Recent reviews by lancelot

Creatures of Ava is a chill and relaxing action-adventure game, or it would have been if it weren't for some poor design decisions and bugs.

The game looks great, and the writing is very good too, CoA is almost worth playing just for the story and characters. Since it's a casual action-adventure, there just have to be goofy exchanges with a cast of goofy characters :), and CoA does that trope really well.

Unfortunately we can't do much with the creatures, and there's not much to do in the open world in general. We can control the creatures only inside a small area, and mostly we just use a creature to open a passage. It's disappointing and rather inconvenient that we don't get any transportation means.

The "combat" isn't very enjoyable. The movement and the camera behavior during fights are rather awkward, especially since it's necessary to keep aiming all the time. The animations for the creatures aren't smooth at all, so it's hard to follow the creatures' movements.

There are only two buttons for spells, so I have to constantly juggle the assigned spells. Aiming is inconsistent, I never know whether or not my spell will connect with the target.

I think some of the design decisions in CoA are very wrong for a casual action-adventure: a limited inventory size and, at the same time, too many different kinds of potions and flowers; environmental hazards everywhere, with Vic taking damage and getting status ailments from everything; attacks which look like they should be avoidable by jumping or standing on a platform but aren't.

All that is made worse by the bugs (or some strange oversights). In addition to the inventory size being quite small, the inventory gets automatically rearranged all the time, ruining my manually created layout. The creatures not just move slowly and tend to get lost when they should be following Vic and to scatter immediately if Vic gets into a fight, they also constantly get stuck on the environment. The game doesn't autosave after actions such as unlocking skills, so I have to redo quite a lot of things if I get killed.

I almost gave up playing at some point because of a number of small but frustrating things. I'm glad I didn't, because I wouldn't have seen the T.A. otherwise, but still, the game could have been so much more fun.

One thing that needs to be mentioned right away is that The Abandoned Planet doesn't wrap up the stories of the astronaut and certain someone else in a satisfactory way. You don't need to play Dexter Stardust before playing TAP, but, same as Dexter, TAP is more like a chapter or an episode than a standalone game. All the plot threads will be concluded only in the fifth game (the third game is currently scheduled for 2025).

Putting that aside, I think TAP is one of the best adventure games to come out this year. It's closer to a puzzle adventure game than to a classical adventure: it has a first-person view, almost no NPCs and lots of codes to decipher and mechanisms to operate. But there are many inventory-based puzzles as well, and most of the mechanisms, with a couple of weird exceptions, are intuitive and fun to operate. Besides, the smooth gameplay, nice animations and lots of unexpected interactions make the world feel dynamic and engaging.

And the game is really charming. I'd compare it to a B movie which, while not having the highest production values, can be more engaging, imaginative and genuine than many blockbusters.

44 The Jail is an interesting narrative-driven adventure game with its pros and cons. It has inventory items and dialog trees but essentially no puzzles, at least until the last chapter. Mostly we just need to figure out where to go next or which NPC to talk to. We do a bit of exploration, participate in some simple activities and engage in dialogs with NPCs, where we can make some small changes to how the story unfolds or select a backstory we like for a character. Which I think works great because this kind of simple gameplay can be very immersive, giving us the feeling of participation in the story.

The game has a very small number of locations, and the location design is quite simple, but the graphics, animations and lighting effects are pretty good for a pixel art game. Large detailed sprites give more personality to the characters.

A game of this kind can be rushed through in a very short time, but, for a normal playthrough, the 2 hours of playtime mentioned on the store page is certainly an underestimate.

There are some instances where the event-driven gameplay could have been implemented a little better so as to give the player an indication of what the next objective is or to make it clearer whether or not there are some optional objectives left.

The last chapter suddenly introduces some very contrived puzzles, very unnecessary pop culture references and in-jokes and quite a few objects which I wasn't able to do anything with. At the same time, I was carrying too many items which turned out to have no use. It seems that too much stuff was made optional, with many easy-to-miss interactions. So it's possible that I missed some important connections, but I found most of the story implausible and the motivations for most of the characters' actions unconvincing.

The English translation is not very good. Other than that, there are only some minor technical issues, such as a jittery animation if an NPC is following us and the screen starts scrolling, a hotspot without a tooltip or a black screen after the credits.

There is no way to turn off auto-advance mode for text.

Bent Oak Island is a nice and simple adventure game. The gameplay is mainly based on inventory puzzles. There are many dialogs with NPCs but no dialog puzzles. Thankfully, there are no logic puzzles or alternate interface puzzles either. The game has a pretty decent length, especially considering that there are no animations for walking or using items, so no playtime is spent on that.

It's fun to watch the story unfold, to follow the interactions of the characters and to learn more about the twins and their family. Although I would say that the story gets a bit incoherent at times, and I'm not sure I liked the time travel part and the ending (any of the endings).

Like so many other indie titles, the game is rather unpolished. There are quite a few issues with the texts, such as dialog lines attributed to the wrong character, typos and other small mistakes and, in one case, using two different names for the same NPC. I've also encountered a minor glitch when reloading a savegame, a minor glitch with hotspot tooltips, missing NPC icons in dialogs, a higher-resolution asset that looked out of place and some things that I think make sense to the developer and no one else.

Doing things not in the expected order can often get confusing because the game doesn't have all the necessary dependency checks, so we suddenly find the characters talking about something that we're not supposed to know yet. The game is not challenging at all, and the Look action does provide hints, but if Use object or Use item doesn't work, there's never any indication of whether or not we're on the right track, we just get one standard response or no response at all.

Most of the puzzles require trading items for other items. It even becomes a running joke that the items we get in return are completely random. Also there are some NPCs and some objects which look like they should be relevant but which are not involved in the story and not used for anything.

The native resolution of the game is 160x90 (the resolution of the old EGA/VGA games is 320x200). And despite that, there are a couple of places where it's easy to miss a hotspot. There is no hotspot highlighting.

Text always advances automatically, there is no way to make the dialogs pause and wait for a mouse click.

Deep Beyond is a very enjoyable walking sim which has some very simple puzzles and lets us do some climbing, diving and toying with simple mechanisms (it's not an action-adventure, we're just navigating with the arrow keys and clicking on hotspots).

As a side note, I'm not sure why developers feel compelled to advertise their games as offering "challenging puzzles". Walking sims have their audience, while that kind of advertisement will just disappoint people if they go into the game expecting a higher level of difficulty and also will possibly drive away people who don't play hardcore adventure games.

The various locations look great (the water in particular looks surprisingly good) and are very well-designed. Some minor things could be improved, such as the picture on TV when Lilly watches a videotape: there should be some video artefacts, the picture shouldn't look exactly like the rest of the surroundings.

The story is mostly fine, but the resolution is indeed very abrupt and unconvincing and the choices that we're given at the end are rather strange.

I can't stop saying "F*** this thing in particular" while pushing things off ledges.

If you're looking for an adventure game with lots of exploration, an elaborate storyline and fleshed out characters, Champy isn't that game. Each character has only a couple of lines of dialog, mostly just to tell us what to do next. And the voice acting is as quirky as the rest of the game :).

Since the game has very few locations with very few hotspots, sometimes what needs to be done is obvious long in advance. Nonetheless, the game still manages to make the tasks quite fun. Also, the actions often have unexpected outcomes.

I think the graphics are very nice, it's fun to notice some subtle bizarre details. One thing I didn't quite like about the animations is that when using an item, it just instantly appears in a new place, I wish there were smoother and more detailed animation sequences for that. Also I think the game should have a simple custom cursor instead of using the system cursor.

There are a couple of minor issues (such as Zara misspelled as Zarah in one instance), but all the game logic bugs seem to be fixed now.

EDIT: I'm changing my vote to Not Recommended, because the English version doesn't have 64 puzzles, contrary to what was advertised on the store page. The Chinese version has 8 groups of 8 puzzles plus one group with 6 puzzles, but the English version has 6 groups of 8 puzzles. The text on the English store page has been corrected, but a screenshot still shows pictures from stories which are absent from the English version (with captions which don't match the pictures).

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The store page should say "situation puzzles" in all caps and flashing colors and with lots of exclamation marks. I think that term is more widely known than "albatross soup", and the first few screenshots don't make it immediately obvious what the gameplay is like. This isn't an investigation-style game where you have to uncover clues by observing and interacting with the environments. It's a collection of lateral-thinking puzzles with the classical rules of asking questions that can be answered only with yes/no/irrelevant, with minor variations allowed in some special cases.

There is a rather big catch though. The game is playable offline, BUT only certain predetermined questions work in offline mode. I wish the game had fully functional offline mode, I doesn't exist did something similar without requiring an Internet connection (irrespective of how good or bad that game is), so I think TH could do it as well. Also, since the game asks for feedback on AI answers, there should be a clarification about what data is being collected, currently there is no mention of that anywhere.

If you get stuck, there are quite a few other ways to get to the answers: noticing some elements that get gradually revealed in the picture, examining the surrounding text, choosing a predetermined question that can pop up automatically when you type in relevant words, guessing words by just typing them in, guessing words by their length or revealed letters, uncovering words by playing Wordle, requesting hints (you can uncover a word or see one of those predetermined questions or a part of the picture).

In fact, sometimes the game is too generous with what gets revealed automatically and which words it considers to be synonyms. I think a hardcore mode where yes/no/irrelevant is the only feedback would be a nice addition to the game. Currently it's not quite possible to play the game exactly like that.

The claim that the game contains nothing revolting or unpleasant is arguable. There are a couple of puzzles that I would say cross the line between grimly amusing and grimly repulsive.

In the TH version of Wordle, if you enter "ever" and the correct word is "evil", the second "e" is highlighted as being present in the word. I think that's not how it should work. Also, the input doesn't have to be an actual word, it can be a random combination of letters, which also seems questionable.

The filtering rules need to be improved. The game doesn't accept questions that contain the words "who", "spot" or "racoon" because it drops a part of the word and declares that the resulting word is inappropriate.

The UI should definitely be improved as well. It's not possible to scroll the text using the up/down arrow keys or PgUp/PgDn, scrolling with the mouse wheel is very slow, and the vertical scrollbar is just broken, sometimes it doesn't react or shifts the text in the wrong direction. Sometimes it's not possible to just start typing, you have to click on the input field first. The triangle buttons that switch between pages in the case record appear broken at first because you have to click on the very tip of the triangle, clicking anywhere else on it does nothing.

There are some silly slip-ups such as "the girl in a white dress" wearing a red dress in the picture.

The "Ask when starting game" setting to choose between English and Chinese doesn't work if you start the game via the desktop shortcut, it just launches the Chinese version.

The English translation leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn't become incomprehensible, but things like "The woman was stroke to death" come close to ruining the experience.

A nice little game which is somewhere in between a traditional adventure and an investigation-style game. There are no dedicated investigation mechanics such as deduction boards, but collecting evidence and questioning witnesses and suspects are a large part of the game. At the same time, there are many inventory-based puzzles, with some unavoidable amount of moon logic.

There are some situations where it's not clear whether or not we still need to pursue a certain line of action/questioning. There may be some piece of evidence which surely seems important, or a character we talk to says, "No, I haven't told her that, but I told someone else", or there is an elaborate dialog tree which gives the impression that it definitely must lead to something, there are literally pop-up icons with exclamation marks accompanying some of the replies, and then all that has no tangible outcome. It's fine to have optional content and red herrings, but the game doesn't make it clear at all when we need to move on.

The game doesn't provide any hints if the player gets stuck either, but, overall, the game is quite easy.

The English translation was improved by a recent patch, but it's still far from ideal. As an example, a story about a family accidentally catching a burglar goes like this: "The owners were telling jokes and heard some laughter from the basement. He was the thief". There are many small annoyances like that. And there are some jokes based on puns which work only in Spanish and which apparently no one has even tried to translate properly.

Unfortunately, unlike Mutazione, Saltsea Chronicles is essentially a visual novel. A good walking simulator -- and Mutazione might be one of the best ever -- needs to have some exploration, some simple activities for the player and some stuff happening around the player. SC has almost none of that, we just move from one static dialog window to another.

If you don't mind visual novels, SC is a very good one. The writers keep their absurd agenda of SC being, in their words, "anti-capitalist" (and, I would add, anti-science) in the subtext and just let the players enjoy the dreamy story.

There are some beautiful pieces of lore, some interesting plot points (and some questionable ones, like dropping people off high buildings), but what is supposed to be the climax isn't very convincing, we're just told that doing X wouldn't be a good thing, it would be a very very bad thing. Also, the whole game ends on a "To be continued, maybe" (I'm paraphrasing). I'm not a big fan of that.

Whether or not inviting people to leave reviews for SC before finishing the game is related to the ending, I think it's a rather questionable move, I wouldn't consider such reviews very reliable.

I have mixed feelings about the game's art, the backgrounds can be very beautiful and evocative, but why does every single character look like a clown?

There's one rather annoying issue where most of the time one click at the end of a dialog does nothing, I have to click again to close the window, but several times a single click closed the window before the last text line was fully displayed. Besides, it's a bit too easy to accidentally click on one of the dialog choices. It's a visual novel, please get your dialog UI right. Also, I thought at first that the game didn't have mouse support, because I have to click a mouse button first to be able to move the mouse cursor.