Trüberbrook (2019)

I've heard mixed things about the gameplay but it looks real nice!

Okay, I think I've been combining this in my head with Harold Halibut. I thought the whole thing was going to feel very stop-motiony, but it turns out that it's 3D modelled characters on photographed diorama backgrounds, which unfortunately means it just ends up looking like a slightly crisper 2010 Telltale game. I think this one is supposed to have more actual puzzling in it, whereas HH is just a conversation-em-up, but also I read that the puzzles are very simple. We'll see. I've played a tiny bit so far, and it's... okay. It's not grabbing me. The tutorial prologue is a woman mucking about with fuses and wires at an abandoned petrol station to get her motorbike running again, and then the game opens proper with a man arriving in a Twin Peaksy town (yawn) with the goal of going to his hotel (yawn). BUT a ghostly guy just appeared in my hotel room so maybe NOT yawn after all?

Okay, this game is terrible. Gave up after finishing chapter one.
Firstly, the translation is awful (one very simple example is "knock the door loud and clearly" - how would even an amateur translator think that was okay?) and the actors misread almost every line as well.
Secondly, the puzzles and inventory system are a bizarre mix of inscrutable and hand-holdy. The only way you can interact with your inventory is via the 'use inventory on' option in your verb coin, which picks one or two options for you from all your objects. So the only thing you have to do is wander around picking everything up and then clicking 'use inventory' on everything and using the thing the game tells you to use. And yet, somehow, it's still difficult to get through because it does shit like forcing you to click through four incredibly boring backstory dialogue branches before giving you the one that you need to progress (so you have to ask the hotel manager five different things about the ownership history of the local mines before you have the option to order a beer - and there are no clues that she would possibly have beer to serve, btw, it's all totally random. Or putting a hotspot of one piece of food on a buffet table right next to the hotspot for all the rest of the food on the table, with no reason to look at that piece anyway (turns out it has a maggot on it, which you can then pick up).
Meanwhile, the inventory puzzles would be completely impossible if they weren't essentially auto-solved. At one point you need to retrieve a guy's pet fox. Initially it's on top of a hut, but at some point it moves across to a tree branch (I have no idea what triggers this), and so the solution is to put a blanket over a nearby rowboat then use the cheese on the cocktail stick and the schnapps and the hollow reed on the fox. This acts as a blowdart which makes it drunk enough to fall off the branch over onto the blanket which somehow is taut enough to act as a trampoline so the fox lands safely and runs off to the next bit of the puzzle. Another goal is to fix some broken live wiring. The thought process that I (or the user interface, I guess) was apparently supposed to go through was "I need to tie those back together by hand without getting electrocuted, the suit of armour in the town square got struck by lightning last night so it definitely doesn't conduct electricity so I should wear it and that will make me safe (??), in order to do so I need to smash it into pieces by throwing a can opener at it, the best place to find a can opener is in the lake, so I should get a fishing rod and some bait (even though I'm not trying to get a fish), for the bait one particular piece of old food on the buffet might have a maggot on it even though the rest doesn't and I can't see any maggots, there are fishing rods behind the hotel desk and the concierge wants me to give her 'a pawn' so I guess I'll give her the massage wand". It's all such egregious puzzle design that I can't even guess where I should be focusing my mindless clicking to get through it quicker.

Most reviews gave this an average score, tending to acknowledge the bad writing and acting and design but excusing it because the game looks so nice. Except it doesn't, it looks like the Land Of The Living section from Grim Fandango! They've clearly all just been bamboozled by the press releases about how they made the art, because the first two paragraphs almost without fail warble on about hand-made dioramas and photogrammetry and LED lights and all that. One review was raving about the very first screen saying it was the stand out of the entire game, seemingly wowed that they put some stars in the sky and a flashing neon light on the garage roof which, apart from being incredibly basic things to be impressed by, as far as I can tell weren't even part of the physical dioramas. Utterly bizarre.

Rating: terrible.

The Walking Dead: The Final Season (2018)

Played the first episode. Only 4 eps this time. Weirdly, I had to tell it what decisions I'd made in the first two seasons - isn't that supposed to be this series' whole thing, remembering my choices? I could barely recall them, why am I having to do it? Anyway, it's pretty much the same thing as always. It picks up a while after the ending of S3 - I can understand why they didn't want to pick up with Clem collecting baby AJ from a ranch, though it was a little odd to have that thread dropped - and you find yourself in a community of kids holed up at their old school. I quite liked this idea, it's got scope for things to be a little different with Clem surrounded by peers and perhaps even being the most grown-up one there. The game also lets you pick up collectibles and decorate your room with them, which I instinctively rolled my eyes at but realised later is quite a clever way to use game mechanics to signal to the player 'this is somewhere Clem is thinking about settling down, at least for a while'. So I was a little disappointed that by the end of the first episode we were already hitting the old 'there's a gang of troublemakers outside the walls, the community has dark secrets, the leader turns out to be an arsehole' standards. I was actually kind of hoping for a while that they were going to do a bit of a sandbox thing, let me tend to the greenhouse, shore up defences, that kind of thing.
All the glitchy, clunky stuff is still in there too, but still at a low enough level that I can just about ignore it. Still bewilders me that some of this got past QA and playtesting, though, especially in the first episode when theoretically they're at their least rushed.

Played the second episode, and my overwhelming feeling is anger at the devs for fucking the whole thing up so badly with their stupid QTEs and action sequences. There are now these rubbish over-the-shoulder bits where you have to 'use tactics' by kicking zombies in the knee and backing away until they're spread out enough that you have time to kill each one, and also some bow and arrow bits, along with the usual abysmal QTEs. The camera is shit, the controls are unresponsive, it's often unclear whether you've got control, and prompt graphics blend in with the background. Why is it that in the menus and dialogue select UI I can whip my mouse across the whole screen with one swipe, but in life or death action sequences it takes four swipes to get the camera to look behind Clem? The most infuriating moment was when someone got killed because I was trying to be smart and shoot out a sniper but it turned out all the game wanted me to do was move the cursor into the target like a good little monkey. This is a siege, I want to be deciding when to set bombs off and where to focus the archers, not basing everything on whether I can scrape the cursor across the screen in 0.3 seconds. Also, Clem keeps on making stupid fucking decisions on her own, which is particularly irritating when this is a game that constantly harps on about how I shape the narrative. It's been a long time since I've been so annoyed at devs for ruining all the good stuff in their own game with a bunch of brain-meltingly bad decisions (possibly Fate Of Atlantis?). How have they got worse and worse at this as the series has gone on?!
Also really annoying is when I google it to see if there are ways to get through it all a bit easier, and there's a bunch of threads of people saying how shit these QTEs are but there's always at least one 'git gud' dickhead in there. Yet again, I find myself losing all sympathy for Telltale going under.
Also, the 'here's how characters feel about you' summary (which is always weirdly unreflective of my actions and the characters' responses) said that the dog was sad I ignored her WHICH I DIDN'T, SHE NEVER EVEN APPROACHED ME, so fuck you Telltale. Clem very bravely made friends with that dog last episode :'( 

Finished. Not much more to say. It was a nice ending. Shame they were fucking up their game with bullshit QTEs and action gameplay right to the last moment. I can't remember if they had introduced 'shift+Q' and 'shift+E' prompts previous to this season, but they're an awful idea that exacerbate the whole thing. It's like an executive decided that because Arkham Asylum was popular they should put that combat system in this game, oh and also the kids all love archery now because of The Hunger Games so put that in too, and the dev team just had to struggle to cram all this shit in there. Though I suspect it was just the dev team making bad decisions all on their own. Hilariously, minutes before the end of the game, the old 'you have to hold down W to walk forward but you're at a slightly different angle to the path so you have to do a little strafe every few seconds' problem showed up again, it was like they wanted to make us nostalgic for season 1's bad design decisions! Amazing that no one said 'you know what, this is one of the most important moments of the entire four seasons, and this is killing the mood, let's move the path a little bit'.

Oh well. Overall, I'd probably recommend people play seasons 1 and 2 and then just head-canon a happy ending.

Rating: more of the same, which is fine but a shame, and the QTEs and action scenes are at their most infuriating.

Unavowed (2018)

Interested to see how much RPG Dave put in his adventure and how many Blackwell references there are. 

Okay, played through the opening and the first mission. There's some cool stuff in here - it looks great as always, the music is good if you like New York jazz, and the voice acting is solid too. Also, the opening is nice and dramatic, starting with you waking up to find yourself having a demon exorcised and then flashing back to when you got possessed and killed a bunch of your friends. Then you help the exorcists (the Unavowed, a league of supernatural do-gooders) defeat a Void Realm creature and join their team. After that, you're off on your first mission to investigate some Void activity, figure out what happened and help people if possible - quite a Blackwelly set-up. There are some effectively creepy and shocking moments in there. RPG stuff is pretty light, just making a few decisions about how to deal with various beings, and conversation choices that may or may not do very much. And there's already been some ghost lore talk with an oblique reference to Rosa! Probably smart to get that done early so Wadjet nerds can relax and enjoy the game.
There is some clunkiness, though. Portraits still flicker in and out between dialogue lines and have odd placement at times - even aside from that, they're even less necessary with the increased resolution, imo, they just block the drama and spectacle. The separate sound levels of VO, music and sound effects vary quite a bit from scene to scene (or conversation to conversation) and so I had to lower the latter two down to 10% and keep VO at 100% just to make sure I could always hear dialogue. Plus there's still the occasional pop or blowout. And some little UI quirks like how when characters are doing background dialogue, subtitles come up even though I've turned them off, and when a character pauses between lines, a little "..." comes up in a text window. And the game doesn't always keep track of what characters already know. Walk animations are slow and stiff and characters do some very unnatural synchronised pathfinding, all suddenly walking at the exact same pace in the exact same direction at the exact same time!
Puzzle-wise, there's a lot of the Blackwells here too - lots of finding passwords on sticky notes, replacing broken fuses and swinging back and forth between dialogue trees. You defeat the void creature by rummaging through bins and putting cloths up drainpipes while he and the Unavowed stand in an infinite pre-battle shit-talk loop. Hopefully I get to do some magic soon! I do at least have my teammates, a djinn (who uses her sword to open doors) and a mage (who handles fire to provide light and melt stuff), so I can indirectly do some stuff there, though mission 1 was a bit of a milk run. 

Played through a couple more missions. My main takeaway is that this is, essentially, more Blackwell. I had got the impression (probably from a mix of interviews and critical reactions) that the RPG elements were mechanically more deep than they are, that there would be turn-based combat and what have you. I wasn't sure I'd like it, but I was curious how it would work. In reality, it seems that the only things that change are incidental lines of dialogue and some puzzle paths. So, say you choose at the start to be a female actor rather than a male cop, when you need to persuade an NPC to let you do something, your dialogue option is 'pretend to be a journalist' rather than 'say you're a cop'. You can choose two team members per mission (though you make everyone get on the metro before picking where you're going to go or whom you're going to take, for some reason, which is pretty funny!) and if, say, you pick the fire mage rather than the ghost whisperer, when you need to find the keypad combo to get in somewhere then you ignore the ghost hovering next to it and instead read the memory of the burnt piece of paper. You also get variations on conversations depending on which characters are there, of course. But yeah, otherwise, it's 'show up to a New York street and try to figure out what happened by wandering around unlocking dialogue tree branches and finding an anniversary date to unlock a door' or whatever.
In his review for RPS, John Walker said that the puzzles pick up a bit later, but I'm not confident I'd agree. Honestly, I'm a bit burnt out on these after having played five of them, so I'm giving up on this, at least for now, Maybe some day I'll come back to it.

The Darkside Detective (2017)

Played through three of the cases (out of six, or nine depending on if the bonus ones unlock for free). It's funny and charming, and has some nice atmosphere, but also there's not a lot going on here. Like, it's similar to Joe Richardson's games in many ways, but I just am not finding it as interesting because everything's a bit too cute and seen-it-before. The graphics are a microcosm of the whole game - they're cute and charming but there's not a lot of character to them and I'm a little bored of that aesthetic now. Also, some minor irritants like putting a mini-game in each episode (fucking tile-sliding puzzle again) and a fair amount of backtracking once the levels get a little larger. Unless it makes any major missteps, I suspect my final verdict will be 'it's a nice idle-point-and-clicker to play one 20-minute episode of per day to chill out and get a few chuckles but that's as far as it goes'. 

Okay, finished the main six cases and tried one of the bonus ones. Them being labelled bonus gives me a nice excuse to not bother with them, but I suspect I actually would have given up at this point if not even earlier if there had just been 9 main cases. It really is just a case of walking through each scene, clicking the interact button on every object, and then looking at the handful of items you've ended up with in your inventory and which one needs to be applied to which obstacle. There is the occasional slightly more complicated puzzle, but mostly 'complexity' is added by increasing the number of screens/objects rather than puzzle layers. Combined with the single-click interface, paucity of dialogue trees, and lack of animations, it all makes it feel very mechanical and unimmersive. The more elements you strip away from adventure games, the more the inner workings are laid bare and it all feels like rote grinding. FPSes and what have you can afford to just say 'collect the colour-coded keys for the colour-coded doors'; adventures can't, because they don't have another central gameplay element to rely on (no matter how many of them try with dreadful minigames!). And the animations thing is another big thing that adventures get wrong - I know that it can be a budget/skill challenge to include them, but they're a big part of the immersion and reward system, and it's better to have crappy walk cycles and special one-off anims than it is to fade down and up every time something happens and to have your character standing stock still the entire game not even walking into a scene as it opens.

(I'm always glad that we made TGP, because it combines with BTDT to make a game that starts off with pretty simple structure and puzzles and then unfurls into something more complex. But as simple as it is, BTDT still has the verbs, the dialogue trees, the animations, all the dressing that pulls you into the game.)

Rating: charming, but overly-simplistic

Nightbitch (2024)

Amy Adams is great, of course, and there's the basis for a great angry vibrant drama about the first years of motherhood here, with some strong moments, but the 'nightbitch' elements distract without really adding anything and then both sides just fizzle out for an unearned happy ending. The film just constantly feels like it's about to get started and never does, as if it's the tamest elevated horror movie ever. A plethora of True Lies extreme violence/rudeness fake-outs doesn't really cut it. The whole thing can be summed up by the scene where the mother finally goes through her transformation and turns into a lovely glossy huskie which may as well be a teddy bear.

Rating: disappointingly non-committal

Four Last Things (2017)

Played through in a single sitting, really enjoyed it. It's very funny, it looks lovely (obviously the classical art helps, but it's all well chosen and composed and animated) and the puzzle difficulty is well-pitched. It's just a nice fun hour or two wandering around a rambunctious medieval town and getting up to mischief. The storytelling is, as with his previous game, really on point.
The only negative I had was that I had to check a walkthrough due to a couple of poorly signposted elements (there's not hotspot highlighter and the density of the art means that occasionally you can miss that a door or person is interactive) and a couple of irritating timed puzzles. I definitely recommend the game, but I also recommend checking a walkthrough (or a hint guide if you can find one) if you've been stuck for more than a few minutes! Depending on your view of game pricing, though, you may want to wait for a sale as it's £8 and fairly short.

Rating: fun and funny, with only some minor niggles

Syberia 3 (2017)

Pretty abysmal so far. Starts with a cutscene that doesn't really explain anything that's happened so far, Kate is in a combo of bra and vest that somehow contrives to still show off a load of side boob, the lip sync is distractingly bad and the translation is wonky. Looks-wise it's okay but Kate's model is ugly and bland. I struggled with an incredibly basic puzzle because it turns out the game wanted me to actually turn a screwdriver by moving my mouse in a circle about thirty times, which was annoying enough on its own but it took me like five minutes to realise it was needed because there were no prompts or UI clues or anything in the settings to suggest this was a thing. I didn't think QTEs could get worse than the Telltale ones, but they've managed it.
Anyway, that was about five minutes' worth and I'm putting it down for tonight. Will probably give it another ten minutes or so tomorrow then bin it..! 

Okay, yeah, I got to the village of offensive indigenous stereotypes and gave up. (Not because of that specifically, just because the game is as awful as advertised.) Puzzles are a combination of checking everything again to see which character has woken up or fallen asleep now, and shitty Myst type dial puzzles. But the main challenge is struggling with the UI, controls camera and pathfinding to actually achieve anything. It clearly was not put in front of any playtesters, just changing the hotspot icon to something other than a tiny white dot would have been a big help. Every aspect of this game is painfully amateurish, in fact; it's staggeringly clumsy. The only good thing I could say about it is that there's some nice character design and certain shots look quite nice.

Rating: terrible