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
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