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.

The Oregon Trail Review

The Oregon Trail
Developer: Gameloft
Publisher: Gameloft
Platforms: PC, Switch, IOS
Release Date: November 14, 2022
MSRP: 29.99

It can be hard to talk about The Oregon Trail

The little franchise that could from the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium began in 1971 as little more than text, before being rereleased for the Apple II with an updated graphical interface, becoming a fond and memorable (if frustrating) experience for grade-schoolers and middle-schoolers alike. Discussing the modern update of The Oregon Trail means engaging with that legacy, which is both inevitable and kind of unfair. Gameloft’s 2021 update of The Oregon Trail, ported here to PC from its mobile incarnation on Apple Arcade, is decidedly not the Oregon Trail we know and love. It’s different. But as much as it should be evaluated on its own merits and discussed as its own thing, it’s still difficult to completely separate. Which is a shame, because despite some wrinkles, the new and updated Oregon Trail is a really solid game that improves upon some weaknesses of the series.

There are some who might be unfamiliar with The Oregon Trail, so here goes: You are a settler on a cross-country journey from Independence, Missouri to the promised land of Oregon with a wagon train. You choose your traveling companions, wagon type, any provisions, and then set off across the vast countryside on a mission to reach the Pacific Northwest or die trying. Along the way, you encounter a staggering array of hazards, everything from wagon breakdowns to getting shot because you try to take bullets through the high desert. But with enough luck, skill, and careful planning, you can brave the trip across America and find your place in a new land.

The Oregon Trail is fairly basic gameplay-wise. You choose things from a variety of menus, set your pace and ration consumption, and hit the “travel” button. Along the way, you choose which direction to take from a node map similar to FTL and games of that stripe, leading to a number of encounters on your way between destinations. This also adds a layer of strategy to the game— do you go for the sidequest and possible rewards down the line, or do you make sure your settlers have the bath they sorely need at the campsite and miss out on further encounters? It adds a layer of strategy missing from the basic gameplay of “travel, hunt, rest, random event,” and does actually pull the game into a little more of a narrative than “this guy I named after my friend died of cholera because I didn’t rest long enough.” It improves the gameplay just enough while keeping the classic feel, adding narrative to a game that always had the bones for emergent narrative but perhaps a little less story. Thankfully, that story has been vastly expanded.

That expansion comes in the form of multiple side-stories, each with their own unlocks for the main game. There are boasts between hunters around the campfire, a trilogy of stories about a family reuniting over the course of the trail, a group of gold rushers heading to California, and in one of the nastiest stories ever put in a comparatively lighthearted adventure game, the journey of a group of arms merchants to a fort over an inhospitable desert. Each one has its own set of mechanics, narrative, and characters, using the general framework of The Oregon Trail to tell a wide variety of stories within its compact confines. Sidestepping some of the previous iterations’ more culturally insensitive moments, it also portrays indigenous Americans as fully realized characters in their own right, their stories standing out every bit as much as their counterparts. It’s a way to introduce variety into what’s a very straightforward game, and one that, while not really needing the expansion of its story, benefits from it.

The graphics overhaul also adds something to the game, nicely balancing the retro feel with the overworld map, pixelated art style, and travel nodes, but making the most of PC graphical displays with its expansive vistas and long treks— there are beautiful sunsets, wide open skies, roaring rivers, and some beautiful forests to explore on your trek northwest. It’s a gorgeous game, with characters trudging across the screen as a variety of pixelated wildlife flies to and fro across your field of view, day and night cycling as you stop. The music also adds to this, while there are few tracks, it creates a sense of forward momentum, always ambling towards the next destination, enjoying the scenery on the way. There’s even a wildlife and sightseeing mode for those who’d rather just sit and enjoy things for a while. It’s an excellent use of modern resources to update something older, and it makes the whole work feel of a piece.

But while the updates and expansions to The Oregon Trail are welcome, Gameloft’s update is unable to escape some of the game’s flaws. Once you’ve played the stories to completion, you’re basically done with them. When you play the main game there are a few side quests and random events, but you’ll quickly see them all within your first two plays of the main game mode. It makes things feel wide, but ultimately shallow, like a huge puddle. Once you take enough journeys along the Trail, there’s just not much there to explore, and all the gorgeous scenery along the way can’t hide that. Even the side stories get a little repetitive on repeat plays. The game is wonderful that first or second time through— I personally lost hours to it when I started it up— but the lack of longevity made me wonder if I should keep playing or set it aside after I managed to beat it.

Compounding this, the random events have somehow gotten more random. It made sense that you could get things like cholera and dysentery along the trail. They seemed like sicknesses and ailments that would genuinely happen, along with things like wagon breakdowns, injuries, drowning, and attacks by bandits and wild animals. But explain to me how someone can go from perfectly fine and in full health to suddenly dying because she broke her arm when the wagon rolled over her, followed by dying seconds later from a broken arm I had no chance to treat? I understand bringing ammo into the high desert resulted in one of my settlers being shot, but the randomness of it, the sudden lethality, and the necessity of the ammo (hunting and fishing are the only ways to get a decent amount of food between settlements and without trading) with no way to mitigate things made it seem needlessly cruel. There were times when I’d have a 95% chance of crossing a river, and then lose my entire expedition while the game chided me for not caulking my wagon, a thing I’d actually successfully done. There were other times where suddenly my wagon would just decide to fall apart. It elevated the normal brutality to a vicious streak of nihilistic fatalism, and one that made it difficult to want to continue playing the game.

So in the end, what’s left is…complicated. A marked improvement over past Oregon Trail games? Certainly. It’s gorgeous, addictive to play, has a ton of content (and more on the way) and it’s worth it for those initial vibrant bursts. But once those bursts wear off and the honeymoon period is over, you’re left with a game that while interesting, fun, addictive, and great to look at, is also shallow and needlessly cruel. It’s a game that matches its legacy— fond memories of the good times you have while playing it, but a hesitation to start things up again once you finally make it down the Trail.

The Good:
- Gorgeous graphics and music
- Addictive core gameplay loop
- Interesting and fleshed-out characters
- Unlock system that rewards playing through the different modes and side stories

The Bad:
- Replay value wanes quickly
- Needlessly cruel RNG

Final Score:

A lovely update that unfortunately can’t completely escape the original

Destiny's Sword - Early Access Look

Destiny’s Sword
Release Date: Early Access as of 9/28/2022
Developer: 2Dogs Games
Publisher: Bonus Stage
Platforms: PC
MSRP: TBD

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW IS FOR AN EARLY ACCESS GAME. IT DOES NOT REFLECT THE FINISHED PRODUCT, BUT REFLECTS THE PRODUCT AS IT WAS GIVEN TO US TO REVIEW.

I shouldn’t have to do this. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and sometimes things like this happen:

Do not under any circumstances pick up Destiny’s Sword. Having received a free copy of the game, I feel like I was overcharged for the privilege. While there are some moments where the ambition of the premise shines through, it’s a severely broken game, so broken that I couldn’t even get an hour into it without the game soft-locking me within its opaque, typo-ridden purgatory. I’m sorry that I have to write this— I hate writing bad reviews, especially for games that seem relatively ambitious— but I need to remain true to my experiences.

Destiny’s Sword puts you in the commander’s chair of the Stellara, a vessel full of cadets thrust into the center of a three-way conflict on the planet Cypris. On one side, the Protectorate, a galactic government tasked with keeping the populace safe and mining the mineral known as Lucidium. On the other, the Consortium, a group of megacorporations who want Cypris and the Lucidium mining for their own purposes, brutally putting down any opposition from the local populace. In the midst of all this, a group of rebels tries to take back their planet from the Consortium and the Protectorate by any means necessary. You and your team will have to bring peace to Cypris and discover a solution to the complex political situation, whether that means violent “pacification,” or more gentle means. But the situation is more complicated than it seems, and good and evil are rarely as clear-cut as they first look.

Destiny’s Sword itself plays out as kind of a traditional visual novel. You navigate through the Stellara, click on text where appropriate, and make decisions when it comes to a branching choice. In between the main “episodes,” you can talk to your crew, tend to wounded in the medbay, check equipment, and do a variety of other tasks. The game claims an advanced personality and background system, where different facets of your squad members’ personalities offer them different kinds of interactions during combat and different ways you have to manage their emotional state, as well as a multilayered branching narrative.

Not much of this is true.

For one thing, the choices the game gives you are somewhat limited and opaque at that. There’s no way to tell if someone has an ability or who’s even making an ability check, so you just have to make a few random choices and hope the right thing happens. There’s not really a lot of direction or transparency, so the whole thing feels weightless, like the game is going to do whatever it wants and you just sit there and click choices to make it advance. While occasionally a skill bar will pop up, or a progress bar for specific tasks, it just seems like they’re there more to provide the idea of any risk than actual risk itself. After all, you have very little connection to what’s going on onscreen, even with the ability to occasionally make a choice to do something. At the end, a commander (and do not get me started on the fact that your character is referred to as “commander” and there’s also a guy who’s your commander and referred to as “Commander” and how confusing that is) or the ship’s AI tells you how you did, or gives you further mission objectives.

That disconnectedness also extends to the crew, those people you’re supposed to be managing the emotional states of. While the game is in early access and some bugs can be expected, there were times where they repeated conversations from the previous chapter, or just didn’t have much to say at all. I was astonished to find out five chapters into the game’s first episode that the guy I’d thought was squad leader was actually the team’s medic, that my team had medical capabilities that weren’t even listed, and that at least one of them hated me, despite no conversational indication we’d ever had anything but a neutral reaction. It also didn’t help that the game doesn’t even teach you half the dialogue system until the end of the first chapter, which means that you essentially don’t even know half the options you have. While the dialogue system does open up, it once again forces you into a series of weightless choices as various values like “TRUST +3” and “DISGUST -6” flash across the screen, seemingly meaning something while not really explaining anything.

Which connects into the larger opacity. When you have a game where choices matter, those choices have to feel like they matter to the player. They have to have weight, consideration, and be something other than a weighted coinflip between several choices you don’t even really know you’re making. When you’re supposed to care about the characters and story, it helps if those characters and that story are understandable quantities you can care about. Unfortunately, Destiny’s Sword doesn’t appear to be quite there yet. There’s too little information, the narrative tries to get you involved in the larger conflict but just feels disjointed, and while you can learn a little about your squad, there’s not a lot of information easily accessible to make you feel like you’re learning anything at all.

Speaking of things that aren’t easily accessible, for a game that’s supposedly “feature complete,” it’s upsettingly easy to get soft-locked. The first time it happened, I was stuck on the medbay screen waiting for an event to fire while it never did. The second time was a little more obvious, with the next chapter’s cinematic being played twice and then the story refusing to progress whatsoever despite having completed all the chapter tasks. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t autosave constantly, meaning that any soft-locked game has to be started over from the beginning. This also means (much like with the dialogue sections) that you see a lot of repeated content over and over again, hoping that this time, things will actually allow you to progress the story. This is only compounded by a large number of typos throughout the text, things that should be fixed by the time your steam page is boasting that it’s “feature complete” and has text by a New York Times bestselling author. “It’s Early Access” is an excuse that only gets one so far, and when you are claiming a game is “mostly done” on your Early Access page, that confers a certain responsibility. Destiny’s Sword shirks that responsibility.

It’s a shame, because the game’s fairly flashy and the art is excellent, using painted backgrounds and portraits that do tend to change as you talk to people. It’s kind of cool the first time you see the skill bars or progress bars, even if they tend to mean less and less the further you get into the game. Even if a game is sparse, that doesn’t mean it has to be shallow, and I wish a game with this much flash had much more substance and transparency and much less bugs and typos.

But I have to play the game I get, not the game I wanted. Maybe in the future Destiny’s Sword will be worth more of a look. But in the already impressive field of narrative games, and with early access titles that had much less of a pedigree and staff but came out much more finished, this one’s an unfortunate swing and a miss.

The Good:
- Intriguing systems where you manage the crew of your starship and take on away missions
- Fantastic artwork

The Bad
- Bugs mean you end up caught in loops of conversations
- The game can soft-lock you at random, forcing you to start from scratch due to autosaves
- Opaque systems mean choices might as well be random or a coin toss
- A lot of flash, but seemingly little substance

Final Score:

It’s so raw. It’s just so raw. Please make this game better.

Foretales Review

---

Foretales
Release Date: September 15, 2022
Developer: Alkemi
Publisher: Dear Villagers
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch
MSRP: TBD

---

Sometimes, the right things come together in the right way, and it can be an utter delight.

Foretales is a careful balancing act— it’s a dark fantasy story about an apocalyptic disaster, but it handles itself with humor and some genuine love of its characters and setting. It’s got an action economy, but things never feel rushed or weirdly paced (well, most of the time, we’ll get to that). It has a morality system, but one that never feels like it’s leaning too far on one side or the other, or punishing you for whatever choice you take. And, most notably for a card battler, it has a ton of diplomatic options for most situations, allowing you to preserve the cards in your hand while spending a number of resources to circumvent the fights and usually gaining a decent reward out of it all.

It’s light and fun without being shallow, deep without being dense or obtuse, and with a story and characters that add a ton of personality to the whole thing (as well as the snarky all-seeing narrator), it blends dark fantasy and lighthearted adventure, and overall, apart from some annoying quality of life issues, it’s a fantastic take on both deckbuilders and adventure games alike.

Volepain the Shoebill and Leo the Tiger are hired by a mysterious leper to steal a musical instrument from a noblewoman. The heist goes cleanly enough, but upon touching the lyre, Volepain is struck with horrifying visions of things yet to come, all leading towards some kind of apocalypse. It falls to Volepain and Leo to save the world, all while staying one step ahead of the strange calamities, dangerous cultists, and a variety of murderous ne’er do wells, pirates, and nobles all out for their blood. But maybe, with Volepain’s visions, the duo and the numerous thieves and lunatics they tend to drag along in their wake have a fighting chance at saving the day. If not, well, at least it’s an adventure, right?

Foretales plays out as a kind of narrative card game. Each chapter, you pick a team of one to three heroes to build your deck, based on the strengths and weaknesses you think you’ll need. turn, you play cards at one of the locations on the board. Based on the card and the location, a number of things happen, such as gaining temporary allies, advancing story events, gaining items, or simply just gaining one of the resources you can also spend (money, fame, grim, and food) to play further down the line. Battles are also decided by cards, as you can either spend resources and items to get rid of the enemies you encounter, or simply use your cards to buff each character before the fight. Sometimes, battles can even be stopped completely by using the right item or the right card, convincing the enemy to end the encounter. As you go further on, you choose each chapter of the story from a map, trying to stay one step ahead of each calamity in your path, growing ever closer to the impending end of existence…

Those looking for a deckbuilding card game will be somewhat disappointed. Foretales is more an RPG and adventure game with cards. That isn’t to say there isn’t an intense level of strategy involved, with cards needing to be played at the right circumstances and different decks working with different abilities. One character might have a deck better themed around navigating the oceans, and one might be better if you’re trying to get criminals on your side. The decks can even grow depending on whether or not you complete certain story events, adding to the card pool and number of options. It’s a wonderful way of underscoring each character, as well, with the decks mirroring aspects of their personality and the way they approach a problem.

While from its setup it looks simple, figuring out the interactions between your characters and the world around them, or figuring out what resources best solve a problem, opens up a wealth of depth and complexity. Bandits, for example, will respect you more if you intimidate them than if you try to push on your fame. Some cultists can’t be talked to and simply have to be attacked. All of this gives the gameplay loop real weight behind its decisions. The combat system has a “morale” mechanic built in that means (well, in most cases, since zombies don’t stop for morale) if you can end a fight the right way (take out high value opponents, bribe the right guard, toss rum at the pirates) then you get fame for leaving your enemies alive. Some cards can end story events immediately, others can gain you a lot of goods when played in the right area, and overall, it’s a careful balancing act.

Balancing is the name of the game, too. For a game that has a lot of dark moments— there’s an apocalypse, slavery, a cult, massacres, and a rampaging pestilent horde— it balances this with a lot of humor. Volepain and his companions fire lines back and forth in a way that never feels quippy, the narrator begs and pleads with the player to pick the nonviolent options in combat, and saving one of your friends from certain execution involves a rather hilarious series of punchlines. It does a lot to make things feel like Foretales is an adventure with friends, one with humor and horror in equal measure. Most encounters can be won, the lightheartedness doesn’t overwhelm the grim portions and vice versa, and it is genuinely (and I know people hate me using this word, but they’re all jerks anyway) fun to spend time in this world. Even when I found myself getting frustrated at a specific point, I would always go back and try a new way, or play a little more conservatively so I wasn’t getting rid of resources, or maybe burn less cards. Foretales made me think, and I love it when a game takes a more thoughtful approach, rather than just flinging cards and numbers at a wall.

Atmosphere is also a big part of that. The lighting, music, and even the background in Foretales change based on where you are, from the hushed chants and darkened lighting of the library, to the almost Monkey Island-esque riff and sunlight reflecting on water of the nautical portions, everything is a delight for the senses. The art’s well-drawn, the music gets stuck in your head after a while, and the narrator’s occasional asides only help underscore it all. The hand-drawn sketches in between each major act similarly help with the theme, making you feel like you’re taking part in some grand animated movie or premium series. It’s a deeply impressive game overall.

But there is one thing that brings it down a little. Foretales is an adventure game, and inherited one of its sins: Logic. Puzzles can be hard to figure out, and sometimes what the story wants to advance can be a little obtuse. While there’s extensive help in the form of hints and being able to talk your way through problems, it doesn’t help that if you don’t have the right card at the right time, you can spend an entire scene wandering around and playing cards until you either run out of cards, resources, or chances to rest, which means a game over in short order. It can get exhausting, as beautiful as the game is, when there’s just that one thing you can’t seem to do.

This shouldn’t dissuade you, though. While the moon-logic puzzles can get annoying and sometimes the game will get pulled into an unwinnable state, it just incentivizes you to play a little closer and a little more conservatively. It’s a gorgeous, fun, and unique take on card battlers that promises hours of play and replay, and a world you’ll want to revisit even after your first journey.

The Good:
- Beautiful art
- An interesting take on card-based gameplay and adventure games
- Excellent economy and game balance
- A wonderful sense of humor
- Top-notch writing

The Bad:
- Sometimes random chance and resource management means getting stuck
- Moon-logic puzzles are out in force in this one

Final Score:

Annoying puzzles and some randomness might be a cloud, but the game is otherwise sunny

I Was A Teenage Exocolonist Review

I Was A Teenage Exocolonist
Platform: PC, Playstation, Nintendo Switch
Developer: Northway Games
Publisher: Finji

Dear. God.

Dys, feeling very much like I did when I finished my first playthrough of Exocolonist

So for some background, normally I try to be a bit more formal in my approach to reviews. That ends this second. Upon receiving I Was A Teenage Exocolonist on Saturday, I have lost roughly two days to the game. I have played three of its twenty-seven possible paths, including the one where, well…it’s probably for the best that you discover that one on your own. It’s weird, and takes a couple of playthroughs, but it is beyond worth it. Between its addictive game loop, methods of drawing in real bonds, some bizarre story choices, and some absolutely gorgeous art and music, I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is the kind of game you can get lost in, right up there with both coming of age games like Growing Up and Chinese Parents (and to a lesser extent, Monster Loves You!), weird narrative experiments like The Yawhg and the Monster Prom series, and vast time-sinks with loads to explore like Cultist Simulator. It’s ambitious, it’s audacious, and it’s incredibly heartfelt, and I can only hope it discovers its audience.

You begin on the colony ship Stratospheric, nicknamed “Stratos,” heading to the planet Virtumna to found the first-ever colony on an alien world through a recently discovered wormhole. As you approach, however, you have strange dreams, dreams of possible futures. And one specific dream of a burning house, a colony lit ablaze, and a creature with very sharp teeth closing in for the kill…

You have ten years. Ten years through your tween-age to teenage existence to unravel the mysteries of Virtumna, to discover the truth behind your dreams, and to save both your own life and that of the colony’s. Ten years to train, explore, build your friendships and relationships. Ten years to live on an alien world. Here’s hoping you can make them count.

I Was A Teenage Exocolonist plays out in a semi-open world. During each month of the cycle, you’re allowed to do one activity: explore the colony and the surrounding areas, talk to people, build friendships (helpfully noted by a heart system on one of the character menus), and do various activities to raise your stats. During activities, the game switches to a deckbuilding format, where you draw a hand of cards and have to put them into the highest possible build for points, either by creating runs of colors, numbers, or sometimes both. You gain new cards from participating in story events and interacting more with the other members of the colony, building your relationships and stats as you go. New stats open up new interactions and story activities as well as new abilities, everything from drawing extra cards, to stat boosts during the card battle sections, to even being able to ignore certain world-map events to save time. It also makes everything feel of a piece, from your desperate attempts to build enough perception and forage for enough food so the colony doesn’t starve, to your combat training going up so that you can save more colonists during the tense “Glow” season at the end of each year when the wildlife attacks en masse.

All of this is presented in a visual-novel style with a variety of gorgeous artwork and music. Glow looks suitably ominous, but there’s a strange beauty to the colony-wide fungus. Pollen season is awash in pink, there’s a lush but downbeat look to Wet season, and Dust season has a shimmer effect that works perfectly with the descriptions of punishing heat. But more than that, important story moments are illustrated in a soft watercolor style that still manages to keep the tone while looking incredibly pretty. It’s relaxing, a game where you’re meant to take your time and explore even as the clock keeps ticking ever upward over those 120 turns you have to do things.

It’s also really transparent with what everything does. Areas are color-coded based on what they do, mousing over a choice tells you what stats you need and who you need to be more involved with, and map markers show you the way to world events. When you know what you want to do on a playthrough, it’s very easy to beeline. But beyond just beelining towards certain things, the game has a gentle enough difficulty curve and is easy enough to understand with its interlocking systems that you don’t necessarily have to beeline. You’re free to explore on every playthrough, figuring out what build and events work for you, and ensuring that you can save as many people as possible.

And save them you will want to. This is a game where, if you’re not prepared for it, any number of people can die horribly, everything from your childhood best friend getting blown up to a creature eating you alive. It’s deeply effective emotionally, letting you know that these people have their fates in your hands, but also that bad things can happen, that the colony you become so familiar with and pour so much love and work into might get trashed, might get fed to fascist bounty hunters from Earth, or might just end up destroyed. But it also creates a sense of accomplishment when you do manage to save someone, when you manage to get things just right, and when the colony manages to coexist, both with their wildlife and their invaders. It’s a game that fine-tunes its emotional highs and lows, so that everything is unexpected but not inevitable. It also helps as you can remember things from previous lives and use them to correct things in the present.

It’s also just straight addictive. The ease of each month and of building your relationships, the satisfying way the numbers go up, the simple-to-learn, difficult-to-master card system (which IMO doesn’t need a hard setting, as it’s just difficult enough), and the way whole months can pass, as well as knowing there’s a specific end, combine to a game you can lose days to, setting up your colonist’s actions, managing your relationships, even exploring day after day until you find something interesting, all of it feels like a choice that matters, and all of it feels rather satisfying.

That isn’t to say the game isn’t without its flaws. After the first time, it can get a little frustrating to nudge at the various tasks, trying to save that one person and help a childhood friend, or figuring out how to keep family and friends from their fates. It could also use some quality of life upgrades, like a map during expeditions so you actually know where you’re going, some sort of quest log for the times when you have to grab specific items or do specific things at certain times, an idea of what perks do what after the first time, and perhaps a little less of a heavy load on the old GPU, as when the snow and pollen starts swirling, my graphics card temp suddenly jumped to 56C and everything slowed down immensely.

But those are nitpicks. If you like life sims, if you like games you can sink hours into satisfyingly, if you like visual novels or weird stories or branching plots, this is the game for you. Jump on board the Stratos when it finally launches, a new life awaits you in the offworld colonies.

The Good
- Addictive core gameplay loop
- Story it’s easy to get invested in
- Gorgeous artwork
- Tons of replay value
- Very easy to figure out the systems, difficult to master

The Bad
- Minor performance issues
- Can be difficult to figure out which things to do in what order to change events
- Could benefit from a map during exploration segments

Final Score:

Thy Creature Review

---

Platform: PC
Developer: MazM
Publisher: Growing Seeds Corporation
Release Date: Early Access as of February 19, 2022

---

I want to talk about the difference between “obtuse” and “cryptic.”

It’s a difference few people consider in their storytelling. Most people think one is basically the pretentious version of the other, but that’s where they’re wrong, and not just because “pretentious” is the silliest possible insult for someone attempting something ambitious. No, “cryptic” is a mystery that definitely has something to it. Questions get answered, things are weird, but you know where you stand, more or less. It can be frustrating, but it can also be thrilling and odd and compelling. Carnivale is cryptic. Dark Souls is cryptic. Hell, Myst is cryptic. Every puzzle has a solution, questions have answers, and you only learn enough for a sense of accomplishment and to drive you forward into further knowledge. Cryptic is interesting. Cryptic goes somewhere.

Thy Creature is obtuse.

Obtuse can be a good thing sometimes, when you want to invoke the surreal or have things be weird or add difficulty. Sometimes “opaque” can be even better, just look at most adventure games from the 1990s— a dreamlike feeling, you have no idea what’s going on, but clearly you’re along for the ride. But other times, obtuse is just exhausting, like with Thy Creature. Questions are answered, but it never feels like those answers are satisfying. Progress is made, but it still feels like you’re standing still. It’s clear the game wants you to think something is going on, but it never feels like you make any progression in figuring out what that is. Which is a shame, because there’s the potential to be a really good adventure game here, if it didn’t fall into all the worst pitfalls.

Thy Creature stars The Creature, a patchwork abomination of body parts who is run out of a village and severely wounded by humans. The creature takes refuge in an unusual and ancient tower, one that haunts his memories. Once inside, he finds himself attacked by monsters and accosted by the tower’s trapped inhabitants, who have their own difficulties with memories, all of them looking for the tower’s owner, Victor Frankenstein. To climb the tower and unlock his own memories and experiences, the Creature will have to fight the mysterious monsters known as Nepes, rescue the memories of the tower’s other inhabitants, and eventually reach the top, all while confronting a variety of mysteries and puzzles along his path.

From the start, Thy Creature has a lot going for it. A gothic atmosphere, lovely music, a plot full of mysteries, and a rather unique art style and control scheme. It feels like a scaled-up RPG Maker game, one of those ones with a lot of places to explore, people to meet, and a story to gradually uncover as you do. The journal promises secrets to uncover about your new friends in the tower and a variety of interesting collectibles to track down, and it has all the makings of an interesting game with a lot of heart behind it.

The game even starts incredibly well, with a fully animated music video welcoming you to the world and showing the Creature’s journey to the mysterious tower, having burned his former home and trudged across the desolate landscape until he finally reaches his destination, the song full of emotion, the strings lush. The tower’s music is creepily atmospheric, and the opening hallways full of defaced and demonic paintings leading into “the fiesta,” a creepy birthday party with a noticeable shift in color scheme, is really effective. Noah’s suitably mysterious, and his guarded behavior combined with you finding his memories makes for an awesome introduction to what should be a compelling mystery adventure game.

Which it would be, if it weren’t so frustrating. Quickly, the core gameplay loop is established: Get insulted by Noah, seemingly your only companion in the place, do some switch puzzles to open up some areas, fight some monsters, grab more memories, then open the exit to the sub-area at which point you get insulted by Noah again, he tells you how to get to the next sub-area, rinse, repeat. This wouldn’t be so bad— each area has its own unique form of “nepe,” the monsters that siphon and hoard memories, putting them in little crystals— but when you realize that for the third time you’ll have to backtrack in and out of rooms, only for your reward to be minimal progress, it gets exhausting.

It also doesn’t help that while each area has its own unique look, the rooms within that area tend to get repetitive and patience with the puzzles tends to run a little thin. Especially when the puzzles get more complicated, meaning you have to move backwards and forwards, opening up pathways, grumbling as I have to essentially perform the same task over and over again, but more difficult this time. It feels padded, like they needed to make up the length of the game by artificially extending things, putting more obstacles and barriers between you and the story.

Which brings us to the battles. Battles in Thy Creature take the form of bullet hell maze sequences. You run around the maze path, dodging bullet patterns until a group of dark crystals appears, then pick up the crystals to damage the creatures. It’s novel, and there’s a sense of urgency at times, with bullets flying from every direction but limited movement keeping things tense. Combined with some interesting creature designs, this makes a lot of the earlier battles in a chapter seem really interesting.

But this, too, falls short. Bullet hell derives its name from the way it fills the screen with projectiles, forcing players to find their way through a seemingly impenetrable wall of light and color. It lives and dies on figuring out how to thread the needle with your hitboxes, to move through the onslaught and come out the other side. Thy Creature by comparison has an awkward hitbox, the limited movement also means you can get easily boxed in and slammed by that awkward hitbox placement, and while there’s some clever darting from cover to cover represented by environmental puzzles in the later battles, it gets frustrating when something representing a stuffed doll but evil shrieks and charges you at warp speed, rapid-firing clusters of bullets over and over again. The repetitive enemy design also doesn’t help, with there being maybe one enemy type for a whole area until the boss.

What’s most frustrating, though, is that it doesn’t always do this. When the boss battles come out, when the story actually progresses, when characters have tender moments together or the Creature tries to learn more about being human— when it’s the parts of the game you can tell the developers worked really hard on, it shines. The clouds part and suddenly you’re playing a game you’re invested in again. There’s a really cool boss battle against a monstrous mutated stuffed bunny that feels tense and epic, but then you remember it’s in Thy Creature or get hit weird because you forgot which switch dissolved which piece of cover, or because your hitbox didn’t cover things this time, and suddenly you’re brought shrieking down to Earth.

The game is still in Early Access, so it’s entirely possible that it’s just lacking in a little polish. Maybe if the pacing were a little faster, if the hitboxes on The Creature were a little clearer, if the regular enemy music wasn’t the same grinding drone, if there wasn’t as much wandering around trying to figure out the solution to a switch puzzle, this could be a stone cold classic. It’s frustrating, because I can see the game they wanted to make. I want to play that game. Hell, I still want to figure out more of what’s going on in this game and see if the story takes a turn. It felt like it was going to.

But it’s not cryptic. it’s not intriguing. It’s a game with a ton of frustratingly good elements that then repeats them over and over until you get tired of them.

And that’s just exhausting

The good:
- Interesting atmosphere
- Unique art style blending anime-esque visuals with gothic horror
- Unusual plot centered around unlocking memories and secrets in a mansion
- Gorgeous soundtrack
- Some interesting depth in discovering journal entries, collectibles, and memories

The bad:
- Frustrating, repetitive puzzles and combat
- Depth gives way to shallowness as the game moves along
- Glacial pacing makes all the rough patches that more obvious

Gamedec Review

---

Publisher: Anshar Publishing
Developer: Anshar Studios
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: Sept. 16, 2021
Price: $29.99 USD

---

Gamedec is frustrating. It’s always difficult to write a review like this, a game I clearly had some fun with, a game I really want to like, but that I also have to criticize. It’s a cyberpunk noir RPG-adventure game with actual investigation and deduction mechanics. The world is so deep you could spend hours lost in the various codexes and character bios alone. The graphics are a little basic in places, but the world has a genuine aesthetic that it’s a lot of fun to look at and wander through. But every time I find myself charmed by its world, I get stuck in the level and forced to load a save. A decision tree might say one thing but possibly mean another.

In short? This could be a really good game, a solid entry in the genre pioneered by Disco Elysium that’s just starting to take off (see also Murder Mystery Machine and to a more failed extent, The Sunken City) but dear God is it in a rough state.

Sometimes, a car is an effective solution

Gamedec drops you into the trenchcoat of the titular gamedec, a kind of private investigator who handles cases in virtual reality MMOs. As you hunt down cheaters, scammers, cultists, and the odd child labor ring, you make enough to get by and hopefully try to make a little light in the dark world of futuristic Warsaw. But as you investigate, slowly another, more sinister thread emerges— one involving a mysterious tree, twin cultists, and possibly even your own memories and thoughts themselves. It will take all your cunning and instinct to get out of this one, especially in a world where everyone’s wearing a false identity.

So first, the good. Gamedec’s investigation system is unrivaled and I wish more games would do something like it. As you solve sidequests and gather clues, you slowly fill up a group of deductions. At any time, you can use the clues you have to make a conclusion and move on to the next phase of the case, as long as you’ve collected enough evidence for it. This can be a godsend if you’ve gotten tired of a certain scene or movement in the game. It also allows something most games don’t, which is the ability to draw the wrong conclusion and possibly send the case in a different direction.

This ties directly into the branching narrative. Choices you make don’t just last within your current investigation, but can have far-reaching consequences down the line, depending on how you interact with others and what clues you can figure out. Each case has a variety of outcomes, and depending on your skills, background, approach to each situation, and how you interpret the clues, you can get a wildly branching story with a number of start and endpoints based on that. In theory, it’s liberating— a huge (if linear) world where all your choices matter and each playthrough can be completely different based on how you work the case.

Aiding in this, there are a number of “professions” related to skills you can pick up, everything from electronic intrusion to programming to even cheating in games. Each one’s related to different methods of responding, so you can level up your skills based on how you play, as you’ll be earning points from that. It’s incredibly adaptive, and while the skill tree might not be as vast as some adventure/RPGs, it’s a lot more expressive in places, with clear, concise descriptions telling you what everything is supposed to do.

The most essential starting skill. Never leave home without it

But here would be where things start to fall apart a little. While it’s clear how things might help, the actual in-game benefits range from “marginally useful” to “can solve entire stages of the case in one section and then do very little the rest of the game.” It’s not clear how helpful a profession can be until you use it, at which point you might be rather deep into a case. Similarly, while the skill points you earn are based on the personality of your gamedec, apart from a few adjectives and a group of bars on the side, it’s unclear exactly how the points you need to earn relate to each approach. Overall, this just makes it feel obtuse and confusing more than anything.

Adding to that obtuse feeling, sometimes puzzling through the plot feels like stumbling blindly. While it’s to be expected that you won’t see or do everything during one playthrough (and Gamedec makes this very clear as you play), the lack of direction, existence of wrong choices, and the idea that some things can be permanently locked off just make it feel obstructive rather than open-ended. Sure, it’s refreshing to have a game that allows you to miss content and doesn’t hand-hold at all, but Gamedec’s lack of signposting feels downright malicious at times. Especially when compared to the game’s own demo, which walked you through an early case without completely solving everything for you. It’s especially annoying when combined with the difficulty, where sometimes making the wrong deduction and getting the wrong people angry with you can feel like the game hits a dead end.

Gamedec could also benefit from a better quest log. While I understand the need for the player to puzzle through everything on their own, the lack of a detailed log apart from the information on the right-hand side of the screen makes it difficult to know what direction you need to travel in at all. Even the slightest bit of info could help, as it’s difficult to tell what “investigate the anomaly” means apart from wandering around and looking at the street, hoping the right hotspot suddenly reveals itself.

Getting stuck in VR Farmville is a special kind of Hell

Which brings us to the bugs. Even with the fixes and patching done to the initial prerelease build, the game’s in rough shape. While I can’t speak to every player’s experience, I personally ended up getting stuck in place in some areas, clicking frantically in an effort to move around the screen. There were also moments where NPCs reacted to dialogue from later in the scene, or simply closed conversations quickly using dialogue from earlier parts. One scene stopped completely dead, making it impossible to continue. In a rather odd gesture, controller support is automatically enabled when the game detects a controller, and no option in the menu exists to turn it off. It’s upsetting that a game with this much promise is this rough, but it’s also a sad reality that sometimes ambitious projects just need a little more love

So should you play Gamedec? Unequivocally, yes. But not right now. Wait a little longer, let the game get a little more polish, and you’ll be rewarded with an unusual and fun adventure/RPG with a wide degree of replayability. But until it sheds that layer of frustration and smooths out some of the rough edges, you’re going to want to be a little more patient.

The Good
- Deep, branching mystery with unusual characters and a twisting plot
- Excellent character interactions and some truly messed-up noir scenes
- Intriguing mechanics for both character creation and investigation
- Deduction mechanic rewards players for finding evidence and replaying scenes
- Immersive cyberpunk world

The Bad
- Obtuse narrative design means it’s difficult to find out where to go next
- Loads of bugs can make getting through the game painful
- Large range of deductions can make getting the essence of the story a little difficult

Final Score:

Final note: This game was procured as a review code in exchange for an honest review. The review is based on a release build as of 9/11/2021. It may not reflect the final build of the game

Infliction Review

---

Release Date: Oct. 18, 2018
Publisher/Developer: Caustic Reality
Platform: PC
Price: $19.99

---

At first glance, Infliction looks like any other game in the stealth/horror-adventure genre. You wander around dark corridors, dodge attacks from a malicious ghost and other monsters, attempt to complete tasks and progress the story all while trying not to get killed, and occasionally solve environmental puzzles with the help of your in-game Polaroid camera. It has all the hallmarks of a good stealth/horror game: It’s tense, the plot is interesting, the story breadcrumbs are easy enough to find but not all laid out in front of the player. It even has an element of exploration, with setting elements changing between areas and levels of the plot and rewarding careful looking through things. It’s all incredibly impressive, especially having been created by a very small team funded through Kickstarter. But at the same time, it marks a possible new route for the spooky corridors genre, one that future game designers would be wise to explore, one where perhaps the main draw is the setting and not the monsters wandering its halls.

Infliction casts you as a man with a loving wife and a dear family, returning back to your house to pick up some plane tickets. Unfortunately, the plane tickets are securely locked in your wife’s office and studio, which means you have to find the code to unlock it. But as you explore the house to find the code, strange things begin to occur, subtly at first (horror titles, odd CD names and track titles that seem to foreshadow things for you) and then with alarming frequency, plunging you directly into a nightmare. As you’re stalked through what used to be your home by a vengeful spirit hellbent on dragging you further into the darkness with her, new dimensions and memories open up, forcing you to uncover what happened to your peaceful family or for your soul to be destroyed forever.

Infliction is a game that gets a lot of things right. The monster designs are suitably grotesque, the house is well-designed and the continual trips through there build a kind of familiarity that makes it all the scarier when things start to break down. The sound design is similarly superb, and the amount of detail put into the house and the further (more spoilery) environs after that, making the player want to explore every surrounding, turn over every rock, and look through every VHS and CD case for clues as to what goes on. Even before things kick off, it’s a suitably eerie place, and that sensation deepens in a really satisfying way, each new location bringing up something even more twisted, from haunted paintings to basements with mysterious passages and holes.

It’s a game that wears its influences very heavily on its sleeve, from references to past environmental narratives like Gone Home, a collection of horror videotapes that contain some interesting references , and a hallway that riffs gently on the infamous Silent Hills trailer P.T. In some ways, it’s almost a love letter to both the stealth-horror/jumpscare games and the more atmospheric environmental horror games, infusing a slow-burning dread and exploration with the nastier surprises of avoiding the vengeful ghost and other, equally upsetting monsters. With the rather simple “hide-a-key” system of exploration (click to pick something up, right-click to zoom in and read, other keys to activate different abilities), it also makes exploration feel really easy and satisfying, allowing you to move through the house and explore what happened, unlocking your memories and new areas as you go.

And here’s where it starts to fall apart a little. Infliction suffers from trying to have its cake and eat it too, to be an exploration game balanced by the urgent threat and tension of being stalked through the house and having to avoid a relentless creature. But that urgency doesn’t allow the setting to seep in as well once the monsters end up on your tail, and the threats kind of get in their own way sometimes. It’s a game with tons of atmosphere and style, and some very tense scripted sequences (the morgue butcher scene and the prison chase stand out), and there are some great mechanics, like keeping the vengeful ghost trapped using the camera, or being able to hide in closets. But having to rush through the various things to read and memories to uncover and phone messages and newspaper articles, as well as not being able to enjoy the scenery as you rush to the next location to stay away from the monsters definitely does not help.

It’s paired with an incredibly annoying checkpointing system, requiring you to sometimes play sequences over and over again if you can’t get them right, something that just grinds down the atmosphere and exploration and fun of the game to a single point as you batter your head against a wall hoping to get through with a combination of luck and skill. While it can be exhilarating to finally get by a rough section, it feels annoying to keep having to replay sections, story and cutscenes intact, so you can make another try at escaping whatever horror’s waiting for you just around the corner. While the horror and possibility of failure helps the tension, the problem is that it wrecks the atmosphere after a while. It’s also a little annoying that some of the scenes rely on trial and error, forcing you to either search everything carefully (time pressure) or watch death after death until you figure out the thing you’re doing wrong. Neither is really all that much fun.

In the end, while Infliction is certainly a well-made game, and one of the better games of its type, the survival/stealth horror genre seems to get in its way more than help. For those who can get through its stickier sections, there’s a lot to enjoy, but it might be worth thinking about how the genre and games of this type could be a little moodier and maybe have a few less checkpoints or more monster attacks or something to kind of take the edge off. But it’s still a fantastic game, and among the better entries of its type, full of great atmosphere and some absolutely nerve-wracking scares.

The Good
- Disturbing visuals and a perfect moody horror atmosphere
- Simple, satisfying control scheme that makes it easy to explore the setting
- Great level design and some tense, genuinely scary sequences
- Large areas to explore and find secrets and memories

The Bad
- Checkpointing means you have some incredibly difficult sequences you will replay over and over again
- Roaming monster attacks sometimes get in the way of exploring the house and wreck the mood

Thanks to Caustic Reality for providing a code for review.

Bounty Train Review: Early American Elitism

---

Release Date: May 16, 2017
Developer: Corbie Games

Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment
Platforms: PC, Mac
Price: $24.99

---

Bounty Train is a curious game. It's a sandbox trading sim/adventure game/railway enthusiast entertainment piece that, while the positions are static and the routes are fixed, still manages to give the player a great deal of movement. It's a genre bending game with multiple story routes and an excellent way to generate micronarratives as you go. It's also one of the few games where you can lose during the tutorial levels, thus causing the game to shrug and go "Well, the game's over, but here, keep playing after the game over screen." But unlike other genre-bending sandbox sims, Bounty Train keeps a focus on fixed points instead of free exploration of the map, allowing the player to focus on things like the complex economy, resource management, and the interplay between various factions and characters, opening up in a way few games of its type do, and creating an entirely unique experience.

Bounty Train's story begins sometime during the Civil War with you and a busted-up locomotive with a cargo compartment. In order to get the majority shares of your father's railroad company and keep the business in the family, you must gather up your siblings, upgrade your train, and slowly expand your rail lines across the United States in an effort to achieve rail dominance and fulfill your father's dream of a transcontinental railroad. Along the way, you will tangle with bandits, get caught up in the Civil War, trade with natives, and engage with numerous dreamers, schemers, con men, and ne'er do wells along the great iron rails. But, lest that sound too sparse, you can also hire a team of hardened gunmen yourself and go after bounties, aid bandits, or smuggle contraband across the United States if you so wish, allowing a remarkable freedom in your quest to fulfill your father's legacy. 

It's actually kind of relaxing at times. Travel is as simple as clicking on the assigned city, figuring how much coal it will take to get there and how much weight you can take with you, then hitting "travel" when you've worked out your route. Along the way, you might run into random events, but most of the time they're very well-defined on the map and you can route around them if you just want to focus on the other aspects. The other cool thing about this is that the events usually follow on storylines from previous events, so you get the sense that you're interacting with a living world. It's a pretty intriguing world, too, with people trying to involve you in get rich quick schemes and various conflicts all over the place, or telling you their life story before joining up with you. 

In fact, a lot goes into the dialogue. Even the NPCs feel like full characters with backstories and personalities, from the person you have to run from New York up to Portland, all the way to the young woman with an abhorrent bandit admirer who gets angry when he's told "no" one too many times. The dialogue also allows a tremendous amount of branching in terms of paths, with multiple methods of completing the main quests, and even some of the sidequests depending on how you react to certain characters. Between this and the extensive quest lines and numerous trips back and forth to the various cities, it does a lot to make the player feel invested in the world. 

Adding to the concrete details are both the variety of train components-- all based on real historical locomotives-- and the in-depth but surprisingly easy to understand economy that charts prices not just on supply and demand, but on the political climate, as the ensuing revolution causes various things to become contraband and prices to spike and fall based on the needs of the various cities. It helps root the game in a sense of history and place, and that accuracy helps sell the realism of the world, even if things are a little more simplified for the sake of gameplay. 

But there are definite problems that need to be addressed. Combat is a kind of scattershot slog, a real-time with pause battlefield where you defend the train from a variety of threats by positioning your people so their field-of-vision cone reaches the enemies and then hoping for the best, occasionally hitting active skills or repairing the train as need be. However, the lack of movement range within the train means that positioning becomes more or less a static thing, as there are only so many optimal positions that exist. The other issue with this is that there's very little range in terms of combat, with a handful of options at most at any given time, the best of which seem to be basic ranged and hand to hand. The other issue is that eventually, when the train becomes overwhelmed in the early stages of the game (before you can upgrade to something a little better) you have to choose between letting your train get overrun by enemies or the train moving forward, making fleeing from the combats an unusually dangerous proposition as opposed to trying to fight.

The difficulty spikes in combat also highlight how grindy the game can get. After the initial tutorial stages, unlocking new routes and upgrading your train can take a lot of swanning up and down the East Coast trading and ferrying people, with quests and assignments not necessarily carrying the load. Highlighting this is the way that, if you aren't careful, there are a few ways to lose in the early stages of the tutorial, from getting stranded in a city with no money to getting killed on the way through a story mission meant to teach you the game, to simple bad luck in an introductory combat. It's frustrating to have to either restart the tutorial again and again or to throw up your hands and play the game in sandbox mode. 

But these issues do little to detract from the true meat of the game, that being a fun trading/adventure hybrid. While the grind may get a little difficult to deal with at times, the result is still a fascinating experience, a free-wheeling trading adventure through early America that offers a decent challenge and easier controls than most trading sims, but with a learning curve that takes a bit to get used to. All in all, though, it's an excellent game. 

Pros:

- Trading game with relatively easy interface

- Incredible depth and complexity

- Great writing

- Can generate stories easily

Cons:

- Can get grindy at the beginning of the game

- Combat kind of kills the game's pacing and rhythm

Thimbleweed Park Review

---

The initial review of this game had two inaccuracies, one about an element of the game needing to be patched, and one about the dialogue being unskippable. These have since been altered for accuracy.

Release Date: March 30, 2017
Developer: Terrible Toybox
Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One, IOS, Android
Price: $19.99

---

In 1987, Lucasfilm Games released a game that would change the adventure-gaming world forever: Maniac Mansion. Maniac Mansion was a graphical adventure game, not rare for it's time period, but instead of a text parser, used a graphical interface where players made sentences by combining a verb menu with various objects onscreen. It was also rare for its day in another way: You had to actively try to lose the game or die, a direct antithesis to most games of the era, where if you moved the wrong way down the right street, you would wind up needing a game restore. The parser they used, SCUMM (short for "Script Creator Utility for Maniac Mansion) allowed the team of Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick to create even more classic adventures over the years, including beloved games like Day of the Tentacle and the Monkey Island series. 

With the resurgence of many of those franchises, as well as Tim Schaefer trying to relive the days when he did something other than design failed business plans and games that sound better on paper, Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick reunited again to bring us a perfectly encapsulated blast of old-school gaming, a pixelated wedge of surreality that brings back the days when puzzles were kind of obtuse and games were dialogue-heavy, and none of that was in any way a bad thing. 

In Thimbleweed Park, you switch between a number of characters in an effort to solve a murder in the small town of Thimbleweed Park. Using a command list of nine verbs and items from your inventory, you solve puzzles and talk to the eccentric inhabitants of the town-- a town run on tubes where the mayor, sheriff, and M.E. might all be the same person with different verbal tics, lorded over by the godlike "Chuck," who may or may not actually be dead. This is not a spoiler, it's pretty clear early on with a city seal that says "his mind lives on" with a picture of a brain under a city. Each character has their own unique ability as well, encouraging the player to switch between various inhabitants of the town in your efforts to solve the murder.

The game essentially lives and dies by it's roots, and this is both a good and a bad thing. First, the good: The writing, old-style nine verb interface, and graphics are great. It's simple in the way the best '80s and '90s adventure games were, has a graphical interface for inventory items so that you know what you're doing, and is recently updated so you have a quick movement system. It runs well on modern resolutions, has the off-kilter atmosphere of something like Twin Peaks or Monkey Island, and it's a lot of fun to wander around the town at night. In other words, it does exactly as it's supposed to. It's an excellent experience, and kind of delightful. 

But with it comes the very reason adventure games sorta died in the first place: obtuse puzzles, repetitive dialogue segments, and a movement system that seemed rather slow at first blush. It's difficult to say how much of this is actually the point, especially on higher difficulties, where you have to make printer ink by burning logs in a fireplace, and that's one of the least obtuse puzzles. There are moments where there's no real direction, no place to go, just an impenetrable wall that requires one thing to knock a chink in it. There are moments where the dialogue starts to drag, like the numerous trips to the town hall to talk to the wacky officials who all might be one guy, scenes that got so grating I had to turn the voices off, and endless conversations that aren't immediately skippable through. Adding to this, while the inventory and verb menu are a great throwback, the verb menu being necessary to combine items is most definitely not. 

In the end, this game will live and die on one question: How much do you miss the older style of adventure games? If the answer is "a lot," then Thimbleweed Park is the best of the bunch. If the answer is "no, and I wish they stayed dead," then this game is going to drive you nuts very quickly, because it is the ideal of that. All in all, though, it's a fun experience for what it is, and if that's your sort of thing, then this is well worth it.

Pros:

• - Perfectly captures the feel of a '90s adventure classic
• - Great, off-kilter atmosphere
• - Excellent writing and art direction

Cons:

• - Captures all the flaws of a '90s adventure classic
• - Some tedious cutscenes when backtracking
• - Puzzle logic that comes from a '90s adventure classic

A review copy of this game was provided by Terrible Toybox

Demetrios: The Big Cynical Adventure: A Big Cynical Review

Having been an aficionado of adventure games over the years, I understand that they aren't without their difficulties. For every Monkey Island or Space Quest, there are four that take the route of Phantasmagoria* and about six different games featuring puzzles with solutions that read like poorly translated stereo instructions. While it's the easiest genre to design for (no combat algorithms or anything like that, clean narrative with a few branches) it's also one of the easiest to screw up. All it takes is one puzzle where processor speed determines difficulty, or pouring whiskey into the gas tank of a car to fuel up a spaceship, or an infuriating pixel hunt and instantly people will throw up their hands and uninstall in annoyance. 

Which is what I felt like doing multiple times with Demetrios: The Big Cynical Adventure. With its slow-moving plot, absolutely loathsome main character, constant pixel hunts, impenetrable logic, and poorly designed minigames, it feels less like an adventure game and more like someone assembled a collection of exactly what not to do in an adventure game, then decided to show it off in adventure game form. 

Demetrios starts with Bjorn Thonen receiving a phone call in the middle of the night, alerting him to grave danger. A few moments later, he's beaten over the head and his house is robbed, including a piece of a mysterious bird statue he has in his apartment. Bjorn immediately sets out to figure out who attacked him, and who is murdering antiques dealers over the bird statues. Of course, because Bjorn is, in adventure game tradition, an inept jackwagon, he spends his time annoying people and committing minor crimes in an effort to achieve his goals. Adding to this is a tremendous amount of gross-out "humor," everything from fart jokes to a puzzle involving vomit. 

The game itself takes place on static, hand-drawn screens, where clicking on various hotspots will reveal more about the area, or allow the player to interact with various things.  The puzzles are all fairly simple in construction, with a lot of it being "Take item to someone else," or "assemble a recipe" rather than the longer and more esoteric Rube Goldberg puzzles found elsewhere. This does not in any way, however, make them easy. Even with a handy menu to tell you what direction to go in, and reveal what you can interact with on the screen, some things are incredibly obscure. They assume that the player will visit every location, even ones they have no reason to go back to, just to get the next event flag to trigger. Sometimes you have to talk repeatedly to people with no indication that you haven't exhausted all the dialogue, and try every option repeatedly until they give up their information, which they don't always do. 

The hint system is just as obscure, relying on finding secret collectibles by dragging your cursor over every inch of the screen to find cookies, which Bjorn then eats while giving some hint about what to do next. Which means you not only have to spend your time looking for difficult to find collectibles that sometimes don't even show up on screen, and are then treated to gulping and smacking noises (you will hear a lot of gross eating noises on the soundtrack. If anyone gets an ASMR reaction from listening to people chew with their mouth open, have I got a game for you) while Bjorn complains about eating another cookie and then drops a hint that more often than not is about useful as the infamous "FIND DON. GIVE HIM WHAT HE NEEDS!" from the aforementioned Phantasmagoria. 

This would be forgivable if the game was at least the slightest bit funny or clever. There are plenty of games out there that have a similar sense of humor. Deponia has a fairly loathsome protagonist who sells people into slavery and screws over his friends for his own profit, but there's some charm, and the character is actively trying to better himself, even if he's a selfish jackass. The humor is also sharper than just trying to make gross-out versions of hoary old adventure cliches. But after the fifth time I had Bjorn eat something off the ground (seriously, with a single-click interface, it gets really annoying when this happens) accompanied by stomach-churning licking noises, or making some joke about how he pops a boner when his hot neighbor is around (so he better not have any sharp objects in his pocket) it just becomes tiresome and sad. Compounding things, the pacing is glacial, spending two chapters on the beginning of the game, when the plot doesn't even begin to get started until halfway through the second. 

As far as all of this goes, I feel at least the slightest bit bad about bashing a game which appears to be the first effort from French-based COWCAT Games. Judging by the art style, this is a bunch of people who just wanted to put a game together, and then went ahead and did so. But their game being a perfect storm of awful jokes, terrible puzzles, and just poor design decisions goes beyond just first-time jitters and the result is a borderline unplayable mess.

I'm going to have to say that this one's a miss. Unless you really like vomit jokes, gross noises, and obtuse, static adventure environments, in which case COWCAT has captured your exact target demographic. Hopefully COWCAT is just working out their birthing pains and will come up with something a little better. There's a good idea buried under all this refuse. I'll just be damned if I want to go looking for it. 

1/5

*I like Phantasmagoria, really, I do. I love the town of Mpawomsett and its inhabitants. But I'm not gonna defend it. 

Full Disclosure: The reviewer received a copy of this game for the purposes of reviewing it