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