Recent reviews by FroggyC

This is a good, linear adventure game, plagued by some technical and quality problems.

The good:
- Really good adaptation of "The A.B.C. Murders" by Agatha Christie. Beats both the David Suchet and John Malkovich TV adaptations.
- Succeeds at placing you in Poirot's shoes and guiding you through his though process -- impressive, since the original novel has a very different framing device.
- Some of the puzzles involving boxes are rather ingenious
- You get challenged to put clues together in a minigame called "little grey cells" which guides you through Poirot's thought process but makes you assemble the clues together yourself.
- Another minigame challenges you to reconstruct the timeline of the murder. Nothing crazy, but it's enjoyable.

The bad:
- There are several moments where it's not clear what is clickable, clickable and interactable areas are more or less arbitrary, sometimes much smaller than the object and sometimes much larger. It can happen that you click directly on the object and the game interprets it as clicking on a larger object next to it.
- It happened to me several times that due to some UX malfunction I could not progress
- It appears that the voiceover has not been quality tested and there are several points where a character hilariously mispronounces a word (in one case, pronouncing "south" as "thouss"). The VAs are also not that great.
- Animation is rather limited.
- There is a section towards the end with a LOT of puzzle machinery which in my opinion was overdone and badly paced, and is the most boring part of the game. You can easily figure out which part this is and use the "Get Clue" function if you get stuck or frustrated.
- Poirot has a hilariously slow walking speed and there are no
- There are several visual bugs, especially during scene transitions.

One thing should be apparent: you have no real agency on whether the case is solved or not. You will solve the case and you will progress if you follow the objectives. The game is linear and there is no failure state, you are meant to be easily able to progress through the game. The game still tries to challenge you to "do it like Poirot", which is: by making correct deductions and acting like Poirot you get Ego points, and you get scored at the end of the game based on how well you did.

Making wrong choices results in a small diversion but eventually leads to the same outcome, except for a couple of cases. Even when it gets frustrating, it offers a "get clue" functionality that can get you unstuck rather quickly without resorting to outside guides.

Overall, I would recommend this game, especially if you like the source material. There is a lot of room for improvement if this studio wants to develop other Poirot games, but it's a good start.

This is the best ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ controller the world has ever seen.

You might find it uncomfortable for a few games, but it works very very well. The right touchpad is great. The grip buttons are godly. The left touchpad is a little useless, I would have preferred a d-pad.

The best use is for games that usually use the right stick or the mouse to control the camera. Dark Souls is a prime example. This is the best input device for playing Dark Souls.

It also works quite well with first and third person shooters, it's better than a standard controller but worse than mouse and keyboard.

I've tried using it from the couch for strategy titles such as CIvilization or Cities, but I just prefer a keyboard and mouse.

It doesn't work well at all with twin-stick shooters.

For fighting games, it works about as well as the 360 controller, which is crap for fighting games. So not good.

Downsides:
- You have to configure it for each game. Standard configuration is mostly correct, and newer games have better default configurations than older ones, but sometimes it's just ♥♥♥♥. Community configurations are available if you don't have time to fix it yourself.
- Takes a while to get used to. A couple of days for proficiency, a week for fluency.
- Does not work well for all games.

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR BUY IT

DO IT

I BELIEVE IN YOU

It has a good, not excellent, but enjoyable plot, with well written characters, great writing and voice acting, and some genuinely funny moments.

The gameplay is a bit repetitive, consisting mainly of solving light puzzles, navigating environments with Monkey's acrobatic abilities, and fighting robots, but manages to keep varied enough to carry you through the end.

It has incredibly detailed animations and facial expressions.

It's a disappointment because if this game had a bigger budget it could have gone much farther than this. Still a good buy, I would recommend it.

I hate you Starbreeze.

I hate you because now all other games will feel bland after experiencing the feelings of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.

Punched a guy's face off, then separated his torso from his legs.

10/10 would maim again.

Bag Throwing Simulator 2014

10/10 would throw bags again

A mix between Minecraft and Metroid. A unmatched sense of progression, discovery and exploration.

Let me first say that I really enjoy story-driven games, I have no problems with short and to the point games if the experience is worth it, and I don't buy all of this "it's not a game" crap about interactive story videogames. Still, I did not like Gone Home as I feel it fails even as a interactive story game.

Although I sympathyze a lot with the issues about homosexuality that Gone Home addresses, I don't think the game manages to get its point across very well, nor to establish any sort of emotional link with the player.

I have two major complaints about Gone Home.

First, the narrative device used for telling the story. Basically, you explore the home while hearing your sister's diary read to you as you discover clues. At the end you find the actual diary, which is everything you've been listening to during the game.

Being this a first-person game, the expectation is that anything you hear is going to be from the point of view of the main character, so when I heard my sister's voice I was expecting it to be some sort of audiolog or registration I found, instead of an extra-diegetic narrative device. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case and it ruined a lot the immersion.

Second, the sister's story is overly saccharine and completely irrealistic, as if out of a badly written light romance novel, to the point that I actually wasn't able to be involved at all in the issues the game was trying to address because of the horrible writing.

SPOILER ALERT

At the end, you discover that your teenage sister has escaped with the "woman of her life". I guess the game expects you to feel happy about this, happy that she found love, but all I could think of was "this girl is a dumbass, her love is going to fade eventually and she'll discover she's thrown her life away."