Edgar Allan Poe's Interactive Horror: 1995 Edition

Edgar Allan Poe’s Interactive Horror: 1995 Edition
Developer: InScape
Publisher: GMedia
Platform: PC
Release Date: February 14, 2026
MSRP: 9.99

This is something of a unique experience for me.

The Dark Eye is a classic horror adventure and is considered one of the gems of the abandonware scene, that is community-supported updates to games whose copyrights have long since lapsed. This allows the games to be preserved and maintained for free, for the historical and educational merit of those interested in days of gaming past. It’s of similar questionable legality to the emulator scene, although there’s less chance of Nintendo forcing you to lawyer up, as many of the people who worked on these games have long since moved on.

Indeed, The Dark Eye is thirty years old at this point, a game released in 1995 and kept up through the vigorous application of ScummVM and the work of hundreds of hobbyists to preserve the work of InScape and their alternative artists. I played it for myself in 2004 on a Gateway laptop I bought with lawnmowing money, and the mix of stop-motion claymation, gothic horror, and William S. Burroughs of all people narrating blew my tiny little teenage mind.

Yes, The Dark Eye is a classic that needs no introduction, and that’s why Edgar Allan Poe’s Interactive Horror: 1995 Edition, a title that shows about as much effort and thought went into titling the game as went into getting it ready for its debut on modern retail platforms, is such a massive disappointment.

Not only were there not many changes made— something that resulted in a similar product to the free available version of Edgar Allan Poe’s Interactive Horror: 1995 Edition— the entire release just feels so…slapdash. The name of the game wasn’t even fully secured, leading to a disclaimer in the launcher claiming that “Edgar Allan Poe’s Interactive Horror: 1995 Edition: The restored edition is titled as above. Originally released in 1995 as The Dark Eye. The original title may still appear on the intro screen and credits for preservation purposes.” It seems like there was a lack of care in the “preservation effort” from the company, one further illuminated by the fact that the game is prominently a ScummVM emulation of a Windows 95 game, a thing that’s already existed.

So this puts us in an interesting position— the game is excellent, a bona fide classic where art and atmosphere ooze from every pore and you can feel the care in every frame of the game— but the retail release of said game is so lazy and unnecessary that charging fifteen bucks for something that exists in a form it already exists in that I can’t give this classic game anywhere near the score it deserves. It feels like this was rushed out to capture the market and gain the copyright info, but without doing much to earn it.

That feels like an odd thing to say, that someone should earn the right to a game, but the community did by keeping the game alive all this time so GMedia could profit from it. GMedia, on the other hand, added a name and Steam integration. Not much has noticeably changed to my eye from the current preserved copy (either ScummVM or basic) and not much has noticeably changed from the last time I played it. The creaks and cracks are still intact, it still takes a second to load the FMV, and overall, it’s just not worth paying the money for something the community already did, but with a new title and a new publisher. Certainly not for this much money.

So in conclusion, go ahead and find a copy of The Dark Eye. Play that. But for God’s sake, Montressor, don’t spend your time and money on Edgar Allan Poe’s Interactive Horror 1995 Edition, a game whose release is as slapdash as its title is long.

The Good:
- A classic adventure game available to a wider audience

The Bad:
- A shoddy release that feels like a rushed cash grab
- Why pay ten bucks for something someone already did for free

FINAL SCORE:

The 1.5 is entirely the work of the community and the fact that this is a classic game. Why someone would do this to it is entirely beyond me.

Book of Hours Review

Book of Hours
Developer and Publisher: Weather Factory
Platform: PC
Release Date: August 17, 2023
MSRP: 24.99

There’s mindbending games, and then there’s Weather Factory. The small indie studio headed by surrealists Lottie Bevans and Alexis Kennedy have put out a variety of games, everything from a bizarre digital card game about losing your mind while forming a cult (Cultist Simulator) to immersive experiences, to their own tabletop game (The Lady Afterwards). Building on their previous work, they’ve unleashed another unusual but nonetheless engrossing offering, Book of Hours. It’s a strange mix of virtual furniture rearranging, gameplay based around gaining forbidden knowledge and hidden skills, and navigating your visitors and neighbors as you explore a massive house and attempt to craft a great work. It’s also vast, deep, and the kind of game you can lose weeks to. All in all, it’s an exciting new entry into their canon, and a worthy successor to their first sleeper hit.

Because of an unspecified incident, you are appointed the Librarian of Hush House, a sprawling Gothic library on the cliffs of Brancrug Isle. After a storm washes you up on the beach, you get yourself acquainted with Brancrug and your new environs, restoring the rooms of Hush House with the assistance of the locals and cataloguing any books you find. You have bigger ambitions for the forbidden knowledge hidden in these halls, however, and it will take all the skills and unusual gifts you gain from your books to achieve the transcendence you secretly seek.

Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

Book of Hours is played out on a huge and expansive map of Brancrug and Hush House. Using a variety of skills, powers, items, and other help represented by cards, you perform various actions across the map— unlocking new rooms of the house that might do different things with your abilities, cataloguing (and studying) the vast library of randomly-generated books, dealing with visitors and locals alike, and upgrading your skills to further access forbidden knowledge on the “Tree of Knowledge” map. More skills and more abilities allow you access to a larger range of powers and knowledge, propelling you further up the tree and gaining more stats. The game works on a day-night cycle, where everything refreshes (and all temporary cards vanish) at daytime, and different actions are available at morning, and evening.

Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

It sounds vast and complex, and it sort of is, but the presentation helps keep it simple. The game begins with your arrival on the beach with only a waterlogged journal and a memory of the storm, and teaches you the concepts of the game from there, with your first challenge being to choose your stats and then get off the beach. From there, you move into the town, and then set about opening up the town and the labyrinthine environs of Hush House itself. New mechanics have a barrier of entry (move to the next area, learn the right skill, generate enough resources) to get over, but once you get over that barrier, you find yourself integrating what you learned into the next set of mechanics. It’s vast and complex, but it’s understandable in a very specific way.

Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

It also expands into a dizzying amount of depth. Apart from unlocking the rooms of Hush House, you can craft occult items, pump the townspeople for any recent omens they saw, enlist the help of townsfolk and visitors, and use the rooms for a variety of savory (and unsavory) purposes. Each new room you unlock comes with its own new set of abilities, uses and decorations. There are secrets (what do those busts on the grand staircase mean), a ton of flavor text and narration to get into, and a number of ways to craft. You can even start exploring the Moors, the Beach, and the Tree, the last of which is a map that, in classic Weather Factory fashion, exposes itself beneath the main game screen as a bizarre network of lines and pathways all leading to…something. The further you go down the rabbit hole, the more you understand, and the further you can get, leading to a sense of accomplishment as you learn the game’s ins and outs. Book of Hours makes you work hard for its secrets, but it does want you to find them, and you don’t usually find yourself waiting for the next thing to do.

That said, the game moves at its own pace, and it’s a slow and relaxing one. While there are clocks to keep track of, they’re long enough that you can figure things out slowly, and the day-night cycle lets the player know you’re going at your own pace, as long as you keep that pace slow. It’s a game about figuring things out and getting to know your area— there’s no obvious lose condition, Book of Hours is generous on time, and while the requirements for some tasks and progress seem daunting, you have more than enough time to work things out. After all, a library is a place for quiet, methodical contemplation and research, not a desperate race against the clock.

Helping all of this, the map and the corresponding Tree are gorgeous. Building on the stained glass/art deco style of Cultist Simulator and Lady Afterwards, Book of Hours features a lavish but abstract view of Brancrug Isle, Cucurbit Bridge, and the all-important Hush House. The rooms are also excessively detailed, with a variety of different furniture and components you can move around to your heart’s content, all of which also have properties you can further use in your work. As you get into the interlocking systems, half the fun is seeing what card will come up next, or what new room will open up, or what new item you can place in the library. Everything also changes with the seasons and weather, shifting to snow-covered skeletal trees and hilltops for Winter, autumn leaves, or…well, that would be a spoiler. It’s just another way the game integrates the environment as part of what it does.

Credit: Weather Factory

While the game is an absolute delight for the senses and mind, it does have a few caveats here and there. You have to constantly zoom in and out around the map, as it’s huge and you’re quickly able to lose track of what you’re doing. There’s also not really a way to keep track of all the processes you initiate, so occasionally something will go off, sending you scrolling back and forth around the map to find the exact point. Sometimes you’ll even misclick on the background or something else, closing the window you opened and opening a different one, or bringing up another tutorial message. It’s a problem quickly solved by zooming in, but it can be exhausting to navigate, especially later in the game when you have multiple processes running.

Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot

The game can also be somewhat daunting in scope. Something might happen before you’re completely ready, leaving you wondering how you’re supposed to come up with 5 Forge to fix something that might be a problem down the road. Finding specific categories means sorting through a tremendous amount of clutter— and while sorting the clutter and organizing the rooms and redecorating is the point of the game to some degree, the somewhat inaccurate placement mechanics and sheer vast amount of space you can open up can be somewhat mind-boggling.

But Book of Hours is in an early state. There’s plenty of time to fix these minor bugs, and gazing into the infinite while rearranging your sprawling library is kind of the point of the game. While it might be a little sprawling, that’s very much the point, and it’s a welcome new addition to Weather Factory’s bizarre universe. If you let this game in, you will lose whole weeks to its engrossing depth and complex interactions. It’s a beautiful expanse of a game that stretches outward from the vertical slice seen during NextFest, and it demands you invite it in.

The Good:
- Beautiful artwork and top-notch integration between theme and gameplay
- Vast, sprawling game of interlocking systems to explore
- Tons of flavor and setting
- Simple but deep card-based gameplay

The Bad:
- Sprawling and vast game means scrolling across the map multiple times to find that one card you placed
- Becomes difficult to keep track of things in the mid-game with too many pieces moving around

Final Score:

It’s got its rough spots and a very specific audience, but you’ll never play another game like it.

Sunday Gold Review

L-R: Sally, Frank, and Gavin

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Sunday Gold
Release Date: September 13, 2022
Developer: BKOM Studios
Publisher: Team 17
Platforms: PC
MSRP: To Be Determined

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I really, really, really want to like Sunday Gold.

I should. It’s a retro-futuristic adventure/heist game taking place in a dystopian city based on ‘70s London Gangster tropes. The art style is an odd and impressionistic one similar to Disco Elysium, one of my favorite games of all time. And the idea of planning heists and putting together evidence to take down a megacorporation is brilliant, especially with the setting details placing the monolithic Hogan Industries at the center of everything from shady pursuits to violent sports. Even some of the mechanics are interesting, with various minigames used to represent the main characters’ abilities. But looking at those mechanics reveals the underpinnings of Sunday Gold, a game fighting itself and the player every step of the way. And unfortunately, that brings the whole package down, somewhat. So in the interest of honesty, I apologize, but I have to be true to my impressions.

It was supposed to be a simple job. That’s what Gavin said when he came to Frank and Sally, all they had to do was go to Hogan Industries, use his backdoor into the system to download some incriminating data, then blackmail Kenny Hogan (who’s a malevolent jerk anyway) for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Given that Frank owed a bunch of loansharks and Sally was floundering as a veterinarian and medic given her hemophobia, it sounded like a sweetheart deal. But things got complicated real quick. Gavin’s security clearance was outdated, the security teams are on alert, and there’s the matter of the dead chief of security and the bloodstained office that the trio found upon reaching the 19th floor. Soon the three are plunged into a murderous conspiracy surrounding Hogan Industries and its founder Kenny Hogan, desperate to solve things and stay out of the red the only way they can— by heisting and piecing bits of the puzzle together so they have a chance to survive.

Sunday Gold has something of interesting mechanics. The meat of the game is a point-and-click adventure where each of the characters has unique skills— Frank, the criminal lowlife sporting a Teddy Boy-style pompadour, can find objects easily and pick locks; Gavin, the twitchy tech expert, can hack computers and upgrade items; and Sally, the team’s muscle and medic, can basically bend bars, lift grates, and heal people. All of these actions, as well as searching the environment for supplies and key items, cost AP, which you have to refresh at the end of every “turn.” Each turn taken raises the alert, encouraging you to be quick and meaningful with your choices rather than to do the adventure game thing of sifting through the environment. When you do run into enemies, the game shifts into a JRPG-style combat sequence, where your AP is used for your attacks and skills against a variety of toughs and security personnel. The object is to balance things and figure out which risks you can take to complete the story as your AP goes down, tension ratcheting up as the alert level gets higher and you have to get things just right to progress, each step bringing you closer to high alert.

The problem with this is that the words “action economy” and “point and click adventure game” should not ever be on the same continent as each other. Point and click adventure games require the player to go through the environment carefully, find multiple solutions, and work things out as they go. It’s a genre that requires a lot of trial and error and solving puzzles in a sometimes obtuse sequence so that the player can eventually reach the specific answers through lateral and unconventional thinking. An action economy is all about finding the best and most workable solutions in any given situation with limited time and resources, requiring you to sometimes find the best way out of a bad situation. The result of combining these two things is that you spend a lot of time burning AP to find the very specific path through the story that the game wants you to take, while the alert level balloons to massive proportions. Even things like Frank’s ability to scan an environment, something that could undercut the normal pixel-hunting mechanics of adventure games, costs AP each time to use, with the ability’s highlighting feature vanishing almost immediately after.

This is compounded by the game’s use of a “composure” meter, essentially a sanity meter for the characters, which can go down as they encounter horrible things. This is great for getting a sense of the individual characteristics, because each character has their own triggers to manage and things they can process. It even goes as far as having them hallucinate or making certain challenges harder unless you carefully manage their composure, which can be brilliant under the right circumstances. Unfortunately, this also means they lose composure for examining certain things, which, again, runs counter to the point and click adventure segments most of the game is built around. If you can’t examine everything and investigate, it makes it difficult to do what you’re supposed to.

While you can, of course, use items to boost AP and restore composure, and restore AP in combat using the “guard” function, it still just feels like you’re fighting the game every time you perform an action. Which, when combined with the “find the specific actions” approach of adventure game logic, feels more like you’re being punished for, well, playing the game. Altogether, it becomes a frustrating morass where you have to push and push and push, then reload an earlier save and use what you know to keep from getting stuck in a tight spot. The game should definitely be tense, but it shouldn’t feel like you’re fighting it as it rams you over and over again against the mechanics. Eventually, one finds themselves save-scumming like mad so that you waste less time and experience more of the story.

All of this is a shame, because the game itself, that is, the story and art and even the feel of things, is really cool. There’s an excellent sense of discovery when you get something right, or discover the right item interaction, or unlock the way forward. The story and visuals set up a nice dark sense of humor, with the character portraits even changing based on the amount of damage or composure lost, and a lot of in-setting materials that add to the world— posters, birthday announcements, and even random comments do a lot to set up the characters and the unique look of 2070s London in a very satisfying way. Hogan and Hogan Industries come off as impossibly huge jerks even before the story starts kicking in, with things like employee motivation posters with bland slogans, a murderous cyberdog used for professional racing (the titular Sunday Gold) and a bulletin board offering a sick day raffle. There’s even a codex that fills in the blanks on setting information.

The art is similarly fantastic, blending surrealist portraits, motion-comic movement, and vibrant colors together in its own unique style, something familiar but entirely its own. The whole world looks like an indie comic book, and the spy-thriller soundtrack and horn stings underscore that beautifully. Even the character animations are fun, with characters stooping over when hurt, or victory poses that keep consistent with character dynamics and personality. The presentation is awesome, and I love every second I spend in that world.

Similarly, the RPG parts of the game do actually involve a bit of tactical thinking, with skill trees, interactions, and actions like guard refreshing your action economy making it worth thinking about your choices in any given situation, balancing defense and item use with the characters who are lower in AP, giving the usual static character roles a more rotational feel. Sure, Sally is the team medic, but if Frank’s down AP and has painkillers and adrenaline to spare, Sally can be just as good at offense. Sure, Gavin can debuff, but in a pinch, if Frank and Sally aren’t able to deal damage, his output’s similarly on the level. Skill trees also add a little complexity, lowering AP costs and allowing things like Gavin upgrading more items and Frank to get a scan ability to make pixel-hunting a little easier.

But when you’re fighting the mechanics every step of the way, it’s not worth it. In the end, Sunday Gold is a brilliantly flawed game, one that, if you have the patience to deal with its barriers of entry and contradictory mechanics, has some genuine moments of delight built in. I wish, however, the brilliance that shines through, the careful consideration to the world and wealth of interesting moments throughout, wasn’t ultimately obscured by the clouds of its own systems and gameplay.

The Good
- Excellent world design
- Fantastic art and characters
- Brilliant writing and a dark sense of humor
- Unusual but rewarding puzzles

The Bad
- Mechanics that fight the player every step of the way
- Impossibly tight margin of error that makes save-scumming pretty much mandatory
- Adventure game elements and turn-based elements don’t allow each other breathing room
- Very easy to get stuck without any clear idea of where to go next or what to do

Final Score:

I wish it didn’t have to be this, but I have to be honest