Recent reviews by Abolish the Penny

I'd love to love Duck Detective; I love adventure games and I've played through all of the major deduction (deducktion!) adventure games on Steam. It looks great and the mechanics are well situated to make for a good game. The mechanic, which you can see in the trailer, where you inspect something and the art asset transitions from an impressionistic sketch into a detailed view as you move your magnifying glass over it is awesome. The production values are good and the full voice acting is highly appreciated (though the lead is in the orbit of "ProZD trying to do Vincent Price" and your mileage may vary as to whether that's what you're looking for). It's got a good user interface. And the case depicted in the game is actually reasonably complex and involves a fair amount of deduction (though none of it very difficult). At $9.99 for 90-120 minutes it's a little on the short side, but I appreciate that the developer is between a rock and a hard place in that having to build another entire case might drive the budget up high enough that it would alienate buyers. It gives me zero pleasure to leave a negative review on a small team's labour of love.

But the reason this is not a recommendation for me is the writing and the choice of story told with the case. Think of the puzzle and adventure games that jump to mind as the best of the best -- in Obra Dinn you investigate a ghost ship from the age of mercantile capitalism that turns up years after being missing and magically delve into the fate of its crew. In Case of the Golden Idol you investigate a curse spanning generations of a noble family against the context of Glorious Revolution era-England. God, you just get hooked on these games from the get-go. Not that everything needs to be adjacent to politics or feature the supernatural. I quite enjoy Gone Home -- a game that is literally just a young woman returning to her home and walking around and revisiting memories. Quotidian is fine, everyday is fine. I just don't think the scenario here is any good.

In Duck Detective you're a detective exploring a six room office for a bus dispatch company to solve the mystery of, like, well, I guess technically who stole someone's lunch, but even when you learn all the complexities and twists it's like... it's just this weird little thing. I think the developers are going for the juxtaposition of the serious and the absurd (there's a smuggling ring!!! lol but they're smuggling salami the detective's personal life is a mess and he's an addict... addicted to BREAD!) and it just comes off as a little twee and charming but not engaging.

Twee is where most of the writing lands, too. It's supposed to be pretty funny, and it's got a funny premise, but the "jokes" are... they have the shape of a joke but they don't make you laugh. You get load screens with "funny" facts like "Did you know there are no ducks on the moon?" and "There are over 1,000 ducks" and "You can't fold a duck more than 7 times". So the gag here is that these sort of remind you of "funny facts" but with the word duck added. More "tee hee" than "ha ha".

If this was a vertical slice to pitch to a publisher, I'd say it's a very good one. The developers have built a series of mechanical systems, they've managed to plot out a mystery that unfolds in several sections, they have a great art style, great voice acting. You can really see the potential here. And I suspect this is why the demo was so well regarded. But if I was a publisher, I think I'd ask the developers "are you sure this is the story you want to tell in the setting you want to use?".

Recently updated with full controller support (and it plays well on Steam Deck, though you might find yourself using the zoom button on the smaller screen), this is a solid though short room escape game. I took about 4 hours to do two playthroughs, but I tend to be a little faster than most at adventure games, so perhaps factor in 3 hours for a single playthrough. I think really any negative review you read below is mostly going to be people saying "3 hours for $17?!", which, okay, fair enough, but like every other game on Steam this will end up having progressively steeper sales over the coming years, so really just pick a price that's right for you.

In terms of puzzle quality and game feel and visual environments, I would place it above Safecracker and slightly below The Inheritance of Crimson Manor in terms of games where you need to explore a mansion and do room escape puzzles. I like the puzzles and interactivity better than Escape Academy (though the latter has more of a "plot" and "characters" -- I didn't much like either) and Escape Simulator (though I'd probably give an edge to Escape Simulator in terms of raw amount of content and the ability to build new levels). I can't imagine anyone is reading a review of this game if they don't already know they enjoy room escape games and are trying to figure out if this one is a good one. It is!

In terms of difficulty, the in-game hint system is pretty generous, The only puzzle I had trouble with in my first run was one that involved visually lining something up. I knew exactly what to line up with what, I just couldn't get it lined up. I don't even think it required a lot of precision, my failure entirely.

One sort of janky technical note: the game consists of 5/6/7 room escapes in a row (depending on how you count). The game saves between rooms, but not within rooms. I get the impression this is because the developer hasn't quite figured out how to serialize game object state effectively, but their defence to this is "since the puzzles are the same, you can quickly catch up if you restart a room". This is true, especially if you take notes like a true adventure game buff, but also it's not what people playing games in 2024 expect.

There are a number of language deciphering games on Steam: Sethian (in my opinion a bit of a failed proof of concept), Heaven's Vault (excellent, but more of an adventure game), Chants of Sennaar (a little too hand-holdy), Fez (mostly a puzzle platformer, but with a language component), Tunic (haven't played it yet), to say nothing of the many adventure games that encourage you to decipher a number or counting system (potentially the greatest adventure game of all time, Riven, among many others) or other knowledge based puzzle-adventures (Outer Wilds, Obra Dinn, Case of the Golden Idol). They're all great. Now it's Matthew Brown's (Hexcells, Cypher) turn to give us his version of the genre.

Epigraph differentiates itself from the others by giving you virtually no handholding. You are plunked in a void. You are given 7 artifacts -- tablets, obelisks, whatever -- written in a constructed language. You are told nothing besides the following: (1) the transliterated Roman renderings of three words that probably exist in the language; (2) the transliterated Roman renderings of 12 words in a different language that should be similar to the one you're trying to translate, plus their English translations; (3) one of your seven artifacts is a Rosetta Stone, the obverse is written in Cuneiform, and you are given a full translation of the obverse.

The game will never give you another piece of feedback. It is your responsibility to translate the language and understand how to use the artifacts. If you translate it wrong, you simply won't learn how to use the artifacts. You translate by typing in your transliterations of individual characters and your translations of whole words. The game will never tell you what you have wrong or right, you will never be tested on anything. It's a great setup and highly satisfying.

Some recommendations: solve the alphabet (well, not exactly an alphabet) first -- you can do 95% of this just from the first clue above. Then try for the number system and parts of speech. Try marking words you're unsure of with a ?. Two extremely mild general solution concepts: If you can't guess a noun even given all the possible context, it's probably a proper noun; all twelve of the words given in the notes appear in the game.

There's a little technical jank here. The notes at the beginning of the game are tough to read and too small of a font. The UI isn't perfect. It's unplayable on Steam Deck because of both font size issues and the pain in the ass of having to invoke the on-screen keyboard. The developer might patch this stuff or might not, his other games (many of which are excellent) also have a little roughness around the edges. But don't let any technical worries dissuade you from playing this gem.

Like many people looking to buy Firmament, I've been playing Cyan games since around 1993. And like all of their other games, I think there's a lot to love about Firmament. You get classic Cyan world construction, breathtaking vistas, awesome (and melancholy!) music, a sparse but interesting story, and very engaging puzzles. Reviews suggest VR performance is not great and there are a handful of somewhat serious bugs so you might wait for a patch or two (surely by mid-June, these will be resolved), but otherwise there's no reason to sleep on this game. If that's all you're looking for, then my review has done its job. The remainder of the review is more a reflection on how the game sits within Cyan's catalogue and what future lies for Cyan.

I think one of the difficult things many fans are going to have to grapple with is that the choice to design around VR/the "Adjunct" mechanic informs the entire game design downstream. The Adjunct is a wrist-mounted gauntlet that can remotely manipulate switches and objects. Every single puzzle in the game involves manipulation of objects in space, and the UI/UX for the Adjunct is definitely VR first. Unlike most previous Cyan games, the puzzles are generally not built around synthesizing knowledge from elsewhere in the world. They can all be solved in situ. You have what you have in front of you, and there's no inventory. You look for a socket (a point the Adjunct can manipulate), assess the types of interaction the Adjunct can make with the socket, and work to solve your way through. The puzzles can be challenging, but the overall space of possible solution concepts is smaller than most Cyan games. There is no language to decode, no counting system to learn. Firmament might be the first ever Cyan game that neither requires nor notably benefits from taking notes while you play. I chalk that up to both VR (where note-taking is unpleasant) and the puzzle design. Additionally, because many puzzles involve physically lining things up, there are moments that feel finnicky in terms of being slightly misaligned, or off by a pixel maybe. On the other hand, building a game around free movement, as in their previous game, Obduction, allows for larger, more open areas which inspire a real sense of spiritual awe. The single-minded focus around a mechanic reminds me a bit of Myst V, though the Adjunct is significantly better and more fun to use than the tablet system was there.

At the risk of turning this review into real navel-gazing, finishing up the game also filled me with a sense of quiet worry about the future of game-making for Cyan. The team is quite small, perhaps a dozen credited people worked on it. A slide in the credits suggests the use of AI assistance to generate a number of background assets and objects. Even so, the game has relatively few assets and there are obvious signs of scope constraint. When you have so few people, there's a real tradeoff between competing on asset polish, visual fidelity, and completing development in a reasonable time. One way of putting this is that the team made a Herculean effort to significantly out-punch their budget and they should be commended for it. Another way of putting this is that more than ever, there are signs that the team has to compromise. Of course there were cuts for time and budget made to all of Cyan's games (and everyone else's too). But in Firmament, you see the seams of those cuts just a little more. Here the most evident limitation is frequent asset reuse and almost no non-puzzle interactive objects. The worlds still feel lived in, as all Cyan worlds always have, but more than ever there's a hope that your imagination and your charity fills in some of the holes left by gaps in the budget.

I've been playing Cyan games for 30 years, and Myst and Riven both count among my favourites. I grew up taking notes and solving puzzles with my father. He's been gone for 8 years now and more than any other games, the release of both Obduction and Firmament served as sad but palpable milestones of remembrance: my life goes on without him, but I think of him when I play. And now I wonder how many more Cyan games I will get to savour until that is my fate too -- hopefully at least a few of them with my own children, so that they can serve as a bond that will last when I am gone and they too need to live on.

Solo's a cute little game but there is a fatal and known bug, as you can see on the Steam forums, where if you exit the game and reopen it, your save file will corrupt: the game will play without sound, your inventory will be reset to the beginning of the game, and you will no longer have access to the item you need to complete puzzles. There is, as best as I can tell, no solution to this -- you simply have to restart the game. I am not sure if this affects everyone who exits and reopens the game, but it looks like it's been an issue since 2021 and the developers do not appear to be in business anymore as they have not responded to threads here or attempts to contact them off Steam.

XEECEE writes with a lucidity and literacy that is shockingly uncommon in video games. I see other reviews compare the game to something called "When They Cry", which I take to be an anime video game that has a good reputation. Okay, fine, but I'd encourage anyone reading this review to come into the game with higher standards; this is a robust and well-told work that draws inspiration from Black Narcissus, The Pillars of the Earth, The Name of the Rose, Wolf Hall, Redwall, Sherlock Holmes, Bound, reality television, two thousand years of Catholic communion, a childhood sense of wonder towards the majesty of the British isles (I suspect emerging from the author's own childhood, but I digress), early 90s trip-hop, chintzy harpsicord ren faire music, and countless other sources. And it can do so while remaining accessible to its audience, many of whom haven't dipped a toe into film or literature or history, which is a triumphant balancing act.

Often when I play video games -- or frankly, read fantasy -- I'm struck with the impression that the author has failed to live a full life, that their imagination is constrained by an unwillingness to engage with the richness of the world. You need to read and to live and to seek out the world: it is the light that the prism of your imagination focuses, and without it, the results of writing are dim. XEECEE, ironically, has written a novel about a woman whose whole life is hidden away from the world in the most total isolation possible, but done so with a human and humane touch. On the most basic level, I've spent the last few years visiting ruined castles and monasteries here in Ireland, and this is perhaps the only video game I've ever played through that captures the feeling of wandering through the annals of time.

Misericorde: Volume One is just the beginning of the story of Linbarrow Abbey, which opens with the murder of resident chronicler Catherine II. I'll warn you that the mystery is not bookended with a tidy reveal of the guilty party or a surprise appearance of the victim, alive and well. Rather, it ends at a logical stopping point: an inflection in time when the members of the Abbey begin to move on with their lives, but find it is not so easy to escape the cursed cloud that hangs over their cloister. A secret ending suggests a much broader universe. And again, as the store page alludes to, this is a novel. There are no choices, no mini-games, no ammo, no health bar: you are reading a story set to images, video, and music. What to think of this genre? It just is. I don't generally "play visual novels" for all the reasons I explained above. I did "play" or "read" or "soak in" this one. It's no deeper than that for me.

The combination of deep cut history and deliberate anachronism makes the novel easy to read. Conversations enjoy a naturalistic and well paced flow that suggests editing uncommon to games. The visual novel style, as compared to paper novels, enjoys less narration and descriptive prose and quite a bit more dialogue, so it's a real credit that the game doesn't create conversational burnout. Characters are drawn in a manner that is at once ostentatiously modern (witness the discussions on reddit, Discord, and in the forums here about which is "best girl"; I suspect a deluge of fan art will follow in the years to come, and I implore the author to consider merchandise if possible) but also reflects a time-tested approach that could well have come from Joseph Conrad's study of mythic archetypes. The in-game text occasionally suggests characters be sorted by their blood humour horoscopes, but I found myself frequently grouping characters and situating them in any number of scales: in particular I think these characters emerged from a brainstorming process that made use of insights of modern (big 5) personality psychology.

I don't think I'm stepping out on a ledge to suggest the author made deliberate strides to incorporate and render neurodiversity throughout the cast of characters, but in a tasteful way that reflects the panoply of human experience rather than just the flatly uninteresting manner that neurodiversity is sometimes used in social media bio text, as though it were a soup can label or a cudgel. I won't ruin the insight I just offered by going ahead and ending with "Flora is ABC... Eustace is XYZ...", but rather leave it by saying that the circumstances through which young women find themselves joining a convent might well reflect a baseline marginality, a sense of not fitting in, a queerness (not just of sexual orientation, though it is that, but of the broader meaning -- what Durkheim called anomie), and I think it's natural to conduct a reading of the text that observes elements of personality disorder and cognitive difference throughout the cast.

I can't sing the praises of the music enough. The credits show the already pseudonymous XEECEE modestly distancing themselves from the music by using an alternate stage name. Sorry, I refuse to be fooled. XEECEE delivers a soundtrack well worth buying on its own, both tone poem and surprisingly catchy. Perhaps the moment I most loved in the game is a particular plot reveal where the track entitled "Scandal!" played. XEECEE hides little meta-commentary and insights in the titles of the tracks that accompany key moments, so be sure to check the game's text history to see a "Now Playing".

Some technical clunkiness emerges from the use of Ren'Py as a core game engine, but my sense is that the single consideration that's useful for a game developer to have when choosing an engine is "will this help me ship my game". XEECEE has accomplished so much here by getting to the finish line with flair, and so Ren'Py may well have been the right choice.

You must, must, must buy this game. If you can afford the game, buy a copy for a friend as well. If you can't, leave a comment and I'd be happy to buy a handful of copies to those who promise to read it to completion. And to XEECEE, wow!, and also, best of luck as you continue the story of Linbarrow Abbey and Misericorde in Volume Two, which I await with bated breath.

I booted up the game. Steam overlay doesn't work. My keyboard doesn't have a pause button so I can't actually view the natural language processing stuff. I got stuck on the first screen of the game because the parser did not understand basic commands. The game is clearly made for mobile because the mouse scroll wheel scrolls at about 1 pixel per second but if you grab-and-flick you can scroll through text.

It's a little baffling this was the project they chose to demonstrate this "AI Technology". Portopia is a pretty simple game (it's great though -- buy a Famicom cart or download a ROM and play it with the English translation, great game for adventure lovers). There aren't very many objects or characters in the world, there's not much state. An AGI (early 1990s) tier text parser would be fine.

Let's say we didn't know anything about machine learning and we wanted to approach this problem. We want to understand the English language to be able to interpret user input. No video game requires an understanding of any tense or mood other than imperative present. No video game needs access to adjectives or adverbs. No game needs prepositions or conjunctions. You need VERBS (what you want to do) and NOUNS (what you need to do it to). A stemmed, lemmatized, part of speech tagger is all you need. If you want to implement PRONOUN support, then you just use the part of speech tagger to identify the most recent noun and do pronoun-noun accord. This is all very 1990s technology. There is no need for fancy NLP.

If you do want to use NLP, here's what I'd do. By far the most annoying thing in text adventures is when you try to interact with the world and you don't type the exact verb or noun that the game wants. Like, say you want to open a box, but the game won't understand box, because it wants chest, or maybe it wants trunk. This is a tricky problem because the author doesn't necessarily know every synonym you might use for the noun. But this is something that can actually be solved with pretty simple machine learning. Take an English language corpus, run it through word2vec. This will assign "spatial coordinates" in a "latent space" for every word in English. This is cool because it's possible to, for instance, take an unknown word ("trunk") and assess its proximity to a known word ("chest"). You then define an arbitrary distance function. If the player is in a scene with an object, you use part of speech tagging + the latent space distance to assess the writer's intent. This could pretty easily solve the synonym problem. This is like 99% of the issues people run into with text input parsers. I just did the work for you for free. You can even get the models pre-trained! (My day job as a social scientist is using NLP to understand the semantics of text posted online)

Again, Portopia is a great game and it looks like the art they did for this remake was cool. But it's unplayable. The parser doesn't work. This has significantly worse text input processing than adventure games from the late 1980s / early 1990s. I do not think there is any reason to play this and I do not think there is any reason for Square Enix to try to pursue AI. This should never have been released. It's a real tragedy because, again, Portopia is a great game and this would have been the first English release of the game.

Sometimes when what you need to do is put a nail through a wall, just use a hammer. You don't need to invent a hydraulic powered mini-catapult. This is a solved problem. I don't blame the individual researchers at Square Enix who worked on this, but I do blame whatever business pressures existed to chase the buzz that emerged over the last 12-24 months with transformer-based LLMs. The next time some dumbass MBA does a slide deck trumpeting the AI-driven future, walk out of the meeting and move on with your life.

No one is benefitting from engaging in this kind of venture capital driven hype-chasing buzzword ♥♥♥♥.

Pleasant little "room escape" style mystery. I was able to finish my first playthrough in about a half an hour and the remaining achievements in another 30 minutes. If you like dark and stormy nights on boats and light puzzling, I think you'll find this worth your time. The plot, such as it is, is fairly thin, just a bit of a set dressing to motivate you going from room to room. I liked the fact that the game let you end early if you didn't want to rescue anyone, or try to rescue everyone for a higher score. Noticed the game here only has 22 reviews and just wanted to add my voice to say it's a good time! I actually really liked the visual style.

If you like escaping doomed ships and are looking for more, I would recommend Return of the Obra Dinn, SOS on the Super NES, and... technically, 999, the first game of the Zero Escape Series.

I played a demo of the Artful Escape at E3 2017 and thought it showed a lot of promise: a cinematic-ish platformer with beautiful backgrounds and themed around music. Very cool. It took 4 years after that event to come out, and I can confirm that it's still a cinematic-ish platformer with beautiful background and themed around music. If 3 hours of great art is your jam, then check it out.

But I have a bone to pick, and that bone extends through both the mechanics of the game and the story. Let's start with the mechanics. This is a platformer where you run and jump, and the only other button you have is to push a button to play your guitar. This is a challenging thing to do -- have a composer come in and write music for playing guitar over any point of the background music in any segment of the game. No Straight Roads did this, and I know how difficult it was for the many, many talented composers and session musicians who worked to make that happen. So, with all due respect, what the hell happened here? When you play your guitar here, it's just random noodling. Your character doesn't play riffs, it's just a sequence of unrelated chords and notes, like a random number generator is spitting out bites of music. Very strange. Then you get to the end-of-level "boss" segments, which play out like the classic duelling banjos via a Simon Says mechanics. Again, great idea. But... the music you play is also just noodling. There's nothing resembling the structure of an actual song. Even the game's very ending, where you finally take the stage in the "real world" and blow the room away... it's just a 13 year old metal head's idea of music: rapid arpeggios all over the guitar. Playing notes fast is technically interesting, but it's not musically interesting. All the great players of this style know how to build together chord and note progressions that tell a sonic and emotional story.

Which brings me to the story. You play as Francis Vendetti, nephew of a famous Bob Dylan-esque folk singer. You have to take the stage, but you feel like a fraud. Your heart is not in folk music, you instead want to play 70s inflected space themed progressive rock. This, again, is something a teenager would think. Genres of music are not in opposition to each other, they aren't things you need to rank. It is possible to play at the intersection of genres. Nirvana played folk music even though they were a grunge band. No guitarist, no matter what their primary genre, would ever deny Django Reinhardt's virtuosity. I have never met a musician that doesn't listen to, play, and write music broadly. The game takes visual inspiration for the folk artist from Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan played folk, but not just folk. Same with Neil Young or Merle Haggard. Country, roots, rock and roll. They played broadly. Eric Clapton is probably the world's most famous rock blues guitarist, and he put out an MTV Unplugged album as well. Folk is barely even a genre, it's a tradition. The idea that Taylor Swift, John Prine, Paul Simon, and Willie Nelson are playing the same genre might be a marketing convenience, but it's not in any sense true. The entire juxtaposition of folk and rock in this game makes absolutely no sense and there's no way that the character knows enough about music to consider playing professionally but is so ignorant that he is in his head about this. Made worse, this is a world that imagines folk as a commercially successful and vibrant route to fame and electronic rock as obscure and underground? Bizarre.

What is this game saying about identity? Throw off the shackles of expectation and be who you really are. Nice moral, so why does it have you do that by inventing a stage persona, having a makeover (I sensibly made my character look like Buddy Holly), and playing derivative commercial pap. Rick Wakeman broke new ground, The Flaming Lips broke new ground, the character in this game is following in footsteps whether he's playing folk or rock or anything else. It feels like the artists who made this game remember thinking Kiss or David Bowie qua Ziggy Stardust were cool, that having a stage character that's a separate person from who you are is the hallmark of musical maturity. But these were inventions of marketing as much as they were true and authentic perspectives (by the way, Bowie wandered from genre to genre too, no one would have pigeonholed him as a glam rocker).

A smarter game would problematize this by introducing these ideas and then showing them to be false. But this game seems to think they aren't false. It troubles me that this is a game about music: the act of making it, discovering your voice as a performer and songwriter, how music impacts audiences and the world, and neither the mechanics nor the writing reveal any understanding of music in the slightest. How about this: stop paying celebrity voice actors (thank god they got Lena Headey for 3 lines and Carl Weathers for 15) and spend the money on hiring actual musicians?

Every review on this page is going to tell you this is an excellent logic-deduction adventure game, and every review on this page is going to tell you that it's a tight 5 hours, and every review on this page is going to compare the game to Obra Dinn. This is probably the most enthusiastic adventure game recommendation I'd give since Outer Wilds or Obra Dinn.

But in an effort to say something new, I'll just note that I am by profession a political scientist and this was one of the most surprisingly political science literate games I've ever played. The game puts a lot of thought into little details about how an aristocratic, post-Glorious Revolution "England" looked. Little details about speeches in parliament are great. A mid-game level discusses the politics of coalition formation in Westminster parliamentary systems in a surprisingly effective way. A late-game level shows a society that has been gripped by anocracy and is rapidly dismantling institutional and democratic safeguards. There's even a very early case where a character has a copy of Plato's Republic on the shelf, in one of the few overt nods to political theory I've ever seen in a game.

I am really, genuinely surprised to run into this and I'm stuck wondering if one of the team members took a degree in a related field. These are all little background details that really have nothing to do with whether or not you'll enjoy the game, and you don't need to know any of what I'm talking about, or even notice it, to recognize it's a great game... but, like, if you trained in biochemistry and a video game had a background discussion of how aspirin is an irreversible COX-1 inhibitor, even if that was just a minor detail, you'd still be super excited to see that kind of literacy even if it had nothing to do with anything, and that's sort of how I feel here.