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