The Silent Age (2012)

Started on The Silent Age. It's nice enough, but it feels very much like a game designed for people to play on their smartphone on the bus. The graphics are nice, kind of art deco side-on presentation. Though there's obviously some corners cut so it feels a little Flash game-y, just stuff like items fading from view rather than getting picked up. The VO is nice, but it's dialogue only (i.e. internal thoughts have no VO, Wadjet Eye style). The writing is nice enough. It starts off very Valve, with you as a janitor in a creepy research company, getting pushed into doing things by men in suits, and turns into a time-travel thing where you're flipping back and forth between present day and post-apocalyptic future. There's nothing that feels particularly fresh but it's all done well. The main problem is that it's very slow and the puzzles are very simple and dull. You spend a lot of time using stairs and lifts over and over, and it's all very linear 'get key to open door to get code to open safe to get paperclip to pick padlock to get knife to cut rope to open door'. It's almost like an idle clicker for adventure game fans. I got to chapter 3 of 11 very quickly and they finally introduced time-travel puzzles, but the only one so far has been 'open door in present so it's open in the future' which is a bit weird logically and also very dull.

It seems like it's going to be short and easy so I'll probably breeze through it until I get stuck and/or bored. Apparently it got released as two episodes initially, with the first one being free, so perhaps the second half of the game as it is now will ramp up a bit...

Some other things about this game that make it feel shallow are that inventory items always disappear when you've used them on something regardless of how much sense that makes, and you barely get to talk to other people there are a few cutscenes and a couple of 'use' interactions that get you a little chat, but that's it.

So many of the puzzles are based around locked doors or getting a light plugged in so you can see in a dark corner and find a new thing.

There's been maybe one interesting puzzle so far, where you use an apple core, leaky pipe, filing cabinet and some soil in the present to make an apple tree in the future. And there's some nice 'oh no, it was me that did that thing' or 'oh no, avoid past me' moments towards the end. But it needed another twenty of those.

Anyway, I got stuck right near the end and it seems from a walkthrough like there might be a bug because I've tried doing the thing I'm supposed a few times and it didn't let me, so I'm giving up on this game.

I watched a playthrough of the last bit, and it's terrible. You lose your time machine, so the last few puzzles are incredibly mundane things, including one where someone gives you a mug and asks you to get them some water, the solution for which is to walk back four screens to the dripping water and use the mug with it then walk through the four screens again. Then they do a big 'oh no it was you all along' causal loop twist, but THEN undo it... somehow, and kind of give you a happy ending except maybe you're going to see a drug dealer now but it's not very clear.

Rating: some nice presentation but very shallow

Nimona (2023)

It looks great, it's well-directed and it's fun enough. (Also cool to get some fully embedded queer rep and themes.)

But it also feels pretty sloppy in a bunch of areas. 

The writing has that 'if we say everything loud and fast it'll be funny' thing, plus that 'we've learnt the rhythm of this style of humour without really coming up with the clever jokes to go in it'.

The setting is a mash-up of medieval, modern day, and sci-fi future, and they needed to drop at least one of those because there's a bunch of overlap and redundancy and gags that are delivered like they're one of those 'modern day but X' Pixar jokes and yet is just 'modern day'. It feels again like they copied a joke format without understanding it, or they just didn't dare make it straight fantasy or get too close to Onward. (I don't know how close it is to the webcomic in how it handles this stuff.)

The writing is too vague when it comes to what characters know or are feeling, which is exacerbated by the 'if they just plainly said this thing' issue.

And there's a whiplash-inducing tonal shift towards the end, so most of the movie is silly gag-a-second comedy and then the last twenty or so minutes are po-faced trans allegory, story reveals and melodrama.

I think the fact that I wrote out so much instead of saying "it's shit" goes to show how frustratingly close to good this was. I was close to noting it down for recommendation to a friend's kid at one point, but I think he'd probably lose interest in it pretty much at the same rate I did.

Stick to Emperor's New Groove or Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.

Rating: good-looking but irritatingly sloppy.

The Lost City (2022)

The humour was infantile and unfunny, the motivations didn't make sense, the characterisation was regularly inconsistent and it was so so predictable and unoriginal. Primarily Romancing The Stone (which they nod to with a convention called Romancing The Page, though I'm whether this is intended as a homage or a nostra culpa), but also a bunch of Tropic Thunder and then a hundred other movies for the rest of it.

(Also, sad to see Sandra Bullock with so much plastic surgery and then a layer of CG airbrushing on top of that.)

Rating: Bad

Primordia (2012)

It looks lovely so far, lots of Josh Kirby-esque gloopy, bloomy pixel art in a weird robot world that I haven't really started exploring yet. The presentation is fairly slick so far, with lots of nice little cutscenes or cutaways, and a dramatic opening that starts to teach you about the world and get you settled. (It was a little annoying being told 'get to the generator!' without knowing where it was, but I quickly realised I just had to find a "Hatch" hotspot a few times in a row!) The music and VO are atmospheric too. It does have the usual Wadjet Eye quirks, like the bloody egg-timer, Abe Goldfarb as a snarky floating sidekick again, and the 320x200 resolution (oh to see these pixel artists get to stretch their legs a little!).

Got stuck, so am stopping for now. But it's good enough that I'd prefer not to use a walkthrough, which is always a good sign. It's striking how much better this is than Deponia, just through good writing. (And solid puzzles, though nothing much amazing except for having to block that a defunct giant sand-steeped robot's nostril-like air vents to get it to open its mouth). There are a few too many cheesy jokes, especially with the snarky sidekick character, but overall the writing's really smart and the world-building is great. I'm loving the drip-drip of info about the history of my character and also of the post-apocalyptic world. 

I just got a little further (with the help of a walkthrough - the puzzles weren't unfair or anything, I probably could have figured them out if I'd spent enough time thinking about it and wandering around). I've moved to a city area now, which is really cool and intriguing and stuff but also is one of those points where you suddenly have fifty things to go look at. So I think I'll try to make playing this for half an hour something I do in the evenings instead of watching tv. My gameplay experience of many games probably suffers a lot from playing in sporadic bursts rather than regularly. It just always feels like more of an effort than just putting The Blacklist on or whatever...

Well, I finally got back to this after a 3 month break. I don't know if I took such a long break because I was a little unenthused or if it's because of that break that I was unenthused when I came back to it. Probably more the former - I didn't mind the fairly bland puzzles when I was climbing inside giant half-buried robot heads in the post-apocalyptic desert, but walking back and forth bartering motors for other motors and doing logic puzzles in a city setting with the end goal of trying to open a couple of doors was a lot less beguiling. When it got to the point that I was having to remember characters' surnames in order to solve puzzles, I gave up. I had a quick scan through the rest of the walkthrough and it didn't seem like it ever got back to what I found really intriguing and exciting about the first act.

Rating: strong first act, gets bogged down in adventure game busywork a little after that.