Thank Goodness You're Here! (2024)

I started, played about 20 minutes and very much enjoyed it. Thankfully I was prepared for it to only have the lightest of gameplay, so my expectations were calibrated correctly. Only slight annoyance is that I don't want the subtitles on but also if I miss a line of dialogue from someone there's no way to get the information I missed. This might end up not being an issue at all, though, seeing as the main way to get through the game is just to walk around and click on everything. I'd prefer to understand what it is I'm solving by clicking on everything, though!

(This turned out to be a total non-issue!)

Finished, it was great: legitimately very funny; wonderful animation, acting, and general presentation; not very much there gameplay-wise but it still made time to put fun little platforming sections in. My only sliiiight niggle was that while most of the time repetition was used to great comedy effect, there were one or two points where I groaned a little at having to go through the same tunnel or walk around the same hub again, even at less than 3 hours total play time. But they did keep on dropping new content through most of the game, and before it became a problem there was that truly excellent ending. I love how the game became an ode to interactive entertainment, just squeezing all it could out of a very limited interaction space.

Rating: some minor issues around light gameplay and repetition, but overall funny, fun and gorgeous.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (2023)

I've now started - great presentation and rolling out of the opening narrative, looks gorgeous, tons of detail. Bit frustrating that my impressive-for-2022 PC doesn't seem to be able to run the game maxxed out, but I guess they're future-proofing it and I'm getting what would have been expected at launch. Gameplay seems to be very much an Ubisoft so far, but because it's being all Na'vi rather than some modern-day bloke running around with a gun, things aren't as clear so I'm doing some of the fumbling around that I expect more from immersive sims than from an FPS sandbox. Having said that, I think I did pick the less intrusive UI option for full immersion so it may well be my own fault. I don't want to be a total pinkskin and give in and fill my screen up with little icons, though. Also, I feel a little underpowered and having to scrabble around constantly for arrow sticks and stuff, and there's a ton of crafting and cooking systems that I'm not sure if I've misunderstood. I guess this is typical RPG opening act stuff though, and it does at least fit with the story of me being a Na'vi raised by the humans and then suddenly flung into the jungle with no cultural knowledge.

Now trying to tempt myself back into Frontiers Of Pandora. I've been told that I should at least keep going until I get an ikran (the pterosaur things) as that really opens the game up. I also think I might need to get myself into the mindset of playing it an hour a day and picking away at the foraging and crafting and stuff. I didn't realise it would be so heavy on that stuff, it's like No Man's Sky level. I also keep giving up on NMS for similar reasons - tons of systems that I can never remember if I take a break for more than a week, which is something I often do because I've never really had that habit of regular gaming. I tend to just pick up an 8 hour game and play it start to finish over a weekend. But the lack of  manual saves is a huge barrier to that because it demands committing to the game for a certain, unknown length of play session. Apparently you can force autosave with the fast travel system, but it's not ideal. I guess modern AAA games are getting to a level of complexity where manual saves aren't feasible anymore...

I gave it a little go, and watched some videos about crafting, and I might jump back in tomorrow. It's not great when learning to play a game feels more complicated than learning to make games!

Continued with Frontiers Of Pandora, did some crafting and got some small quests. It does lend itself to lovely moments, it's really cool to be climbing up a tree and spot a weird bug, then check out the wiki and find out about its survival techniques and place in Navi culture, or to go hunting a deer type thing and realise that they herd around the big hammerhead rhino things intentionally for protection so you have to try and get one wandering off from the herd. But also, the menus are still nigh-impenetrable and there's a huge amount of faff around the simplest of things like getting food for health. Also, the weapons are all extremely underpowered and tricky to aim with right now. I hear that once you've levelled up a lot then you can have great fun slaughtering camps full of sky people, but for me the promise of 'the game gets satisfying later' is never really enough. If this were a Far Cry game I'd probably have given up on it by now, it's only the Avatar trappings that are encouraging me to stick at it.

Okay, I uninstalled Frontiers Of Pandora. Hopefully I'll come back to it some day when I'm more likely to be able to regularly sink a couple of hours into it over an extended period, and I'm a little more prepared for the crafting and upgrading system that is this game. Also maybe when I've got a big enough hard drive that 80GB sitting there not getting used much isn't quite so irritating.

Spec Ops: The Line (2012)

SPOILERS BELOW

 I'm apparently 10/15 chapters through and it's pretty disappointing, The impression I got of it beforehand was average gameplay, good political storytelling; I agree with the former, not the latter. It starts off like any gung-ho Modern Warfare bullshit, fair enough I think, you've got to set this up to undercut it, but then it doesn't stop being that for like the first half. And even then it's just a couple of decisions of exactly how shitty a soldier to be, which considering I'm already going around stomping on people's necks to put them out of their misery doesn't feel meaningful. And it's academic, as the decisions are so badly signposted that I barely realise I'm making one, how I'm supposed to or what it is, so I accidentally ended up being a war criminal just because it was incredibly unclear how not to be. The storytelling is really unclear too, there are a bunch of characters vying for power but you never meet any of them and they all sound the same, so I had no idea which was which, what they were doing or whether they were good or bad or ambiguous. I often die because of bad communication, like it's told me to run through a sandstorm when what it means is proceed carefully through a sandstorm. There's also the annoying thing of having two weapon slots and letting you choose whether to swap your current one for any lying around but not telling you anything about them, so because I'm not a gun-humping dickhead I have no idea what these micro-decisions mean either. I know pistol/shotgun/machine gun/rocket launcher and that's it.
It's a real shame, because the whole Heart Of Darkness take sounded really interesting, but the only thing I've taken away from it really is 'shooting windows so baddies get swept away by sand is cool'. If I hadn't heard ahead of time that it was supposed to be doing commentary I don't think I even would have realised it was trying to.

Got to the end, pretty frustrating. For one thing, fucking Fight Club? Come on. And it didn't work anyway because of the aforementioned problems that I didn't know who anyone was or what was going on so the twist meant nothing to me and I couldn't follow which bits had been real, and it seemed like maybe I could have made choices to affect it but also I'm not sure when the game was being 'clever' and giving me no real choice and when it was being bad and giving me a real choice very unclearly.
I like the general concept of 'do a Bioshock to interrogate Modern Warfare type games, with a bunch of Apocalypse Now (and unfortunately another movie) thrown in', and the setting of Dubai with all the ultra-modern hotels and stuff against the harsh sand and violence was really striking, but the storytelling was muddled to say the least and the gameplay was solid but unremarkable and it got to be a trudge by the end of it on both fronts.

The Supper: New Blood (2025)

A medium-length sequel to the short game I liked a while ago. Here's what I said about the first one:

a mash-up of Monkey Island 1 and Sweeney Todd, it's got lovely art (a slightly more cartoony version of the old Lucasarts style, which is refreshing amongst all the Sierra pastiche art that is so prevalent in modern indie adventures), some nice animations and tunes, and a fun dark vibe. The only negatives really are that it's very short and easy (basically a compliment, as I would have liked more of it!), that the UI is sometimes a little too streamlined for its own good, and that it would have been nice for the twenty or so narrator lines to be voice acted. Tiny nitpicks, though, in a very fun little game.

New Blood has all the same strengths and weaknesses, but unfortunately the weaknesses loom larger when a game lasts for more than twenty minutes, especially when it's so episodic. I had hoped it would be the first game evolved into a dark Day Of The Tentacle, but instead it's more like Darkside Detective - a collection of vignettes all with the same repeated framing and no difficulty to speak of. So, nice presentation, enjoyable grand guignol story, but I wish it were a 'real' adventure game rather than an idle point-and-clicker.

Rating: presentation still great, nitpicks worsened exponentially

Return To Monkey Island (2022)

SPOILERS BELOW

I'll paste in what I wrote back when Dan and I played a bit of it shortly after release, with a few edits. This all still stands for me, unfortunately:

First the fairground thing - so all the games so far have been Guybrush's kid play-acting his own versions of his stories? And he hangs out with a kid who happens to be called Chucky? And then they just did a couple of things at the end that didn't really make any sense but would have acted well as a good cliffhanger for a video game? And actually it all looking like modern day (down to Chucky's heavy metal t-shirt) was misleading and this is still pirate times? And when Guybrush Jr saw his parents in the dream sequence in Revenge, he made them two randos from the park he'd seen earlier? And Chucky was, what, just watching Guybrush Jr play-act on his own for 95% of the time then stepping in for two minutes once an hour? But... this thing we're playing now is real? Or maybe not for all I know? Also, the fairground reveal and the 'previously on' scrapbook really clash - so Guybrush definitely did the stuff in the book? So he definitely pulled LeChuck's leg off with the voodoo doll? But we just will now never get to know how that story actually ended. Or maybe that is Guybrush Jr playing at being Guybrush Sr looking through an imaginary scrapbook about imaginary adventures and talking out loud about them. Maybe Guybrush Sr is actually an accountant and all the pirate stuff is stories he's wholly made up for his kids. Who knows, now? Very unsatisfying and messy and frankly a total cop-out. (Maybe they'll reveal more stuff later that turns it all around but doing a shit twist in order to set up a good twist later isn't the best idea.)

Regardless of whether it all technically makes sense somehow, I'm not really paying attention to the game, because I'm trying to juggle all this in my head. It's just a very inelegant way to handle it all and especially to start a game.

More general stuff. It's a very boring start even apart from the canon-wrangling - a drawn out tutorial that is inconsequential to the story, then Melee Island again except it's sliiiightly diiiifferent! Plus the Princess Bride 'kid interrupts adult telling the story' stuff is pretty tired now. I still don't like the art, or the animation. Guybrush looks like an anorexic homeless person with a dicknose, and the cheap animation makes everyone looks like they've got Parkinson's. It's just not funny so far. I have a sneaking suspicion they're going to do Pun Swordfighting, which if they do is just the laziest internet-addled shit ever. And that dated horse armour reference they did as promotion which actually infected the game was terrible. It's got a To Do list (with pop-ups) and 'new item' exclamation mark icons, and a Hint Guide (which they waste the Voodoo Lady's intro scene on giving to you and which glows and shakes in your inventory unlike any other item, as if encouraging you to just give up on playing the game properly) and some sort of collectibles thing, which UGH. The context-sensitive hover text is really irritating and pointless, and Guybrush on the map is now an icon bouncing around rather than actual Guybrush walking across an island.

The tutorial was ridiculously long and had zero subtlety, plus it feels really weird for an MI game to open with something like that anyway. Newcomers could just look at a controls screen or something. Along with the flat, child's doodle art style and the whole 'this is a kid just making shit up' thing being made completely explicit from the jump, the whole thing feels really patronising and cutesy and fake. Just completely the wrong mood for a Monkey Island game. Even if you take the twist ending of MI2 at face value, it's still done in a creepy way and it doesn't undo the tone of the first two games. 

So, yeah, not a fan of this at all so far, and it's really weird to see Gilbert go from 'purposefully retro, poking at the player's patience in just the right way' in TP to this smoothed out collection of bells and whistles.

Hopefully as I go on, more stuff will appeal to me and I'll be able to stop thinking about the bumpy start.

God, Dan mentioned this at the time, but I'd forgotten how hand-holdy these cuts back to storyteller Guybrush are. Explaining very basic concepts that you just heard literally ten seconds earlier, and reassuring you that doing adventure game puzzles isn't boring because it's leading to story beats. It's a Monkey Island game that is too caught up in its own lore and yet wants to be accessible to someone who's never played an adventure game before.

When I opened the game up again, I was like 'hmmm, actually this art isn't half as bad as I remembered from yesterday, it looks sorta nice', and then as soon as I walked somewhere and all the movement kicked in, it looked horrible again. It's the paper-puppets aesthetic, the characters just gliding through the world and printing on top of stuff they shouldn't, and the way everything is constantly in motion, not just the weird head shaking but the chandeliers violently swinging, the bouncing pot on the throbbing stove. It all feels like a cheap YouTube under-4s animation, or a very cheap knock off of Broken Age. They also put a bunch of background animation in, which I'd normally appreciate, but it's so in your face here it can sometimes feel like the same kind of over-compensation as the head warping. 

A lot of the time you have to examine stuff to unlock the interact option, sometimes you don't get an examine option at all, and when trying to use your inventory on stuff you get a big red no entry icon for most of it so you can't try anything out and get hints. It makes it all feel more on rails. Even a flat 'that doesn't work' response, while in effect the same as a pre-emptive no entry, makes you feel more involved (and also makes it less tempting to brute force stuff by just sweeping your inventory over all the hotspots until you get a sentence line).

Storywise, there's a recurring motif of Guybrush looking at broken down relics from the past and reminiscing on old times. Like, the sentence line is sometimes explicitly stuff like "remember happier times" while looking at Melee island stuff. So I think Gilbert is trying to do an Unforgiven style narrative here, with older Guybrush coming back to his old haunts and finding everything falling apart, taken over by more ruthlessly capitalist and cynical tastes, with an allegorical layer about his return to the series. This is really interesting and I wish he'd leaned into this rather than the meta stuff. Like, give Guybrush grey hair and a shaggy beard, make it the next step from MI2, have him and LeChuck get back on track to the secret of Monkey Island after getting distracted by other weird silly adventures. Frankly, lean a bit more into the 'this is how you should have done an MI3' thing that a lot of fans wanted (and that he himself blogged about many years earlier). But if this is what he's reaching for, it's massively compromised by the presentation (art style tone, UI etc). Also, it's a shame that Escape already did the return to Melee and the capitalist modernising thing, it has (had?) a lot more potential resonance here. 

Finished. It got a little more complicated towards the end, with five keys to collect, but I basically made my way through without having to stop to think, which is a weird experience for a Monkey Island game. Probably the paucity of verbs and dialogue trees played a big part in this. The only times I ever really slowed down were when I had to re-examine something in my inventory and when I missed a pathway because it blended in with the background.

Storywise, it's a very bog-standard Monkey Island set-up, going to Melee Island, LeChuck's ship and a few other island, taking part in contests and cheating to win, tracking down five of the same item, racing against LeChuck, all the same characters again.

And so, the ending. I've been posting spoilers all through this thread, but just a last warning: spoilers! So, just before the final section, there's a little conversation with Elaine where she lists some of the bad things you've done through the game. There have been multiple cutscenes setting this up where she finds out about the path of destruction you've been leaving behind you. Then she lists them and asks whether it was worth it just to chase down this secret, and Guybrush says he was just solving puzzles, there was no other way, to which she replies "wasn't there?" (No. No there wasn't.) And that's it. Loads of narrative weight all for this one sub-Bioshock 'gotcha' moment, the kind of clever clever video game post-modernism that we poke fun at in LOTCG with Ben's reaction to the Denial level. I have no idea what Gilbert and Grossman are trying to say here - are they questioning our willingness to do bad things via Guybrush, or the fanbase's fixation on "The Secret", or whether they should have bothered making this game? It's also a little hard to dissect it precisely, because they hedge their bets by giving Guybrush multiple reply options.

So, that over with and forgotten, you get through the last few puzzles. LeChuck has the secret of Monkey Island in a big chest, says it must be opened in the bowels of Monkey Island, and has gone through the last door to do that. So you solve the puzzle, walk through, and... you exit through the same "employees only" Melee Island door that you did in Monkey Island 2. You're back on the high street but everything is fake, it's a theme park that Stan maintains and regularly creates different stories for. Basically, it's an escape room/LARP type set up, that Guybrush occasionally plays in. Then it cuts back to Guybrush Jr complaining about the ending and demanding to know what the secret is, the player is given various options, and then Elaine heads off with Guybrush Jr and Guybrush is left sitting on the bench relaxing. It's all incredibly smug and meaningless and so fucking lazy. It's just the same 'it's all a story' thing from MI2 (and Thimbleweed Park) but with more muddled layers thrown on top. The message seems to be 'you played a fun game, right? Who cares what the ending of the story is, it's all fake anyway!' Which I find to be an incredibly flawed and uninteresting one.

G&G add a final note to the player at the end of the 'previously on' (bit annoying to have to click through to get to, but whatever), where they talk about how the game addressed Gilbert's career being largely defined by this one thing, and how successful they can be at revisiting the glory days as older people. But... the game doesn't really grapple with those themes in any meaningful way. It just replays some old hits, has a character ask "is it worth it" and then wraps up with a shrug. If the secret is so unimportant, why spend the whole story on it? Why not get it and Monkey Island out of the way early and do something new and exciting with the rest of the game?

A shallow ending to a shallow game.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (2022)

I have a sneaking suspicion I won't like Hob's Barrow half as much as reviewers did.

Okay, did the extended prologue, and so far am liking it! The voice acting and sound design is great, writing is solid to good so far, lots of forboding Wicker Man/Royston Vasey energy. Not much has happened except a dream about a slightly weird looking cat, so I hope this isn't an 'elevated horror' game where it's all build up except for the last five minutes!

Only negative so far really is that the art is very basic pixel art. Serviceable but bog-standard. The exception is the creepy close-ups, which have tones of character, but a downside to that is it makes the regular art feel all the more unremarkable. Shame they couldn't have gone a bit more in that direction in general.

Realised that I was possibly mingling this in my mind with Curse Of The Golden Idol, which I think is a lot more of a detective game, and that may have contributed to my pessimism!

Having said that, I've played a bit more now and my opinion has dipped. After the atmospheric opening section, I'm now wandering around feeling a little aimless and doing incongruously silly adventure game stuff like distracting NPCs so I can use a hairpin to pick a lock, or finding a random necklace to use as a deposit to open a tab at the bar. It's all a little boring and is putting a big dent in the atmosphere. I'm now having to check a walkthrough because the latest puzzle is getting some paraffin for my lantern and the blacksmith will trade me for some but when I ask him what he wants. he says "surprise me" and apparently he wouldn't want anything I have! What kind of puzzle is that?

Also, minor criticism is that this is another game that opts for fading to black rather than animate simple stuff like the character sitting down or picking a lock, and even weirder fading characters out of the scene rather than have them open a door and walk through it. It's a small thing but it does spoil the immersion a bit, and it's not the most complicated thing to include.

Okay, looked at a walkthrough and before I got all the way to the solution was reminded that the blacksmith likes fossils. There's one in a rock I've seen, plus I now have a chisel. So I suppose that's actually a reasonable puzzle and one that a bit of wandering around all the screens would probably have got me to after a few minutes - I was just so irritated by that "surprise me" line! Might have been good to get a bit more feedback on trying to give him tools, though, as that seems a fair route to take. But regardless, this all still feels more Monkey Island than Wicker Man. I think I'm about to get to the end of this bit and find Hob's Barrow, though, so hopefully it'll get back on track.

It's a shame because when the atmosphere is uninterrupted, it's really strong. Striding out across the moors, finding a barrow, getting sense memories from the damp peat, then walking back to the village as it gets dark and starts to rain (and the rain effect is great - not the standard AGS rain, it's thick near horizontal British rain) and getting out of the evening mist into the warm firelit tavern. Having a pint of ale and chatting to the locals, enjoying slowly getting to know them even though there's an ever-present underlying worry that as a posh unmarried woman you'll never be truly welcome and may be in some danger. And then you go to sleep and have eerie dreams of walking under purple skies, with creepy close-ups of fair folk. But then you get a little autosave or "acquired: lump of tree resin" message pop-up with an electronic ding, the game fades to black to cover a three second event, the cursor pops in and out, the music behind an interstitial card cuts out abruptly; it all just bumps you out of it a bit. Plus you have a great long conversation at a pub table but there are never any close-ups or anything, and go through all the generic puzzling from earlier, it all serves to remind you you're playing a video game. It's all the kind of little stuff I'd nag Dan about when playtesting and writing up massive lists of notes for him!

Anyway, have done the arrival and Day One now, am onto Day Two (of three, apparently), so I guess I'm almost halfway through...

Ughhhh, more aimless wandering around. I now have to try to convince the farmer to let me excavate the barrow (which I already failed at yesterday and have no reason to think I'll be any more successful today, plus I can't even find him so I'm doing less well than I was before) and 'find out about local folklore' which I suppose just entails walking through every screen and getting through any new dialogue options for every character. Not a propulsive narrative, to say the least.

The puzzle design in this game is truly terrible. I've reached the point where I'm checking a walkthrough every few minutes and I can't be bothered any more. Remember that episode of the Simpsons where the kids are stranded on a desert island and by the end of the episode they've resolved their Lord of the Flies style conflicts but they're still stuck there so a narrator starts speaking and finishes with "and they were rescued by, oh, let's say Moe"? This game is like that: "you need some workers but you can't hire any until, oh, let's say you get some milk for the maid ... the lord won't help you until you get him, oh, let's say some cakes from the church patron." Just laughably perfunctory. And the solutions to the puzzles tick off a bunch of bad adventure design boxes too, like having to walk around interacting with everything until you trigger a change, having to do the same action three times to get a result without any suggestion that will happen, cause and effect you couldn't possibly guess at. Like, you've been trying to get the farmer to let you excavate the barrow and he's resolutely refusing. The solution? Show him an old stone from the previous dig. Turns out his brother, who was on that dig, also had a stone like that and for some reason this convinces him to give in. I still don't understand that one. Or when you need a particular kind of flower, which you've been told grows on the moors. The solution is to go into the church where there is now suddenly someone inside despite it being consistently empty up to this very moment, ask them about the vicar and randomly be told he had a roof garden at the top of the church and he has a key which he keeps in an unknown location maybe the graveyard, and realise this means that actually he's hidden the key behind one of the plaques that aren't in the graveyard and which now your character mentions have crumbly plaster around them despite never having said that before and that it must be the plaque with the names Romeo and Juliet mentioned because the vicar quoted Shakespeare at you a few times. There are more of these, it's painful.

Again, a real shame, this would have been better off as an If On A Winter's Night... style interactive story. Even the flashbacks were starting to run out of steam though, to be honest, no new information or mystery to them, it was all starting to feel a bit perfunctory. too. So I'm going to watch a walkthrough because I do want to see all the supernatural stuff (assuming it turns out to be real) but I can't be bothered struggling through any more of it. Especially as I have a journal with a bunch of quoted passages with IMPORTANT highlighted WORDS in them and a bunch of drawings with stars in different positions and shit, and I definitely can't be bothered to go through a load of Fate Of Atlantis style dial-turning nonsense.

Watching the last third of the game on a playthrough video, and my god the puzzles got worse just after I quit. The lord will only let you use his workers if you get him that one villager's homemade cakes, so you go ask her, she says she just gave the last of them to the vicar and even though he's left town and the cakes will go off you can't have them, and she's too upset over the recent death of her husband to bake more (which doesn't make sense seeing as he's been buried since you got here, at which point she was going on at you about her latest batch), so you have to go look at his grave, then go back to her and mention it to her at which point she tells you she wants to put a certain kind of flower on it (the third 'get me some flowers' puzzle of the game, in fact) and will bake you some cakes if you get her some, but you can't get them because a grumpy housekeeper is guarding them, but the maid will distract her if you find her missing boyfriend so you go ask some bloke in the town square who tells you which road he comes in from and you go there, find he's been tied up, cut his ropes and take him back to the maid. It's the kind of stupid "Man I love spanners" puzzle chain that Dan and I would put in a game to take the piss, I can't believe the devs thought it was a good match for this game. And unless I missed some contrived detail while scanning through, it doesn't make sense that the lord would even demand this of you, because his secret scheme depends wholly on you excavating the barrow! Why would he refuse to facilitate you doing that unless you got him some cakes?!

The worst thing is, the egregious puzzle design means I stop giving the benefit of the doubt on other stuff: odd choices like a little text pop-up that says something like "acquired: lump of tree resin" whenever you pick something up, like you're a terminator. Or directing the goblin VO to sound completely human (and I know, goblins aren't real, there's no reason they couldn't just sound like some twenty-five year old bloke down the pub, but it just feels wrong). Or stopping the story to listen to a travelling musician (cool idea, nice bit of atmosphere) but writing and mixing it to sound like a 90s Radiohead B-side rather than some late 19th century folk music being played on an acoustic guitar in the corner of a tavern. Things that, when I read reviewers gushing about how they had to keep reminding themselves that this terrifying ordeal was just a game or that they spent hours after playing thinking about the deep socio-philosophical themes, make me want to shout "did you just not notice all the terrible bits, have you not played a game since the 80s?!"

Finished watching the video, and wow the last section is a purple Atlantis full of riddles and turning statue heads to face the right way, and sneering cartoon villains doing evil laughs together like it's an Austin Powers movie. All that opening atmosphere gone. It's like if the last twenty minutes of Wicker Man were Sergeant Howie finding the Wicker Man's secret underground lair and solving riddles to get past booby traps. I can see why one reviewer reported being initially disappointed after finishing the game but then spending hours talking themselves into liking it and thinking it was really clever actually. Maybe if you have to work that hard on maintaining cognitive dissonance, the game was actually just disappointing and you'll have to bring yourself to give a bad review to an adventure game despite it being one of those 'important serious ones with themes'.

This really does remind me so much of Fate of Atlantis in how frustrated I am at the devs for squandering so much promise with so much bullshit.

Dexter Stardust: Adventures In Outer Space (2022)

This looks a little cheap but got 'solid and charming' type reviews...

Okay, yeah, predictably from the name and the screenshots, this one is bland and clunky in every way. An idle-point-and-clicker with pop ups every time you pick something up or get a new objective and jokes aimed at six year olds who have played Monkey Island. A bit of a shame, I was hoping this would have a kind of 'Robert Rodriguez does Futurama' vibe, but despite the Hispanic voice actors having apparently "co-created" the characters, as far as I can tell from a quick google this game was written by a White American who fills it with Hispanic characters who love tacos and wear sombreros (and yet the lead is called Dexter!). As for the Futurama aspect, well it's got 'useless manchild' and 'scolding competent woman' as the leads, I guess.

I suppose one good thing I can say about it is that they put a lot of animation and cutscenes in there, which adds production value. 

Sidenote: it's funny how playing games over the past few years it's clear to see when Adventure Creator became popular - you can sniff out the standard AC set-ups just as easily as the AGS ones!

Rating: bland and clunky

Strangeland (2021)

A Giger-y adventure from the makers of Primordia, which I was very enthusiastic about at first and then cooled on to the point of giving up on it, so I'm moderately optimistic for it!

This turned out to be utter shit, what a shame. It's a metaphorical nightmarescape, where the metaphor is painfully obviously one for cancer and where just in case you didn't get it a talking crow tells you that things are metaphorical here and reflect on you. It's all the stuff we were taking the piss out of in LOTCG's Grief level: an evil floating black cloud thing that "got mostly burned away but a little bit remained and it grew back", floating platforms in a liminal space etc etc. Everyone talks in vague idioms so there are no interesting characters or dialogues. The design is bad, too: in one location there are three separate exits which are all unintentionally made hard to find in different ways; one puzzle required me to intentionally kill the character so I could go back to the opening screen which otherwise you can't walk back to, because there are some easy to miss small grey pebbles on the grey rocky ground to pick up there; I eventually got bottlenecked by a fucking shooting gallery minigame which apparently is possible to achieve with lightning fast reflexes but the other way to get past it is to break open the control box and... complete a spinning dial logic puzzle. AAGH. Worst of all - that logic puzzle doesn't fucking work. I solved it, I checked with walkthroughs that I solved it, and yet it didn't make the shooting game slower. So that's that game over, then. And I bought it too long ago to refund it.

Rating: terrible

The Procession To Calvary (2020)

Another Gilliam-y game by Joe Richardson. It was very good! As always, strong storytelling, funny, and fun puzzles. Had a few different endings, too. Not much to say about it that I didn't already with Four Last Things, but 3 more hours of the same great stuff!

Rating: great

Nick Bounty And The Dame With The Blue Chewed Shoe (2020)

Don't know anything about this series, except I have two of them and I got them for free somewhere!

Turns out this is by Mark Darin, an ex-Telltale designer, and has music and VO by a bunch of Telltale pros too. Unfortunately, it also turns out that it is dreadful. It looks ugly as sin, the pathfinding is so bad that you're constantly having to nudge your character past obstacles, and the writing is weary sub-Police Squad stuff. There's pixel hunting which is exacerbated by the fact that the game is in black and white and 3D so it's incredibly easy to walk past important objects or not realise that you can just walk behind a structure in the back corner and the camera will swing round to let you see something on the floor. To access your inventory you have to slowly move your cursor up to the icon in the top left of the screen (the game tells you it's designed to be played with a controller but I would have swapped to kbm in the hopes of alleviating some of these issues if I were to play any further). These are all mistakes that not even Sam & Max S01E01 was making. Have uninstalled and won't be playing the other game in the series which is called, wait for it, A Case Of The Crabs. Ah ha ha, like the venereal disease! Brilliant!

Rating: terrible

The Supper (2020)

It's by Octavi Navarro, who did some art on Thimbleweed Park and has made a bunch of little cartoony dark comedy horror adventure games. This one is a mash-up of Monkey Island 1 and Sweeney Todd, it's got lovely art (a slightly more cartoony version of the old Lucasarts style, which is refreshing amongst all the Sierra pastiche art that is so prevalent in modern indie adventures), some nice animations and tunes, and a fun dark vibe. The only negatives really are that it's very short and easy (basically a compliment, as I would have liked more of it!), that the UI is sometimes a little too streamlined for its own good, and that it would have been nice for the twenty or so narrator lines to be voice acted. Tiny nitpicks, though, in a very fun little game.

Rating: fun but very short and simple, wanted more!

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

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

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