Trüberbrook (2019)

I've heard mixed things about the gameplay but it looks real nice!

Okay, I think I've been combining this in my head with Harold Halibut. I thought the whole thing was going to feel very stop-motiony, but it turns out that it's 3D modelled characters on photographed diorama backgrounds, which unfortunately means it just ends up looking like a slightly crisper 2010 Telltale game. I think this one is supposed to have more actual puzzling in it, whereas HH is just a conversation-em-up, but also I read that the puzzles are very simple. We'll see. I've played a tiny bit so far, and it's... okay. It's not grabbing me. The tutorial prologue is a woman mucking about with fuses and wires at an abandoned petrol station to get her motorbike running again, and then the game opens proper with a man arriving in a Twin Peaksy town (yawn) with the goal of going to his hotel (yawn). BUT a ghostly guy just appeared in my hotel room so maybe NOT yawn after all?

Okay, this game is terrible. Gave up after finishing chapter one.
Firstly, the translation is awful (one very simple example is "knock the door loud and clearly" - how would even an amateur translator think that was okay?) and the actors misread almost every line as well.
Secondly, the puzzles and inventory system are a bizarre mix of inscrutable and hand-holdy. The only way you can interact with your inventory is via the 'use inventory on' option in your verb coin, which picks one or two options for you from all your objects. So the only thing you have to do is wander around picking everything up and then clicking 'use inventory' on everything and using the thing the game tells you to use. And yet, somehow, it's still difficult to get through because it does shit like forcing you to click through four incredibly boring backstory dialogue branches before giving you the one that you need to progress (so you have to ask the hotel manager five different things about the ownership history of the local mines before you have the option to order a beer - and there are no clues that she would possibly have beer to serve, btw, it's all totally random. Or putting a hotspot of one piece of food on a buffet table right next to the hotspot for all the rest of the food on the table, with no reason to look at that piece anyway (turns out it has a maggot on it, which you can then pick up).
Meanwhile, the inventory puzzles would be completely impossible if they weren't essentially auto-solved. At one point you need to retrieve a guy's pet fox. Initially it's on top of a hut, but at some point it moves across to a tree branch (I have no idea what triggers this), and so the solution is to put a blanket over a nearby rowboat then use the cheese on the cocktail stick and the schnapps and the hollow reed on the fox. This acts as a blowdart which makes it drunk enough to fall off the branch over onto the blanket which somehow is taut enough to act as a trampoline so the fox lands safely and runs off to the next bit of the puzzle. Another goal is to fix some broken live wiring. The thought process that I (or the user interface, I guess) was apparently supposed to go through was "I need to tie those back together by hand without getting electrocuted, the suit of armour in the town square got struck by lightning last night so it definitely doesn't conduct electricity so I should wear it and that will make me safe (??), in order to do so I need to smash it into pieces by throwing a can opener at it, the best place to find a can opener is in the lake, so I should get a fishing rod and some bait (even though I'm not trying to get a fish), for the bait one particular piece of old food on the buffet might have a maggot on it even though the rest doesn't and I can't see any maggots, there are fishing rods behind the hotel desk and the concierge wants me to give her 'a pawn' so I guess I'll give her the massage wand". It's all such egregious puzzle design that I can't even guess where I should be focusing my mindless clicking to get through it quicker.

Most reviews gave this an average score, tending to acknowledge the bad writing and acting and design but excusing it because the game looks so nice. Except it doesn't, it looks like the Land Of The Living section from Grim Fandango! They've clearly all just been bamboozled by the press releases about how they made the art, because the first two paragraphs almost without fail warble on about hand-made dioramas and photogrammetry and LED lights and all that. One review was raving about the very first screen saying it was the stand out of the entire game, seemingly wowed that they put some stars in the sky and a flashing neon light on the garage roof which, apart from being incredibly basic things to be impressed by, as far as I can tell weren't even part of the physical dioramas. Utterly bizarre.

Rating: terrible.

The Walking Dead: The Final Season (2018)

Played the first episode. Only 4 eps this time. Weirdly, I had to tell it what decisions I'd made in the first two seasons - isn't that supposed to be this series' whole thing, remembering my choices? I could barely recall them, why am I having to do it? Anyway, it's pretty much the same thing as always. It picks up a while after the ending of S3 - I can understand why they didn't want to pick up with Clem collecting baby AJ from a ranch, though it was a little odd to have that thread dropped - and you find yourself in a community of kids holed up at their old school. I quite liked this idea, it's got scope for things to be a little different with Clem surrounded by peers and perhaps even being the most grown-up one there. The game also lets you pick up collectibles and decorate your room with them, which I instinctively rolled my eyes at but realised later is quite a clever way to use game mechanics to signal to the player 'this is somewhere Clem is thinking about settling down, at least for a while'. So I was a little disappointed that by the end of the first episode we were already hitting the old 'there's a gang of troublemakers outside the walls, the community has dark secrets, the leader turns out to be an arsehole' standards. I was actually kind of hoping for a while that they were going to do a bit of a sandbox thing, let me tend to the greenhouse, shore up defences, that kind of thing.
All the glitchy, clunky stuff is still in there too, but still at a low enough level that I can just about ignore it. Still bewilders me that some of this got past QA and playtesting, though, especially in the first episode when theoretically they're at their least rushed.

Played the second episode, and my overwhelming feeling is anger at the devs for fucking the whole thing up so badly with their stupid QTEs and action sequences. There are now these rubbish over-the-shoulder bits where you have to 'use tactics' by kicking zombies in the knee and backing away until they're spread out enough that you have time to kill each one, and also some bow and arrow bits, along with the usual abysmal QTEs. The camera is shit, the controls are unresponsive, it's often unclear whether you've got control, and prompt graphics blend in with the background. Why is it that in the menus and dialogue select UI I can whip my mouse across the whole screen with one swipe, but in life or death action sequences it takes four swipes to get the camera to look behind Clem? The most infuriating moment was when someone got killed because I was trying to be smart and shoot out a sniper but it turned out all the game wanted me to do was move the cursor into the target like a good little monkey. This is a siege, I want to be deciding when to set bombs off and where to focus the archers, not basing everything on whether I can scrape the cursor across the screen in 0.3 seconds. Also, Clem keeps on making stupid fucking decisions on her own, which is particularly irritating when this is a game that constantly harps on about how I shape the narrative. It's been a long time since I've been so annoyed at devs for ruining all the good stuff in their own game with a bunch of brain-meltingly bad decisions (possibly Fate Of Atlantis?). How have they got worse and worse at this as the series has gone on?!
Also really annoying is when I google it to see if there are ways to get through it all a bit easier, and there's a bunch of threads of people saying how shit these QTEs are but there's always at least one 'git gud' dickhead in there. Yet again, I find myself losing all sympathy for Telltale going under.
Also, the 'here's how characters feel about you' summary (which is always weirdly unreflective of my actions and the characters' responses) said that the dog was sad I ignored her WHICH I DIDN'T, SHE NEVER EVEN APPROACHED ME, so fuck you Telltale. Clem very bravely made friends with that dog last episode :'( 

Finished. Not much more to say. It was a nice ending. Shame they were fucking up their game with bullshit QTEs and action gameplay right to the last moment. I can't remember if they had introduced 'shift+Q' and 'shift+E' prompts previous to this season, but they're an awful idea that exacerbate the whole thing. It's like an executive decided that because Arkham Asylum was popular they should put that combat system in this game, oh and also the kids all love archery now because of The Hunger Games so put that in too, and the dev team just had to struggle to cram all this shit in there. Though I suspect it was just the dev team making bad decisions all on their own. Hilariously, minutes before the end of the game, the old 'you have to hold down W to walk forward but you're at a slightly different angle to the path so you have to do a little strafe every few seconds' problem showed up again, it was like they wanted to make us nostalgic for season 1's bad design decisions! Amazing that no one said 'you know what, this is one of the most important moments of the entire four seasons, and this is killing the mood, let's move the path a little bit'.

Oh well. Overall, I'd probably recommend people play seasons 1 and 2 and then just head-canon a happy ending.

Rating: more of the same, which is fine but a shame, and the QTEs and action scenes are at their most infuriating.

Unavowed (2018)

Interested to see how much RPG Dave put in his adventure and how many Blackwell references there are. 

Okay, played through the opening and the first mission. There's some cool stuff in here - it looks great as always, the music is good if you like New York jazz, and the voice acting is solid too. Also, the opening is nice and dramatic, starting with you waking up to find yourself having a demon exorcised and then flashing back to when you got possessed and killed a bunch of your friends. Then you help the exorcists (the Unavowed, a league of supernatural do-gooders) defeat a Void Realm creature and join their team. After that, you're off on your first mission to investigate some Void activity, figure out what happened and help people if possible - quite a Blackwelly set-up. There are some effectively creepy and shocking moments in there. RPG stuff is pretty light, just making a few decisions about how to deal with various beings, and conversation choices that may or may not do very much. And there's already been some ghost lore talk with an oblique reference to Rosa! Probably smart to get that done early so Wadjet nerds can relax and enjoy the game.
There is some clunkiness, though. Portraits still flicker in and out between dialogue lines and have odd placement at times - even aside from that, they're even less necessary with the increased resolution, imo, they just block the drama and spectacle. The separate sound levels of VO, music and sound effects vary quite a bit from scene to scene (or conversation to conversation) and so I had to lower the latter two down to 10% and keep VO at 100% just to make sure I could always hear dialogue. Plus there's still the occasional pop or blowout. And some little UI quirks like how when characters are doing background dialogue, subtitles come up even though I've turned them off, and when a character pauses between lines, a little "..." comes up in a text window. And the game doesn't always keep track of what characters already know. Walk animations are slow and stiff and characters do some very unnatural synchronised pathfinding, all suddenly walking at the exact same pace in the exact same direction at the exact same time!
Puzzle-wise, there's a lot of the Blackwells here too - lots of finding passwords on sticky notes, replacing broken fuses and swinging back and forth between dialogue trees. You defeat the void creature by rummaging through bins and putting cloths up drainpipes while he and the Unavowed stand in an infinite pre-battle shit-talk loop. Hopefully I get to do some magic soon! I do at least have my teammates, a djinn (who uses her sword to open doors) and a mage (who handles fire to provide light and melt stuff), so I can indirectly do some stuff there, though mission 1 was a bit of a milk run. 

Played through a couple more missions. My main takeaway is that this is, essentially, more Blackwell. I had got the impression (probably from a mix of interviews and critical reactions) that the RPG elements were mechanically more deep than they are, that there would be turn-based combat and what have you. I wasn't sure I'd like it, but I was curious how it would work. In reality, it seems that the only things that change are incidental lines of dialogue and some puzzle paths. So, say you choose at the start to be a female actor rather than a male cop, when you need to persuade an NPC to let you do something, your dialogue option is 'pretend to be a journalist' rather than 'say you're a cop'. You can choose two team members per mission (though you make everyone get on the metro before picking where you're going to go or whom you're going to take, for some reason, which is pretty funny!) and if, say, you pick the fire mage rather than the ghost whisperer, when you need to find the keypad combo to get in somewhere then you ignore the ghost hovering next to it and instead read the memory of the burnt piece of paper. You also get variations on conversations depending on which characters are there, of course. But yeah, otherwise, it's 'show up to a New York street and try to figure out what happened by wandering around unlocking dialogue tree branches and finding an anniversary date to unlock a door' or whatever.
In his review for RPS, John Walker said that the puzzles pick up a bit later, but I'm not confident I'd agree. Honestly, I'm a bit burnt out on these after having played five of them, so I'm giving up on this, at least for now, Maybe some day I'll come back to it.

The Darkside Detective (2017)

Played through three of the cases (out of six, or nine depending on if the bonus ones unlock for free). It's funny and charming, and has some nice atmosphere, but also there's not a lot going on here. Like, it's similar to Joe Richardson's games in many ways, but I just am not finding it as interesting because everything's a bit too cute and seen-it-before. The graphics are a microcosm of the whole game - they're cute and charming but there's not a lot of character to them and I'm a little bored of that aesthetic now. Also, some minor irritants like putting a mini-game in each episode (fucking tile-sliding puzzle again) and a fair amount of backtracking once the levels get a little larger. Unless it makes any major missteps, I suspect my final verdict will be 'it's a nice idle-point-and-clicker to play one 20-minute episode of per day to chill out and get a few chuckles but that's as far as it goes'. 

Okay, finished the main six cases and tried one of the bonus ones. Them being labelled bonus gives me a nice excuse to not bother with them, but I suspect I actually would have given up at this point if not even earlier if there had just been 9 main cases. It really is just a case of walking through each scene, clicking the interact button on every object, and then looking at the handful of items you've ended up with in your inventory and which one needs to be applied to which obstacle. There is the occasional slightly more complicated puzzle, but mostly 'complexity' is added by increasing the number of screens/objects rather than puzzle layers. Combined with the single-click interface, paucity of dialogue trees, and lack of animations, it all makes it feel very mechanical and unimmersive. The more elements you strip away from adventure games, the more the inner workings are laid bare and it all feels like rote grinding. FPSes and what have you can afford to just say 'collect the colour-coded keys for the colour-coded doors'; adventures can't, because they don't have another central gameplay element to rely on (no matter how many of them try with dreadful minigames!). And the animations thing is another big thing that adventures get wrong - I know that it can be a budget/skill challenge to include them, but they're a big part of the immersion and reward system, and it's better to have crappy walk cycles and special one-off anims than it is to fade down and up every time something happens and to have your character standing stock still the entire game not even walking into a scene as it opens.

(I'm always glad that we made TGP, because it combines with BTDT to make a game that starts off with pretty simple structure and puzzles and then unfurls into something more complex. But as simple as it is, BTDT still has the verbs, the dialogue trees, the animations, all the dressing that pulls you into the game.)

Rating: charming, but overly-simplistic

Nightbitch (2024)

Amy Adams is great, of course, and there's the basis for a great angry vibrant drama about the first years of motherhood here, with some strong moments, but the 'nightbitch' elements distract without really adding anything and then both sides just fizzle out for an unearned happy ending. The film just constantly feels like it's about to get started and never does, as if it's the tamest elevated horror movie ever. A plethora of True Lies extreme violence/rudeness fake-outs doesn't really cut it. The whole thing can be summed up by the scene where the mother finally goes through her transformation and turns into a lovely glossy huskie which may as well be a teddy bear.

Rating: disappointingly non-committal

Four Last Things (2017)

Played through in a single sitting, really enjoyed it. It's very funny, it looks lovely (obviously the classical art helps, but it's all well chosen and composed and animated) and the puzzle difficulty is well-pitched. It's just a nice fun hour or two wandering around a rambunctious medieval town and getting up to mischief. The storytelling is, as with his previous game, really on point.
The only negative I had was that I had to check a walkthrough due to a couple of poorly signposted elements (there's not hotspot highlighter and the density of the art means that occasionally you can miss that a door or person is interactive) and a couple of irritating timed puzzles. I definitely recommend the game, but I also recommend checking a walkthrough (or a hint guide if you can find one) if you've been stuck for more than a few minutes! Depending on your view of game pricing, though, you may want to wait for a sale as it's £8 and fairly short.

Rating: fun and funny, with only some minor niggles

Syberia 3 (2017)

Pretty abysmal so far. Starts with a cutscene that doesn't really explain anything that's happened so far, Kate is in a combo of bra and vest that somehow contrives to still show off a load of side boob, the lip sync is distractingly bad and the translation is wonky. Looks-wise it's okay but Kate's model is ugly and bland. I struggled with an incredibly basic puzzle because it turns out the game wanted me to actually turn a screwdriver by moving my mouse in a circle about thirty times, which was annoying enough on its own but it took me like five minutes to realise it was needed because there were no prompts or UI clues or anything in the settings to suggest this was a thing. I didn't think QTEs could get worse than the Telltale ones, but they've managed it.
Anyway, that was about five minutes' worth and I'm putting it down for tonight. Will probably give it another ten minutes or so tomorrow then bin it..! 

Okay, yeah, I got to the village of offensive indigenous stereotypes and gave up. (Not because of that specifically, just because the game is as awful as advertised.) Puzzles are a combination of checking everything again to see which character has woken up or fallen asleep now, and shitty Myst type dial puzzles. But the main challenge is struggling with the UI, controls camera and pathfinding to actually achieve anything. It clearly was not put in front of any playtesters, just changing the hotspot icon to something other than a tiny white dot would have been a big help. Every aspect of this game is painfully amateurish, in fact; it's staggeringly clumsy. The only good thing I could say about it is that there's some nice character design and certain shots look quite nice.

Rating: terrible

The Preposterous Awesomeness of Everything (2016)

Very funny, I really enjoyed the Orwellian allegory and the presentation was really striking and full of fun details. It's basically a Garden Of Eden type set-up where people quickly start wearing clothes and voting between two near-identical candidates for a PM (Project Manager) to build them a rocket to escape their planet. I will say, it is a bit of a shame that it's all a little clunky UI-wise and while the puzzles aren't really meant to be challenging (which works fine here) a couple of them are a bit shitty. You do have a hint character for most of the time, though, so I never got bogged down. It's also a shame that big blocks of text in pop-up windows are used for most of the satire and that there's no speech, as delivering more of the satire via dialogue would have helped, I think. But overall I laughed a lot, and it reminded me a lot of my Twine/Cwine game 'The Often-Ending Story' in that it's a satire where you have no idea where it's going to go next or when you're going to get a funny death (and then plonked back to a reasonable restart point), or when it's going to contrive to loop back to the beginning of the story and start again.

Ugh, apparently this featured a cameo by PewDiePie (I suppose a mangled up photo as one character's face and maybe a couple of grunts). This was released in 2016, which I feel like was probably at a point when PDP's awfulness was broadly known and Richardson should have known better, but maybe I'm wrong on that. Plus apparently once he saw the game PDP stopped returning Richardson's emails, so that's pretty funny.

Rating: sharp, surprising, funny, and mostly survives its clunkiness.

Adventures of Bertram Fiddle 1: A Dreadly Business (2014)

Got through it in a single session as it's quite a short game and very easy. It looks lovely, though there's the occasional little fidelity mismatch (possibly exacerbated by playing on a massive telly in 4K, which Unity does provide as a native setting but may not have been considered a likely setup in 2014) and the backgrounds can sometimes get a bit close to Daedelic's Edna games for my tastes. Plus the cursor doesn't hide during cutscenes, grrrr! The character designs and animations are lovely. Voice acting is great too. The dialogue is fine, though far too dependent on puns. The main issue with the game is the puzzle design - even though I barely stopped the whole way through, I often had no idea why I was solving things, why my solutions worked and sometimes how I was even solving them. Why did using the cork on the street cleaning machine fix it? No idea, but of the few interactive items across the whole map, they were the two that seemed like they might do something, so I tried it and it worked. The game feels very much designed for mobile, with no examine, dialogue trees, hotspot highlight or verbs, and typically puts you in a space of three rooms at a time with an item or so in each of them so it almost feels like an infinite runner, just sliding through and clicking on things as you see them. (Speaking of which, the game also has a couple of action sequences where you press up and down to dodge incoming obstacles, which are mildly irritating and far too long but thankfully are very forgiving.)

Apparently the second episode wraps things up and is a lot longer with better puzzle design (though very buggy, at least on release), co-developed with a more seasoned adventure dev. It would have been nice to play a version of this with the design issues ironed out, but unfortunately I don't own it!

Rating: Pretty, but shallow and some spotty design

The Substance (2024)

SPOILERS BELOW

Great overall, Moore and Qualley are incredible and Quaid is good fun, and loads of great ideas and imagery. Only issues with it were that there's a section in the middle that could have lost ten minutes easy and threatened to lose all momentum, and the whole movie is fairly on the nose which I don't mind but there are a few moments where it felt like they lost control of it and it starts to feel like a student film or a PETA advert, and unfortunately they were mostly near the end (I'm particularly thinking of the NYE Special and the glitter on the star) so, for me, if it did manage to stick the ending then it did so in a very wobbly fashion.

Thimbleweed Park (2017)

I think this is supposed to be old-school difficulty levels, so I may find it as frustrating as Maniac Mansion!

Okay, I got a little bit into this and wow. It is intentionally daunting and rough around the edges. You've got characters to swap between but who are in the same location a lot of the time, it makes you walk a long way down a highway or pathways to get where you want to go (and if you want to try out an idea for opening the tomb at the end of the cemetery you'd better be confident because it takes a good half minute and several clicks to walk there from the front gate with no hotspots in between), I've already had to draw out a little map of the town so I can remember where all the different shops and stuff are to avoid wandering around for ages every time I have an idea, there's junk lying by the side of the road like empty bottles and Atari cartridges that you can pick up but are useless, it uses the old-school SCUMM verb bar with 9 verbs ever-present at the bottom of the screen and the help screen doesn't even tell you the keyboard shortcuts instead just advising you to find them yourself. Add to that the presentation, with the prettied up Maniac Mansion graphics and the idiosyncratic VO (stilted Dragnet voices, strong German accents, characters who put '-ino' at the end of their words a lot), it's a game that isn't trying to give you a smooth experience. It wants to poke and prod at you, in a very old-school Ron Gilbert way.
Having said that, it does put effort into not unintentionally annoying you - with right clicks and shortcuts, the verb UI isn't too bad, there are an impressive amount of responses to player actions, and the game will often move a following character around when it's clearly the most logical thing to happen, or remind you that a certain action is available again.
It's also incredibly nostalgia-driven - lots of jokes about Lucasfilm and callbacks to old games (I've already found a chainsaw and some chainsaw fuel located in such a way they can never be used together, and there's a mansion that is very reminiscent of the Maniac one) and a lot of the set-up immediately takes you back, like when you get to a row of arcade games and there's a token dispensing machine that seems to exist wholly to get your hopes up before telling you it's empty.
On the whole, I'm really enjoying it so far, in a way I didn't think I would from the initial abrasive nature of it. I've done lots of stuff and not got stuck yet, the way the mysteries of the story unfold are really great - needling little bits of information from people, suddenly getting thrown into playable flashbacks from the middle of dialogue trees - and there have been a few clever puzzles and very funny moments. And it feels very densely packed in a good way. A bit of a shame that multiple characters will often give the same lines when interacting with stuff, but overall lots of pleasing detail. I suspect that as soon as I hit a dead end with all my puzzles then it will immediately be the most frustrating game ever, but we'll see. There is at least an in-game hint system, but you need a working phone for it and I'm not sure if I've actually found one of those outside the flashbacks yet.
Speaking of which, I'm kind of surprised that there's not only a hint system but a to do list, both of which don't seem to tally with the old-school vibe of the game. I personally feel that if you need to put an actual hint system in your game, that's a sign that you haven't done your signposting properly; at the very least you could disguise it by having characters you can ask for advice (like a Dan or a Dead Ted Edison). And I generally don't like To Do lists, especially in this type of game where you can always go back and ask the characters to repeat their vital information; they always break the magic for me, reduce everything to abstract keys and locks. At least this one doesn't have any sounds and graphics come up when it updates (god I hate that pencil scribble sfx) and makes you look at your notepad from your inventory for it so it all feels a bit more diegetic.
I can see the reasoning behind them with modern adventure games - people can look at an online walkthrough in seconds anyway, and people have so many games to play and so little time that they'll often take longer breaks between play sessions of any given game and more easily forget all the puzzle threads. But they're often used unnecessarily, I think.

Still really enjoying this! It keeps on opening up - a map gets you more locations, and now I've got five playable characters each with their own to do list, one of whom is in the ghost realm version of the locations - and I haven't got stuck yet but I always feel like my adventure gamer brain is getting a workout. This may jinx it but I really feel like I'm attuned to the game's puzzle design. Not sure how far through I am, but currently the game feels pleasingly big, like it's going to be Grim Fandango size.
Speaking of the to do lists, I can see now that they were a bit more necessary than usual seeing as each character has their own objectives. Plus, they don't get really granular like with, say, the Deponia games where every objective and sub-objective is laid out in a big diagram so you feel like you're just progressing through a design flowchart. One slight niggle with them is that as I get new characters, they come ready with to do items that I don't understand the motivation for, which feels a bit cheaty. But perhaps I'll learn the motivations as I start to look around and it'll be a nice storytelling technique, we'll see...

Finished. It got a tiny bit frustrating when I was stuck on a puzzle and the game had narrowed down enough that I was bottlenecked - at that point you're having to wander around a lot to see if anything inspires you. Thanks to Ron Gilbert's penchant for having to use different characters in different ways, and no way to instantly transfer items or jump to locations, this can involve a LOT of clicking down long streets and winding map roads and manoeuvring characters and items around just to see if one particular combination works. That didn't happen much, though - there were only two puzzles that I needed  the hint guide for and which I actually had the correct solution in mind but were a little unfair imo (one due to a location unlocking in the very short time since I last checked it, and one where I assumed ghosts wouldn't be able to use phones themselves as they can't pick up the receivers).
It got really exciting towards the end, getting all the characters to work together on a single puzzle (could have done with more of that, actually) and getting into the big factory that's been taken over by an AI.
Unfortunately, it then grinds to a halt with an incredibly frustrating ending - Dolores' uncle reveals that he found out you're all characters in an adventure game, gives you all the items you need to finish your storylines, and tells you to go to the Kickstarter demo version and kill the machine there so that the game is wiped and the Thimbleweed Park devs can't reset and make you all start again. You just walk each one to an NPC, give them an item and get a ten second wrap-up, then Dolores goes into a placeholder art version of the game and you flip eight switches on the evil machine and the credits immediately roll. Then an unseen dev uses a C64 interface to reload the game and you go back to the menu screen. And that's it. "Ha ha, all the stuff you cared about either doesn't get resolved or gets resolved in an intentionally rushed manner and then the game ends because the game ends." I don't really find that satisfying or clever or funny. It's the same thing that annoyed me about the She-Hulk tv show ending - I'd rather they just did the actual ending than a post-modern thumbing of the nose to the dreary concept of satisfying storytelling. (Movies like Wayne's World or Labyrinth are smart enough to manage both, which is great.) And even the 'logic' of the post-modern stuff didn't really make sense.
Just a massive letdown and if I were marking out of ten it would knock the game down a point or even two.

Rating: a (mostly intentionally) rough diamond, with a terrible ending

Alien Romulus (2024)

SPOILERS BELOW

Turns out hurrying between remixes of moments from six previous movies makes your story utterly uninvolving - I didn't care about the characters, wasn't scared by the various monsters, could only vaguely follow where everyone was and which ship was crashing into what at any given moment. It looked fine, in that they ripped off the first one well enough and spent enough money on the CG for nothing to look tacky (except the uncanny valley of Rook - what a terrible, pointless choice to make instead of just getting a good new actor in), but it's not like it was anywhere close to the iconic, inventive, horrifying beautiful imagery of the first and to a certain extent second movie. At least 3 & 4 had their own vibes. Alverez seems content to just lift shots and moments from the rest of the franchise - that side-on shot of the alien and Ripley from 3, Ripley wide-eyed and head tilted back behind a perspiration-covered space helmet, Hicks showing Ripley how to use a pulse rifle, a weird albino hybrid thing getting sucked out of a hole in the side of the ship until it gets shredded, on and on it goes.

And there's this weird dissonance of not wanting to do anything new with the franchise at all and yet simultaneously disintegrating its integrity - now you only need five minutes of facehugging, another five minutes of gestation to chestburster and then another five minutes to full-grown alien; you can walk past facehuggers and they won't attack you if you stay calm, but when they do attack you they will be so shit at it that dozens of them aren't really a threat; the black stuff from Prometheus is extractable so we can just throw a weird vaguely related monster in whenever we want; the human characters no longer get taken out for half the movie because a carry case fell on their head, say - they can now fall thirty feet onto solid metal and shake it off (no genetic engineering here, just the Flubberisation of action movies). Also some minor nerdy irritations like breaking the alphabetical order of synthetics' names with Rook, and deciding that the blue laser field from Alien is actually something the xenomorphs generate somehow (and here for no particular reason that I could tell). Kudos to them for sticking their neck out and explicitly showing the pupal stage between chestburster and fully-grown, but the size and complexity of it felt a little silly to me - again, rushing to get to the next thing made it less effective. They could have slowed the whole thing down and made the chestburster an active threat as it's caught in close quarters with them and trying to get more food wherever it can so it's got enough energy to build up its cocoon. That could have been up there with the 'holy shit, facehuggers can run around and jump?!' moment of Aliens, and no other movie in the franchise has done it yet, but no, they needed to keep moving so they could get to their mash-up of the Newborn and the Prometheus dudes.

It reminds me of the later Indiana Jones movies - Crystal Skull was a bad Indiana Jones movie but it was an Indiana Jones movie, that was also trying out new stuff; Dial Of Destiny just felt like any 2010s action movie with a passable synthesis of all the past Indy movies stretched over the top of it. Same with this versus 3, 4, even Prometheus. (I think Covenant starts as one and then has the other bolted on as the third act.) Like, if Dial Of Destiny or Romulus were a video game I'd be like "yeah, they did really well to emulate the movies' vibes", but for a new movie in the series it's just not enough.

Also, just some really bad basic writing. Like, fuck me, yet another recent movie that thinks 'tells dad jokes' is a rounded personality. The first three lines of dialogue in this Alien movie are shit puns. "How should I show that this other character gets on with them? I know, I'll make him tell shit jokes too!" COPY-PASTING TWEETS IS NOT WRITING, YOU ARE ALL BAD AND LAZY AND SHOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED TO WRITE A MOVIE AGAIN. Watching modern blockbusters has the same energy as listening to a wedding speech and realising ten seconds in that they just googled 'funny wedding speech' and printed the first result. And then the usual crappy exposition like someone referring to their brother as "my brother" rather than by his name. Or the moment where one person says "we don't have enough cryo power, this will only last us for three years" and another replies "We need enough for nine years!", which everyone in that room knows and the audience does not need to because they got all they needed from the first line. And the dialogue is not free from the clunking fan service, copying lines verbatim from Ash, Bishop, Ripley. You could kind of justify synthetics saying the exact same things, though it still feels tacky, but when someone is shouting "get away from her you bitch" in a context that doesn't really make much sense, it's hugely cringey.

Verdict: Rubbish.

The Walking Dead: A New Frontier (2016)

It's pretty much more of the same, but the storytelling is still good, and I still gasp and feel bad when characters die. They mix it up a little by having you play a new character who meets Clem a little way into the story and teams up with her, which is cool. The QTEs haven't been too bad so far, either.
I'm still not a big fan of this latest look that seems to have stuck since the Borderlands game, though - it feels more like 3D with a black outlines filter slapped on, rather than a comic come to life. The first season stuck with brushstroke textures and more stylised backgrounds with thick shadows and silhouettes, and it looked nicer even though it's lower res. The Wolf Among Us stayed stylised, looked great and played in 4K, so I don't know why they didn't go back to that approach for this, especially as the first TWD season iconically introduced that style.  Maybe it takes more work, which takes more time and money, so they decided to stick with this style. Still, this game doesn't look bad and it does still sometimes look good. 

Finished episode 3 of 5. Not much more to say about it, to be honest. There are no tech issues, thankfully. The QTEs are still not too bad, but the fact remains that the only response they ever elicit from me is "oh fuck off, that's bullshit, ugh you're sending me back this far?" The zombie soap opera stuff is still really good, I agonise over choices, I'm never quite sure who to trust and I'm always aware that saying the wrong thing to someone could get someone shot (or at least it feels like it could!). Having said that, I don't know what season 4 is like but if they'd wanting to keep this going for much longer they would have needed to mix it up a lot somehow. Deciding which of your burly bearded grieving friends to side with can only play so many times. Basically, the same problem the comic and the show had!

Finished! Very enjoyable and overall I'm pretty happy with where my choices took me. They added a nice little bit to the intra-credits stats of what percentage of players made the same choices you did, where they tell you what kind of a relationship you had with a bunch of the characters. I am proud to say I converted Clementine from being a loner, so she helped me out in the final battle.
I will say, it was kind of weird having a Brown guy with long hair and a beard called Jesus showing up periodically to rescue me and tell me what a good person I am!
The ending wasn't quite as satisfying as I would have liked, the baddy is just 'whereabouts unknown' and the final shot as well as the post-credits scene was just Clem wandering off to another adventure, but maybe season 4 will come back to these characters and tie things up a bit. Really my only other issue with it was that it is just the same thing again. I suspect I'll be glad by the end of S4 that they didn't get to make any more, but we'll see.

Rating: more of the same but still very good

The Blind Prophet (2020)

Okay, nope, giving up on this one after about ten minutes or so. It looks nice, with a Mignola-alike art style (although the lead character has a tendency to go off-model in his cutaways) but that's about it. It's a mash-up of an adventure game and a visual novel, so there's lots of clicking through dialogue, and action is done via comic panels that pop up, and it does that incredibly annoying VN thing of having like three non-verbal noises per character which they play when certain lines vaguely match up with them. (It's always distracting, clunky and goofy, I have no idea why VN devs do this.)
The dialogue is terrible, seemingly a clumsy translation, and even trying to squint past that the storytelling is clumsy.
The puzzles are dire (worried a wounded possessed guy will attack you as soon as you enter his room? Use a desk lamp with his severed hand and then put it through his letterbox first!) and are exacerbated by the fact that you can't pick up objects until you've come across a reason for it, so every time you come to a new puzzle you have to go back over all the many many background objects again to see if you're allowed to pick them up now. Plus you sometimes just don't get a response to trying something.
There are little bugs as well, like a room exit icon not showing, or some text balloons displaying half offscreen so you can't see why you're not allowed to do something. And they didn't even pick out a nice font for the dialogue options.
All in all, so bad that even Adventure Gamers gave it 2.5/5 (which for any normal outlet is a 1/5).

Review: nice Mignola-homaging art, dire in every other aspect.

Whispers Of A Machine (2019)

This is the follow-up to Kathy Rain and I think I read about the guy having learnt some lessons from that previous game (which was his first, iirc, or at least his first adventure game) so hopefully this one will be a good 'un.

Okay, it looks really nice, the acting is good and the story is moderately involving - you're a fed with cyber implants come to a small town to investigate a couple of murders. Similar presentation niggles to Kathy Rain - can't turn subtitles off and it uses portraits (with no talking animation on either the portraits or the sprites, which always feels a little odd) - but nothing egregious. The pixel art is the usual, but it's all a little washed out and dusty which gives it a slightly different feel.
There are a few little mechanical quirks - it keeps track of the tone of response you use in any conversation and tracks it to one of three approach styles, and apparently at some point this will unlock new augment abilities depending on which approach(es) I'm using most). It autosaves and decisions can't be rethought. This is fine, but I haven't seen the results of it yet so it's a little frustrating to think that I'm making all these micro-decisions without really understanding them, but I'm just not thinking about it and waiting to see what happens. There's also a scanner, which you can either set to do a general scan looking for stuff or to look for specific stuff like an individual's DNA (basically, to make sure the player has a specific solution in mind), a strength augment (just turn it on if a door is stuck or whatever), and a lie detector where if you notice their patterns spike you can click on it and it opens a new conversation option (which is a cool idea but you have to manually turn it on for every conversation and it's only done anything once, which was during its tutorial). They're all pretty cool, though really the scanner is the only one that doesn't feel like a gimmick so far.

I've made a little bit of progress and enjoyed the puzzles and the writing thus far, though I do keep getting that detective game thing of not actually being sure what my next goal or step should be. I finally find someone's hidden science lab, and then... have no idea what to do with that. There's nothing in there I can use, I can't talk to anyone about it, the detective doesn't say "ah ha, I should report this to the Illegal Science Department" or whatever, and the whole game so far has been funnelling me towards this, so I'm stumped. It's a common problem with games where the only goal you're ever explicitly given is 'solve the mystery'.

(Looking at a walkthrough, seems like something I tried to do already is the solution but it just didn't take - I scanned a panel and noticed a bunch of fingerprints on it and so was hoping that would open up a hotspot for me to examine but it didn't. Apparently it should have done, so maybe I didn't hover over it for long enough or something.)

Yep, that was it, didn't let the little scanner window sit on it for long enough, fair enough. So, to be fair, the game does still get that detective game aimlessness thing that I was talking about, but this was the biggest example of it, and it does often do stuff to avoid it. It's just that when you get stuck on a puzzle, you're not sure if you're actually stuck on a puzzle or you're supposed to be looking at some other area of investigation.
But I'm still enjoying this, the detective augment stuff continues to be fun (I can now wipe people's short term memories to get them to stop panicking or forget they have something to do that isn't helping me) though there aren't any outrageously cool or interesting puzzles. Using my amnesia augment to daze a ten year old kid so he wouldn't tell his sister not to tell me something felt pretty extreme, though! The writing is a bit better than Kathy Rain, I think; though it can sometimes get a bit sterile and didactic, it kind of gets away with it thanks to the Blade Runner vibes.
Dave Gilbert Watch: Dave has so far delivered a handful of lines each as Beat Cop and Stoner Graffiti Artist.

Okay, finished this one. It was fine. Looked nice, some cool ideas, but pretty much your usual cyberpunk AI transhumanism stuff. The story ended up feeling pretty linear and flat, there was so much worldbuilding that didn't really amount to much. The augments and the personality vector thing were mostly gimmicks and some barely used at all - it suggests that choosing different dialogue options would open up different augments (your own injected AI adapting itself to your personality), but as you only get a couple of puzzles per augment I can't imagine this makes a huge difference on playthroughs. And even the default ones don't get much use -  the heartrate one is useless except for the couple of times it's necessary in which case it opens automatically (and if you do turn it on yourself, it doesn't even react when a character is explicitly given a shock and then relaxes!), and the brute force one is just there to be clicked on every now and then when your character needs to open a door and says "mmph, I'm not strong enough to open it".
Also the issues with the dialogue started to get more glaring towards the end - it often felt like the writer had googled 'arguments for and against sapient AIs' and then copy-pasted them into long conversations.

The incredibly obvious baddy revealed herself, I shot her and then got the standard 'wipe out the AI or unleash it' choice, went for the heavily stacked 'wipe it out' choice, and got the happy ending of deciding to adopt the planned-AI-vessel baby. I guess I can't complain too much when Aliens does something similar, but it felt a bit normative to have 'be a mum' as the happy ending for my strong independent federal agent.
Also, not really fair to call out a low budget game on this, but it was a bit disappointing that whenever a special animation was called for, the game just faded down to black and then up again. Special animations are a powerful reward for adventure game players! It was one big strength of fellow low-budget adventure The Little Acre, even if the animations were often a bit wonky.

Rating: solid, but some wasted potential.

The Little Acre (2016)

It's kinda charming but pretty janky and amateurish.

You play as a brother and sister waking up in their rural Irish cottage to discover their inventor dad has disappeared, and you have to get his wacky inventions running to find out what happened. So that's all pretty cute, and the art looks quite nice and the voice acting is endearing. There's a fun section where you're the whirling dervish of a sister trying to make her own breakfast and almost getting flattened by cabinets or setting the cottage on fire at every step, saved each time by your increasingly-exhausted dog.
But also, the brother's VO is all delivered twice as fast as it should be, the art all has that 'good but untrained artist using MS Paint' feel, and it took me a while to even figure out what my goal was. There's an inventory and the puzzles are all pretty easy but not mindless, but there's no inventory combining, it's a one-click interface, there are some irritating timed puzzles and bridge-switches logic puzzles, and at one point I got stuck simply because I hadn't realised that as well as all the exits with hotspots, there was one without. There's lots of other little jank as well, like juddery scrolling, line skip and quick exit only working some of the time, characters changing size mid-animation. Charles Cecil was the exec producer on this, and I would have hoped he'd have spotted and (indirectly) ironed out a lot of this stuff.

Apparently it's very short, so I'll keep playing unless I hit some major bump.

Okay, finished. Turns out you're actually playing as father and daughter, not siblings, which goes to show how spotty the storytelling is! It continued in the same vein throughout, with some charming aspects (forgot to mention the live-recorded trad Irish music which is pleasant to listen to) but not much thought gone into puzzle design or polish. I could only really recommend this as a gateway adventure to play with a young kid with a walkthrough to hand to get them past any bumps, and even then only if you already got it for free.

Rating: a lot of charm, a lot of jank.

Silence: The Whispered World II (2016)

I'll give it five minutes and if it's not immediately notably better than the first one I'll uninstall.

I started on the sequel, and had not realised how different it is! First off, it's 3D. Secondly, it is continuing the story of the previously-comatose boy, now in 'the real world', which seems to be a European country in WWII though it's intentionally unclear, I think. Anyway, it actually looks pretty nice, lots of smartly applied painterly shaders and textures and what have you. The character design is a little bland but looks nice enough, and there's some interesting background art. The story starts well, too, with a cutscene of you grabbing your sister and running to a bunker as a bombing raid starts, and then an opening puzzle of trying to cheer her up by finding props around the place to tell her again the story of Sadwick - a stuffed donkey toy's head for the jester hat etc. Very clever way to tie everything together. Then another bomb hits and you clamber through a hole to find your sister and find yourself in a liminal space with bits and pieces of Sadwick's world floating around, so I guess you've been knocked out and will be going back into the fantasy land. I'm genuinely curious to see how they deal with that now.
Only real downsides so far are: the hint levels are wild by default - you get icons telling you exactly what to use where every step of the way - and still a little much at minimum; checkpoint auto save only; it's unclear whether you'll have an inventory at all; there are these little puzzle steps where you have to click then hold on a heavy object and drag it a bit in the direction they tell you, in an utterly pointless and unsuccessful attempt to increase immersion. Nothing too awful and so far I'm much more impressed than I was with the first one. 

Silence: WWII (bad acronym!) continued to be a mixed bag, but is probably the best Daedelic game (not that that's a high bar).
It generally looks very nice, occasionally gorgeous, sometimes a bit sterile, like you're walking through someone's Artstation portfolio. In practice, it's just 2D with lots of parallaxing and 3D character models, but that's fine. It allows for lots of neat camera moves, and there are lots of fun, detailed animations. They continue to make the world feel alive with lots of little flora and fauna getting up to antics in the background, too. The setting itself is still your bog standard high fantasy with old ruins and what have you, but as with the first game there are some fun concepts and creature designs in there too.
The puzzles are generally very easy, what with the lack of inventory, the UI context-sensitive icons and the single-button system, but at least they're not stupid as with the first game, and they make a lot of use of your pet slug with his different abilities throughout, which is great. Sometimes it's a bit unclear what they expect you to do, and sometimes the solution involves doing the same thing a few times in a row or looking at something will actually lead to picking it up - I suspect this is mostly because they have to make the puzzle steps more convoluted than they should be to get around the lack of inventory - but at least you can get out of these sticky spots by pretty much just interacting with everything a few times until it all resolves. 

The story has settled down and is fairly dull now - we're with some rebels who have to get to the queen for some reason, and you want to get to the mirror from the last game so you and your sister can wake up. Not only is the Silence story bland, it is even more difficult to get involved in now we know from the start this is all fake. There's also a lazily written romance angle - they both squabble, they fall off something and land on each other, there's no reason for them to like each other except being a boy and a girl in a story. And it comes with the requisite Daedelic dash of creepiness, with the girl being dressed in a skintight chainmail body suit and boob armour, and one moment where he has to resuscitate her and in a Freudian slip says "kiss of love" rather than "kiss of life". Dude, she's certainly unconscious and pretty much dead, now's not the time. This is 2016, not 1812.
The dialogue is mostly clunky, as usual with their games.
There is some fun storytelling stuff with the dual protagonists, though, like when you set off a firework to solve a puzzle as the brother and then realise that was what saved your sister by distracting a monster at the end of her last section. And the puzzle concepts are a bit more interesting, like a room full of hallucinogenic plants that make your three loose ladder rungs seem like snakes so you have to calm them with music before you can put them in place, then as the sister you have to disable the plants in various ways so the snakes turn back into rungs. 

Finished! Sadly, it got worse as it went on - the puzzles get more fiddly (especially the ones where you're controlling the slug so there's even less feedback on attempted actions and it really is just Samorost), and the story gets more tedious. Also, that specious tone of writing where it sounds like it's deeply thematic but actually means nothing at all got worse. Like "You never help me, brother!" "You must learn to shine your light and help yourself!" "I try but the shadows scare me too much and so I retreat!" What the fuck are you going on about?
And after all the silly little gimmicks like holding your mouse down for a moment to drag an item or keeping a character balanced for three seconds or whatever, they decide to end with two terrible minigames where you're doing a little race flying through cloud rings (and the mouse sensitivity is insane) and then you're just waving the cursor over a bunch of stars in the sky to draw a picture. They repeat both of these a few times, it's bewildering that they wanted to end their game with ten or so minutes of infuriating mindless crap. Then you get a choice (one of a few in the game, which so far seem to have been another gimmick and not made any difference to the game, but here actually give you two different endings) whether to rescue all the imaginary characters and let yourself die in the real world or escape the imaginary world but with the caveat that this will (somehow) mean your brother dies. It doesn't make much sense and it's not very satisfying. Either way, the entire story of these two games turns out to be: Noah is a boy in a coma whose father reads to him; he wakes up; later, he saves his sister from a bombing raid while leaving her friends to die; their bomb shelter turns out to have one weakness - bombs; one of them dies.
The overwhelming impression I have of Daedalic from all these games is a bunch of talented people in need of good designers and writers.

Rating: Lovely presentation, some fun ideas and puzzles, but still victim to the Daedalic Clunk.

The Whispering World - Special Edition (2014)

It's Daedalic's third ever game and reviews were mixed, so I don't have high hopes for this one, but I'll give it a quick go at least.

Played through the tutorial. The overall presentation isn't as obnoxious as most of their other games, and visually it's gorgeous. The voice-acting is a bit rum though - Sadwick sounds like John Leguizamo in Ice Age, which is certainly a choice for your player character, every sound clip has been trimmed a quarter second too close on either end, which is a bizarre error to have been consistently made throughout, and there have been many misreads already.
It really does look nice, though, and I've got a cool slime grub pet for a sidekick and there's a massive beasty having a snooze on the first screen, so I'm not fully disengaged just yet. 

Okay, played through the first chapter and I think I'm going to give up. Partly because the dialogue is all over-written and clunky to the point where the whole thing feels like the Merry/Pippin/Treebeard scenes in Two Towers, plus the dialogue clip trimming and inconsistent volume levels make it all extra irritating, and partly because the puzzle solutions tend to be pretty dreadful. There's a lot of wondering if you're struggling to solve a puzzle or there's just an extra step that simply isn't clearly required, sometimes the signposting is really bad, and occasionally I solve something without really understanding what the logic was.
One puzzle requires me to get an egg off a little lizard creature who's playing with it. The egg's red, and your brother's idle animation is juggling some red balls, so the solution is to swap them for the egg. They're much smaller than the egg and they're not ovoid, you can't talk to him about the balls or examine them or anything, but they're red so I guess that's enough. You can randomly talk to him about being scared of things, so of all the animals pick the ones he doesn't believe in and describe them to him until he is scared. If you tell him they have two heads, claws and sharp teeth, then you can combine two turtle statues, a bear claw from a rug, and some dentures, by applying tree resin (which you must collect with a bowl AND NO OTHER WAY) to one of them and then use that resin-covered item on the others (this is not intuitive at all) to make a tiny fake monster which scares him so much he drops one of his balls and covers his eyes. With about five changes this could have been just about reasonable, but as is it's terrible.
And that's without getting into how you're supposed to intuit that a clown hat turned to stone is the perfect thing to put in the top of a cannon and then sit in so you can get launched somewhere, or remember that weird thing from the tutorial where putting your slug in a bowl of water gives him 'sphere shape' mode and realise that this means feeding him a firebug gives him flame powers (but giving him some electricity or him eating a magic stone does nothing).
Another minor irritant is it's one of these games with loads of inventory items but only a few onscreen slots (because we simply must take up most of the screen with the surrounding sack graphic), so loads of scrolling through every time you want to try something, which especially doesn't help when you're trying things a lot thanks to bad puzzles.
Also, while it does look really nice, and there are lots of lovely custom animations, there's often the feeling of different levels of fidelity butting up against each other. Like, the animations' frame rates are sometimes too low, or the cutscenes' art feels a bit too soft, loose and bare compared to the in-game graphics. Again, it's the Daedalic thing of looking nicer in screenshots than in motion. 

Before moving on, I had a scrub through a playthrough vid. Your pet slug's different abilities seem to be where any interesting puzzles are at, they really should have focused on those. I forgot to say much about the story - it's bland fantasy stuff with vague prophecies and a humble little creature being tied to the world's fate etc, and it starts off in a really messy way, telling you to go find an audience for the circus (and also practice your human cannonball trick, though this is actually just a distractingly placed set-up for a later puzzle) so your entire goal is 'walk around a bit'. And as soon as you find someone, they turn out to be on an epic all-important quest which for some reason you lie about your own incompetence to join, despite being a whiny sadsack who doesn't have any interest in or suitability for adventure. But then you find out that it involves finding an oracle who might be able to decipher your recurring nightmare and this gives you personal stakes. They should have just cut out the quest, had him wake up from his nightmare at the start and decide to go find an oracle. It's all just really unsatisfying. On the upside, it does have some fun Labyrinth-y concepts, like the two talking rocks who face away from each other and have only ever had the one view each but refuse to let someone move them. But it's all written and performed so irritatingly, it's a bit of a waste. Lots of nice creature and background designs, at least.
Anyway, turns out the game ends with a reveal that it was all a dream of a comatose boy having a fairytale read to him by his father. And I guess the quest to find the king was really the quest to wake up and also we're supposed to feel sad because Sadwick's sacrificing his existence to wake this kid up even though he's a non-sapient imagining of a fictional character and then he breaks the mirror and the kid wakes up THE END. It's all really clunky and sudden and unoriginal, and a very Daedelic thing to do!

Rating: pretty but otherwise very clunky

The Wrath Of Becky (2023)

I enjoyed the first movie, thought it was solid fun.

Then I watched the sequel and was reminded why one should never trust a positive Rotten Tomatoes score without clicking through to every supposedly positive review first. It's 80 minutes before credits, and it takes at least half of that to get started, it's full of 'I bet you're wondering how I got here' shit, it's hugely unoriginal (the baddies steal her dog, there are at least two fake-out 'imagined sudden violent kills', etc) the action has turned into Home Alone, the villains are terribly written, and for some bizarre reason instead of using the far-right macguffin left dangling from the first movie to kickstart this one they just have her stumble into a different far-right conspiracy through pure coincidence and utter idiocy on their part. 

Rating: Terrible.

Emerald City Confidential (2009)

This is a 2009 game made by Dave Gilbert as a contract job, so it's a bit of a mixed bag. It's aimed at casual gamers, so there are lots of tutorial pop-ups and 'WOW you picked up a piece of paper!' pop-ups with loud dings and sparkle effects and what have you. In some ways it feels a bit cheap - the walking speed is too fast for the animation, the VO quality is fairly low, the UI all looks really cheap, stuff like that - but it does have a fair few custom animations, it looks alright, and it started off with a fun action sequence with the Lion, a dastardly corrupt lawyer in this version, throwing you off a high bridge. And I've already chuckled a couple of times - to be honest I think I'm currently enjoying it more than the Blackwells!

Dave Gilbert VO watch side-corner: Dave has already appeared, playing a flying taxi gump-couch! (I guess the makeshift gump-couch from TMLOO was the inspiration for an entire industry, and someone is going around chopping gumps' heads off then attaching them to sofas and sprinkling powder of life on them and enslaving them?)

I'm about a third of the way through now (it's much bigger than I guessed, thought I'd be basically done with it by now!), and it's still fairly charming. Very rough around the edges though (not least of all that it locked my PC when I quit, so I had to ctrl-alt-del and restart), and some fun puzzles but also it's a detective game and so it has the old conversation spiral going too. Not that Dave has ownership to do this of his own volition, but I'm wondering to myself if he could make some money in the modern adventure game market by doing a quick remaster and selling it for a couple of quid. I reckon with a little bit of effort it could do quite well. Perhaps knock out yearly sequels, nice steady earner.

One amusing thing I spotted: in the University of Oz, there are two busts in pride of place side by side - one of Frank L Baum and one of Dave Gilbert! He did make sure to have Petra say that she owes FLB everything and DG is unimportant, but still, not sure I'd have the brass cojones to do something like that!

Okay, finished it. If anything, it was a bit too long! Pretty good fun when you're meeting weird people and cleverly using magic spells to defeat froggy extortionists or win an arena duel against Mumbi, and getting yourself turned into a hat stand or whatever, less so when when you're just bouncing back and forth between two characters and clicking the new dialogue options until the job is done, or when you're sitting through lore dumps or Dramatic Writing that needed to be cut in half. Very easy as well, I rarely had to stop and think. But, with all the caveats, not bad.

Rating: a very rough diamond, but fairly charming and fun