Painting Werther

Painting Werther

The Sorrows of Young Werther, was written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1774.

Loved by artists and emperors, it shows the inner struggle of a deeply romantic man.

Or at least that’s what I used to think…

Come with us on this interactive visual novel to see another version of this legendary story.

Was young Werther really a romantic? Or was he just a man with a death wish?

How deeply did he really love his friend Wilhelm? Maybe his letters hide some clues…

Did he even loved Charlotte? Or did he just love the idea of an unrequited love?

For all these questions and more, Mad Cream Games presents you and overloading artistic experience, full of brush strokes and ink spots, where Chopin played the sax and Mozart the guitar, where love turns into hate, and pity into madness:

With this game we want to celebrate the mastery and abilities from the painters and musicians that came before us, presenting their work in a new original and respectful way.


Read More: Best Based On A Novel Point & Click Games.


Painting Werther on Steam

Nancy Drew®: Secrets Can Kill REMASTERED

Nancy Drew®: Secrets Can Kill REMASTERED

Unimportant little Rant:

People really want to find any flaw they can with the Nancy Drew series. I have been playing this game series since I was about 5. I’m 20 now. I love the clunky art style, and like 12 fps you get when scrolling around, it’s charming more so than ugly. It gives me a feeling of going back to 2007 and playing these kinds of games all over again, when I couldn’t just find a review or guide to it and beat it in half an hour, but actually had to use the in-game books and phone for clues and help. I guess as younger and younger people start to play this series, they might not fully appreciate it, much like I don’t think I could fully appreciate an N64 game. With that being said, I hope whatever your opinion on the series, you will try to rate it based on the time it came out and not now. It obviously is littered with problems if you think about it from a 2021 perspective, but if you could imagine yourself back in the 2000s, this game was one of the better series coming out for the point-and-click adventure genre at the time. Now you have much better story games like LIS and most of Telltale Games' series, but the Nancy Drew games to me still retain that old flair and charm of early 2000’s point and clicks.

Real player with 29.0 hrs in game


Read More: Best Based On A Novel Point & Click Games.


ABSOLUTELY RECOMMENDED! :) :) :) :) For those who love playing Nancy Drew games, you are going to love this one, because it’s much better than the majority of the older Nancy Drew games. If you read 2 reviews I’ve made on 2 of the older Nancy Drew games (Treasure in the Royal Tower and The Final Scene), and read the problems that are in both of them, none of those problems are even in this one, because it’s actually a remake, that’s why it’s called remastered, it’s a newer and improved version of the original ‘Secrets Can Kill’ one that was made in the 1980s, so it has the feel of the older games, with a better story than the majority of ones in the newer games lately, but has the features of the newer ones, like:

Real player with 28.1 hrs in game

Nancy Drew®: Secrets Can Kill REMASTERED on Steam

Nancy Drew®: The Secret of Shadow Ranch

Nancy Drew®: The Secret of Shadow Ranch

This is one of my favorite Nancy Drew games and my second time playing it. It’s the 10th game in the series, which I’m playing in order. When I wrote about Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake (7th game, which had also been an old favorite, I mentioned that it didn’t hold up quite as well. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case here. Fyi, my actual playtime is probably more like 10-12 hours.

You are staying on a ranch in Arizona, where the appearance of a “phantom horse” accompanied an accident. You have to help out with some ranch chores, which is something I was looking forward to because of nostalgia. While some chores are one-offs you only do once (fixing wiring for chicken fence, preparing animal food in proper proportions, baking a cake), some you do each day (3 days). The daily chores are collecting chicken eggs and vegetables. Different variety of vegetables are picked at different stages, which you can read up on in an in-game website from your phone.

Real player with 38.4 hrs in game


Read More: Best Based On A Novel Point & Click Games.


This is one of my favorite Nancy games. It’s right in the sweet spot of being a little old/outdated and having some of the newer features. It has a modern setting but follows a mystery from the 1800’s, so you still have your secret passageways and a great treasure hunt. The puzzles are just hard enough without leaving you stumped, and it’s always pretty obvious what you’re supposed to do next. Personally, I wasn’t too annoyed by the whole saddle thing, as I grew up with horses (yep sorry annoying horse person here) and it’s pretty accurate as far as horse etiquette goes. Same with the garden thing, just save before you pick vegetables and if you get frustrated you can find a walkthrough online to show you what the ripe veggies look like. My only complaint about this game is the roadrunner game. Good lord. If you want to keep your sanity, make sure you save before using your token so you don’t have to replay the same three levels of an incredibly slow arcade game over and over and over!

Real player with 23.8 hrs in game

Nancy Drew®: The Secret of Shadow Ranch on Steam

Dear Althea

Dear Althea

About this game

This visual novel, full of decisions and repercussions, is a fun reinterpretation of the novel “Dear Faustina” (1897) by British author Rhoda Broughton. Each chapter is filled with beautiful, high quality artwork that illustrates all the situations and moments you will experience alongside the charismatic characters. The art that you will be able to see has been made with special care in the representation of the British Victorian era as well as taking into account the class difference that is present at all times. The entire video game has 51 chapters that you will only be able to see if you play all the routes and enjoy the nine endings of the video game.

Story

In Dear Althea, you play as Althea Vane; a young upper class British woman whose life is turned upside down after the death of her father which causes her family to fall apart along with her future. She will be forced to choose a new future, a place to call home and a group to belong to. To get there she will have to face all sorts of situations in Victorian London, but love and romance will fortunately abound and make her quest more enjoyable.

Choices matter

You will find that the choices you make will change the story from the very first chapter, even if they change there will be many of them that will affect the story in the long run. In Dear Althea, your choices can affect not only your fate, but also the fate of other people. They can also change your relationship with other characters and open up new routes of dialogue that will change the dynamics of relationships.

Diverse relationships

You don’t have to fall in love with anyone or enter into any kind of romantic or sexual relationship in the game, but depending on your choices you can enter into a relationship with up to four characters that fall within the LGBT spectrum, however you don’t have to choose just one relationship; you can enter into a variety of polyamorous relationships.

In this video game, consent is discussed and encouraged in all aspects of relationships between characters. In romantic relationships there is no obligation to have sex, and refusing to have sex has no negative repercussions.

Characters

There is a great diversity of charismatic characters in “Dear Althea” but there is a clear division between upper class and working class characters. As a protagonist you can decide from the first chapter and throughout the story which group you are more sympathetic to. Defending characters from one class or the other can have repercussions.

Puzzles

If puzzles are not your thing you can skip them without missing any important plot points; however, there has been a lot of effort in the creation of the puzzles to make them all diverse. They have been integrated in the best possible way into the storyline as well as being completely set in the era in which the story takes place.

Typography

The typography has been created to help people with dyslexia to identify letters more easily. It is based on the typeface that appears in the original 1897 book.

Endings

There are a total of nine completely different final chapters, many of which are the result of decisions that took place several chapters earlier.Due to the branching of the story, finishing a single route can cause you to miss even twenty whole chapters that belong to the other routes, so the title invites replayability. Also, as a final surprise, there are some small post-credits scenes that will change depending on the decisions made throughout the story.

Duration and text

Counting all possible decisions, the game has 112408 words and (although it is not finished yet) I estimate that approximately and depending on the decisions chosen, the game can last about 5 hours.

Dear Althea on Steam

A Little Lily Princess

A Little Lily Princess

I absolutely loved this romance sim. It was very delightful and interesting.

There are 4 romance routes, and 2 friendship routes. It involves stat raising, but it is not tedious or annoying.

It takes place during the Victorian era in London, England. That is a vague time frame considering Queen Victoria ruled for 63 years. However, since the book this visual novel is based on was published in 1905, I would assume the story took place late in her reign before she died in 1901.

The young protagonist arrives at a boarding school for girls after living in India her whole life; do remember that The British Empire ruled over India for a long time. She is a tad out of place in her school for having grown up in India, and for also being half-French; The English and French are long-time rivals, after all. Although, elitist English aristocrats would have prejudice against anyone who wasn’t completely English anyway.

Real player with 34.9 hrs in game

This was a rather unique experience for me. I’ve played visual novels before, and I had a cursory knowledge of the source material going in.

In short, this is a visual novel retelling of the story “A Little Princess.” It takes a few liberties with the source material such as Miss Minchin’s sister being completely absent, and they created one character wholecloth.

Being a visual novel, there’s really not much that you can expect from the game. The interface is clean, the mechanics are explained well enough, though the RNG element can make it frustrating if you’re shooting for a specific ending. Jessie’s route, for example, requires a high number of high count skills, while characters like Mariette and Becky tend to have lower costs. It also completely goes out the window in the second have of the game, where you can completely cheese the system.

Real player with 18.8 hrs in game

A Little Lily Princess on Steam

Nancy Drew®: Labyrinth of Lies

Nancy Drew®: Labyrinth of Lies

it’s okay! i probably would’ve given it a thumbs down if i’d played it before midnight in salem, but it’s definitely better than midnight in salem.

my main complaint is the pacing and the amount of spoon-feeding. there are a lot of nd games where you are sort of led gently through the story, but this one feels less like you’re driving it and more like it’s being told to you with puzzles. most of the major breakthroughs don’t feel like things that you did yourself, but that might just be me. that being said, the sets are pretty, if a little immersion-breaking. the characters vary in quality imo.

Real player with 44.3 hrs in game

This morning I was fired from my job after 25 years of working there. My boss had retired and let this POS college grad with $200,000 in student debt and an ego the size of Texas take over, firing everyone over the age of 35 in order to “progress the company into the next century.” FCK YOU, CHAD! FCK YOU AND YOUR PORSCHE YOUR DAD BOUGHT YOU! Have fun looking for the huge sh*t I took in your wiper fluid container!!!

TlDr Nancy Drew 8/10 Would recommend

Real player with 17.1 hrs in game

Nancy Drew®: Labyrinth of Lies on Steam

Nancy Drew®: Sea of Darkness

Nancy Drew®: Sea of Darkness

This game hands-down has the best graphics I’ve ever seen in a Nancy Drew game- from the gorgeous northern lights in the sky to the stunning ice caves to the characters themselves, the graphics were absolutely beautiful in my opinion. I found all of the characters to be likeable/ could sympathize with them to some extent as well. If anything, I wish there was even more dialogue so I could have spent more time getting to know some of the characters. This game was chock-full of puzzles and I found them to be quite challenging on Master sleuth level. Something that surprised/ disappointed me was how few “fatal errors” there were to make in this game- I’ve heard there were only three total. I weirdly enjoy the deaths in these games and was a little disappointed to have so few. All in all, an awesome game which I would strongly recommend. It took me 15 hours to complete.

Real player with 15.2 hrs in game

Not bad as far as Nancy Drew games go…

I’ve been loyally playing these since ‘Secrets can Kill’ first came out back in the 90s so I can assure you this is better than the atrocity which was ‘The Creature of Kapu Cave’ or the utter nonsense which was ‘Ransom of the Seven Ships’. This game was a much better ‘ship’ game that’s for certain and the ‘ship facts’ were fun to listen to.

It definitely ranks below the kings of the saga, but it is still enjoyable. The puzzles are not bad, though some of them use common themes and it feels a tad repetitive. The mini games are fun though and I enjoyed making enough money to purchase everything in the gift shop (because I can). Plus the Iceland scenery is nice. In general the plot was… a bit more mediocre than some of the other games - I suspected the guilty party immediately and the climax felt a bit stunted.

Real player with 14.7 hrs in game

Nancy Drew®: Sea of Darkness on Steam

Nancy Drew®: The Captive Curse

Nancy Drew®: The Captive Curse

This was my first ever Nancy Drew game and now I’m hooked! I thought this game was going to be really corny and the characters looked silly, but i was intrugued by the German castle setting and i love point and click puzzle games which are so hard to find! I wasn’t expecting much from the game and i was very pleased. Some of the puzzles i ended up looking up clues for online, but found if i would of just tried a little more i would of gotten them. But overall i found them challenging and fun. I liked many aspects of the game, which i think really sold it to me.

Real player with 23.9 hrs in game

♥ Spooky spooky.

The first time I played Captive Curse, I was absolutely terrified.

Though the game firmly keeps with being family friendly, it does an excellent job of conveying the castle and its array of characters fear. From the dark atomsphere to the animal skull in the dungeon to the monster lurking outside the castle walls, replaying it gave me the shivers!

If you’d like to play a spookier Nancy Drew game, this one makes for a great choice.

♥ Love the mini games.

Usually I tend to skip the mini games unless they’re directly related to clearing a task or two. Playing Raid? Killing cows in search of the hidden monster? Loved them! The two mini games added a great amount of replay value to the game. Admittedly I wouldn’t mind if they made more of the mini games as fun as those two!

Real player with 20.1 hrs in game

Nancy Drew®: The Captive Curse on Steam

Orwell’s Animal Farm

Orwell’s Animal Farm

This game explains nothing about its gameplay (after multiple playthroughs I’m still unsure of what the Animalism stat does) and appears to be a buggy mess of RNG. Dead animals can still comment on events occurring (Napoleon and Boxer appear to be the biggest culprits) or show up at the gravesite despite being dead (such as the Cabal of Pigs ending where Snowball and Napoleon have died, but Napoleon is at the grave). You can run into problems where you have plenty of supplies and want to repair the buildings but you can’t until the option presents itself, or similarly where you had the opportunity to harvest with multiple animals to fill the supplies to their maximum but suddenly only one animal can be chosen and you have far less than usual. Sometimes it skips letting you plant for next year which makes supplies much worse and no longer lets you plant on subsequent years, even if you have the supplies to do so.

Real player with 12.9 hrs in game

Introduction

George Orwell’s dystopian and satirist literary work undoubtedly influenced, and still influences, a lot of other creative people, who are inspired by his themes, and use them for their own work. However, having a full videogame adaptation of his work is something else, and now we finally got it with Orwell’s Animal Farm, which adapts the original allegorical novella. This text-based game tries to capture and expand the book’s themes and experience a bit by adding several story choices. There is not much more to this game, as you could say it is similar to a visual novel. Is it a good addition, though? Well, let us dive into the review to find it out!

Real player with 6.6 hrs in game

Orwell's Animal Farm on Steam

Nancy Drew®: Tomb of the Lost Queen

Nancy Drew®: Tomb of the Lost Queen

I really like the graphics of this game and how in order to progress in the computer game, during which you play as Nancy Drew, you are trying to figure out the nature of the crime (whatever the crime is) by being a sleuth. I enjoyed reading the Nancy Drew books growing up during my childhood and it was really fun for me, as well as my family because my sister and I grew up watching watching mysteries, and so I’ve always liked to solve mysteries too. I think the Nancy Drew games are really nicely done because it feels like you’re solving the crime as a sleuth rather than someone who works for law enforcement, which is why I feel it’s more fun in that regard and you can progress in the game by using clues that you find while playing and also talking to various suspects in the game to investigate, which not only gives you information about them that would help in your investigation, but also helps to continue to progress further along in the game.

Real player with 37.3 hrs in game

This is a must for anyone who’s a fan of the Egyptian tomb-exploration setting. I’d say the puzzles are medium to difficult, but they shouldn’t cause you too much pain unlike some of the more challenging installments. Some were very challenging for me but only because I happen to be really bad at ‘find the hidden word’ and sliding block puzzles.

I feel that the cast let this installment down a little. There are only four others with you at the dig site, one of whom is only there for a limited time, and none of them were particularly interesting or likeable. Often the dialogue felt like it was going nowhere and dragging on forever. On top of that Bess is the only one of Nancy’s regular crew you can chat with on the phone, and she’s even less helpful than usual. I did enjoy the reapperance of Professor Hotchkiss, though, and Nancy’s employer/supervisor. Despite the lacklustre cast and non-excistent mystery, the puzzles, the setting, and the fascinating history makes up for a lot.

Real player with 23.8 hrs in game

Nancy Drew®: Tomb of the Lost Queen on Steam