Reviews by Rovarsson
Puzzler
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20th Century Tidbits, August 4, 2021I remember getting a very intimidating book as a present when I was a small child. I was amazed that it had more than a thousand pages. It seemed impossible that anyone would get through such a huge story. It turned out to be a "365 Bedtime Fairytales"-book, with a 3-page story for each night.
What was a relief in the case of the bedtime book turned out to be a disappointment in the case of Jigsaw, a game I had been looking forward to playing for a long time.
Instead of a sweeping epic story taking me past the turning points of recent history, I got 16 smallish (but hard) bedtime puzzles barely held together by an overarching plot. Just as with the bedtime-book, Jigsaw took a long time to finish. I would hardly call it a big game though. More a series of historical vignettes, to be experienced and enjoyed at the player's leisure.
As for the overarching plot, anyone's guess is as good as mine. Here's what I made of it: Black has a plan to change the past to mold the present and/or future to Black's priorities/preferences. You don't want that. (Even if some of the changes Black tries to make are really good ideas, like (Spoiler - click to show)preventing World War I...) Your task is to find and reverse the temporal disturbances Black leaves in his wake as he visits certain important times in the 20th century. Black's and your motives for all of this remain in the dark (to me, at least).
After a confusing introductory sequence (where you need to find an unmentioned exit to progress, not for the only time in this game...), you arrive in the central hub/control centre. From here you can access the different time-areas where you need to solve a puzzle.
Fortunately, the time-areas are mostly independent from each other. As you enter one, you should be able to find everything needed to fix the temporal disturbance. This makes the puzzles merely hard, instead of impossible. Allthough the number of rooms and available objects is limited in every area, you have to time your actions carefully and execute them in a particular order. SAVE and RESTORE are necessary parts of the gameplay.
Most of the historical vignettes were very enjoyable, clearly well-researched and very satisfying to solve. Some were either too hard, or were solvable but took me far into try-everything-on-everything terrain.
I missed a cohesive backstory tying this game together as a whole. However, it's well worth exploring and trying to solve the puzzles independently. As I said: very satisfying.
Dimension-shifting theme-park, July 27, 2021Happy birthday to you!
It's your special day and your parents have gone all out and got you the Queen-package for Grooverland. It's an all-access special treatment pass for your favourite theme-park, with a coronation ball in the big castle included. You just have to enjoy the rides and find your Queen-stuff while you're at it.
A seemingly light and humorous plot, told in a funny and colourful tone. Until you get a bit farther along on your quest and start gathering the regalia you need to enter the Queen's castle. A darker dimension lies behind our own, and obtaining the symbols of your royalty causes it somehow to overlap more and more with the happy theme-park reality, subverting our familiar world into solid scary-clown territory. (Coulrophobics can rest assured, no actual scary clowns appear in the game)
The writing seems to have some trouble keeping up with the gradually changing atmosphere. The descriptions do change while the game-world devolves into a darker version of itself, and random background events now depict monstrosities selling snacks, but I never had the feeling of being dragged down into darkness with the protagonist though. I was more a curious but distant observer than an involved participant.
In part, this is because the puzzles are so darn good. They are very accessible, even on the easy side. At the same time, they are wonderfully original in the most creative way: take something that's well-established and add an unexpected twist. The laser-fight puzzle is among the best I've ever seen, while it is in essence a "push the right button"-puzzle in disguise.
Now, the accessibility and originality of the puzzles demands that the writing be crystal clear (which it is), without any ambiguities in the descriptions, so the player can clearly visualize the surroundings. This takes precedence over describing the atmosphere of the changing game-world. The clarity of the puzzle-descriptions shines a bright spotlight in the supposedly dim and gloomy alternate realm taking over our world, causing it to be not so dim and gloomy.
Grooverland's gameplay made a very solid, robust impression on me. The game-world felt like it was there, and I could try whatever I wanted without fear of breaking anything or confusing the underlying order. There are helpful NPCs, funny references to other games, a lot of tinkering and experimenting puzzles, all leading up to an exciting endgame.
The grand finale is just the way I like it. I have proved my worth during the middlegame, solving the fiddly puzzles with the many possibilities. Now it is time for a straightforward but very exciting and well-paced boss fight. Excellent way to reward the player and to leave him with a sense of accomplishment after finishing the game.
I enjoyed this very much.
"But if we throw the Cat in the barrel first,..., June 28, 2021...then how will the Aardvark learn to swim?"
A small taste of the sometimes absurd sense of humour that pervades Augmented Fourth
King Goosen of Papoosen did not enjoy your rendering of "Ode to a Duck". Consequently, you and your trusty trumpet are thrown down the pit, where you discover a community of sorts living at the bottom of the volcano.
Determined to make it back top-side, you must now overcome the obstacles that stand between you and the closed off ladder to the castle. You have your wits and your magically enhanced trumpet.
Instead of memorizing magic scrolls, in Augmented Fourth you must obtain and learn music sheets. Each of the melodies has its own effect on your surroundings and as such functions as a wizard's spell. This magic system is worked out in detail. If you play a particular ditty in a location that is not the intended puzzle-room, the surroundings will still react, sometimes hilariously. The actual effects of the spells are mostly natural phenomena (rain, gravity, ducks...), so it is not too difficult to judge which spell/song to play to solve a particular puzzle.
The game keeps a nice balance between magical solutions and more prosaic adventuring puzzles. Along with summoning ducks through trumpet-playing, you will also need to do the usual bit of exploring of the cave and manipulating of the objects.
The cave under the volcano has a splendid map. The adventure starts off in the center of the volcano, also the central hub of the area. All directions save one are open for exploration from the beginning, and multiple puzzles are accessible from the start. Almost without noticing though, you will have less and less options to pursue, effectively pushing you to the bottleneck in the northern quadrant. From there on out, the game shifts gears and the story gets on fast-moving railroad tracks to the hilarious finale.
A finale that is foreshadowed throughout the game in small amusing intermezzos narrating what is happening with the King up top, who is spiraling down to ever more insanely funny despotic madness.
Modern IF is often lauded for the way the puzzles are seamlessly integrated into the story. Augmented Fourth turns this on its head: the story is woven seamlessly around the puzzles, which are without a doubt the real reason of existence for this game. In many of those puzzles, well-known adventuring tropes are averted, subverted, completely avoided or twisted in a knot. Breaking down the player's expectations often leads to fantastically comic situations, when a certain build-up of tension is suddenly relieved in an unforeseen direction.
There are also a number of playthings that are just that: items to play around with. They're not even red herrings (of which there are also a fair number...), just opportunities to idly while away the time. In the same vein, there are a number of books that provide hints; they mostly provide page after page of completely unnecessary sillines.
A very silly, moderately difficult and very smoothly playing puzzle-romp.
A walk in the park ... until it turns into a jungle., June 8, 2021After lying through your teeth about your lockpicking skills (which are non-existent), you were allowed into the Thieves' Guild. However, instead off stealing old ladies handbags, you are sent to a mysterious island, a letter from the Guild Master with your objective in your pocket.
Isle of the Cult starts out very laid-back and lighthearted. So much so that when a) the letter with your goal on it turns out to be illegibly smudged by seawater, and b) the fishing boat that dropped you off sails away with your burglar's gear still in it, you decide to just wing it without any equipment.
So you set off to explore the island and you soon come across remnants of an old civilization: an abandoned village and two temples on a hill. The ex-inhabitants of the village probably said to each other: "Hey, if ever a lone adventurer comes this way, we might as well make them feel welcome!", and left a few easy obstacles in the way. "The way" being a straight north-south avenue with buildings to the sides.
Things change when you get to the southern part of the island. Here, narrow paths wind through the jungle to isolated locations, ravines and streams block your path. In the center of the jungle a great fog-tipped mountain looms. There are harder puzzles you must solve to get to locked off areas of the map. Not harder as in complicated, but cunningly deceiving, making you look one way while the solution is right under your nose. Quite exhilarating to solve these, really. A few red herrings are thrown in for good measure, and these add to the overall abandoned island-feel.
The writing in Isle of the Cult is not remarkable but it is efficient and to the point. Storywise there is hardly any story or plot to speak of. This is an oldschool puzzle adventure. But it is an excuisitely polished one. The author has thought of many unnecessary or "wrong" actions and has provided appropriate, helpful or funny responses. Your movements are described tersely, reminding you that you are crossing jungle-terrain, not just going E or N on a grid.
A smooth and sometimes misleading adventure. Nothing groundbreaking, but very well made. A joy to play.
Not-princesses all around!, June 4, 2021It all begins with a rather awkward protagonist to control: a pig (which can alledgedly sniff out wizards...) Since pigs walk on four feet and have no opposable thumbs, a lot of commands are thrown out the window by nature of the PC. And although pigs are known to be very clever animals by those who study them (pigycists?), this particular pig does seem to rise even above normal intelligence levels of other members of the species Sus scrofa. For one thing, it can read...
Seeing that this smart pig is somewhat limited in the handiness department, it must find other ways to further its goals. Cue NPCs. By virtue of an excellent grasp of human psychology, our protagonist-pig can manipulate the other characters into following it around and it nudges them to interact with objects or other characters through very deliberately SNIFFing of pieces of the surroundings. Different characters will act upon this sniffing in different ways, according to their nature.
One of the pig's major ways to solve puzzles is therefore to choose the right NPC to come along and do the hands-on work. Instead of switching between PCs with their special abilities, here our pig-protagonist has to switch between NPC accomplices. The way this is handled in-game is both elegant and hilarious.
The puzzles flow seamlessly from the story and the setting. Some of them are pig-adjusted variations on standard adventure-fare, while others are truly surprising and original.
The writing is fresh and crisp, with a truly great comedic touch. There is lots of physical slapstick comedy, but at least as much of the humour comes from the pig's observations of the humans. Our pig always keeps a certain distance and so can easily see through the notions about identity the NPCs have about themselves.
Through these observations and the development of the story, what started as a laugh-out-loud comedy evolves into a character-driven drama by the finale. The Aesop that becomes clear near the end could have been cliché and heavy-handed, but the lightness and subtlety of the writing lifts it far above a finger-waving moral-of-the-story.
Truly one of the greatest games I have ever played.
Cleaning windows..., May 30, 2021Conveniently for the author of The Plant, his protagonist's car breaks down right in front of a sketchy detour leading to a mysterious plant off the main road. Equally convenient is the fact the boss of said protagonist is very eager to explore said plant...
While the circumstances leading up to the start of the game are a bit convoluted, once the story starts, I got drawn in fast and deep. The main reason for this is the excellent writing and pacing. The player's curiosity is piqued along with the PC's, and the boss's nudging adds some extra motivation to find a way into this mysterious facility.
The puzzles provide good pacing to the story, forcing the player to slow down and take note of what is happening. A good deal of actions trigger cutscenes, giving movement to the game/story, instead of being a static stage with the PC walking around it.
I did not encounter one bug, and only one puzzle that could be a bit more player-friendly in design ((Spoiler - click to show)When moving atop the glass ceiling, you have to LOOK each time you stop to see the particulars of your surroundings). Everything else is smooth, well clued (that doesn't mean easy...) and executed perfectly. The technical skill shown in the design of this game makes sure the player trusts that even though she is stuck, there is a way to win the game, and that it makes sense. (Lord of the IF-realm knows I've played games not so trustworthy...)
I'm still of two minds regarding the finale. It seemed like a profound breach of tone, but on the other hand, I did burst out laughing.
Very good original puzzles, extremely good pacing. Maybe a tad impersonal. Recommended.
As if particle physics wasn't weird enough on its own..., May 23, 2021As I was reading the lengthy and funny prologue to Dr. Dumont's P.A.R.T.I. I was quickly drawn into the backstory to this game. Allthough it's a fairly traditional comic/surreal puzzle romp, the fact that the weirdness is explained in-game put the entire experience in a whole other light.
Our protagonist is an accidental guinea pig trying out the newest particle accelerator in the university lab. The A.I. controlling this advanced particle detection machine needs genuine creative input from a human mind to teach it how and where to look for the elusive particle X. In order to get this input, the computer generates a metaphorical world in which the human subject must solve puzzles for the computer to learn from.
With this in the back of my mind, there were many instances where I could relate the superficial silliness of the puzzles and their solutions to my limited layman's knowledge of actual scientifically demonstrated properties of the subatomic world. ((Spoiler - click to show)the golfball, the bubble wand,...)
It's certainly a welcome change from getting lost in a magical realm as an explanation for unbridled silliness. When push comes to shove, that is exactly what this physics-themed adventure is: a stack of bizarre, weird and silly circumstances with their own internal consistence, strung together for the player to test her wits against.
After a bit of just wandering around enjoying the views, I did have some trouble to find an appropriate starting point to the game proper. The map has a spoked hub-structure with each spoke open to exploration from the moment you find the central hub. I assumed that each spoke would be its own self-contained puzzle area, independent of the others until I had gathered everything needed for the endgame. I found out this was a wrong assumption after bashing my head against a timed puzzle in the first spoke I tried. It turns out that although the spokes are freely accessible from the get go, they have to be entered and solved in a particular order to solve the game, each game area building on objects or clues you got in the previous one.
Once this was clear however, I had a very enjoyable time finding my way through the many locations. The puzzles were just right for my skill- and knowledge-level. Most are common sense physics/mechanics puzzles with enough of a twist to keep them from being overly obvious. There is also a tip of the hat to a quite common link between quantum physics and Zen meditation (nature of reality stuff...) that appears in many layman's books about particle physics. Suffice it to say that you have to MEDITATE ON some topics to get the insight needed to find the solution to a puzzle.
The writing is consistently funny, the humour ranging from slapstick to surreal, interspersed with small in-jokes for the subatomically in-the-know. A lot of the comedy comes from the descriptions, behaviour and conversations of the NPCs, who all seem to be the same guy in various transparent disguises.
Gameplay-wise, Dr. Dumont's P.A.R.T.I. is very much a classic puzzle-heavy text adventure. The quirky humour and the quantum-physics background does set it apart from others of its kind.
Not too hard, lots of laughs, lots of fun. Chucklingly recommended.
Duke Alaric dukes it out with the trolls., May 20, 2021It had been a long time since I ventured into Hecate, the land of Alaric Blackmoon. I was immediately drawn back in. I love the high-on-questing/low-on-magic surroundings. Alaric is a down-to-earth veteran who got appointed Duke for saving Hecate in the first game, Axe of Kolt. Since then he has been roaming the lands to help his people where he can.
In The Lost Children the children of Hecate are being kidnapped by the trolls, who are normally friendly commercial partners. Might there be some magical coercion behind their changed behavior?
The story of The Lost Children is standard but great fun. Alaric goes on a straightforward, unironic quest to save the missing children, solving problems and puzzles on his way. The first area, west of the Fireheart Mountains, involves two fetch-quests. One is particularly weird/hilarious. The mother of one of the missing children has information Alaric needs, but she demands that he fix her leaking roof first. The fact that she's an Elf who knows through a psychic connection that her son is alive and well might help explain her warped priorities, but still...
The puzzles here range from the very simple find-object-use-object kind to more elaborate obstacles where our hero must obtain the right information first and go through a multi-step plan to get what he needs.
It is during one of these fetch-quests that the player encounters a magnificent puzzle where they have to take stock of their inventory, the geography of multiple locations and make a mental leap that would come natural for a playing child. The moment it clicks is fantastic. ((Spoiler - click to show)Skipping into the cave across the cove.
The area east of the mountains offers a whole other set of obstacles. Here Alaric comes face to face with the trolls and must find ways to deceive, kill or in some other way go around them. There is certainly some learn-by-dying involved in the endgame, where the player has to figure out which steps to take and then restore and execute those steps in as few moves as possible, or else be caught by trolls or pulverized by wizard-fire. In a game as proudly oldschool as this one, I had not one bit of a problem with that.
The problems with <iThe Lost Children mostly lie in a lack of gatekeeping between the two areas. It is exceedingly easy to move through the tunnels under the Fireheart Mountains to the valley of the trolls from which there is no return, and only then notice that you lack a necessary object to kill the ogre.
Indeed, there are many, many ways to get the game into walking-dead terrain. Too many. That's a shame, because the good oldschool features (I learned to like a well-thought-through try-die-repeat puzzle) of the game threaten to be buried under the frustration that comes with too many restores and lack of clues and guidance.
I enjoyed playing through this game with a massive amount of hints and explicit help. Without that, I would recommend playing another Alaric Blackmoon-game like Die Feuerfaust instead.
A cabin in the woods...*, April 14, 2021First off: Some Space is beautiful. There are background images of stars and nebulas while you play, and a soothing soundtrack.
I quite liked the lettering, but I do think it might be hard for people with certain eye-problems to notice the clickable words.
Playing the game left me with a split experience.
The main body of the game is about your PC who has moved to the Koilan planet for a new job. Unfortunately, the Koilan have a very vague and roundabout way of communicating. Everything they say is interpreted by you as one or other code, even with the universal translation goo you drink at the beginning of the game.
I thought the code puzzles were cool in the way that ten-year-olds playing spies think secret messages are cool. (This is a good thing. I liked playing spies as a ten-year-old. Still do.) I can't elaborate, just be ready to look up resources (very simple recources) out-of-game/on the net.
Throughout the game, you keep getting hints that something's wrong on the home-front. It's a vague but effective method of characterization that the PC keeps ignoring certain messages, without the player having any choice in the matter.
After happily breaking different codes and translating secret messages, the game suddenly changes tone. Very soon after, it comes to a screeching halt, leaving the player wondering about the small but intense bits of backstory that were just revealed.
I really don't know. I liked a lot about this game, but it didn't feel like an integrated whole.
*You'll get it when you play it.
Phone booth to the stars, Microwave to the past, April 4, 2021A big review for a big game.
Finding Martin is an extremely big and extremely difficult game. I would not have been able to finish it without external hints and peeking at the walkthrough.
However, it’s also a very long, complicated and well-conceived story that ties together the lives and fates of many characters. It was a great experience to see this play out over the course of many playsessions.
The intro is somewhat hurried. It pays little attention to character exposition or context, instead just telling you the bare minimum of information. A former college mate, Martin, has disappeared. His sister calls you up and persuades you to help find him. That’s it. No big emotional reminders of what close friends you were or what splendid memories you share.
In fact, this detachement in the beginning of the game is one of the first points of criticism in Adam Cadre’s and Janice Eisen’s podcast about Finding Martin. And I have to agree with them… to a point. Were one to come to Finding Martin empty-slated as it were, it would be very hard to muster the determination to wade through that much pointless puzzles without any in-game motivation. Having read reviews and forum-posts about the game though, as I expect almost any player attempting it now would do, I anticipated this. I was prepared and actually looking forward to these puzzles-for-puzzles’-sake.
And I have to say, it is very much worth it when the story starts unfolding to have bit your teeth hard into these unmotivated puzzles. They turn out to have meaning after all.
Technically, Finding Martin is a monster-achievement. The room descriptions follow the many and varied changes in game-state almost seamlessly. There are some points where a repeated description of a device in motion hints at the cogwheels of the game straining ((Spoiler - click to show)the Fuzzy Room in action), but I believe eliminating this would have been very difficult to program.
There is another point of criticism I’d like to bring up: the huge amount of micro-management. There are a few puzzles where you have to sit in front of a desk or a piano and where you have to explicitly SIT and STAND UP every time. There is also the main puzzle/clue mechanism of the game that requires you PUT X IN POCKET every time. Well, okay, I guess… But then you put on a jacket and get disambiguation prompts the whole time. (“The trouser pocket or the jacket pocket?”.) Maybe there could have been a designated pocket for this object? I’m sure I could have shaven a few hundred moves off the +5OOO I took to finish the game.
Ah well, technicalities…
The map is actually not so big. There is Martin’s house, which comprises the main game-area. This area contains a number of hidden passages that expand the map, but not by that much. Then there are quite a number of small submaps to journey to that are easily explored. Together they give a feeling of possibility, of a wider space than is actually in the game.
Part One
You begin by exploring Martin’s house. I got the impression that a mad genius had been in charge of installing the domotics technology and went all out. “Hmmm, what if I tied opening the oven to the turtle drawing its head into its shell?” (Not a real example, but close enough.)
There are hidden or unknown mechanisms and controls everywhere. An enormous number of the objects you come across come with a puzzle. This amount of puzzles also means that by the time you’ve gone through the house once, you’ve been bombarded with a veritable barrage of clues. Very hard to keep track of.
Luckily, there are some things to help the player. For one, the writing. It is clear, descriptive and detailed, with just enough flair as to not become dry.
Then, there are two in-game hint/clue systems. Unfortunately, one of them (the one that tells you how to do things) takes some intricate puzzle-solving all by itself to activate. The other one tells you what to look for next. It hangs just outside the front door.
By meticulously following these clues and experimenting with everything, the player finds more and more ways to open doors and make seemingly trivial things happen ((Spoiler - click to show)running a bath for instance…). This gradually shrinks down the pile of clues to a more manageable size, making it easier to plan ahead.
Also, I found that after a while, my brain adapted to the bizarre-yet-consistent logic of the game. I came to expect certain kinds of solutions to work.
Part Two
In the second part you find a device for travelling that is reminiscent of a certain doctor’s means of transportation. This allows you to leave the house and pick up objects necessary for solving puzzles in the house (by solving more puzzles of course).
During these travels, the backstory finally starts opening up. By listening to old cassettes and through the cunning use of your sense of smell, you learn more about Martin and his family. In the rest of the game you will get to see how their lives and yours entwine to make a possible future.
You also meet the first people. NPCs in Finding Martin are very unresponsive. But they do have a lot to say and do without you having to ask them to. In a bunch of pleasant cut-scenes you will meet half a dozen or so people that will aid you on your quest. They also provide welcome paragraphs of rest and exposition to ease your by-now-overheating brain.
The puzzles in this part are easier, most of all because you have clearer sub-goals and a clearer course of action. This is also a part where you get to experiment and train with the training wheels still on. You are gently prohibited from going on a trip if you don’t have a necessary object. Not so in the last part of the game!
And last but not least, you get to re-explore your surroundings with a cool new gadget! It will change the way you view the world.
Part Three
And now we come to the third part. A long, dense and insanely difficult buildup to the finale.
Through a series of time-travel trips you have to resolve a number of paradoxes in the desired timeline to make it reality. You will need to coöperate with your past self to set up the necessary conditions for the following time trips, plant objects for your future self to solve puzzles and eventually make the intended future a reality instead of a mere possibility.
Finding Martin’s world and logic are bizarre, unintuitive and twisted. However, there is a strong consistency throughout the game. An unseen interlocking machinery is at work underneath the surface and gives the piece its coherence in tone and style. There is method to the madness, it’s just nigh impossible to grasp it.
Therefore I was disappointed to see the coherence crumble in this part as the game descended into gratuitous zaniness (Spoiler - click to show)(Peter Pan and Captain Hook show up…
It’s only one scene during one overseas trip, but it did break the atmosphere for me.
But soon the game shook off this temporary lapse and continued to a truly satisfying finale. It was a joy to see all those carefully laid out pieces come together, tying together timelines as well as the lives of the characters I had come to care about. The road was long and hard, but the reward is very much worth it.
Highly recommended game!
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