip to an assault rifle as efficiently as a trained soldier, and able to single-handedly kill many trained and armed guards who don't seem to know how to aim at all.

Objectively, there is a lot to be desired in the exploration freedom, to have bigger and more varied maps. But considering that this is essentially a very low budget game by only one main developer being also the content creator, I cannot really blame them for the lack of content. After all, the game should be ready at some point and there is only so much one can do on their spare time! Even with this amount of content, I am amazed at how much detail managed to get into the level design. It would just have been nice to have more content.


Early access done right, developer is very responsive and actively engaging the community to steer development efforts. Can't wait to see how the game turns in the end.

Good:

• Hidden Object puzzles

Bad:

• Resolution
  
  • This makes the hidden object scenes more difficult due to low fidelity. I was supposed to know that bundle of few pixels was the object you claimed it was?
    
  • Defaulting to full screen forces all open windows to be resized to letter stamp sized as the game changes desktop resolution.
• On all the sliding puzzles it's almost impossible to slide objects left-right. Usually it needs tens of tries until the game finally gets that you don't want to slide the object up or down.
  
• Jigsaw puzzle mechanics, needing to switch the tool between move/rotate/slide instead of allowing for instance right click to rotate and left click to move. Also the sliding bug also affects this puzzle type, making it almost impossible to slide the tiles horizontally, and sometimes it doesn't even want to slide them up-down until nth try.

So, while the game does do the hidden object scenes very nicely, the technical execution is poor and very buggy.

So, this "Digital Adaptation" of a novel, as they call it, is an interesting beast. The story itself, which is the main point of a visual novel, is good, as would be expected as it is based on a real novel.

That being said, since there is not much gameplay involved, the judgement of this "game" is then mostly on the technical execution side. Let's just go through my experience:

I launch the game, and dreadully I notice that it goes into full screen mode using 1920x1080 resolution, downsizing the desktop from the native 3840x2160, causing all open previously windows, Steam included, to be moved and resized. So the first thing in the main menu I am looking for graphics options to change the resolution, in vain. A bit upset of this setback, I start the story.

The game starts with a kind of a tutorial on the controls, telling to make a clockwise motion with mouse to progress on the text, and use left mouse click to progress at the end of a scene. A bit awkward way to do it. Then it explains that the game is mostly pointer-free and that if you see the mouse cursor, that's the cue that it's time to interact with it. And the first scene is to click on your Apartment to go in there.

At this point, since the wrong resolution is taking away the enjoyment already, I hit Escape in hopes of a in-game menu that might contains some settings to fix it. Instead, it brings a menu containing Events, Cards, Bookmarks, and Extras. I click through them but don't find any options to change the resolution, so in the Events screen I see one tile is unlocked, presuming that to be the start of the game, so I click on that, and choose to Play. Apparently doing that just skipped the rest of the tutorial and went directly to the first chapter of the actual story. Later I find out that completing the tutorial would yield one of the in-game awards, and there is no way to get back to the tutorial. So thanks, trying to fix a technical issue just permanently banned me from getting one unlockable on this profile. Whatever, let's continue the story.

Despite having missed the tutorial, I quickly learn the rest of the game mechanics, how to interact with objects, and how the story plays out. Not really a fan of the mouse movement to progress on text, I try to figure out alternative ways to progress and find out that simply clicking the left mouse button appears to do the same as the mouse movement, but unlike waving with the mouse, it also works for the end of the scene, for what it was for instructed in the tutorial. Still, not keen on keeping my hand on the mouse all the time for a game that's mostly about reading text, I tried pressing Enter (or Return, as they call it) and that seemed to work too!

Except, at some points I notice that if I press Enter, the game doesn't just progress to the next piece of text, but totally skips the scene. This seemed random to me, and there was even a part where using keyboard didn't progress forward but mouse click did. Too bad that the game is about the text, and this made me miss some of it! I didn't see an easy way to go back. Also, because of this random scene-skipping, I encountered a bug that after the end of an Event, skipping the final scene caused the event completion achievement not unlocking, and also the next Event tile stayed locked and black, even though the story itself progressed forward. Funnily, at the end of the game I got the achievement for completing all the events, even though one event completion achievement was still locked due to this bug!

At some point I had to Alt-Tab out of the game. On first try it worked all fine, just with the inconvenience of resolution switching back and forth, causing window sizing and scaling problems, but on the next try the game just froze and I couldn't go back in. Fortunately the progress is auto-saved constantly, so no progress was lost. At this point I went through the Steam Discussion for the game and found out that you can change the in-game screen resolution by editing Windows Registry. A bit cumbersome for such a basic setting, but at least I managed to make the game run with the native resolution now.

Also later on I found out that in the Extra menu there is a section explaining the controls, and there it says that Left and Right arrow keys are aliases for the mouse-controlled text progression, and Return is for skipping the scene. So it was somehow my fault for not finding this information first and only learning the hard way to refrain from reading the text using Enter (as it didn't always skip the whole scene...!) Also in the Controls section it told me that Backspace goes back to previous scene. Oh would that also have been handy to know at the times I mistakenly skipped something. I wonder why the keyboard controls weren't mentioned at all during the tutorial? (yes, I did then replay the tutorial with different player profile to see how that part goes through)

At least I managed to get all the Steam achievements, thanks to the ability to jump back to any scene from the Events menu, so I jumped back to the end of the event where I bug-skipped the ending, to unlock the last thing. Still I am missing some of the in-game unlockables for this profile, including the tutorial completion, which apparently is impossible to get if you happen to skip it by mistake. Normally I would go replay a game to unlock the rest of the collectibles, and in this case to read the scenes I missed because of non-explained controls, but the way the story is told is putting me off.

The actual story text is not that plentiful, to tell what's happening with the protagonist, usually a few sentences per scene, but then all the unnecessary text, such as newspaper articles that have nothing to do with the plot, can have many pages of text to be read. I would have expected the opposite, and would have loved to read more of the feelings and environment, as I presume would have been the case in the original text novel. I am only guessing that the authors of the game tried to minimize the text to the reader, and use the artwork to replace much of the environmental description.

So, since the way the story was presented was suboptimal, and due to all the technical issues that would have been basic to fix, I cannot recommend the game as it is.

Very straightforward point and click puzzler with hidden object scenes, typical Artifex Mundi published game. Most of the time the game is a bit too linear, the items you need are in the rooms that were just unlocked, and usually other areas of the asylum also get locked so you cannot get sidetracked.

The puzzles are for the most part easy, and hidden object scenes can alternatively be played through as a Mahjong game. Even in this mode there is no possibility of failing the puzzle because the game will automatically reshuffle the pieces if you manage to get to a point that there are no more pairs to be removed.

The most difficult part of the game is finding the hidden items that yield the final achievements and would usually require you to replay the game and perhaps even consult a guide to locate them as they are sometimes very difficult to spot.

The story is absurd, of "whatever" level, but I didn't really expect much more to be honest. Still, the word "typical" fits here to describe the game's contents. The story, the graphics, voice acting, are all of mediocre level, very typical for the genre.

All in all, for me, I don't think the game is worth the full asking price, but for extra puzzles for those evenings you want to click through some adventures, it's a recommendation when discounted.

A slow paced game with bad English translation. Well, the translation isn't so bad that you couldn't understand what the people are trying to convey, but they could have easily asked someone in the community to fix the subtitles to have correct spelling and grammar, just to make it look a bit better.

The game doesn't tell you much, where do you come from, where are you going, why are you on the journey. You can find pieces of notes written by people throughout the adventure, and there are possibilities of eavesdropping on some conversations to get a bit more context of the setting. Only after the end game you start to be able to put the pieces together to imagine what's the story behind the game. It took me two play throughs to figure out the relationship between the two friends the story mostly follows, mostly because on the first go I managed to get the "good ending" which plays a bit differently to the two other possible endings which actually expressed a bit better the situation.

That said, the game can be played by faithfully following the story, just walking and doing as you are told. However, in many locations it might actually be worthwile to stray from the path and go explore the nearby buildings and rooms. There are the notes I mentioned, and also many secrets including puzzles, usually yielding Steam achievements for finding and solving them.

The game has light survival mechanism including medkits, food, and batteries for your flashlight. The game doesn't really instruct how to tell if you are hurt (needing medkit) or hungry (to consume food). What I found out, which I guess is quite close to the truth, is that whenever you check the notebook (which works as the inventory), there may appear some blood stains. The more blood there is, the more hurt you are, and consuming medkits and food will reduce the visible blood. Medkits have bigger effect than food. Now I am not totally sure, but it could be that the game doesn't really differentiate between health and hunger, but your health just drops slowly over time to simulate hunger, so you need to replenish it by eating.

The amount of these resources is plentiful. What I mean by this is that there aren't many of them, but unless you get hurt a lot, usually because of not noticing a trap, the scarce medkits and food supplies are more than enough to last through the game.

The inventory also tallies one-time usable items needed for some puzzles and story progression, as well as various weapons and your trusty 35 mm film camera. The melee weapons are mostly useful for unlocking doors. The pistol is not needed at all, you may optionally shoot some bad guys right after obtaining the firearm, but in any case that scene ends up in you escaping by running, which you can do even without shooting a single bullet. The only part of the game where you need to shoot is right after getting an assault rifle and you get ambushed by a pack of wild dogs, and soon followed by some scene which is purely about wasting tons of bullets.

The easiest ways to die in this game are by triggering explosive traps which you can defuse with the knife, if spotting them before tripping, and by the wild dogs. Otherwise, the game is mostly about slowly telling a story and admiring the atmosphere these indie developers managed to create. With little risk of failure. Which is good, in my opinion.

The game lasts for maybe 3 - 4 hours to play through if you explore all the locations. Subsequent runs, when you know exactly how the game plays, you can reach the end in less time, about 2 hours. And if you want to complete all the achievements, you are expected to replay the game for the different endings.