Recent reviews by Saga

Very disappointing effort from the people who brought us Myst, even without considering the quantity of assets generated using *Machine Learning* to... cut corners in development? I guess?

The story is bland and uninteresting with a "oh, is that IT?" twist at the end, the script borderline nonsensical thanks to a.i. meddling, navigating around from place to place can be kind of slow, and the puzzles are pretty much all variations on three dimensional sliding blocks or 'random fiddling with simple mechanics until something changes'.

Oh and they don't *appear* to credit the voice actor(s) who then go on to have their work artificially manipulated, which isn't a good look.

There are a lot of really well made hidden object games available on steam. This...is not one of them.

Not only is it strung together by nothing even remotely resembling a coherent story but the hidden object puzzles themselves (of which there are MANY) are pretty awful. The same objects are repeated a lot, many are misspelled or completely the wrong word for the object (clocks are called "watches" throughout). The other puzzles in the game are more of the same of the type of thing you see in these games and are often even repeated two or three times to pad things out a bit.

It's also (mercifully) very short but ends on...something? I hesitate to call it a cliffhanger because that would suggest they leave it somewhere that makes you want to return later for a sequel. This is not the case.

If your after a decent Hidden Object game I'd look elsewhere. There's plenty of good ones on Steam and this one is REALLY not worth your time.

Spiders are a weird company. They are one of the few game makers that try to break free of the 'norm' when it comes to fantasy RPG's and occasionally try things that are little bit different than the "Tolkien tropes" of other games.

Unfortunately, they also always seem to lose interest in FINISHING any of the ideas they come up with, leaving each game half baked and not quite finished (it was the same with Mars War Logs as well).

This game is no exception. There are some GREAT ideas in this game (the fae setting is a really brilliant idea and the way you develop and upgrade your character and have it physically affect your appearance is very interesting) but again - everything feels unpolished and not quite thought through completely. It's short, ends at a cliffhanger that will probably never be resolved and with a not particularly interesting main story.

That said, there's enough there to make it entertaining for a few hours. Providing you grab it at a discount during a steam sale then I don't think you'd be TOO disappointed. It might actually work quite well as an entry-level RPG for a younger gamer if you drop the difficulty level down to easy. It also lacks the casual mysogyny of their newer stuff like Bound By Flame.

If Spiders took what they learned from this game and put it into a sequel or another game in the same world I think they could come up with something really fun...but as with their other games, instead of building on and fleshing out the game systems they create, they seem to just get bored and move on to ANOTHER short RPG with fancier graphics, a completely different setting and a whole NEW set of half-baked mechanics and they end up right back at square one again. Weird.

An entertaining little linear musical detective story that touches on Gender issues and which I'm sure has already baffled and enraged certain corners of the Internet purely by it's existence.

The fact that the singing is horribly off-key just makes it more endearing :)

It's worth knowing up front that it's a very short experience (about 30min if you feel the need to rapidly click your way through it - an hour and a half or so for everyone else) but worth a look if you're interest in something that's very unique and witty.

I was worried that, for the money, this was going to turn out to be another over-priced and extremely short disappointment (Among the Sleep, I'm looking at you).

Could not have been more wrong, it was just wonderful. A great little slice of what feels like PROPER sci-fi and I hesitate to spoil anything beyond that. Superb music too. For the work of mostly one person this was very impressive.

If I had any complaints - maybe could have done with varying up the puzzles a bit more, and tightened up some of the open-spaces/jumping puzzle bits, but generally speaking, this could well be on my personal top ten of the year.

Four carbon based life-forms out of five.

After absolutely HATING the first game (mostly due to it's thoroughly unlikable and horribly acted protagonist) I pretty much ignored the second game in the series. I'm glad I finally gave it a chance when it came to Steam though, as it felt like a VAST improvement.

A MUCH more likable protagonist, a better paced story which still manages to be mostly ambiguous as to whether there's anything supernatural going on or not, more logical puzzles...there's a lot here which is much improved over the first game. It's a good length too but the variety of locations with a minimum of backtracking helps keep it interesting.

The voice acting is still mostly terrible, but that's pretty much to be expected of adventure games of it's time. It also has possibly one of the most ridiculously abrupt cliffhanger endings I've seen (from what I gather it runs directly into the third and final game) but overall...yeah. I liked it.

Four cases of hereditary brain-madness out of five.

Such a conflicting game and NOT one I can recommend sadly.

The atmosphere, mystery and exploration elements are FANTASTIC and it has some remarkably unsettling imagery and design but it's crippled by TERRIBLE gameplay decisions.

The checkpointing is AWFUL and made significantly worse by some of the worst 'first person platforming' elements this side of Xen, incorporating instant-death booby traps, fiddly jumps, narrow walkways and areas where progression is not sufficiently telegraphed resulting in some stupidly unneccessary deaths. By some accounts there may also be some bugs with the various "windy" locations that make the game nigh-on unplayable in places, but I personally never encountered any of those problems.

Special mention needs to go to the completely pointless side corridor that warns you "not to continue this way", and when you (of course) *DO* continue in that direction the game eventually just unceremoniously quits to desktop.

Ha. Ha. Funny. *sigh*

Also, unless I missed something (which is very possible) don't expect any sort of payoff or even an ending to the game. Upon reaching the end you just get dropped back to the main menu with nary an explanation of what just happened or why.

* * *

In the end, I personally have a particular love of exploring strange, alien places and abandoned locale's in games, so I still feel like I got my moneys worth out of it. The visuals and sound design feels like a modern interpretation of an ancient long-lost Lovecraftian cityscape.

BUT unless you can be equally forgiving of some incredibly bad "game" elements then I'd suggest you steer clear or wait for a sale.

Two wibbly wobbly cuboid snake monsters out of five.

A cute little adventure game with mostly fun puzzles that aren't too taxing (apart from a few near the end which are a little on the convoluted and frustrating side). However it's REALLY short (less than 2 hours long) and ends with a big ol' "too be continued", so definitely worth taking that into account when considering buying.

The animation is lovely.

Overall, 4 wibbley wobbly timey wimeys out of 5

Has a really nice game engine (presumably an advanced version of this was used to better effect in the later Shadow Warrior remake) but this game is dull, with enemies that blend in too much with the gunmetal grey / blue scenery. The plot (such as it is) is badly translated to the point of being incomprehensible and it's far too repetative in general.

That said, the DLC chapters (the last five or so maps) improve significantly with more interesting environments but you'll struggle not to get bored before reaching them.

Also, Technically I never managed to complete it, because beating the final boss caused my game to CTD every time. Not great.

I'd avoid and instead maybe take a look at the developers more recent game, Shadow Warrior, which is a lot more interesting.

Two C-beams glittering in the dark near Tanhauser Gate out of five.

Hmm...a difficult game to recommend because it's incredibly short (took me two hours) with little in the way of replay value (obviously, given it's a point n' click) and a fairly blande and uninteresting story,

BUT the puzzles are solid, the game looks pretty good and it's SIGNIFICANTLY better than the main Secret Files games which are a complete mess so if you can grab it fairly cheap then it's a perfectly adequate couple of hours of adventure gaming.

I give it three Ark of the Covenants out of OHGODMYFACEISMELTING