Ulasan terkini oleh RecessiveGeneQueen

Laughing and crying the whole time, this was 3% better than Salem but still so..... wow.

This is a spectacular Nancy Drew game that combines so many of my favorite things - puzzles, gossip, petty drama, ambient cello music, and a very easy cooking puzzle. The Rachel reveal is one of my favorite plot beats of anything ever and lives in my head rent-free.

This was a sweet little game without a lot of depth to it. I love games that are relaxing and tell stories through puzzles so this seemed extremely up my alley. And it was - but it's fleeting and the balance of it felt a bit off. Thematically, Assemble With Care is about what it means to restore things that have been broken and how they can heal more EMOTIONAL rifts between people, but - and this is a weird criticism I never thought I'd give - it almost felt like there was TOO much narrative? What to me would be the mechanical strength of a game like this is the way it feels to get engrossed in the puzzle of fixing something, the way hours can pass when I'm doing a jigsaw puzzle. But the puzzles in this game were usually extremely short and straightforward, broken up by narrative segments, and I rarely got to enjoy that immersed feeling before I had finished a puzzle. The objects didn't feel terribly unexpected either, although the two different character stories at the center of the game were cute. I think this might have worked better if the repairwoman character had a shop people were bringing things into so that the flow of the repairs was more uninterrupted. I think I wanted it to be more through my own inference that I learned about the characters (like in the brilliant and chill Unpacking), but it was a straightforward run to the finish. The art, music, and voice acting were unassailable and masterfully executed. Good for 90 minutes of relative calm, but something felt a bit lacking here.

This game does a great job of balancing all the series' strongest elements of character-building, puzzle-solving, and exploring without falling into some of the hoarier traps that plagued the later games.

First of all, Japan is a fantastic setting for a game (and probably the country I most want to visit myself someday), and the game did a good job of conveying both the traditional and hypermodern aspects of Japanese culture, as well as how the rapidly changing nature of Japanese life can create friction between generations. There were elements of technological innovation, street style and food, myth, and the traditional arts woven through the narrative, and characters' different interests and positions on the spectrum of traditional to modern set up plenty of good character conflict throughout.

I recently replayed Nancy Drew: Ghost of Thornton Hall for the first time since it came out, and the atrociousness of that game helped to highlight some of what this one does well. Thornton Hall was concerned with 2 things: being EXTREMELY "spooky" and telling a convoluted story about generational trauma, two elements this game does much better.

On the spook factor, there are some genuinely scary moments in Shadow, but they're infrequent and serve as setpieces that indicate you're making progress through the story. More importantly, they all have a reasonable/practical explanation at the end that is contextualized by a character's motivations. In Thornton Hall, a cockamamie excuse is given for why frightening sequences that couldn't be executed on a practical level are so abundant which makes clear the game producers just wanted to brand the game as the spookiest entry in the series HER did a good job in Shadow to not let the hauntings overshadow Nancy's INVESTIGATION of what was going on and why.

As to the narrative itself, Shadow at the Water's edge did an admirable job of telling a compact story about how a painful loss affected a family and the ways it pushed them to internalize their pain. Getting to know each character and come to understand how they have failed to recover from the loss is a satisfying bit of investigating, and there are many clues scattered throughout the game that help us to also understand the dead woman's personality so that we ourselves feel her loss by sensing her absence in her family. Thornton Hall took a much sloppier approach, going for a larger scope involving multiple generations of characters spread a hundred years apart that failed to gel fully, especially because it hinted at the specters of darker elements (namely slavery) but refused to name and explore them outright. Keeping the focus tighter was a clear win here.

This game also had one of the more satisfying culprit motives - often the resolution involves a character wanting some sort of money or treasure, which effectivelys make any suspect equally likely, but the eventual reveal in this game both logically explained how the hauntings were happening and also felt genuinely believable from an emotional perspective as a selfish, unhealthy reaction to a horrible loss.

The music and visual design were particular standouts here as well. One particular track on the soundtrack goes from traditional to creepy in a very subtle way and is genuinely shiver-inducing. The scenic design did a great job of making the world of the game feel bigger than it was, with small corners of public spaces doing a good job of suggesting a larger whole. Also, props for building an entire "subway" to move around on rather than just automating fast travel. It felt more like Nancy was navigating a foreign city when I would get her hopelessly lost looking for a destination.

The puzzles were strong here, wisely leaning heavily on traditional puzzles like nonograms, renograms, sudoku, and other logic-based puzzles that are challenging yet straightforward. When a game has a strong narrative, I often find myself turning to a walkthrough for a puzzle or two that feels like it's killing the momentum without being any fun, but I never once had to do so here.

The only real weakness I'd point to were that the voice acting choices didn't age particularly well - most of the Japanese characters were voiced by white actors and the accents felt caricature-ish at points. I think if this game was made today they wouldn't have made that choice but it sticks out a little more than it did to me as a kid.

An interesting element I've seen pointed out online in this game is the way Nancy's confrontational method of talking to and questioning people is received by the Japanese characters. Nancy remarks to her friends at a couple of different points that everyone seems secretive and guarded, which is something of a tone-deaf white American response to a more private and polite cultural mode like Japan's. It's interesting to see this cultural difference played out, but it may not have been intentional since it isn't really underscored within the text itself.

Overall, Shadow at the Water's Edge is easily in the top 5 or so Nancy Drew games of all time and maybe the best modern games of the series. A+

Such a gorgeous game that does what games as a medium can do uniquely - makes you feel and discover a story through inputs and actions. Unpacking is about exactly what it sounds like: unpacking your stuff in a series of places as your character moves through life. But the developers had an intuitive understanding of the ways in which this universal experience can tell us such specific things about a person. What items travel through a person's whole life and which fall away as the years pass tell us about a person's priorities and the direction of their growth, while the places they move to mark major life milestones. I'm pretty sure I've made every one of these moves, from going off to college to navigating space with roommates to coming home again, until eventually you find the right path and take decisive steps forward. Mechanics like whether you can move another person's possessions when you're moving into their space (roommates: no, boyfriend: yes) are a clever way to change the mechanics of the puzzles while alluding to the way it truly feels to inhabit others' spaces - and to have one all our own. It was emotional and satisfying to see this unnamed character taking new paths in life and finally moving from cramped spaces where things had to be shoved into every nook and cranny to larger abodes where she had more room to breathe. Our homes - and our possessions - are ultimately what constitutes our lives, and the intimate exploration of one person's stuff was a moving and joyful experience.

An innovative puzzle game that helps you conceive of computer coding in a unique way.

It is Paris, 1894. The city is a sumptuous dream — fireworks erupt in the distance, framing the Eiffel Tower with colorful blooms, and moonlight dances along the cobblestone streets. You are an inventor, a bachelor, a ♥♥♥♥♥, living a well-to-do bohemian life. But now they are calling you something else. A young woman has been murdered and all the evidence points to you. The court has called on you to testify, to clear your own name. But did you do it?

Yes. You did. You inarguably, indiscriminately, incontrovertibly committed a cold-blooded murder. But you don’t have to go down for it.

This is the conceit of Bohemian Killing, an inventive new game by The Moonwalls. Writer and developer Marcin Makaj has heavily utilized his law school expertise in creating an experience that tasks you with freeing yourself from a murder charge in the Parisian courts. You can do so through clever maneuvers or subterfuge, or you can fail to provide an adequate testimony and be jailed or beheaded. The outcome falls entirely on your shoulders.

Full Review Here:
http://justadventure.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3831

Hidden Folks uses visual creativity and ingenious sound effects to make a gameplay experience that is calming and amusing.

Full Review Here:
http://justadventure.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3821

At $2.99 for 1.5-2 hours of playtime, I can heartily recommend A Normal Lost Phone as a quick story that might pique deeper questions about personal communication and your own use of technology (or at least encourage you to add a lock-screen password to your personal devices). It probably says something about me that I felt such delight at sifting through another person’s private life and that I didn’t have any squeamishness about it. Maybe you wouldn’t have looked. Maybe what you’d have done would surprise you.

Full Review Here:
http://justadventure.com/2013-05-20-21-09-14/3808-a-normal-lost-phone-review

Venture Moon Industries took to Kickstarter to drum up funds for a title conceptualized and headed by Bill Tiller, a LucasArts alumnus who worked on the art for adventure titles such as The Dig, Ghost Pirates of Voojo Island and The Curse of Monkey Island . For any point-and-click adventure fan whose roots reach back into the heyday of the nineties, nothing more needs to be known —- the project practically bankrolls itself. And sure enough, the game was funded and made.

The result is Duke Grabowski, Mighty Swashbuckler. It’s a fun and compact little point-and-click story that has flavors of the Monkey Island series in its visuals and humor, but lacks the same zany logic and madcap puzzle design. Genre fans will find this game a tasty morsel with a clever swashbuckler-sword edge.

Full Review Here:
http://justadventure.com/2013-05-20-21-09-14/3800-duke-grabowski-mighty-swashbuckler-review