Much like Kate (also 2021), this is a solid performance and some great action in an utterly formulaic film full of tropes and straight up steals from many other, better movies. The dialogue also could have used a second pass. But it's worth coasting through to see Gillan and a bunch of older female actors get to do some awesome action.
Rating: Pretty good.
A standard Apatow movie except the comedy has mostly been stripped away and all that's left is the formulaic drama that the laughs are normally hung on. Worse, the man-child in this one is not adorable or charismatic and in fact is a cruel, selfish 25 year old brat with 'his dad died when he was 7 and he has ADHD and is on anti-depressants' for unsuccessful pathos; he is fixed for the happy ending by living with ten new father figures for a couple of weeks.
Rating: poor to mediocre
Starts off feeling like it's going to have some real bite, but instead opts for the easiest option every time filling its social commentary with stereotypes, and quickly devolves into a Meet The Parents clone full of predictable tropes.
Rating: Meh.
Have made a very brief start on it and it's definitely better so far - there's a slightly better opening cutscene, then you get a nice easy puzzle in the middle of an action scene as an old English priest hiding a manuscript and whatnot, then you get another cutscene as he is killed and we switch to whatserface from the first game. A much better start, even if it is funny to go from W&G's earthy accents to one extremely plummy English accent and another that sounds more like Australian. Anyway, back to thingummy and everything's already slightly worse again! Her puzzles are immediately less exciting and also the combination of her writing, direction and acting comes out as very robotic. I tried to pick up her handbag to which her response was "even a woman should be able to go for five minutes without her handbag", and I can't tell from the delivery whether that was intended to be sarcastic or if the writers genuinely think this is a strong Girl Power stance.
Also, hilarious moment in her introductory cutscene - she's about to board a cruise ship, some guy runs up to her in a panic, says something cryptic to her and then immediately gets killed by a forklift truck, and she just gazes in that direction for a moment then wordlessly turns and boards the ship! Just could not give a shit about this human dying in front of her!
Okay, this is atrocious. Giving up. She sounds like a robot high on weed the whole time, almost ever line is a misread, the puzzles are dire (someone is leaving riddles around the ship for you to follow so you can get your suitcase back, for some weird reason, and the first one is about things that come from the stars which sounds difficult until you come across a big plastic UFO sitting in the reception), and they just made another weird comment about "women's lib". Also, a cruise ship is functionally a hotel, and so many of these games start in hotels, it's so goddamn boring. I never want to press a reception bell again. It was at least very funny to watch someone in skin-tight jeans and a vest top somehow put a six foot oar and a full bucket of soapy water into her inventory.
Rating: Awful
(Dave made a massive error here because they don't sit in correct order in your games library - he should have committed to naming them so the release order was also in correct alphabetical order!).
Played a fair amount of Unbound. It's definitely better. There's a bit more polish, though still some issues. The music is good, it's jazz that matches the 70s NY setting well, and it's more consistent (if still too damn loud). The art is all by Ivy Robinson, and it's a little more cartoony but it looks nice and it's more consistent as well. I think I prefer it. And no portraits, woohoo! Just need to get rid of that stupid egg timer. The storytelling is better (though I still have my nitpicks) and so are the puzzles. The only problem really is that it's still a detective game which mainly revolves around pinging back and forth between a handful of characters topping up your conversation topics. It's also a bit silly when your optimum path involves walking into someone's office in the middle of the night (for some reason everyone is still awake and at work), asking them a single question and then leaving again, about ten times in one night! But there is other stuff thrown in there, like controlling Joey and going snooping around for clues, using the phone book to look places up (it was ace calling up a newspaper and saying "have you got a reporter called Mitchell there?" and getting the info, just like they do in the movies), and honest to goodness use of inventory items.
Finished! I hadn't realised how short these games were. Not in a bad way, just that I'd imagined they were 8 hour games rather than 4 hour ones. And this one was only $10 on release and more polished, so it feels a lot more reasonable to me (if I try to set myself back to a 2007 mindset!). So yeah, still some clunkiness in most areas but holds together a lot better. One thing that's annoying me a bit is how much of a prick Joey is. He just does not want his 'mediums' to have lives at all, constantly makes snarky or shitty comments, and he still gets angry at ghosts for not knowing they're ghosts which is, like, The Whole Thing. There's no 'he's frustrated at the situation, but he has a strong bond with his medium and can be a positive supportive presence in her life'. He's a dick and they're all depressed. They could make the most of this situation - help ghosts, have a good friend who can use his powers to benefit you, and still have some sort of life because he can go float 30ft away from you in other rooms and watch tv or whatever. I guess I've been spoiled by Ghosts!
I tried the freeware version and it still looks great (possibly even better than the HD version, with its big chunky fuzzy lines) but there were too many quirks running it on Win11 so I've plumped for the HD version with ABK voice acting turned off. He's done a really good job of uprezzing it while retaining the charm. The animation is a bit smoother and so looks a little more Flash-y, but it's barely noticeable. Regardless of version, though, it's still instantly charming and funny and really well presented (outside of a bit of AGS glitchiness). Just a lovely chill sweet little game.
Finished! That was a bit longer than I remembered, really nicely structured to keep widening out a little bit more. Fun and funny all the way through too, puzzles are clever but not too difficult. Except one last one where you have a Full Throttle-y magnet control pad puzzle thing and it's a bit irritating, but I just fluked it in the end!
It's very good and I really hope the sequel isn't shit.
Rating: Very good
I've played all of these before and didn't like them. As far as I remember, they looked pretty ugly, they weren't particularly funny or clever, and they kept on using the same characters over and over even though there wasn't anything interesting about them at all. I think the third season took a leap in terms of looks and invention but iirc I still wasn't a massive fan of it. I think I'll have a quick play of episode 1 and if it's as bad as I remember, move onto the next season and so on, just to remind myself of what they were like. It's a shame I don't happen to have a copy of the remastered ones from Skunkape, it'd be interesting to see how much of a difference they've been able to make to them.
Well, I played some S&M S01E01, and yeah, the main issue is that it's not very funny. It's like this photocopy of the Sam & Max style - just say incredibly long sentences full of odd word choices and have Max be sadistic, that'll do it. Plus it's not off to a very interesting start. You get told that there's trouble at your local corner shop, so you go down and find out that there are some ex child stars who have been hypnotised into doing some very minor crimes, and you struggle to arrest them because they run fast. It's all very bleh, and it's not helped by Sam sounding more bored than Joe Friday. Presentation-wise, even setting aside the low fidelity that they were stuck with because the suits insisted on getting the games to fit on the Wii which leads to some crappy textures, low-poly models and bad voice quality, it doesn't look great. Sometimes you catch an angle that looks pretty nice but there's not a lot of cohesion, there are far too many bright colours slapped together and ugly-ass street signs done with digital fonts rather than by hand.
Perhaps it's unfair, but compare this to the first half hour of Hit The Road, where you've already had a hundred great lines, met some amazing characters, done a bunch of fun stuff and got embroiled in a cool case, and it all looks and sounds amazing.
So I think I'll watch a playthrough vid of the remaster out of interest, then skip forward to season 3 and see how that is.
Yeah, wow, they did a really good job on that remaster, it looks ten times better. Doesn't fix the ropey writing and puzzles, but never mind!
Played a bit of season 3, and holy shit the differences are palpable. I laughed multiple times! It's at 1920x1080 now, the textures are a lot better and everything ties together well, putting a layer of grime over everything really helps. The direction is so much more dynamic, and the opening is exciting! And they're playing around with fun stuff like using stock photographic images and riffing on The Twilight Zone and doing weird narrative structures. The new control scheme is a little weird but I'm getting used to, and it's a shame that the models' poly counts are still a little low, but overall it's amazing how far this series came in the 2 years since the previous season.
Finished S3 episode 1. I enjoyed that!
It's definitely still over-written - a lot of the time if they just cut the last two lines from a dialogue it would be hugely improved - and has the occasional stinker of a joke.
It still suffers from using the same old one-note/zero-note characters, too. Why the fuck use Bosco's mother as your scientist? The only interesting thing about her is that she's a ghost, and that doesn't even affect anything! Just make a new fun scientist character! I don't care if you have to reuse a model and slap glasses on them or something, as long as they're funny and interesting. Plus still with this gang of computers who are so dull and unfunny - the only thing they do here is put clues together for you, which could at least be done by Flint Paper or the scientist person if you can't afford to model new stuff.
But puzzles-wise, it's fun and fair. The only issue there is that they often signal information in weird ways so you're not sure if you're not thinking hard enough or they just haven't conveyed stuff to you correctly. This could probably be fixed with a proper verb set rather than the 'one button for everything' system tbh.
But yeah, streets ahead of most of the games I've played since Grim Fandango. I am going to try the second episode but I remember liking it a lot less, so if it gets irritating I might skip to the last episode...
I played through episode 2. I think I actually gave up on it the first time round, so it was mostly new to me. It's definitely not as good as ep 1, you can already see their rushed episodic schedule catching up with them - it doesn't look as good, it's not as polished, it's a lot buggier, the level layouts play havoc with the new direct control system, and it's back to not being funny. The puzzles are pretty interesting - you can flip between different chapters of the story, and use information from one to get further in another. In practice this means they boil down to just being different sets of rooms, but it's still a bit more inventive than the previous seasons. Funnily enough, it's quite similar to an idea we had for a Dan & Ben 3 - the God Complex one. We even uses VHSes to represent chapters where here they use reels. Ours was a lot cleverer, though - the chapters were set years apart and by changing the events of one you affected the set up of the others.
I was considering playing episodes 3 and 4, but I think of the few things I remember about them and groan, so I won't bother. I don't think I'll even bother with the finale, to be honest. I'll just move on.
Rating: Mostly bad, with moments of quality in season 3.
The writing's meandering, the acting isn't awful but it's also directed really poorly so there are a bunch of incorrect line readings, and the puzzles are all mundane yet faintly silly. To work out a 4-digit passcode for the computer in "daddy's apartment" (to me it's quite weird to hear a grown woman call her father 'daddy', not sure if that's a cultural thing!), I had to find a cassette tape in a dictaphone, put it in a separate tape player (?), and hear a recording of my father reading out clues which boiled down to looking at his car licence plate and remembering that the museum had TWO statues outside. And the graphics are acceptable but bland. It's not bad, really, it's just all quite thoughtless. It feels like this was made to fulfil some contract and no one really gave a shit. I think the audience for this is adventure game fans who love the genre so much that this is like an idle clicker for them. So I only played a little of this before bailing.
Rating: mediocre at best
Technically very impressive but as per usual with COD it's a floaty shooting gallery with too many fiddly gimmicky mechanics and a bunch of annoying QTEs and tank battles and crap. Also, all the big setpieces are first-person cutscenes, which is disappointing. I had imagined being able to run through that big 'church exploding with big bell shooting out into the courtyard' bit, but no such luck. The writing is all bland cliche and, for all the tech on display, it rarely looks that good. Just another step closer to photorealism without any real aesthetic.
I got about halfway through before giving up out of boredom.
Rating: Meh.
I'm playing the Kosher Edition, which means it's got much nicer art, new music and apparently re-recorded VO though it sounds like the exact same readings to me (maybe they've been remastered? There are still a few pops here and there and some heavy microphone breathing, but from a quick YouTube comparison they do sound better balanced). It's a fun idea - a noir mystery with a grumpy rabbi acting as detective. Apparently it's a pretty short game, too, which is no bad thing. There are a few little irritations, like the egg-timer cursor and the character portraits, neither of which I like in my adventure games, and the way the music volume dips up and down for dialogue, but I'd probably be less picky about this stuff if I were playing it as someone's debut game with scrappy production values back in 2006.
The beginning is a little slow - do some googling, have some conversations - and I think I found that the conversations dragged a little more than they should because they centre around your relationship with the victim and a big falling out you had a few years ago, which the game refuses to give you the details of, so it kind of feels like you're just clicking through at random rather than making informed decisions to dodge a cop's suspicions or the widow's anger. But you're at the murder scene relatively quickly, which is good.
Finished! It's fun and rather silly, and the puzzles are fair. I did get stuck once, but I should have figured it out, really - you get given someone's business card with their email address on, so you can log out of your own email and log into theirs, guessing their password with info from the Jewish Google search results on him. I'd gone so far as to consider emailing him, but not logging in as him which is a reasonable detective move to make.
Anyway, like I say, it's a bit of an odd situation because this was a small freeware low-budget debut game and in that context it's really impressive. With the new swanky graphics and music and considered as part of the Wadjet Eye Games pantheon (especially seeing as it has cameos from later WE games in it now!), it's tempting to judge it a little harsher on some stuff, like how the puzzles are all rather mundane, and the tone veers a bit between Sin City style ultra-hard-boiled noir pastiche where you're growling at assassins as you hold them over subway tracks, and sincere religious and ethical discussions. It feels a little odd when the protagonist falls into a rant about inter-faith marriages being a danger to the Jewish people at the end of the game. The one thing I do feel confident in saying is that Dave is the one bad voice actor in the whole thing, thankfully he only has about ten lines! Otherwise, it's all better than Syberia, say, despite the low-budget technical issues.
Rating: Okay.
I wasn't willing to give this game much leeway, as I'd just quit the abysmal first game and this one seems to be more of the exact same.
The first task is 'wind the train again', which isn't actually a puzzle, just busywork, and then 'get some coal'. And I was so bored I gave up. So I'll probably skim through another playthrough.
Fucking hell, the first puzzle requires you to find a gate key that the guard dropped. The solution is to realise that one of the otherwise unclickable NPCs in the background is actually clickable and will get the key for you. But she wants candy first. There are some candy machines and you find a whole bunch of coins - the solution is to simply try every coin on every machine until you find out which works on which. What a pile of shit.
Rating: From what I played, very bad
I don't know why, but I'm quite excited to play this one. Maybe because it's the first relatively modern and big-budget adventure game on this list that I haven't played. It's also quite well thought-of iirc, but that doesn't seem to mean much with adventure games!
Have got through the first few steps. So far, it's kind of cool but it lacks finesse. It's kind of like a more polished GK3 - it looks a hundred times nicer, and the UI's much better, but you start the game in a hotel and then just wander around having mundane conversations in a naturalistic aesthetic. These are dangerously bland choices for an adventure game - the player is going to be spending most of their time walking slowly around and talking to people while gazing at the same environments for extended periods, so 'have them take business calls and pass paperwork back and forth for the first ten minutes' and 'make it look as realistic as current technology will allow' is not really the smartest approach. The translation is also quite shoddy and the voice acting isn't exactly bad but it feels very stagey and disconnected (though perhaps the writing is mainly to blame here!). Also, there's a very weird choice to start the looping music track with a dramatic timpani strike so every few minutes it seems like something exciting is about to happen even though you're just walking down the same old street for the 20th time.
To be fair, though, the art is all nicely presented and they've at least got some weird architecture and rusty automatons all over the place to liven it up. I know what my goal is, I'm intrigued by the overall story, and the puzzles so far have been fair if mostly dull. The automaton ones have been cool, though - realising I had to place a letter in the doorbot's hand so it would scan it and let me in was very satisfying.
I'm stuck now because I have the key to the factory but I can't find the actual entrance. Considering half my playtime so far has been looking for the notary's house, forced to try numerous fake doors until I finally discovered the correct one because the hotel guy refused to give me any more direction than "you'll know it when you see it" (I didn't), having essentially the same problem again straight away does not bode well.
Goddammit, it's a tiny hotspot in a long concrete wall that's trailing into the distance off on the side of one screen, like I'm in Labyrinth or something.
Hard to spot exit spots are a plague of the genre, but this one was particularly egregious.
Gahh, I was worried that the automaton puzzles were perilously close to Myst type stuff and now that's exactly what they are. I'm in an automaton factory and I've got to make some legs, but it's basically just walking around arbitrarily pushing weird switches and hoping they do something useful. I've managed to get some power to meter 6, but none of the others. Do I need to go wander round the grounds and find other factory buildings to push stuff in, or is there just some specific order that I need to do things in here? If the former, that's not particularly satisfying but also a lot less frustrating than the latter, so here's hoping.
This game is on the verge of losing any goodwill, hopefully it'll pull itself back from the brink soon. Really though, the opening section of an adventure game should be where it's at its most fun - easy satisfying puzzles and fast-moving story to pull the player in before it settles down into the bigger hubs of more complex puzzle structure. If I'm getting bored or irritated in the opening chapter, that's a bad sign.
Well, it didn't go full Myst, it was more like Samorost - just randomly clicking on shit until something happens, which I don't consider engaging puzzle design. It's especially irritating when there's so much empty space to run back and forth through - the ratio of screens with some use to screens purely there for you to walk through on the way to somewhere else is probably 3:7. Even single rooms get split up into three or four screens that you have to click your way through until you land on the correct camera angle to interact with a desk drawer or whatever.
There's very little thought required here at all, even with the more classic adventure puzzles. The only things I got stuck on were pixel-hunts, which are exacerbated here by the trendy little cursor, which only changes a tiny bit when it hovers over something interactive, so even when you're sweeping over the entire screen for hotspots it's very easy to miss them.
Anyway, I finished the scavenger hunt for four "important things" (that's genuinely all the information you get, so you just have to keep pulling at levers until something shows up that seems backstory-related enough to count) so I'm onto the next chapter now and am done for the day. Unless the game picks up massively at this point, I doubt I'll play it for much longer when I come back to it. I'm starting to wonder if Grim Fandango is the only good 3D adventure ever made..!
I decided to hate-read some reviews and realised that I've been amalgamating this with Longest Journey in my head. Sadly, I don't own that game. But anyway, here's a quote from the Adventure Gamers review of Syberia: "the story is so elegantly and subtly told that you feel as though you are reading poetry or being sung a sonnet that has been transformed into a game". The storytelling in this game is abysmal! It regularly stops everything for Kate to get a phonecall from someone in her everyday life and either get shouted at (if it's a man) or waffled at (if it's a woman), none of which have any bearing on the story or are well written enough to help with character building. There are a handful of background characters to talk to who don't affect the story or puzzles and presumably are there to add flavour but are less convincing as human beings than the robot. You spend a long time reading through old diaries, having backstory arduously spelled out to you, and then a big moment at the end of the chapter is getting a flashback cutscene which doesn't show you a single thing you didn't already know!
I know I shouldn't be surprised that adventure-devoted sites is giving these bad games glowing reviews, but they're giving them equal or better scores than the best Lucasarts adventures, and AG rated this as the 15th best adventure game of all time! And some mainstream sites gave it strong reviews as well - even the worst of them was IGN saying "Syberia had the makings of a great game. Spectacular graphics, somewhat decent voice acting, a nice musical score and sound effects and a plot that might have been interesting are all present in the game. It falls far short of being a great game because of its much too simplistic puzzles, boring story, characters you don't fall in love with and a really bad ending. Syberia is a must-buy for anyone who loves eye candy and doesn't care about an immersive story, but for hard-core adventure gamers seeking the latest in puzzling thrills, this is a pass." and yet still giving it 71%!
This is all to say that adventure games got far too easy a ride back in 2002!
Well, it kept crashing in the new area for some reason, so the decision was taken out of my hands. I skimmed through a playthrough vid instead. Turns out the entire story is that you track down the missing inventor and he's obsessed with finding the missing island of Syberia (terrible choice to name their fictional island one letter out from an existing country) where mammoths might still exist. So you decide to get on his train with him instead of going home to your cheating fiancé (you find out over the course of a bunch more of those phone calls that he's cheating, another terrible decision to have this big sub-plot going on purely via a bunch of stilted 30 second calls). And that's it! The End! No Syberia, no mammoths, nothing. And then the second game picks up there and is just more of the same. It's as if they were doing an episodic release, except the games came out two years apart.
Rating: Very bad
Just watched the opening and got to the first room. This still looks and sounds gorgeous. There's no getting around the smudginess of the era's low resolution in the FMVs, but the in-game visuals, despite not being as crisp as they would be today, are beautiful and all tie together really well. It's got that extra 20% polish that the Broken Swords are missing; it's awesome to see Lucasarts coming out of the 640x480 gates running. It's a damn shame that everything moved to 3D before we could get anything else in this format from the studio (or even any later 2D adventures with higher resolution and number of colours, though even the 3D ones didn't get any further than this).
(One crap thing is the THX sound system riff right at the top, not very funny, just kind of slapped in there and immediately threatens the immersion. Thankfully the bad taste immediately gets blasted away by the opening FMV.)
Finished the Puerto Pollo chapter. Generally excellent, lots of fun and interesting puzzles, fun characters, and even some little breather sections like the snake/quicksand one-room puzzles, or the interactive musical number. The voice-acting is great, there are some characters who are seared into my brain still, like Blondebeard and Mr Fossey. "Welll, just get lost then." Tons of little details, too; it's incredible how much stuff they pack in here without it feeling overloaded. Just stuff like how when you go to Danjer Cove there are three circling shark fins there and from that point on they follow you around the island, so in every screen with a body of water they now show up. There is one very tough puzzle - the gold tooth one - and one utterly unfair one - get rid of the cabana boy by whipping him with a wet towel. Just no hints toward that last one at all. I think when I first played through I solved it by accident, when in desperation I tried to hand the cabana boy a wet towel to give him a distracting task to do.
Now I'm on the one crappy bit of the game - the insult swordfighting. The basic mechanic works fine - it's the excellent design lifted wholesale from the first game after all - but just because they put the rhyming aspect in there doesn't make it feel any more original, so it's a bit galling to be doing the exact same thing again as in the first game. It was cheeky enough starting with a 'get a map, ship and crew' section again, but at least that had all new puzzles. The worst thing is, though, that it's all wrapped up in this dreadful, clunky, ugly ship combat. It's all simple 3D models on a plain blue background, so it looks like a cheap Sid Meier knock-off, and it's really fiddly and dull even when you choose easy combat mode. Just a terrible decision and I have no idea why they put this whole section in here.
Almost done with Blood Island, but embarrassingly I'm stuck despite having completed this game like 15 times. Am going to have to use a hint guide. Hoping I've just missed a hotspot...
Ooooh, GODDAMMIT. Instead of opening a corked bottle with my hands, I had to use my mouth on it. I'm not sure if that's unfair or just a cheeky use of non-moon logic and something I should have considered.
Finished Blood Island. Again, lots of fun, inventive puzzles, great characters etc. Lovely storytelling with the undead couple that you have to reunite, it comes together so perfectly. And they've even got Kathleen Freeman doing a little role, brilliant as always.
Started the final chapter. Man, that whole bit with LeChuck dumping a load of exposition to explain away any plotholes and connect every possible dot through all the games really is bad storytelling. Not only is it such an inert way of getting all this information across, they chose the most mundane, literal way to interpret and progress the ending of MI2. Guybrush was physically turned into a child and in an actual evil theme park. Big Whoop is actually on Monkey Island not Dinky Island and is basically the giant monkey head, and also what made LeChuck undead, and also LeChuck was behind all the mapholders' deaths. It's that Star Wars problem of tying everything together and making the universe feel smaller. I appreciate they had a tough starting point but they really lost some of the rich, mysterious atmosphere of the first two games, especially 2. I do love this one too, but it feels more like a great cartoon than a dusty old storybook. There's still some of that in here, though. All the Goodsoup family history and how it ties in with that undead romance, standing in that little clearing with the abandoned lighthouse in the background and the little cloud of fireflies zipping around in the night air, the way the feral chickens slowly spread and take over Puerto Pollo as you spend more time there (and you piece together the story about how they got free in the first place).
Finished. Pretty crappy ending as well. They do the whole 'LeChuck appears and zaps you occasionally while you run around a handful of rooms trying to put a defence together' thing from MI2 again, except here it's an extremely simple puzzle, and then the game ends very abruptly. Apparently they were going to have a big end cutscene here with a battle sequence, a musical number etc, but they decided to spend the budget on the crash cutscene instead because they liked the kilt joke so much. Biiiig mistake. Oh well, overall still a fantastic game!
Rating: Excellent.
This definitely is of a piece with the first game - it opens with a lavish animated cutscene which looks gorgeous although it's edited to within an inch of its life, the game looks and sounds great (with the exception of a crappy 3D-modelled spider straight out of The Dig - are arachnids too difficult to pixel animate?) and the writing is pretty charming, but the puzzles involve a lot of bouncing back and forth between dialogue trees until something clicks and George is still a whiny insecure bag of slop. We're back in Paris and so there's a lot of wandering around galleries and cafes pixel-hunting for fiddly banal little puzzles.
I think if this game doesn't pick up soon, I may just assume it's going to be no better than the first one and move on...
The puzzles got a little more fun as I went to break into a dockside warehouse, even though there's still some shitty pixel-hunting. Knocking dogs in water (BASS throwback) and using machinery to knock baddies over and crash through doors. Pretty funny to get a 2D crate-pushing puzzle, too! Shades of things to come in the 3D sequel iirc.
So I was enjoying it a little more, then it moved from Paris to South America and I was even more buoyed by the new location. Then I realised it was another circular marketplace with the same two American tourists from the Syrian market in the first game, and my heart sank a little. Lots of talking and fiddly little puzzles coming up, I reckon...
The puzzles have descended into random madness now. I finished the marketplace bit by freeing some guy from jail for the tourist who has delusions of being in the CIA, so I had to escape down a river but then my boat got blown up so I ended up in the jungle where a priest lives in a Swiss Family Robinson treehouse where he's made lots of contraptions but they're all broken. He's playing his pipe organ (!) too loud to hear me and let me up, so rather than, say, throw a bit of coal through his window, I have to put a piece of paper on some damp leaves by the air pump then use a flint statue on the iron waterwheel to set the paper on fire to get smoke into the pump to get the priest's attention. There's no good hinting for any of this, the perspective and art is really confusing, and I thought there was something moving within the pile of leaves but I guess they were getting lightly blown and sucked by the air pump vent (!). Then the priest insists that I press his collar before he helps save Nico's life so I have to fix his primitive pressing machine that he's somehow created with two large perfectly cylindrical stones. Then he takes me to a shaman, whom I have to get a meeting with by sending him a gift - I just used everything in my inventory until it turned out that for some reason 'dog biscuits' was the correct answer. This is just terrible, it's like something we'd put in one of our games as a joke about nonsensical puzzles.
The shaman told George that an evil god will be unleashed if I don't find two magic stones, and it seems he's just... accepted that as true and taken on the quest? These games really don't provide very good reason for not just fucking off back to America.
I'm over halfway through, it seems, so I'm tempted to blitz through using a walkthrough to get me past the smallest bump, but on the other hand I just got to a very boring looking beach filled with boring looking people so I might just quit.
Yikes, even Adventure Gamers gave this 2/5. I think that's a definite sign that I should quit!
Just skimmed a playthrough video and am glad I didn't bother with the rest of this. Apparently they had a lot less time and budget for this one...
Rating: Pretty, but otherwise bad.
I've had a browse of the manual (not promising, sounds like the UI will be terrible!) and the introductory graphic novel (awful - badly written, confusing layout and art, full of typos).
Ha ha ha, started the game and immediately having issues - the first screen says "Insert CD 1" and it just stays stuck on that! So, the only solution for this is either mount a virtual optical drive or download an updated exe file from GOG (even if you got the game on Steam). Trying the latter now. What an incredibly promising start!
Didn't work, and it seems like a very fiddly issue to fix. I might try installing on my older PC which has an actual optical drive, which apparently can often fix the issue even if you don't have a CD to put in there. A lot of effort for what is almost certainly going to be a dreadful game that I give up on in half an hour, but never mind!
Good news: it worked! And there was some glitchiness in the game but I fixed that by turning Incremental Rendering off and on!
Bad news: it's fucking terrible already.
It's ugly as sin, for one thing. The control scheme has point and click verbs on the mouse, but also arrow keys for the free-roaming camera which controls like you're in a level editor and means that the game looks even worse than it should at all times. You absolutely have to read the graphic novel to have any idea what's going on because the game starts with you getting off a train with bruises on your face and going to a hotel and that's it (the comic tells you that you're hunting some vampires who have been feeding off a family for generations, the vamps took the family's newborn baby and Gabriel chased them onto a train but they got the drop on him - none of this is in the game, and if you haven't played the previous games then you'll need to read the manual too!), but even so it's an incredibly dull and bewildering start to the game with you in a bland hotel room and no idea of your objectives.
The one good thing so far has been the opening titles which were admirably bonkers - a mix of classic late-90s Clive Barkery horror imagery, a gentle piano tune laid over them which gives the whole thing an anime feel, Space Odyssey (starchild imagery) and Blade Runner (a unicorn dream). Brilliantly, none of this means anything or helps set up the game whatsoever.
Welp, after spending ten minutes or so wandering aimlessly I was about to resort to a walkthough when the game froze and wouldn't let me close it or go to another window so I had to restart my PC. So I think I'm done with this game! Just embarrassingly bad, even ignoring the tech issues.
Skimmed through a playthrough vid, it seems the game is 90% walking around fields and then the last 10% goes absolutely bonkers. It turns out the family are the descendants of Christ, you're the descendant of the soldier who crucified him and your dagger is magic because Jesus kissed it, Jesus had a team of bodyguards whose descendants help you, but a rogue faction used Christ's blood to become vampires. And the guy in the hotel lobby turns out to be another immortal who drank Jesus's blood, but he's a good guy because he decided never to use his powers. Wow.
It is an absolute disgrace how many good reviews this game got, and certain adventure sites should be ashamed.
Rating: Embarrassingly awful.
I started Sanitarium. It's far too clunky and cheesy to be effectively terrifying or even unnerving - the graphics are ugly, the production values are low, the UI is fiddly, the acting is hammy, the puzzles are silly and the whole thing has that late-90s Clive Barker/Se7en/nu-metal feel where even the menus have to be grimdark and spooky (here, two big yellow eyes follow your cursor around the screen, and a ghostly little girl's voice reads out the name of every option you hover over which is hilariously out of place when it's stuff like "text options" and "play credits") - but you can feel the earnest passion behind it all, the puzzles are at least fun, and I am kind of intrigued at the story so far.
Ha ha, it just moved into 100% silly territory, as I am now fighting a pumpkinheaded scarecrow by slashing at his pumpkinhead display weakspots with a scythe. It's all very fiddly, plus the game has already crashed a couple of times. Thankfully I saved in time...
Ugh, this got crappy real fast. The puzzles are of the kind that depend on pixel hunting and going back to check for things arbitrarily changing, which includes new dialogue options. It's already annoying enough having to talk to ten different mutant kids with ten badly written and acted options each, all pretty much telling me the same thing, it really sucks having to keep going back to them in case there's suddenly something else to talk about. It reminds me of Broken Sword and endlessly circling around until something unlocks. I've just about finished the first chapter (I had to check a walkthrough to find out what to do once I'd defeated the evil meteor that had killed all the adults and was mutating the kids into plants, though - turns out I have to walk around the whole place to find the one kid who hasn't disappeared, instead of the game just smoothly taking me to a cutscene or whatever), so I'll leave it there for now. I get the feeling I'm going to have to work through a bunch of small different vignettes, I Have No Mouth style, until I find out how they relate to the real world or whatever, so I don't have any particular urge to find out which cheesy genre story I'm going to get plonked in next.
Sigh, I finally went back to Sanitarium and gog updated it in the last week to use SCUMMVM, which has lost all my saves. Apparently if I rename them and move them then they'll work again, but I can't be arsed, honestly.
Endnote: lololol Adventure Gamers list the spooky girl voice menus as a good thing.
Rating: Admirable ambition but poor design and ugly as hell.
Grim Fandango is still great, obviously. Really funny, well acted, great writing, music is gorgeous.
I put the rendering back to original mode because when you put super-sharp hi-res models on top of the old backgrounds, suddenly the backgrounds look really crappy. With the old pixelly models next to them, they look nice and crisp and detailed! That fixed, everything looks lovely and the art design is great. Especially next to an abomination like Sanitarium. Looking at some comparison videos, it seems like they also brightened the backgrounds up, reduced the contrast, which lets you see more detail but flattens them out a fair bit. That's a shame if so.
(I also went back to tank controls because I was finding the camera-relative controls a bit confusing, for some reason. Perhaps because I've played the original version so many times.)
There are a couple of other little annoyances with the remaster, like how they've slapped UI on top of certain views when the entire design is based around having no UI at all (except dialogue trees - they never solved that one).
