Recent reviews by richardmv

A short but clever puzzle game with some neat music. In the game you are trying to fill in the blanks in a book about the history of a rivalry between two former friends and band mates. There are 30 'chapters' to puzzle through, organized chronologically, and the game will confirm any 5 correct answers. The answers are deduced through visual and auditory clues such as interviews, posters, a post card, and others. Once the main puzzle is completed, there's an "extra credit" section that involves some real world internet sleuthing (such as looking up the player who scored a game winning point in a particular sporting event mentioned during one of the audio clues).

Overall, while the story unveiled within the various clues is nothing extraordinary, it works well with the gameplay and piecing everything together feels satisfying. If you're a fan of Obra Dinn, Golden Idol, or similar style games, this is a nice, short treat. If you're thinking of getting into the investigation genre and want a taste of what it's like, this game is a perfect introduction.

I suppose if you really like a game that is basically just stimulus-response with very little in the way of choice, just pure RNG, this is it. In its defense, this game does exactly what it sets out to do and seems to run just fine, with passable art and some interesting upgrades that you can get as the game goes on.

Cyber Manhunt is a take on an Orwell style game, but it lacks the polish and quality of those titles. Sometimes you can find a piece of information that you need (for example, a character's name) earlier in a chapter, but the game won't let you 'learn' it until you reach a later point because it isn't the specific place where the game wants you to collect that information. Certain dialogue choices are vague and their outcomes are unpredictable. Sometimes the game will ask you to provide specific information that you collected (or information that the game never clearly gave) but won't let you access your 'notes'.

There are a few interesting minigames scattered throughout, but some of them give a strict time limit and vague guidance as to what you need to do. Failure just sets you back a short time, but in some instances you're forced to sit through unskippable dialogue scenes to get back to the minigame.

There are a lot of good ideas here, and the chapters and overall story are fairly interesting, but the overall presentation makes this more of a frustrating experience than a fun one.

As some other reviewers have mentioned, at a certain point (seems to be around tier II?) characters will stop feeding themselves (and it seemed I had starving animals, as well) despite there being more than enough food to go around. I was enjoying the game, but it seems like this bug will quickly kill off a colony with seemingly no solution. If this were resolved, I'd keep playing and probably recommend, but seeing as this issue has been known for quite some time with no updates, I suspect it will never be fixed.

This is a tough recommendation that I'm honestly on the fence about, but in the end I did enjoy my time with most of the game, so it earned a positive review with some big caveats. First, this game sets you loose in a fairly large map for a point-and-click adventure game, with puzzles late in the game requiring you to revisit many areas throughout the game. I really enjoyed the scope of the game. Unfortunately it feels padded with some hidden object puzzles that feel arbitrary and not fun, especially when each image is reused on a subsequent visit. On the adventure side of things, some of the puzzles, especially late game, just require you to find a specifically shaped key to go in a lock, and there were a LOT of locks.

The game has many options to prevent tedium and feeling lost despite the large number of rooms/screens. The map is a fantastic feature, allowing you to fast travel to any room you've visited and showing which rooms currently have something you can do in them. The game also has a hint system that will point out objects in the hidden object segments and guide you to the next item you'll need for puzzles. There are a few mini-game style puzzles, but there's a button to skip them (which I was very happy for when presented with my nemesis, the sliding tile puzzle).

There are many, many items to find during the adventure. To avoid inventory clutter, any objects that no longer have a use are automatically removed from the inventory. This is helpful from a gameplay perspective, but leads to some odd situations late in the game where you need to locate a new tool in order to solve a puzzle that an old tool would have been perfect for. Generally the actions required to progress are logical and straightforward, so I never felt overly frustrated by a puzzle, but I also never felt particularly challenged by the game. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though; it felt good to finally find the key I needed to open a door I'd found earlier in the game, which gave me the object I needed to solve a puzzle somewhere else, which...

So in short, Mystery of Unicorn Castle is a decent way to spend a few hours as long as you keep your expectations fairly low. It doesn't do anything particularly great or new and it isn't particularly challenging, but it is well designed and feels enjoyable to play.

This game has some fun dialogue and good voice acting (which is impressive for a free game), but it's essentially an idle game while simultaneously punishing you for not actively playing it (creatures will come and steal your resources if you don't click on them). This game very much feels like it was designed to be a mobile game, including 'offline rewards' that don't work when you quit the game (after not playing for several hours, I was told I'd been offline for a few seconds). It has some interesting concepts that seem to come into play later in the game, but they're trickled out slowly and not enough to motivate me to continue playing.

It's an experience, but one that I found neither fun nor enriching in any way.

This is an adorable puzzle game based on the classic French book 'The Little Prince'. The art is gorgeous and putting the puzzles together feels good (good sound effect feedback when pieces are in place, for example). There are a number of different options for puzzle difficulty, ranging from 60 pieces all the way to over 700. While the variety of puzzles is small with only 6 different images, for the price it's a great value if you enjoy jigsaw puzzles.

One minor complaint (as a completionist) would be how the achievements are handled. To get all the achievements, you would have to complete every puzzle at each of the difficulty levels. An improvement to this would be to provide all the achievements for all difficulties below the highest difficulty completed. Definitely a minor nitpick, of course, but something I felt worth mentioning.

This is a masterpiece of the puzzle genre, introducing plenty of different elements, exploring them alone and in combination with others, yet never allowing a mechanic to be overused or become stale. The puzzles never felt convoluted and, once I had seen the solution, I could get through a puzzle quickly. Each one felt great to solve, yet I only really got hung up on one of the later puzzles. The finale was brilliant; I was overjoyed when I realized what was going on and how the final puzzles needed to be solved.

This game was fun from start to finish, never frustrating, never tedious, and never dull. If you're a fan of clever puzzle platformers, this is a must play.

This isn't a bad game; it's exactly as it is described, in fact. I was hoping the game would have a bit more of an RPG feel or do something more interesting and puzzle like with the powers of the face cards, but a lot of times I tried to avoid using most of the face cards because their powers would hinder me more than help. So it felt just like playing really simplified solitaire with a bare-bones, predictable plot.

So if you REALLY like solitaire, this is a way to spice the experience up a bit. But otherwise it's about as much fun as the free versions that come with Windows.