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.

Dropsy The Clown (2015)

I've been playing Dropsy The Clown and I kind of hate it.

You're just chucked into this huge sprawling map with no objective, no feedback on actions, everything is done via pictograms which half the time are indecipherable. I just solved my first puzzle because a dog told me to put a sock on a grave so I did then the dog told me to go back to the circus, so I guess that's progress somehow?

As far as I can tell, people like it because hugging. It's the game equivalent of a cat photo.

I'm giving up on it already - I feel like I'd have to physically draw a map of the entire game and what each character wants (or what I think that blob of pixels is trying to tell me that they want) in order to get anywhere with it. And it's got a four-stage day-night cycle that apparently changes stuff in each location, but with no clues as to what changes and only a couple of rooms with beds that actually let you push the cycle forward. So I'd have to map all that out as well.

Shardlight (2016)

Just played the opening section. Good so far - lovely Ben Chandler art as always (though it has portraits, which I'm against on principle no matter how gorgeous the art!), the acting is mostly good if a little stagey, and the post-apocalyptic setting is cool with lots of little details already. The opening puzzle was pretty fun, pulling crossbolts out of corpses and stuff. I'm now on a little quest to take a letter to someone at the market, classic 'give you a cool opening then ease you into the bigger world with something simple' stuff.

 

A little further through this now. It's nice enough, but the story is very RPGish - I've got two factions thinking I'm loyal to them and spying on the other one, and I'm doing little quests to keep them happy - just 'go and see if the butcher needs help with anything', that sort of thing. It's not a great fit for an adventure game, really, as there aren't a dozen other systems that you're learning and ranking up in via these quests that are, ideally, fun in and of themselves, so it just feels a little underwhelming and directionless. The puzzles have been mostly fine, though I've had to check a walkthrough a couple of times. First time was for a puzzle where you need to get a news announcer to read a certain story out then eavesdrop on some snooty ladies who spot you and stop talking every time you get too close so you can hear their reaction and get some info. I thought I'd have to get the announcer's microphone and put it in the bin next to the ladies. Turns out, talking to the nearby old man about feeding the birds had unbeknownst to me opened up a dialogue option with the food stall at the market on the other side of the map and the solution is to go there, get some sprouts, give them to the old man, point out to him that the crow near the ladies should get some food, so he throws a sprout over there which makes all the crows fly over there and knock the bin over so you can go and pick up the bin so the ladies assume you're a street cleaner and thus not eavesdropping on them so they keep talking. Gabriel Knight levels of nonsense.

Second time was because I got given a five-step plan for infiltrating a hospital and finding a secret, I got as far as pilfering someone's appointment card and then simply couldn't remember what the next thing I was supposed to do was. You can't go back and ask the quest-giver, there's no to do list, and trying to just give the card to the hospital guard doesn't get you any pointers either. However, I'm not sure it would have helped even if I'd written the plan down verbatim, because it seems that what I'm supposed to do is give the card to my forger friend, but I have no idea why that's helpful. I assume he'll put the signature of the patient on there, but I don't know what that will achieve, especially as there was specifically a bit of dialogue where the patient was told they couldn't send someone else in their stead. I'm getting flashbacks to struggling through Deus Ex quests, this really is RPGish!

Anyway, I've left it there for the moment, with that step ready to complete at the start of my next play session. I'm going to keep going with the game, it's fairly enjoyable and nicely presented, but I just hope it picks up a bit soon.

Okay, finished Shardlight. It turned out to be weirdly short and linear, given how RPGy it felt not only in the quest-based structure but also the world-building with different factions etc. Felt very much like a Dishonored or Fallout or something. It really needed to broaden out in the middle a bit in order to give the ending more heft, and some more twists and turns to the story (the only one it had was the 'rebel leader turns out to also be bad' trope - especially not great to do it with a Black woman three years after Bioshock Infinite). Overall, very much a typical Wadjet Eye production - lovely presentation (art, VO etc), but quite a dour tone with some clunky writing and mostly simple mundane puzzles.

Rating: pretty but shallow

The Fabelmans (2022)

A slow, overlong coming of age pic, with didactic dialogue and some clunky acting - the young actors are all just about okay, while Dano, Williams and Rogen are stilted. It felt like Spielberg indulging in a therapy session more than anything, and I suspect if JJ Abrams had directed this picture, people would have been a lot less forgiving of it. Better to watch Super 8 or Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made.

Rating: Fine.

Batman: Arkham VR (2016)

I paid £3.75 and it was juuuust about worth it. You stand still and occasionally open or scan things, or grapple-hook/batarang things with the help of an auto-target. The presentation is great, there's lots of variety and it makes you feel cool the whole time. It's great fun sliding open a morgue drawer and using your Bat-Scanner on the corpse, then grappling out of the skylight to the Batwing above. But "the whole time" is under an hour, unless you examine every nook and cranny and then play through again with added Riddler trophies to find (though for as long as I bothered with it, this just amounts to opening drawers etc, nothing clever). Also, there are some tech issues - they haven't kept on top of it for modern headsets, so you have to do a lot of fiddling with settings in Windows and Steam VR.

So, at 75% off and if you're willing to do some fiddling, I'd recommend it as an 'interactive experience' rather than a game. But I think I would have been happier if it had been 80% off!

It did make me think, a lot more AAA(A) games should put a little team together and knock out a VR experience set in the world they've spent years building, then put it out at a very reasonable price. It was really cool just to be standing on a ledge in Gotham, looking up at the blimps and towers, looking down at the tiny cars and people streaming by.

Rating: cool experience, with some price and tech provisos.

2064: Read Only Memories (2015)

Initial impressions:
Gameplay-wise, so far it's half-adventure game, half VN. Unfortunately, the introductory puzzle was very dull (pick up some headphones, pair them with two home devices, write and submit a review of them, go to bed), and the VN dialogue is cute and well-written but goes on for too long. I suspect this, and possibly the VO issue, is just a standard aspect of the VN genre - all you've got is talking, so let's put as much of it in there as possible - and the adventure game aspect is making me a little itchier to get through the dialogue than I should be.
The presentation is cute, though it's mildly irritating to have the graphics take up so little of the screen! The interface is a little annoying: it often takes more clicks than it should to do something, even before the standard VN dialogue clicking (why do I have to open a verb coin then select use for each icon on my computer rather than just click on them?!); there's voice acting and the text always runs slower than the VO so you either finish listening to the line then have to wait for the text to catch up or you're clicking to get the text up immediately and you've read the whole thing before the VO has got halfway through - it feels like one of those escort missions where the NPC's walking speed is halfway between your walk and run speeds, and it's yet more clicking!

Welp, it crashed, there's no autosave, and I can't be bothered to spend like ten minutes clicking through all that dialogue again to catch back up to my latest manual save. I got an hour or so in. It's fine, but it's incredibly linear and the adventure game stuff doesn't actually have any heft, it's more like a minigame to break up the VN clicking. It feels like a 'my first cyberpunk story' and/or 'my first VN', probably better suited to a 13 year old Hot Topic customer. Everything about it is good - the voice-acting, music, art, writing - but it's all very cutesy (your robot pal sounds very much like Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun) and can get wearing fast. If it were a game within a game, like something that Chloe plays in Life Is Strange or something, it'd be amazing (assuming it didn't crash and fail to save!). Or even as a portable game, something to play on your phone while you commute. (Looking at Wikipedia to see if it was originally a DX game or something, I see it was first released on PC, but also that it only later got a port and a voiced update - with the "2064" bit being added on at that point - so that might explain why the VO and text aren't very well synced.)

Rating: nicely made, but a bit basic and some UI irritations.

Her Story (2015)

BIG SPOILERS BELOW

I love the concept of this but suspect I will get frustrated with very quickly.

Yeah, I was right, not sold on this at all so far! I've only played about 30 minutes, I guess, but I don't feel any compulsion to play more. Basically, you're put in front of an old CRT monitor with a database of a bunch of 10ish second clips from some police interviews of this one woman. You can search the clips' transcripts for any word(s), and it brings up the results. That's it. You don't know who you are, or why you're looking at these clips. I can only assume the goal is 'find out what really happened', though all you can do is watch (and tag and bookmark) clips, it's not like there's any way (currently) to communicate your deductions. Also, there's no way to take notes, never mind copy paste sections of the clips' digital transcripts. Plus, if you do a search it only shows you the first five results. What I'd actually do here would be to put them all in order, and just watch the interviews through, but there's no way to do that and I wouldn't want to do that level of tedious busywork anyway.
So it seems like what this is, is 'watch three or so interviews and then have a little think to yourself about what might have really happened', with a bunch of contrived obstacles to make it feel like a game. She mentions the cat flap in one clip, so I do a search for cat flap and watch a couple more clips where she mentions it. It's a possible ingress to the house for a thin person. So, what, I'm just supposed to flail wildly at random stuff like that, tab out to Notepad and basically transcribe everything, grinding away until I have a vague idea of what happened? This just... does not seem interesting to me. Has anyone else played this? 

I quickly glanced at some reviews and saw one mention that the reviewer had 3 A4 pages of notes by the end of it. This reminded me that generally I'm not a big fan of detective games, mainly because I go in with little faith that things will make sense, that its expectations of my deductive skills will be reasonable, and that it will be much more fun than those 'every blue tile must be next to a green tile' logic puzzles, and I'm not often proved wrong. I had hoped that the unusual format of this game would force the designer to avoid these issues, but it seems that instead it's just exacerbated them.
I think what's dampened my enthusiasm is that I don't feel like I'm solving a mystery as much as I'm solving a search engine.
I suspect that the game putting you in front of the UI with no context of who you are etc is an indicator that this is to be approached as a logic puzzle rather than a story, like playing Minesweeper with video clips, and that's just not very appealing to me. And yet simultaneously it seems like there's no formal end state, so I'll just have to decide whether I've finished or not, which feels equally unsatisfying and undermining of my confidence in the game.
I really want to like this game, so I might give it another hour tomorrow and commit to making copious notes and try to give the game the benefit of the doubt that I'm not just wasting my time transcribing a load of irrelevant fluff, see if it clicks for me and I suddenly get really into it... (If I'm not even supposed to be doing stuff like that and I'm supposed to just be jumping from clip to clip and gleaning some sort of overall story, I'd rather just watch Memento or an episode of Bergerac.)

Okay, played it for a couple more hours. I managed to fluke my way into finding a big story thread through some random search, which wasn't super satisfying but at least it got me underway. I also started getting those reflections on the monitor and bits of music to tell me that I'd found an important clip. So, it was quite fun for a while finding out new bits of the real story. And it's cool to go back to watch the older clips and realise that her performance is very different and that her clothes are much more vibrant, like she's putting on a show. By the time you get to the confession interview, she's in a plain white top. Smart touch. Also, I get now that the results are in chronological order and become more telling as they go, so the 'first 5 results' thing is there to force you to come up with more specific words or combinations of them.

But now I'm back to feeling like I'm fighting the search engine/abstruse game structure rather than solving a mystery, because as far as I can tell I basically know the entire story - the midwife, the twin in the attic, the murder with the mirror shard and then the cover-up - but the game hasn't ended, so I'm just flailing around again trying to work out what questions still exist. Like, I don't know where Hannah is at the time of this final interview, but how do I find that out? There's no way to know what search terms will get me there. For all I know, there's an entire extra level of story I haven't got to yet and an even more recent interview where it turns out that actually she was pretending to be Eve pretending to be Hannah and she actually is Hannah. Or something. I was hoping the clock might be a way to judge how far through the game I am, but seems not.  I think I'm at the stage where I need to go get hints on how to complete this thing, which is a shame.

Okay, so I looked at some hint guides trying not to spoil anything for myself, and saw a mention that the database checker shows you how many videos you've watched. So I thought maybe the aim is to watch every single one of them. So I set to that, watching the older clips that I'd mostly been ignoring, and after a couple that I didn't think had really told me anything more, I got the chat window. I said yes I understood and I was finished, just to see what happened, I was told to log off to meet SB outside, did that and got the credits! It also called me Sarah and referred to what my mother had done, which I actually hadn't realised at all - I had assumed I was Hannah (or maybe Eve in a twist) a few years later. I probably should have thought about it, as I knew there was a baby and the clock said 2024, but I figured that must have been matching my system clock because why would he set the game in the future? Anyway, after the credits, it gave me the ability to see all videos for any search, not just five, but going back in and using that just feels like cheating. So, I know it's kind of my fault for saying 'yes, I understand everything' but also I knew that I didn't know what I didn't know, so I was hoping to bump up against some sort of final test and then be able to go back in with more focus.
So, I guess the remaining question is, where is Hannah? I did see in the hint guide that there's a question of whether it's actually split personality because in one video you see her tapping their secret code to herself. Also, I did notice that the tattoo timeline maybe seemed a bit weird. Like, she was supposed to have got that when she went to the bedsit, and I figured that was why Simon found it easy to believe she was just someone who looked very similar to his wife. But there's one interview where she doesn't have the tattoo, which doesn't make sense?
But yeah, it's stuff like that which I found a bit frustrating, because either I knew what questions I wanted to ask but not how, or I didn't know which questions remained. And the way it ended was not very satisfying either, though I cop to that being half my fault.

Okay, looking at Wikipedia, I think I understood like... 80% of it? I think it hedges its bets a fair bit by having the answer be 'there are three possible interpretations' and also by leaving it up to the player to decide the game is finished! 

Rating: interesting, but frustrating in lots of different ways.

Late Night With The Devil (2024)

Didn't think much of this. It makes too many fake footage errors, the acting is often stagey when it shouldn't be, a lot of the characterisation and dialogue is far too close to Larry Sanders for comfort (I know they're both pulling from Johnny Carson et al, but even so) and there's nothing very surprising in there. Felt like a slightly lazy Inside No 9 episode. David Dastmalchian is really good, though.

Rating: Fine.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

I genuinely struggled to get through it. It has the feel of a cinematic universe movie, just rushing to handle all the different plotlines and franchise elements that it feels obliged to cover. Just jampacked with story elements that it unceremoniously drops or forgets about, barely any jokes and the ones that are in there are painfully unfunny, full of fanservice in ways that almost never make sense, and zero new ideas. The reason "Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian" had promise as a title was that it suggested a sequel that took a complete left-turn and dared to throw out a bunch of elements from the first movie; the replacement, "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice", seemed like a clever title but in retrospect it's an accurate indictment of a movie that does nothing except repeat the original.

Rating: Atrocious.

Trap (2024)

It was goofy fun but closer to a The Visit or Old than Sixth Sense or Split in terms of quality. One of those ones that feels like it should be an "M Night Shyamalan presents" rather than one directed by him. I really liked Josh Hartnett, his kid and Allison Pill, and Senya Shyamalan was alright (good singer-songwriter, okay actor). The concept of the structure being successive cat and mouse games getting tighter and tighter was cool, but it did lead to a lot of stuff feeling contrived or disjointed. If you go in expecting silly genre thrills you'll probably enjoy it.

Rating: throwaway fun

Dream Scenario (2023)

SPOILERS BELOW

A solid execution, but the allegory for internet fame was so close that they may as well have not bothered with the dream stuff and just had it be about a milkshake ducked guy. It felt like a semi-Kaufman. And when they do finally commit to the concept for a few minutes at the end, it conflicts with the rest of the movie which had up till then kept it ambiguous at best as to whether anything metaphysical had happened (and in fact seemed to be leaning towards it being coincidence until the internet article at which point it became mass suggestion).

Rating: intriguing but timid

Anna's Quest (2015)

It's produced by Daedalic but not developed by them so I thought I'd give it a shot. So far, I'm not really enjoying it. It's incredibly twee and bland, from the artstyle through the voice acting to even the font (which is either Comic Sans or very close to it). The VO also goes at a snail's pace and contains fairly regular misreads. The storytelling isn't up to much either, starting with a pointless prologue then the inciting incident told via storybook cutscene (terrible decision) and gameplay kicking in with you stuck in a small room and doing some rote puzzles. It's in the Daedelic engine, so it does also have a few of their standard problems like the characters moving too fast for their walk animation so they look like they're sliding around, and the tacky adverts on the menu screen. Also, there are no custom animations for any interactions which, as I think I've said previously (probably with a Daedalic game), you can't really get away with at high resolution. And even Monkey Island etc would have a few of them! It just feels really cheap. At least that Daedalic guy didn't insist on singing a song at the start, I guess.
Anyway, I just got stuck (which I maintain should not really happen at this early stage of an adventure), and looked up a walkthrough and the solution is nonsense. Basically, you've got to get the collar off a tired but grumpy cat, so you need a bed for it so it'll go to sleep. I got the lumpy pillow and put some toy stuffing in it to make it comfy, but it's still "not appealing enough". That's all the hints I get. Apparently the solution is to use the scissors to cut a bit off the curtains and use that on the pillow. I have no idea why this is the case.
So I'm going to give this a tiny bit more of a chance but I doubt I'll be spending long on it. 

Re. the curtains puzzle, if you try to use them, she does mention that they're soft. So I suppose that if you've guessed that the problem with the pillow is that it's not soft enough yet, then you might decide to try to cut a strip of curtain off and just lay it on top of the pillow, but it's a hell of a reach, especially when the player character Anna is giving you the solution to a bunch of other puzzles before you get to complete them.
Another classic Daedalic issue at play is the ever-present question "is this bad writing or a bad translation or both?" If the lead character didn't say "oh" or "pardon?" or "sorry?" every other line the game would be half as long and a lot more bearable.
So, I got out of the witch's cottage by gathering the ingredients of a spell, then went to a village with a tavern and a blacksmiths and a church and yawwwwwn. My quest is to cure my sick uncle so I go see a wizard and find out my big mission is to... gather the ingredients of a spell! Nope. Along with a new character whose VO is so bad I can only assume they were a backer or something (the main feature of the extras is what seems to be fan art of the game, so they were crowd-sourcing at least some stuff), this is the last straw. I had hoped it would get a little more exciting once I escaped the cottage but it went the other way if anything. So I'm done with it.

Rating: twee, rote and bland with infuriating VO.

Technobabylon (2015)

Started on Technobabylon, a Wadjet Eye produced (but not developed) game. Like Blackwell Epiphany, it's got Ben Chandler doing art in a 640x400 resolution, and again it looks as gorgeous as pixel art at this res is ever going to (I'll be interested to see how their upcoming game Old Skies ends up looking, as it's Ben doing HD art!). Also, it has the massive portraits like Epiphany, and the inability to turn off subtitles like Primordia had until a very recent patch (that came along shortly after I tweeted them to ask if it was possible, so I suspect that was thanks to me!). As far as I can tell, though - no egg-timer! Hooray!

So far, it's pretty cool. It's a cyberpunk story with lots of structural playfulness - multiple POV characters, flashbacks - and lots of cool world-building. It starts off with you stuck in your shitty welfare apartment because the internet has gone down and so your door won't open. Potentially a dull start to a game, but here you're using wetware goop to hack into stuff, giving viruses to your home appliances and pitting their digital mascots against each other, so it's good fun. The juxtaposition between the cyberspace with its floating anime heads and glowy icons, and your scuzzy apartment full of dirty clothes and dripping food is really effective. The writing is strong as well.

There are some minor issues - the UI isn't quite as slick as it should be (too many steps and mouse journeys to everything), sometimes the worldbuilding is subtle enough that it obfuscates puzzle logic, and the voice acting is sometimes a little off (line misreads, or a bit stagey) - but overall so far it's very engaging. 

Played a bit more of this. It switched to the detective co-protagonist and the game got a little less interesting, a little more clunky. The dialogue is a bit more wrought and contrived, and some of the puzzles are a bit wonkier. Also, it's got that Wadjet Eye feel to the VO where everyone's dour and grumbly and it's just a bit wearing after a while. (Also, Dave tries his hand at a Texan religous zealot this time round!) Production values are still impressive, though, and I like the second detective on the case, Lao (who happens to be trans, which is nice to see included - and I think it only gets mentioned on an optional dialogue thread, which is cool, though Ed Fear would call this second wave rep and want to see more focus on it!). It's just brought the timelines of the two player-characters together and reveal how one was affecting the other, which was fun, so I'm hoping it perks up again. 

I finished Technobabylon. It's gorgeous throughout, really nicely presented, and the VO is all great, no clunkers. But puzzles and dialogue wise it ended up feeling like a bit of a slog. There's clearly been a lot of work put into the background lore, but instead of hinting towards it, every conversation, every dialogue tree is twice as long as it needs to be, it's all incredibly didactic, and the writer seems aware of it because the player characters are mainly there to listen to a long diatribe and then reply "so you're saying [five word down-to-earth summary]".

The plot is overly-complex too, I found myself not really following or caring about all the many evil scientists and politicians and what have you and their various schemes. 

And there were some fun puzzles where you're taking out evil soldiers and stuff, but also a lot of looking through files and replacing cannisters with other cannisters and interacting with UIs. Even the 'fun action-scene' puzzles felt fiddly and drawn out, there was never any change in pace. And frustration was added on top when the way that future stuff works wasn't explained properly, so after finally figuring something out (or brute forcing it or using a walkthrough) my reaction was too often 'oh, that's how that thing works' rather than 'oh, I should have got that, what a clever puzzle'. That, combined with a few regular puzzles that just had poor signposting or bullshit pixel-hunts, made for a pretty bumpy experience.

Bulletstorm (2013)

Played a little under an hour, so far it's... okay. I maybe had my expectations set too high, or I had it combined with Titanfall 2 in my mind, but I was expecting something a little more fun and inventive. The first half hour or so is mostly cheesy meatheaded cutscenes, QTEs and tutorial stuff. It's all really bland and feels like it was written by a 14 year old who plays a lot of Gears Of War and Duke Nukem Forever. It looks fine, but the art direction isn't particularly imaginative either, Gears Of War but with some Rage thrown in. I got to the start of the gameplay and while it's got some fun mechanics (the kick, the lasso, the points for kill types) it all feels really loose, like I'm just mashing my way through it. It doesn't have that feeling of precision tactics that Doom (93 and 16), Juarez Gunslinger or Shadow Warrior do. Maybe it's not supposed to and I should be barrelling through having fun killing people in different ways. The only problem is that that's getting a little stale already - you can only whip and kick someone to death so many times before it gets dull. It feels a little like I'm playing a single-player campaign that was only really designed to teach me how to play a multiplayer game or a wave shooter or something. Hopefully I'm still in the opening stages and it'll get more involved as I go.

I've now played for a few more hours. It might be because I'm coming from the fairly rubbish and po-faced Crysis 3, but I felt a lot more positive about this game as I went on. The settings get a lot more attractive - sci-fi cities and big double moons and the like - and lots of fun setpieces like getting chased by a gigantic threshing wheel thing or dropping a train on an angry dragon beast (though I had to drop the difficulty down to very easy for the former - why do devs always make turret sections insanely hard?). And most of the team have fucked off so there's less meathead marine swearing and grunting to put up with. Now I've unlocked some weapons and alt-fire modes and stuff, the combat has livened up a bit too, though it can still feel a little loose and a little repetitive. I'd really like a slo-mo power-up to get in some nice trick shots. Also, I understand the thinking behind it - to encourage players to have fun - but having checklists of complicated ways to kill enemies in order to unlock stuff can make doing stuff like killing punk-thugs by kicking them into cacti feel like grinding.

Okay, finished. The story and writing continued to be painfully bad - the most generic stuff possible covered with rude words masquerading as jokes or bigotry masquerading as characterisation. Apparently they were inspired by Firefly but they must not have actually watched the show if this is what they ended up with. And they have the gall to end it on a cliffhanger.
Otherwise, when it's fun and pretty, it's really fun and pretty, but there were too many bullet-sponge mini-bosses and interminable boss fights and zombies and what have you, and not enough variety of locations (turns out the partially-collapsed leisure mega-complex one is basically the only exterior you get, and while it looks nice, seeing it yet again after another section of corridors isn't really enough), for it to sustain that for any period of time. Probably the most irritating thing was that you are only allowed to hold three weapons at a time, and you can only swap them out when you come across an in-world terminal - the whole game is based around finding fun ways to kill enemies, why would they restrain the player like that? Even more frustrating is that when you finish the campaign they unlock the ability to hold all your weapons at once on a replay. Let me do that the first time, you idiots!

Rating: can be fun, but often held back by irritating design and bad writing

A Fisherman's Tale (2019)

Really nice presentation, and some cool basic puzzles to get started. I did have to check a walkthrough really early on because due to some bad lighting design I thought something was a glitch. Weirdly, I couldn't find a single text walkthrough, so I had to quit out, watch a video and then come back in (and redo a bunch of stuff because of the lack of checkpoints).
I really like the choice of a French narrator, it works really well. But the radio VO is clearly just one of the devs and it really lets the whole thing down, I don't understand why they'd do that. At least get a mate who can do a solid sea captain yarrrr voice instead of having it sound like an IT helpdesk. There's some other clunkiness to it, but overall pretty cool and I'm looking forward to going back to it.

Finished A Fisherman's Tale, it was quite nice but fairly limited in various ways - there's not a lot of world interaction, the puzzles are mostly 'you need a thing, either find it in a drawer or find a too small/big version of it and resize it', and it's pretty short with only three main puzzles that have a few elements each to them.

Rating: lovely presentation, but short and shallow gameplay.

Crysis 3 (2013)

Well, I've played through the cyberspace tutorial and hopefully remembered most of the myriad controls. I've put all the settings to high and it seems to be running fine, but it still seems to have weird visuals, where you get bright white pixels on the edges of surfaces. I'm hoping it because I'm out in the rain and once I get indoors it'll go away...
Anyway, the game isn't particularly fun so far! I don't feel like I'm getting a chance to sneak around and come up with tactics. I'm in an action bubble of sorts but it's not the open spaces of Crysis 1 or Far Cry 1, it's all walls and stairs, so it feels like I may as well be in a corridor shooter anyway. This is just the first level, hopefully it'll get to some nice daytime post-apocalyptic open spaces soon.

I had to put it down to the easiest setting because it really does not give you an inch on the very first level. Really bad way to start the game, especially as I tended to coast through the rest of it. Anyway, generally it's fairly terrible. The white pixels thing went away after that first level, and the visuals are technically impressive (especially in the outside bits) but rather soulless - I got more of a thrill from the setting of Far Cry 1 in a recent replay because it's so well directed. The gameplay doesn't help either, because as with Crysis 2 they've basically abandoned the original loop of staking out an area, tagging the enemies and oh-so-slowly creeping your way around the place taking them out one by one (then maniacally rushing the last few and blowing a bunch of stuff up), so you don't get to sit there enjoying your surroundings, you're basically just sprinting past them the whole time. You can tag enemies and all that, but you're basically just play-acting as you just get a group of three enemies or so to take out from behind a crate before you trundle down the one path you need to take to get to the next glowy thing and watch as your control is taken away and some more stuff blows up. That's if you're not following Psycho through another five minutes of actual corridors as he bleats on about some plot point. (The story, incidentally, is absolutely abominable - clunkily told, interminably long and utterly boring.)

And the weird thing is it keeps getting worse as it goes. They just keep throwing more turret sections and boss battles and confusing cave sections and stuff at you. It's really bizarre how much this franchise misunderstands its own original strengths. I gave it six hours or so but gave up once I got to a boss battle with no checkpoints, just endlessly shooting a bit metal thing.

Rating: technically impressive visuals but no fun

Star Trek: Voyager (1995 - 2001)

Note: most of these are my posts copied over from a Star Trek group-watch going through the entire series in broadcast order, rather than properly written reviews. 

VOY S01E0 "title" Stardate  Broadcast date 1995-00-00
Placeholder

group watch ongoing

Previous watch through notes:

I watched the Voyager pilot, and thought it was okay. Can't believe they also went back to the well of "trapped in an olde times recreation by a god-type being" for their opening episode, after TNG did Q and DS9 did the wormhole entities (albeit with memories), though!

am on S2. Voyager has been consistently entertaining.

I just watched Living Witness and it was absolutely fantastic.

Just watched the cold open for Relativity, and it's a very similar set-up to LOST's opening of Season 5

Seven Of Nine's uniform is fucking ridiculous, whatever exoplating excuses they want to come up with ("you're used to having big clunky armour on, so you'll probably be most comfortable getting sewn into a skintight one-piece"). Her tits take over every scene she's in, it's really distracting and feels pretty seedy.

Just watched Equinox, and I see what you guys mean by Janeway being so uneven - she's gone completely mental! Does this get followed up on at all, or just forgotten? Her actions are incredibly heinous in this episode and seem to have been forgotten about by the end of it because she pulled a sad face when SPOILER that captain died.

I'm on the antepenultimate episode of Voyager and have generally really enjoyed the (skiplist episodes of the) series. I just finished Author, Author, which went back to the alt-crew holo-sim well, but was still entertaining. It also was indeed very reminiscent of the Data trial.

The series finale was rather unsatisfying. It felt very similar to that one where Chekotay and Harry find Voyager on the ice planet, plus there never felt like any peril except from crazier-than-usual, genocidal future Janeway until she does what she should remember is always the best thing to do: stop fucking about for half an episode and just tell Janeway the truth. It certainly had high production value, though, and I liked the future stuff.

(Enterprise notes start on page 12 of that Thumbs thread.)

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993 - 1999)

Note: most of these are my posts copied over from a Star Trek group-watch going through the entire series in broadcast order, rather than properly written reviews. 

DS9 S01E0 "title" Stardate  Broadcast date 1993-00-00
Placeholder

group watch ongoing

Previous watch through notes:

Just watched the opening scene of DS9 and it was brilliant! A cool idea and a dramatic start to the series, the visual effect shots are a lot more dynamic and integrated (something that started happening towards the end of TNG - an example that caught my eye was Yar and Picard approaching the Enterprise in All Good Things), and it's very energetically directed.

the DS9 intro does reflect the series, i.e. BORING. I'm about to move onto season 3, hopefully it'll start picking up.

I did enjoy the Kafka-esque elements of Tribunal. It got a little slow in the second half, and O'Brien didn't have quite the same gravitas as Picard in his "four lights" episode, but overall it was pretty cool.

am on S4. DS9 is finally starting to get bearable (the changelings tend to perk everything up a bit, especially as they introduce the ever-reliable The Thing plot-mechanics, and Sisko definitely improves along with his hair stylings)

I'm giving up on DS9. Perhaps it's because I'm not watching the whole thing, but I'm at season 5 and even the cherry-picked episodes are nothing special. So I ended on a high note with the excellent "Trials And Tribble-ations" (it's a shame that Tribbles didn't become more of a tradition - TOS, TAS and DS9 got them, would have been nice for TNG, Voyager and Enterprise to get them too).

I enjoyed the three remaining DS9 eps that I watched - the Klingon one ("Soldiers of the Empire"?), Far Beyond the Stars and In the Pale Moonlight.

Just watched the end of DS9. As someone who has barely been watching it, that seemed like some pretty goofy, cheesy shit! First the Republic Serial stuff with Sisko and the prophet god dude, then all those badly-put-together flashback sequences! Also, that final shot tracking away from the window seemed really off-scale. But really, as I say, it didn't mean much to me as I haven't been invested in this series.

The Fall Guy (2024)

It's so close to being great, it just needed half an hour cut out and a Shane Black rewrite. There's loads of fun stuff in there, it just regularly loses steam and focus. Whenever it gets away from 'stunt guy uses his skillset to survive peril' it starts to drag: the romantic storyline feels disconnected and distracting, and the villains' plot is too busy (they lampshade this at one point but that doesn't magically fix it) and occasionally nonsensical.

Also, for a movie about a stunt guy directed by a stunt guy, a lot of the stunts feel too fake or underwhelming. A lot of them look better in the bts footage that plays over the credits than they do in-movie. I think it may have been a combination of too much wire-removal and digital enhancement plus an overuse of close-ups to show off how much the actors are doing - it just never looks as good as the GoPro wide shots.

Anyway, I enjoyed it, laughed a fair bit, and thought some of the melee combat was great (Gosling and Blunt are excellent, and Duke gets some good stuff though not as much as I would have liked), but still came away a bit disappointed.

Rating: sporadically great but overall a bit of a waste.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

(watched as part of a broadcast-order franchise group-watch)

This movie came out in the middle of a month-long gap between TNG episodes, before the last four episodes of TNG S2. I suspect it's going to feel very weird jumping from TNG back to TOS movies!

Back to the classy opening titles. I like this arrangement of the opening theme, too.
The opening is cool. Enigmatic, and a bit of a Mad Max vibe. (edited) 

More location shooting for this rock-climbing bit, too. Good stuff.

More Mad Max and Star Wars vibes on that planet, with the Mos Eisley style bar (though SW never had three-boobed cat strippers!).
They're going back to the 'this is a new ship that hasn't had all the wrinkles ironed out' beat from TMP again, which I can't blame them for - solid narrative sense to put your heroes on the back foot again.
Straight into the broad comedy stuff with the main crew, though - this perhaps feels like a bit of an admission that the light-hearted tone of Voyage Home is the best fit for the ensemble at their current age. Don't know if they could pull off a Wrath Of Khan again, even though it's only 7 years later.

All the visual and special effects are strong so far. Good starship shots, matte paintings, compositing etc. Funny to see them save budget on the shuttle picking up Kirk et al by just shining a big light - you'd never see a more modern Trek movie doing that.

The Kirk/Spock/Bones dialogue is still great. Amazing how evergreen that chemistry is. (edited) 

The majesty of the shuttle approach and docking to the Enterprise is a bit less than it used to be, but nice that they're still taking a few moments to do it.

I see Kirk still has a female crewmember in a skirt to take his coat for him.
It's interesting to see that they're keeping the 'I hate those Klingon devils' stuff in, even though regular Trek viewers are now used to seeing Worf on the Enterprise and generally less fraught relations with the Klingons. Intentionally making the TOS crew seem a little bigoted and retrograde is a bold choice.

Spock's eyebrows look a little more drawn on than usual!

Well, it's nice that Uhura's singing finally got used in a story beat, I guess, even if she did have to strip in front of the crew.

Ha, great to see Shatner still doing some unconvincing karate chops.
And neck-pinching a horse is a fun move, even if tactically nonsensical.

Oh wow, I remember that 'Scotty hits his head' gag was in the (tv?) trailer and endlessly amusing, I don't think I'd ever realised that it's actually a very contrived way to take him off the board rather than have him actively on either side.
Oh well, at least he passed the Venkman test of not copping off with a possessed horny woman. Not sure TOS Scotty would have.

A few more ropey effects showing up as it goes on!

This God thing comes out of left-field. I think that's the big issue with this movie: it's full of good stuff (that scene where he's attempting to 'turn' McCoy, Spock and Kirk was very effective) and it's fairly pacey but the structure is pretty flimsy. There's no strong throughline because you don't know what Sybok wants, you're not sure for a long time what the nature of his hold over people is, the Klingons are just hanging about on the edges to show up for a bit of jeopardy when needed...

Funny moment when Eden turns out to look like Southern California and Sybok is awed while Kirk just has a 'I've seen this at least thirty times before' look on his face.

A really messy ending. Suddenly they're looking for God, and they get through this impassable barrier with no issues or unique approach, but then he turns out to be a Wizard Of Oz with laser eyes (and it's unclear how Sybok knew to come to this planet, or if it's a coincidence that there's a godlike alien on the one they happened upon, or it's read their minds somehow and played into what they were looking for), and then they try to do an action movie ending which is far too low-budget and goofy to work, and then there's an empty gesture towards some sort of character arc between the lead trio, a butt joke and then that's the end.
I like a lot about it, including the deeper thematic stuff even though it's under-served, but it has a lot of issues with structure, pacing and scale. I think I would have preferred a return to the TMP tone for this one.

DooM (2016)

Finally got round to starting DooM '16 on my new PC and it handles it marvellously! It's running fine in 4K (as far as I can tell, unless even though I've set it to that it's outputting at 1080p regardless because of some setting or other and I'm sitting there like a dope going "wowwww 4K much difference"!), I might whack some more settings up, see how it does. It looks really nice although honestly I don't think I can really see much difference in game graphics over the past ten years. Maybe I need to get a 2024 game and see if it blows me away.
Anyway, I had to knock it down to easy mode to get anywhere with it (maybe the game is tough, maybe I'm rubbish, or maybe it's because I'm not at a proper set-up with a desk and stuff, I'm just on the sofa with my kb/m and a tray, but I didn't feel like I was able to do all the strafing and swivelling and what have you as gracefully as I should be), but now it's really fun. I'm enjoying ripping through demons but still getting freaked out when they decide to charge at me. The enemy AI and physics and stuff all come together really nicely. The mood's great as well, everything's designed to feel really oppressive and heavy metal.

Have got back into DooM 2016 (with a proper desk set up now but still on easy mode!) and am now about halfway through. While I'm enjoying it, I am feeling a little worn on it already. I'm not sure if it's because I put it down to Easy, but there doesn't feel like much balancing in this game - none of the enemies or weapons feel that different from each other, I'm not constantly making tactical decisions like I was with classic DooM™. The hellknight is the main one I worry about because it constantly charges and does its jump attack thing, but otherwise it feels a bit more like a Serious Sam game a lot of the time. The enemy AI and navigation continues to be very impressive, though. But I'm climbing this tower to chase down cyborg Tilda Swinton, and it's just big fight in a circle then lots of platforming then big fight in a circle...
Also, I want some pinkies and flying tomatoes and stuff! I'm starting to get cooler enemies now but it's still mostly zombie variants, and all humanoids.

Okay, Doom almost immediately picked back up again by sending me to Hell and introducing a bunch of new enemies. I've now got Cacos, Lost Souls and Barons, plus I've got the gauss gun! The atmosphere is great here as well, especially the sound design.

I'm just about to get the BFG, and I'd ideally like to meet a cyberdemon and robospider, but I'll have to see if I get bored of it before they show up! The arena fights are definitely more blood-pumping now all the bigger, more diverse enemies are in. They probably should have cut an hour or two out of the first half of the game.
It's also weird how the beginning of the game is all 'look at us, we hate boring story, the Doomslayer is just going to smash up any vidscreens trying to do exposition and give him missions' and then there's loads of boring story throughout the whole thing.

Well, I got to the cyberdemon, and fuck that noise. An incredibly irritating, long and boring boss battle in a small round arena with a bunch of shitty wave attacks, and they start you off in a really annoying position as well. Plus, it kept crashing every fifteen or so attempts. Fuck that. I was still enjoying the game but it also didn't really feel like it was giving me much variety, so I'm not too disappointed to give up at this point - I think I got everything out of it I was going to, although it's a shame I didn't get to see more of Hell.
Generally, though, very cool game, especially once it steps up at the halfway point, with lots of atmosphere and great enemy AI.

Red Matter (2018)

Gave it a little try. If it weren't VR, it'd be the most boring game ever - deserted space station, spooky whispers, snarky AI, you have to go around finding fuses - but it is still cool to be hanging out in a high fidelity sci-fi setting. It's still not as good as Alyx, obvs. One thing a lot of VR games just don't seem to twig to is how important world and object interaction is. You want to go peer at things, pick things up, throw things around etc. Your inputs are your eyes and your hands, that's what you want to be using all the time. And a - if not the - big selling point of VR is immersion.

Finished. It was bad enough that I don't know if I'll bother with the sequel, which is a shame considering I've already purchased it. I'll have to be more wary of the review 'VR bump' in future!

Basically, it's cool coasting around big well-rendered spaces in VR, but otherwise this is a fairly empty game with not much interaction and the only actual mechanics being a few simple logic puzzles. Movement is slow, and there are a couple of UI choices that mean everything takes more steps than it should. It feels like these choices were made to pad the game out tbh. Also, the story is pretty generic and then there's an abrupt twist ending which manages to simultaneously be nigh-incomprehensible and tired.

Rating: pretty but empty.

Furiosa (2024)

MILD SPOILERS BELOW

This movie makes all the mistakes I was hoping it wouldn't.

As a Mad Max movie, it's too long - the longest by a full half hour. It's over-reliant on CG - there are big chunks of action sequences where it feels entirely CG or at best actors against a greenscreen, giving it that dreaded 'video game feel', and there's a lot of de-aging and actor-merging so a lot of characters have a digital feel to their faces. It uses all the same visual iconography as a previous entry, bringing nothing new to the table. (The only new thing it brings, really, is Dementus, in that it's a prostheticed-up performance at Oldman in Fifth Element or Depp in Tusk levels of silliness that the series has never gone to before. Not that this is a good thing.) It has a romance subplot (could a female-led Wasteland movie really not just get by without one?). It actually slows down towards the end, retreating into montages, lore-and-exposition narration and self-indulgent monologues about human suffering and 'we're not so different, you and I'. I often felt myself zoning out, bored and even losing track of the story, which are very odd things to happen during a Mad Max movie.

It walks into all the usual prequel traps, too. It defangs and demystifies existing villains (Immortan Joe is now some guy who hangs out in his office bartering over exchange rates, almost on the same level as the other warlords and no longer Furiosa's great nemesis). It needlessly and prosaically explains things from the original (hey, did you want to know how the doctor came to work for Immortan Joe? He was part of a barter deal!). It crams cameos from existing characters in, coming up with contrived ways to avoid contradicting established events. It feels the need to link up directly to the start of the original, even though it's not a satisfying ending. It recontextualises little things in odd, slightly less satisfying ways (the other towns have the same skull-on-steering-wheel emblem as Immortan Joe which, while not directly contradicting anything in Fury Road, makes the three warlords of the wasteland feel more like a regimented structure rather than separate unstable elements who sometimes form uneasy alliances). It doesn't manage to overcome the viewer's knowledge of future events to create a feeling of jeopardy.

Fury Road surprised everyone with its freshness and vitality. Furiosa has none of that. File it alongside Prometheus and Crystal Skull under 'directors returning to their series and dashing high hopes by producing what feels like a legacy sequel that provides a superficially close facsimile of the source material while not actually understanding it'.

Rating: a disappointing slog.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)

Never funny, exciting, cool, interesting or scary. The script is an overstuffed mess of pointless cameos and fan-service, jokes that are barely there never mind actually amusing, story beats that don't go anywhere (you could probably lift half of the scenes out of this movie and still have it make sense), lines that make no sense, and too many characters. There are so many things wrong with this movie that watching it made me feel like a Cinema Sins video except every one of my points was fair and accurate.

Rating: terrible

Ghostbusters (2016)

A passable Scooby Doo movie at best. An unfunny mess of a movie, seemingly aimed at 6 year olds.

Life Is Strange (2015)

Just played chapter 1. Really enjoyed it. Such a breath of fresh air after Borderlands to have something where I'm in control most of the time, there's actually some sort of mechanic there, and I actually give a shit about what's happening. I'm already totally invested in the characters and the mystery. It's a little clunky in places, painfully sincere and hipsterish, but that fits perfectly with these 18 year old art students. The writing is fairly subtle, and where it isn't then it still feels like it's the 18 year olds being cringey or the tone being slightly heightened and Twin Peaksy. And seeing a montage that felt more like Magnolia than Smokin' Aces was, again, very gratifying.
Only a couple of small negatives for me.
Firstly, it could do with more detailed and expressive character models - they give the whole thing a bit of a painterly look which helps cover stuff up but the faces are all pretty low-res and static, and no hair physics, which is all a real shame when it's such an emotioncentric story and you spend so much of it looking at people's faces. I'd love to see a very subtle remaster of this that just fixes these issues. (Oof, just took a look and found out that there actually was a remaster done a couple of years ago, and it looks terrible. Glad I didn't get forced by corporate fuckery to play that version.)
Secondly, the time-rewind puzzles can be a little fiddly. A lot of the time they're really satisfying and fun, but a couple of times I was irritated, especially when there was an aspect of it that didn't get tutorialised till later but I kind of needed to understand at that point, or the boundaries weren't communicated completely clearly.
I'm not convinced right now that it branches any more than a Telltale game (although there were some decisions that I totally bypassed because I didn't bother to look in a certain spot, which is quite cool - apparently I failed to save a bird's life, no idea where that was!), but perhaps stuff will snowball later. I'm hoping the town setting with its reusable settings and cast will help there - easier to spend budget on branching that way.
Really, the best review I can give is that I want to play the second episode right away.

Okay, finished it. On the whole I really enjoyed this. It does enough to hide the fact that it's basically just a fancy visual novel, the time puzzles are often fun and cool, the story is perfect Twin Peaks/Donnie Darko pastiche, the branching has at least some heft to it (a few big options and lots of little ones, plus puzzles with multiple solutions), and I cared about the characters. I found myself laughing along with them when they poked fun at each other, rather than laughing with the writers.
There were a few flaws aside from the stuff I mentioned previously. Though most characters looked fairly different three of the teen girls had very similar, almost bland faces. The clothing and hair has to do a lot of heavy lifting (plus, to be fair, the writing and acting). There is the occasional lack of polish - how soon you get a hint, or how far back you have to keep rewinding, or dialogue playing just as you're about to do something and getting cut off - though nothing major. And the ending was a little bit of a let down - the murder mystery gets solved around the end of 4/start of 5 and then it pretty much moves on to dealing with the time travel stuff and gets trippy, which is a good choice, but it indulgently goes on too long (a real shame, the sequence would have been super-effective if every moment was cut in half), it has an annoying stealth section which, even though you can save-scum through it using your powers, is exactly what I don't want to be doing at the climax of this game, and it eventually gives in and does that 'vignettes on floating platforms in an empty space' thing from every game dream sequence ever.
And then the story ends too ambiguously and, though this may be due to branching stuff, abruptly for my tastes. They don't explain or resolve the time power stuff and they never address the possible romance between Max and Chloe which seemed to me like the third pillar of the story! By the end of it, I was starting to wonder if I'd imagined that element, especially as apparently a large majority of players got Max to kiss some boy near the end of it.
It wasn't awful or anything, it just didn't measure up to the highs of the rest of the game. And, hey, maybe the sequels will solve this stuff. Much like with TWD, I'd gladly play more, and if I get through this backlog and they show up on sale I'll likely grab them.

Rating: clunky in places, but wonderful

Tales From the Borderlands (2014-15)

Okay, played episode 1. I'd actually played this one before but not got any further. It looks pretty nice, slickly presented, the writing is pretty good. It's basically a two-hour-long QTE, where they've all but given up on puzzles and (the illusion of) branching choices, but it's a fun one. The writing is a little more try-hard than I'd remembered, like everything is wacky or a quip or a stylistic flourish, and they put lots of swearing in the text descriptions except they f@#!ing censor themselves (if you have to do that, just don't swear - it doesn't automatically make you cool or clever, anyway). Buuut it's energetic, there's lots going on, and even if it's not incredibly original it's done well. Really, the only question is, is half-playing this interactive animated show as good as just watching an episode of Rick & Morty or whatever. And I think my answer is "not reeeeally, but it's close enough that I'll play at least the next episode".

I finished episode 3 and can't be bothered to play any further. Non-TWD nu-Telltale is not quite on the 'don't even bother trying these' pile with Deponia, Lost Horizon, Syberia etc, but I'll be dropping Batman very quickly if I sense it's got all the same issues.

Basically, this game comes down to cutscenes, QTEs and branching narrative. (They pretend to have currency and inventory systems but they're fake.)
The cutscenes are fine, but it's all got that 'hey, this video game writing is almost as good as something you'd see in a movie!' vibe. Like, it mimics the Guardians Of The Galaxy movie style well enough to get you from gameplay chunk to gameplay chunk (or just wholesale steals from Spaced), but it's not strong enough to carry the whole thing, and it regularly slips into cringily try-hard.
The QTEs are just that, and often very annoying, and I don't know if it's because they frontloaded with a great climax for the first one or if I just stopped being impressed by the production values, but the action scenes felt like they got less impressive as they went. None of them were as good as the Wallace & Gromit ones, frankly.
The narrative doesn't really branch, and it doesn't get away with it as much as TWD.

Also, a continuing Telltale irritant is that either they're using the same models for a bunch of primary characters, or they're so unimaginative in their designs that it just looks like they are. Every man is the same white guy with pointy chin and ruffled hair in some shade of brown. Every woman looks the same as each other and all the ones from TWAU. What makes it worse, is they keep introducing plots in these games where one person is disguised as or haunted by another, and it's incredibly confusing because you can't tell how alike they're supposed to now look in this storyline seeing as they all look the same anyway. Again, TWD mostly avoids this, and if a character looks like Lee, he only shows up years after Lee died and you can be confident that they've done it intentionally to let you know Clem is thinking the same thing. 

It boils down to the fact that I don't care about any of these characters or storylines enough to do another two hours of QTEs. My not knowing the Borderlands lore at all may have factored in, but the writers just haven't got me invested at all.

Rating: slick but slight and soulless

Scream 6 (2023)

Didn't think much of it. More concerned with franchise stuff than being a scary movie, everyone acts incredibly dumb, and it all feels really tired. The convenience store sequence was cool, though.

Rating: Meh.

Metal Dead (2011)

I'm quite looking forward to this, a low-budget indie thing which iirc seemed quite Dan & Ben ish and was well-liked by the community.

This is pretty fun so far! It's very BTDT: scratchy black outline art (not as good as ours, a bit more MS Paint, though still charming); black-on-red stylised opening titles; zombies; two bantering Spaced-ish best mates. Also, it's made in AGS and went for the same control scheme/UI set-up. Not that I think they ripped us off or anything, it's just got the same vibe and presumably shared influences.
A few little annoyances: it doesn't have a fullscreen option, and they made the odd choice to put black bars at the top and bottom of the 4:3 screen, so it's postage-stamped on my telly; it has enforced achievement pop-ups, which I find a little irritating on principal but at least it's all within the game's artstyle rather than a Steam overlay; early on it has you pick up your friend's decapitated zombie head, which becomes a permanent UI fixture for you to talk to and get advice from at any point, which is a nice Dan-style-sidekick idea, except the game explicitly labels him "Hint System" which suddenly makes it feel very clunky and unwelcome.
It's weird going back to this retro level of adventure game as well - no VO or even hotspot labels. But that stuff's fine as long as the writing and design is good, and I'm having fun here - I've chuckled a few times and paused but not got stuck on a few puzzles. The presentation's nice as well, with DooM '93 pastiche heavy metal and a fun Shaun Of The Dead style opening where you're in a car barrelling down the empty motorway as your friend mows down the occasional zombie just to watch them splatter over your windscreen. 

Finished - this was great! For the first half I had it pegged as light fun, a mild recommendation, but it keeps escalating (literally, with a neat 'keep getting access to higher floors in the skyscraper' structure) and including so many fun and exciting moments that by the end I was loving it and gutted that the more ambitious sequel seems to have puttered out ten years ago. Very funny, lots of cool low-fi action, a funny/helpful response for everything. Recommend picking it up if you ever have the itch for a few hours of BTDT style fun (it's £4 but regularly goes on sale at 66% off).

Rating: fun and exciting little low-budget treat.

Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse (2013 - 2014)

After trying to play BS3 from my Trilogy disc on Windows 11 and managing to wrestle it into installing but not actually running, I did a very brief skim through YouTube playthroughs of 3 and 4 instead as prep for the fifth game. Main thing of note is that they're both ugly as sin. The first two were never gorgeous - they were inconsistent, they fought against the limited tech rather than worked with it, and they had that same 'working from research photos' vibe as Gabriel Knight and so could feel a little too mundane - but they looked decent enough, especially compared to these 3D monstrosities. The gameplay and puzzles look fairly irritating and dull as well, though it's hard to judge, and wow do they continue the Broken Sword tradition of abrupt endings. Also, they do the Infernal Machine thing of escalating from an original that had two glowing rocks and some lightning, to fighting dragons and flying skeletons.
Now to see how they did with the fifth one!

Okay, so they've gone back to 2D backgrounds, but with cel-shaded 3D characters. It definitely looks a ton better than the previous two, and it's certainly sharper than the first two thanks to the HD resolution. But the art direction is cheap and bland, so it ends up looking like a hidden object game. It looks nowhere near as good as the recent Telltale games or even The Journey Down, to pick two recent games with similar 3D/2D set-ups. Frankly, it doesn't look as good as the Wallace & Gromit game from 5 years earlier, or even Grim Fandango from 16 years earlier, despite the higher fidelity. Good art direction always wins.
The acting is all solid, the writing is fine though it goes on too much, and the puzzles while a little goofy are so far fair and relatively entertaining for an opening section - you witness an art theft and murder, and have to investigate without the cops noticing because George insured the exhibition (he's in insurance now), so you're doing stuff like giving them coffee so they have to go take a piss, or dropping pizza on the floor and telling them the tomato sauce is blood spatter. I've only played about ten minutes or so; it's all fine and a step above, say, The Secret Files, but so far it's not standing up to the heights of the genre.

I've gone a little further with this, and really the word for it all so far is bland. I've also realised what it reminds me of - that awful 3D animated video advertising plots of land on that crypto island. Like, put together surprisingly well, but everyone's dead-eyed and there are no laughs to be had. There's even a dead rat in the background of one scene, with the hotspot label "stretch goal", so it's got the 'weird meta in-jokes about online finances' vibe in there too. Speaking of which, yeah, this was part funded by a Kickstarter. They raised $770K. Not sure how much the total budget was, but comparing it to Broken Age which had a budget of $3.4M (plus funnelling revenue from the release of the first half back into finishing the second half) suggests it wasn't a whole lot more than the Kickstarter money...
Turns out the characters are 3D models rendered into 2D sprites, which make it all the more galling that they didn't do them in 2D art instead, but I guess it's a budget thing.
Okay, looking at Wikipedia, they spent $500K of their own money, and raised $823K. So $1.3M ish budget.

Aagh, it crashed! Otherwise, I'm progressing steadily through. It's pretty hand-holdy, which is a double-edged sword - it does keep the energy up and the story moving forward, but also it makes me feel like I'm just here to do silly puzzles like capturing a cockroach or rearranging bits of paper (or neon sign letters!) rather than investigate the murder.
One more thing about the cheapness is that you never see the characters holding the items they're supposed to be using on things, they just vaguely wave an empty hand in the air. You can get away with this in old pixel art games but it looks pretty naff in HD with 3D-rendered characters. Also little things like conspicuously limited looping idle animations, or characters not moving their mouth if they're talking while, say, holding their hands up at gunpoint. I thought the point of going with 3D characters was that it's a lot easier and quicker to pump these kind of animations out, they've got the worst of both worlds here.

It crashed again, which happened just as I was on the verge of quitting anyway, so I'm giving up on it. This is very much a Broken Sword game - dull with crap puzzles. I'm halfway through the game and I'm still solving puzzles like 'the drunken widow smashed her obscure vinyl record and now won't help you until she can hear it again, the only other location you can go to is the random market stall opposite an office that is otherwise no longer relevant to the story, and they have just started stocking musical birthday cards'. Can YOU work out the solution? Just terrible. One of the main stumbling blocks in this game is scanning every screen each time you hit a new puzzle step, to see if any new hotspots have suddenly been unlocked. I need to look like the dead guy? Oh, I can now suddenly pick up a flower from his body that I couldn't before.

Rating: bland at best; ugly, dull and irritating at worst

Blackwell Epiphany (2014)

I've played the opening section. It looks great - I think Ben Chandler is doing all the art now, so it feels a lot more cohesive. Again, would be nice to see him stretch out into higher resolutions, but I guess at least this way the series is consistent. There's lots of lovely polish as well, with weather effects, silhouettes of people walking around in their rooms in the distant windows, idle chatter between Rosa and Joey. You can even leave footprints in the snow, and if you spend too long walking back and forth admiring it, Joey notices and mocks you for it! The story starts up quite nicely - Rosa is an unofficial police consultant now and has been sent to look around a condemned building, you handle a ghost, see a shooting and get the start of some evil ghost-related plot, and then jump back to the 30s for a flashback with that duchess ghost who's shown up a few times.

I did find the puzzles themselves a bit fiddly, though, and got stuck far too often for an opening section (perhaps the assumption is that the game doesn't need to cater for new players at this point of the series, even in the tutorial section). I was mainly being held back by a lack of feedback on combination attempts or weird UI quirks (why have a 'use' option for Joey if he can't use anything ever, and have the only thing he can do - blow on things - be relegated to his only ever inventory item? Just make that the use option!). Also, there's the same old 'keep clicking through every note and then go back to every dialogue tree to see what's been unlocked' structure here.

Egg-timer update: the dreaded egg-timer is gone in this game, but the cursor is still active during cutscenes, which is very confusing! They never got it right, all the way to the end! Also, the portraits are really nice but also are massive (they take up like a fifth of the screen) so I find them even more distracting than usual. (Also, Joey is too attractive!)

Okay, I got to the point with this one where I was checking walkthroughs and then grumbling at the next solution so much that I gave up and just watched a playthrough. It's been a constant throughout the series, but they nearly all came down to just not having talked to everyone about everything over and over until a new option was unlocked elsewhere, regardless of whether there was a logical reason to follow a particular thread. Anyway, it was nice how this entry connected back to a lot of stuff in the earlier games and tied everything up fairly neatly. I don't think we ever got an answer to why certain spooks become guides, though, which I found a little frustrating!

Sidenote: Dave does some acting again in a couple of roles and is okay, but he cast himself as a Japanese person for one of them. Wouldn't get away with that now even in the world of indie PnCs, I suspect!

Broken Age (2014 - 2015)

Started on a replay of Broken Age. It looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous. The writing is really strong, of course, but I'd forgotten how gentle this game is, especially at the start, and that includes the puzzles. It's not as exciting a replay as other Schafer adventures. I have only just broken out into the hubs for both characters, though, so maybe I'm being a bit harsh.
I didn't mind the first half being easy when I first played, as I was enjoying the world(s) so much, but it's a little more noticeable on replay when you know exactly what's happening. I guess part of it is that the story revolves around two kids breaking out of a gentle, cloying routine, so the opening sections mirror that. You're not kicking down doors and smashing people's faces into bars or whatever.

Am into part 2 now and really enjoying it again. The build up of puzzles is really nice, it has a perfect oscillation of gaining new goals and finding their solutions. Plus, having all the different characters getting mashed up in different combinations and locations is really cool, bolstered with a load of story reveals.
The only thing is, I'm now stuck on the last steps of these sections for both characters! I'd really like to be able to solve it on my own, but I might have to resort to a walkthrough, which would be a shame. Can't remember if I had to use a walkthrough my first time playing it, but I don't think so! 

Okay, checked a hint through, and I probably would have solved it after a break and then coming back for a wander  - I had thought the 'tell a joke' puzzle was impossible to do with dialogue alone, but I just need to find the right combination apparently (I suspect I fluked it last time), and I didn't really think about where a till-then unused inventory item could help. 

Finished! The ending does feel a little abrupt - might have been nice for the villains to play more of an active role, and perhaps for Shay and Vella to get to do some more awesome stuff too (they were getting the massive ships to fire death rays and grabbers and stuff but again it felt a little indirect) - but a lot of the wrap-up is built-in already and any loose ends are tied up with the credits illustrations, so overall I think it's a cute, tidy way to finish it. Also would have liked a 'look at' function just to get more Tim Schafer writing in there, but never mind. Overall, looks and sounds gorgeous, loads of interesting characters and locations, and fun satisfying puzzles. It's not up there with DOTT, FT and GF, and it's hard to rate it separate from my experience as a backer with all the prior knowledge and everything, but it's definitely one of the better adventure games I've played.

Rating: gentle but great

Stick It To The Man (2013)

The platforming is bad and there are annoying pseudo-stealth bits everywhere that involve running away from baddies while also trying to grapple-hook out of their reach, and some of them you have to mind-read to get a sleep sticker to apply to them to put them temporarily to sleep, which is a real faff. It all adds that 'am I missing a puzzle or am I just not doing the platforming well enough' element, which is frustrating.
Otherwise, it's just running across the level and clicking on every thing to see what stickers you can get and then trying to use them on stuff in a way that feels like it might solve a puzzle. Oh, messing with the clowns enough made them get on with each other so one of them suddenly produced a smile sticker? I had no way of knowing that and did it just by mindlessly putting things on other things that kind of felt like they made sense. It's all very Amanita Design, just 'click everywhere until stuff happens'. It's one step of complexity up from McPixel.
The writing is all a bit too try-hard wacky and overwritten, it's like Schafer filtered through MCU writing. And, as reported, it really does feel very reminiscent of Psychonauts at every turn, with the artstyle and the psychic powers manifested as big glowing hands and a crazy lobotomist and a wild circus with an angry father figure and a bunch of g-men in trenchcoats chasing you and so on.

I'm going to give it a bit more of a chance, but first impressions are not great. Presentation is quite nice.

Yeah, played a bit more on this and gave up after skipping through a few long unfunny dialogues delivered in irritatingly wacky voices, and then getting stuck on a stealth bit where I have to do that nine-button-press sequence over and over again trying to figure out which of the two enemies is supposed to attack the other and at which precise pixel of their route it needs to happen at.

Rating: irritating, shallow and unfunny.

The Wolf Among Us (2013)

Started it. It looks great - the engine has been improved a bit, I'm playing it in 4K now, and it's drenched in 80s neon lighting. Along with the melodramatic title sequence, it's giving me Jessica Jones vibes. All the character designs are great, too, especially the non-human characters. The writing and acting is good so far, and the story is relatively intriguing. It does still have all those Telltale issues, though - some weird camera behaviour, inconsistent graphics quality, some characters looking near-identical, QTEs are still a thing, and the big issue of it pushing the whole 'your choices MATTER' thing without it ever being very convincing (at least, so far).

Finished episode 1.  They still have these bullshit 'next time on's at the end, am going to assume that if I quit out before it starts then I can go straight to episode 2 with everything saved when I return, but it's really bad UX to make that a thing I'm worrying about. Especially when I own the whole season. Just cut those out or make them optional.
The other thing that was really annoying me is the QTEs. They're so fiddly and confusing, plus they just distract you from whatever action sequence is actually happening on screen. Really can't believe they're still in here and still this bad. And regular gameplay-wise, the discrepancies between what you meant to do and what actually happens are still there. Otherwise, a fairly good Telltale. I'm hoping that I'll get more involved as the episodes go on, as with TWD S1.

Finished the whole thing. So, yeah, it has nearly all the same issues as TWD S1, though at least it didn't do shitty adventure game puzzles every now and again. The QTEs were infuriating, though. Also, by the end, I didn't really feel like I'd participated in or even really understood the detective story at all - I kept getting whisked away from places before I could look at everything, there was no really chance to put conclusions together, and then everything deflated into a 'well, the big group of baddies did it, obviously, but there's some quibbling to be done about whether the leader was really responsible' ending. There was also a twist at the end, but I didn't understand it and the internet seems to have decided it could mean two or three things but the point is that it's impossible to really know, which is the SHIT kind of twist. And I didn't feel as involved in it as I did with TWD by the end. Honestly, the more I think about it, the lower my opinion goes. It just gets away with a lot because the presentation is so nice. I'm deffo going to try the comics out, but I doubt I'll ever bother with S2 unless it gets rave reviews saying 'this is how Old Telltale should have done things'.

Rating: pretty but dumb; most of TWD's flaws but not as many of its highs.

The Inner World (2013)

Played a tiny bit of it. All very charming so far, a nice gentle start. It's presented well, although I have a few niggles like the character art style having that 'talented artist working in MS Paint' feel and a sneaking suspicion that the dialogue is either a translation or written and directed by someone for whom English is not their first language. I've chuckled at some jokes, but a couple have also not quite landed due to phrasing or delivery. Puzzle-wise, it's started small (catch a pigeon) but without being too dull - I've already got a worm drunk and used my naivety to haggle a garbage vendor down to zero, and regardless chasing a pigeon is much better than opening an email or whatever as the first puzzle.

Okay, played a little bit more. Was planning on playing longer but I actually got put off almost immediately by getting stuck on the very first puzzle - not a good idea to start the player off with something so close to moon logic - and then solving it and being given the goal 'find the girl' with nothing more than that to go on and a big opened up world, so it's going to be a case of looking at everything and talking to everyone until some puzzle strands coalesce. It's all a bit directionless and unengaging. The dialogue also continues to be gentle to a fault.

I slogged through the first section of this and can't be bothered to continue. The puzzles all feel completely arbitrary and disconnected from the story, the signposting is dreadful (especially annoying is the lack of feedback on interactions, outside of a few all-purpose sarcastic remarks - "that was a random guess, wasn't it?" being particularly annoying when the thing you tried made perfect sense) and some puzzles are only really solvable thanks to dialogue option icons which I'm not sure was intentional, the translation and readings from German to English are frequently wonky, and the puzzles are uninspired. I just got to the start of another section, where I've been dropped in a forest and not given any direction whatsoever so it's back to just wandering around clicking every interaction on every hotspot until I can figure out what random task I've got to work on (and presumably then have my character's achievement nullified by the game, which has happened every time so far). Just a very fiddly, irritating game with not much in the way of story or charm to get past the issues.

Rating: irritating.

The Journey Down (2012 - 2017)

I only have chapters 1 and 3 of the three, irritatingly, and it'll cost £9.11 to get the middle one, so I probably won't do that unless the first one is spectacular!

Started it. Very slick so far! Impressive for an indie game (though at nearly £30 for all episodes, it had better be). Great atmosphere, looks lovely, good voice acting and music, and I immediately like the scoundrel I'm playing as.
Small issues: the characters are a mix of 3D models and 2D sprites (slightly different method between cutscenes and gameplay, I think) and their animations can feel a little stilted and canned (and the very first character you see doesn't have a great face design, unfortunately, which didn't help); it's a single-click interface; the first puzzle was opening a panel then opening four clasps then opening another panel then pulling a switch (in the name of tutorialisation and nicely presented as part of a little story beat, but still, ugh) and now I'm looking for ladder rungs so I can actually climb a ladder in my house and get the story started - it's all very 'my first adventure game'.

Okay, had to find a book in a room (by clicking on five hotspots) then a little logic puzzle (AGGGH, though at least this one was very simple). Now I'm into a slightly more meaty puzzle, finding three missing parts (of course!) for my plane. It's not the most exciting thing ever, but it's a step up and it looks like I'll be tempting rats with cheese and all that good adventure game stuff to get them
Incidentally, this whole thing is very Grim Fandango. Apart from the 3D(ish) characters on 2D backgrounds thing, the characters all have Afro-Caribbean masks for faces, the whole thing is very culturally specific with the VO and music etc in fact, and there's talk of the underworld as an adjacent location, there are some gangsters involved in some scam about the way to get there, and the inciting incident is a woman showing up in the lead scoundrel's life who has some connection to it all. Obviously some of that is rather broad, but all together and with some other little specifics, it is clearly a huge influence.
Just a shame the puzzles are a bit bland. By this point in GF I'm clambering up the sides of skyscrapers and befriending demons and reaping souls in the land of the living.

Got a fair bit further with this, and yeah, the puzzles are just uninspired. I'm breezing through it without really thinking. I got to a point where I was finally stuck, so will pause here for now, but I just checked a walkthrough and the only reason I was stuck was that I didn't realise I could get in the plane I'm trying to fix. Now, I should have thought of this really, because they showed me in there in a cutscene and I know the lady is in there waiting for me, but I'd only ever been in there in the cutscene and then they take you back out of it, so it just instinctively felt like a non-gameplay space, plus it turns out you get in via a small hole in the top rather than the big but inaccessible door on the side, so I can see why I didn't consider it.
One puzzle I did like was very simple, which was that I'd been looking at a lovely ceiling fan a lot, thinking 'that's rendered so well, and it looks nice and chunky, great art design', and then at one point realised that I hadn't seen clues as to how to get a propellor anywhere, and instantly clicked that I'd been walking around under one the whole time. They cheat a tiny bit by not giving it a hotspot before the plane puzzle (I think), but that's okay, it helped the moment.

Okay, finished Chapter 1. Good enough to play Chapter 3 (I'll do it straight away, rather than stick to its actual release date in this chronological playthrough), but not enough to buy Chapter 2 (especially not for £9. Maybe if it had been one or two quid, just for completion's sake?).
So, yeah, presentation is great even though it's still very clearly low-budget. The atmosphere, the music, the acting, the visual design, all top notch. It's a shame they couldn't go a bit further with the animation at times, and some of the character designs feel a little cheap, but an impressive amount of cutscenes.
There's not much story to speak of, but that's intentional, and honestly they probably could have done with even less - just have Lina show up, buy the book and then ask to charter your plane. Then goons show up and start shooting at you as you take off and intrigue is created. In the meantime, you've used the puzzles to sow the seeds of the big bad electric company etc. Honestly, the 'meanwhile' cutscenes of the villains feel a bit like padding, and without them this all would have been a nice 30-60 minute intro to a full-length game.
As mentioned though, the puzzles are a bit crap overall. The only places I got stuck were a lack of communication on the game's part which, as with many adventure games' sticking points, I probably could have overcome by dedicating more time to just wandering around and double-checking everything but shouldn't really have had to. Like, I had no reason to go back and check all those bookcases a second time and find out that there's a book on herbs in there which also has some pressed herbs in it of the exact variety I need. I had no reason to think, when I was trying to get rid of a dog, that I should go use a fishing pole with a buoy which was an  ambiguous distance away from me because it had a crab in a cage on the bottom of it which I could use to scare the dog away.
There were some smarter ones, though, like a walk-in freezer that you can come back to and re-use for different stuff - at first you have to route power to the overhead heater to thaw the door out and escape, but later you can then re-route power back to the lower heater to use it to grill some bread. It's one of those nice Tim Schafer moments where you feel smart for using your learned knowledge to figure it out and you also appreciate the tidy layered design that went into it. There's another bit where you have to stop a lift halfway down (Grim Fandango!) so you can sneak up under a railway track and put something on it to get run over by a train. It's a nice FT/GF big-budget-feeling moment where you get to feel clever and cool. Shame there wasn't a lot more of that. For the most part, as I think I said about a recent game on this playthrough, it mostly felt like an idle-clicker for adventure veterans, like you see the matrix and it's all coloured keys for coloured doors. 

Started Chapter 3. They're trekking through the Lower World now, and it's basically Africa, it's well-presented and nice to have a change of scenery, even if some of the wide shots are embarrassingly low-poly and empty. You get to a mining station which is basically the petrified forest from GF, but it overall is taking in a wider range of influences (Tomb Raider 1, Monkey Island, FoA, Terminator and Avatar, Last Crusade). It's a double-edged sword, though, because having these characters out of their element robs them of the charming specificity they had in chapter 1; they start to feel more like video game characters. You quickly move to the city, though, and see the local chefs from Chapter 1 have been forced to move there to survive and there's a big street market with a fruit stand and street band and so on, and you start to feel the cultural idiosyncrasies again of African immigrants in a western city. It reminded me a lot of North East London. Also, we return to the great running bit of Bwana knowing everyone he meets - even when you jump in a bucket chain (GF) and wind up being held at gunpoint by some revolutionaries (GF), you get out of it immediately because you're mates with that one soldier in the Rasta hat. Normally in an adventure game, you're meeting everyone for the first time. Here, there's this lovely feeling of community, and any outsiders stick out even more. It's like Deponia except good.
Otherwise, all the same issues with the puzzles and the story (very simple goal - find the professor - is a bit overloaded by conspiracy plot).

Okay, finished. Not much more to say, really just scuppered by the puzzles, but also I didn't really feel driven to get through them by the storytelling either. This might be to do with skipping the middle chapter, but I don't think so. The actual beats of the story or really just there to give you the occasional long-term goal, which is fine except there isn't much characterisation to replace it either. You never get to know any of these people. The street market that I was happy to see was there purely to give you a fruit sticker, that's its sole purpose, and they don't take the opportunity to let you chat with the vendors or anything. I was actually on the verge of giving up but then it went into the final act which was a bunch of little isolated puzzles (one of them is 'you need to tell someone the name of this plane, you can see the number of the plane and there's a manifest that tells you what names go with what numbers', that's the level of puzzle we're dealing with here) and extravagant action sequences. While it's cool and impressive to have things exploding and car chases and gods fighting each other, it also does contribute to this feeling more like a Lego game.
So, lots of stuff to enjoy but also some fairly big flaws. (I suspect some of these problems could have been solved by having an Afro-Caribbean person on the creative team rather than a bunch of white guys. I guess they copied that from Grim Fandango too!)

Rating: buckets of atmosphere and charm, but some big design and narrative issues.