The Little Acre (2016)

It's kinda charming but pretty janky and amateurish.

You play as a brother and sister waking up in their rural Irish cottage to discover their inventor dad has disappeared, and you have to get his wacky inventions running to find out what happened. So that's all pretty cute, and the art looks quite nice and the voice acting is endearing. There's a fun section where you're the whirling dervish of a sister trying to make her own breakfast and almost getting flattened by cabinets or setting the cottage on fire at every step, saved each time by your increasingly-exhausted dog.
But also, the brother's VO is all delivered twice as fast as it should be, the art all has that 'good but untrained artist using MS Paint' feel, and it took me a while to even figure out what my goal was. There's an inventory and the puzzles are all pretty easy but not mindless, but there's no inventory combining, it's a one-click interface, there are some irritating timed puzzles and bridge-switches logic puzzles, and at one point I got stuck simply because I hadn't realised that as well as all the exits with hotspots, there was one without. There's lots of other little jank as well, like juddery scrolling, line skip and quick exit only working some of the time, characters changing size mid-animation. Charles Cecil was the exec producer on this, and I would have hoped he'd have spotted and (indirectly) ironed out a lot of this stuff.

Apparently it's very short, so I'll keep playing unless I hit some major bump.

Okay, finished. Turns out you're actually playing as father and daughter, not siblings, which goes to show how spotty the storytelling is! It continued in the same vein throughout, with some charming aspects (forgot to mention the live-recorded trad Irish music which is pleasant to listen to) but not much thought gone into puzzle design or polish. I could only really recommend this as a gateway adventure to play with a young kid with a walkthrough to hand to get them past any bumps, and even then only if you already got it for free.

Rating: a lot of charm, a lot of jank.

Silence: The Whispered World II (2016)

I'll give it five minutes and if it's not immediately notably better than the first one I'll uninstall.

I started on the sequel, and had not realised how different it is! First off, it's 3D. Secondly, it is continuing the story of the previously-comatose boy, now in 'the real world', which seems to be a European country in WWII though it's intentionally unclear, I think. Anyway, it actually looks pretty nice, lots of smartly applied painterly shaders and textures and what have you. The character design is a little bland but looks nice enough, and there's some interesting background art. The story starts well, too, with a cutscene of you grabbing your sister and running to a bunker as a bombing raid starts, and then an opening puzzle of trying to cheer her up by finding props around the place to tell her again the story of Sadwick - a stuffed donkey toy's head for the jester hat etc. Very clever way to tie everything together. Then another bomb hits and you clamber through a hole to find your sister and find yourself in a liminal space with bits and pieces of Sadwick's world floating around, so I guess you've been knocked out and will be going back into the fantasy land. I'm genuinely curious to see how they deal with that now.
Only real downsides so far are: the hint levels are wild by default - you get icons telling you exactly what to use where every step of the way - and still a little much at minimum; checkpoint auto save only; it's unclear whether you'll have an inventory at all; there are these little puzzle steps where you have to click then hold on a heavy object and drag it a bit in the direction they tell you, in an utterly pointless and unsuccessful attempt to increase immersion. Nothing too awful and so far I'm much more impressed than I was with the first one. 

Silence: WWII (bad acronym!) continued to be a mixed bag, but is probably the best Daedelic game (not that that's a high bar).
It generally looks very nice, occasionally gorgeous, sometimes a bit sterile, like you're walking through someone's Artstation portfolio. In practice, it's just 2D with lots of parallaxing and 3D character models, but that's fine. It allows for lots of neat camera moves, and there are lots of fun, detailed animations. They continue to make the world feel alive with lots of little flora and fauna getting up to antics in the background, too. The setting itself is still your bog standard high fantasy with old ruins and what have you, but as with the first game there are some fun concepts and creature designs in there too.
The puzzles are generally very easy, what with the lack of inventory, the UI context-sensitive icons and the single-button system, but at least they're not stupid as with the first game, and they make a lot of use of your pet slug with his different abilities throughout, which is great. Sometimes it's a bit unclear what they expect you to do, and sometimes the solution involves doing the same thing a few times in a row or looking at something will actually lead to picking it up - I suspect this is mostly because they have to make the puzzle steps more convoluted than they should be to get around the lack of inventory - but at least you can get out of these sticky spots by pretty much just interacting with everything a few times until it all resolves. 

The story has settled down and is fairly dull now - we're with some rebels who have to get to the queen for some reason, and you want to get to the mirror from the last game so you and your sister can wake up. Not only is the Silence story bland, it is even more difficult to get involved in now we know from the start this is all fake. There's also a lazily written romance angle - they both squabble, they fall off something and land on each other, there's no reason for them to like each other except being a boy and a girl in a story. And it comes with the requisite Daedelic dash of creepiness, with the girl being dressed in a skintight chainmail body suit and boob armour, and one moment where he has to resuscitate her and in a Freudian slip says "kiss of love" rather than "kiss of life". Dude, she's certainly unconscious and pretty much dead, now's not the time. This is 2016, not 1812.
The dialogue is mostly clunky, as usual with their games.
There is some fun storytelling stuff with the dual protagonists, though, like when you set off a firework to solve a puzzle as the brother and then realise that was what saved your sister by distracting a monster at the end of her last section. And the puzzle concepts are a bit more interesting, like a room full of hallucinogenic plants that make your three loose ladder rungs seem like snakes so you have to calm them with music before you can put them in place, then as the sister you have to disable the plants in various ways so the snakes turn back into rungs. 

Finished! Sadly, it got worse as it went on - the puzzles get more fiddly (especially the ones where you're controlling the slug so there's even less feedback on attempted actions and it really is just Samorost), and the story gets more tedious. Also, that specious tone of writing where it sounds like it's deeply thematic but actually means nothing at all got worse. Like "You never help me, brother!" "You must learn to shine your light and help yourself!" "I try but the shadows scare me too much and so I retreat!" What the fuck are you going on about?
And after all the silly little gimmicks like holding your mouse down for a moment to drag an item or keeping a character balanced for three seconds or whatever, they decide to end with two terrible minigames where you're doing a little race flying through cloud rings (and the mouse sensitivity is insane) and then you're just waving the cursor over a bunch of stars in the sky to draw a picture. They repeat both of these a few times, it's bewildering that they wanted to end their game with ten or so minutes of infuriating mindless crap. Then you get a choice (one of a few in the game, which so far seem to have been another gimmick and not made any difference to the game, but here actually give you two different endings) whether to rescue all the imaginary characters and let yourself die in the real world or escape the imaginary world but with the caveat that this will (somehow) mean your brother dies. It doesn't make much sense and it's not very satisfying. Either way, the entire story of these two games turns out to be: Noah is a boy in a coma whose father reads to him; he wakes up; later, he saves his sister from a bombing raid while leaving her friends to die; their bomb shelter turns out to have one weakness - bombs; one of them dies.
The overwhelming impression I have of Daedalic from all these games is a bunch of talented people in need of good designers and writers.

Rating: Lovely presentation, some fun ideas and puzzles, but still victim to the Daedalic Clunk.

The Whispering World - Special Edition (2014)

It's Daedalic's third ever game and reviews were mixed, so I don't have high hopes for this one, but I'll give it a quick go at least.

Played through the tutorial. The overall presentation isn't as obnoxious as most of their other games, and visually it's gorgeous. The voice-acting is a bit rum though - Sadwick sounds like John Leguizamo in Ice Age, which is certainly a choice for your player character, every sound clip has been trimmed a quarter second too close on either end, which is a bizarre error to have been consistently made throughout, and there have been many misreads already.
It really does look nice, though, and I've got a cool slime grub pet for a sidekick and there's a massive beasty having a snooze on the first screen, so I'm not fully disengaged just yet. 

Okay, played through the first chapter and I think I'm going to give up. Partly because the dialogue is all over-written and clunky to the point where the whole thing feels like the Merry/Pippin/Treebeard scenes in Two Towers, plus the dialogue clip trimming and inconsistent volume levels make it all extra irritating, and partly because the puzzle solutions tend to be pretty dreadful. There's a lot of wondering if you're struggling to solve a puzzle or there's just an extra step that simply isn't clearly required, sometimes the signposting is really bad, and occasionally I solve something without really understanding what the logic was.
One puzzle requires me to get an egg off a little lizard creature who's playing with it. The egg's red, and your brother's idle animation is juggling some red balls, so the solution is to swap them for the egg. They're much smaller than the egg and they're not ovoid, you can't talk to him about the balls or examine them or anything, but they're red so I guess that's enough. You can randomly talk to him about being scared of things, so of all the animals pick the ones he doesn't believe in and describe them to him until he is scared. If you tell him they have two heads, claws and sharp teeth, then you can combine two turtle statues, a bear claw from a rug, and some dentures, by applying tree resin (which you must collect with a bowl AND NO OTHER WAY) to one of them and then use that resin-covered item on the others (this is not intuitive at all) to make a tiny fake monster which scares him so much he drops one of his balls and covers his eyes. With about five changes this could have been just about reasonable, but as is it's terrible.
And that's without getting into how you're supposed to intuit that a clown hat turned to stone is the perfect thing to put in the top of a cannon and then sit in so you can get launched somewhere, or remember that weird thing from the tutorial where putting your slug in a bowl of water gives him 'sphere shape' mode and realise that this means feeding him a firebug gives him flame powers (but giving him some electricity or him eating a magic stone does nothing).
Another minor irritant is it's one of these games with loads of inventory items but only a few onscreen slots (because we simply must take up most of the screen with the surrounding sack graphic), so loads of scrolling through every time you want to try something, which especially doesn't help when you're trying things a lot thanks to bad puzzles.
Also, while it does look really nice, and there are lots of lovely custom animations, there's often the feeling of different levels of fidelity butting up against each other. Like, the animations' frame rates are sometimes too low, or the cutscenes' art feels a bit too soft, loose and bare compared to the in-game graphics. Again, it's the Daedalic thing of looking nicer in screenshots than in motion. 

Before moving on, I had a scrub through a playthrough vid. Your pet slug's different abilities seem to be where any interesting puzzles are at, they really should have focused on those. I forgot to say much about the story - it's bland fantasy stuff with vague prophecies and a humble little creature being tied to the world's fate etc, and it starts off in a really messy way, telling you to go find an audience for the circus (and also practice your human cannonball trick, though this is actually just a distractingly placed set-up for a later puzzle) so your entire goal is 'walk around a bit'. And as soon as you find someone, they turn out to be on an epic all-important quest which for some reason you lie about your own incompetence to join, despite being a whiny sadsack who doesn't have any interest in or suitability for adventure. But then you find out that it involves finding an oracle who might be able to decipher your recurring nightmare and this gives you personal stakes. They should have just cut out the quest, had him wake up from his nightmare at the start and decide to go find an oracle. It's all just really unsatisfying. On the upside, it does have some fun Labyrinth-y concepts, like the two talking rocks who face away from each other and have only ever had the one view each but refuse to let someone move them. But it's all written and performed so irritatingly, it's a bit of a waste. Lots of nice creature and background designs, at least.
Anyway, turns out the game ends with a reveal that it was all a dream of a comatose boy having a fairytale read to him by his father. And I guess the quest to find the king was really the quest to wake up and also we're supposed to feel sad because Sadwick's sacrificing his existence to wake this kid up even though he's a non-sapient imagining of a fictional character and then he breaks the mirror and the kid wakes up THE END. It's all really clunky and sudden and unoriginal, and a very Daedelic thing to do!

Rating: pretty but otherwise very clunky

The Wrath Of Becky (2023)

I enjoyed the first movie, thought it was solid fun.

Then I watched the sequel and was reminded why one should never trust a positive Rotten Tomatoes score without clicking through to every supposedly positive review first. It's 80 minutes before credits, and it takes at least half of that to get started, it's full of 'I bet you're wondering how I got here' shit, it's hugely unoriginal (the baddies steal her dog, there are at least two fake-out 'imagined sudden violent kills', etc) the action has turned into Home Alone, the villains are terribly written, and for some bizarre reason instead of using the far-right macguffin left dangling from the first movie to kickstart this one they just have her stumble into a different far-right conspiracy through pure coincidence and utter idiocy on their part. 

Rating: Terrible.

Emerald City Confidential (2009)

This is a 2009 game made by Dave Gilbert as a contract job, so it's a bit of a mixed bag. It's aimed at casual gamers, so there are lots of tutorial pop-ups and 'WOW you picked up a piece of paper!' pop-ups with loud dings and sparkle effects and what have you. In some ways it feels a bit cheap - the walking speed is too fast for the animation, the VO quality is fairly low, the UI all looks really cheap, stuff like that - but it does have a fair few custom animations, it looks alright, and it started off with a fun action sequence with the Lion, a dastardly corrupt lawyer in this version, throwing you off a high bridge. And I've already chuckled a couple of times - to be honest I think I'm currently enjoying it more than the Blackwells!

Dave Gilbert VO watch side-corner: Dave has already appeared, playing a flying taxi gump-couch! (I guess the makeshift gump-couch from TMLOO was the inspiration for an entire industry, and someone is going around chopping gumps' heads off then attaching them to sofas and sprinkling powder of life on them and enslaving them?)

I'm about a third of the way through now (it's much bigger than I guessed, thought I'd be basically done with it by now!), and it's still fairly charming. Very rough around the edges though (not least of all that it locked my PC when I quit, so I had to ctrl-alt-del and restart), and some fun puzzles but also it's a detective game and so it has the old conversation spiral going too. Not that Dave has ownership to do this of his own volition, but I'm wondering to myself if he could make some money in the modern adventure game market by doing a quick remaster and selling it for a couple of quid. I reckon with a little bit of effort it could do quite well. Perhaps knock out yearly sequels, nice steady earner.

One amusing thing I spotted: in the University of Oz, there are two busts in pride of place side by side - one of Frank L Baum and one of Dave Gilbert! He did make sure to have Petra say that she owes FLB everything and DG is unimportant, but still, not sure I'd have the brass cojones to do something like that!

Okay, finished it. If anything, it was a bit too long! Pretty good fun when you're meeting weird people and cleverly using magic spells to defeat froggy extortionists or win an arena duel against Mumbi, and getting yourself turned into a hat stand or whatever, less so when when you're just bouncing back and forth between two characters and clicking the new dialogue options until the job is done, or when you're sitting through lore dumps or Dramatic Writing that needed to be cut in half. Very easy as well, I rarely had to stop and think. But, with all the caveats, not bad.

Rating: a very rough diamond, but fairly charming and fun

Kathy Rain - Director's Cut (2021)

I'm playing the director's cut, as that's the version I have on Steam. I also have the original version on my shared Prime account, but that's a bit more of a faff to access. Apparently the DC introduces: "Extended storyline, including a longer and more satisfying ending and 700+ new lines of dialogue with the original cast; Several new areas to explore with unique puzzles to solve; Streamlined controls with a single-click mouse interface and controller support; Enlarged all game environments for widescreen without black bars on the sides; Extra character animations, improved lighting/shadows and better weather effects; Remixed and expanded soundtrack; Five brand new motorcycle designs to unlock". Not sure about the 'streamlined interface' thing, and even the added content (which for all I know is just unnecessary filler to justify the price tag) but it seems people generally prefer the DC so I'm going to go with it.

Apparently they switched from AGS to Unity for it as well. I think Fowl Fleet (2016) was Unity, as was LOTCG (2020) and this Director's Cut (2021 - I've put it in my playthrough chronology on the original's release date!), so perhaps a bit of a shift away from AGS even with indie adventure devs over the last ten years.

Okay, gave it a couple of minutes just to pique my interest. Pretty funny so far - you're Kathy, a rock chick student rolling drunk into her shared dorm room and talking to your roommate who's your polar opposite. You have a poster of The Thing, she has a poster of Titanic. Kathy is coming across a little try hard, though; I'm not sure exactly how cool I'm supposed to think she is! We'll see.

Otherwise - portraits and egg-timer, booo! But it looks nice enough and it's got proper resolution and discrete volume settings and all that. Also, it seems to be a single-click interface, not even a left button for interact, right for examine set-up. Can't help but wonder if some puzzle complexity has been streamlined away...

Got a little further with this. Some more UI irritations - you can't turn the subtitles off, the one-click UI means I'm forever examining my inventory items by mistake when I actually need to drag them out and over other stuff, and the inventory is a 10-item strip along the bottom that already has 4 items in it to start with and gets filled up very quickly with various bits of paper and junk so there's lots of clocking to scroll every time you want to try something. All minor stuff, but it adds up.

Kathy definitely still feels try-hard but I don't think that's sharp characterisation, just bad writing. She comes across like a porn video version of a bad chick, saying stuff like "free lightbulb, score!" when she picks up random crap, and she's always going on about how much of a rebel she is and all the vague naughtiness she's got up to in the past. Meanwhile, her grandma speaks like excerpts from a memoir. The shy young deputy says things like "Do you like to eat foot?" when trying to ask you out for dinner. It's all quite clunkily unnatural.
Storywise, it's your usual Twin Peaksy mystery, complete with a drowned teen girl (Lisa Myers, rather than Laura Palmer) and a Sheriff Truman in a spooky small town. It feels a bit contrived and indirect right now - my estranged grandfather died, so I went to his funeral, my grandmother told me he mysteriously went catatonic for the last ten years of his life, and asked me to investigate. And that's it, so now I'm just scrabbling around for scraps of clues until a story coalesces. Puzzles-wise, it's fine but it's got that detective game thing of just circling around asking people about stuff until another option somewhere is unlocked. To be fair, it's broken up a little with regular adventure game puzzles, but they're all very basic so far.

So, looking back at all this, I guess I'm not enjoying it that much! But I haven't been playing for long, the presentation's nice, and it's well thought-of, so I'll give it a while longer.

Hmm, okay, looking at Metacritic it's just got 6 reviews from nothing outlets, and even John Walker seemed lukewarm on it - he says that the conversation topic unlock spiral gets worse as it goes on and the pace gets slower! He also refers to Kathy as "faux-rebellious" and a complex character, so maybe I've misjudged the writing there, though I doubt it!

Played a little more. It put me in my dorm room and gave me a bunch of computer password puzzles to do, which aren't the most interesting or fun puzzle type ever but at least it wasn't topic-spiralling. The writing still keeps on clunking but I do like how some characters start off abrasive to you and then warm up once you find ways to get in their good graces, it gives them a little bit of depth. And the Christian roommate is pretty adorable. Kathy is still low-key obnoxious, though - it's been revealed that she had an abortion at 16 and she has a recurring dream about it, so maybe the idea is that she puts on a super-tough front now to protect herself or deny her trauma or something, but the game isn't really getting that across. I think I'm around 40% through; I'm done for today but I'll keep going with it unless it gets more irritating.

Finished. I think the big letdown with this game was the puzzles - whether you're Lisbeth Salandering your way around Twin Peaks or you're fighting your way through a nightmarish alternate fear dimension, you spend most of your time figuring out riddles and passcodes or bouncing back and forth between conversation trees (to be fair, these at least always made sense, so it wasn't the full unlock spiral of trying everyone constantly). It never felt connected to the story, and the story in turn never had much structure or depth to it. Your overarching goal is to help your grandmother figure out the mystery behind what happened to your grandfather, and then at some point your friend gets overtaken by the dark forces and so you have to free her as well. But then you unravel the mystery (there's some sort of alternate dimension that drives people mad if they see these lights that it broadcasts, but if you find a sinkhole in the woods you can travel there and confront your emotional baggage and either get stuck there or escape), and not only does it turn out your friend wasn't really in jeopardy, you never tell your grandmother about it either! And Kathy finds out that you can destroy this entire dimension by burning some flowers in the real world so she does that. All the nightmare stuff is really literal as well, it's just creepy versions of places you've already been to and Kathy meets spooky versions of her estranged parents and aborted kid and tells them that she's done with being upset about them now. Nightmare dimension defeated!

Sidenote: it's not a Wadjet Eye game, but Dave Gilbert did produce the VO, so I get to do my Dave self-casting round-up. This time, Dave played a hulking private bodyguard and a big gruff biker gang member!

So, presentation generally very good (some lovely pixel skies!) but too much clunkiness across the whole thing to stand out amongst the crowd.

Nelly Cootalot: the Fowl Fleet (2016)

Gave it a very brief start, bit of a mixed bag so far. The background art is lovely, the voice acting is charming, full of regional British accents, and the opening tutorial puzzle was well pitched; but the 3D cel-shaded characters (boiled down to 2D) just don't have the charm of the original game's 2D art, there's no way to disable the subtitles (which come in great big speech bubbles), and the cursor doesn't hide during cutscenes. So far the humour is very very gentle (which iirc it was in the first game too), and perhaps a little sparse but I've only been playing for a few minutes so presumably it'll pick up a bit!
The negatives are mostly mild irritations, though, and it's still got the same vibe as the first one, which is the main thing.

Aggh, I can't name savegames or delete the older ones either! More minor irritations!
Have to say, though, the subtitles thing is the most glaring, as I find they always kill comedy, whether in tv, movies or games - it's hard not to read ahead and ruin the timing of it all. So I'm trying to look at other areas of the screen while characters are speaking, but that's not ideal either, it's a mental distraction.
Anyway, am pottering about at the moment and have found a classic 'win a competition by sabotaging the other contestants' set-up. I've chuckled a fair few times, so obviously the comedy hasn't been completely scuppered by the subtitles!
Also, hooray, it handles alt-tabbing fine!

Okay, got through the first batch of puzzles, and so far they're really nicely pitched, making me think but not stumping me, and not giving me too much to deal with right off the bat. Very much in the Spoonbeaks/Wallace & Gromit realm. Plus I've been laughing a lot, so that's good! (One of my favourite moments was finally taking a second to consider the character name Commodore LXIV and then laugh-groaning.)

I think I'm about three quarters through now, very much enjoying it. I've laughed a lot, and the puzzles are the same pleasing difficulty level as the first game - I've not got stuck but I have had to think things through. It's not the 'idle clicker for adventure game veterans' that a few other games on this list have been. My favourite joke so far was the pirate called Lucas who exists purely to do lazy Lucasarts references, and gets booted out of the game after a couple of them.
Speaking of which, this instalment feels a lot more indebted to the MI games that Spoonbeaks Ahoy did - gathering a ship and crew, defending oneself in court, fixing a competition etc. Obviously there's going to be overlap with another comedy pirate PnC series, especially when said series has 6ish games in it, and it feels like a remix rather than a rip-off (similar to what we aimed for with TGP's clock puzzle), but I do hope that we get a bit more of the weird leprechauns/ships made of bloomers/etc energy of the first one in the final quarter.

There was indeed some weird energy in the next section, a classic 'go into someone's mind, represented by a liminal void with floating platforms and a series of doors, and fix their mental issues'. It then went to a tight little village section and then wrapped up with an action finale. The credits song was great, poking fun at the Monkey Island influences (of which there were more in the village section!) and making a brilliantly groanworthy joke about Google Chrome. Nice to be laughing right up to the end.

Rating: more of the same Nelly Cootalot gently amusing comedy adventure goodness, which was exactly what I wanted it to be.