Recent reviews by QerterD

It's free, it's fun, and it's original. Nice experience for an evening!

A nice game!

What it contains:

• A box that's not only giving you puzzles, but conveying a particular story in a visual way
  
• A lot of complex and witty object interactions. In order to find them you have to really think out-of-the-box and apply your brain muscles.
  
• Many cute objects and tiny puzzles.

The first play-through is quite short. I've played the game only once and finished it in <2 hrs with no hints, but I'm not going to refund it, for I enjoyed it immensely.

Quite a poor design: I figured literally neither any objective nor an interaction rule. For example:
* How was I supposed to promote cultists?
* How to promote a cult beliefs?
* How to convert good memories into compassion?
* Which cards fit which purpose?
* What do all the card features mean? How to use them? What is the purpose of them if I can just fit something in and it works?

I usually forget how I obtained a particular card in a few minutes, and unfortunately the game doesn't want to help you with that by showing the output of an action or keeping track of actions, so probably you have to write it down somehow or just keep forgetting it, both of which is frustrating.

There were a lot of those questions regarding the game mechanics that when unanswered, make the game harder to play, because you always have to guess. Obviously, the game doesn't answer many.

I've spent a bit more than 2 hours to understand that the game would not answer these questions in any way, so you just have to figure it by trial-and-error. Sad that I couldn't even refund it now.

Overall, wouldn't recommend buying. If you're looking for a puzzle game with neat mechanics, try Inscryption. I don't really know any real-time strategy puzzle games, but this one proved to be not as satisfying as it might look.

Vlad the Impaler II is literally impossible to win. Tried to win him over, like, 50 times, after that tried several chess engines to help me with the moves, then removed the game.

Why is it so hard? Well, because AI has an ability to convert any piece in 2-tile radius from the king into its own. So when AI decides just to put a king closer to the center, and you have few long-range chess pieces, you're probably done, for you can't check him with knights and pawns (if you check by them, they get converted), and it's quite a challenge to do it with rooks too. Trading also becomes impossible when a piece is close to the opponent's king: you take the enemy's piece, he converts yours into his, as if you have just lost it straight away!

Some other levels also require a LOT of luck, just as much as hell. For example:

• A level with poisoned pieces (you have to move a piece so it doesn't die). Those pieces are king and queen - the queen is obviously quite valuable and you can't play without a king! So you have to waste moves...
  
• A 'capture-the-kingless-queen' level. There is no king in this game. A king is replaced by a bishop (wasn't that enough, huh!), and the goal is to capture the queen! The AI has to be dumb enough to get the queen in a tight space where it would have little moves left. In the endgame the enemy's king-queen can check your king, but not vice versa.
  
• A level with "elephant bones". Well, that's a huge guess game, because you have to walk a king through a board full of holes to the opposing side. You have only 6 king pieces, and each piece hightlights a 3x3 square when you make a mistake. Obviously, you just can't cover the whole 6 rows (2 to 7) with traps, so you have to guess, and usually uoy would guess a lot.

Dark chess levels are cool, by the way, but there are too little of them in the Campaign.

The puzzles give a feeling of a set-up. In no game would such a position occur that my opponent has 3 queens and I still could checkmate him somehow, really! Or when each player has 5 pieces each, but my king can still castle. You usually feel just like wuut when you see the solution...

All in all, I could say that the game design was quite poor, and that's my opinion of the Normal difficulty! I wonder how hell-like this game is on Hard!

P.S. Also, there are some bugs in the game. For instance, if you make a move too quickly, the opponent just freezes and you have to restart both the game and the level. I was really disappointed at the moment the game did it when I was just about to win one of the harder levels.

Wouldn't recommend buying until the devs fix most of the issues. The campaign needs to be reworked too, but even nerfing some of the AI's cheating abilities would be a blessing.

I have some really controversial feelings after playing this game for a while. It has a lot of things: beautiful landscapes, nice story, smart puzzles.

However, I can't get out of the feeling of frustration. I felt it all the time while playing Obduction! Why does the initial world look (and feel) so large and difficult to grasp? Why is there no embedded level map so I can figure out where I am and where I should go? And why is everything so frustratingly slow?

For instance, why is the character moving so slow? There are no enemies, it is a point-and-click game, so why should I spend so much time to just walk between locations? This freaky lvl1 one cart moves in such a slow pace that it feels like a century to get from one place to another! And all these animations-- Why is it necessary for us to watch for, like, 3-5 long seconds how a protagonist disembarks or embarks this cart? That really spoils the fun.

But probably the worst thing is that the 'space' button is bound to make a screenshot. WTF, developers? I'm used to jump a lot, and if you disable this ability (and I perfectly understand why you have to do it), just don't use 'space' for anything else! What is embarrassing is that I can't even change it in settings.

Overall, the game looks nice, but these small thingies spoil most of the fun for me, unfortunately.

Although this game is really captivating at first, you get tired as **** after solving 100+ similar puzzles. Some of them are really smart tho.

The most surprising twist about the 5th card lane really turned my head upside down.

Overall, a great game. Love playing with Leshy.

A good but short real-time strategy. Looks much like Galcon2, but is more complex than just having enough forces to capture another planet.

Just like this if you know the story.

Mogwai – Travel Is Dangerous

Who might know of this?
The notes we left
The final thoughts
And we knew they'd get ours out

*Sink, sink*
*Drowned* by our country
Old machine
Is *lost* and forgotten
Never surface again

The air runs out
The captain's first
So we take to memories
And layers of clothes

Up there the family weeps
Outside hammers
Noises sound like the end
And we will never see them

Sink, sink
Drowned by our country
Great machine
Is crushed, old and rotten
Never surface again...

Oh gosh, this game becomes more and more awesome every time I open it!
Just 10/10.