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!