Recent reviews by GirlBug

Absolutely loved this nostalgic point-and-click mystery that is the perfect homage to the Nancy Drew PC adventure games series. A great little story with interesting characters and talented voice actors draws you into a ghostly mystery in an Upstate New York inn. There's a good balance of dialogue and puzzles and navigation; I think if I could make one change, it would be having a clearer trigger for events. There were definitely times I got stuck wandering around, unsure of what I had left to do to trigger a night cycle. But for an indie developer on their first game, this really hit the mark! It's no wonder that the Nancy Drew gaming community has fallen so hard for this game. I can't wait for more Alex Hill!

One of my favorite narrative games. Dark, hilarious, disturbing, yet oddly moving at times. It's not a challenging game: you essentially are navigating scenes, making a few choices, and occasionally solving a bit of a puzzle, but you'll be rewarded with funny characters, a fantastic premise, and a story you'll keep thinking about long after you finish playing.

I loved two main things about this game: 1. it's a real mystery, so you do need to solve it yourself rather than randomly clicking things until you find what works. 2. the story. Lucifer Within Us is set in a technologically advanced, yet very religious world, where daemonic possession causes people to act on their worst desires. You play as an exorcist detective who not only solves the mystery, but rids the poor possessed souls of these daemons. But the way it all unfolds is especially delightful. I love the premise and lore of this world.

It's far from a perfect game, but the voice acting is solid, the mechanics are fine, the style is good, and it felt fresh and original. Plus, it's pretty short (it's just 3 cases), so it's well worth the playtime.

I'm easy to please: put a cast of anthropomorphic animals into a classic point-and-click adventure game and make them solve a murder mystery. That's it. That's what I want. And that's what you want.

Make tea (the RIGHT way), question suspects, inspect scenes, solve puzzles, and use your logical mind (and a robust inventory of items) to bring your favorite detective giraffe to the story's brilliant conclusion.

Love this game and hope to come back to it and play some more routes! With the procedural generation of the encounters you get, the story is different every time, and it winds up a bit of a roguelite choices matter game. I love that there's a mix of puzzles, choices, RNG, morality, and more. The voice acting is great, the characters are funny, and you really get invested in everyone's arcs. The message of the story can feel a little heavy handed at times, but even that is hard to critique, because it's relevant and timely.

Not entirely sure why, but this one didn't quite do it for me. It's really not a bad game, which is why I'm still rating it positively, but it didn't capture me like other visual novels have. The postcard writing mechanic for making choices was cute game design, and the art feels polished. But the choices felt... I don't know. Random at best. Ultimately, I liked playing through the story once, but don't feel compelled to look at any other routes--and that's a defining characteristic of a captivating choices matter game for me. I want to know what else could have happened. In this particular case, I'm fine closing the book on this story.

I do like some of the FMV games set in this world and games featuring these actors (I enjoyed The Shapeshifting Detective, for instance), but this one was a slog for me. I can't believe it was only three hours of gameplay--it felt like SO much longer. Between all the overacting, the generally unlikeable characters, and the disconnected, episodic nature of the narrative, it just didn't feel like a satisfying arc to play through all six of these parts. The story opened a lot of interesting doors, but it never really managed to close any of them. Worth it if you love this genre of choices matter FMV game, but certainly not the finest example of its kind.

A surprisingly emotional game. I thought I had a handle on where things were going, but it kept surprising me with its genuine, heartfelt storytelling. This visual novel is interspersed with various technical puzzles, and for the first time, I can say that the puzzles in a game didn't feel like they were for me. I found myself growing tired of trying to understand the in-game manual to figure out which switches and knobs to flip and turn just so I could progress the story I was invested in. Maybe it's the juxtaposition of very basic, fairly linear storytelling with very complicated, instruction-based puzzles that felt like a mismatch. Or perhaps this might be a case of "it's not the game, it's me;" I might have just lacked the focus and patience to enjoy solving these kinds of puzzles today.

Still, I loved the storytelling and the characters, and I'm very happy I got around to playing it!

I was captivated by this game. If you like choices matter style games, visual novels/interactive movies, and an emotional story packed with characters you care about, this game is for you. It's perfect for fans of David Cage Games, Life is Strange, or Supermassive Games, but I would argue the story is VASTLY superior to any of the aforementioned. Featuring high-intensity scenes and difficult decisions, this game makes you feel deeply involved in changing the direction of the story. As opposed to the aforementioned games, which I also enjoyed, there feels like very little wasted time or melodrama: every scene matters. Every character matters. And whether it's true or not, it feels like every choice matters. I've only played this once through, but I'm so curious about those paths not chosen.

My only critique is that, while the art is beautiful, the storyboard-style animation was a little hard to adjust to. You get used to it, but there are still some awkward moments where it doesn't feel incredibly clear who's talking, or where you expect someone to move, and they don't. But that's a really small nitpick for such a compelling game.

A note that this game DOES seem to be finished, but the end of book 2 (at least in my ending) does leave room for a bit of speculation, so if you need everything perfectly tied up, you might not love that. I, for one, feel very satisfied with the arc of the story, though I'd be so happy to play more in this world if the developers ever make a sequel.

I've had this game wishlisted forever, and I'm so happy it finally became available this year! It is beyond charming--a perfect retro throwback to text parser adventure games. With that kind of gameplay comes some inevitable hiccups (trying to get the phrasing just right, making typos and getting aggravated), but overall, it felt like the game was pretty intuitive about doing what I wanted it to do.

The story is a mystery wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a mystery, and all of the layers were compelling. I don't usually say this, but one of the best things about this game was that it was possible to miss clues depending on how you approached certain tasks. Normally, I want to discover every last detail in a game, and in most mystery adventure games, you're pretty much on rails, and you can't proceed without finding all the clues. Here, you can proceed by attending key events without discovering something important, which will change the outcome of your game.

Because of these miss-able clues, you feel like a real amateur detective, trying to piece together information from your limited observations. I didn't find it hard to get enough information to solve the mystery, but I imagine it WOULD be hard to figure out every last detail without a walkthrough. Still, with limited help, I was able to get a solid positive ending, and I don't have any major remaining questions.

The graphics are great--even in the pixel art, it's usually pretty easy to see important details or when something has changed in a scene. There aren't TOO many areas that aren't important, and there's relatively minimal backtracking. I also feel there's very little moon logic, to the point where I found myself intuiting what to do with objects before their ultimate use became apparent. It's by no means an easy game, but it felt like a logical one, and I simply loved it.

A small list of nitpicks: I did see one reviewer complaining that there isn't enough sound, and I agree with that. It would have been nice to have a bit of ambient noise, but honestly, I'd rather there be too LITTLE sound rather than an irritating repetitive soundtrack. I did sometimes get frustrated when I thought I had looked at something only to find that I had to "Examine" it. At one point I typed "pick up strip of paper" about 20 different ways before I realized I had to examine something first, find out what that strip of paper was, and then type that. I also found the tasks in the notebook a little hard to parse. I think this is a game where you'd benefit from taking your own notes so you can remember whom to talk to about what; I didn't ask people enough questions!

If you love a classic adventure mystery, this IS your next game.