Recent reviews by LinustheBold

This is the least of the three games in the Hero of the Kingdom main saga. It keeps the style and setting of the other two games but adds a variety of mechanics, including crafting (which is a little bland, but interesting) and respawning monsters and resources (which I did not like at all, though it pretty much needed to happen to support the crafting). It never caught my affections like the other two games, and ultimately feels like a general fantasy-lite title.

There are some real irritants, like silver weapons breaking after one or two uses. I reckon this was done in part because smithing is introduced late in the game but the skill still needs to be maxed to get the associated achievements; having silver weapons break constantly keeps a player crafting them, and boosting that skill level. If you ask me, that's just poor busywork design. Because creatures respawn, zones don't feel completed and there's an awful lot of critter-killing during travel. Same creatures, over and over and over again. It's not actually necessary to clear them again, but it feels wrong to leave them all in place - after all, we are the Hero of the Kingdom.

It's all pleasant enough, but the other two are the essential HotK games.

Maybe there's more of a game here than what I saw, but if there is, I missed it. This is in essence a slide show, perhaps interlinked in some clever ways, but it's all obscure and baffling. Ultimately I messed around with it a bit, and then gave up. The controls are puzzling, the images are suggestive, and the whole is like looking at a bunch of pictures that may or may not mean something to someone else.

So here's the thing. I know this is a popular game, and in fact it's fine - it does what it's supposed to do, it's relatively entertaining, it's reliable. But I didn't really enjoy myself much playing. When I first discovered Artifex Mundi games I was delighted to find someone out there taking real time and putting real effort into a nutty little genre of casual gaming. Actual stories! Weird monsters! Peculiarly violent deaths! Hidden Objects! Fun!

At this point, Artifex Mundi puts out two kinds of HOGs: flagship games and under-baked casual games. I'm not really enjoying the casual ones. The formula is threadbare, and if the games aren't exactly lazy in design and execution, they lack the quality that made me such a fan in the first place.

In Dark Arcana we'll explore nefarious supernatural events at a Carnival, flitting back and forth between our home plane and the darker realms of magical arts. Lurch forward and hit a locked door or barred portal or broken bridge or malfunctioning magical toaster, and in the surrounding scenes recover the missing key or parts, and then lurch forward again. Lather, rinse, repeat. (I'm kidding about the toaster, but if there WERE a magical toaster, the game would probably be more fun.) This formula is rigid, repetitive, bland. The Hidden Object scenes are cleanly done and largely uninspired.

Success succeeds, though, and clearly this is the game Artifex Mundi wanted to make. I just miss the denser and more intricate models. If you want to 100% the achievements here, you'll need to play twice: there's one set of achievements for completing the Hidden Object scenes, and another for completing the card games that you can play if you don't want to do the Hidden Object scenes. So you can't do both in a single play.

Demon Hunter 3: Revelation is a bunch of fun. I liked the first one well enough for its good-natured embrace of all things nutty and random - dinosaurs? sure! toss 'em on in! - and wasn't crazy about the second one, which never really caught my interest.

This third one in the series uses the plot as a framework for general Hidden-Object funning, with high production values and a flimsy but sufficient story to keep things moving. It's not my favorite Artifex Mundi title. But it's easy and splashy, ideal for casual but not face-palming play. (Some titles treat us like children - perhaps they are meant for children. But if they are, they should say so on the box. This one treats us like proper players.)

Ludicrous story, check. High body count, check. Curiously affectless voice acting, check. Terrible bonus chapter, check. There are three flavors of collectibles, 15 of each, at least one of which is seriously devilishly hidden. Don't be like me, do the tutorial, even if you've played way more HOGs than you can really excuse. Why? Because it will point out to you the indicator that lets you know if you've found all the collectibles on each screen, so you don't have to dip back in after you finish to clean up those last missing three objects, grrrr.

The graphics are good, the sound is spiffy, most of the scenes are nice and intricate. There's a really annoying bird sound that comes up often (it works, it just bugged me is all - not really complaining). It's a pleasant solid way to while away a few downtime hours.

If you're on The Room III, presumably you've visited The Room and The Room II. So you know pretty much what to expect. And you'll get it! Puzzling, elusive, finely-crafted, and weird. These are wonderful games, for those of the right bent. If you haven't begun at the beginning, I recommend that you do - with the first of the games. All three are a pleasure, and they lead pretty naturally one to the next.

A tepid thumb up or a tepid thumb down? Down, in this case. There's nothing terribly wrong with this simple Hidden Object Game, but there's not much that's especially right about it either. It's bland, which is not where I like to go with my monster games. It's fine to play. But you could be playing a better one.

This Hidden-Object Game has very few hidden object puzzles. Let's start with that. There are lots of things to do in the few HOG scenes - piece together the puzzle of a face before you can click the face, that sort of thing - but it's all very simple stuff, and the objects collected are largely random. The plot is more concerned with ludicrous keys in bizarre shapes than solid play in a sensible world. Inventory use is arbitrary: at one point I had a crowbar, a screwdriver, a fire extinguisher, and several other shop tools, but I couldn't get an amulet/key in a fireplace behind a grate. That's just silly. Another time I couldn't open a glass-fronted cabinet until I found the fitting handle, even though the glass panels appeared to be broken and it wasn't locked anyway.

But the mini-games work, the pictures are pretty, and the devs have fixed the previous achievement bugs, so you no longer have to play the whole game at a single sitting without stopping. At least, it worked for me. Good on them for not leaving a lamed game out there for public consumption. Take the above and freight it down with repetitive back-and-forth play, arbitrary design, and a pale story. It's an opportunity missed, I think. It's very vanilla, but not anything that will leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Cautiously, I choose the up-thumb here, wishing once again for a Steam neutral. We Went Back is a really good-looking game with limited controls and a smart, meticulous attention to detailing in the environment. Halfway through my first trip around the deserted moon base where I stepped out of my stasis pod I was already trying to open all the storage bins, read all the lab notes, push all the buttons on the intriguing control panels, figure out how everything worked. Basically, I immediately felt like I was playing Gone Home in space, and I was delighted.

This is not that game, at least not yet. And that's fair, because this is a free half-hour demo, a proof of concept more than anything else. There's not actually a lot to do. The detailed environments are largely static, and some of the wonderful details may change in clever ways as we work our way around the hoop a couple of times, but there's no interacting with most of the good stuff. We're after a handful of objects we can work with, each of which will yield a clue to the password that will open the locked security door. So, a few clues, a suggestive environment, a great vibe: fair enough. Free, proof of concept, it's plenty fair.

The problem is that a lot of it doesn't work, which is frustrating when we can only do a very few things to start with. I have 2.6 hours in on this 30-45 minute game. Now, I'm not the swiftest nor the cleverest gamer, and I'm used to my times running long - I like to explore and mostly I'm in no hurry. Here, though, I had to run the game several times before I could collect all of the first clues.

If you miss a critical clue in a critical area, say something in the lab or the hydroponics section, that section will appear again in front of you to give you another crack at it. In my case, a couple of times, I picked up the clue and did the proper thing with it the first time, but then ran through endless looping identical sections, some of which showed more and more damage the further I went. The object appeared in most of these, but since I had already done The Thing I couldn't interact with it again, until eventually the monster showed up to kill me and respawn me in the start area.

Another time a Clue Object appeared in a place it shouldn't have been, in one of those repeated areas described above, but it wasn't in the right environment. I did The Thing with it too, but it didn't register successfully, and later it wouldn't appear in the right place. Monster, death, respawn. When it appeared in the right place after the respawn, I couldn't interact with it at all, and the clue it creates never appeared in the puzzle-solving place, so. Restart.

Sometimes the lab rat appeared in a couple of different forms, sometimes it just vanished, never to return. There's a short cut-scene that can run before the final (abrupt, letdowny) jump to the end credits, but I couldn't trigger it despite multiple tries, so I've only seen it on YouTube. Something I missed? I have no idea. Environment changes appeared out of sequence at times, and I wasn't sure whether they were triggered by my actions or just running at random at predetermined intervals. Sometimes I could reverse direction through that locked door behind me, sometimes I couldn't.

Not sorry I put in the hours, but be aware that this is a rough product. I'd like to see the devs work out the kinks and make the game this seems to promise it could be - one in which I can open all the closets and read all the lab notes and press all the buttons, and explore the story of the crew in their station. I hope I get to play it.

Short, indie, earnest, mysterious: in some ways I wish “A Wolf in Autumn” were a little more open and a little less coy, but what we’re given is enough, and it’s the nature of some beasts to shy from light. This Unity 5 game by David Szymanski is about freedom, family, and damage. It’s a short story, in essence, with a game built up around it.

We start locked in a disorienting shed, in turn fenced in a forest. There are a couple of ways to get out of the shed – leave it to me to find a complicated one right away – and once we’re out there’s a buzzing blinking machine waiting to give us a message from Mom. Mom’s not happy that we’re out, and wants us back in the shed. This is a theme. Mom is kind of one-note on this subject.

Eventually we’ll walk down some dark corridors and end up in dark places, literally and figuratively. What you’ll make of what you discover along the way is your own. But there’s stuff amiss. Our body isn’t quite right, and there are wolves about. Or are there?

A swift player will make it to the end of this story the first time in 30 or 40 minutes. Some will return for a second visit, to fill out a few details. I’d recommend that. This is a game that will not appeal to everyone – what does? – but if you saw the store description and made it down to the reviews, it may be your kind of thing.

Plasticity is a nice little game, and I mean all those words: it's nice, and it's a little game. It's got a basic 20-40 minutes of minimalist play for your FREE dollars, shekels, or plasmids, and you can play it again with some different decisions to find better or worse endings. Your choices won't make changes in the play of the main game - you won't unlock secret areas, or anything - but the final sequence can have some cosmetic differences.

The controls are basic and yet confusing. You won't need them enough for them to really be bothersome, but they are imprecise enough that occasionally you won't know if something isn't doable or if you aren't doing it properly. Especially on the boat. The sound is pretty, the morals are woke, and the goals are vague enough that I at least muddled through for a while before I realized there was a mechanic I wasn't using, which meant that my ending was not optimal.

Pleasant and earnest. I gather Plasticity is a university class project, and for that it's great. For a brief free proof-of-concept demo it's a good start. It's fun. It's nice. I recommend it.

Greed: The Mad Scientist gets a tepid recommendation - it's a short and fairly simple Hidden Object Game in the usual mold, and apparently it's a re-release of an older game. It's a bit of a kludge in some ways, and it relies way too much on what another Steam reviewer calls "moon logic," and I leaned heavily on the Hint function because really, how on earth are we supposed to think of some of this stuff. But somehow it's brisk and attractive enough to keep things pleasant.

There are two kinds of collectible objects, and I have no idea if they work - there doesn't seem to be any function that let me view what I had collected, or track their numbers against the totals. My game told me there would be 50 radioactive objects (they are crunchy acid green, and thereby hard to miss) and I had nowhere near that number when the game ended; checking around I found a YouTube video that shows a version where the number of radioactive objects is 14. I may have had 14, but I don't know. Like I say, it's a bit of a kludge.

Still and all, it tells a preposterous story and mixes pleasant puzzles with occasional absurd fiddly ones, and that's what makes the world go round. Or something.